Hazel looked back at her, then nodded. She scrubbed a tear from her cheek with the back of her hand. “You’re disappointed in me, aren’t you, Gemma?”
Gemma thought about it. “No . . . at least . . . not you, exactly. It’s just that, after my marriage to Rob turned out to be such a disaster, I based my idea of what made a family work on you and Tim—that’s what gave me the courage to move in with Duncan—and now I find it was all a sham. It makes me feel—odd.” She rose and slipped back into her jacket. “You go on to bed. I’m going out for
a bit of air.” Giving Hazel a shaky smile, she let herself out into the darkened drive.
She stood, gazing up at the stars, now mist-obscured, and listening to the faint creaking of the night. What she wanted, she realized with a shiver, was not air, but to ring Duncan and assure herself that her world was still intact.
Chapter Four
O what lies younder north of Tweed?
Monsters and hillmen, hairy kneed And music that wad wauk the deid!
To venture there were risky O!
The fearsome haggis haunts the snaw The kelpy waits—your banes to gnaw There’s nocht to eat but oatmeal—raw BUT I’M STILL TOLD THERE’S WHISKY O!
—anonymous scottish poet
Carnmore, November
By morning, the wind had died, and the world outside the farmhouse lay encased in a rippling blanket of white. This Will knew only from peering out the front windows, as the back of the house was completely blocked by drifts.
He had spent the remainder of the night dozing in the parlor armchair, waking periodically to stoke the fire, watching his mother minister to his increasingly restless and delirious father. By daybreak, Charles had begun
muttering and clutching at his throat, as if it pained him, and seemed soothed only by spoons of hot water with whisky and honey.
As the cold morning light crept into the room, Will saw that his mother’s face was gray with exhaustion. Her thick, dark hair had escaped from its knot in wayward tendrils, and he noticed, for the first time, a single thread of silver.
“He’s burning with fever,” she said softly, resting the backs of her fingers fleetingly against his father’s forehead.
“Mam,” Will whispered, “let me look after him. You get some rest now.”
She shook her head. “No, Will. I’ll bide here. There’s porridge in the kitchen for you, and then you’d best see if you can get to the beasts.”
With a last glance at his father’s flushed face, Will left the parlor. The kitchen was bitterly cold, in spite of the stove, and he shivered as he ate his breakfast. Then he wrapped up as well as he could and, taking the shovel they kept handy in the porch, ventured out the front door.
His boots sank into the powdery snow—a bad sign.
Once an ice crust formed over the top it would be easier walking, but for now he’d have to wade or shovel his way through the drifts to the barn and distillery buildings. Beyond the near field Carn More, the hill from which the distillery took its name, rose steeply, its rugged granite face softened by the white icing of snow.
As he watched, the sun rose, gilding the march of the Ladder Hills with a glistening rose as delicate as his mother’s best satin gown. The air was so still it felt charged with silence, as if the world were waiting for something to happen.
Will held his breath for a moment, listening, then picked up the spade and dug in.
It took him almost an hour to reach the barn. Wiping a hand across his sweating brow, he stretched his shoulders and contemplated the drifts that reached all the way to the eaves. He could hear the animals moving restively about inside, and he felt a moment’s stab of despair at the enormity of the task before him.
Not that it was the first time Carnmore had been snowed in, but always before, he and his father had managed together. He pushed away the unbidden thought of his wee sister, Charlotte, taken from them by a fever at less than a year old. But his father was older and stronger—surely he would be all right.
Will began digging with renewed energy, trying to blot out his fear with the thunk of the spade. Once he’d cleared the snow from the barn door, he was glad to slip into the relative warmth of the stone building. He moved among the shuffling beasts—his father’s prize dairy cows, his father’s horse, and the pack ponies that carried Carnmore whisky down to the coast—filling troughs and lining the stalls with fresh hay.
Although some of the Speyside distilleries now had their own railway lines, ponies remained the only reliable way to get whisky out of the Braes, even in good weather. The paths the smugglers had used to move whisky down through the Ladder Hills now carried a le-gitimate product. As for supplies, they warehoused enough barley to last the season, water flowed freely year-round from the Carn More spring, and the peats came from their own moss.
When he’d finished in the barn, Will cleared a path to the distillery easily enough, as the buildings themselves had blocked the worst of the snow. But once inside the
main production house, he stood for a moment, trying to decide what to do. Distilling was a continuous process, made up of many interrelated steps. Barley lay soaking in the steeps, waiting for the maltster to determine when it had absorbed just the right amount of moisture; then the barley was spread on the mesh floor of the malt barn to germinate, after which it would dry in the peat fires of the kiln.
Once dried, the malt was ground into grist in the mill, and from there it was funneled into the enormous wooden mash tuns, where hot water would release the sugar from the grains. From the mash tuns the sugary liquid, called wort, ran into the great fermenting vessels.
This was the brewer’s domain: it was he who added the yeast, he who decided when the wash was ready for distilling. Then the stillman would take over, running the wash into the wash charger, and from it into the first of the great copper stills.
Carnmore used three stills rather than the traditional two, one wash still and two spirit stills. His father claimed that it was this further distillation that gave Carnmore whisky its smooth, light taste, and it was a su-perstitious practice among most distillers that nothing which gave a whisky its distinct character should be changed—not a cobweb swept away nor a dent repaired in the copper stills.