Prisoner of Love (15 page)

“It’s yon woman!” he gasped when Morag led him into the hall. “Yon nurse. She’s in her bed an’ fair ravin’ mad!”

“What happened to her, Callum?” Laura asked, coming into the hall in the middle of this somewhat garbled statement. “Has she had some sort of accident?”

“Not her!” Callum answered. “She wakened up out of
her sleep like it. The sweat was pouring off her face and she just mumbled when she talked.
Och!
Yon was an awful sight!” he groaned. “An awful sight! She had lost all her teeth. She was like a witch—or a
bochdan
!”

“There are no such things as ghosts!” Morag told him firmly, but kindly. She looked at Laura. “It’s flu, as likely as not,” she decided. “Anyway, I’ll go up and see.”

“I’ll come with you,” Laura offered. “There will be the patients to see to.”

In her heart she knew that she was thinking only about Blair. Julius had left explicit instructions with Nurse Scyler about all his patients, and quite possibly special ones in Blair’s case.

It was pretty much as Morag had foreseen. Nurse Scyler was in the grip of influenza and had been slightly delirious in the small hours of the morning, but Blair had prescribed for her and she was how asleep.

Blair himself looked haggard from want of sleep, but somewhere in the background there was a new assurance about him, and he certainly had taken over quite efficiently when Nurse Scyler had gone down.

Laura did what she could in the sickroom while Morag bustled about in the kitchen preparing a meal, and Blair went out to chop some wood for the fire. Hearing the regular ring of the axe as he worked, Laura felt her heart lift a little. The whole problem of Blair’s health was confusing, but certainly he did seem as if he was improving a little now.

She crossed to the dresser where Nurse Scyler had set out her toilet requisites and began to tidy it. A haphazard collection of personal belongings was mixed up with the instruments of her profession in a most unhygienic way, Laura thought, fishing out a clinical thermometer and a pocketwatch, which had stopped at three o’clock. She found, too, a small hypodermic syringe that had not been properly cleaned after use, and took it to the washbasin on the far side of the room. There, on a sidetable holding a collection of bottles and a towel or two, she came upon another syringe. It was much larger than that normally used for the administering of injections. Five cubic centimeters, she thought. Ten to twelve grains—or more. With certain drugs it would be a killing dose—

She dropped the instrument back into its box, unable to see for a moment. Who had been using the syringe?

Suddenly her hands were trembling, but she told herself that the idea—the suspicion—was fantastic. All sorts of syringes were used for all sorts of purposes.

Nevertheless, she found herself searching for the record of sedatives administered in Blair’s case. She could not find it.

For the next thirty-six hours she gave Blair his injections herself, cutting the quantity down to the bare minimum, and she could not believe that it was only in her own imagination that he seemed brighter and free and far more full of life.

What am I to do, she thought, faced with such a ghastly, half-formed suspicion? I can’t challenge Julius and I can’t question Nurse Scyler. I can’t confide in anybody, least of all Blair!

She found herself walking toward Garvie Lodge. I’ve got to know about this. I’ve got to
know,
she kept repeating.

Zachray was ploughing out the only bit of arable land that Garvie boasted. He grew the household vegetables there and some of the winter feeding for the sheep, working on it in his spare time. Cathie concentrated on the small walled garden immediately surrounding the house, but in spite of the fact that it was a glorious day, she was nowhere to be seen.

“She’s away to Inverness for the day,” Zachray informed her as he stopped the plough and came to shake hands. “It’s the first time she’s been able to go any distance since the snow cut us off.”

There was still quite a lot of snow up here on the moor, lying in the hollows and along the line of the gray stone dykes, and she could see where they had been compelled to dig themselves out during the heavier falls. Zachray had piled it up into a solid wall on either side of the path leading to the door, and it would remain there as a reminder of their winter for many weeks to come.

“I’d like to have seen Cathie,” Laura said, “but it can’t be helped. I would have been up sooner, Zachray, but I’ve had flu, and now Nurse Scyler at the lodge is down with it.”

“And Blair?” he asked sharply.

“
No,” Laura said, “he hasn’t had flu. Mercifully, he has escaped that.”

“Then—there’s something else?” He was searching her eyes with an intensity she had not expected, seeing the reflection of her distress before she could attempt to hide it from him. “He didn’t look particularly good to me last time I saw him.”

“He’s had a relapse,” Laura explained, but could not bring herself to speak of her fear because suddenly, up here on the open moor with the fresh wind blowing against her cheeks and Zachray smiling at her in a sane, normal way, it seemed ridiculous.

“Come in,
”
he invited, “and I’ll make you some tea. I’m sorry about Blair,” he added, “but maybe this fine weather will help.”

He looked across at her, as if waiting for her to confirm his suggestion. After all, she was the nurse.

“I hope so,” she said uncertainly.

She made the tea while he foraged for something to eat.

“Is your husband at Dunraven just now?” he asked as she handed him his cup.

“No, he’s in London. I would have gone with him,” she explained hurriedly, “but for the flu.”

He stirred the sugar in his tea.

“Laura, you know that I was in love with Helene,” he said unexpectedly.

“Yes.”

He looked beyond her into the fire.

“She didn’t know,” he added at last. “But Julius did.”

Laura drew in a quivering breath, waiting for him to go on, because she knew that he had something further to say.

“She died as the result of a chill—lobar pneumonia. The certificate was made out by the local doctor, and I checked on it.”

What did he suspect? Why had Zachray “checked” on the death certificate? Laura felt herself trembling violently, but all he said was: “She died naturally, it would seem, but all the same, I think Julius killed her. There are so many ways—”

“No, Zachray!” She bent toward him, touching his hand. “Don’t go on thinking that. It will only spoil your life.”

He rose to stand beside the window.

“I’ve told you this because I think Julius is mad,” he said. “Insane jealousy is a form of madness, and I think he already suspects you and Blair.”

Laura got to her feet. She could no longer sit still.

“Don’t go on, Zachray,” she said. “I know you’re doing this because you feel that you have to, but—but it could all so easily be a figment of our imagination.”

He turned from the window, but she had already admitted her own doubt by that one word “our.”

“Yes,” he said, “that is so,” and they did not speak of Julius again. Zachray walked with her back to Dunraven, but she could not persuade him to come in.

“I’d like to get that bit of land ploughed out before dark,” he excused himself.

Laura watched him go with a strange, dead feeling in her heart. Zachray MacKellar would never have spoken to her as he had done if he had not considered a warning vitally necessary.

Wild with anxiety for Blair, she paced up and down in the turret room, watching for Morag’s return, seeing the deep gulf that had widened between her and the man she had married in simple faith. She saw, too, her own obsession with greatness, her almost idolatrous worship of Julius’s brilliance and success, and the irony of the love she was at last forced to admit.

For she loved Blair. The knowledge had come to her slowly during this past, desperate hour. She was hopelessly, pointlessly in love with Julius's “failure”!

CHAPTER TWELVE

Nurse Scyler did not rally as well as might have been expected in a woman of her build and undoubted vigor, and she was still dangerously ill when Julius returned to Dunraven.

He had brought Lance with him, and Laura hugged her brother to her and hoped that Lance’s bright approach to life would help her to forget some of the horror of the past few days.

Seeing Julius again, she could not credit him with murder. Suave and distinguished, he looked everything that he had ever seemed to her, yet instinctively she knew that he would not hesitate to sweep any obstacle from his path.

Lance’s first action, as soon as he had eaten, was to rush down to the bay to look at
Northern Bird,
and it was then that Laura told Julius about Nurse Scyler.

Looking faintly perturbed by the news, he rose immediately.

“I’ll walk up there now and see what I can do for her,” he said.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Laura asked.

He looked back at her as if he scarcely understood her request. “Not really, Laura. Have you been going there regularly while I have been away?”

“Someone had to go as soon as we heard
that she was ill.”

“I suppose so,” he agreed, his brows drawn darkly together. “I’m sorry you had to have this extra responsibility thrust on you like this,” he added, “especially as you have been ill yourself. When I come to think of it,” he added, surveying her critically, “you still look rather peaked. Is there anything else the matter?”

“No.
”
She felt the last remnants of color fading out of her cheeks, but she forced herself to meet the casually interested eyes. “There’s nothing, Julius.”

“I wondered," he said, and turned away.

“Julius.”

“Yes, Laura?”

“I’ve been dealing with all the patients, giving them the injections you prescribed before you left, but I haven’t been able to find a record. I’ve written down the dosages I’ve administered on a piece of paper and left it with Blair. You will see that I have reduced the quantity of Sedormid he has been having nightly.”

She waited, shaken and uneasy, for him to speak.

“Perhaps you will tell me,” he asked, “what made you do that?”

“I thought he might be able to sleep quite well without it.” With an effort she had managed to keep her voice normal. “These things can become dangerous if they are taken over too long a period, or if they are given in conjunction with—something else.”

His smile,
w
hen he looked at her, was faintly indulgent.

“Allow me to know what I am doing, Laura,” he said. “Cameron’s case is not quite the straightforward one you seem to imagine it to be. He is still suffering from the effects of a tropical fever, so that I am not, in any way, experimenting with his life.”

She bit her lip.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized, “but I thought it the best thing to do. He has seemed so well these past few days—so different.”

He left her without making any comment about that, and she found a woollen coat and joined Lance down in the bay. He was already covered in paint, but she hadn’t the heart to reprimand him.

“I wonder when we’ll be ready to launch her,” he said, standing back a foot or two to admire his efforts with the brush. “Blair said she could be in the water by the middle of April, and it’s April now. April the first!”

“Patience,” Laura informed him, “is a virtue. One well worth cultivating in fact, my impatient mariner!” She put an arm about him. “Have you been writing regularly to Blair?”

“Every week. He didn’t always answer, but I kept writing, just the same. When he didn’t write, I knew that he’d been ‘under the weather.’ That’s what he used to say. He said his mind took notions to go blank occasionally.”

Laura held her breath. Why had Blair said that? If it were true, surely there must be something seriously wrong?

“He’s had a relapse, but I think he might be all right now,” she said, scraping vigorously at the far side of the deck. “Perhaps when we get
Northern Bird
out it will help.
”

“D’you know,” Lance said, “I think Julius is afraid of
Northern Bird
.”

“What a strange thing to say!”

“No, it isn’t. People can be afraid of a thing because it’s too big for them or too difficult. One of the masters at school said that,” he conceded modestly. “What I mean is that Julius may be afraid of
Northern Bird
because he can’t handle her properly. Not without Blair and Callum being there.”

“He hasn't had the same experience of the sea as Blair has,” Laura pointed out in all fairness to her husband. “He can learn, of course.”

“Some people never learn about boats,” Lance said with decision. “You’ve got to have a feel for them, Blair says. It’s like handling a horse or even a car, though a car’s easy.”

“Just you wait till you attempt to drive one!” Laura laughed. “But I think maybe you’re right about boats. One has the sea to contend with.”

“Was it rough up here after I went back to school?” he asked eagerly. “Blair told me about the snow and the old jetty being washed away. Julius is going to build a new stone one, but he’s not sure if it can be started before I have to go back at the end of these holidays.”

He was so eager to be part of their lives, Laura realized, so keen to share everything and help Blair.

“Will Blair be coming down to work on
Northern Bird
tomorrow?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Laura said. “I—expect so.”

It was all so natural, Lance expecting Blair to come, expecting them to finish the overhaul of the yacht in the shortest possible time so that they could sail out across The Minch and in and out among the Islands. It could all have been wonderful for her, too, but for the dreadful, insinuating doubt in her heart.

When Julius came back from the lodge he did not mention Blair. “Nurse Scyler is a very sick woman,” he said. “I may have to get someone in her place. But the point is that I can’t move her just now.”

“Do you want to bring her here?” Laura asked.

He shook his head.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” he said. “What I was thinking was that, if I have to employ another nurse right away, there’s not going to be an available room for her at the lodge.” His eyes narrowed a fraction as he watched her. “It would mean one of the patients having to come here for a week or two. Cameron, I thought.”

Laura’s hand was halfway to her throat before she checked the nervous little gesture, but she managed to say casually: “If that’s what you want, Julius. He’s been spending quite a lot of time on the yacht, and I suppose he must want to finish her and get her into the water.”

“Yes,” Julius mused, crossing to the window. “I shall need Cameron on
Northern Bird
for a trip or two, at least till I am quite able to handle her myself.”

“Lance is very keen,” Laura heard herself say. “He has just been asking me when you will be ready to take her out.”

“Doctor Cameron is dubious about the weather at present.” There was the faintest trace of scorn in his voice. “He thinks we ought to play safe and conform to the local superstition that the ‘Blue Men’ may still be lying in wait for would-be adventurers on the far side of The Minch at least till the middle of April!”

“All these local legends,” Laura reminded him, “probably stem from cruel experiences in the past.”

“Legend,” he said, “is the belief of ignorance. Take Callum, for instance. He firmly believes in what he calls ‘The Seal Folk,’ a race of people presumably descended from the gray Atlantic Seal!”

“Callum is—different,” Laura said gently, but she was remembering the terrible look on Callum’s face when Julius had brought the slaughtered seal ashore.

“He certai
n
ly is,” he agreed. “Men like Callum are prone to take fanatical likes—and dislikes—to people. Callum has certainly taken a tremendous liking to Doctor Cameron.”

Laura was remembering how Blair had called Callum his “personal Brownie” on that first visit to the lodge, and she smiled, forgetting Julius for a moment.

“I take it, then, that you have no real objection to having Cameron here?" he asked at last.

“No.” Laura turned, and suddenly she wanted to withdraw that swift acceptance of his plan. Why, she wondered, had Julius chosen Blair? “Unless—there’s anyone else you would rather have under your direct supervision?” she tried to say steadily.

Blair was standing close behind her, so close that the slightest movement would have taken her into his arms.

“No one,” he answered. “I am still very interested in Doctor Cameron.”

Laura could find nothing to say to that, and when Blair came to Dunraven the following afternoon she tried to assure herself that it was a perfectly natural arrangement. Blair had been Julius’s patient longer than any of the others and he had made considerably less progress. His case was not straightforward, and Julius might even be baffled by it, seeing it as a challenge to his skill. Under the circumstances, it would be only natural to bring Blair to Dunraven, since someone had to come.

Laura had prepared his room, but she left Morag to show him up to it. “Thank you, Laura,” he said when he came down,
“
for a pleasant view.” He knew, then, that she had chosen the room overlooking the sea, with its wide windows affording him a view across the bay and out toward the North Minch.

“I thought you would like to be high up,” she said, “but if the stairs bother you, Blair, I can quite easily find you another room.”

“At the moment,” he smiled, “the stairs are a detail. I’m at the peak of my graph again—on the upbeat!”

“One day it will stay that way,” she said eagerly. “The fever could very well be wearing itself out, couldn’t it? One day we’ll find that the graph is quite steady, that it doesn’t go down anymore.”

She thought of these terrible plunges down into the depths, shown so plainly in her personal chart, wondering if Blair had accepted them now as inevitable. Although he was still far too thin, the past week had seen a tremendous difference in him. He looked alert and competent again, and he had dealt with Nurse Scyler’s emergency as efficiently as Julius could have done. Yes, the past week had set him on his feet again—the week when Julius had been in London.

She thrust the ugly thought from her, wondering what part Blair would be allowed to take in the life at Dunraven. Julius could not very well exclude him from their friendship, although he was still a patient.

Julius did not want to do that. He even appeared to encourage Blair to consider himself more of a guest than anything else, and certainly Lance was overjoyed at the new arrangement.

“Now we’ll
get Northern Bird
out!” he gloated. “Now everything will go just right!”

“We must not ask too much of Doctor Cameron," Julius warned. “He is still a sick man.”

Lance looked bewildered.

“But he can
do
so much,” he objected. “He’s so strong!”

“Yes, that’s true,” Julius said, and left the argument there.

Lance went to look for Blair and Laura turned to the window.

“Do you want me to help with Blair?” she asked steadily.

“You might be useful, Laura,” he answered unexpectedly. “I have a little theory I would like to try out, as a matter of fact. Something that might bear results. It is not as if you would need to be in a sickroom all day.”

“I’m used to that, and—if it would help Blair—I’d gladly do anything you ask. He can’t be left like this, Julius!” She turned to face him. “There must be something we can do.”

He took a cigarette out of his case and lit it.

“Indeed,” he said, “yes, there must be something we can do.”

Curiously chilled by his noncommittal answer, she left him. What was happening? They seemed to be all struggling in a web, caught up in the invisible mesh of suspicion and counter-suspicion; yet during the next few days Julius seemed to be too busy at the lodge to worry about Blair.

And Blair himself was frankly in his element. Sitting high on
Northern Bird’s
prow, he holystoned the deck, with Lance and Callum in attendance, and sometimes when she heard their discordant singing borne on the wind far across the
machar,
Laura told herself that she must have passed out of a bad dream. Blair seemed to be putting the winter and its recurring relapses behind him and fixing his eyes steadily on the future.

Northern Bird
was ready to be put back into the water by the following weekend, and Julius seemed pleased and grateful to Blair for all the work he had done to make her seaworthy again.

“Are we going to sail her?” Lance asked anxiously as they watched the yacht settling at her moorings in the outer bay. “You said we might be able to take her across to Harris if the weather stayed fine.” Unconsciously he had addressed Blair as the only real authority where
Northern Bird
was concerned, and Laura felt almost nervous as she looked across at Julius. He was smiling, however.

“Why not?” he said before Blair could answer the question. “The Minch looks as smooth as glass.”

“It’s a treacherous sea,” Blair warned, “although it looks fair enough today. We can chance it if you like.”

“We’ve stores and water to put aboard,” Julius said, “but that won’t take so very long.” He turned to Laura. “You’ll come, of course?
”

“Of course!” Already a little thrill of pleasurable anticipation was tingling along her spine. “I’m anxious to see what
Northern Bird
can do.”

“What about the others at the lodge?” Blair asked. “We almost need a third hand.”

“We’ll take Callum,” Julius decided.
“I’
m not really maintaining
Northern Bird
for the benefit of my patients.”

Laura looked swiftly at Blair, but he didn’t seem to mind the snub. Julius’s cynical rejoinder had apparently left him unmoved. But perhaps Julius no longer considered Blair as a patient, she thought with relief.

They set out early the following morning, carried by a gentle northeast wind across a sea that was as blue as turquoise with hardly a ripple on its surface all the way. Laura sat out on deck, hugging her knees and watching for porpoises, but the water seemed curiously devoid of life. Even the seals that Blair said sported by the hundreds around the Shiant Isles and Scalpay were conspicuously absent though it was a day to be lying in the sun.

Even so early in April it could be warm up here in the Islands, warm and healing, with the first promise of summer tiptoeing up from the south. As easily, however, it could change. Winter could come back with a vicious snarl, and that had been Blair's reason for advising caution.

Yet there was no sign of change anywhere on all the broad horizon, no tiny cloud hovering on the skyline warning of a storm. Even Blair seemed to have forgotten everything but the sheer joy of feeling a tiller in his hand again and the pull of wind in a sail.

The Shiants came up and fell away to leeward, ghost islands riding gently on the blue water with a plume of white seabirds on their crest The sound between them and the Lond Island, Laura noticed, was choppy and difficult, and Blair had to give his full attention to the sails. Callum, too, looked uneasy, but it was for another reason.

“This is a bad place,” he said, regarding Laura with large, earnest brown eyes. “The Blue Men of the Minch live here, waiting to trap a boat that has only a sail to help her escape.”

Behind them Julius laughed derisively.

“They must all be away for the day, Callum,” he suggested, “laying their spells elsewhere!”

“You would not be able to tell,” he said. “You would not be able to see them.
”

Laura bit her lip. There had not been any real scorn in Callum’s voice, only an assurance of truth. Julius was not the kind of person who saw water-kelpies to be warned by them. Callum’s eyes dilated when he thought of how Julius had killed the seal that day coming back from beyond Tanera Mor. He was a murderer.

Julius put in at East Loch Tarbert and they went ashore.

“I’ll row back, I think,” he said, sitting where he was in the dinghy. “When you’ve done your sightseeing you can signal me from here.”

Lance was eager to explore and Laura felt that she would like to see something of this lovely Hebridean isle now that they had come so far. She had no idea what particular whim had prompted her husband to return to the yacht, but at least he wasn’t leaving her alone with Blair. He had that assurance.

They walked a short way out of the little port on the winding road that skirted the Atlantic. There was a whaling station tucked into a secluded bay, and they spent an hour there, with Lance asking so many questions that Laura felt almost ashamed.

“Blair!” she laughed as they retraced their steps along the shore, “you must be exhausted! Lance is a veritable sponge when it comes to soaking up information about the sea.”

“No more than I was at his age,” Blair admitted. “It’s rather a pity that we haven’t longer to walk on a bit, but—Julius may be waiting.” He glanced at the watch strapped to his wrist. “We’ve been well over an hour.”

It had seemed far shorter than that, a moment snatched from time, a second in a long eternity, Laura thought, as a desperate surge of love and longing rose in her heart. Oh, Blair! Blair! she cried wordlessly. If we could only live this little hour forever!

The peace, the murmur of the sea, the sheen-white sands where no foot had trod, all caught at her heart.

“I suppose we ought to go,” she said reluctantly.

They had stopped on the brow of a hill, waiting for Lance to catch up with them, and all the wide vista of both the Tarbert sea lochs was spread out beneath them. On one side there was nothing but the limitless horizon of the Atlantic; on the other the eastern waters of The Minch. Only the short stretch of road before them linked the two; only a step to take between fantasy and the land of the heart to—reality.

Blair was standing close behind her, so close that the slightest movement would have taken her into his arms, and for a split second he did not move. The moment passed and he turned away, facing t
h
e wide blue sea loch to the east where Scalpay guarded the entrance to the “Stream of the Blue Men.”

Laura could not look at him because she knew that he had been as shaken as she had been in that moment of silent revelation, and when Lance came over the brow of the hill they both turned toward him almost with relief.

“Look!” Lance exclaimed when he had gained their vantage point. “Over there! It’s
Northern Bird.
Julius has taken her out on his own!”

It was true enough. The yacht was cruising slowly in the sheltered waters of the loch, and before they had reached the little port it had disappeared beyond the islands.

Blair’s anger was obvious. Julius had yet to learn to handle the yacht with confidence, but there was some consolation in the fact that Callum was still on board with him. They had turned into the “Stream of the Blue Men,” Callum’s haunted sound, where every puff of wind so Callum would believe, would be against them. His expression sharpened as he scanned the empty sea, and Laura realized that he was keeping his temper in check with the utmost difficulty. When they reached the harbor he said abruptly:

“We’ll see if they have left a message for us. They may have come ashore again before they set out.”

It was a ridiculous situation, Laura thought, and one that could quite easily lead to trouble. Blair had said that they should make their way back to the mainland as early as possible, and they had decided to not even wait for a meal on shore. Laura had planned to cook it in the galley while they were sailing homeward, but now it would seem that Julius had thrown all thought of caution to the winds. He was prepared to let them wait for him until he saw fit to bring
Northern Bird
back.

Blair, who knew the Outer Islands well, had stumbled upon an old acquaintance, a crofter-fisherman who made a profit out of catching lobsters and who had come down to the port to augment his stores and buy extra string for his pots. He was a well-educated and exceedingly intelligent man, a Celt with a
strong mixture of Norse in his ancestry, tall and fair, with vividly blue eyes belying his age and giving him the look of a boy, although Blair told Laura afterward that he was seventy-three. He spoke English with great beauty and accuracy. It was an acquired language and therefore formal and graceful, with no accent whatsoever. He would not speak in his native tongue when he discovered that Laura “hadn’t the Gaelic,” merely giving Blair the briefest salute in that language as they met.

“Will you take a dram?” he asked as they moved toward a small hotel above the harbor. “It is a long time since we met.”

“Ten years,” Blair calculated, although it seemed by the way they smiled at each other that it could have been yesterday.

“Yes, it will be all of that,” the old man said. “Have you been well?”

“Most of the time.” Blair evidently did not wish to dwell on his present troubles. “I have been abroad, Lachlan.”

“Is that so? You look thinner than you were, but this is the air to put a man back on his feet again!”

“It has certainly kept you steadily enough on yours, Lachlan!” Blair smiled. “Ten years hasn’t made a scrap of difference to you!”

“No,” Lachlan smiled, “that is perhaps so.”
He stood back to let Laura precede him into the hotel. “It may be that I am going to live as long as the Jura MacCrains, although what I would be doing with myself at one hundred and twenty years of age I do not know!”

The landlord came forward and Blair asked if a message had been left for them, but apparently
Northern Bird
had pulled up her anchor without anyone coming ashore.