A Dark and Distant Shore (49 page)

Vilia interrupted. ‘Don’t you dare say how long ago, Jamie Lowson, you old blether!’

‘Ah wusny going to,’ he replied, injured. ‘All Ah was going to say was, before Ah went intae business for myself.’ He grinned. ‘Aye, weel, Ah’d better be getting on. Johnnie Soutar and Wee Hamish are back there a bit, near the tail o’ the herd. Ah’d advise you tae huv thae horses rarin’ to go the meenit they’ve passed.’

With a valedictory grin and a salute with his whip he was gone, but it was well over twenty minutes before the tail of the herd rounded the bend, to the accompaniment of a great many Glasgow oaths from black-avised Johnnie Soutar and the grubby, ginger-haired urchin known as Wee Hamish, who looked as if he were having the time of his life. His face split into a wide, gap-toothed grin when he saw Luke, but he just had time to yelp, ‘The sheep’s three mile back, if yoose want tae beat them hame!’ before he disappeared into the cloud of dust that, despite the recent rains, the herd had succeeded in kicking up.

When she was able to make herself heard again, Vilia said happily, ‘Whit a stoor!’ and Luke cast her a glance with more exasperation than amusement in it. ‘One would think,’ he said, ‘that you had been associating with the lower classes. Anyway, stoor or no stoor, we’d better move. For God’s sake, wrap your scarf round your mouth so that you don’t inhale too much of it.’ He slapped the reins on his horses’ rumps, clicked his tongue imperatively, and said, ‘Let’s go! And devil take the hindmost!’

As declarations of love went, it hadn’t been the most successful of all time, and what worried Luke was that, afterwards, Vilia seemed to be avoiding his eyes, although he couldn’t tell whether it was deliberate or not. And then, next morning, his mother, with a pleased murmur of ‘Alone at last!’ – which provoked Vilia into a gurgle of laughter – swept her off to the drawing-room to catch up with half a dozen years’ gossip, recommending her son to go and join his father and Henry Phillpotts, who were engaged on trying to settle Henry’s future. Gloomily, Luke did as he was told. There didn’t seem to be much alternative.

At twenty-four, Luke couldn’t, even by the most optimistic stretch of the imagination – and Henry’s imagination was nothing if not optimistic – be said to need a tutor any longer, but the openings for a forty-year-old eccentric were limited, even though Rome had given Henry a distaste for cassocks and he now dressed rather more conventionally. If one regarded claret broadcloth and purple velvet as conventional. Luke was very tired of Henry.

His father said, ‘Well! Haven’t you any suggestions?’

Henry’s only real talent, as far as Luke had ever been able to discover, was that he had an unusual affinity with birds and animals, but he couldn’t very well suggest that Henry apply for a position at His Majesty’s little menagerie at Windsor. ‘Something literary,’ he replied hurriedly. ‘His spelling’s quite good, and you know how fond he is of books, and how many he’s read. Down in the village, they call him the Mobile Library.’

For an unguarded moment, Henry allowed a look of pleased surprise to cross his face. Then he remembered that he had no opinion of the Kinveil yokels and, clearing his throat, said with a frown, ‘A librarian, do you think? But there are very few gentlemen who employ private librarians these days.’

Luke had more important things to think about than wading through Debrett’s
Peerage
in search of potential employers, which he could see would be the next stage. He had a thought. Gazing solemnly at his father, he said, ‘You know, I believe Henry could be of the greatest assistance in relieving you of some of the burdens of the estate. All those papers you have to deal with, I mean. All that wearisome correspondence and administration!’

With malicious enjoyment, he saw that his father was swallowing it, hook, line and sinker, though if he spent more than an hour a day on administration, Luke would have been surprised.

Magnus nodded his head, much struck, while Henry bent an intent regard on his erstwhile pupil.

‘You mean...?’ Magnus said.

‘I mean that you’d find a secretary uncommonly useful, wouldn’t you?’

Henry had not, clearly, been thinking of anything quite so lowly, but Magnus said thoughtfully, ‘I’ve often considered... Indeed, I suppose I owe it to my position.’

Luke wondered whether his mother and Vilia had finished yet. ‘And if you wished,’ he said, with a minatory glance at Henry, ‘I’m sure Henry would also be happy to relieve you of reading the Bible to the tenants on Sundays.
Wouldn’t you, Henry
?
’
The minister of the united parishes of Kinveil and Glenbraddan had so much territory to cover that he preached at the various kirks in rotation. As a result, Magnus had to rise from his bed early on three Sundays out of four to fulfil his lairdly duties. Fond though he was of the sound of his own voice, he considered it a heavy imposition, especially since the service also included a number of lugubrious psalms and at least two interminable prayers, delivered extempore and in Gaelic by certain of the more devout members of the congregation. It made Sunday a very trying day for everyone.

Henry said, ‘Well...’

‘He could even preach a sermon,’ Magnus said thoughtfully. ‘And one or two rather short prayers, perhaps. That would certainly speed things up.’

Henry said, ‘But...’

Luke silenced him with a glare. The conflict between Henry’s High Church beliefs and the dour Presbyterianism of the glens was something that could be resolved later. Perhaps.

‘No,’ Magnus said. But Luke and Henry both knew that Magnus would come round, in a day or two, to thinking it had all been his own idea, and then it would be settled without further need for discussion.

‘And I assume you’d like it to be settled?’ Luke inquired acidly of his mentor, when that gentleman showed a continuing tendency to grumble. ‘Acting as secretary to my father is the nearest thing to a sinecure you’re ever likely to be offered!’

And Henry, while resenting most of the implications of this forthright remark, found himself compelled to agree.

Two minutes later, Luke strolled into his mother’s drawing-room. The weather had cleared, and already on his lips was the casual suggestion that Vilia might care to join him in a walk on the hill. But his mother was alone with her embroidery, and Vilia had already gone.

All Vilia had wanted to do for more than three long weeks had been to escape to the hill and savour the knowledge of being back at Kinveil, where she belonged. Mungo would have understood, and would have shown he understood by making himself invisible, so that there was no need for excuses or explanations, or anything at all but to go in perfect freedom when she wanted to. But now she was only a guest, and had been forced to smile and chat and look regretfully out at the rain, as a civilized person was expected to do, and ask Magnus – in a helpless and feminine way – one or other of the questions about Catholic emancipation that ignorant ladies were asking well-informed gentlemen this year.

Then today, at last, opportunity had offered and she had fled, straight for the little hollow that had been her private eyrie in those long-ago days when the boundaries of the estate had been the boundaries of her world, the place where on warm August days she had lain half asleep in the heather, tattooed like an American Indian with bilberry juice, hummed around by insects as somnolent as herself, and relying on her own stillness and the sprig of elder tucked in her collar to ward off the midges that were the bane of the Highland summer. She remembered watching the buzzards planing and mewing over the hills, teaching their young where the best hunting grounds were. She saw again the people from the clachan working on their stacks, black or gold, depending on whether they were storing peats for the fire, or fodder for the beasts. Was reminded of the slow transition from day to dusk, with the landscape melting gently from green to smoky black, until the mountains turned to shavings of ebony, rimmed with peach against a sage-leaf sky. And then the moon would appear, a thread of worn silver, waking her to the realization that she was hungry and should have been home long since. And she would scamper down over the hummocks, and skip across the burns, and run laughing into the kitchen to be hugged and scolded and have a toasted bannock and a glass of goat’s milk thrust into her eager hands.

It was strange how dancing with Sorley at the Glenbraddan wedding had brought those childhood days back so sharply. She had gone barefoot in homespun, then, but there were sandals on her feet now, and the simplicity of her gown had nothing to do with poverty. She was thirty-four years old; had been married, and widowed, and borne three sons; had proved herself, as few women had done, in a man’s world. Had wept, and wanted to die. Yet nothing had changed at all. The boundaries of Kinveil were still the boundaries of her heart’s world.

For more years now than she could remember, when she had dreamed of Kinveil she had dreamed of it with Mungo there. She had been happy to share it with him, for he had the same deep, uncritical, committed love for it as she, and belonged to it as she did. More, in a way, because she had been born to it, whereas he – rich enough, after a full and successful life, to have bought something much grander – had
chosen
it. She wondered whether Mungo’s continuing presence in the dreams stemmed from the fact that she hadn’t been back at Kinveil since he died, although she had been near to inviting herself a dozen – a hundred – times. Perhaps this visit would break the pattern. Perhaps now, her dreams would come to recognize, as her conscious mind had done long since, that the time of sharing had gone and the love was all her own again.

She sat in her eyrie on a patch of thick, mossy turf and gazed out, dreaming, over the water. The gales had really died now, and two weeks’ rain had already drained away into ground parched by the six preceding weeks of drought. The mountains were capped with snow, but there was no breeze to carry the chill of it to where Vilia sat in the early October sun. Tonight, she thought, there was going to be a magnificent sunset, one of the golden ones that poured its antique riches over the polished sea and turned the slender halo of cloud above the islands into a burnished crown. Later in the month, the sun was more likely to go down in purple and flame, and in November the sky would be so overcast that it wouldn’t go down at all. But after that, if the snows came early, there would be a few majestic moments of turquoise and apricot and slate before the darkening. And in January...

She stopped herself. Those were sunsets she wouldn’t see, just as she wouldn’t see the wheatears return in spring, or hear the wild geese pass overhead, calling, or the whooper swans with their eerie bugle note. She wouldn’t be here – unless she were invited – when the irises and orchids and gentians, smaller than dewdrops, opened on the hills, or when the infant birds flew the nest and thrush-babies lurked squeaking in the undergrowth, their beaks opening and closing like excitable buttercups. She wouldn’t lie, without moving, in the shelter of a rock and watch roe deer fawns playing, the loveliest things in Nature, slim, dappled and graceful. Or, when the harsh weather came again, see a sparrow-hawk doubling through the bare branches to trap a pretty, silly dunnock, too innocent to dive for cover. So many things she wouldn’t see, except in the eye of mind and memory.

Her vision was suddenly blurred, and she shook her head a little. Madness, all madness, her mind told her. If love were currency, Kinveil should be hers, but she had no right to it in any other terms, and never could have.

Unless.

There was one way she knew of.

She lay back on the soft carpet of turf and then, after a moment, turned over and rested her forehead on her hands, eyelids fluttering over unseeing eyes. Long ago, during the weeks after her father had sold Kinveil, she had cast around despairingly in her seven-year-old mind for some way of winning it back, not for her father but for herself. Childishly arrogant, she had made up her mind that, one day when she was old enough, she would marry Magnus Telfer. It had seemed the easiest, and the only, way of doing it. Then Magnus had married Lucy, and Vilia, brought face to face with reality, had abandoned a plan that had been doomed since its inception, remembering it only once, when Lucy had slipped on the stairs and might have been killed.

She had never thought of Luke as a substitute for his father. But he was the heir, now.

Raising her head a little, she propped her chin on crossed wrists. The germ of the idea had been planted in her mind when she saw what Luke’s travels had made of him; when she saw, too, that this new, adult Luke was very much aware of her. She had been in the mood for noticing. Effervescent with the delight of coming home after so long, she had felt ten years younger – and probably looked it, too. There had been a bubble of irrepressible happiness trapped inside her like a bead of rosewater in the scented oil she used on her skin. She smiled wryly at the comparison. Nowadays, she had begun to pamper her complexion, although her mirror told her she had lost none of her looks. She wasn’t vain of them, but neither was she foolish enough to despise them. They gave her an almost impersonal pleasure, and she would be sad when time began to flaw them, just as she was sad when a flower began to fade.

Quick to sense Luke’s appreciation, she had been ready enough to find release for her high spirits in being feminine and frivolous and a little flirtatious with him in these last weeks. He had, after all, turned into an unusually attractive young man. She hadn’t troubled to think beyond that. And then, yesterday, he had told her that he loved her, and seemed to mean it. Had talked of loving her ‘for so long’.

How long? He hadn’t loved her when he was a child, certainly. She could never forget how he had competed with her for emotional possession of Kinveil, although she had always thought that for him it hadn’t been Kinveil, but possession, that had been the key to the equation. Later, when he was adolescent, they had scarcely met. And that left the Oxford years, those years when he had turned up so regularly, and sometimes so inconveniently, at Marchfield House, nervous as the overgrown schoolboy he was but trying very hard to appear adult. He had been more than a little tiresome, and it had been difficult not to be impatient with him when the foundry was absorbing all her energies. It had sometimes been too much for her to come home drained after a day poring over the accounts with Wally Richards, or puzzling over some illiterate drawings in the moulding shed, to find Luke waiting for her, at once jaunty and diffident. If she hadn’t had an obsession about manners and hospitality, she would have been hard put to it to welcome him with even the appearance of complaisance. But only once, as far as she could remember, had she weakened to the point of snapping at him, and that had been when he had told her – as he so frequently did – something about the glens that he must have known was bound to upset her. Every time he had come to see her, he had harped on the changes in the glens, as if to emphasize that there was nothing she could do about them, because Kinveil was his father’s now, and would some day be his.