The Lost Treasure of Lorne

Chapter One

Lorne Castle, Scotland

22nd August 1785

His Grace the Duke of Kendal was digging in the moat again. The unusually dry summer had presented an opportunity he could not resist. With the moat almost empty, even the deepest pools came barely to the hem of his kilt. Apart from the boots out of sight under the murky water, the kilt was all he wore.

At not quite forty years of age, the duke was still a fine figure of a man, broad of shoulder, slim of waist, and well-muscled. Even Caitlin Morgan, that stern moralist his housekeeper, paused at the windows of the long gallery to admire the view before she scolded the maids who were doing the same and sent them scurrying back to their tasks. Caitlin stopped for one more glance before resolutely turning away and closing herself in the housekeeper's pantry with her accounts.

The columns of figures were unlikely to drive the sight of a half-naked duke from her mind, but one could try.

Normally, she would do her accounts at night, after the servants—the other servants—had departed for the village. No one but the duke and Caitlin herself would remain in Castle Lorne after dusk. And His Grace's son, John Normington, when he was home from university. Even the duke's valet and butler retreated at nightfall, though only as far as a cottage in the grounds.

The ghosts were a bother, with their moaning and their chatter; which they seemed to understand among themselves, but which stopped somewhere short of intelligible language when they tried to speak to a living being. Any sense was drowned deep under a chaotic racket of hisses, clicks and whines.

Caitlin paid them no mind. She had, after all, spent more than a decade in charge of a rambunctious boy in a nursery, and knew that a little noise never hurt anyone. Besides, for some reason, the ghosts listened to her, and would be quiet if she insisted.

And if she were as much a coward as the rest of them, who would fetch John his supper or keep His Grace company when the male ghosts drove him out of his bedchamber with their carousing?

Not that the duke knew she kept him company. She sat on the secret staircase on one side of the panel that opened into the library while on the other he read a book next to the fire. She frowned down any ghost that thought to disturb him, and in time he would drift off to sleep.

After that one glorious night seven years ago, she did not dare be alone with him. She trusted Kendal, of course. It was herself she did not trust.

***

Michael held out little hope of finding what he sought in the near-dry moat, and sure enough all he had unearthed so far was cast-off broken furniture and other detritus. The Lorimer family, in their long residence at the castle, had clearly used the moat as a dumping ground for anything too damaged to repair.

Mrs Morgan had told him his quest was in vain, and he was almost certain she was correct. He persisted because of that one slim doubt. No. He would not lie to himself. He persisted because it gave him the opportunity to strip and show his muscles before Caitlin Morgan.

The lovely Caitlin, who hid her beautiful copper hair under dull caps and her glorious curves beneath shapeless gowns.

Loyal Caitlin, who had been with him and John for nineteen years. No. Nearly twenty. John's birthday was this coming October, and he had been only a few days old when his mother died and his great uncle, the last Marquis of Lorne, put the half-Normington newborn out of the castle, exposed on the hillside to die.

Brave Caitlin, who had been thirteen years old when she rescued his son and walked to Edinburgh, daring the soldiers' barracks to find Lieutenant Normington and break the news to him that he was a father and a widower.