The House of Doors [antikvár]

Chapter OneHamish Grieve, as his surname might suggest,ihad been a gillie for the Laird of Earn for forty-jfour years. Before that he'd been apprenticedfas a joiner, receiving his signed indentures and freedom on the attainment of his twenty-first birthday; at which point he'd given up working with woods to work in them. And from then until he was sixty-five and pensionable, like many 'i a good Scot before him, he'd cannily managed his affairs and silted away a percentage of his middling but not entirely insubstantial wages:Biding his time, he'd kept his contempt for !i the Laird well hidden, until the evening of his sixty-fifty birthday (the 2nd May, 1984), when, leaving the stables and crossing the paddock for the last time, he'd walked up to the great granite house at the heart of its many acres of woods and entered his master's rooms. There Hamish{