Tidings of Great Boys Read online

  “Can’t you tell him?”

  Those plaintive blue eyes would make him fall deeper in love with her if she turned them on him. “Then he’d be mad at me. You’re the one going about kissing people. It’s your responsibility.”

  She sighed. “I suppose you’re right.” Then she brightened. “Maybe I should ask Kaz.”

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “You are a heartless thing. Don’t you know the poor boy is harboring a crush on you the size of the Spencer playing field? I must say, you know how to collect them. You just don’t know what to do with them once you’ve got them.”

  Her mouth hung open as she stared at me. “You must be kidding. That’s not funny.”

  “Perhaps not, but it’s certainly true.” On both counts.

  “Kaz does not have a crush on me. He’s my friend.”

  “Only because that’s the nice little compartment where you keep him. Ask Gillian. Or Carly. They’ll back me up.”

  “You guys are deluded.”

  “No,” I said gently. “You are.”

  She got up and turned away, pretending to look for something in the wardrobe. “I need to change for lunch.”

  Was it just me, or had there been a sale recently on No Trespassing signs?

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Date: December 24, 2009

  Re: Merry Christmas

  Is your phone turned off? We haven’t talked in a week and that’s just wrong. It feels weird not to be spending Christmas Eve with you and Danyel and everyone from youth group. No service at our church, no eggnog, no long walks on the beach. Wah!

  But Strathcairn is pretty amazing. I shouldn’t whine about what I can’t have when I’m spending Christmas in a castle! Did you get the pictures I sent? I think I must have filled up your inbox by now. I predicted it would snow, and it did last night. I was worried my folks wouldn’t make it, but they got here about half an hour ago, along with one of the production people from TMW.

  The earl (I just can’t call him Graham, or Your Lordship, so I’m settling for what Carly informs me is the incorrect “Mr. MacPhail”) has invited a few people from around here in for tea, then we’re going to the 6:30 carol service. There’s a chapel in the castle, but no one uses it, so we’re all walking to the church. It’s between here and the village and it’s four hundred years old, can you believe it?

  After that I think everyone is going to the local pub for ceilidh dancing and music. Feels funny to go to a pub, but Mac tells me it’s the happenin’ place. The center of it all. It’s called the Cairn and Crown and it’s really a hotel, with whitewashed walls and half-timbering and stone. No thatched roof—such a disappointment! Anyway, it’s named after a pile of stones somewhere around here that marks where one of Mac’s warrior ancestors is buried. There’s history everywhere you look.

  Okay, enough babbling. I miss you and everyone in S.B. And since we get to open one present tonight, I’m going to open yours

  Love, Lissa xo

  chapter 9

  CHRISTMAS EVE. If those two words don’t define anticipation, I don’t know what does. When I was little, I used to pester my parents so much about the presents that they finally gave in and let me open one on Christmas Eve. That took the edge off and I could sleep. I always made sure to open the smallest one, though. The big ones were for the morning, and had to be built up to.

  When I got old enough, my parents distracted me after the evening service by taking me with them down to the pub, where the music and dancing and singing went on until the wee hours of the morning. I usually conked out by ten o’clock and Dad had to load me into the back of the car, sound asleep.

  There’d be no sleeping for me tonight—not at the pub, anyway.

  I ducked under the low lintel and the music and noise rushed out to meet us as the door swung open. Carrie’s brother Lachlan and the village chemist played their fiddles, someone else had a drum, the local constable played the old upright piano, and Leon from the post office pumped away at an accordion. Behind him lay a set of small pipes for later.

  With a roar, half the crowd toasted us as we came in, and Dad blushed and ordered a round for the house. Well, what else could he do?

  Then Carrie and Lily appeared out of nowhere and grabbed me. “Come on! We’ve got a great table.”

  “No, no, wait. Everyone, these are my friends, Carrie Crombie and Lily Vu.” I rattled off the Spencer girls’ names and by the time I was finished, we’d all fetched up against the table like surf on a beach.

  “So these are the California girls,” Gordon drawled. “Are there no ugly ones out there?”

  “Why, is that all you can manage?” Terrell poked him in the ribs and guffawed.

  Lissa glanced over her shoulder to where Dad was showing her parents to his usual table. “Um, shouldn’t we—”

  “’Course not,” Carrie said. “Unless you want to sit with the old folks.”

  “They’re not exactly ancient,” Gillian informed her.

  “Is that blonde your mum?” Gordon asked Lissa. “She’s putting the wind up the boys’ kilts, that’s certain.”

  Only Gordon would see simple introductions as something… not quite socially acceptable.

  “I like seeing people in kilts,” Carly said. “It doesn’t happen a lot in California.”

  “I’ll have to go home and get mine, then.” Gordon wore his usual ripped jeans. No dressing up for him, or for Carrie either. Still, I felt quite comfortable in my Alexander Wang petal skirt, and when Gillian slipped her coat off, I saw Carrie take in every inch of her red Miu Miu cashmere tunic and black leggings.

  Take it in, and turn up her nose as if it didn’t matter.

  Carly made a face, and I realized I’d just missed Gordon’s obligatory joke about what a Scotsman wore under his kilt. Oh, please. “Will you be civilized?” I hissed at him. “These are my guests.”

  “Excuse me.” He raised his hands. “Just giving the girls what they expect.”

  “They’re not tourists, you eejit. Mind your mouth.”

  “Since when?” Lily drawled. “You going all toffy on us, Mac? Pulling rank?”

  “Of course not. I want all my friends to like each other.” I shot Gordon a withering glare. “No matter what the provocation.”

  “All right, then, how’s this?” Terrell slid off his chair and offered his hand to Lissa. “Care for a dance?”

  “I don’t know any of them except Strip the Willow,” she confessed.

  “They’re not playing country dances, blondie.”

  Sure enough, the impromptu band had taken a break and some enterprising person had snuck a Neckties CD into the player. Their distinctive brand of Celtic swing filled the little room as Terrell pulled Lissa out into the center of the floor.

  “He’s gonna be so sorry,” Gillian breathed.

  She wasn’t kidding.

  With the first turn, Lissa grabbed every eye in the room as her midnight-blue Zac Posen dress belled out like a flower and she whirled back into Terrell’s clumsy dance hold. Within five seconds it was obvious that Terrell, who had meant to embarrass her, was about as embarrassed as a guy could get. For every move he proposed, she embellished it and he was forced to catch up. For every turn, she had another. No matter how fast he moved, she was faster.

  I smothered a smile as two more couples joined them, and turned to Alasdair. “Well? Dance with me?”

  He actually blushed. “I don’t do, uh… that kind of dancing. If I did, I’d have gone out there and saved her. All I can do are country dances.”

  Rats. But I covered my disappointment, even as I couldn’t keep my foot from tapping to the beat. “Never fear. There’ll be plenty of those when the old folks get their courage up.” Lindsay, you eejit. “Not that you’re old. I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “That’s okay, Lady Lindsay. I know what you meant.”

  “Please. Call me Mac. All my friends do.” I wanted him to consider
himself my friend.

  “So I heard.”

  “What?”

  He shrugged, watching Lissa make mince of poor Terrell. “Some of your friends seem a little… unfriendly.”

  “That’s just their way. They’ll warm up.”

  “I didn’t mean that. Both those guys meant to embarrass your guests.”

  “Do you have to criticize them?” I said in a low tone with a point to it. “You’re just as unfriendly as they are.” He lifted his chin and moved away from me half a step. I felt like kicking myself. The famous MacPhail charm at work. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

  “Yes, you did. Excuse me.” He turned to Gillian and Carly. “Can I get you ladies something to drink?”

  And he made his way across the pub with their order, leaving me with Carrie and her laser-beam gaze that hadn’t missed a thing.

  “So that’s how it is, is it?” She watched Alasdair jockey himself into position to order sparkling waters at the bar. “Poor Gordon, left out in the cold again.”

  I slid in next to her. “Don’t say a word,” I said urgently.

  “He’s staying at the house?”

  “Yes. Until Hogmanay.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “Not so lucky. All we do is fight. He wants Lissa, anyway.”

  “Poor Terrell.”

  “After this performance, Terrell won’t have a chance.”

  “Or a dance. He’ll never live this down.” Both of us watched Terrell bring Lissa back as the song ended. Then he melted into the crowd in the direction of the bar, where no doubt he’d persuade the barman to give him something stronger than cider.

  The chemist pulled his chair farther into the cleared circle in the middle and laid his fiddle in his lap. When he began to sing, the rest of us joined in with “Hark the Bonny Christ Church Bells” and “Christmas Day in the Morning.” And then Gillian found the piano in the corner and I recognized the chords of “O Holy Night.”

  The chemist’s violin joined in on the melody. I opened my mouth to sing, when beside me Shani took a deep breath and let her voice out in a clear alto that swept me into silence. And not only me. When Shani realized the crowd had fallen silent, she faltered to a stop. An embarrassed flush seeped into her face as she hunched her shoulders and seemed to shrink into her coat.

  Someone giggled. I think it was Carrie, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “Nay, lass, dinna stop.” The chemist marked the beat with his bow like a conductor in front of an orchestra. “A voice like that was meant to be heard. Sing out.”

  Gillian didn’t give her a chance to demur. She rippled out the opening chords once again and Shani straightened. Her voice soared over everyone else’s as she sang the old carol gospel style, something I’d become familiar with in the time we’d been rooming together. I’d heard her practicing and heard her in the shower, but it had never sounded like this. At the end of the first chorus, the bow waved again, and she plunged into the second verse. And the third.

  When the last of the verses died away, the pub was dead silent.

  Then my dad began to clap, and Lissa’s parents joined in, and pandemonium broke out. Shani disappeared in a sea of laughing, clapping people, and then the band collected itself once again and began to play a country dance.

  Alasdair appeared next to Shani. “May I offer our singer a dance?”

  “Not me,” Shani mumbled. “I’m done for the night. Maybe even the rest of the year.”

  With a smile, he turned to Lissa. “What about you?”

  “I don’t know how to do it,” she said, making a funny regretful face. “Mac taught us how to do Strip the Willow, but I don’t think that will fit in here.”

  “No, it won’t, but this is different. Come on, I’ll show you.”

  “Honest, Alasdair. I’d rather not.”

  “Please? Don’t leave a man to be turned down twice, Lissa.”

  “I’ll dance with you.” Mouth spoke before brain engaged. Way to set yourself up for rejection, girl. “We’ll demonstrate, and Lissa and the others will pick it up.”

  To be slotted into the role of teacher seemed to save his pride, and we took the floor with old folks and young folks alike. I don’t know how much Lissa got out of it, but if I could have crystallized the moment and put it under glass to admire later, I would have. Alasdair’s hands were warm and strong, and he knew the steps as well as I did. That meant we didn’t have to think about anything but each other.

  Well, in a perfect world, that’s the way it would have been. As it was, I just treasured the way he led me into and out of the turns, the way his knitted jumper felt warm under my hands, and the fact that even though I wore heels, he was still taller.

  It didn’t hurt that both Carrie and Lily looked madly jealous that I was dancing with the university man while they had to put up with the third-form antics of Gordon and Terrell.

  Dad and Lissa’s parents got up to go at close to eleven. By that time, the band was sweaty and exhausted and people had begun to lose their footing on the floor—and not because it was slippery, either. They stopped to collect us, and while the Spencer girls were putting on their coats and hunting up handbags and mufflers, Carrie tugged on my arm.

  “You’re not going yet?”

  “I have to. It’s a long walk back in the snow.”

  “Gordon will take you.”

  “Gordon’s been nipping more than cider. I’ll see you after the weekend, yeah?”

  “I can’t believe it. Have you gone all goody-goody on me? You used to be the one who wanted to close the place down.”

  I stepped away so her hand fell from my sleeve. “Not as much as you’ve gone all critical on me. I haven’t been able to do one thing to your satisfaction all night. What is it with you?”

  A hunted expression came into her eyes. “Nothing. Sorry. Are you opening presents?”

  “Just one.”

  She pulled a little box out of her pocket and slipped it into my hand. “Open mine first.”

  “All right. Thank you. You got the parcel from the States, didn’t you?”

  “Under the tree and waiting.” She gave me a hug and I left feeling a bit happier. She just had a bit of the green-eyed monster, was all. Once she realized that our friendship wasn’t in jeopardy because I was friends with the other girls, she’d settle down and be normal.

  Alasdair climbed into the front of our Range Rover, and I staked out a seat in the back. Gillian and Shani joined us, leaving Lissa to ride home with her folks and Carly. While Shani and Gillian played vocal gymnastics with some of the American carols (ever heard “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” sung hip-hop style?), I left them to it and sank into thought.

  Sometime in the next week I’d have to tell them all I wouldn’t be going back to Spencer for the winter term. Even though I’d made a big deal about applying to Harvard and Pepperdine, the simple truth was that I didn’t want to go there. Or to Oxford, either. All I wanted to do was stay right here at Strathcairn and—what? Haunt the place for years until either I got married or Roger inherited it and booted me out?

  That wasn’t a very appealing prospect, and neither was becoming a doctor. Though with that, at least, I could practice somewhere round here, and maybe even live at home. I could turn the carriage house into a surgery, even.

  But future plans aside, I didn’t want to alienate the friends I had here. I know they got on Dad’s nerves a bit—he was old-fashioned about things like tattoos and piercings and hated it when people like Gordon flaunted what he called their “personal ventilation.” But at the same time, they were my crowd. We’d been friends since primary school, and yeah, maybe we stuck together in self-defense because there weren’t many kids out here in the country. But they weren’t a bad lot. They just liked a bit of entertainment now and again and weren’t fussy about other people’s boundaries when they went out to find it.

  Dad had been right when he said I had one foot in one world and one foot in another. I was
going to have to choose a side and put my whole weight somewhere. Soon.

  So, gathering at the foot of the Christmas tree was a relief—I could totally regress into childhood, where a person didn’t have to make these kinds of decisions, and no one would think badly of me.

  Dad had chosen the tree and put it up yesterday, and Shani and Gillian and I had decorated it. After we’d located the box containing the candles, it had taken at least three more calls to Mummy to decorate the sitting room, and one call to figure out how to slide back the panels that divided it from the music room. “Why can’t you ask your father?” she’d finally demanded in exasperation.

  “Because he’s out on the estate with Gabe and Mr. Gillie.” The three of them were in the orchard, talking about beekeeping or root rot or something equally interesting. They were only a shout away if you leaned out a window, but I wasn’t about to tell her that.

  The result was a beautifully decorated setting for our cozy party and the tree—and one agitated mother who secretly couldn’t bear the fact that Strathcairn had come alive again without her. It was the first time I’d ever been home to play hostess—no ski trip to Chamonix, no quick flight to the Azores—and I was developing quite the taste for it.

  Lissa picked up a flat package with a spill of silver curls on top. She held it to her ear and shook it, but no rattles or clunks told her what might be inside.

  “It’s a book,” Carly suggested.

  “From Kaz? I hope not.”

  “A DVD, then. Some obscure science fiction movie none of us has ever heard of.”

  From his seat on an ottoman, Alasdair held a little box out. “You might try this one.”

  “Oh, no,” Lissa assured him. “I promised Kaz I’d open his tonight. I’ve been dying to—”

  “It’s from me.” His tone was diffident. Shy, even.

  “Oh.” Lissa turned a pleading face on Shani and me, sharing the love seat. Help me out, here, it said plainly. “I, um—”

  “A promise is a promise, Alasdair,” her dad told him. “Come and toast the season with Graham and me.”