At the Water's Edge (31 page)

I
n the end, I sent Ellis home to his mother. I didn't want to attend the funeral, and suspected I wouldn't be welcome anyway.

Two days after Hank flew off with Ellis's body, Angus slipped into my room and my bed. He lay beside me, balanced on an elbow, stroking the hair away from my throat. He fingered the neck of my nightgown.

“Take that off…”

When I lay back down, he leaned over and whispered directly into my ear. “I want to marry you,
mo chridhe
. To make this official just as soon as we can.”

He planted tiny kisses on my neck, working his way down. When he was almost at my collarbone, he took a small piece of my flesh between his teeth. I gasped, and every hair on my body stood on end.

“That's assuming you'll even have such a rough dog as myself,” he said, continuing his descent. He kissed his way to my left breast and ran his tongue over my nipple. It tightened into a little raspberry.

He raised his head. “Although I suppose I didn't phrase it exactly as a question, that last comment of mine does require an answer…”

“But of course!” I said. “I want to be Mrs. Grant as soon as…oh!”

His mouth was once again on the move.

“Actually,” he said between kisses, “you'll be the Much Honored Madeline Grant, Lady of Craig Gairbh.”

The thing he did next left me unable to respond at all—at least, not with words.

We decided to wait a few weeks for the sake of propriety, but for all intents and purposes we were married from that moment on. Angus spent every night in my bed, although he slipped downstairs before dawn so as not to offend Anna's sensibilities.

The news from the Front made it clear that the war in Europe couldn't last much longer. City after city either surrendered or was liberated, and the Germans were driven ever deeper into their own territory. They were surrounded on all sides. They had also run out of men to recruit. They began drafting boys as young as ten from the Hitler Youth, and reenlisting any soldier who had only lost his leg below the knee.

From there, it all fell like dominoes, beginning with a hit close to home. President Roosevelt died on April 12, and Harry S. Truman became the 33rd President of the United States.

Three days later, British forces liberated a complex of concentration camps at Bergen-Belsen and, according to an article in
The Inverness Courier
, found “thousands of starving men, women, and children, naked bodies lying four feet high stretching a distance of 80 yards by a width of 30 yards, cannibalism rife, disease and unspeakable cruelty rampant.” General Eisenhower implored members of the British House of Commons to come see “the agony of crucified humanity” for themselves, because “no words can convey the horror.”

On April 16, the same day the Russians began yet another massive offensive, a desperate Adolf Hitler issued his “Last Stand,” in which he ordered troops to arrest immediately any officer or soldier who gave orders to retreat, regardless of rank, and if necessary to execute
them, because even if they were in German uniform, they were probably drawing Russian pay. He told his forces, “In this hour the entire German nation looks to you, my soldiers in the East, and only hopes that by your fanaticism, by your arms, and by your leadership, the Bolshevik onslaught is drowned in a bloodbath.”

Twelve days later, Mussolini and his mistress were executed by firing squad after trying to escape to Switzerland. Their bodies were then hung upside down on meat hooks in the Piazzale Loreto. A woman approached and cried, “Five shots for my five assassinated sons!” before pumping another five bullets into Mussolini's already-battered corpse.

The next day, April 29, American forces liberated Dachau, the first of the German concentration camps to be erected, and among the last to be liberated. Upon their approach, the Americans encountered thirty coal cars filled with decomposing bodies. Within the camp, they found approximately thirty thousand emaciated survivors, who continued to die at the rate of several hundred a day, because their systems were too weak to take nourishment.

On April 30, the Russians took Berlin and raised the Soviet flag over the Reichstag. Deep in their bunker, with the battle raging above them, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun poisoned themselves and their dogs, after which Hitler shot himself in the head.

We huddled around the radio that night, every one of us breathing through our mouths. It was almost too much to believe. At long last—after more devastation and cruelty and callous disregard for human life than any of us could have possibly dreamed up—the hostilities appeared to be over. They were, in fact, although it wasn't made official for another week, when all remaining German forces surrendered unconditionally.

When Victory Day was finally declared, the collective jubilation became chaos. People ripped down their Blackout curtains and set them on fire in the streets, sirens blared and church bells rang, victory
parades turned into wild impromptu parties, people whooped and danced and sang, strangers made love in bushes off to the side of the road, bonfires raged, and bagpipes called out triumphantly from every hill the whole night through.

At ten the next morning, Angus and I got married. The day after that, Anna and Willie did the same.

A
few weeks after our wedding, I noticed that Angus had quietly had the gravestone with his name on it replaced with one that didn't. This time, it was I who knelt and traced the names of Màiri and her baby, leaving behind the handful of bluebells I'd just gathered from the Cover.

Knowing I'd paid homage to just one grave, I continued on to the Water Gate, picking more flowers on the way. After placing them at the water's edge, I stared across the loch's shiny black surface, and wondered what, exactly, had happened to us out there. Was it Màiri? Was it the monster? Or was it something else entirely?

The monster—if there was one—never revealed itself to me again. But what I had learned over the past year was that monsters abound, usually in plain sight.

When Angus asked if I was ready to see my new home, I said that yes, of course I was, as long as he was entirely sure the army had removed all the land mines. He roared with laughter when I told him about my
escapade, and told me that there weren't any mines in the first place—the signs were there to keep civilians out, as well as to keep the commandos in. The live ammunition, however, was real.

“What do you think?” he asked, when we rounded the bend and reached the oak-lined drive. The Nissen huts and barbed wire were gone, so it was the first time I'd seen the Big House in its entirety.

Angus's arm was around my shoulder, and he watched my face expectantly.

“Oh, Angus!” I said, skipping ahead of him. “It's magnificent! Is it locked?”

“I don't think so,” he said, and then laughed as I ran ahead.

The double doors were huge and studded with brass. The entranceway was draped with carved boughs and vines, starting above the pediment and reaching almost to the ground. Just above that was an enormous coat of arms, and way up at the top, over a frieze of rearing horses flanking a shield, was a clock tower in a cupola that Angus told me was added in 1642. Each window was graced with a carving, and forty-foot Corinthian pillars ran up the wall between them.

When I walked through the front doors and found myself looking up at a vast, multistory gallery, I caught my breath. Generations of larger-than-life Grants glowered down at me from the oak-paneled walls, the frames that contained them separated by gilt curlicues. Most of them had ginger hair; all of them had Angus's striking blue eyes.

There was not one room on the main level that didn't have intricate plasterwork on its ceiling, and most were either painted or trimmed with gilt. Every detail was exquisite—from the ornate chandeliers to the medieval tapestries to the “cabinet of curiosities” that once belonged to Louis XIV. The upholstered furniture seemed oddly shabby until Angus told me that it dated from the early 1700s, and that all the velvet was original.

I tried to imagine the Colonel's reaction when he first stepped inside
all those years ago. When he looked up at the portraits of his relatives, did his fantasies of finding the monster grow to encompass fantasies of becoming the laird? During his stay, as he harassed servant girls and adopted his upper-crust accent and commissioned estate tweeds, did he secretly ascertain how many male Grants stood between him and the title?

There was no doubt in my mind. Ellis probably had too.

Although the war was over, Europe remained in chaos: there were food shortages and transportation crises, a staggering number of refugees streaming from city to city, mass surrenders of German troops, hundreds of thousands of freed prisoners, as well as innumerable wounded soldiers who now faced the prospect of trying to rebuild their lives.

I'd never forgotten the wounded men on the SS
Mallory
, particularly the soldier who had caught my gaze and held it. He opened my eyes, awakening me to a reality I had somehow managed to avoid until that point. While Hank and Ellis carried on without a care in the world, it was men like the burned soldier, Angus, and Anna's brothers who sacrificed everything to save the rest of us. I wanted to give something back.

When I told Angus what I had in mind, he folded me wordlessly into his arms.

And so the plans were laid. For the next few years, the Big House at Craig Gairbh would be a convalescent hospital for injured soldiers.

W
ithin two months, hospital beds and portable screens lined the halls and ballroom. The East Drawing Room became a surgery, and the Great Hall a burn unit. We moved into the servants' quarters on the top floor with Conall, and before long, Meg joined us, having decided to become a nurse.

The patients both crushed and amazed me. I watched as a forty-seven-year-old sergeant, newly blind and learning to find his way around with a cane, first fingered the petals of a peony, and then leaned over to bury his face in it. I held the hand of a boy who was not yet twenty as he cried in frustration after donning his prosthetic limb for the first time. I cheered from the sidelines during the frequent wheelchair races in the Great Hall. The library became a game room. One indomitable soldier, twenty-two years old, whose spine and left arm had been shattered, had one of us wheel him into the library each morning, then spent the rest of the day defeating anyone who dared take him on at chess.

I rooted for these men, and hundreds like them, as they passed through our lives and our home. It was a comfort to me to see them taking solace in the garden, or cooling in the shade of the fountain.

Meg was a great favorite with the soldiers, and she married a young corporal, who was also from Clydebank, the following Valentine's Day—an event that Angus and I had to skip for the happiest of reasons. I went into labor the night before, and just like that, Valentine's Day was redeemed.

Two of our children were born during that time, to the great delight of the soldiers. After all the horror, death, and despair, the babies were the truest possible affirmation of life.

Life. There it was. In all its beautiful, tragic fragility, there was still life, and those of us who'd been lucky enough to survive opened our arms wide and embraced it.

A
nd now for the usual caveats about writing fiction based on real events:

I've appropriated some parts of the history of monster sightings. In particular, I transformed the “Surgeon's Photo” into the “Colonel's Photo,” and reimagined the Royal Observer Corps sighting completely. The British Aluminium plant at Foyers was indeed bombed during the war, but at noon rather than at night, and in February 1941 rather than January 1945. Similarly, while I tried to stay true to all other facts about the creation of the Special Service Brigade, Achnacarry Castle did not become Castle Commando until 1942.

While I did not fictionalize any of these, the facts and numbers associated with some of the battles and certainly the death camps are inaccurate in the book because I had to base them on the information that would have been available to my characters at the time, which was limited to the nightly BBC broadcast and what was reported in
The Inverness Courier
. The real numbers and full truth took years to come out, and, as we now know, are even harder to comprehend than those that so horrified Maddie.

For Bob,

'S tusa gràdh mo bheatha

I
don't know if writing drives people crazy or if crazy people are driven to write, but I could not possibly have written this book without the help of the following noncrazy people, to whom I am forever indebted:

My husband, Bob, my Rock of Gibraltar—without your unwavering support and belief, none of this would have been possible, and I certainly would not be able to continue.

To my sons, Benjamin, Thomas, and Daniel, who are delightful and incredibly well-adjusted young men in spite of having me as their mother.

To Hugh Allison and Tony Harmsworth. It was as though some invisible hand guided me to you. Experts each on Scotland during World War II and the Loch Ness Monster, your willingness to answer my endless questions over the years was nothing short of heroic.

To Hugh's family members, who invited me in by the fire and made sure (for better or worse) that the level in my glass never went down: Hughie and Chrissie Campbell, Donnie and Joan Macdonald, Jock Macdonald, and Alasdair Macdonald—thanks to each of you for your hospitality and for sharing your memories and mementos with me.

To the people who lived in Glenurquhart during the war and were generous enough to share their experiences: Duncan MacDonald, Angus MacKenzie, Jessie (Nan) Marshall, William Ross, and Bonita Spence.

To Lady Munro of Foulis, for graciously inviting me to Foulis Castle to discuss her experiences in the WAAF, and for allowing me to prowl around the castle's original kitchen with my camera.

To Siobhan McNab, for her timely and thorough archival work; to Fiona Marwick, from the West Highland Museum in Fort William; and to Sheila Gunn for providing Gaelic translations.

To my trusted critique partners: Karen Abbott, Joshilyn Jackson, and Renee Rosen, each of whom has talked me off the ledge at least once, or, if I've already fallen over, pulled me back by my bungee cord. I can no longer count how many books we've collectively survived.

I would be remiss if I didn't also send a heartfelt shout-out to my dear friend David Verzello, who dropped everything to read this book every time I asked him to, which was often.

And a very special thanks to Emma Sweeney, my wonderful agent; Cindy Spiegel, editor extraordinaire; and to Gina Centrello and the team at Random House. All of you have the patience of Job and a keen understanding of the creative process, and you provided an unfaltering but gentle hand in guiding my book toward its finest form. I am also eternally grateful to Lisa Highton, my editor at Two Roads Books, who believed in this book from the very beginning.

To Cindy specifically—life threw me a number of curveballs over the last few years and I am grateful beyond words that you stuck with me. If I hadn't been sure of your support, I'm not sure I could have crawled through it. Thank you.