Free The Heart Queen by PATRICIA POTTER Page A

it not your business. But mayhap a simple word from you to Lord Cumberland may help safeguard the future of my son
and his sisters.

    His stomach tightened as he read on. He sensed how desperate she must have been to send the letter. Damn the Campbells of Lochaene. Damn their souls to hell.
    “Torquil,” he roared.
    Torquil, who’d obviously been hovering nearby, appeared at the door.
    “I am leaving again. I will stop by Jock’s cottage, then be gone at least four days, mayhap more.”
    “Ye will eat first,” Torquil said. “I have already set a place for ye.”
    In the dining room, no doubt. Neil had never felt comfortable supping there. In fact, he had never been included at the table when the old marquis had ruled. He always took his meals with the clansmen in the great hall. It had suited him well enough.
    But now—mostly to pacify Torquil—he took his meals in lonely splendor in the family dining room. A misnomer if there ever was one, he thought. The old marquis, now dead nearly two years, had hated his second wife—Rory’s mother—nearly as much as she had hated him. She had, in truth, hated her husband enough to tell him that Rory was not his son.
    Even now, Neil recalled the shouts and screams, the brutality. God, he had hated it. Sometimes he felt the room still echoed with those bitter voices, the raw accusations.
    “My lord?” Torquil asked again. “Your supper?”
    “Aye,” Neil said, knowing the man would nag him until he did. He went into the dining room where a place was set at the end of a very long table.
    Torquil gave what was for him a smile and hurried from the room. Neil sighed and poured himself a glass of wine. He did not like the delay, but Torquil was right that he needed to eat. Torquil was, in truth, usually right.
    He had found Torquil months ago when, on an odd whim, he went back to his mother’s family home some seventy miles away. Even as a lad, he had remembered the desolate falling down wreck of a home on the edge of the sea. His mother was an only child, and she had died in madness.
    When her father died, there was not enough left of the estate to save. The land reverted to the crown for taxes. But no one had wanted the damnable thing. The castle had been a drafty, mean place and the land too poor to grow or graze anything. Locals said it was even haunted and they kept away from it.
    It was probably the castle that had driven his mother mad, he’d thought when he’d visited there. He had wandered up steps to the tower where she had lived until one day she threw herself out a window, or so they said. That had been more than twenty years ago. Her father died six months later with no more issue, and word passed that the castle was haunted. No one had lived there since.
    He had wandered through the wreckage, trying to remember. But all he could recall was his silent mother sitting in a chair, rocking. He remembered being told he was fortunate that a kinsman would take him in as a companion for his own son.
    He recalled riding away. He had turned back and seen his mother’s face in the window. That was the sum total of his memories of this place.
    As he was about to leave this second time, Torquil had appeared seemingly out of nowhere. He had once served the family as a groom, he said. He was nearly sixty, thin to the point of emaciation and dressed in little more than rags. The clothing was clean, though, and his lined face clean shaven. He said he was the caretaker, and he was allowed to live in the stables in exchange for looking after the property. He had been doing just that for the past two decades. Probably, he added honestly, everyone had forgotten about the estate. And him.
    Neil had taken an instant liking to the man who looked as if he had not had a decent meal in as long as he’d cared for the property. It was unusual for Neil to accept someone so readily, yet he had found himself asking if Torquil would like to come to Braemoor.
    And so Torquil had gone with him