A Dark and Distant Shore (10 page)

‘There you are,’ Ewen said. ‘That iss kelp.’ The seaweed ashes had begun to accumulate in a kind of glowing, molten mass. ‘When it cools down it will be aal brittle and blue-coloured. You will see if you stay with us long enough.’

By midday Luke had been promoted to the post of assistant seaweed-spreader, and was blissfully engaged when he glanced up and saw that Vilia had arrived. She was looking at him with her eyebrows raised – no doubt because he was as filthy as a chimney boy. The ten-foot clatt, or poker, hadn’t been designed for someone his size, and the air round his kiln was thick with the black snowflakes he had succeeded in stirring up. But at least he was doing something useful.

No one was so unkind as to disabuse him of the idea. Vilia had come down from the castle kitchen with Jessie Graham and Sorley McClure, bringing the kelpers’ midday meal, and within minutes they had been absorbed into the cheerful group round the slype, who had gone back to their chattering again. Luke’s high spirits plummeted. It wasn’t fair.

After a while, Vilia came over to where he was sitting munching oatmeal bannocks and crowdie and feeling left out. She plumped down beside him.

‘Are you enjoying yourself?’

‘Yes, thank you.’ He swallowed a mouthful of buttermilk.

‘You’ll have to learn the Gaelic, you know.’

‘I don’t see why. My grandfather gets on perfectly well without it.’

‘He speaks it a little.’

Luke hadn’t known that. ‘Only a little, though,’ he risked.

‘Well, he has an excuse. You can’t expect a man of seventy to be fluent in a strange language. Everyone appreciates that.’ She looked at him in exasperation. ‘But the people here will expect
you
to learn, if you’re going to be the laird some day.’

‘Pooh!’

‘Luke!’ she exclaimed. ‘I am trying to
help
you! Why must you be so sulky?’

He didn’t answer, but made a great show of masticating his bannock.

Just at that moment, Sorley came over, juggling with some hot baked potatoes. They were pot black, and Luke wrinkled his nose disgustedly. Sorley grinned and tossed him one. ‘Peats iss good for cooking other things as well as kelp.’

Vilia said, ‘Sorley! How do you always manage to read my mind? I was just remembering how good baked potatoes were when we were children!’

‘Aye, and I remembered something else, too.’ Triumphantly, he produced a twist of cotton from his pocket, and opened it to reveal some salt.

Vilia laughed. ‘
Clever
Sorley!’

It was the first time Luke had seen Sorley since their arrival at Kinveil. He had abandoned his dashing London livery and was wearing a plain shirt and breeches, and his carroty head was topped with one of the pom-pommed woollen tarns known locally as ‘toories’. Luke hadn’t made up his mind about Sorley. He was only a servant, and Vilia’s servant at that – two considerations that should have damned him wholly in Luke’s eyes. But he didn’t behave like a servant, though he was never forward or impertinent; more like a respectful equal. And there was no denying that he was likeable. He had the sunniest smile Luke had ever seen.

Luke surveyed his potato. ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’

‘You could try eating it,’ Vilia said. ‘I’ll show you.’ With her fingers she stripped away part of the skin, and then squashed the potato a little so that it popped open. ‘Now, salt. And – Sorley, don’t tell me you haven’t brought a spoon?’ He rummaged in his shirt pocket. ‘Thank you. Now scoop some of the buttery lumps out of your buttermilk, and drop them in the middle. That’s right.’

It was the best potato Luke had ever tasted. Through it, he mumbled, ‘What were you all laughing at?’ It didn’t sound like an apology, but it was.

Vilia smiled. ‘Just one of the latest dramas.’

‘What was it?’

‘There’s a man called Willie Macrae who lives at Dunbarchan, very fond of his dram. Well, he was coming home one night, rather bosky, with a bottle of barm – that’s yeast, you know? – in his back pocket for his wife to make some bread. He had to pass through the Howe of the Elms, which is a pretty eerie place even in daylight, and this was midnight. Well, he was getting more and more nervous when all of a sudden there was a faint hissing noise, just by his ear. It got louder, and louder, and louder, and eventually he panicked and began to run for all he was worth. But it didn’t do any good, because suddenly there was a tremendous bang, and he felt a violent blow between his shoulderblades.’

She giggled. Henry had flopped down beside them to listen – revealing that, under his cassock, he wore a serviceable pair of dark grey trousers.

‘Well, as Henry knows,’ Vilia said, with a mischievous glance at him, ‘there are more things in heaven and earth, etcetera. When Willie reached home he was more dead than alive. “What ails ye, man?” his wife said. And Willie said...’

She giggled again. ‘Sorley, you tell them. You can do it better than I can.’

Sorley grinned, and declaimed, ‘Och, I am done! I am done! Forgiff me, Lord, for my sins. Och, Guid save me. Guid save me. I am dead, woman! I am elf-shot. As I came through the Howe, the devil took me. See the blood pouring down my back. It iss a terrible thing, surely! I am dead, I am dead.’ He clapped his hand over his chest and fell to the ground.

Luke couldn’t begin to imagine what was so funny about this rather sinister tale. ‘What happened?’ he gasped.

Vilia showed signs of relapsing. ‘I’ll spare you the detail. When Donella got him inside, he wasn’t covered with blood, but he
was
very wet. What had happened was that his nervousness – and the whisky – had made him rather warm, and the heat of his body had started the yeast working and
that
had forced the cork right out of the bottle. “It must haff given a great pop, do you see?” Donella said. “But it wass not an elf-shot at aal. Not at aal!”’

Henry gave an unclerical hoot, and after a moment Luke began to laugh, too. It really was very funny. Amusement grew like a bubble inside him, and soon he and Henry and Vilia and Sorley were all puffing and chuckling in companionable unison. Suddenly, Luke realized that here, in the peat-reeking heat of a June midday, surrounded by people with whom he had nothing in common, whose language was a closed book to him, he was happier than he had ever been in his life before. Except when he’d caught the salmon, of course.

And then Vilia spoiled it completely. ‘It sounds much better in the Gaelic,’ she said. ‘You really
will
have to learn, you know!’

He tossed his head pettishly. ‘I’ve no intention of doing any such thing. And you needn’t sound so governessy about it, either!’

It was Mungo’s birthday not long before they were due to leave, and he decided to make an occasion of it. There was to be a family dinner party first in the Great Hall, and then everyone on the estate was invited to a
ceilidh,
which, Mungo told his grandson, was a portmanteau word for anything ranging from a neighbourly cup of tea to a full-scale riot.

Dinner was at five, and the table was handsomely set with damask and crystal and silver, and there was a great bowl of red roses in the centre. Everyone was dressed to kill. There hadn’t been any occasion for the visitors to wear their best clothes since they arrived, so Chrissie Fraser, the laundry-maid, had been working like a beaver all day. A faint miasma of hot irons and pressing cloths hung round the table. Mungo, whose everyday garb was an iron-grey shooting jacket – a concession to what he called his lairdliness, for he had never shot anything in his life – was smartly turned out in his best blue swallowtail coat, with gilt buttons, a buff waistcoat, and black trousers instead of his usual breeches. Round his neck were several soft white muslin neckerchiefs, and there was an impressive display of pleated shirt ruffles cascading from the front of his waistcoat. Luke and Edward were both clad in long pantaloons whose waists rested somewhere around their armpits, with short jackets and soft shirts to complete the ensemble. Luke could hardly wait for the day when his mama decided he was old enough to have a properly tailored coat.

But Vilia dumbfounded them all. She had condescended for once to abandon her bombazines, now a little rusty and salt-stained, and was wearing an exceedingly pretty half-mourning gown of pale grey muslin. The amethyst and gold filigree necklace was the first jewellery, other than the Kinveil ring, that Luke had ever seen her wear.

There was a strong atmosphere of best behaviour, although Luke’s virtuous resolutions took a tumble when he discovered that Vilia had been seated at the opposite end of the table from his grandfather, as if she were the hostess rather than a mere guest.

It wasn’t a very vivacious gathering, although everyone was pleased enough to be indoors. It had been an overcast day, not cold, but grey and depressing. The Great Hall looked surprisingly welcoming with a huge log fire, candles lit in their wall sconces, and the most enticing meal Luke had ever seen set out on the table. Although he would have died rather than admit it, it was his very first grown-up dinner party, and for one accustomed to nursery rules about eating what one was given, and no nonsense, the choice was stupendous. Mrs Barrshaw had obviously been as busy in the kitchen as Chrissie Fraser in the laundry.

There were two steaming tureens on the table, one full of chicken soup and the other of a delectable cream of barley and carrots.

‘
Potage d’orge perlée à la Crécy,
’
said Robert Fraser the butler with the greatest aplomb, just as if he weren’t the gardener’s son and the laundry-maid’s brother. There seemed to Luke to be an impossible number of Frasers, and most of them employed in the castle.

The soups were removed with grilled trout and lobster cutlets, but it was the entrées that betrayed Luke into a childish gasp of sheer gluttony. Mrs Barrshaw had excelled herself. Afterwards, Luke particularly remembered the suprêmes of wild rabbit, the timbale of macaroni, some salmon steaks with a beautiful green sauce, and the sweetbreads. He scarcely even glanced at the
pièces de résistance
when they were brought in, since no boy of taste could be interested in a mere roast of veal and a boiled leg of mutton. Instead he persevered with the entrées, but when the entremets arrived, he wished he hadn’t. For here were devilled kidneys, braised lettuces, potatoes in Hollandaise sauce, scrambled eggs with the first chanterelles of the season, and pastries, and caramel custards, and Genoese cake with a heavenly coffee-flavoured filling, and early raspberries. No one was expected to try even a mouthful of all of them, but Luke did his best.

He was much too busy to pay attention to the conversation which, in any case, was the usual duologue between his grandfather and Vilia, with occasional intrusions from Henry. Luke knew that, if he were to match Vilia’s knowledge of Kinveil, he ought to be listening. But the Genoese cake was more appealing than modern forestry techniques, and the chanterelles a revelation beside which the saga of Macdonell’s war against the Caledonian Canal Commissioners paled into insignificance.

In the end, blissfully full, he sat back and began to take notice.

His grandfather was saying, with a sly twinkle, ‘I’ve passed then, have I?’

Vilia didn’t answer directly. In her pale gown, and with her hair a bright aureole in the candlelight, she looked fragile, almost ethereal. Her eyes were like green opals. She said slowly, ‘I was very excited to be coming back, and then I was afraid. I thought you might have changed everything, so that I wouldn’t recognize Kinveil any more.’

Luke congratulated himself on having made an accurate analysis of her changes of mood on the journey. Well, almost accurate. Fear wasn’t precisely the emotion he had credited her with.

‘I thought you might have bought thousands of sheep, and demolished all the houses, or cut down all the trees. You might have added a modern extension to the castle, or panelled all the walls, or painted them. You might have brought in glossy new furniture, and neo-Classical paintings, and fashionable knick-knacks. That would have been dreadful.’

Luke raised a replete eyebrow. He had thought, as they sat down to dinner, that the Great Hall would be much the better for a coat or two of lime wash, and some decent pictures and up-to-date furniture.

Mungo said placidly, ‘Aye, well. I might have done, I suppose. But I bought Kinveil because I admired it and wanted to stop it falling to bits. I wanted to preserve it, not change it.’ He grinned. ‘And you’ll admit that, other considerations apart, it’s not just the kind of place that lends itself to being converted into something modern and cosy!’

She smiled, but said nothing.

Mungo consulted his watch and then rose, glass in hand. Everyone else followed his example, even, with some officious assistance from Edward, little Georgiana, who needed both hands to clasp her tumblerful of water, faintly pink from the teaspoon of claret she had clamoured to have added to it.

‘Now,’ Mungo said decisively. ‘My birthday was only an excuse. This party is really for Miss Vilia. As long as I’m alive, she’ll always be welcome here.’ Everybody smiled and beamed at Vilia, who was suddenly looking a little less than her usual composed self. Everybody but Luke, busy repressing a chanterelle-and-coffee-flavoured burp. ‘And I’d like you all to join me in a toast – though not to the lady, because that would be bad form, wouldn’t it?’

He grinned, and there was a moment’s inexplicable pause. Then Luke saw his grandfather’s eyes go past his shoulder, and there was a flurry of air which meant that the courtyard door had opened. The candle flames swerved wildly, and then steadied. The door must have closed again. Vilia’s eyes were enormous, and – lethargically – Luke wondered why.

His grandfather resumed. ‘The toast I give you is Kinveil! May its walls never crumble!’

Luke thought they were going to.

From behind him, quite without warning, came the most blood-curdling noise he had ever heard, a kind of breathy wail on a deep, single, interminable, and incredibly piercing note that gradually intensified, and then multiplied itself, until it became a ferocious, deafening, cacophonous, gargling discord loud enough to wake the dead. And then it stopped. Bang. Just like that.