Legend Of The Highland Dragon Read Free

her. Even though she’s mad. And he wants to be kind to her.”
    “He didn’t seem the sort to be madly in love with anybody,” said Mina, remembering being called Cerberus and MacAlasdair’s demand that she stop being ridiculous. “And he certainly didn’t seem very kind.”
    “His maids probably don’t agree with you there, my girl,” said Mr. Seymour, chuckling. “Still, he sounds like a strange sort.”
    “That’s for certain,” Mina said. “Alice, could you talk to Ethel for me? I think I’d like to have a cup of tea with Mrs. Hennings when she has a moment.”

Two
    Contrary to all general wisdom about cooks, Mrs. Hennings was neither short nor stout nor elderly, but rather a tall woman of handsome middle age, with the sort of black eyes that novels inevitably called “flashing” and glossy black hair that made Mina touch her own brown curls with envy. Her own figure was undoubtedly voluptuous, but that was as close as she came to the stereotype.
    The kitchen of MacAlasdair’s house was far more conventional than the cook. It included a black stove like a mountain of ironwork, shelves of stoppered jars, racks of pots and pans, and smoke-stained walls ascending toward rafters that Mina could barely see. Even though it was only dusk, the stars not yet out, the shadows were deep in the corners of the room. Sitting at the long oak table in the center of the room, she felt dwarfed and mouse-like.
    Tea helped. She added three lumps of sugar to her cup, stirred, and sipped.
    “You haven’t been here long, Alice says,” she began.
    “Well, not here,” said Mrs. Hennings, gesturing around the room. The light caught a gold ring on her hand. Mrs. was more than a courtesy title, then, at least for her. “I’ve been in London for some years now. Worked at Bailey’s before his lordship hired me.”
    “The hotel?” Mina grinned. “When I was small, we used to watch the people going in, some nights. My brother and sister and I. Saw all kinds of lords and ladies. George used to swear he spotted a sultan or a rajah or the like once, but Alice and I never credited it.”
    Mrs. Hennings joined Mina in laughing. The atmosphere in the room lightened a little, although when Mina glanced toward the corner of the room, the shadows seemed even deeper.
    Well, it was getting on toward night.
    “He might have been telling the truth, at that,” said Mrs. Hennings. “We had a few.” She set down her teacup. “But that isn’t why you wanted to talk to me.”
    “No,” Mina said. “Actually, I was hoping you could tell me something about his lordship. What kind of a man he is.”
    Mrs. Hennings’s eyebrows lifted. “I see,” she said. “Made you an offer, has he?”
    “Lord, no!” Mina’s face burned. The topic was embarrassing enough, but a sudden, treacherous memory of MacAlasdair’s powerful body leaning over her desk suggested that such an offer might have its attractions.
    She couldn’t meet Mrs. Hennings’s eyes for a moment. She looked off into the corner again, and this time she thought she saw something move.
    Well, rats showed up in the best-kept kitchens, Mina had heard. She didn’t want to call anything of the kind to the cook’s attention, though.
    “He’s…he came to visit my employer the other day,” she said, “and he seemed cross. I was hoping to find out—”
    She hesitated, caught between several choices of phrase. “Whether he’s actually a murderer” was almost certainly too blunt. “What exactly is wrong with the man” probably was too. And she didn’t want to bring Moore into it unless she had to.
    More movement caught her eye. That was a large rat, if it actually was a rat. A cat, maybe? If so, Mina was surprised it wasn’t under the table begging. In her experience of cats, their reaction to food was almost universal.
    “Hoping to find out if there’s anything I can do to help things go more smoothly,” she finished belatedly.
    “That would depend on what