Page 52 of A Recipe for Love
‘Anyway that meant the girl was free to marry her baron. Not very long after the wedding she had a baby.’
‘How long is not very long?’
‘Well close enough that nobody was ever quite sure whether the son she had was really the baron’s or whether he was the fisherman’s boy. Either way, the baron loved him and raised him as his own.’
‘Good baron.’
‘Yeah. He did the right thing. I mean, assuming he didn’t have the fisherman bumped off. There’s a lot of that with your early Scottish lairds.’
‘Bumping off fishermen?’
‘Bumping off love rivals. Any sort of rival really. They were usually rival lairds though.’ He shook his head. ‘Anyway, my father told me that story when I was about seven or eight years old. The point, he said, was that it meant that we weren’t lords over the village. We’re not above it. We’re part of it. They’re part of us. Whether we’re descended from that fisherman or not doesn’t matter, because we’re all part of one thing. We’re not in charge of Lowbridge. We…’ He stopped.
‘What?’
‘It sounds ridiculous.’
‘WeareLowbridge. The village is the house. The house is the land. It’s all one thing.’
Finally Bella thought she might be beginning to understand. ‘And so selling part of it is hard to get your head around?’
‘Something like that.’
She nodded. ‘Like when you saw the bridge all broken down.’
‘What?’
‘Well, the bridge represented how everything’s linked together didn’t it? The community, and the castle and the landscape.’
‘Yes, and not just represented it. It was the connection. Literally. Without it, how does anyone come from one to the other? It’s like pulling up the drawbridge and saying, “We’re separate from you.”’
The understanding that was trickling into Bella’s head started to crystallise. ‘And selling off part of the land rips the whole thing apart?’
He nodded.
They sat next to one another staring out across the loch. Bella thought she was starting to understand. It wasn’t just that the village and the castle and the land were all one. It was that Adam was too. He wasn’t the lord of Lowbridge. HewasLowbridge.
And that meant they weren’t going back to Edinburgh, were they? There was, Bella saw now, no way she could ask him to leave. If Adam was her future, her future was here. She stared out across the bay, and tried to imagine what a life here might look like. Was she ready for her life to be Ladies’ Group and community fundraisers and village gossip? Was she ready to spend her days with one man, working to make this castle a place fit for the twenty-first century, working to make Lowbridge come to life and retain its place at the heart of a community, working to make it a place where, one day a very very long time in the future, her own child might become the next Baron Lowbridge?
‘What are you grinning at?’
Adam’s question pulled Bella out of her reverie. She was grinning, wasn’t she? She rested her head against his shoulder. ‘I didn’t realise that I was.’
Was Bella ready for all that? Maybe that smile meant she was.
‘I think I need to see McKenzie’s place.’
Bella could understand that. From what she’d heard at Ladies’ Group the McKenzie estate was a well-oiled money-making machine, exactly what Lowbridge wasn’t. Checking out the enemy was a good idea. Even if they didn’t want to go in the same direction, there were bound to be ideas they could repurpose and adapt. Looking out at the view from the clifftop above the castle the possibilities seemed endless. Weddings, weekend breaks, a teashop – a thousand and one ideas were sparking through Bella’s mind…
‘Let’s go then.’
‘Right now?’
No. It had been a long and tiring day already, and Bella could see that her fiancé needed to rest. ‘Tomorrow?’
He nodded. ‘Tomorrow.’
Chapter Nine
