Alex lifted Kelpie down from the horse, looked at her oddly, and then with a grin forced open her left hand.
“You little devil!” He laughed. “You’ve picked my pocket!”
3. Glenfern
Kelpie perched gingerly on a fine brocaded chair near the door of the drawing room and gazed curiously at the scene before her. For house and glen had, on their arrival, erupted into a perfect frenzy of excitement, questions, tears, laughter, shouting, teasing, and hugging.
Dhé! And was this the way most families were behaving toward one another? Kelpie found it baffling and achingly strange, and vaguely annoying; and on the whole she was glad enough to have been forgotten for the moment while she recovered her usual cool head.
Talk rose and surged in a mixture of Gaelic and English. Cameron of Glenfern paced back and forth, the rusty-red and green of his kilt swinging about strong knees. Lady Glenfern, smiling and anxious at once, sat in a carved oak chair, her harebell-blue skirts billowing about her feet. Two small kilted lads pranced with excitement, a bittie lass clamored to be away up in Ian’s arms, and a bonnie lass in green, perhaps near Kelpie’s age, clung affectionately to both Ian and Alex at once.
Through the open window Kelpie could see Lachlan standing in a ring of laughing and chattering clansmen, and it began to dawn on her that this was no ordinary homecoming. The lads had been away to school in a far-off place in England and had returned quite unexpectedly with important news.
“We knew that King Charles had fled London and set up his court at Oxford,” said Glenfern. “And you wrote that Montrose was there, awaiting permission to come and raise an army in Scotland for the King. Now you say he’s coming?”