Beneath the Abbey Wall by A. D. Scott Read Free Book Online Page A

this inheritance. It’ll only lead to trouble.” She nodded—“Mr. McLean, McAllister”—and made for the door.
    â€œCould you give me an address where I can write to you?” Angus McLean asked.
    â€œCare of the Ferry Inn will get me.”
    When he and the solicitor were alone, McAllister sat down and lit a Passing Cloud, hoping the fragrance would clear the malice from the air.
    â€œI suppose you are used to it,” he said, waiting as the solicitor filled and lit his pipe, setting off enough smoke to kipper a good dozen herrings. “But from all I know and read, wills bring out the worst in everyone, and this will is certainly intriguing.”
    â€œI couldn’t pass an opinion on a client’s mind.” Angus smiled. “All I do is administer their wishes. In this case I fear it may be a long-drawn-out, perhaps bitter, process.”
    â€œRather you than me.” The banality of the comment covered McAllister’s curiosity. He knew he would get few answers from Angus McLean—but maybe a few discreet directions. “It was good of her to leave a scholarship to the Gazette .”
    â€œShe was a good woman.”
    â€œShe and Jenny must have been close.”
    â€œIndeed.”
    â€œAn estate in Sutherland—does that make Don a laird?”
    â€œQuite a thought.” Angus McLean smiled, but he was giving no more information than absolutely required of him by law.
    They shook hands. McAllister left to walk to the Gazette office. In the act of walking he did his thinking; he would consider yet another layer of complexity in the character of the much-missed Mrs. Joyce Eileen Smart, née Mackenzie, of the Assynt Mackenzies.
    The scholarship for a young person from the Gaeltachd was novel and welcome and much needed. The bequests to Jenny McPhee and Don McLeod were perplexing.
    In former times Jenny and Mrs. Smart must have known each other well. McAllister had not been aware of a connection between them; the friendship seemed unlikely—one being a tinker, the other a lady. Although he could say he knew Jimmy McPhee and his mother, he could not say he knew them; the Travelers were secretive, and knowing the hostility towards them from the majority of the population, he didn’t blame them for distrusting outsiders.
    As for an estate in remote Assynt—what would Don do with it? There was nothing there but heather, peat bogs, lochs, and lochans, fortified by fiercesome mountains. In McAllister’s opinion, summer in the Northwest, with its nine-and-a-half-month winter, did not make it the Highland paradise of song and legend and maudlin expatriate memory. A Glasgow public house was his idea of real Scotland.
    Not that he knew the area well. When a young journalist in Glasgow, he had been as far as Lairg once, in June, and had been driven back by rain interspersed with occasional sleet. Two years later, in August, he had driven up the west coast to Ullapool and on to Lochinver, on some of the most beautiful roads in Scotland. The purple-heather-clad hills were spectacular, though the shocking clouds of midgies that could bite through cowhide made walking nigh impossible. The way the locals examined a stranger as though he was a green man from Mars, the absolute ban on any activity on the Sabbath, and the desolate glens withabandoned crofts overgrown with grass a brighter green than the surrounding moorland depressed him. He knew the history of the Clearances and the stories still hurt.
    Yes, there was something majestic about the ancient scarred mountaintops, particularly Suilven. Yes, the late-night-never-quite-dark light was enchanting, but he was a city man then, too young and self-absorbed to fall in love with landscape. So he went scuttling back to the warm comfort of his beloved hard man land of Glasgow.
    McAllister thought again about the woman he had worked with but barely knew. He hadn’t known her husband was wheelchair-bound.