A Dark and Distant Shore (73 page)

It was a calm, beautiful day, and Loch an Vele was alive with boats, small and large, some of them sparkling with brass and fresh paintwork, others still slippery with fish scales, but all of them bravely flying flags and bunting. There was scarcely a Highland landowner who hadn’t turned up with his family and retainers, and guests had come from as far afield as Edinburgh and London. Georgy and Emile had even made the trip from Paris, bringing little Gabrielle and Guy for a first sight of their mother’s native heath. And from all over Kinveil and Glenbraddan the tenants and crofters had come, spruce and clean in their best clothes, travelling in carts or gigs, on foot or on Highland ponies.

After the ceremony in the courtyard of the castle, the invited guests sat down to a magnificent banquet in the Great Hall while the tenants and crofters picnicked on the mainland, and then, at eight, the two parties came together in Kinveil’s big stone barn for the traditional
ceilidh.
It was another Mackinnon now – old Dougal’s son – who strode up and down outside the barn, but the sound of the pipes, handsomely played, was multiplied and mellowed as of old by the echoes, as the sun went down, burnished gold against an aquamarine sky. The water was like softly creased satin.

Neither Gideon nor Theo nor Drew had ever seen their mother look so beautiful except, perhaps, on that long-ago evening of the royal ball in Edinburgh. And perhaps, Drew said, childhood innocence had invested her that evening with a special splendour. They had never seen her dressed up before, and never so happy. Gideon caught Theo’s eye and knew that he, too, was thinking they had never seen her so happy again. But that was not something to remember on this carefree day. Even Elinor, who had achieved a kind of truce with her mother-in-law, had to exclaim over how lovely she looked in the low-necked pelisse robe of palest water-green muslin, with its tiny flower print, and the belt of fresh rosebuds round her waist. There was a nonsensical green ruffled hat on her head, with a single rose under the brim.

Vilia, smiling on her new husband and her family and guests, found her eyes coming to rest most often on the people of Kinveil, all the dear, familiar faces from long ago, many of them old and wrinkled now, and others whom she had known only as children.
Her
people now in reality, as they had always been in her heart. Was she imagining it, or did they all seem especially happy today – because a Cameron had come home again to Kinveil? She caught Sorley’s glance. He was forty now, as lanky and freckled as ever, as unobtrusive, as unswervingly devoted as he had always been. She smiled at him, and he smiled back, the blinding, beautiful smile that was associated in her mind with days when she herself had been happy. As if he smiled
for
her, more than at her.

When there was no light outdoors but the afterglow, she slipped out of the barn and across the causeway to the castle. There, alone on the sea wall, she sipped from the glass she had brought with her, and then took a rosebud from her belt. Slowly, carefully, she poured what remained in the glass in a fine, thin stream into the sea, and then dropped the rosebud after it. A sentimental offering to the memory of Mungo Telfer. And to Kinveil.

She stayed only for a moment, and then turned away back to the
ceilidh.
She didn’t know whether Mungo would have been disappointed in her, or happy for her. She didn’t know, herself, whether she was happy. But at least she was content.

As the fishing smack nosed its way in to the shore, water creaming softly under its bows, Gideon grinned to himself. Ahead lay a wide, magnificent, mile-long stretch of beach, virgin and empty as on the fourth day of Creation – except for one intrusive element.

‘Robinson Crusoe, doing things in style,’ he murmured.

Vilia laughed. ‘You can’t think Magnus would forego his comforts merely because of a family picnic?’

She waved, and the figure on the beach raised a stately hand in response. Gideon was irresistibly reminded of some solitary explorer upholding civilization in the heart of the desert, for Magnus was seated on a large, comfortable chair behind a linen-draped table laid out with crystal and crockery; he had a glass in one hand and some kind of
bonne bouche
in the other, and there was a liveried footman standing at attention behind him. Otherwise, there wasn’t a soul in sight.

‘Not Robinson Crusoe,’ Gideon said with a chuckle. ‘Ozymandias, king of kings. “Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.”’

‘Yes, well,’ his mother replied prosaically. ‘Don’t let Magnus hear you. He may be approaching the colossal, but not even three years of marriage to me have made a wreck of him. Yet.’

Gideon didn’t pursue it. From a distance, when one couldn’t see his unhealthy colour or the pouches under his eyes, the old boy made an impressive figure. The white shirt, black cravat, and nankeen frock coat lent him a faintly rakish air, and the tall, wide-brimmed straw hat revealed a profusion of grizzled curls over his ears while concealing the fact that, on top, his hair had retreated almost to vanishing point. Defiantly, he had also begun cultivating a moustache which sat on his upper lip like an extra pair of eyebrows. Facial hair was coming ‘in’, and Magnus prided himself on keeping abreast of fashion. But he was undoubtedly getting fat.

Responding to the small hand that tugged at his, Gideon looked down into the big blue eyes of Magnus’s four-year-old daughter. She had been clinging to him ever since they left Kinveil, prey to the unreasoning alarm that the unfamiliar always seemed to rouse in her. There, she was like her father –
very
like her father, Vilia said – although what demoralized Juliana were sights and sounds rather than new ideas or unexpected suggestions. Magnus’s automatic rejection of what he wasn’t prepared for was becoming a family joke, but luckily Juliana was easier to deal with. Reassurance, for her, consisted quite simply of a strong male hand to cling to. Gideon smiled at her. The waif-like prettiness and big blue eyes, their colour midway between sapphire and cornflower, were irresistible. She was going to be a real honeypot when she grew up.

She said pleadingly, ‘Are we nearly there, Gideon? Is that papa on the beach?’

‘Yes. Very soon now. Look, he’s saying something to Macdonald.’

They watched the footman turn away towards the rocky outcrop at the northern end of the sands, and Gideon added to his mama, ‘The question is, has he gone to make sure that the wine is decently cooled, or merely to tell the others we’ve arrived?’ It was a baking hot June day, and he knew what his own priorities would have been.

‘Undoubtedly the wine,’ Vilia said. ‘No one could possibly have failed to hear us coming. Even if they have Grace holding forth on the subject of parliamentary reform, they could scarcely remain deaf to the approach of a seaborne monkey-house!’

It wasn’t a bad description. In addition to the crew, the
Maggie May
was carrying six adults – Peter Barber, Theo, Drew, and Sorley McClure, as well as Vilia and Gideon – and six children ranging in age from eight to four. The voyage had been longer than expected since the breeze had suddenly dropped, and the children were on the verge of becoming fractious. Even so, the sail up the coast had been enjoyable, and Gideon was glad he hadn’t accepted Magnus’s invitation to join the party travelling by road. Magnus was not happy on boats and neither was anyone who was so ill-advised as to sail with him: the thought of Magnus at sea with half a dozen children was very unnerving indeed. Vilia, arranging the expedition, had handled him beautifully, and Elinor and Grace Barber had accompanied him willingly enough, Elinor because her first and only Atlantic crossing had given her a distaste for the sea, and Grace because she considered fishing smacks insanitary. Shona, who would have preferred to be with Drew, had gone with them only for the sake of little Peregrine James, who was too young at the tender age of one to be committed to the mighty deep. The sixth member of the carriage party, Grace’s daughter Petronella, had tagged along – as far as Gideon could discover – only because it seemed to emphasize her ten-year-old superiority over ‘the little ones’. Yes, Gideon thought again, he was glad he hadn’t gone by road. Absently, he wondered if Grace had talked
all
the way.

As the children were being decanted from the rowing boat on to the sand, the girls emerged from the shelter of the rocks; even on such a day as this they had been too concerned with their complexions to yield to the lure of the sun. Elinor was looking exceedingly pretty, her husband thought, in a blue tarlatan gown with flower-sprigged stripes, her mahogany ringlets bunched at the sides under the deep poke of her bonnet. The brim was lined with pale blue, and when she bent to kiss little Lizzie, running across the beach towards her, her skin seemed white as milk. They were much alike in looks and, to some extent, in temperament, for Lizzie, child of northern climes, had acquired some of her mother’s Southern languor. It worried Gideon. Languor had a purpose in hot climates, but on this side of the Atlantic it too easily deteriorated into lethargy. Lizzie was timid, too; her father didn’t know whether it was because Elinor always complained that her head ached when children were exuberant, or because Lizzie was dominated by Cousin Lavinia, six months older, and a bright, lively, forward little madam. Lavinia was more like Drew than Shona, and more like Vilia than either of them, and Lizzie trailed around in her wake like the rowing boat in the wake of the
Maggie May.

The picnic was excellent. Afterwards, replete, Theo, Gideon and Drew lay back on the sand, coats and cravats off, near where Magnus sat somnolent in his chair, half in sun and half in shade. The girls had retreated again to the shelter of the rocks, but Vilia, accustomed to being outdoors, was propped against an outcrop, her eyes closed, her softly tanned face turned towards the warmth, and her uncovered hair bleached every shade from cream through topaz to citrine. She looked marvellously exotic, Gideon thought. The children had been despatched to play among the rock pools in Peter Barber’s charge. There had been a faint echo of dissidence at first, when Lavinia, who didn’t like being ordered about, had objected to Petronella’s telling her to move over so that
everyone
could see the crabs in the pool, but even that had moderated to no more than an occasional sleepy murmur.

Not a cloud marred the sky, and the sea stretched glittering to the far horizon, bounded by a low line of mist that might have been a mirage but was, in fact, the island of Harris, forty miles away. It was the kind of day, Gideon thought, that belonged to childhood – bright, innocent, flawless. Something to treasure secretly in one’s heart as an amulet against all that was petty and hurtful in the everyday world. In the eight years since that unforgettable day in Clarges Street, Gideon had begun to understand a little of what Vilia felt about the Highlands, her need for, her sense of one-ness with, the empty places. There had been times when he too, stranger to tragedy though he was, had been aware of strung nerves crying out for refuge. But he didn’t think he could ever renounce the rough vitality of ordinary life for the kind of peace Kinveil had to offer, the emotional peace that sprang from rejecting all challenge. Not permanently, anyway – even if, on a temporary basis, Kinveil was unbeatable as a place to restore and refresh the spirit. Idly, Gideon wondered how his mother felt about it now, after three years. Before that, she hadn’t spent more than eight consecutive weeks here since she was a child.

A bee droned past, and Gideon opened his eyes, squinting against the brilliance of sun, sea and sand, to follow its progress in search of the tufted heads of sea pinks, rising from their neat green cushions on the rocks. Young Jermyn, further down the beach with Sorley keeping a lazy eye on him, didn’t even raise his head from the sandcastle he was building. Gideon knew that, although he wasn’t yet seven and still wearing a childish smock over his pantaloons, his castle would be neat, intricate, and constructed with an instinctive knowledge of strains and stresses. Was it because Perry Randall’s blood ran in both Drew and Shona that they had produced a son who looked set to become a technical prodigy? It wasn’t a thought he was inclined to pursue on such a day. As he laid his head down again, Gideon heard Peter Barber’s soft voice say to eight-year-old Ian, ‘Tell me, Ian, in Greek if you please, what Hesiod had to say about bee-keeping.’ The boy’s Greek was very good; his father had begun teaching it to him at the age of three. Gideon smiled and drifted off to sleep.

He returned to the present to hear Theo’s voice, sun-filled and drowsy, saying, ‘Gideon should do it, don’t you think?’

Gideon sat up and stretched. ‘I disagree. Gideon should not do it. Gideon has enough to do already.’ He yawned. ‘Anyway – do what?’

‘Take over the Telfer chronicle, dear boy. After all, we Lauristons are now part of the family, so it would be legitimate. And who better qualified than you to bring literary distinction to it? Shona herself says that, in twelve years, she hasn’t recorded very much, and is perfectly ready to admit that her style lacks that certain something. One
would
like the Telfers to have a chronicler worthy of them.’

Magnus grunted. ‘That’s true. I can’t think Shona’s done more than write down a lot of women’s gossip.’

Gideon stared at his brother. Show Theo a hornets’ nest and he could always be relied on to stir it up, wearing an air of the most perfect innocence the while. Gideon had taken some care to avoid finding out whether Theo still patronized brothels like Mrs Berkley’s, but it was clear he hadn’t lost his taste for excitement.

Drew looked as if he were about to have an apoplexy, and Gideon intervened hastily. ‘Nonsense, Theo. I’m sure Shona is making an admirable job of it.’

But Drew wasn’t to be diverted. ‘By God, but you’ve a sly tongue, haven’t you, Theo!’ he exclaimed, his handsome face scarlet. ‘What has literary style to do with it? Shona’s spent a lot of time on the chronicle all these years. She’s forever writing letters, and filing them, and making notes and God knows what else. She’s worked
damned
hard at it and been
damned
conscientious – and look what she gets in the way of thanks!’ He glared at Magnus.