A Dark and Distant Shore (41 page)

‘The dead-drap,’ Vilia replied tiredly. ‘The death drip. Oh, Luke! Have you learned nothing about the Highlands in all these years? It’s an omen. Someone in this house is going to – to die. Soon.’

He laughed uncomfortably. ‘Really, Vilia! Second sight? Omens? You don’t believe all that nonsense, do you? Damn it, in this climate, if someone died every time there was a drip from the eaves the country would be completely depopulated by now!’

‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio... No. Laugh if you must, Luke, but don’t scorn the second sight. I don’t know what it is – some kind of nervous vibrations, perhaps – but it doesn’t matter. Have you ever heard rain sound like that before?’

‘Well, no. But there could be any number of explanations. It might just have been hitting the gutters at an odd angle.’

‘And how do you explain that you couldn’t hear anything except when you were touching me?’

He couldn’t but he tried. ‘A freak of sound? So that I could catch it only when I was near you?’

She smiled without humour, and then closed her eyes with a spread forefinger and thumb. ‘One person hears the dead-drap, others only if they have hold of the one who hears. That’s why the Duchess heard it as soon as I did, because her head was against my foot. That’s why you heard it only when you were clasping my hand.’

After a few minutes he became conscious of the sea on the rocks again, and the wind gusting, and the rain lashing against the glass.

Stoutly, he said, ‘I hope your watery omen isn’t as apt as it sounds. Just think! If the steam yacht goes down on Thursday, half the estates in the Highlands will be looking for new owners!’

But it was Mungo who died.

He was perfectly well during the drive from Kinveil to Glengarry’s house overlooking Loch Oich. He even enjoyed himself in the evening, when Mac-mhic-Alistair laid himself out to be a jovial host. Mungo had never seen him in this mood before – ‘so normal’, as he muttered to Vilia – and began, very slightly, to revise his opinion of him. Not that he thought much of the things Glengarry set such store by. The monument at the Well of the Heads, for example. They had to listen to the familiar story, told at great length, of the vengeance taken on the orders of an earlier Glengarry on seven clansmen who had murdered their local chief. With what Mungo considered an indecent regard for the niceties, the avenger had rinsed the severed heads of the offenders in the well before delivering them up to Himself. If it had been Mungo, he’d have had the well disinfected in case anyone drank from it, but Glengarry instead had raised a monument bearing a lengthy inscription in Gaelic, English, French, and Latin, and topped with a sculpture that depicted a hand holding not only a dagger but, with a certain amount of difficulty, seven severed heads as well. There was no accounting for tastes, and the sculptor, Mungo noted sadly, had been no Chantrey.

Nor could he believe in the vast key that hung on the chimney breast of the room where they dined. According to Glengarry, it belonged to the ancestral ruin that had been gutted by the Redcoats during the ’Forty-five, but its size and ornamentation and, above all, the number of wards, made Mungo very suspicious indeed. It didn’t look like seventeenth-century workmanship to him.

But never mind, it was interesting. He was wryly amused, and not in the least offended, that it had taken Glengarry almost twenty years to invite him to his house, and knew that even so he had been invited only because of Vilia. Glengarry, following Highland tradition, still insisted on calling her ‘Mistress Cameron’. Mungo himself, in the view of Mac-mhic-Alistair, belonged among the common townsfolk, tradesmen, and merchants whom he was accustomed to damn up hill and down dale, in their hearing as well as out of it.

Cannily, Mungo held his tongue and left the conversation to Vilia and Luke, who seemed to have the knack of handling the fellow. It was only to be expected of Vilia, but he was pleased to see that Luke was getting on with Glengarry’s heir, a boy of his own age who was magnificently turned out, as was Glengarry himself, in the full glory of The Dress, plaid and kilt and sporran. Mungo thought that it was a wee bit incongruous, maybe, that the boy’s belt sheath held his knife and fork as well as his dirk. However...

Not surprisingly, most of the conversation had to do with the Canal. Glengarry’s opinions were typically inconsistent. ‘We shipped one and a half million birch staves out of this district in 1820, when the northern stretch of the Canal was opened,’ he said proudly. ‘And there are people in Fort Augustus who can burn coal in their fireplaces now, because it’s so cheap to bring in. Did ye know that?’

‘Aye, mphmmm,’ said Mungo, carrying a piece of his host’s excellent venison to his mouth. The folk who were burning coal were burning it because Glengarry wouldn’t let them have so much as a twig of kindling that he could sell at a thumping profit elsewhere. Another few years and there wouldn’t be a birch tree left on all Glengarry’s vast acres.

‘On the other hand,’ Glengarry went on. ‘I and my fellow landowners are losing a great deal by having the Canal go through our land.’

‘Oh, aye?’ Mungo said, and took another bite. A few years ago, Glengarry had squeezed £10,000 out of the Canal Commissioners for the privilege of cutting a short stretch of it through his land. Mungo estimated that had been about three times what the privilege was worth.

‘Of course, we haven’t yet agreed the compensation for disturbing the fish, and the Canal people will have to pay for permission to navigate Loch Oich. And, assuming that’s settled, they’ll have to give me assurances that those filthy passenger boats and smoking steam vessels will keep to the far shore of the loch, well away from this house.’

‘Oh, aye?’ Mungo said again. There didn’t seem much point in saying anything else, but he hoped one of the others would ask the question he was dying to.

Vilia did. ‘But if you let the steam yacht through Loch Oich tomorrow, won’t that undermine your claim to control the navigation rights?’

Glengarry beamed at her with a vast self-satisfaction. ‘Ha! Ha!’ he barked. ‘I’m too old a hand at litigation to make that kind of mistake. No! If I join the yacht at Fort Augustus, I’ll be aboard before it enters Loch Oich, and will therefore be in the position of acting as host through my own waters. What do you think of that, eh? So it won’t undermine my position at all.’

Mungo had to admit that it was ingenious.

But it was to be a case of the best-laid schemes of mice and men. This one went agley at half-past seven the next morning, in the middle of breakfast. No one except Glengarry was very talkative, and even he had to stop occasionally to swallow, since he was anxious to get off in good time to board the yacht at the Fort.

He had just masticated a mouthful of cold roast beef and was raising his tumbler of whisky bitters to wash it down when his eyes suddenly started out of his head. Loud and clear, and more than a little off key, there wafted across the loch the unmistakable strains of a military band playing the ancestral anthem of the Macdonells. It was punctuated by a succession of shots from what sounded like an overgrown pop-gun.

With an explosive oath in the Gaelic, Glengarry shot to his feet and rushed to the window, where he was rewarded by the sight of the steam yacht, well over an hour early, just about to draw level with the house, its passengers cheering and waving with extravagant enthusiasm. His pale eyes fairly popping with rage, Glengarry let out another bellow to one of the plaided servants standing dumbfounded by the serving buffet and then made a beeline for the door, followed after a moment by a bewildered Luke.

Repressing a tactless desire to sit and laugh themselves silly, Mungo and Vilia followed Glengarry’s wife and children to the window in time to see the chief, pursued by his panting retinue – including bard and piper – making for the loch side at a record-breaking sprint, kilts and plaids flying in the breeze.

Just at that moment, a distraught figure burst through the breakfast-room door, having entered the house, it seemed, from another direction. ‘Och, dearie me! Dearie me!’ this apparition intoned between gasps for breath. ‘There wass no way I could be getting here in time, so there wassn’t! They were feart Himself would stop the boat from entering Loch Oich at aal, do you see, so they set off from the Fort at the first glisk of daylight. Och, dearie me, dearie me! Himself will be furious. And I ran aal the way, too. Och, mistress! He will neffer forgiff me, so he won’t!’

Rebecca Macdonell looked at him sadly. ‘I fear you may be right, Angus Mor,’ she said. ‘In fact, if I were you, I wouldn’t show my face for quite a while. Have you not got a daughter a good long way away that you could go and visit?’

The erring clansman gave this a moment’s thought. ‘There iss Jinty in Stornoway, Mistress?’

She nodded. ‘That would be best, I should think.’ She turned her eyes back to her husband’s diminishing figure. ‘Och, just look at him, the poor man, having to run all that way, and him not even finished his breakfast. And Jamie will have to row him out. It’s not dignified at all. And he will be so upset at having his lovely plan all spoilt!’

‘Yon woman,’ said Mungo a few hours later, when he and Vilia were on the way back to Kinveil, ‘has a real nice nature. Tell me honestly, do you know any other wifey who would still be capable of calling Glengarry “poor man” after being married to him for twenty years?’

There was a faint twinkle in her eye as she said, ‘Lucy?’

He gave a snort of laughter. ‘Aye, you’re maybe right.’ He was glad to see the farce at breakfast had cheered her up. She’d been desperately depressed when she arrived at Kinveil, and it had taken him almost a week to coax a smile out of her. And just when he’d thought she was on the way to recovering from whatever ailed her, she had come downstairs – was it only yesterday morning? – looking as if the world had come to an end. She and Luke had been behaving with a kind of bright artificiality ever since, but he didn’t think it was because Luke had made some silly mistake like trying to kiss her, though he looked as if he’d like to. What a fankle!

Luke would be spending tonight at Fort William, and tomorrow night at Glenbraddan on his way home. With the darkness drawing in, the journey was too long to do in a day. Mungo was pleased that he was going to have Vilia to himself, because there were one or two things that, at long last, he’d decided to say to her. Although he had admitted it to no one, he was always tired these days, and he suspected that he mightn’t be here next time she came to visit the place where she’d been born, which he’d taken from her, and which he had tried over these last years to give back to her a little.

But they weren’t even half-way home when it happened.

Willie Aird, the coachman, knew the road so well that he was driving like an automaton when he was startled out of his trance by a violent tugging on the check cord.

It was Mistress Cameron, face and voice full of despair. ‘Pull up, Willie! It’s Himself. I don’t know what’s wrong. Mungo! Can you tell me? Do you feel pain?’

She had known. She had known. Because the warning had come to her, who was so close to him, she had known it must be Mungo.

He was struggling harshly, agonizingly, for breath, his body arching with the effort, and his face was so contorted that all the blood had fled from it. She thought at first that he didn’t hear her, but his hands began to flap weakly and aimlessly in front of his chest, as if somehow he could ease the terrible pressure and through stiff, gasping lips he managed a sound that might have been ‘Yes’. But then all his concentration focused again on the need to draw air into his body. She tore the neck-cloth away from his throat and opened the shirt beneath.

Once before, Willie Aird had seen a man in such straits, and the doctor had said afterwards that his heart had failed him. He said, ‘We’ll have to take him to Glenbraddan, Mistress Cameron. There’s nowhere else.’

She was half cradling him with one arm round his shoulders, the other hand pressing against his diaphragm as if to force heart and lungs back to their normal rhythms. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘As smoothly as you can, and as fast as you can. If we see anyone on the road, you must stop them and get them to send to Fort Augustus for the doctor. Oh, why couldn’t it have happened when we were nearer there? Hurry, Willie. Please hurry.’

The road was empty, and the finely engineered surface still firm. The coach itself was one of the new ones, with elliptical springs and a low centre of gravity. Willie Aird flicked his whip round the horses’ ears and set them to a full gallop, and within a couple of minutes they were going flat out and the coach was flying over the ground. Willie scarcely drew rein when he saw Mr Edward cantering towards them. At the full power of his lungs, he yelled, ‘We need the doctor for Mr Telfer! Can you fetch him?’ and then laid his whip to the horses again and concentrated on keeping them to their matched stride as the road bore left and then right again, following the line of the river. Vilia had a momentary glimpse of Edward as they flashed past him, his mouth a little open but his shoulders already turning as if, for once, he were going to act without first taking an hour to meditate. ‘Hurry, Edward. Hurry,’ she prayed.

The last narrow, winding mile off the main road was a protracted torture, but although Mungo had lost consciousness he was still alive when the carriage lurched to a standstill at Glenbraddan. For an incredulous moment, Vilia thought Charlotte was going to refuse to allow her to cross the doorstep, but the sight of her father’s face drove everything but concern for him from Charlotte’s mind.

She dithered. God, how she dithered! It was as much as Vilia could do not to start issuing orders. But at last Mungo was laid on a soft feather bed, his outdoor clothes removed and replaced with a night-shirt from his baggage. Then the butler and Willie Aird, inexperienced but kindly valets, were dismissed, and Charlotte and Vilia sat down to wait for the doctor.

It was three hours before he came, riding well ahead of Edward, whose horse had gone lame just outside Fort Augustus. By then, Mungo lay conscious on his pillows, his lips blue and his eye sockets deep and dark as if they had been excavated from his skull. His struggles for breath had subsided a little, but it was not a bettering.