Cairnvein

Outside, the passage has lamps set at broad intervals in iron brackets. Their small flames pick out damp stone, dark runners, and the backs of paintings. Every portrait faces the wall. Some frames are gilt, some plain oak, some chipped beyond repair. Mairi passes them with new care, imagining each hidden face turned away from her.

At the corridor’s far end stands a door of blackened wood beneath a shallow arch. Its brass plate bears a design she knows before she reaches it: piled stones under a crooked crown.

Her hand goes beneath her coat.

The little brass key rests in her palm.

“That is the chapel,” Hester says.

“It bears my key’s mark.”

“Yes.”

Mairi steps nearer. The lock is old, its keyhole narrow and jagged. “Does this open it?”

“Do not try.”

Lord Ainslie stands farther down the hall, half-lit beside an extinguished sconce. Mairi has not heard him arrive. He holds himself so still that the sight unsettles her more than any noise could.

“Do not put that key in the chapel lock,” he says.

“Mrs. Tait has already instructed me.”

“I am repeating the instruction.”

“Why?”

His attention settles on the brass in her hand. His face has lost what little color the fire gave it downstairs.

“Because Cairnvein does not use doors for ordinary purposes.”

“That sounds like a poor answer from a man who expects me to inherit the place.”

“I do not expect it.” His words come fast, then stop. “I fear it.”

The corridor seems to narrow around them. Mairi closes her hand over the key.

“Your wife feared it too?”

For the first time, something shifts in him. Not softness. Damage.

“Davina believed rules were a method for making cowardice respectable,” he says. “She had every right to think so.”

“And?”

“And she was wrong about Cairnvein.”

Hester lowers the taper. The flame makes the brass chapel plate glint once, then dull again.

Mairi has met men who manufacture dread to keep women obedient. She knows their manner: the practiced pause, the convenient mystery, the pleasure they take in being believed. Alasdair has none of that pleasure. He looks like a man watching a carriage approach a bridge he has seen collapse.

That makes him worse.

“I came to inspect property,” she says.

“No.” He looks toward the chapel door. “You came because paper placed your name here. The house will treat every look you give it as an introduction.”

“Property cannot do that.”

“Keep saying it,” he replies. “Say it often.”

He turns away before she can ask another question.

Hester escorts her back to the chamber. At the threshold, she points to the ledger.

“Record what changes,” she says.

Then she leaves Mairi with the lamp, the rain, and the locked shutters.

Mairi sits at the desk. She opens the ledger to its first blank page and writes the date in a firm hand. Beneath it, she records the five rules exactly as given.

When she finishes, she places the brass key beside the inkpot.

For several seconds, neither object moves.

At midnight, the key and inkpot remain precisely where Mairi placed them.

The house clock gives twelve dull strokes belowstairs. She counts every one. No thirteenth follows.

She waits through sixty slow seconds, then takes the ledger, her lamp, and the inheritance clause from beneath her coat. Sleep can make an honest woman stupid. Records rarely do.

The main corridor lies empty. Portrait backs face plaster in a patient line. Mairi keeps east, well away from the west passage and its appointed dark.

A strip of lamplight shows beneath a door on the ground floor.

The room beyond was once an estate office, perhaps before Cairnvein began swallowing its own paperwork. Shelves climb to a ceiling stained brown by old smoke. Rolled maps stand in wicker tubes. Account books lie in untidy ranks, their leather spines split and scabbed with age.

Alasdair sits at the long central table beneath two lamps. His coat hangs over a chair. His sleeves are turned back, and ink marks one cuff. A folio large enough to stun a burglar lies open before him.

“You keep late hours,” Mairi says.

He looks up. “So do copyists.”

“I was promised access tomorrow.”

“It is tomorrow.”

“That is a petty answer.”

“It is the only sort I have left.”

She sets her lamp down opposite him. The room smells of dust, damp wool, and lamp oil. Beyond the windows, rain works at the shutters with steady malice.

“What is that?” she asks.

“The title register.”

“You brought it out for me?”

“Hester did.”

“Mrs. Tait is an efficient conspirator.”

“She would say she is an efficient steward.”

Mairi sits. “And you?”

“I am here to prevent mistakes.”

“That sounds reassuring until one asks what mistakes require a lord at midnight.”

His attention falls to the open register. “You should begin at the first settlement.”

He says no more.

Mairi takes out her spectacles and bends to the pages.

The register begins in 1791, copied in several hands over more than a century. Every transfer is listed: grazing rights, peat banks, ruined cottages, mineral claims nobody has worked since the French wars. The Ainslies gather moorland by marriage, debt, death, and the familiar thefts of men with legal stationery.

Mairi reads until the years begin to march in a clean sequence.

1864.

1865.

1866.

1867.

Then 1883.

She turns back.

The page numbers are consecutive. Folio two hundred and fourteen ends with a boundary dispute settled in October 1867. Folio two hundred and fifteen begins with an annual confirmation dated January 1883.

Mairi studies the sewn spine. The thread is old and unbroken. The paper carries matching mould marks. The corners wear the same brown grime. No leaf has been torn out. No gathering has been replaced.

Fifteen years have vanished from the register without leaving a wound.

She checks the index. The annual entries leap from 1867 to 1883 there as well. No blot. No scraped dates. No clumsy correction. The books behave as if those years never existed.

“Was there no business conducted here between 1868 and 1882?” she asks.

“Cairnvein conducted business.”

“Then where is it?”

Alasdair turns a page in the account book before him. “Gone.”

“Gone is not a legal description.”

“It is the nearest one.”

She points to the binding. “For this gap to exist, someone would need to remove a great many leaves and replace them with nothing. Yet the stitching is original.”

“Yes.”

“Who made the alteration?”

“I do not know.”

“Who held title during those years?”

“I do not know.”

“Who paid the taxes?”

“I do not know.”

Her irritation finds its footing. “You do know something.”

“I know enough to tell you not to sign that clause.”

“That is not an answer.”

“No.”

The bluntness of it lands harder than evasion would. He is not trying to persuade her with a pretty lie. He has chosen silence and sits inside it like a man occupying a ruined fort.

Mairi turns the register sideways beneath the lamp. The ink on the 1883 entry has faded to brown. The hand is careful, clerkly, almost familiar. Above it, the earlier writing ends in the middle of an ownership column.

The missing years are not absent by accident. Someone—or something—has removed them with the precision of a solicitor striking a disgraced heir from a will.

“What happened here?” she asks.

Alasdair closes his account book.

“The house keeps records of its own.”

“That is nonsense.”

“Yes.”

“You agree?”

“I have stopped finding agreement useful.”

For an instant she sees the man beneath the title: tired, watchful, held together by habit and grief. There is something dangerous in that sight, not because it makes him admirable, but because it makes him human.

She distrusts the response at once.

The chapel door exerts the stronger pull. Its brass sigil, its lock made for her mother’s key, its clean place in a corridor of rules. The register’s missing years feel like the same hand at work: neat omissions, exact removals, a house editing its own case.

Mairi opens her ledger.

“Recording a change?” Alasdair asks.

“Recording an impossibility.”

“Be exact.”

She gives him a hard look. “Now you value exact wording?”

“I value it more than anything.”

She writes the date, the hour, the title register number, and the missing span of years. Her pen scratches steadily. When she finishes, she blots the entry and shuts the book.

Alasdair rises.

“Do not read further tonight,” he says.

“Because of your bell?”

“Because you have seen enough.”

“That is for me to decide.”

“It was for Davina too.”

The name stops her.

He seems to regret it at once. His face closes, not coldly but with the grim reflex of an old injury. He takes his coat from the chair.

“Good night, Miss Kincaid.”

“Lord Ainslie.”

He pauses at the door.

“Fifteen years are missing,” she says. “They belonged to someone.”