The House Between Tides (2 page)

Then, as he tore across the wet sand, he glimpsed a figure in a long dark coat standing on a little headland, staring out towards the house. A woman? He looked more keenly. A stranger— The Land Rover plunged drunkenly into the last deep channel and he revved the engine again to pull up the other side, releasing his breath as he felt firm ground beneath the tyres. Then he swung the vehicle to the right, wiping damp palms on worn jeans, and headed down the single-track road, skirting the edge of the bay, to find Ruairidh.

2010, Hetty

As the last of next morning's tide retreated across Muirlan Strand, seabirds swooped over the sand ripples, and the low morning sun turned the remaining pools to glittering silver.

Hetty had risen early and now followed the ebbing tide across the sand towards the island. At the halfway point, she stopped for a moment and looked around at the vast, empty bay, then continued on her way. The start of her route across had been marked by tyre tracks, but these had soon disappeared, washed away by last night's tide. It didn't matter, of course, because Muirlan House was clearly visible, outlined against the sky on a ridge ahead of her. Presumably it was safe just to head straight for it now that the tide had pulled back. The tyre marks reappeared as she drew closer to the island, and they rose from the beach to become a track, which she followed, stepping along the grassy strip between deep wheel ruts. Birdsong floated down on the soft air, freshened after last night's storm, and she lifted her head to listen. Skylarks! When had she last heard skylarks?

Ahead lay the house, and she stopped where the track passed between two crumbling gateposts and stared at it. It was huge! Much bigger than she had imagined, somewhere between an oversized country vicarage and small baronial seat. And beyond it, lower down the ridge, she saw another house, a rambling two-storey farmhouse with outbuildings, which was, in fact, much more the sort of place she had been expecting.

She continued through the gateway up the old drive towards Muirlan House. A low wall encircled it, defining an apron of garden, the top stones laid to form a crenulation, but the wall had been breached in several places and stones lay tumbled in the long grasses. A side gate, which once gave access to pastureland, lay rusting away amongst the stones in a patch of nettles. As she neared the house, she saw the windows were boarded up, which gave the house a closed, unwelcoming air, as if refuting her right to be there. She breathed deep, summoning up her courage, and the breeze carried to her a sweet scent from a patch of blown wild roses which spread, abandoned, across a heap of broken trelliswork. Cheered by this, she lifted her chin and walked up to the front door to find, as expected, that it was locked, secured by an iron bar and a businesslike padlock, recently oiled. The work of Mr. Forbes, no doubt.

But as she turned away, she saw that his precautions had not deterred determined intruders, who had simply ripped away the boarding from one of the ground-floor windows, ignoring the daubed warnings:
DANGER! UNSAFE! KEEP OUT! YES, YOU!
Fragments of shattered chimney pots and roof slates lay strewn amongst the clover and underlined the message.

But a sign on the adjacent window gave her a mighty pulse of excitement, spiked by disbelief.

PRIVATE PROPERTY.

And she felt a sudden need to get inside, to see for herself, now, at once—before excitement curdled to stark terror at the responsibility of ownership. Her eye fell on an old fish crate lying on a clump of thistles, and she glanced back at the broken boarding. Why not? She looked both ways, an urban instinct, but there was no one about, nothing to stop her. Besides—incredibly—the place was hers. She went quickly, before she could change her mind, fetched the crate and positioned it under the window, and then she was up, through, and over. Like Alice, she thought, as she landed
with a crunch on broken glass and splintered wood, and dusted the grit from her hands. And how ridiculous, when the keys were with Mr. Forbes and she had only to ask.

And then, in the stillness of the abandoned house, she became a trespasser, intruding where she had no business, and her courage faltered. She stood motionless as the feeling grew within her, resting her hand on the stained wall, and she listened to the great silence around her. Her palm absorbed a chill dampness from the wall, and she withdrew it, wiping it against her coat, and she looked around at the empty room.

Not just empty. Wrecked.

On her journey north, she had pressed her face to the train window, telling herself that this trip would mark a watershed, a new beginning. This was where she would take back control and focus her energies. But somehow it had felt more like a flight, or an escape from something . . . and as the train passed through the built-up midlands and the industrial north, doubts had crowded in. Whatever was she doing? It was madness! She knew nothing about restoring houses, or about running the hotel which she planned would follow. Perhaps, after all, she should listen to Giles and sell, and then invest the money. But as the train passed through the Borders and slowed to meet the demands of the West Highland line, she became lost in the scenery and her mind steadied. At least when she'd seen the place she would know what to do. And so she had sat up straighter, putting aside a thriller plucked from the bookshop at Euston, and listened to the unfamiliar cadence of the attendant's voice as he pushed the trolley through the swaying train, which now skirted the mountains, pressing northwards, offering glimpses of sea and far horizons.

After a night in Fort William, the self-proclaimed Gateway
to the Highlands, she had picked up a hire car to drive the last hundred or so miles, crossing the bridge which now linked Skye to the mainland, and then boarded the ferry to the western isles. It had been a smooth crossing, and when they docked, most of the disembarking vehicles had turned towards the village, but her directions were to continue straight on, away from the small harbour community, where the road had soon dwindled to a single strip of potholed tarmac. It crossed a desolate landscape of moorland and peat bog, where low roofless ruins stood stark beside small grey lochs and streams. Returning to the village had begun to seem an attractive option until, from the top of the next rise, she had seen a fringe of coastline and a greener landscape of small fields with grazing cattle and sheep, and had felt a surge of delight.

The cottage she had rented for the week had been a bit further on, and when she got there she'd left the car and walked out onto a spur of land and stood looking across a vast expanse of drained sand. So there it was: Muirlan Strand. And there was the island, as her grandmother had described it, on the edge of the world, and there, standing tall on a ridge, she had seen the house itself, the painter's eyrie, silhouetted against the complex hues of the western sky.

The wind had gusted fitfully around her, snatching the cry of a gull. Six hundred miles she'd covered these last two days, but that moment had made it all worthwhile. And then the sound of an engine had shattered the silence, and she had seen a Land Rover racing across the strand towards her, sending up fans of spray on either side. It had rocked through a deep channel, climbed up the foreshore from the beach, then turned onto the road and was gone, leaving behind a deeper silence broken only by the bird's cry, and the wind.

But that was last night.

In that low evening glow, Muirlan House had had a mystical quality, but in the sharper light of morning, the illusion collapsed,
and its true state was revealed. She took a step forward, placing her feet carefully, and looked up at falling ceilings and green damp-stained walls, where fractured plaster exposed rotting laths. Oh Lord, what had she got herself into? An acrid stench of sheep dung rose from the floor as she made her way gingerly to the hall, her eye caught by a line of rusting wires straggling along the plaster coving to connect with long-vanished bells. A wide staircase had once curved elegantly to a half-landing, lit by a glass roof-light, but this was now open to the elements and, through the jagged hole, she could see broken roof beams, angled like the misaligned spars of a wrecked ship. Clouds drifted past.
Dear God!
Splintered stair treads and drunken banisters led to the second floor, but there was no way she was going to trust them.

She had been warned, she reminded herself, as she peered into dark rooms opening off the hall, rooms where the window boarding remained intact. The lawyer acting as her grandmother's executor had told her the place had been empty for many years and would need work. But she hadn't expected it to be just a shell, pillaged and empty.

Nightmare.

Returning to the first room, dry mouthed, she had to fight a rising panic. Like it or not, all this was now
her
responsibility. She'd better go and find Ruairidh Forbes, and then do some hard thinking. She had a knee on the window-sill preparing to climb out when she heard an engine again and leant out to see a Land Rover pulling up the foreshore towards the house. It looked like the one she'd watched racing the tide the night before—a farmer, perhaps, come to check on grazing livestock.

She pulled back to avoid being seen. Perhaps there was another way out? Back in the hall, she saw a passageway to the rear and started towards it, but then she saw a slit of daylight through one of the doors off to the right and turned to investigate.

She found it was coming not from the room itself but from some sort of small annex built on, so she went through and then stopped at the doorway of a little room. It too was boarded up, and the light was coming from a hole in the sloping roof through which it lit a wheelbarrow, a spade, and recently disturbed ground covered by planks and boarding. What on earth was going on?

And then the hammering started.

She turned her head at the sound. It must be coming from outdoors, close by. But what—? Then she saw that the light from the hall behind her had disappeared and remembered the unboarded window. She rushed back across the hall, shouting out, tripping in her haste, and began banging with her fists on newly fixed plywood which now covered her escape.

The hammering stopped abruptly, she heard a curse, and then the sound of nails being wrenched out. The boarding shifted, and she found herself face-to-face with a man with dark hair and angry eyes.

“Can't you read, for Christ's sake?” He rested the boarding against the wall, kicked the fish crate back into position under the window, and jerked his head.
“Out.”
And he stood back, offering no assistance, watching her clamber, wrong-footed, back across the ledge.

“Wait. Let me explain. I'm not trespassing, I—” Her jeans caught on a protruding nail and tore. Damn. “Look, it's really alright—”

The man was not listening, and as soon as her feet touched the ground he tossed the fish crate back into the thistles and lifted the boarding again. “There's nothing left to steal in there anyway.”

“
Steal?
No! You misunderstand. This is my—” Why was that so difficult to say?
This is my house.
She winced as staccato hammering drowned out her words, but then the man seemed to catch their meaning, and he stopped and looked over his shoulder at her. He lowered his arm, his eyes narrowing, and she found herself being
scrutinised with a disconcerting intensity. His lean face bore the signs of an outdoor life, and beneath the old woollen jersey she sensed physical strength. “Are you Ruairidh Forbes?” she asked, struggling to regain some measure of control. What a start.