A Small Death in the Great Glen (20 page)

“Journey to the West” was to be the next chapter heading. This is it, Joanne kept telling herself, a last chance. This time we have to
talk.
Then again—the thought would sting her like a paper cut—how many times have I said
that.

Sitting beside Bill, in the noisy, shaky, damp, smelling-of-fresh-wood-and-old-socks van, not much passed between them as they drove out of town in the dark. Not that they had spoken much all week. A driving rain accompanied them along the shores of the smelled but unseen firth. Their spirits matched the gloom. Dawn broke very gradually through dank cloud. On the higher passes
between glens the water vapor was so dense it was as though they were driving into perpetual dawn like an airplane flying into perpetual sunset.

The van reached the top of the pass, and Bill stopped in a passing place before the drop into the faultline that led to the west coast. A biblical shaft of sun shone down on a distant shepherd, his dogs working a flock of blackface sheep, bringing them to lower pastures.

They had left behind the sepulchral cloud and the unease that hovered over them like a golden eagle sizing up a newborn. The paper was finished and would be, by now, scattered throughout the Highlands and Islands, the girls were with their grandparents, and she was going on a holiday—three whole days. Joanne was determined. This was what they needed, this time she would make it work. And her mood lifted with the elusive sun and the sense of the distant Isles. She started the song. Bill joined in. They used to sing together a lot, in the days of the war. Everyone did. But the habit had died out. Joanne still whistled, but less and less.

Following the railway track, the van rattled along with the singing, westward to the sea. Giant boulders and scree scarred the hillsides. The distant navy-blue peaks, jagged as in a child's drawing, were outlined against a sky-blue sky. Clouds scudded, their shadows racing each other, making the fern carpet flicker from dirty rust to brassy gold.

The road up to the pass could be seen in the distance, sharp zigzags cut into an almost vertical hill. Passing places, marked by
signs that would show in deep snow, protruded out over sheer drops with no soft landings in the rocks and heather below. Joanne was uncertain that the van could make it. It did, in first gear and at a walking pace.

At the top, the Bealach na Ba leveled for a mile or two before a slightly less steep descent. A small slate-dark tarn seemingly with no edge hovered at the brink of the drop to their right, a perfectly formed mirror for the clouds to admire themselves. The sea that took up two-thirds of the moving picture dazzled bright one moment, dark silver the next, and the islands big and small, some only oversized boulders, disappeared to then magically pop up in a seemingly different spot. Joanne felt that she would not have blinked if a sea dragon had landed across the bay.

Below, a sheltering of buildings and small clachans followed the curve of the shore. With a shop, an inn, a post office, a school, a harbor and twenty or so houses, the habitable land was a narrow strip squeezed between mountain and sea. Whitewashed but-and-bens, some still with thatched roofs, punctuated the slopes. A patchwork of tiny fields hemmed in by stone walls alternated with strip fields following the lines of the land. Breughel painting the countryside of the Middle Ages would have recognized the scene. But this is the land of the clans, of the Clearances, the land of the ever-diminishing Gaeltacht. And God.

Bill had nursed the van up the pass with one eye on the temperature gauge. It was on the red. He decided to rest before the downhill stretch.

“Five minutes before I can fill her up again.”

“Right you are.”

They waited to the gurgle and hissing and burping and sighing of the radiator and the smell of rusty water. A dark hairpiece of heavy cloud descended abruptly, and the light vanished; out here, weather changed by the half hour, seasons by the hour.

The sound of running water got to Joanne. Tammy and scarf pulled tight, she stepped out into the mist, scouting around for bushes. There were none, only occasional tussocks of thin grasses and bog cotton and lichen-covered rock. A few steps and the van vanished. She crouched down. A cough from a spectral blackface sheep startled her, then the sun broke through a hole in the cloud. Caught squatting in the spotlight, half a dozen curious sheep for an audience, she saw the edge a few yards off, falling away to the shore hundreds of feet below. She burst out laughing.

“Mind how you go,” Bill called out. “It drops away over there.”

“Thanks. I've just worked that out for myself.”

By the time the radiator was cool enough to refill they were chilled and damp, and Bill was impatient to get down the mountain. He had had enough of scenery. Joanne took a last look over to Skye, the cloud already a story tucked away for later. Or to share with Chiara.

“When we reach the village, leave me at the inn and I'll explore. We'll have tea when you get back.”

“Aye, it's getting on and I'm to meet this man about the houses,” Bill replied.

They freewheeled down the last of the hill, a bump, the engine caught and they motored into the village.

She stretched and shook the cramps of the journey from her bones before going inside the hotel. A bar ran through to a small parlor where a brass ship's bell hung above a handwritten notice,
Ring for attention.
She did.

“I'll be right with you,” a voice called out, and almost immediately Mhairi was there. Both women started, then stared. What startled Joanne into recognition of a girl she had barely met was her bright rosy red apple cheeks. Joanne collected words and clichés and was always pleased to come across an exact
illustration, to be mentally matched to her list of favorites. What Mhairi felt when confronted with the guest was panic.

“Don't I know you?” asked Joanne.

“I don't think so.” The girl went bright pink. She was a hopeless liar.

“I phoned about a room for tonight. Mr. and Mrs. Ross.”

“Aye, I'll show you up.”

Mhairi seized the bag and hurried up the narrow steep staircase, Joanne following.

“This is the room.” A pretty bedroom, the dormer window looking directly onto the harbor. “I'll light the fire.”

“Thanks,” said Joanne. “This is lovely. What's your name?”

“Mhairi.”

“Mhairi, now I remember. I'm Joanne Ross—you worked for my sister Elizabeth Macdonald and Reverend Duncan Macdonald.”

Mhairi turned from pink to red.

“Och, I'm sorry. Me and my big mouth. Not another word. Promise.”

The relieved look on Mhairi's face said it all.

“Will you be wanting supper?”

“That would be lovely.”

Joanne changed her shoes for wellies and set off in what was left of the afternoon light to explore the harbor and village.

Mhairi MacKinnon worked away in the kitchen, the door to the bar left open in the unlikely event of guests arriving. With black pudding-basin haircut, white white skin and blue blue eyes, she could have been a Celtic beauty if only she had an awareness of herself.

The owners of the inn were from Easter Ross but now lived over the mountain. The steep miles across the pass made this place another country. Mrs. Watt, her employer, knew most of
Mhairi's story but was only too glad to have someone reliable, willing to work with the “demon drink,” as the minister never failed to call it in his three-hour Sunday sermons. The water-into-wine parable had been passed over by the congregation of the Free Church of Scotland, or Wee Frees as they were commonly known.

A lass already lost was how Mhairi saw herself, so one more sin, the serving of alcohol, wouldn't matter. But the shock of meeting Joanne Ross, the shock of meeting someone from the town where her tragedy had played out, the very thought of someone who knew the truth of her secret and that very someone lodging at the inn, was worrying.

Not that most in the parish didn't know; it was more a matter of acquiescence to an age-old convention: Children born out of wedlock were given away, sometimes to the tinkers. Failing that, especially if the lass in question was young, the child was passed off as a sibling. Everyone knew, everyone accepted the lie; it was just the way it was done. To most, Mhairi's family had done the decent thing. To others it was a disgrace and the whole family was made to feel the shame.

Tales of girls told never to darken the door again, cast out into the proverbial storm, were many and ancient. Songs of betrayed lassies, kidnapped babies, babies being stolen by the faeries or lifted up by golden eagles, all those tunes, words, poems, were part of Scottish folklore. Mhairi was just another story, and a not uncommon one at that.

Bill shifted uncomfortably in the driver's seat, engine running, heater blasting hot to the body, freezing to the feet, waiting for the foreman to turn up. He stared at the unfinished buildings, his forced optimism seeping away. His picture of himself was that of a survivor, and by sheer belief he had often been able to turn
disasters around. This time, he thought, we're cutting it very close. The contract, with a clause that he had skipped over, so desperate to sign, stipulated the end of December for completion of the job. Still possible, but where were the men that he needed in order to finish the job?

Unexplained delays, materials not delivered, delivered but to the wrong port, bad weather, bad luck, a badgering bank manager; all this had plagued the project from the start. Then workers left; lack of lodgings, frozen out by the locals, the weather, the isolation and the west-coast Sabbath, so they said. “Acts of God,” the previous site foreman had said. Bill recalled the man as a strict Sabbatharian, dour but honest.

“The site is jinxed,” another had complained to Bill as he collected his cards.

The almost completed, desperately needed council houses, sitting forlornly waiting to be fitted out, were to have been Bill's financial salvation. He was now certain sabotage was the root of his trouble.