A Dark and Distant Shore (48 page)

Grace, with sad reasonableness, said, ‘It would have upset Mama. But I confess I should have liked to know that my father was safe and well. Have you heard nothing since, Luke?’

It rather spoiled the effect to have to confess, ‘No, not a word.’ But it occurred to him for the first time that perhaps something might have happened to his uncle. It had been a long silence.

Vilia was looking thoughtful, and Grace showed signs of wishing to pursue the subject, but M. Savarin had more urgent matters on his mind than the errant Mr Randall, and Luke retired again into abstraction while Georgiana embarked, for what didn’t sound like the first time, on a detailed description of everything the groom and his groomsman, the silent Peter Barber – who was apparently a student of philosophy – needed to know about the next day’s ceremonies.

Even so, the two young men had clearly not been prepared to find the bridal route lined with crofters and tenants liberally endowed with black eyes and make-shift bandages – evidence of the impromptu game of shinty, a murderous kind of hockey, with which they had whiled away the waiting time. Nor had they expected the volley that greeted them on their emergence from the kirk, which came from as motley a collection of firearms as Luke ever hoped to see. There were pocket pistols, carriage pistols, a blunderbuss of heroic proportions, and something that looked uncommonly like a musket, as well as shotguns old, new, and prehistoric. Luke didn’t altogether blame Savarin for flinching. And after that there was the public wedding breakfast in the great stone barn, complete with a whole ox and several sheep roasted on the spit in true mediaeval style. The cooks weren’t used to it, and the results were uneven. It was M. Savarin’s misfortune that his plate happened to be piled with the carbonized bits.
‘Mon dieu!’
he breathed, surveying it reverently.

Luke watched it all, without really being part of it, concentrated wholly on himself and Vilia, as if they were at two ends of a telescope and everything else was peripheral to his vision. He was waiting for some sign from her, a sign that she had recognized the change in him.

But when the sign came, it wasn’t like that at all. Without being conscious of any particular feeling, he had watched her progress through reels, flings and strathspeys, country dances and quadrilles and cotillions, with everyone from his father, through a variety of Grants and Frasers and Macraes and Macleods, to Glengarry’s debt-ridden young successor, Aeneas Macdonell, nervous and stiff and wearing an eagle’s feather in his cap. And then she stood up with Sorley.

Luke had never seen her so vivid, so carefree, so sparkling, and his stomach contracted violently with jealousy. Sorley led her to her place in the reel, and Vilia, laughing, held her mouth up to him for the smacking kiss that, among Highlanders and among friends, was the natural preliminary to the dance. Sorley hesitated for a moment
and, then, with his blinding smile, planted his lips on hers before standing back to take up his position. For Luke, suddenly, the world turned upside down.

He stood and watched them. They scarcely spoke during the dance, for they had no breath to spare, and since a Highland reel always sounded like war in heaven they could scarcely have made themselves heard, anyway. But it made no difference. Luke could see that they were in perfect accord, sharing something he was unable to identify, something deeper and more intimate than the simple pleasure of the moment. What he couldn’t know was that they were both remembering the ceilidhs of their childhood, in the warm friendly kitchen of Kinveil, once a vaulted dungeon but by then a wonderful place lit by pungent tallow candles and reeking of the clean, eye-stinging smoke of the peats and the appetizing odours of toasting oatmeal and stewing mutton. Not since Vilia was seven and Sorley five had they hopped together to a fiddler’s tune. Kinveil, then, had been their whole world. They had loved it blindly and devotedly and had believed such days would never end.

When Sorley led Vilia, laughing and exhilarated and absurdly youthful, off the floor, Luke was waiting, every muscle under control, and his eyes glinting with the private, humorous smile that experience had taught him was the surest way to any woman’s heart. But the control was precarious and the humour false. For six years he had worshipped Vilia from a distance, as if she were some lady of courtly love. Even last night, even today, his preoccupation with her had remained romantic, only fleetingly touched by the physical. Until he had seen Sorley kiss her, when everything had changed.

Not for another three weeks was Luke able to catch Vilia quite alone, and even then it was difficult.

A few days after Georgiana’s wedding the equinoctial gales had begun to blow, so that the islands had disappeared into thick banks of cloud that parted only briefly to show the Cuillins, black and menacing, swept by great grey sheets of advancing rain. The wet, gusty wind blew with bewildering velocity and strength, and the noise outdoors was stupefying, for the howl of the gale and the separate shrieks that punctuated it were backed by the unceasing roar of the Atlantic, surging along Loch an Vele in great rollers twenty feet high, leaden grey, with long plumes of spray at the crests. As they hit the curve of the land they broke into colossal, tumbling confusion, curling over and then thundering down on the rocks and bursting into pillars of white foam, before the undertow caught them and swept them into a huge vortex, the whirlpool that gave the loch its name.

At last had come a morning of seeming calm, as if the winds had blown themselves out, and Luke’s mother suggested that Shona, who had been a guest at Kinveil for the last ten days, must be anxious to go home and see Harriet’s new baby. Shona hadn’t been very enthusiastic, and Luke could understand it. By all the laws of probability, the child was bound to resemble either Edward or Harriet or – gruesome thought – both of them. On the other hand, Luke had been finding Shona’s adolescent passion for Vilia more than a little trying.

Seeing Shona at Glenbraddan had reawakened a dull ache in Vilia’s heart, and it was this, she later thought, that had drawn the child to her, for Shona, though pretty and sweet, and shy, received scant kindness from her mother and governess, and was treated with no more than careless tolerance by Edward and Georgiana. Only Grace paid any attention to her, ruling her with all the tyranny of good intentions. But, somehow, Shona had sensed that Vilia was not indifferent, and Vilia, fighting her own private battle against the past and aware that the child was its innocent victim, had been touched by her timid advances and could not help but be kind.

Luke couldn’t understand why Vilia was so patient and gentle with her. He had found it impossible to prise the child from her goddess’s side. With admirable promptitude, therefore, he had volunteered to drive Shona back to Glenbraddan that very day, adding in an undertone to his mother, ‘I believe she might consent to go more readily if Vilia were to accompany us.’ It would be a squeeze in the curricle, but he didn’t care.

Lucy, who enjoyed children only in limited doses, had exclaimed, ‘How clever of you! I will suggest it at once!’

But they were very nearly back at Kinveil again, without Shona, and it was beginning to appear as if Luke’s resourcefulness had been wasted after all. The calm, sunny morning had proved to be deceptive, and the wind was working up to gale force once more, thrashing the trees that had somehow retained a foothold in the inhospitable soil, and filling the narrow passes between the mountains with a roar that assaulted the ear as unremittingly as a torrent in spate. It was scarcely the weather for romance, but Luke was desperate by now. Even so, he had almost given up when, on his right, he saw a smooth patch of turf scooped out of the mountain just at a point where the road curved round preparatory to plunging straight back into the teeth of the wind. It looked as if it might be sheltered, and it was now or never. Sharply, he reined in his horses and drew the curricle on to the grass.

Vilia looked at him in surprise, her colour whipped high and curling tendrils of silver-blonde hair escaping from the scarf rakishly tied over the tam o’ shanter that had moved Lucy to shocked protest. ‘But only
peasants
wear such things!’ She looked as if she were enjoying herself, and was for once less than perfectly groomed.

Luke wound the reins round his right forearm and turned to her, saying in mock sorrowing tones, ‘A week at Glenbraddan and almost two weeks at Kinveil, and we haven’t had the opportunity for a private talk in all that time. Tell me, my dear. How are you? What’s been happening since we last met?’

Her smile was quizzical, and a little measuring. He wondered whether he had overdone it with that slightly superior ‘my dear’. And then he was diverted for a moment, because the horses were restive. When he had calmed them, he turned back to her. Even in shelter, the wind was still loud enough to drown the intimate tones he should have used, echoing from the rocks in a way that made him think of distant thunder. But he was keyed up and wouldn’t be diverted now. Possessing himself of her hands, he held them hard, and in a voice robbed of careful nuance, said in a rush, ‘Vilia! I love you! I’ve loved you so long. You
can’t
be indifferent to me!’

He couldn’t quite read her expression. She stared at him for a moment, and then, her eyes wide and dark in the shadows thrown by the mountains and the scudding clouds, swallowed and said something he didn’t hear.

‘What?’ It came out as a muted shout, and she swallowed again and shrieked back, ‘I said, “Oh!”’

It was scarcely encouraging, but he went on somehow. ‘I know I must always have seemed very young, very immature to you, but these last months...’ He realized that the wind was whisking his voice away, and went on more loudly, ‘...have taught me a great deal. I thought they might have cured me of you, but they haven’t. I love you –
I
love you
–
far more than I ever thought possible.’

She was gazing at him, almost as if stunned, her eyes open on his and the delicate brows a little raised, and suddenly he was overcome by a wave of desire, the pent-up dreams of six long years. Madness to wait for an answer, he thought, when words could never express what he felt for her. Casting a swift glance up and down the empty road, he pulled her roughly into his arms and sealed her lips with his. For a delirious moment he felt the soft mouth yield under his, but then, even as joy flooded into his heart, she gave an inarticulate sound and began to push him away. All his senses rebelled. He wouldn’t, couldn’t accept a rebuff – not now – and with a smothered groan he exerted his strength to draw her back to him.

But just as his lips were about to descend on hers again, he realized that her face was alive with amusement and that she was trying, unavailingly, to tell him something.

Uncertainly, he raised his head. And this time she was able to wail, loudly enough for him to distinguish. ‘Luke! You niddicock! Stop!’ And then, ‘Can’t you
hear
?
’

Suddenly, he did hear, and released her with such unflattering alacrity that she fell back against the side of the curricle, gasping with helpless laughter.

The distant thunder, now, wasn’t distant at all, but just round the shoulder of the mountain and approaching fast.
‘Christ!’
Luke exploded, and with a surge of fury struck the heel of his palm against his forehead. ‘The Skye cattle market!’

Then his horses began to plunge, claiming all his attention as there swept into sight, travelling at breakneck speed, the vanguard of what sounded like an enormous herd of cattle, flanked right and left by a dozen sheepdogs, their stomachs low to the ground and tongues lolling out of their mouths. They were far too intent on keeping the wild-eyed shorthorns in line to spare any attention for the curricle as they raced past, but Luke was just getting his horses under something approximating to control when a skinny, badly dressed little man with a hooked nose and ferret eyes came into view, riding a wiry pony and flicking his whip over the heads of the beasts nearest to him to keep them to the road. Seeing Luke, he dragged the pony round on to the grass and reined it in so sharply that it bucked and reared, and started Luke’s horses plunging all over again.

‘Damn you, Jamie Lowson!’ Luke yelled in response to the little man’s grin. ‘How the hell did you get your animals away from the market so soon? I thought it only started yesterday!’

Jamie was beaming at Vilia, who, clinging to the side of the swaying vehicle, wore an expression that was perfectly seraphic. ‘Aye, weel!’ he bellowed in a voice of astonishing power. ‘Ah thought Ah’d pay a shulling or two above the odds this time, to save higgling, and since Ah knew jist whit Ah was wanting – only stots, and nae coos – Ah went roon’ yon market like a flea in a lodging-hoose. If I can get the beasts frae here tae the Fa’kirk Tryst aheed of a’ the ithers, Ah can sell high enough to cover the extra Ah paid for them, and mair besides.’

Luke nodded at the steers thundering past, and shouted, ‘If you keep them going at this rate, you’ll be at Falkirk before any of the other drovers has even left Skye!’

‘Canny dae that!’ Jamie said regretfully. ‘It’s jist a wee trick o’ the trade. You keep them going like the hammers to begin wi’, tae lick them intae trail shape, but then you huv tae slow doon. There’d be nae flesh left on them itherwise.’

Vilia, with more foresight than her harassed swain, shrieked, ‘How many have you bought this year, Jamie?’ and when he replied, ‘A thoosand heid o’ cattle, and there’s five thoosand sheep as weel,’ dissolved into an uncontrollable fit of giggling.

Jamie, eyeing her percipiently, turned to an appalled Luke and yelled, ‘Ye’ll no get home till the morn’s morn if ye dinny spring your horses the meenit this lot’s past. The sheep’re behind, but they’re no sae easy tae drive, so you’ll maybe make Kinveil before they get there!’

‘Thank
you!’
Luke exclaimed bitterly. ‘I didn’t know you two knew each other.’

‘Och, aye. Mistress Vilia was jist a wee bit lassie when Ah startit working fur the big drovers...’