Highland Mist by Rose Burghley Page A

car in which they had travelled from London described a slight skid. Toni offered to take over the wheel, but Celia gripped it firmly and said they mustn’t stop now, even for a moment. She was dying to arrive at the house itself and pull up in front of the porch.
    Toni watched carefully as the distance between them and the house lessened. This was Inverada House, that had caused her a bout of near-pneumonia when the weather was at its worst, but which she was very anxious to see. Perhaps not as anxious as Celia—whose hobby it was at the moment; but she was curious to know why Euan MacLeod had been willing to pay a heavy rental for it to her mother, and why, in the past few weeks, he had started to spend a lot of money on it.
    The road dipped down from the open moorland and curved through a little larch wood before it entered the gates of Inverada. A handsome pair of wrought-iron gates, they guarded the approaches to this once well-kept house. And no doubt the grounds had also been well kept, and were fairly extensive, as Toni realised.
    Celia put on a burst of speed—when it would have been wiser to travel more cautiously, considering the twists and turns in the drive—and then, all at once, the house was before them, with a kind of semicircular gravel sweep in front of it.
    Toni felt instant pleasure well over her. It reminded her of a tiny fortress with its pepper-box towers, but the portico was Georgian, and was flanked by Georgian windows. Celia ignored the front door and drove round an angle to the side of the house, where there was a wonderful view of the loch which reflected the summit of Ben Inver as clearly and sharply as if it had been a mirror. And not only did it reflect Ben Inver, but every fleecy ball of cloud that was sailing serenely across the blue sky above it—an intense blue sky, an intense northern blue, which has so much in common with Neapolitan blue that only the fierce warmth of a Neapolitan sun is missing when the weather is fine and the clouds roll onwards to make it visible.
    At other times, anything less like or reminiscent of a corner of Italy than northern skies and dark clumps of fir wood has yet to be envisaged.
    This time it was Toni who let out a cry of sheer delight.
    “Oh, how wonderful! How absolutely beautiful!” She was looking at the loch. “I never dreamed it was as beautiful as this!”
    But Celia was looking hard at the house, and her brows had become puckered.
    “What on earth was the matter with Uncle Angus in his declining years that he allowed the place to fall into this condition of decay? Look at that peeling plaster, and that faded stucco! And the paintwork’s all blistered and scarcely recognisable as paintwork!” She indicated it with an appalled finger. “I simply can’t understand...” She looked about her vaguely. “And the garden’s a complete wilderness, and would take a positive regiment of men to get it into anything like order under a period of six months. Why, these grounds used to be the apple of Uncle Angus’s eye!”
    “The view across the loch is gorgeous,” Toni said, still feasting her eyes on it, and marvelling at the magical light that hung about it.
    Celia frowned still more.
    “I simply don’t understand,” she was repeating, when the side door opened and Euan MacLeod appeared on the terrace raised high above the loch. He was wearing a kilt and a well-cut tweed jacket, and the red in his hair flamed in the sunshine. A good deal of the perplexity died out of Celia’s eyes, and she smiled at him approvingly.
    “You look the part, at least,” she said. “The Laird of Inverada! But what has happened to the house?” glancing up at it as if it defeated her.
    He followed her glance with a slightly cynical gleam in his eyes.
    “What did you expect?” he asked. “After so many years! Your uncle was an old man when he died, and for years there was no one he cared about, or who cared about him. So why should he have put himself out to