Chapter 5

The next day we were off to Scotland to look at the estate there. Most of the arrangements had been made by Mr Potter's secretary, and he was accompanying us, to do all the introductions. I was by now quite convinced that we were going to have to get one of these amazing secretary females – note I do not do politically correct and I do not want a fellow doing this job. That is to say that if a fellow wants to be a secretary then that is just fine by me. But not my secretary. Her Loveliness and I may have meaningful discussions on this subject at some time in the near future. I was amazed to find that we had an executive jet waiting our local airport to take us to the nearest airport, or in this case airfield, to the Scottish estate. Mr Potter said we could afford it, well, he wasn't paying, but if we could then I was all for it. HL on the other hand doesn't do small. She doesn't drive small cars, sail on small boats and doesn't like anything smaller than a 747 when she is flying. So happiness was not HL shaped that morning. She was rather tight lipped and less than impressed when I suggested joining the 'mile high' club. I did rather get the impression that if Mr Potter hadn't been there she might have had a go at taking her mind off the fact that at some time in the near future we were going to have to land. Or it might have been if I hadn't been there. Whatever.

After a perfect landing, experienced pilots are good at these, student pilots are much better at rough ones, we were met by a car and taken to the end on the road. That might seem an odd thing, but truth to tell the estate was so far off the beaten track that the only way to get there was by boat. From the end of the road. Along the way the driver told us about some of the things we could see, with Mr Potter joining in with some explanations. At the end of the road there was a shed for the car, and a jetty with a motor launch tied up. We boarded the launch for the journey to the house, which would take about half an hour. The Loch was apparently shaped like a banana and it wasn't until the last ten minutes that we came around a small promontory, and there was the house. Medium sized castle would be nearer the mark. Our new possessions never ceased to amaze me. This place was probably a little older than the Dorset house, but not by a lot, having been built in the second half of the nineteenth century.

"Bertram Olroyd," said Mr Potter, "built this as a shooting lodge."

"I'm sorry," I said. "Who?"

"Oh, I'm sorry," he said. "I thought I had filled you in on this. Oh dear, how remiss of me."

"No, I thought that this had been in the family a long time, so what is the story here?"

"Well, it was left to the General's sister when Olroyd died in about 1905,"he said. "Although what the relationship was I am not too sure. Olroyd had made a vast fortune in munitions and that sort of thing, and had sold out by the time he died. He had married a lady from his home town, Clathuddersfax or somewhere, as a young man, but she died quite young. He never remarried but appears to have met Harriet Fenton Moode through General Fenton Moode, and although they never married she was the sole beneficiary of his will. She in turn left this to Herbert Fenton Moode on her death. Although Herbert had inherited a considerable fortune after his mother died, the combined fortunes are, as you know, vast. I really am sorry, I thought I had told you more of this before, I must be getting old." He shook his head.

HL was hanging on every word of this.

"What about the French property?" she asked.

"That came from Lady Giselle, the General's wife's side of the family. But I don't know very much about them," he said. "It does, however, have an excellent vineyard and produces some extremely fine wines. You will, of course have sampled some of them at home."

Indeed we had. HL is normally a southern hemisphere aficionado, Chateau Wogga-Wogga and all that, but she had been very impressed with what was now our own wine.

We drew alongside the jetty and I handed HL up onto it. We walked up to the house to be introduced to the staff here. Basically the set up was similar, except here there was a husband and wife team, Angus and Elizabeth McDonald. The estate manager was Andrew Campbell, who laughed when I raised an eyebrow.