A Dark and Distant Shore (119 page)

And then Theo threw back his head and laughed. ‘How I hate to ruin such a splendid exit line, dear boy. But I’ve been saving my trump till last.’

His eyes brilliant with pleasure, he surveyed them both. ‘I know things that you don’t know! As Jay’s official guardian, I had a communication this afternoon from the police department in Hamburg. Jay, foolish boy, took a young thug into his lodgings and – if you’ll forgive me – his bed. A murderous young thug, I’m afraid. Jay is dead.’ The rain was dripping from his moustache, but his smile was dazzling. ‘And that card, Vilia dear, takes the trick, don’t you think?’

Vilia had never admitted that it could be cold at Kinveil, but in the February of 1895 she was feeling it. Knowing vaguely that she was slurring her words, she said to the hazy figure by the bed, ‘Hot pig’, and then giggled. It would be funny if Shona thought she meant a pig from the furnace instead of a stone hot water bottle. Then she’d frizzle rather than freeze to death.

It had never been as cold as this in her childhood, no matter what the astronomers said. They claimed that their registers showed the temperatures had been the same in 1802 as they were now. Such nonsense! She could remember everyone having light summer clothes then, whereas now one wore the same things all the year round, give or take a vest or two. Hazelnuts had ripened then by the bushel, but just try and find one now! On June fourth, the king’s birthday, there had always been the first strawberries of the season, whereas today they didn’t ripen till July. And as for wild honey! Even thirty years ago there had been so many nests in the grass that the scythers had been forever stopping to raid them, whereas now, if one found a nest, there was no honey in it. Or so young Callum said. It was a long time since Vilia had gone looking for wild bees’ nests.

‘Uhhh!’ she exclaimed, as a hard, hot object was pushed against her feet, and a voice said, ‘Is that better?’

‘Shona?’

‘Yes, Vilia?’

‘Nothing. I just wanted to know if it was you.’ She curled her toes round the scalding bottle. Shona wasn’t a day under eighty, but she hadn’t changed since she was eighteen. Probably remembered Drew better than his mother did, for he had always been a shadowy figure to her. He had been handsome – hadn’t he? – but his personality had never matched his face. Nature and nurture. Funny.

Vilia knew she was dying and was annoyed. She had set her mind on a hundred. But she wasn’t going to last until then, and, if it came to the bit, she didn’t really care. Truth to tell, she was bored. It was months – years – since anything interesting had happened. Fifteen years since she had had the pleasure of telling Theo and Gideon what she really thought of them, self-satisfied prigs that they were. How on earth had she produced such sons? Theo had died half a dozen years later, and Gideon in ’91. And then Jermyn had gone eighteen months ago, which had been a surprise.

No one interesting had been to visit her for a long time. Jermyn’s two girls, spinster schoolteachers, had come, and Petronella Barber, and some of Isa and Ian’s girls; she could never remember which of them was which. Dull as ditch-water, all of them. Neil and Callum, Jermyn and Madge’s boys, had come, too. Vilia hadn’t been able to discover how Neil, the heir, felt about Kinveil; too wide a gap between the generations for her to be able to read him.

How long was it, she suddenly wondered, since she had seen Peregrine James?
Sir
Peregrine James! It was gratifying that the business she had built up, almost single-handed, three quarters of a century ago, was now famous throughout the world, if for its military rather than its architectural ironmongery. Young P.J. was as infuriating as he had ever been, and Lady P.J. had produced six sons in a row. Distantly, Vilia remembered saying to someone that P.J. was
just
the kind of young man who would have nothing but sons, and there was a certain satisfaction in knowing that she had been right.

Ah, well. It was almost over now. The end of an old song. She wriggled a little, and kicked, and Shona came to fluff up the blankets and move the pig. Better, much better.

A face from long ago hung just above hers, and a light, vibrant, humorous voice murmured, ‘Always, and forever.’ Such love as that had been – brilliant, iridescent, beautiful. She remembered, still, how the jewel-bright gate had swung open for her; how she had gazed for a moment down the long, dark, frightening arches of the years, and then, wilfully, turned her eyes back to the loving, lovely threshold. And the years
had
been nightmare-dark, so that often – how often! – she had wished she had been wiser, then. But now, eighty years on, she couldn’t quite regret it. Had
he,
she wondered? At least, out of all the agony of life, she had something to remember. The pretty, sprigged room in summer London, and the elegant, fragrant house in France. Now, when it was all over, she could forget the destruction and the instinct for self-destruction that had followed. Now, she could remember only a pure, perfect beauty. It was more than most people had. Such a pity everything had gone wrong. His fault, and hers. And circumstances. And other people. Yet there had been something, and it had been beautiful. Funny how the years changed one’s perspective – not once, but again and again.

She yawned cavernously, and Shona began fidgeting with her blankets again. Vilia couldn’t be bothered telling her to stop.

In another day, or week, or month, Neil Lauriston would become laird of Kinveil. She had suggested he might change his name to Cameron, but all he had done was smile, the deceptively absent-minded smile he had inherited from his father, and say, ‘I can’t do that, Great-grandmama.’ She couldn’t see why not but it didn’t matter. It was the principle that counted.

Was there... ? She tried to work it out. Was there more Randall in him than Cameron? If Drew was half Cameron and half Randall, and Shona was half Randall and half Telfer, then Jermyn must have been fifty per cent Randall and only twenty-five per cent Cameron. And if that were diluted by Neil’s Holman blood... Arithmetic was beyond her these days. Irritated, she gave up.

Ironical, though. And nice, in a funny kind of way. Because Perry Randall had always been part of her, whatever had gone wrong. A living part of her. Mungo – dear Mungo! – had known. ‘Made for each other...’

And whatever Perry had contributed, it was she, Vilia Cameron, who had made sure that her great-grandson – their great-grandson – would inherit Kinveil in the end.

The purpose of so much of her life. She had won, she had won. Smiling, she closed her eyes and drifted towards death.

Kinveil, when Callum Lauriston left it to return to London in August 1914, looked very much, he thought, as it must have done more than a hundred years before, when Mungo Telfer saw it for the first time. In that immutable landscape, his shiny new Mercer Raceabout looked every bit as out of place as it would have done in Mungo’s day.

He stopped at the end of the loch to look back at the castle, perched on its island in the blue water, with blue skies above and a marvellous tapestry of blues and greens and purples around it. As castles went, it wasn’t much, and people who expected a Balmoral, a kind of Windsor-in-the-Wilderness, were apt to feel let down. But although it boasted neither gas nor electricity, and although its conveniences were modern only by the standards of the eighteenth century, it still had an undeniable
je ne sais quoi.

Callum had been innocently fond of the place as a boy, when his brother Neil, fifteen years older, had brought him up to visit their great-grandmother, but reading the family chronicle had changed all that.

What had happened was that Neil had inherited Kinveil when Great-grandmama Vilia died in 1895. And Neil didn’t want it. ‘Fine for holidays,’ he had said. ‘But can you see me retiring into that hermit’s cave and leaving the world to go to the devil in its own way? No, thank you. There’s no fun in that.’

For the next four years he had ignored it, apart from paying an occasional visit and letting it out for the shooting and fishing. Then he had gone off to the Boer War – ostensibly to see how one of Lauristons’ new field guns performed in action, but really, his brother thought, because he was a buccaneer at heart – and had got himself killed.

At the age of nineteen, therefore, Callum had found himself laird of Kinveil, and more than a little overawed by the prospect. Conscientiously going through Neil’s papers, he had found an untidy and obviously unlooked-at drawerful that turned out to consist of sixty years of Telfer family chronicle. It seemed that Great-uncle Gideon had decided not to go on with it after 1880, and had arranged for the trust to be wound up. Then he had handed all the material over to Neil, who seemed to have stuffed it in his desk and forgotten all about it.

Callum virtuously resolved that he would do better, and made a note to go through it all carefully – some day. But being the kind of person who chose his reading matter on the basis of the last page of a book rather than the first, before he put it aside he cast a brief glance at Gideon’s report of his last visit to Kinveil in 1880. The visit that had seen the final confrontation with Theo – who had died when Callum was six – and Great-grandmama Vilia. It was enough, more than enough, to arouse the liveliest interest in Callum. Soon, he was regretting very deeply that he had been too young and ill-informed to appreciate Vilia properly when he had the chance. What a woman!

In the years that followed, he had spent a good deal of his spare time on sorting out the papers, and the task had a curious effect on him. Most people, he reflected, scarcely even knew the names of their great-grandparents, or their laterals, collaterals, and descendants. But not Callum. By the time he had finished he knew them all personally, and had wept with them, and for them. He went up to Kinveil many times, trying to discover why it should have caused so much anguish and ruined so many lives, but by that day in August 1914 he still hadn’t discovered the answer and supposed that, now, he never would.

What he had discovered was that he could never bring himself to make the place his home. His very bones turned cold inside him as soon as he set foot on the causeway. It was as if the shades of Luke Telfer, and Juliana, and her baby son, and Lizzie, and Ian Barber, and all the rest of them, were waiting for him on the other side.

All that old heartbreak, all those old tears, he thought, as he sat in his rakish little two-seater and gazed back at the landscape he might never see again. None of it mattered any more. The world was at war, now, and he was going back to London to enlist.

He had made his Will years ago, when he came into his inheritance. Everything was to go to Gideon’s son, Steven, who was Callum’s uncle but near enough to him in age and outlook not to feel it. Callum wasn’t sure whether Steven would want Kinveil; it wasn’t something they’d ever had occasion to discuss. The assumption had always been that Callum would marry some day and bequeath the place to his children. But nothing was sure any more.

If Steven did want it, well and good. There would still be someone of Cameron blood to carry on the line, and Great-grandmother Vilia would have won in the end, as she died believing she had. And yet... It had been irony enough when, after her life-long obsession with bringing Kinveil back into her own family, her great-grandson Neil should have ignored it, though he had still been prepared to keep it. The supreme irony would be if her grandson Steven, knowing from Gideon the human cost of that obsession, chose to reject it completely.

Callum sat frowning at the bright scene, at the sea-girt little castle, that, on such a day, charmed both the eye and the imagination. He would add a codicil, he thought. Steven could sell the land, if he wanted to. But the castle... No. That, in justice, must be left to the sun, and the rain, and the ghosts it had created.

He pulled down his goggles, and cranked up the engine, and turned his back on Kinveil for the last time.

Kinveil, when Callum Lauriston left it to return to London in August 1914, looked very much, he thought, as it must have done more than a hundred years before, when Mungo Telfer saw it for the first time. In that immutable landscape, his shiny new Mercer Raceabout looked every bit as out of place as it would have done in Mungo’s day.

He stopped at the end of the loch to look back at the castle, perched on its island in the blue water, with blue skies above and a marvellous tapestry of blues and greens and purples around it. As castles went, it wasn’t much, and people who expected a Balmoral, a kind of Windsor-in-the-Wilderness, were apt to feel let down. But although it boasted neither gas nor electricity, and although its conveniences were modern only by the standards of the eighteenth century, it still had an undeniable
je ne sais quoi.

Callum had been innocently fond of the place as a boy, when his brother Neil, fifteen years older, had brought him up to visit their great-grandmother, but reading the family chronicle had changed all that.

What had happened was that Neil had inherited Kinveil when Great-grandmama Vilia died in 1895. And Neil didn’t want it. ‘Fine for holidays,’ he had said. ‘But can you see me retiring into that hermit’s cave and leaving the world to go to the devil in its own way? No, thank you. There’s no fun in that.’

For the next four years he had ignored it, apart from paying an occasional visit and letting it out for the shooting and fishing. Then he had gone off to the Boer War – ostensibly to see how one of Lauristons’ new field guns performed in action, but really, his brother thought, because he was a buccaneer at heart – and had got himself killed.

At the age of nineteen, therefore, Callum had found himself laird of Kinveil, and more than a little overawed by the prospect. Conscientiously going through Neil’s papers, he had found an untidy and obviously unlooked-at drawerful that turned out to consist of sixty years of Telfer family chronicle. It seemed that Great-uncle Gideon had decided not to go on with it after 1880, and had arranged for the trust to be wound up. Then he had handed all the material over to Neil, who seemed to have stuffed it in his desk and forgotten all about it.