Beside her, Henry sat moodily listening to the rumbling of his stomach. They had stopped for a horrible lunch hours ago at a motorway café. He wanted his dinner. He wanted this nightmare journey to end.
Priscilla slowed to a stop and he looked up impatiently.
A shepherd was driving a flock of sheep down the centre of the road. He moved with an easy slow pace and did not look at the car. With an impatient grunt, Henry leaned across and honked the horn loudly. The sheep panicked and scattered.
“You awful fool,” snapped Priscilla. She rolled down the window. “I’m very sorry, Mr Mackay,” she called. “An accident.”
The shepherd came up and leaned in the car window. “It’s yerself, Miss Halburton-Smythe,” he said. “Now, you should know better than to startle a man’s sheep.”
“Sorry,” said Priscilla again. “How’s Mrs Mackay’s leg?”
“Better, she says. We got a new doctor, Dr Brodie. He’s given her the green bottle. She says it’s awf’y good.”
“Are we going to sit here all day?” growled Henry.
The shepherd looked at him with mild surprise.
“My friend is tired,” said Priscilla. “Must get on. Tell Mrs Mackay I shall call on her in a few days.”
“You mustn’t hurry things in the country,” said Priscilla severely as they moved on. “Mr Mackay was most offended.”
“Does it matter what the peasantry think?”
“They’re not peasants,” said Priscilla. “Really, Henry. I’m surprised at you.”
“Well, since you have promised to visit Mrs Mackay of the green bottle and the bad leg, I assume we must be nearly at our journey’s end.”
“About another thirty miles to go.”
Henry groaned.
Lord and Lady Helmsdale sat in the back of their antique Rolls-Royce and shouted at each other, which was the way they normally conversed.
“If it weren’t for this playwright-chappie, I would have turned down Mary’s invitation,” said Lord Helmsdale. Mary was Mrs Halburton-Smythe.
Lord Helmsdale was small and round with thin grey hair combed carefully in strips over his bald patch. His wife was a huge woman, well over six feet tall, with a slab of a face. She was wearing an old tweed jacket and skirt and a shirt with a hard collar. On her head she sported an off-the-face blue-and-white-spotted hat. It looked remarkably like one Her Majesty had worn during her last American visit, and Lord Helmsdale had delayed their leaving by asking whether she had been ferreting around the garbage cans at Buckingham Palace again. The resultant row had been frightful. But there is nothing more cosy than a shared marital resentment, and the Helmsdales were once more drawn together by their hatred of one of the Halburton-Smythes’s guests.
The target of their hatred was Captain Peter Bartlett of the Highland Dragoons.
“Why on earth did Mary ask him?” demanded Lord Helmsdale querulously.
“If you mean Bartlett, then God knows,” snapped his wife. “But I know why Bartlett’s going to be there. He wants to bag the first brace.” She had long chats on the phone to Mrs Halburton-Smythe and never guessed for a moment how much that lady dreaded her calls.
“Didn’t think there would be any grouse shooting,” observed his lordship. “Grouse population’s declining fast, and Halburton-Smythe told me not to bring my guns.”
The previous grouse season – which begins in Britain on August 12, known as the Glorious Twelfth, and ends on December 10 – had confirmed Scottish landowners’ worst fears: The grouse were dying off fast, and that could soon mean an end to Scotland’s £150 million-a-year grouse ‘industry.”
“My birds are disappearing as well,” grumbled Lord Helmsdale. “Think those Animal Rights people must be poisoning them to spite me.”
“Everyone’s birds are dying off,” said his wife reasonably. “The Game Conservancy has launched a three-hundred-thousand-pound appeal to finance research. They’re appealing to all landowners for cash. Didn’t you get their letter?”
“Can’t remember,” said Lord Helmsdale.
“Sheikh Hamdan Al Maktoum has already given them a hundred thousand.”
“Mac who?”
“He’s a United Arab Emirates Cabinet Minister who has a large estate in Scotland, and you ask me the same thing every time I mention his name.”
“Well, they won’t need my money if they’ve got that much from him,” said her husband comfortably. “Still, we needn’t let Bartlett bother us. This playwright-chappie Withering’s damned clever. Best play I’ve seen in ages.”
“I shall enjoy being rude to Bartlett,” remarked his wife. “I shall enjoy that very much.”
“The man’s an utter cad.”
Jessica Villiers and Diana Bryce were best friends – the sort of odd friendship that springs up between a pretty girl and a plain one. Diana was secretly contemptuous of the mannish, gawky, horsy Jessica, and Jessica was bitterly jealous of Diana’s stunning good looks.
Both girls’ parents had estates over in Caithness in the north-east. Diana and Jessica had made their come-out at the London Season at the same time. Both worked in London and had taken their holidays at the same time, not out of friendship but because August was the fashionable time to holiday in Scotland.
The Highland grapevine works for the landed gentry in the same way as it does for everyone else there, and it seemed that no sooner had Mary Halburton-Smythe hit upon the idea of a small house party to welcome the playwright Henry Withering than she was besieged by pleading phone calls from all over. Everyone wanted to come, but she had kept the guest list down, and Jessica and Diana were two of that fortunate number. As Jessica competently managed her draughty old Land-Rover along the one-lane Highland roads, Diana dreamt of snatching this famous playwright from under Priscilla’s nose. Everyone knew Priscilla had about as much sex appeal as a fish. Diana had glossy black hair and a flawless complexion. The fact that the men hadn’t exactly all fallen at her feet during her London Season still rankled. She had not yet learned the hard lesson that women who love themselves too much are rarely loved by anyone else. She had been engaged twice and on each occasion it had been the man who had called it off.
She would have been amazed had she known that Jessica was nourishing the same dream of wooing the playwright away from Priscilla. Jessica was convinced that the fellows, in the end, preferred a girl who was ‘a good chap’ rather than a posturing little miss…like Diana, she thought, casting a brief and evil look at her best friend. Of course, there had been that distressing business two years ago, she thought, when Diana had become engaged to her, Jessica’s, boyfriend. Of course, that engagement hadn’t lasted – for how could any man enjoy the pleasures of Diana after having tasted those of Jessica?
“Who’s going to be there?” asked Jessica. “I mean apart from you and me and Priscilla and her fellow.”
“Oh, all the usual faces,” yawned Diana. “By the time I had coerced Mrs Halburton-Smythe into inviting the both of us, I hadn’t any energy left to ask who else was going to be there. There won’t be any shooting with all this boring grouse problem, so I suppose the rest will be a lot of old fogies.”
Tommel Castle, home of the Halburton-Smythes, was not a real castle. It had been built by a beer baron in the nineteenth century, when Queen Victoria had made the Highlands fashionable by her visits. It had pinnacles, turrets, battlements, and a multitude of cold, dark rooms. The shallow oak stairs and corridors were guarded by fake suits of medieval armour.