A MacKenzie Clan Gathering Page 5

  “The newest one,” Ian answered.

  The steward, well trained, took up the speech. “The original still was blown up by the English army in the winter of 1745. Reconstructed in 1748 by Malcolm Mackenzie, who survived the Battle of Culloden and became the Duke of Kilmorgan once the charge of treason on him was lifted. Parts of the first still remain in this one—pieces have been replaced and the whole thing added on to in the last hundred and fifty years. Except for the few years following the Uprising, this still has been producing the best Scots whisky since the late 1600s.”

  Ian, who’d heard the story too many times to count, watched Ackerley’s reaction instead. He’d expected a missionary to be sternly disapproving of anything to do with spirits, but Ackerley looked over the still and the room around it, a huge vault of a chamber that ran straight back into the hillside, with great interest.

  Ian, though he did not talk nearly as much as his brothers, had as wide a mischievous streak as any of them. He might be mad, but that didn’t make him weak, or even worse, nice.

  Ian fixed Ackerley with a sharp stare, forcing himself to look into the man’s rather ingenuous brown eyes.

  “Come with me,” Ian said. “And try some.”

  Chapter Six

  Ackerley looked doubtful as Ian poured another measure of whisky into two glasses. They sat in a little parlor off the barrel room, where clients and privileged tourists were allowed to meet with the steward or a Mackenzie—whichever brother happened to be home—and sample the wares.

  Ackerley had already downed one glass of the special reserve and declared it excellent. He seemed content to prudently stop after one glassful, so Ian brought out the special special reserve.

  “The queen drinks this,” Ian said, as he poured it, the liquid making a musical sound.

  Ackerley lifted his glass, studying how the amber liquid caught the light, the facets of the heavy crystal throwing warm spangles to the table. “The queen herself, eh?”

  Ian shrugged. “Hart says she mostly serves it to guests.”

  “Ones she wishes to impress,” Ackerley said. “Well, I must sip what Her Majesty does, mustn’t I?”

  Ian watched closely as Ackerley let a droplet flow over his tongue. He sat quietly for a moment, then his face changed. “Good heavens, my lord. That is ambrosia. Pure ambrosia.”

  Ian topped up Ackerley’s glass and lifted his own. He took a sip, letting the smooth liquid tingle over his tongue and down his throat.

  Ackerley took another mouthful, closing his eyes to savor it. Ian’s respect for him rose a notch. Ackerley didn’t swig the stuff, or claim to not understand what the fuss was about. He seemed to share Ian’s appreciation for a well-made whisky.

  Ian waited patiently until Ackerley finished his glass, then he poured more.

  Ackerley shook his head. “Oh no, I should not. I’m not used to spirits.”

  “Ye are staying at the house, going nowhere,” Ian said. “Do ye have to face any of your flock later today?”

  “My flock? No, of course not. I’ve retired. My last flock is still in India, ably tended by my replacement.”

  “Verra well, then.” Ian filled his own glass and lifted the decanter, offering.

  Ackerley hesitated, then flushed. “Oh, why not? Just another taste.”

  The whisky lessened Ian’s shyness a bit. Being slightly drunk didn’t always help him, especially when he was with a crowd, but sometimes, he’d feel less inhibited. Not always a good thing, Beth warned him.

  However, Ian wanted to know all about John Ackerley. And the best way to find out was to loosen the man’s tongue and encourage him to reveal things about himself.

  “Never thought a missionary would approve of whisky,” Ian said. “The Scots’ ones are teetotalers. They drive Hart spare.”

  Ackerley looked amused. “Those of us in the C of E are not quite so uncompromising. Excessive drink is a terrible thing, of course. A taste now and again of a fine wine, or indeed, whisky such as this, is far different from living in a glass of gin. Even our Lord Jesus Christ drank wine. Not that he had much choice in those days—I imagine it was much better for him than the water. Though they had ale as well. An ancient drink, is ale.”

  Ian did not want to talk about the history of ale or wine in Roman times.

  “Beth is happy to see you,” he prompted.

  “Yes, dearest Beth. As I said, I am pleased to find that her circumstances have much improved. Poor little thing.” Ackerley took another sip. “You have done well by her.”

  “Aye.” Ian waited, hoping the man would say something like, Now that I’ve seen she is all right, I can be on my way.

  Ackerley drained his glass and studied its emptiness regretfully. “I must confess something to you, Lord Ian. My motives for traveling all this way weren’t simply to call on an old friend—my brother’s widow, that is.”

  “No?” Ian snatched up the decanter and refilled Ackerley’s glass. “What then?”

  Ackerley cleared his throat. He took a fortifying sip, his face reddening with it. “I came here on purpose to see you, my lord. To ascertain Beth’s well-being also, of course, but I’ve known for some time she was perfectly happy. She’s very polite, but I could tell by her letters that she is quite fond of you and content in her marriage. A man of the cloth develops a knack for reading people, you know.”

  Ian fixed on the man’s first sentence. “To see me?”

  “Indeed.” Ackerley rested his hands on the table as though resisting the temptation to take another sip. “I’ve traveled the world. Once I made my decision to retire and left the mission, I did not come straight home. I took my leisure to visit places I’d longed to, staying with friends and other clergy of my acquaintance as I moved across the Continent. A missionary does not retire with much funds in his pocket, you understand.”

  Ian curbed his impatience. Was Ackerley trying to touch Ian for money? Ian would happily give him all he wanted, if he would go away.

  “I spent some time in Vienna,” Ackerley went on. “A fascinating place, and a beautiful one. And the work being done there by philosophers and doctors is equally as fascinating.”

  Ian sat back in the chair, the amount of whisky he’d drunk warming him. He saw no reason to respond to this, so he simply waited.

  Ackerley said, “I learned much about the new work done on various madnesses. I spoke to one doctor in particular, who had a patient with difficulty in speaking to people, who couldn’t meet their eyes, did not answer direct questions, broke out in non sequiturs, disliked water that was too hot, insisted that everything in his life be ordered in an exact way, and so forth. The doctor was making remarkable strides with him. I learned all I could. The patient made me remember how others have described you. And I thought—why not toddle along to Beth and tell her about this possible cure?”

  Ian said nothing. His gaze slid to the stone wall behind Ackerley, his heartbeat quickening.

  Ackerley continued, “I confess, you do not appear to be as mad as this other fellow. I suppose it comes in degrees.”

  Ian opened his mouth. Nothing came out for a few seconds, then words burst into the silence. “They tried to cure me at the asylum. It was torture. I was a child. It made me worse.”

  Ian tried to tamp down the memories, but they spilled upon him. The trouble with being able to remember everything was not being able to shut the bad things out.

  They’d put Ian into ice baths to cool down his tempers, shut him alone into dark rooms when he became violent. The electric shocks were the worst, bursts of white-hot pain through his body, meant to erase his troubled thoughts.

  Ian’s hand closed around the whisky glass until the facets pressed into his palm. Ian was a large man, his hand strong, but the glass was made of heavy lead crystal and didn’t break.

  Ackerley watched him with a look of sympathy. “My dear fellow, this is not the same sort of thing at all. I heard what you went through. Those asylums of twenty years ago were positively
medieval. Many insisted on using techniques from the early years of the science, which have proved useless. I am surprised they did not claim you had demons inside you and tried to exorcise them. I have studied the problems of the mind for many years, and I must confess I became more fascinated when I learned that Beth had married you. I believe, my lord, that I can help you.”

  Chapter Seven

  Help him.

  Help me do what? Be normal? Give Beth a husband she doesn’t have to apologize for, change her life for, be ashamed of?

  Ian sat very still while the memories of the asylum receded and his true life came back to him. He was in his distillery, which made the most famous Scots whisky in the world, facing the brother of his wife’s late husband.

  “Did Beth tell you about me?” Ian asked. Beth didn’t like to talk to others about Ian, didn’t like anyone talking about him. But perhaps she’d been more forthcoming to Ackerley.

  “No.” Ackerley sounded frustrated. “She says little about you except what extraordinary things you achieve. She is very proud. But—and I hope this does not offend you—your, shall we say, unique character is common knowledge. It is the subject of journal articles.”

  Ian hadn’t known that. But then, he wasn’t much for perusing medical journals. He read about Ming bowls, whisky distilling, mathematics, and astronomy, and read children’s stories to his son and daughters. Plus he read, in privacy, the occasional tome about bed play that his brothers always seemed to be finding. These, Ian enjoyed discussing at length with Beth.

  He could be in bed with Beth right now, the two of them laughing while they explored the more creative positions of the Kama Sutra. They’d concluded after much experimentation that some of the positions simply couldn’t be achieved, but it had been quite agreeable to attempt them.

  Instead of enjoying himself with his wife at the moment, Ian was entertaining Beth’s brother-in-law, who peered at him in earnestness, offering him a cure for his lingering madness.

  Was it possible? Thinking of cures brought back the horrible years at the asylum, and darkness flickered at the edges of Ian’s vision. The tiny amount of hope that someday he might be free of his oddities made the memories worse. He felt the air leave his lungs, a crushing weight on his chest.

  Some days life dealt bad cards, Beth liked to say. Metaphorical decks were impossible to calculate probabilities for, which Ian thought highly unfair.

  He rose abruptly. Beth would not be happy if Ian deserted her brother-in-law, but Ian’s thoughts took hold of him and danced and spun like the will-o’-the-wisps that haunted the woods around here.

  The room began to blur, stones, Ackerley’s black and gray clothes and worried brown eyes, the paintings on the walls, the window that looked into the barrel room, spinning until Ian was dizzy.

  He saw the door coming toward him, and he angled for it, letting his feet propel him out.

  Behind him he heard Ackerley calling after him, asking what was wrong, but Ian was gone, the world a place of colorful, flickering lights.

  * * *

  When Inspector Fellows faced Beth Ackerley downstairs in the gallery, he decided not to mention the bullet her husband had passed him.

  He recalled the day, long ago, when he’d first met her. Beth, daughter of a confidence trickster and a gullible gentlewoman, had stood before him in the sitting room of a lavish house in Paris and dared to tell him, an inspector of Scotland Yard, that she would not allow him to persecute Ian Mackenzie any longer.

  Fellows had dismissed her but soon realized his error in judgment. He hadn’t understood the connection she’d made with Ian, or her tenacity in protecting those she loved.

  Beth still had that tenacity, which she used to fiercely guard her children and the rest of the Mackenzie brood.

  “This man who has come to visit,” Fellows said to Beth now. “You are certain he is John Ackerley?”

  Beth gave him a bewildered look. “Of course. Why wouldn’t he be?”

  “You’d be amazed at the number of crimes I’ve worked on where the long-lost brother was anything but. Confidence tricksters know how to assume guises, how to worm their way into your trust. Be careful.”

  Beth shook her head. “I met John Ackerley at my wedding, and again a year later, when Thomas passed. John has not altered all that much. Grayer, his face more lined, that is all.”

  “Hmm.” Fellows believed her, but the cynicism deeply ingrained in him didn’t let him dismiss the idea. “Perhaps I grasp at straws, but that is because I have so bloody little to go on. What did you see the night of the robbery?”

  “Not very much.” Beth looked unhappy that this was the case. “I was heading down the stairs to see what the noise was about when a man came charging out of this corridor, Ian behind him. There wasn’t much light—the man was smaller than Ian, with dark hair, and he wore black trousers and a black coat. Ian chased him to the front door, which he opened and ran out of. Not much to go on, I know. I’m certain thousands of men in Great Britain fit the description.”

  “That can’t be helped.” Fellows had heard similarly vague descriptions from many a witness, and still managed to find the culprit in the end. He wasn’t discouraged. “It is a beginning.”

  “Do you think you can recover the artwork?” Beth asked. “Some of it is priceless.”

  Of that, Fellows was not as optimistic. Art thieves were of two breeds—the opportunists who didn’t always know what they’d stolen, only thought it looked valuable, and those who targeted a specific piece or collection, usually with a buyer lined up beforehand. Fellows’s best course of action was to find the buyer on the other end and put the fear of God into him.

  “I’ll have a damned good try,” Fellows said. “I’ll ask Hart when he arrives, but do you know if he has enemies who would wish to ruin him? By robbing him, destroying his distillery? To gloat if nothing else?”

  Beth flashed him her smile. “You are asking whether Hart Mackenzie has enemies? He has many of those, dear Lloyd. You know that. You were one of them once.”

  True. Fellows had hated his half brother with great intensity, and he knew plenty of gentlemen in Britain and across the Continent who held that kind of animosity toward Hart. “I agree, I could shake the nearest tree and a dozen men who wanted Hart’s head would fall out. Well, I will shake many trees very hard before I find the right person. But find him I will. Or her.”

  “You believe a woman could do this?” Beth asked, interested.

  “I never underestimate the ability of women for being criminal masterminds,” Fellows said dryly. “Men with fancy degrees talk a lot of rot about the female brain not having the capacity or strength to endure male pursuits, but such men are fools, the lot of them. I’ve seen women orchestrate the most insidious crimes and get away with them.”

  “I suppose you have a point.” Beth’s eyes twinkled. “Imagine what the Mackenzie ladies could do if we put our heads together. If we were evil enough to be criminal masterminds, that is.”

  Fellows suppressed a shudder. The Mackenzie ladies could take over the world and rule with a collective iron hand if they chose. He did not exclude his own wife, a Mackenzie sister-in-law, from this group.

  He would have said more, but John Ackerley himself chose to come bustling into the gallery.

  Fellows studied him with clinical detachment. Ackerley was not a small man, though relative to the Mackenzies he’d not be considered tall, perhaps four inches shy of six feet. He had skin with the leathery texture of one who’d spent decades in strong sunlight, unkempt brown hair going to gray, and a closely trimmed beard, with more gray in it than in his hair. His eyes were brown, wide, and worried.

  “Sister-in-law, did your husband arrive home? Is he here?”

  Fellows came alert, and he watched Beth change from reasonable woman to Ian Mackenzie’s avenging angel, who’d turn the wrath of heaven against any who harmed him.

  “Why?” she asked in a sharp voice. “What happened? What did you do?”
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  Ackerley blinked. “I did nothing. We were speaking in his distillery, quite calmly, when he simply rose and walked out. Very fast. By the time I reached the courtyard, he’d vanished. Those I asked said he headed in this direction, but I never saw him, and your servants claim he didn’t come inside.”

  “What were you speaking about?” Beth’s gaze was hard, her politeness gone.

  “Oh, this and that. My travels . . . I only want to make certain he is well, my dear Beth.”

  The man was lying, Fellows knew. Whatever Ackerley had said to Ian had upset him, and Ian had gone off to be alone and think about it. Fellows knew this was what must have happened, and Beth knew it too.

  She gave Ackerley a narrow look. “I will search for him,” she announced. “Lloyd, will you help? John, if you retire to your chamber, the housekeeper will bring you tea. You must have some sustenance after your journey.”

  “I will help you find him, of course,” Ackerley said. His face was flushed, his words slurred, which told Fellows exactly what he’d been doing in the distillery. Some revelation, loosened by whisky, had disquieted Ian enough to send him off.

  “Best you stay here,” Fellows said sternly. “We know the house and grounds far better than you do. We don’t want to have to make a search for two of you.”

  Ackerley pursed his lips, as though coming up with further argument, then he subsided.

  Fellows, whose pocket felt suddenly heavy with the bullet Ian had slipped him, tried to hide his unease, but he couldn’t subdue it. Hart had an enemy out there bold enough to rob him of thousands of guineas’ worth of artwork, brave enough to shoot at his brother in the woods. Ian could have burst away in one of his muddles, or he could have gotten an idea of who had done this and marched out to confront him.

  Either way, Ian must be found.

  Ackerley at least let himself be persuaded to stay behind. Fellows called together a troop of footmen and groundskeepers to help him search. With Beth at his side—who firmly would not be dissuaded—Fellows left the house by the garden door and began the search.