Bad Heir Day (24 page)

Anna stared at him for a few seconds. “None, I suppose,” she said, slowly. “Except for the fact I was the only person—on this entire island, by the sound of it—who didn’t realise it
was
an arrangement.”

Jamie cleared his throat. He sounded almost bored now, so distant had his tone become. “Well, that didn’t seem necessary,” he drawled, “because you seemed to find me rather, um, attractive when we met.”

Anna blushed furiously. “But I
still
don’t understand why you picked me,” she hit back. “Surely half the smartest girls in Scotland would have been
desperate
to marry you.”

Jamie took a deep breath and closed his eyes
—
a brief but eloquent gesture implying that this was an extremely unpleasant business he heartily wished was over. “It’s true that in the past there
have
been some women—some rich, some beautiful, some even both—who thought they wanted to marry me,” he muttered. “But they all changed their minds.”

How
rich?
How
beautiful? More to the point,
how dare he
?
Anna gazed at him indignantly. “Why?”

“I’m not sure,” Jamie said, not entirely convincingly. “I think when they came here they realised that perhaps living in an isolated castle in the middle of nowhere wasn’t their idea of heaven.”

You mean they didn’t realise they would have to play second fiddle to a pile of old stones,
Anna thought. She glanced at the engagement ring. Belonged to his mother, indeed. His mother and God knew how many other women since. Like an upmarket Pass the Parcel.

“I see what you’re getting at,” she said with just a trace of sarcasm. “It’s not so much a matter of not being able to get the staff these days as not being able to get the ladies of the manor.” So this is what he had meant in the tandoori about not having the right personnel in place.

Jamie wrinkled his brow slightly. “Something like that,” he confirmed. “But another advantage you had was that you had at least been up here and knew what it was like.”

What I
thought
it was like, thought Anna. Dampie dressed up with flowers and laughter for a wedding and Dampie in its everyday habit had turned out to be very different places. God, she’d been a fool.

“So to a certain extent, you knew what you were taking on,” Jamie continued.

“So it’s all my fault, is it?” Anna felt the anger rise again.

“To a certain extent, well, um, yes.”

Anna stared at him hard. There was something, she felt, that Jamie wasn’t telling her. Something wasn’t quite adding up. Plenty of women, after all, willingly married into remote estates. There must be some other reason why only someone poor and desperate would want to marry him.

“This is just a thought,” she said slowly, as it suddenly struck her. “Just an idea. But did they, did
any
of these beautiful, rich women happen to meet Nanny?”

Jamie looked away quickly.

“
Thought
as much,” said Anna, as triumphantly as she could, given the circumstances.

Officially, it was morning, yet as the light stayed that way all day, it could be any time at all. Jamie once had tried to persuade her that the failing light was a consequence of their position in the far north, a sort of Grey Days of Skul answer to the White Nights of Scandinavia. Anna’s private theory, however, was that there was only so much light to go around and what there was simply didn’t stretch as far as Dampie.

As she walked away from the castle, Anna clenched her fists and stared desperately into the grey half-darkness. Dawn rambles were getting to be a habit with her, as was not sleeping. She had stayed awake almost the entire night after Jamie’s bombshell, first pouring out her battered heart to her diary and then lying sleepless in the darkness. She was alone—Jamie had gone off to a bedroom somewhere else. As soon as ashen-fingered dawn appeared between the crack in her curtains, Anna had got up. A walk might clear her head, as well as give her some idea of what the hell to do next. Jamie had asked her not to make any sudden decisions, but to think about things. He’d refused even to take back the ring which she had yanked painfully from her finger and hurled across the mouldering carpet at him. Eventually, she had been persuaded to pick it up again; this time, however, it was going in her pocket.

But…
think about things
?
What was she to think? She must, of course, leave the castle. But go where? In the not-so-broad light of day, the idea of returning to London struck her as lamer than a sheep with foot rot. She was, Anna dolefully told herself, unemployed, unskilled, impecunious, and effectively homeless. She was back to square one, square minus one now she’d failed at being engaged as well as everything else. As the mist rolled over her like steam from a kettle, gathering her into its ethereal embrace, Anna let out an agonised howl.

It was a howl of hurt, of betrayal. Of fury with herself for having been so easily taken in. Having failed even at
writing
romantic novels, how had she ever thought it possible to
live
them? She felt exploited, more used than an old five-pound note. And lurking darkly behind all the sound and fury of her disappointment was the maddening knowledge that Jamie had had a point. It
had
suited her to agree to marry him at the time. No one had forced her. She had only herself to blame.

Anna stumbled blindly onward, heading she knew not where and caring less. She felt as if the earth had given way beneath her—which, given the muddy ground and the careless way she was negotiating it, was more or less the case. The violent jolts of her ankles as they twisted and slid onward over the uneven humps of marshy grass were intensely painful; throwing back her head, Anna howled again, investing in the sound all the indignation, betrayal, remorse, and shame one might have expected to find given the circumstances. It was a howl that reverberated with perfectly understandable panic and pain. Only one thing about Anna’s howl was a surprise. It was answered.

At first, she thought the sound was an echo bouncing off the rocks and drifting back across the water, except that the water she saw before her, she suddenly realised, was the sea. She must have stumbled for miles and did not now recognise the shore she found herself standing on, heels sinking into an expanse of sand as white as bone. She listened in awe as the full aural expression of her agony was borne thunderously back to her on the waves. It was impressive. Terrifying, even, a wild, abandoned shriek, the cry of a banshee, the scream of a soul in purgatory. As she listened, it came again. Exactly the same but with the crucial difference that this time she had not yelled first. Someone else was howling by the shore.

Anna’s first instinct was to duck out of sight behind one of the rocks and wait for her fellow hollerer to reveal himself. Yet, as the minutes went by and no one appeared, Anna started to wonder whether what she had heard had, in retrospect, been MacLoggie at the pipes again. Failing that, a howling dog.

“And you are?”

Anna’s throat contracted with terror before she could fully release another scream. A strangled yelp emerged, like an indignant puppy. Having focused all her attention on the shore in front of her, she hadn’t heard anyone coming up from behind.

“Come on, you can do better than that,” said the voice. “I heard you. Very impressive. You were doing a much better job than I was.”

Anna felt her back crunch as she whipped round to find herself staring at a tall, broad-shouldered, and very untidy-looking young man. She was suddenly intensely aware of being a woman alone in the last landscape on earth; easy prey for any psychopath who happened to be passing. Perhaps she was jumping to conclusions, but this strange man, given that he was the person she had heard emitting terrifying howls a mere few minutes before, hardly struck her as particularly normal.

“Oh. You heard me then?” Anna spoke steadily and quietly.
Better not do anything to agitate him
.
But it was just her luck. Even on the remotest beach on the remotest island she’d not only ended up engaged to Mr. Wrong but meeting Mr. Possibly Extremely Dangerous into the bargain. Five minutes ago, she had wanted to die but was now acutely conscious that she hadn’t meant it
really
.

“Yes,” he replied. “You see, I’ve been out yowling all morning as well.”

It was fatal, she knew, to make eye contact with lunatics, but there being just the two of them, it was difficult not to. Anna drew a measure of relief from the fact that his pupils seemed warm rather than blazing insanely and that the grin looked more full of friendly enquiry than murderous intent. Yet complete peace of mind was prevented by the fact that, standing like a hedge between herself and reassurance was—a beard.

Anna had read enough of Cassandra’s glossy magazines to know that beards, hitherto firmly beyond the style pale, had recently experienced a renaissance. She was aware that, when cut and shaped, they could even be fashionable. But there was nothing trimmed about this one. It was an out-of-control leylandii; large, abundant, and the sort of thing neighbours complain about. It was firmly of the variety favoured by geography teachers, vicars, and lunatics. Free range, to say the least. And very possibly organic.

“Why
were
you yowling?” she asked him.

The bearded youth smiled again. Looking at his extraordinarily strong-looking white teeth, Anna tried to banish all thoughts about
The Silence of the Lambs
.
She also noticed that, apart from the bad hair day at the end of his chin, he had some distinctly deranged-looking clothes on. Torn and faded jeans that seemed to have been attacked by a wild animal and a cotton jumper that had more holes than a mesh tank peeped from under the wrinkled flaps of an ancient Barbour. “Yowling helps me in my work,” he said. “When I’m really letting it all out, I feel as if I’m communicating with a higher, creative force. With the Great One.”

That rules out the geography teacher then, thought Anna. Which left only vicar or lunatic. Could be either, except that he’d mentioned his
work
.
Vicar then. Must be.

“An unusual approach to work.”

“Not to mine.”

“Really?” Some island parishes, Anna knew, adhered to practices considered extreme and unusual by those of more liberal beliefs and downright bizarre by those of no beliefs whatsoever. But those island priests, the ones who forbade even heating up tins of beans on Sundays on the grounds that it counted as work, hardly struck her as likely to go in for screaming on hillsides. Perhaps, Anna thought, the man before her was some sort of charismatic prophet, marrying people on clifftops and baptising others in the freezing real-ale coloured waves breaking ever closer up the shore behind them.

“But what do your congregation think?”

It was his turn to look wary. “Congregation?”

“Aren’t you the vicar?”

“No, I’m a writer. My name’s Robbie MacAskill. I’m the—”

“
Poet
!”
Anna finished. “Oh, it’s
you
.
I read about you on the noticeboard. You give classes in creative writing. I’m
so sorry
.”

“Well, they’re not
that
bad.”

***

Anna had not expected to return to the castle feeling calmer than when she had left it. It was amazing how a few hours’ talking about writing soothed the nerves. Robbie was impressively passionate about it. The hilariously trite diktats he had invented for his creative writing classes had made her laugh for the first time in weeks.

“You have to take the
fear
out of it,” he explained as they walked slowly back over the dripping heather. “Most people would rather show you their bottoms than their writing.” He turned to smile at her, his large teeth glinting in his beard. “You’re a writer, of course?”

Anna nodded, flushing with both embarrassment and gratification. “In theory. How did you know?” Was it her eyes? Her hands? The creative aura around her?

“Well,
everyone’s
a writer,” came the rather less flattering reply. “I tell everyone at the start of my course that a book is like an arsehole. Everyone’s got one in them. And most of what comes out is, of course, usually shit.”

“
Oh
.” Anna wasn’t sure what she thought of this. Then Cassandra came to mind and she smiled.

“But the point is,” said Robbie, helping her negotiate a shallow stream which would otherwise have flooded all over her shoes, “it’s better out than in. Most people feel a lot better afterwards, anyway. It helps them work out their frustrations. I’m a great believer in the therapeutic value of writing things down. If everyone did it, the world would be a better, calmer, less hysterical place. And if that means there are more bad novels about, so what?”

With surprise, Anna saw that they were already approaching the castle entrance. She stopped and smiled at him. “This is where I live.” This, she decided, was as much as she would tell him.

“I know.” But of course he did, she thought, feeling her former sour mood returning. Everyone on this island knew everything. Except her.

“Come in for a coffee…or a drink?”

“Thanks, but I’d better be getting back. I have a class to prepare. Mrs. McLeod has given me another chapter of her novel and I need to have read it with comments by tomorrow afternoon.”

“Mrs. McLeod? The one who irons with discretion?”

“The very same. And writes the raunchiest stuff I’ve seen this side of a Soho porn parlour. All that steam must go to her head.”

“Not to mention all that underwear.”

They said their goodbyes. “Come to my class,” Robbie told her. “Come tomorrow afternoon, if you feel like it.” He swung on his way back down the drive without looking back. But then, if he had, Anna realised, he would have probably broken his neck in a pothole.

She stepped, heart sinking, into the flagged chill of the hall and wondered what on earth to do with herself. Where exactly did she go from here—in every sense of the word? But as she paused at the foot of the stairs, a strange, faint, and entirely new sound greeted her. A sound she had not heard since coming to Dampie. Someone, somewhere, was laughing.

It seemed to be coming from somewhere upstairs. As Anna mounted the wide treads with their rotting red runner, she wondered who on earth it could be. Kate Tressell? Had one of the girls who had jilted Jamie dropped in for old times’ sake? The laughter rang out again down the second-floor passage. It was coming from the sitting room. Anna rounded the corner to the sitting-room doorway, and gasped as Nanny, looming terrifyingly out of the gloom like the
Hound of the Baskervilles
, rolled on past her down the corridor with the force of a juggernaut and a face like thunder.

Whoever was laughing had made Nanny livid, which must by definition be good news. And, if she was not mistaken, before she had surprised her, Nanny had been bent double in the corridor with her ear shoved against the door. Which, come to think of it, seemed rather a good idea.

“Is that the Angus tartan?” a woman’s voice was asking as Anna put her ear to the keyhole.
Geri
.
It was
Geri’s
voice.
Christ, she’d completely forgotten she was coming
.
Even though there didn’t seem much point in her being here now, Anna suddenly felt overwhelmingly glad she was.

“
Absolutely
.”
Jamie sounded almost incoherent with enthusiasm.

Fools rush in
,
Anna told herself, taking her hand away from the doorknob she had been about to turn.
Not
that
bloody
tartan story again. On the other hand, what a heaven-sent opportunity to let Jamie reveal his true colours to Geri—in every sense of the word.