A Dark and Distant Shore (107 page)

If she could have stopped him from coming, she would. But it seemed he had landed at Liverpool just over a week before, and his letter had reached her only this morning. Kinveil wasn’t the kind of place from which one could decamp at the drop of a hat, nor was it the kind of place where one told one’s butler to say that madam was not at home.

She wondered what he was like now, at seventy-five. Such an attractive young man he had been all those years ago. In spite of everything, she still remembered her sense of dazzlement during that week in London in 1815, and the feeling that she lived and breathed only when he was with her. So exciting, so exhilarating, that innocent certainty that love was a kind of magic that would make everything right.

He hadn’t said in his letter why he was coming. If he had been going to Glenbraddan, she might have understood it, although it was hard to believe that he should want to pay a last visit to the scenes of his youth. But old men sometimes had strange fancies, and...

She sniffed, brought back to the present by the realization that for some minutes the wind had been carrying to where she sat, motionless and shapeless like a rock atop another rock, a heavy, rank, familiar odour, sour and yet cloying – the smell of a stag in rut. Turning her head infinitely slowly, she peered into the shifting veils of mist to her right, but could see nothing other than mist-shapes, shadows and darkenings that might or might not have substance.

Sorley’s whisper was so low that it scarcely disturbed the air. ‘Nearer the cliff, mistress. He iss ferry close.’

And then, quite without warning and hugely magnified by echoes from cloud and mountain, there broke out the first low, grumbling roar of the stag calling. After a moment, it tightened and began to rise, higher and higher, wild and elemental, with challenge in it, and anguish, and a primeval desolation. Vilia sat transfixed, all her senses concentrated on the mad, deafening music, the anarchic call of the wild. At last, slowly, it began to die, burdened by echoes and re-echoes and the answers of other stags on the mountainside across the invisible glen.

‘There!’ Sorley breathed, just as she herself saw the familiar red deer antlers, huge and branched, and then the stag himself, the faint grey puff of breath from his last explosive grunt still hanging on the air before him, his head high, and the wide scarf of thick long hair round his neck clinging in lank elf locks. It was the end of October, and the weeks of feverish activity had taken their toll, so that he was in poor condition, but nothing could altogether diminish a stag’s splendour. He was staring straight at them, but they didn’t move a muscle and they were upwind of him, so that he hadn’t caught their scent. Vilia could see, now, the twitching ears of a hind standing a little back from him, and, she thought, another beyond.

The wind gusted, and the mist enveloping their cloud room swirled and reformed, and the scudding clouds above raced faster.

And out of them, with shocking unexpectedness and silent at first as the mist itself, coasted a golden eagle riding on the wind. It was so large that it had to be a female, and she came in, not too low, over the stag’s left shoulder. For a dreamlike moment it seemed as if she would glide on, on her great seven-foot wing span, past the misshapen rocks that were Vilia and Sorley, and disappear again into the mist.

But just as she reached it, the whole illusion was violently shattered. With a harsh, rasping shriek of air through the great pinion feathers of her wings, she soared into a powerful, banking turn and, side-slipping to lose height, swept back at terrifying speed straight towards the deer.

Fear of eagles bred into them from birth, the two hinds were already in panic-stricken flight before she made her turn, but they had impeded the stag and he was trapped between them and the precipice. As the eagle rushed upon him, her head with its dark predatory beak drawn back and the vicious yellow-framed talons extended on muscular, feathered legs, he tried to defend himself, backing a step and stamping, dropping the great spread of his antlers against the attack. The bird, frustrated, swept up and over him, high towards the roof of their eerie cavern in the clouds where, magnificent and menacing, she hung for the space of no more than a moment and then, half folding her tremendous wings, dropped like a stone in a dive of astonishing, perfectly controlled power, straight back for the stag, still blindly butting the air where she had been only seconds before.

‘The neck!’ Sorley breathed. ‘She iss going for the neck!’

The stag recognized it, too, for he threw up his head almost at the last moment, and reared, his hooves striking out wildly at the mist, and the eagle, once more frustrated, pulled out of its stoop with a murderous screech of air and turned into another climb. Three times she tried it, and three times the stag drove her off, and then she changed her tactics. Vilia and Sorley, frozen on their rocks, had heard of eagles driving a deer over a precipice to its death, but had never seen it happen. The great bird used her wings now, not her talons, and the stag, at each ferocious swoop, recoiled a little further, and a little further, blind and crazed with terror. It seemed as if he were no longer aware of the cruel beak, the piercing talons, the bright, malevolent eyes, but only of the vast wings that rent the air fearsomely before him as the eagle plunged, and plunged, and plunged again.

Afterwards, Vilia realized that the whole drama had taken less than five minutes. They didn’t see the end, which had never been in doubt, only the stag retreating back into the mist – staggering and unstable on its hind legs – and the eagle’s wings closing for another stoop, and fanning out with a thunderous crack as, yet again, she pulled clear. But they heard it. Heard the scrabbling hooves on the loose scree, and the sound that was half squeal and half bark, and the rattling thud of a two-hundred-pound body hitting the cliff face once, twice, and then no more. The eagle, they knew, would be diving smoothly down beside her prey, half-folded wings held in close to her body so that she took the shape of a trident reversed.

Vilia let out her breath, slowly, at last, and after a while Sorley sighed, and murmured, ‘Aye, well.’

She had no idea how long they had been sitting there, but she felt chilled and exhausted. Rising, she said, ‘Yes. It will be dark soon.’

They scarcely spoke as they made their careful way downhill by the same route as they had come, choosing their footholds knowledgeably, stepping from heather tuft to heather tuft through the treacherous stretches of bog, following the swollen streams and skirting the great boulders, slippery with moss and lichen, that marked their path as surely as any signpost.

They were almost home when Vilia voiced the question that had been exercising her mind. ‘That first attack. Eagles don’t usually attack adult deer directly. Do you think she expected it to work?’

‘
Dia!
Who knows? There wass an opportunity and she took it, wise bird. With the stupid beast roaring like that, she knew chust where he wass, and thought he would haff no time to run.’

‘And when it didn’t work, she wouldn’t be put off.’

Wheezing a little, Sorley said, ‘
Ged bheirear tràigh dhiom, cha toirear timcheall.
’
Though I cannot go by the shore, I can go the long way round.

Vilia stared at him. ‘Or to put it another way,’ she said, ‘if at first you don’t succeed...’

‘Chust so. Chust so.’

Perry Randall sat back in his carriage, trying to find a position out of the draught. Although it was almost November, the cutting wind sweeping down Loch an Vele reminded him of nothing so much as the wind off the Hudson in March, but there the resemblance ended. The barren, compact grandeur of this land of his early manhood had nothing in common with the undulating plains of Westchester, open, and quiet, and affluent. It was thirty-six years since he had last travelled this road, and another fourteen before that, and his view of it had changed, as it had changed before. In ’29 he had thanked God that this wasn’t his country any more, but now he was a little less sure. The American Civil War, six months over, had distorted all the things he loved most about his adopted land. The rough idealism had turned sour and self-seeking; the wide open spaces were closing in and would soon crush the Indians who belonged there; and the wide open American heart was closing, too. All unavoidable developments, he supposed, but as the real pioneering days had gone, so had gone the eager spirit. America, now was not so very different from Europe; it was only its problems that differed.

He sighed, and shrugged to himself. It made no odds now. What remained of his life would be lived out between Boston and New York. His choice had been made too long ago.

The carriage rounded the last bend and Kinveil came into view. It didn’t welcome him. It never had. It was too stiff-necked and arrogant, there on its rock; too alone and self-contained. Only when the sun shone, and white clouds scudded across a blue sky, and there was colour in the landscape, had he ever responded to it; only when the wind was the kind that stirred the blood instead of chilling it. Strange that for fifty years he should have been obsessed by the woman who was so much a part of it. Stranger still that he had never quite drawn the parallel until now. Which mood? Which mood, now that she was no longer young, or middle-aged, but old? He had no idea. Too much had happened in these absent years for him to read her mind as once he had thought he could. Drawing the furred collar of his coat more closely about him, he leaned forward to tell the coachman to stop under the rowan tree.

Vilia stood at the window of the Long Gallery and watched him descend from the britzschka, wondering whether his choice of carriage meant that he now found it necessary to lie down on long journeys. He was almost six years older than she was, and his physical condition must have deteriorated since she had last seen him, fourteen years ago at Shona’s famous dinner party. She hoped that he wasn’t really
old,
because that would offend her in a foolish kind of way. And yet better, perhaps, that he was.

She saw him speak to the stable boy who had come running, another sprig of the tribe of Frasers who had served Kinveil for as long as she could remember. The boy grinned and bobbed his head, and then Perry, with a word to his coachman and another to his valet, turned and set his foot on the causeway. He was wearing a broad-brimmed, low-crowned wideawake hat, and the new style of caped travelling coat known as an Inverness. Was that coincidence, or was there a trace of his old habit of irony about it? The soft brown tweed of the cape was lined with fur, and he turned the fur collar up against the damp wind that was whipping in from the west. Vilia couldn’t tell whether he had put on weight, or whether it was age that had taken the spring from his step. At least he wasn’t leaning on a cane.

He glanced up, as if he knew she must be there, and raised his hat an inch or two and smiled. It was a shock to see his face so heavily lined, and the brows that had always been straight and dark now white as salt. The neatly trimmed sidewhiskers curved down to stop at either side of his chin, but he was otherwise clean shaven. Even from this distance, she could see that the old, familiar sparkle was still in his eyes, although Shona had told her that his sight was failing. So instead of merely smiling in return, she raised her hand in acknowledgement.

Perry had known there wouldn’t be a servant in the place he had ever met before, but the butler admitted to being a Fraser and Perry was able to say, ‘Robert’s son?’

‘Indeed, yess, Mr Randall, sir. And if I may make so bold, there iss many a time he hass been speaking to me of you.’

‘Kindly, I hope?’

‘Gootness, gracious, yess, sir! Now, will you be wishing to freshen after your chourney, before I take you to Mistress Cameron?’

Cameron? That old Highland habit of women keeping their maiden names. He smiled a little. ‘Yes. Thank you, Fraser.’

He had been given a room at the foot of the tower. Did she think he was too old to climb a few stairs? He washed, shivering a little, and changed into the fresh shirt his valet laid out for him, then shivered again as Fraser led him across the courtyard, through the Great Hall, and up to the Gallery. Thank God there was a fire.

She rose to welcome him. ‘It has been a long time. You look cold. Come and warm yourself, and tea will be here directly.’ He was a marvellously handsome man still, despite the lines, and hadn’t shrunk with age, as so many people did. Except for a slight stoop about the shoulders, he held himself erect, and although his figure had thickened he was tall enough to stand it. His coat fitted him to perfection, and she was glad to see he hadn’t succumbed to the four-in-hand necktie, but still wore something like the cravat of his youth. And still with the opal-eyed serpent pin in it that Mungo had given him. She faltered for a moment, at that.

She had given some thought as to how she should treat him. Not as the merest acquaintance. There was, after all, no one else to see. As someone she had known well, long ago, and had lost touch with? Better. And it had the merit of being true.

She walked over to him and took his hand to lead him to the fire. His fingers were cold as ice, and she exclaimed, ‘Goodness! You’re frozen. Do come and warm yourself.’

But he was in some kind of dream, staring at her as if there were something he didn’t understand. She thought that perhaps he didn’t see her very well, and that would be a pity, for she had taken the greatest trouble to look her best. She had touched her cheeks and lips with rouge, and chosen her most flattering gown. Only since her hair had turned white had she begun wearing the soft rose colours she had shunned in the past; fair-haired women in pink had always been ten a penny. But she’d had to give up wearing green now, because it made her eyes look hard as chips of emerald against the pallor of skin and hair.

He shook himself free of his daze, and the glinting smile came back. ‘Do you realize that I have never seen you at Kinveil before? Here, in your natural habitat? This is the first time we have ever been perched on this benighted rock together.’