Page 58 of Somewhere Along The Way (Mackinnon #3)

Seeing her horrified look, Ailie said, “It is human urine, Bella,” as if that made a great difference. “Some people use hog manure. Don’t look so ghastly. Everything is washed in clean water afterward. Mama said they do the same thing in England. In fact, the English…”

Bella didn’t want to hear the rest.

Laundry day was only the beginning. Early the following morning Ailie had her up at daybreak to hurry into the kitchen, which was already bustling with activity—Tuesday officially being baking day.

The kitchen hearth was fueled with peat, and already the fire was built, a cauldron suspended on a chain receiving the ingredients for Scotch broth: neck of mutton, barley, turnips, leeks, peas, cabbage, and carrots.

Already the kitchen was warm and cozy with the abundant smell of yeast. Round loaves of bread lined the table.

Ailie enlisted Annabella’s help to cut crosses on the top of cob bread. “To let the devil out,” she said.

Then it was put on the hearth, covered with an inverted pot, and surrounded by burning peat. While that baked, oatmeal was mixed with a thible, shaped on a riddleboard and rolled with a ridged rolling pin before being made into oatcakes and baked on the griddle.

Truly the kitchen was a wonderful place, even when it wasn’t baking day.

The larder was the storage place for all the staples.

What fun it was to open the crocks and see what was inside—flour, peas, dried fruit, sugar, meal, broad beans—which were used to make the most delicious pease pudding back in England.

Annabella made a mental note to inquire as to their use here in Scotland—she rather doubted that it was for pease pudding. The meat safe was suspended from the rafters. Here the meat was hung to ripen. Eggs, cheese, and butter were on the shelves with dry goods.

During the following week Bella had spent most of her time in the kitchen, watching food being salted, dried, and pickled.

Each time she went there, she settled down on her own stool near the pastry table, where she learned to grate suet.

This was rubbed into flour, then mixed with water and patted into a china pudding basin for grouse-and-steak pudding.

This always made her mouth water for the marvelous English suet pudding she had grown up with.

While Cook—whose name was Sibeal—made such dishes as potted hough (hough being a beef shin), Forfar bodies, which was akin to her own Cornish pastry, Scotch collops, or a wonderful crab soup called partan bree , Annabella listened like a child at her knee as Sibeal outlined the value of herbs for cooking and medicinal purposes.

Soon Bella’s nose was in the black japanned spice tin, or poking around in the spice chest, as she learned to sort aromatic berries, buds, bark, fruit, roots, or flower stigmas taken from plants that grew in the hot countries her governess had taught her about—countries that were so much more real to her now as the strongly flavored scents drifted around her.

“It’s a pity they can’t flavor the ink with these spices,” she said to Cook one afternoon.

Sibeal gave her a strange look. “Now, why would ye be wantin’ to flavor yer ink?”

“So you could smell the spices when you read about all those places,” Bella said, much to Cook’s delight.

A castle like Seaforth was a delightful place for one whose entire life had been so controlled that a young woman’s inquisitive nature was limited.

Here, in this great aging fortress, no boundaries existed, and every question brought answers.

Yet some of the staff, like Dugal and Cook, were watchful of her at first.

She was, after all, English.

But soon even the watchful and the leery began to respond openly to the young English lass with the sad eyes.

The staff and visitors to the castle accepted her presence, her inquisitiveness, her questions as commonplace; they accepted as well, her earnest praise, her open admiration, her intelligent input and suggestions.

Soon they were listening for the musical tones of her laughter or the lilt of her odd British accent.

They laughed at her funny way of saying things and admired her gentleness, her openness, her kind heart, her sense of humor, her ability to laugh at herself.

And when she wasn’t present, they whispered and carried tales about the kind of family that would treat the puir lass so, one that would wrap her up in rules and regulations like a mummy and then marry her off to a man old enough to be her father. No wonder the lass had sad eyes.

After leaving her aunt in the weaving room, Annabella found Ailie in the kitchen. “I was just coming to find you. Have you looked outside, Ailie? It’s beautiful,” she said. “As warm as a fresh-laid egg.”

Allan was in the kitchen as well, his head bent over a bowl of cock-a-leekie soup.

Allan was in his usual rare form, and in between spoonfuls he was teasing Malai, a pretty blonde lass who helped with the baking.

“Ahh, Malai, my lass. What do you say to you and I going out to the barn and having a nip o’ cheese? ”

Malai was holding a sycamore rolling pin, looking as if she couldn’t decide whether she wanted to roll out the dough before her or throw it at Allan. “I dinna ken why ye think I’d be goin’ to the barn wi’ the likes o’ ye.”

“I know how much you enjoyed the last time we went,” he said, winking at Annabella.

Malai must have decided the word was mightier than the rolling pin, for she went back to rolling out the dough as she said, “I be thinking yer memory is shorter than yer privates, if ye think that.”

As the kitchen exploded with laughter, Ailie and Annabella decided it was time to depart. “Come on,” Ailie said. “I told Cook we’d go down to the well and draw some water.”

Remembering the last time she was at the well, Annabella shuddered. “I don’t like that place. It’s full of spiders.”

“That one isn’t used very much. We use a different well—one that’s much closer,” Ailie said.

Once they reached the well, Annabella turned the crank as Ailie guided the wooden barrel, and as she cranked, she wondered what her parents would do if they saw her looking as common as a housemaid, with her white apron and her nose sprinkled with flour and freckles, turning a crank to draw water from a well.

“We’ll use the hoops,” Ailie said, attaching two buckets to a hoop. “Now, step inside the hoops,” she said. “Watch your skirts.”

Annabella hitched her skirts and stepped inside the hoop. At this exact moment Ross Mackinnon happened by. Sitting astride his horse, he looked as tasty as freshly baked bread.

With a laugh, he pulled up beside her and said, “Don’t drop your skirts on my account.”

“How odd,” Annabella said. “You look exactly like the kind of man who would encourage a woman to drop her skirts.”

“Drop them, raise them, it matters not—as long as the lady in them has limbs as shapely as yours.”

Annabella took off so fast she was immediately thankful Ailie had suggested the hoops, for they kept the pails from banging against her legs as she walked.

Not once did she look back to see if Ross or Ailie followed.

As it turned out, Ailie was right behind her and came into the kitchen a few moments later.

“ He isn’t with you, is he?” Annabella asked.

“No,” said Ailie, “he looked ready to topple from his horse in a fit of laughter last time I saw him.”

“Come on,” Bella said. “I want to finish smocking that apron.”

“You go on,” Ailie said. “Mama wants me to help her pin a pattern.”

Annabella collected her smocking on her way to the library, the most wonderful room at Seaforth and her very favorite because it had none of the attributes of a sitting room.

It was filled with novels, plays, and journals for idle time, as well as books for serious study.

It was a room one could spend weeks in and still not see everything.

Aside from the usual portraits and furniture, this library was richly equipped with games, portfolios of engravings, and scientific toys—the Scots being quite an inventive lot.

The sun was going down, so she moved to the mullioned window and lighted a resplendent Aladdin lamp on a round, skirted table.

A marvelous old chair, fat with stuffing, was next to the table.

It was Bella’s favorite place to sit. With her feet on a footstool, she spread her smocking across her lap and began drawing up the gathers she had taken last evening.

She worked at this for over an hour, and during that time the maid came in to light the peat fire, which soon reached out to surround her like a thick woolen blanket.

She began sewing the gathers with a honeycomb stitch, then lowered her hands to rest on her lap. The last shaft of fading sunlight broke over the mountains and flooded her chair in golden warmth and her eyes felt heavy…so…very…very…heavy. She nodded off to sleep.

The dream was wonderful, though it didn’t start out that way.

She was being held prisoner in a drafty stone tower in a black castle.

She had been taken from her home, the white castle, and imprisoned in the black castle by an evil prince who always wore black.

She pined for her lost love, the red prince, whom she feared she would never see again.

But then he appeared, bursting through the doors with a sword in his hand.

The red prince looked a lot like Ross Mackinnon, but that only made him more attractive.

He took her in his arms and kissed her. He kept on kissing her until everything began to spin, faster and faster; at last she feared her heart would stop.

She gave a start and clasped her hand over the thundering heart with in her breast.