alone in a castle, with a ghost and a revolving door for nannies, were something completely different.
Heather felt sick again. Didn’t this castle have any bathrooms? She wasn’t sure that Mrs Peterson had shown her one.
‘And this will be your room,’ Mrs Peterson said finally, opening the door on a grey room with a grey metal bed and a green and grey tartan bedspread. There was a chair by the window, looking out over the front of the castle all the way to the grey gates. Heather wondered if this was where Daisy had thrown the duck from.
‘Is there a bathroom?’ Heather entered the room cautiously, looking for a bathroom door and possibly a ghost, or a child waiting to jump out at her and pelt her with bath toys. She saw neither.
‘Down the hall,’ Mrs Peterson answered. ‘Lengroth Castle was built before the advent of your modern en suite bathrooms, you realise.’
Lengroth Castle had clearly been built before indoor plumbing, central heating, electricity and Wi-Fi technology, too, but Heather sincerely hoped they’d all been included in any subsequent remodelling.
‘Down the hall? Right...’
Feeling she’d taken in enough of the room, Heather dumped her rucksack beside the bed, turned to Mrs Peterson and said, ‘So, shall we go and meet the children?’ in her best Mary Poppins voice.
Mrs Peterson looked suspicious.
‘I mean, that is what I’m here for,’ Heather went on, knowing she was babbling and unable to stop herself. ‘To be a nanny, I mean.’ And definitely not the bearer of the children’s illegitimate half-sibling or anything. No, sir.
Oh, she was terrible at lying. Clearly she took after her father and not her mother there. Why had she ever thought she could pull this off?
But after a long moment Mrs Peterson stepped back, out of the doorway. ‘The nursery is this way.’
She click-clacked off down the corridor, her heels echoing off the stone walls, and stopped at the next door, a good ten metres away.
Heather steeled herself, and followed.
‘Children,’ Mrs Peterson said as she opened the nursery door, ‘this is Miss Reid, your new nanny.’ She sounded almost...fond, Heather realised. Which, given what she knew of the children so far, didn’t make much sense.
Unless they were in it together, determined to drive away any newcomers to the castle.
Heather was so engaged in a sudden daydream of Mrs Peterson dressing up in a white sheet pretending to be a ghost, while Daisy and Ryan stood behind her hurling rubber ducks at an invading army of nannies, that she almost forgot to greet the children.
‘Hello! You can call me Heather. And you two must be Daisy and Ryan!’ She was still channelling Mary Poppins, she realised. If she wasn’t careful she might burst into song at any moment.
‘She doesn’t look like the other nannies,’ Ryan said, eyeing her with suspicion.
His dark hair was curled over his forehead, so like his father’s and his uncle’s that Heather felt a pang of sympathy all over again.
Mrs Peterson looked at Heather and sighed. ‘No. No, she doesn’t.’
‘Maybe that means I’ll last longer than they did,’ Heather replied, a little archly.
Mrs Peterson’s mouth flickered into something that might almost, almost be considered a smile. If she squinted. The almost smile was gone so quickly that Heather wasn’t entirely sure she hadn’t imagined it.
‘Daisy. Come and say hello to Miss Reid.’
Over at the window, looking out over the very steps Heather had climbed to get into the castle, sat Daisy. She must take after her mother, Heather decided, given the pale mousy hair, braided into thin plaits that hung over her thinner shoulders. There was nothing about Daisy that spoke of the broad-shouldered confidence the Bryce men seemed to be born with.
Then she turned away from the window to face Heather and pierced her with sharp, intelligent amber eyes that were all her Uncle Cal.
‘Nannies don’t wear baggy jumpers,’ she said, looking Heather up and down. ‘Or trainers.’
‘Well, this one does,’ Heather said cheerfully.
These kids had better get used to her wardrobe, since she hadn’t brought anything smart in her small rucksack. In fact, she hadn’t brought much of anything. A single change of clothing, her phone charger, that sort of thing. She hadn’t been planning on staying, after all. She’d have to find out if Cal’s generous employment deal included an advance for suitable work wear.
‘I’ll leave you to it, then, Miss Reid,’ Mrs Peterson said, as if she were saying, I hope the lions don’t eat you, but they probably will.
‘Heather, please,’ she tried one last time, but Mrs Peterson ignored her.
‘Dinner is at six in the dining hall,’ she added, closing the door behind her.
Heather looked at the children. The children looked at Heather, clearly waiting for her to break first.
They’d broken eight different nannies, Heather remembered uncomfortably. But they wouldn’t break her. Because Heather knew something that they didn’t.
They were family. Or they would be once this baby was born. And if Heather had learned one thing from her taunting, scandal-ridden childhood, it was this: you never ran out on family.
‘Right,’ she said, clapping her hands together à la Mary Poppins. ‘Mrs Peterson has shown me all around the inside of the castle—how about you two show me around outside?’
Daisy and Ryan exchanged a look that Heather couldn’t read.
‘Outside?’ Daisy asked suspiciously, as if there had to be a catch somewhere.
‘Yep. I saw some great-looking woodland on my way in—I bet that’s fun to explore.’ She shot a sideways look at Daisy, who was trying to communicate something to her brother using only her eyebrows. ‘Plus, I understand that the castle moat has some very unusual ducks in it.’
Ryan stifled a snigger at that, while Daisy glared at him so hard that Heather thought lasers might shoot out of her eyes.
‘Come on! It’s summer. You two should be outside, enjoying the glorious sunshine.’ Heather glanced out of the window. ‘But grab your wellies on the way, yeah?’
They were in Scotland, after all.
* * *
The dining hall at Lengroth Castle was large, cold, prone to damp and currently mostly empty.
From the head of the oversized table Cal stared down at the vacant seats arranged around him. Alone, it was almost too easy for him to remember them occupied by Ross, or their parents. Even society’s brightest and best, in the castle’s heyday, before his father’s rages had taken greater hold and entertaining had become just too risky.
Right
