Death at Glamis Castle Read Free

spring. This was indeed good news, but she had saved the very best letter until last. Chatty and casually affectionate, it was from Patrick, the fifteen-year-old boy whom she and Charles had taken as their own and who was now at Newmarket as an apprentice to George Lambton, one of the country’s leading horse trainers. Newmarket was near enough to Bishop’s Keep for Patrick to come home on the weekends, and she was looking forward with pleasure to seeing him again.
    Kate replaced the letters in her pack and took out a fountain pen and notebook. Under the pseudonym of Beryl Bardwell, she had been a published writer for seven or eight years, first in her native New York (where she lived in a garret and composed penny dreadfuls for a sensation-hungry public), and after ’94 in England, where she had enjoyed a gratifying success as a novelist. Death on the Moor was a gothic sort of thing, set on the wild, wind-swept reaches of Dartmoor and inspired by an adventure that she and Charles and Conan Doyle had shared earlier in the year. For her next effort, Beryl was thinking of an historical novel in the style of Sir Walter Scott, whose Waverly novels Kate was rereading with great delight. Unfortunately, historical fictions were not quite the thing in these modern days; with the death of the old Queen, the advent of a new King, and the coming of the twentieth century, everyone seemed to want to look into the future, not the past. But the estate bequeathed Kate by her aunts allowed Beryl to write whatever she pleased, and she had been further freed by her marriage to Charles, a landed peer—although his dutiful attendance in the House of Lords took her to London for longer periods than she liked and required her to perform tedious social obligations which she abhorred.
    Kate gazed out across the landscape. For a time, she and Beryl had toyed with the idea of writing a novel set during the Roman occupation of Britain, but while they had enjoyed their visit to the Wall and had been impressed no end by the ancient fortifications, they hadn’t been inspired. In fact, Beryl’s well of inspiration seemed to have run entirely dry, and she couldn’t seem to find anything that enticed her. Now, after making a few notes about the landscape, just in case Beryl changed her mind about Roman Britain, Kate put the notebook away and picked up her camera again, thinking to take a photograph of Charles, who was still sitting on the Wall, gazing northward in the direction of Scotland. He did not seem aware that he was being approached from the rear by a man on horseback, in a very great hurry. The hair on the back of Kate’s neck prickled as she recognized the man as the local constable, whom they had met the week before. She watched for a moment as the constable dismounted from his horse, ran up to Charles, and handed him an envelope.
    With a small sigh, she stood up and reached for her pack. She had the feeling that their leisurely holiday was about to be interrupted.

CHAPTER TWO

    TO LORD CHARLES SHERIDAN HAYDON BRIDGE NORTHUMBERLAND.
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    REQUEST YOU MEET SPECIAL TRAIN ARRIVING HAYDON BRIDGE SHORTLY STOP OUR MUTUAL FRIEND E.R. REQUIRES ASSISTANCE IN MATTER OF GRAVEST IMPORTANCE FOR WHICH YOU ARE UNIQUELY QUALIFIED STOP YR SERVANT ANDREW KIRK-SMYTHE STOP
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    As he sat on Hadrian’s Wall, facing north, Charles was gazing out across Caledonia, the wild land that lay beyond this northernmost border of the Roman Empire. In his imagination, he was seeing the shadowy ghosts of the legions of Roman soldiers and enslaved Britons who, some two millennia before, had labored tirelessly to construct the ancient fortification on which he now sat, block by quarried block. They worked at the order of the Emperor Hadrian, who had conceived the great engineering scheme as much to keep his Roman troops in as to keep the barbarian Picts out. Sensing that his vast territories had reached a size at which their