Highland Mist Read Online Free Page A

headlights. “I suppose you know what you’re going to do when you get to Inverada?” he asked curtly. “There’s no one looking after the place at the moment, and in fact, it’s empty.”
    “Empty?” Charles sent a startled look at his profile. “But what about the caretaker and his wife? There is a caretaker, and he’s been notified of our arrival!”
    Euan shrugged his shoulders.
    “Fine, but the last I heard of old MacTaggert he’d broken his leg and been rushed off to hospital. Mrs. MacTaggert had a bad dose of ’flu and had gone to stay with her sister-in-law. Of course, she might have returned ... but I doubt it, in this weather. Inverada’s not an ideal place for recuperation in the dead of winter, and with Mac in hospital there’d be no one to fetch in the wood, or do anything like that.”
    Charles barked at him.
    “Don’t be such a fool, man. The MacTaggerts are paid to do their job by Miss Drew’s mother.”
    Euan said nothing, and Toni leaned forward across the front seat.
    “Of course, if they’re ill...” she said uncertainly. “But it seems odd that they should both be ill.”
    “At seventy nothing is really odd,” the driver of the car remarked bleakly. “At least, it’s not odd that they should neither of them be as spry as they once were. They looked after old Angus, until he died, and then they should have been pensioned off.”
    Toni was silent.
    “Everyone imagined they would be pensioned off, and the house sold, or shut up. It’s not fit for occupation.”
    “Not fit—?
    Charles remarked on an odd note of satisfaction: “That doesn’t altogether surprise me. But it’s inconvenient to hear of such things now.”
    Another sheep blundered across the road in front of the headlights, and MacLeod explained that they were mountain sheep, being driven to lower levels by the bad weather. He was finding it increasingly difficult to make any progress, and in fact they had now slowed to a crawl, and the car was full of the eerie whine of the wind, and the snow was beating at them like a mad white wall that dissolved into frenzied particles when it touched them. A sudden violent lurch—much more violent than that caused by the skid to avoid the first sheep—and Charles at least realised they were in the ditch. He made a gloomy pronouncement that was not without an undercurrent of satisfaction.
    “It seems you’ve had it, MacLeod! Unless I’m very much mistaken we won’t see Inverada House tonight.”
    The relish in his tone made Toni’s eyes grow round.
    But MacLeod opened the door on his side and stepped out into the storm. A brief inspection of his front wheels—one of which was firmly embedded in a deep declivity at the side of the road—and he returned to make a pronouncement, also.
    “We won’t be able to go any farther, but matters could be worse. As it is, my cottage isn’t more than a quarter of a mile away, and we should be able to make it with ease. I hope you’re both wrapped up fairly warmly?”
    Toni clutched her tweed coat and wrapped it round her. The collar was already wet with snow that had found its way in through the faulty windows, and although she had worn a hat when she left Edinburgh she must have left it behind somewhere on the journey in between. Seeing that she was bareheaded Euan MacLeod took off his tartan scarf and handed it to her to make use of as a head scarf.
    “But won’t you miss it?” she said, through chattering teeth, as they stood together in the darkness and the snow. Charles came up behind her and put his arm round her.
    “Sorry about this, infant,” he muttered. “I ought to have had more sense than to let you leave the shelter of that one-eyed halt where we could have spent the night. But this young man was almost as over-confident as I was, and with less excuse, for he knows his district.”
    “Unless you’re both made of very poor material you’ll survive such an experience as this,” the young Scotsman said