“Let me do it, lass,” Roderick offered, slipping past Claray to enter the small room when Kenna couldn’t lift the door.
Giving up, Kenna straightened and shifted out of the way for the big man.
They all watched as he bent to grasp the ring and pulled upward. There was a slight hesitation, and then almost a suctioning-type sound as the trap door jerked up. They all crowded a little closer to peer through the square hole left behind. But there was nothing to see. The darkness was absolute.
“We’re going to need more than the one torch,” Roderick commented.
“Is three enough?” Hendrie asked as the area around Claray suddenly grew much brighter. Turning, she saw the approving look Hamish gave the soldier when he saw that he carried one lit torch and two unlit torches. It made her smile. Hendrie was obviously a slightly older version of Hamish. A man who thought ahead and planned for anything.
Roderick waited patiently as Hendrie lit the other two torches, and then took the last one when he held it out. Her husband’s large friend then held it over the square hole to reveal stairs hewn in stone. Glancing up then, Roderick said, “I’ll go first. Lady Claray, ye’re behind me with Hamish at yer back, then the ladies MacKay, and then Colban and Hendrie.”
He was obviously a man used to making decisions. Roderick didn’t wait for anyone’s approval of his plan, but then started down the stairs with his torch, and Claray quickly followed.
Where everything was covered with debris in the great hall, down here there was just a fine coat of dust that got stirred up a bit by their footsteps. Other than that though, the space looked the same as it had no doubt looked twenty-two years ago. The ceiling, floor and walls—like the stairs—were hewn out of the same limestone that the keep and curtain walls appeared to be built of, and Claray wondered if they hadn’t been mined from down here and hauled up to make walls.
“Look at all the beer butts,” Kenna breathed with wonder, and Claray turned her attention to the large casks lining the walls as the girl exclaimed, “They’re still sealed. Do ye think the beers any good?”
Claray didn’t think so, but before she could say as much, Kenna gasped, “Oh, look! Another room!”
When Kenna rushed toward the door, Hamish hurried to beat her there, and then opened the door and led the way in.
“The wine cellar,” Claray murmured as she followed Kenna in and glanced over the rows of oak casks.
“Most of them are sealed too,” Kenna pointed out. “They might still be good.”
“Or poisoned,” Roderick rumbled, and told them, “They think the poison was in the beer and wine that night.”
While Kenna gasped and immediately backed away from the casks, Claray eyed them silently. She didn’t think the sealed casks were probably poisoned. But the ones with seals that were broken might be. She didn’t care either way, because she had no intention of taking the risk by drinking anything. Besides, she had another use for the wine. It would solve a problem she’d been fretting over since finally being allowed inside the keep. She needed something to remove the mold and moss from the keep walls. Lye would do the trick. However, they didn’t have any, and she didn’t wish to wait until they could make it. Besides, the amount they’d have to make would take forever and need a lot of ash. Nay. Using the wine—and undoubtedly in some cases, vinegar that the wine had turned into—would be a much better solution to kill the mold and moss. There was certainly enough here to do it.
“We’d best go back above. The torches will soon go out,” Roderick warned, stomping his foot on a bit of burning linen that had fallen from the torch he carried.
Not wanting to try to find her way out of the cellars in the dark, Claray nodded and walked back to where Lady MacKay waited by the door.
“I have been thinking about the moss and mold on the keep walls,” Aunt Annabel said as they crossed through the next room to the stairs.
“That the wine in the cellar would take care of it?” Claray suggested.
“Exactly.” Lady MacKay beamed at her and they began to chat about how to go about it as they mounted the stairs leading back up to the great hall.
Chapter 19
“They’re here! They’re here! M’lady, m’laird sent me to tell ye they’re here!”
Claray straightened from weeding the herb garden, and rubbed her lower back as she watched young Dawy race excitedly into the gardens.
“Oy!” someone barked pretty much in her ear, and Claray glanced around in surprise to see Mhairi, one of the clan members who had returned from MacKay. She’d been told the woman was in her mid to late thirties but she looked twice that. The results of a hard life, Claray supposed. But the woman was strong and had worked diligently beside her all day. Now, she was scowling at the fair-haired boy with displeasure and snapped, “Watch where ye’re stepping, boy. This is a garden, no’ the bailey.”
“Sorry,” Dawy said, quickly moving back onto the path. “But are ye coming, m’lady? They’re here.”
“Who’s here?” Claray asked patiently, managing not to laugh when the boy’s eyes went round with the realization that he hadn’t explained.
“Yer wagons from yer da,” he told her. “And there’s six o’ them. All piled high with goods and furniture. Me ma near to swooned when she saw ’em.”
Aches and pains forgotten, Claray dropped the weeds she’d just pulled up, and hurried out of the garden to make her way toward the front of the castle with young Dawy at her side. She wasn’t surprised when Lovey gave up his spot under a tree where he’d been napping to rush to accompany her. Neither was she surprised to see Squeak sitting up on the base of his neck, his little paws clutching at the wolf’s fur to keep his seat as he looked around like a little emperor. The stoat didn’t like the jostling he suffered when Claray constantly bent over and straightened while weeding the gardens, and had taken to climbing out of her dress and scrambling over to climb onto Lovey to sleep while she worked. Much to her surprise, the wolf was tolerating it.
Shaking her head at the picture they made, Claray glanced over her shoulder in search of Stubborn Bastard and found him right behind her. He wasn’t the only one following her. She had a small parade of people trailing after her. Roderick and Hamish were hard on her heels on either side of her horse. She was used to that though; the two men had followed her around every minute of every day this last week. Then came Mhairi, who’d apparently managed to scoot in front of Hendrie and Colban, Claray’s other two guards. But behind them trailed the other two dozen women who had been working in the gardens with her. And every one of them looked excited.
The sight made her smile faintly as she turned forward. Then she rounded the corner of the castle, and scanned the bailey. It actually now looked like a bailey and not a forest, she noted with satisfaction.
The last week and a half had wrought a lot of change at Deagh Fhortan. With so many men working on it, the new drawbridge had been finished late on the evening of their arrival. A relief to everyone since it had allowed the returning clan members, and the soldiers who had initially been left outside the wall with the horses, to enter.
It had been a bit of a crowded mess that first night. Unable to sleep in the keep with its mold, moss, debris and the stench from the animals that had lived in it, everyone had been forced to sleep in the bailey among the raised roots of the trees. It hadn’t been very comfortable that first night. But with three hundred men and the returning clan members all working together, removing the trees and rebuilding and repairing the castle had gone apace.