“Lassies! Remember yer manners! Sir Bryan-Steward-Camphor-Smith will think I’ve raised a patch of wild hellions!”
“Smith-Bruce-Stewart-Campbell,” he corrected helpfully. “And I like hellions.”
Lady Oliphant’s fanning increased in intensity. “Ooh! I feel another spell coming on!”
Nicola managed to keep her voice bland when she asked, “What kind of spell, Mother?”
“Oh!” More frantic fanning. “I think this one will be my reactive explosive disorder.”
Kenneth wrinkled his nose and sat back.
“That sounds messy,” he whispered to Leanna, who giggled in response.
“Disorder, aye,” her father joined the conversation. “Perhaps a lie-down is in order, as the cartographer said of the castle turret.”
Kenneth raised a brow.
He was beginning to suspect Leanna had been right when she’d told him her father was innocent of knowledge about McIlvain.
Nae one is that good of an actor, and he believed she had been right about everything she’d said in her father’s defense. Laird Oliphant might just be a genuine clot-heid. Still, Kenneth needed to ask.
Wynda, meanwhile, was still going on about her idea of stamping letters. “I think the trick is to be able to take apart the letters to make new words. Some words like ‘the’ and whatnot ye could leave together, but others, ye could take apart to make new words and stamp new books.”
Coira scoffed. “Then ye’d get letters used to stamp books about romantic love, later used to stamp holy words. That’s sacrilegious.”
“Or lovely,” Fenella offered with a happy sigh.
“I still dinnae think ‘tis feasible. The wood would wear away,” Robena pointed out.
Wynda rubbed at her forehead again. “I think… Mayhap the trick is to use something besides wood. I wonder if the blacksmith could fashion something from steel?”
Around her, the members of the table burst into chuckles at the ridiculous idea, even her parents. Nicola gestured grandly.
“We love ye, Wynda, but this is one of yer more absurd ideas.” She spoke to her sisters. “Remember her idea about moldy bread being good for sick people?”
“That one was true!” Wynda shouted in her own defense over her sisters’ laughter.
“Or,” Robena called out, “that time she told us that, one day, we’d have a device capable of accessing all the world’s information at once, and it would be small enough to fit in our pockets!”
Amid the chuckles, Fenella shook her head. “What in damnation is a pocket?”
As the conversation and joking continued around them, Kenneth cleared his throat and leaned toward the laird. He’d decided he needed to be upfront with the man in order to get the clearest answer. “Milord, have ye ever met a man named McIlvain?”
The older man nodded, his eyes vague, as he murmured, “McIlvain, aye.”
Kenneth’s heart leapt, until he remembered the laird’s habit of repeating the last word anyone said. For certes, the older man began to shake his head immediately.
“McIlvain, ye say? Nay, I cannae recall ever meeting a man from that clan. They’re in the west, aye? I have a map of the Highland clans on my desk in the solar, lad, if ye’d ever like to examine it.”
Sitting back in his chair, Kenneth blew out a breath and plastered a grateful smile on his face. “Nay, but thank ye, milord.”
He knew where McIlvain hailed from; he wanted to know where the man was now.
Under the table, Leanna took his hand and squeezed. Grateful, Kenneth squeezed back and sent her a little smile as the conversation swirled around them.
Mayhap he wouldn’t be able to find out where McIlvain was now, but if he could be certain the missing Hunter wasn’t on Oliphant land…
Movement caught his eye, but the man hurrying toward the high table wasn’t a servant. He appeared to be a messenger, and Kenneth’s senses went on alert.
Instead of approaching the laird of the clan, the messenger stepped up to Coira, the eldest of the sisters, and held out a scroll. The lass wiped her hands on her gown and reached for the missive, and her brow furrowed as she unrolled it and began to read.
Hmm.
An idea was forming. Was it possible, with the state of Laird Oliphant’s mind, he no longer oversaw the clan’s day-to-day running? Mayhap someone else had the information about McIlvain Kenneth sought.
He needed to make time to interrogate Coira.