Page 41 of A Recipe for Love
‘It’s so stunning. It would be an amazing wedding venue. Have you ever thought about…?’
Adam shook his head.
‘Sorry.’ She stroked his arm. ‘Getting ahead of myself. We probably won’t even be here that long.’
Would they be? ‘One thing at a time,’ he suggested.
They made their way towards the gate. Bella stopped by the three small steps a few feet away from the back door. ‘So is that the dungeon?’ She peered down.
‘It’s not really a dungeon, more a sort of cellar,’ he explained. ‘With iron bars on the exit.’
‘The nearest my childhood got to that was the time out corner at nursery school.’
‘We don’t send people to the dungeon. Not for like centuries.’ He hesitated. ‘I think Hugh ended up sleeping in there the night before my dad’s wedding to Darcy, but that was just cos he didn’t want go home and have Anna see how drunk he’d got.’
They walked slowly away from the castle, ignoring the path up to his father’s garden, and following the road towards the burn. ‘So, are you going to show me the famous Low Bridge then?’
Why not? That was as good a reason to say he’d chosen this route as any. The riverbank dropped in a shallow slope at first, before getting steeper down to the stream. Adam stopped. The Low Bridge was the heart of Lowbridge. It was the very reason the village, and by extension the castle, were here at all. It was the only crossing point on the Crosan for centuries, until the modern road bridge was built roughly sixty years ago.
‘Oh.’ Bella came to a halt alongside him. ‘It doesn’t look like much.’
She was right. The bridge had always been the main route from the estate to the village. As an infant he’d been pushed over here in his buggy by his mother, or by Flinty, almost daily. He’d run across here as a child to play with his village schoolfriends. And visitors to the house had parked across the river and walked over, getting their first glimpse of Lowbridge Castle from the riverside.
He’d been told that the bridge was in need of some TLC, but this needed more than a lick of paint. It needed knocking down and rebuilding from scratch. It was a simple wooden bridge, probably not that different from the first crossing ever built here, but it was wide enough to get a buggy or a wheelchair across, or a quad bike if you really wanted to. Nobody in their right mind would try that now. Adam didn’t fancy trying the rotting structure himself and he could see perfectly well that the drop was no more than two feet and the river only a few inches deep.
Bella took his hand. ‘A bit of paint, a few new boards?’
‘It needs replacing.’
‘OK, well how hard can that be?’
The rational part of Adam’s brain said not hard at all. He was a professional landscaper after all. He could get the materials at cost and probably even lure a few mates over to do the work for beers and a slap-up dinner. The rational part of Adam’s brain was holding on to the controls with its fingertips though. The other part, the part that wanted to run back to Edinburgh and deny that any of this was anything to do with him, was telling him that a broken down bridge wasn’t just a bridge at all. It was a symbol of everything that was wrong here. Adam wasn’t the laird. His father had been Laird of Lowbridge, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather before that. They were proper lairds. They had tweeds and elbow patches and grown-up beards. Adam wasn’t them. The bridge was falling down. The estate needed someone at the helm who wasn’t falling apart themselves. It needed someone with ideas, someone who could make plans, someone who wanted to be here.
Chapter Six
The day of the cremation dawned inappropriately bright and sunny. Birds sang in the eaves around the coach house and the sunlight bounced off the water of the loch. It was the sort of day where the grey stone of the castle took on a warmer hue in the sunshine and the world seemed to be trying to tell Bella that all was well.
The world was wrong.
After much negotiation, mostly conducted by Flinty, it had been agreed that, as the ‘real’ funeral would be at Lowbridge a few days hence, Adam alone would accompany the funeral director on the long drive to the crematorium. Bella had overruled that in an instant and insisted that Adam would not be going on any such journey alone. Veronica had been entirely unhappy with the notion of some girl who’d just blown in going if she wasn’t, and Darcy, quite reasonably, had thought that as his wife she probably ought to have been first on the list anyway. So now all four of them were getting ready for the long slow drive to Inverness.
Bella checked her outfit – a mid-calf length black wrap dress, borrowed from Darcy, on the grounds that the wrap was the only possible option to accommodate Bella’s carb-enhanced hips – in the mirror. Adam was sitting on the edge of his bed in boxer shorts and white shirt staring at the black suit trousers draped over the back of the chair in front of him. ‘Is it silly?’
‘Is what?’
‘Getting dressed up to sit in the back of a car for four hours?’
‘Not at all.’
‘I mean he’s not there, is he. I know that. I…’ Adam shrugged. ‘It’s his last journey.’
Bella shook her head. ‘Not quite. They’re going to bring him back here afterwards.’
Adam nodded. ‘Where he will probably sit for all eternity in the back of a cupboard because no one can agree on what to do with the ashes.’
Bella rested her head on his shoulder. ‘We’ll worry about that tomorrow. For now let’s take one thing at a time.’
‘You’re right.’
