The Legend of Lady MacLaoch Read Free

that into finding a husband, you’d be happily married with kids by now, so don’t start. Not here.”
    “I’m just asking—”
    “Not now, Cole. For Christ’s sake! Your grandfather isn’t even cold in our memories and you want to drag this out now?”
    “Mother, it’s not like I demanded to know if Grandpappy left me anything in his will. I just asked—”
    The room suddenly had ears for our conversation.
    “What’d you ask?” my father turned from some friends he’d been chatting with.
    Hand on her hip, my mother gave me a look. It said, Now you’ve done it.
    “I was asking Mother,” I said, giving her an equal look back, “if we had learned anything more about our family lineage.”
    My father shrugged. “We’re Bakers.”
    “No. The whole Minary thing from Christmas,” I said, exasperated. Was I the only one who still cared?
    “Nicole Ransome Baker, that’s enough. I told you, not here,” my mother cut in.
    “Why? I don’t see why I can’t ask about our history— my history—now.” I punctuated my point by stabbing my fork into what was left of my pie. “Grandpappy was the one who told us!”
    Exhausted by my family, I spent the rest of the evening walking the dusky rows of the orchards, all the while thinking that my flight back to Portland couldn’t come soon enough.

CHAPTER 3 T he week after my graduation I made the decision to research my family history in full. When you spend two years researching and studying, the need to do it doesn’t just stop the day you graduate. Plus, the truth was, even through the final revision of my master’s thesis and its defense, I couldn’t stop thinking about Grandpappy’s revelation.
    A search on the good ol’ World Wide Web for the Minary name’s home base returned a few possibilities, but the most reliable data seemed to point to a place called Glentree, which was on an island called Skye, off the western coast of Scotland. Convinced there was no better way to do research than in person, I bought a plane ticket to Scotland and made one last try for information from my parents.
    My father would no doubt still be in the fields, leaving my mother to answer the phone. My timing was excellent—it was Wednesday, and Wednesday was bridge day. By this hour, my mother, an avid player with the local ladies of society, would be sauced up to her eyeballs.
    “Minary. That’s right,” she said after the initial lecture on going alone to a foreign country. “You don’t like being a Baker? You know, Cole, when I married your daddy, I was proud to take his name. We are a respectable family, and if you spent more than a moment thinking about it, you’d see the same. Chasing some foreign name isn’t what I think your grandpappy would want you spending all your time doing, either. You should be proud of your Baker heritage.” She was relaxing into what I had long ago understood as her soapbox performance, one of her heart-to-heart moments wrapped in a guilt trip, the multiple cocktails no doubt helping.
    “Mother, I am proud to be a Baker, but it’s not our heritage. Our heritage is this Minary name,” I said and waited. All I heard was paper rustling. “You understand that, right? That by blood I am no longer a Baker but a Minary?”
    “You know, Ruby says that I ought to tell you this,” she said, ignoring me. I thought I heard the distinct sounds of ice tinkling against the sides of a crystal tumbler. “Ah yes, Minary. This is a copy of your cousin’s report that he gave to us. I was going to send it to you but just couldn’t do it. You always take things too far. Anyway, Minary is from the British Isles, probably Scottish . . . Your cousin found a name, lessee”—she slurred her attempt at “let’s see”—“his name is—”
    “A name!” I shouted in a fit of frustration and excitement. “You have a name?”
    “Yes, yes, dear. I’ve had it for months. And don’t get so excited,” she said, taking another swallow of her drink,