The flight from the U.S. to Edinburgh took eight hours, during which I had ample time to question the sanity of flying halfway around the world based on a mysterious letter and an antique key.
At sixty‑eight years old, I’d never taken an international trip alone. I’d never made impulsive travel decisions. I certainly had never embarked on what felt like a treasure hunt orchestrated by my deceased husband.
But I also couldn’t shake the growing certainty that Bart had been planning something extraordinary for decades—something so significant he felt compelled to keep it secret even from me until after his death.
I told Perl and Oilia only that I was taking a brief vacation to process my grief.
“Mom, are you sure you should be traveling alone so soon after Dad’s death?” Perl asked over the phone from his condo in Chicago.
“Maybe Oilia or I should come with you.”
“Darling, I just need some time alone to think about the future,” I said. “Your father’s death made me realize how little of the world I’ve seen.”
“Scotland seems so random,” he said. “Since when do you care about Scottish history?”
I deflected with vague references to exploring ancestral roots and European history, which satisfied their curiosity just enough without betraying Bart’s instructions about secrecy.
The rental‑car drive from Edinburgh into the Highlands took another three hours, through increasingly dramatic scenery. Rolling green hills gave way to rugged mountains. Civilized farmland surrendered to wild moors that looked exactly like the romantic Scottish landscapes I’d seen in movies back home.
As I drove deeper into the Highlands, I began to understand why Bart would choose Scotland for whatever surprise he’d been planning. The land felt ancient and mysterious, a place designed for legends and secrets.
Raven’s Hollow Castle appeared suddenly around a curve in the narrow road, and my first glimpse of it stole my breath.
The photographs hadn’t done it justice. The castle rose from the hillside like something from a medieval fantasy—enormous gray stone walls, three stories high, with four circular towers connected by high battlements. Massive oak doors were set into an arched entrance flanked by carved stone lions. Terraced gardens cascaded down the hillside in a riot of color.
I parked in a small designated area near the entrance and sat in the rental car for several minutes, staring at the castle and trying to process what I was seeing.
This wasn’t some modest cottage or hunting lodge Bart might have dreamed of buying as a retirement surprise. This was a fortress fit for royalty.
The golden key felt warm in my hand as I approached the massive doors, carved with intricate Celtic designs that matched the knotwork on the key itself. Above the entrance, a coat of arms I didn’t recognize was carved into the stone, flanked by Latin words I couldn’t translate.
The key slid into the ancient lock with perfect precision, turning smoothly. The doors opened silently on well‑oiled hinges, revealing an entrance hall that belonged in a museum rather than a private residence.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Blackwood. We’ve been expecting you.”
I spun around.
An elderly gentleman in formal livery stood just inside the entrance, as if he’d materialized from the stone walls.
“You’ve been expecting me?” I asked. “How did you know I was coming?”
“Mrs. Blackwood, I am Henderson, the castle’s head butler,” he said with a slight bow. His accent was Scottish, but his diction was crisp and precise. “Mr. Blackwood left very specific instructions regarding your eventual arrival and your needs during your stay with us.”
“Bart left instructions?” I repeated faintly. “How long have you been working here, Henderson?”
“I have been in Mr. Blackwood’s employ for fifteen years, ma’am. The entire staff has been preparing for your arrival for quite some time.”
I looked around the entrance hall, details sharpening as my shock gave way to curiosity. Stone walls hung with medieval tapestries, interspersed with portraits in oil. A grand staircase curved upward to a gallery that overlooked the main hall, its banister carved from what appeared to be a single piece of oak.
“Henderson, I’m afraid I don’t understand any of this,” I said honestly. “My husband never mentioned owning property in Scotland. He never mentioned employing staff. He never mentioned… any of this.”
“Perhaps you would like to see your private quarters and refresh yourself after your journey,” Henderson suggested calmly. “Mr. Blackwood left a detailed letter explaining everything, which I was instructed to give you once you had settled in.”
He led me through what felt like endless corridors, past rooms filled with antique furniture, paintings, and decorative objects that would have looked at home in the finest museums in New York or Washington, D.C. Every window offered spectacular views of the Highland landscape.
My private quarters turned out to be a suite fit for a queen: a sitting room with a stone fireplace large enough to stand inside, a bedroom with a four‑poster bed draped in silk, a private bathroom—somehow both medieval and modern—and a small library filled with leather‑bound books.
“I’ll give you time to rest, ma’am,” Henderson said. “When you’re ready, please ring the bell beside your bed, and I’ll bring you the letter Mr. Blackwood prepared for this occasion.”
After he left, I stood in the center of the palatial bedroom, trying to comprehend the impossibility of my situation. Less than twenty‑four hours earlier, I’d been a middle‑class widow living quietly in a Connecticut suburb. Now I was apparently the mistress of a Scottish castle with servants who’d been preparing for my arrival for years.
I walked to the window and looked out over the gardens, the stables, a greenhouse complex, and several smaller buildings scattered across the estate. This wasn’t just a property. This was an entire world.
How, I wondered, had my husband—a mild‑mannered American maritime historian I’d shared grocery lists and faculty meetings with—managed to acquire and maintain all this without my knowledge?
And why had he kept it secret for so long?
I rang the bell beside my bed.
Henderson returned with a silver tray containing tea service and an envelope sealed with dark blue wax, stamped with the same coat of arms I’d seen above the castle entrance. My name was written across the front in Bart’s distinctive hand.
“Mr. Blackwood was quite specific that you should read this letter in private,” Henderson said softly. “And that you should take whatever time you need to process its contents.”
When he left, I carried the tray to the sitting room, poured myself a cup of tea with shaking hands, and broke the wax seal.
Inside were several pages of Bart’s familiar handwriting and a small stack of documents and photographs.
“My beloved Rose,” the letter began, “if you’re reading this in Raven’s Hollow Castle, it means you’ve taken the first step toward discovering the most important secret I kept during our marriage. I hope you’ll forgive the theatrical nature of this revelation, but some stories are too extraordinary to tell without the proper setting.
“Everything you see at Raven’s Hollow—the castle, the staff, the grounds—belongs to you. I purchased the estate seventeen years ago and have been preparing it as your future residence. I had hoped we would share many years here together, perhaps splitting our time between Scotland and our life in America, but fate had other plans.
“To understand why I chose this particular castle, and why I’ve spent nearly two decades preparing it for you, you need to know about something I discovered twenty‑five years ago that changed our financial circumstances in ways I never told you about.”
I paused, stunned. I had managed our household budget for forty years. I had never seen evidence of unusual income, no mysterious deposits, no unexplained withdrawals that hinted at hidden wealth.
Yet here I was, sitting in a Scottish castle my husband apparently owned.
I kept reading.
“In 1999,” Bart wrote, “while researching shipwrecks in the Scottish Highlands for a book on maritime disasters, I discovered something historians had been searching for since 1746: the lost treasure of the Stuart royal supporters.
“After the Battle of Culloden, when Bonnie Prince Charlie’s allies realized their cause was lost, several Highland clans worked together to hide the royal treasure—crown jewels, gold, silver, ceremonial artifacts—somewhere in the mountains near Glen Nevis. The treasure was intended to fund a future restoration of the Stuart line, but the location was lost when the men who hid it were killed in subsequent clashes.
“For more than two centuries, treasure hunters and scholars searched for what became known as the Lost Crown of Scotland. Most people assumed it had either been found and sold in secret or lost forever.
“I found it in 1999, hidden in a cave system about fifteen miles from where you’re sitting right now. The entrance had been concealed so cleverly it took me three summers of systematic searching to locate it, and another full year to excavate the cache safely.
“What I uncovered,” Bart wrote, “went far beyond anything historians had estimated. There were gold coins, silver plate, jeweled crowns, ceremonial weapons, and artifacts that represented the artistic and cultural heritage of Scottish royalty. When I had the collection professionally appraised, the conservative estimate of its value was five hundred million pounds.
“I know that number is almost impossible to wrap your mind around, Rose. It was for me too.
“You’re probably wondering why I never told you about this discovery, and why I didn’t immediately use the treasure to transform our lifestyle back in the States. The answer is complicated, but it comes down to one thing: I was absolutely sure that sudden, enormous wealth would change our family dynamics in ways that might not be healthy.
“I watched what happened to people who won big prizes or inherited unexpected fortunes. I saw how relatives and friends began treating them differently, how children developed unrealistic expectations about money, and how marriages buckled under the pressure that came with fast wealth.
“More importantly, I wanted to make sure that if anything ever happened to me, you would be financially secure and treated with the dignity and respect you’ve always deserved, without our children seeing you primarily as a source of money. I worried that if Perl and Oilia knew the full extent of our resources, they would see opportunities and dollar signs instead of responsibilities and history.
“You know how often they’ve joked about ‘inheriting the house and Dad’s pension’ someday. They assumed that was all there would ever be. I allowed that assumption to stand because I wanted them to build their own lives, their own careers, their own character.
“So I did something that might seem extreme, but that I still believe was right: I built a future for you in secret.
“For seventeen years, I have been turning Raven’s Hollow into a place where you could live like the queen you’ve always been in my eyes. The castle is fully staffed, fully maintained, and financially endowed so it can operate indefinitely without you ever having to contribute a penny. The income generated from carefully structured investments tied to part of the treasure will cover everything.
“But the castle is only part of what I’m leaving you.
“Beneath Raven’s Hollow, I constructed a secure vault and private museum space where the Stuart Royal Collection is housed. Every artifact, every crown, every jeweled sword you’ll see down there belongs to you now. You control a fortune that most people couldn’t spend in ten lifetimes.
“My darling Rose, you married a quiet maritime historian in the United States and just found out you’re the secret guardian of a Scottish royal treasure, living in a castle you own.
“Welcome to your new life.
“All my eternal love,
Bartholomew.”
I set the letter down and stared around the luxurious sitting room, trying to process the idea that everything I was seeing—the castle, the staff, the grounds, and a treasure worth half a billion pounds—was now mine.
Some husbands left their wives comfortable retirement accounts in American banks. Mine had apparently turned me into the kind of woman financial magazines wrote profiles about, while building a fairy‑tale setting for me to enjoy that wealth.
The question was whether I was ready to live the way he clearly believed I deserved.
I barely slept that night, despite the luxurious four‑poster bed that could have held a small royal family. I lay awake, staring at the carved ceiling, trying to reconcile the modest life I’d lived in Connecticut with the extraordinary circumstances Bart had been orchestrating since 1999.
Every few hours, I got up and walked to the window just to confirm that the Highlands were still outside and that I hadn’t imagined the castle or the letter. The moonlight silvered the gardens and the distant peaks, whispering that this was all real.
By morning, I knew I had to see the treasure vault.
Part 3
