A Dark and Distant Shore (16 page)

Although they could hear the cutter’s longboat, they could no longer see it, for it was now in dark water. Very stealthily indeed, they placed the ankers of spirit in the kilns, covered them with fresh peat, and then with great shovelfuls of ash. The boat was very near. It seemed to be making not for the beach, but for a point slightly north of the village.

‘The deffle,’ Ewen breathed. ‘If they get there before we do and find all the cots iss empty...’

Perry murmured, ‘There’s only one thing to be done. Get all the people from the village back there right now. The castle folk can stay a few minutes longer. Luke and I will see that everything is done that needs to be done.’ There was a flash of white teeth in Luke’s direction, and he felt ready to burst with pride and happiness.

Ewen’s hesitation lasted only a moment. ‘You are right,’ he said. Almost at once the beach began to empty itself. There were no giveaway sounds of clacking heels or nailed boots as the villagers fled back to their homes, for
at Kinveil, as everywhere else in the Highlands, people went barefoot in summer, and often in winter too.

Those who were left – who included Robert Fraser the butler, a couple of maids, and Jessie-Graham-the-good-plain-cook – swiftly cleared up the evidence. The slypes and barrows were lined up innocently side by side, the kilns were inspected to make sure that not even a gleam of wood was visible under the ashes and peats, and the sand was stirred up to hide where the dousing water had been spilled. When they heard the longboat scrape to a landing on the beach further up, Perry sent the servants back to the castle while he himself remained for a last careful survey of the scene. Luke was almost dancing with impatience before, with another flash of teeth, his uncle tapped him lightly on the shoulder and the two of them sped back along the beach in the direction of home. Somewhere behind them they could hear the disciplined tramp of feet along the road.

Luke was trying to gather enough breath to gasp, ‘We’ve done it!’ when his uncle’s hand dragged him to a slithering halt. The gravel was crunching ahead of them as well as behind. None too gently, Perry pushed his nephew into the shadow of the causeway. ‘A carriage!’ he whispered.

It was then that Luke remembered his grandfather.

After a stunned moment, Perry subsided helplessly onto a rock, doubled up in silent laughter. Honest, law-abiding Mungo Telfer! The only man within a hundred miles who virtuously paid duty on his champagne, claret, port, and Madeira! ‘I thought he was safe in bed, sleeping the sleep of the just!’

‘No, he’s been to see Aunt Charlotte and the children. He’ll meet the excise men! Jesu!’ Luke shook his afflicted uncle by the shoulder. ‘Come on! We’ve time to get indoors before him. They won’t see us if we bend low over the causeway!’

The carriage rolled past. Mungo, it seemed, was on his way to investigate the activity up the road. They heard a rumble of voices, and then Mungo’s, crisp and clear. ‘
Such
nonsense! I never heard the like!’

‘They won’t see
you,
you mean,’ Perry whispered. ‘I’m not here at all. I’m twenty miles up in the hills, inspecting the sawmill at Monadh!’

Luke hesitated. It hadn’t occurred to him to wonder why Perry Randall had been here to be caught up in the smuggling operation.

They heard Mungo say, ‘Do you mean to tell me you’re waking up the whole clachan? Getting respectable folks out of their bed in the middle of the night because you
think
there
might
be some smuggled goods about? We’ll soon see about that! Just you take me to whoever’s in charge, and I’ll put a stop to it.
Such
goings-on!’

The sounds began to fade.

‘Well done, the old man!’ Perry said. ‘Now’s your chance, Luke. Off with you, and I’ll see you again in a day or two!’ As the boy moved away, his uncle’s soft voice followed him. ‘And well done you, too!’

Bent low, Luke scuttled across the causeway, into the castle, and up to his room. Half an hour later, as the sky was beginning to lighten, he witnessed the rout of the enemy as the excise men, empty-handed, retired to their boat and rowed off again to the cutter waiting in the bay.

News travelled fast in the glens, and the official version of the night’s events reached Kinveil the very next day. The revenue men, it appeared, had been pursuing an innocent fishing boat which, owing to some of its crew being asleep and the others a trifle well to live, had failed to respond when the cutter ordered it to stand to for a routine search. The skipper had subsequently explained this lapse to an irritable but unsurprised revenue officer, who knew enough about the fishing fraternity’s drinking habits to see nothing out of the ordinary in it. Peter Fraser had been deeply apologetic.

Mungo, still simmering three days later, pounced delightedly on Perry Randall when he rode over to make his excuses for having been absent when Mungo called at Glenbraddan. It was Perry’s custom to keep an unobtrusive eye on his wife’s grieve, or steward, who, though an admirable fellow, needed supervision, and this meant that he sometimes had to spend a night away from home, up at the shielings, perhaps, or at one of the little sawmills just below the tree line, powered by the mountain streams.

‘Aye, well,’ said Mungo, who wasn’t listening. ‘I was sorry to miss you. But it was my own fault for not having let you know I was coming.’

Perry gave such a sympathetic hearing to Mungo’s views on having honest citizens rootled out of their beds by jumped-up jacks-in-office who wanted to turn the country into a police state – as if that wasn’t what we’d just finished fighting a war to prevent! – that when the young man raised the second purpose of his visit, Mungo agreed without a murmur. Knowing that Henry Phillpotts was away, Perry said, it had occurred to him that Luke might like to bear him company on days when Glenbraddan business brought him within reach of Kinveil.

Turning to his grandson, Mungo said, ‘What do you think, laddie? Would you like that?’

‘Yes, please!’

‘And we might,’ Perry went on, ‘teach you to handle a gun. It’s about time you learned.’

‘
Yes, please!
’
Luke said again.

‘Fine. That’s settled, then. We’ll have a splendid time, the pair of us.’

Mungo blinked. ‘The pair of you? What about young Edward?’

Perry was standing with his back to the window and his expression was unreadable. But there was no mistaking the sardonic note in his voice when he said, ‘You must have noticed, sir, that my stepson regards me as a frippery fellow. Some day, no doubt, we will call a truce, but in the meantime I am still a very inadequate substitute for his father. I understand they had a good deal in common.’

Mungo grinned. ‘Aye, you could say that!’

‘In any case, Edward knows the countryside as well as I do. Better, perhaps. There’s little I can teach him. Whereas in the case of young Luke here...’

‘I want to know
everything,
’
Luke said, with all the emphasis at his command.

During the next few weeks, his education began in earnest. He learned about birds and plants and rocks and rivers. He visited the shielings and the sawmills. He discovered how the local people lived and what they worked at. He became quite a good shot with his little gun, a single-barrelled muzzle loader that weighed no more than four pounds. Although the game season hadn’t begun, there was plenty of vermin to practise on. His first great triumph came one day when a hoodie crow sat on a post and sneered at him from what it thought was a safe distance. When the smoke of the black powder cleared, there it lay on the ground with its toes turned up, dead as a dodo. Luke was jubilant.

Sometimes they went fishing, although Luke considered fly-fishing poor sport compared with the mass slaughter that could be achieved with a seine net in the bay. One day they played truant and set off on an excursion to the islands in a fishing smack not unlike the
Bride
of joyful memory. And on another occasion, this time with permission, they stayed out all night climbing to the 3,000-foot top of Ben Guisachan to see the dawn break. It was September by this time, and there was a touch of frost in the clear air. The whole firmament glittered. Even what seemed at first to be empty spaces revealed, when Luke’s vision became adjusted, a teeming mass of pinpoint sparkles – stars, stars, and more stars.

They slept under them for four hours and then climbed the last few yards and waited for day. Gradually the dusk began to fade to a clear, pale green, and then to silver, and then the sun edged over the horizon, turning the little streamers of mist from grey, to coral, and then to white, while the whole eastern horizon shimmered in rose and flame, and the rivers and lochs glistened darkly, and the shadows began to appear, long and black. Soon, they could see for twenty miles in all directions. To the west, the sun tipped the Red Hills of Skye with a dazzling pale pink, outlining them against the dark serrated ramparts of the Cuillins behind. The islands drifted on a colourless sea, and beyond them, stretching from end to end of the far horizon, there was a wide, rich band of apricot and gold.

Suddenly, it was day. They lit a campfire and made coffee, and ate oatcakes and cheese, and laughed and shivered in the clean, crisp air. It was like being in at the creation of the world.

And Perry was Luke’s god, though Perry didn’t realize it at first, noticing only, with amusement, that the boy was trying to copy some of his mannerisms. It seemed harmless enough. The unfortunate brat had been starved of normal human company, deprived of natural outlets for his youthful exuberance. It had been Perry’s impression, to begin with, that the boy had been ruined by the combined efforts of his parents and tutor. He had been sullen, tongue-tied, and lackadaisical. But the smuggling episode had suggested that there was still hope for him, and Perry, carelessly kind, had decided to take him in hand. He himself, God knew, needed something to distract his mind from problems that grew daily more acute.

Luke, suffering from a bad case of hero-worship, had neither the desire nor the perception to separate the man from the idol. Spoilt, possessive, and incurably self-centred, he judged other people entirely from his own standpoint, and noticed only what affected himself. In general, he liked people who treated him well, and disliked those who did not. In Perry, he had met for the first time someone who gave him, without reservation, something he had not known he needed – a sense of excitement, adventure, a humorous vitality that acted on him like a tonic.

He tried very hard to model himself on his hero. A returned Henry Phillpotts, sulky over his exclusion from the boy’s expeditions with his uncle, caught him more than once seated before the glass practising the art of raising one eyebrow, or crinkling his face in the attempt to produce a smile that touched his eyes alone. He clocked up a good many miles striving after a lazy grace of movement, brushed his hair with unheard-of vigour until a single, waving lock began to droop over his left eye, and ruined so many neck-cloths that Chrissie Fraser, the laundry-maid, was brought almost to the point of revolt. He failed dismally with what he most wanted to achieve, Perry’s vivid, heart-warming grin. But he went on trying. With rare wisdom, Henry Phillpotts said nothing.

The idyll came to an end with the summer. In the middle of September, the equinoctial gales began to blow, and when they died and the hills reappeared out of the clouds, their peaks were thick with snow. Winter was on the way.

And so was Vilia. She wrote from Marchfield House, near Edinburgh, where she was on a visit to her father-in-law, Duncan Lauriston. She hoped that Mr Telfer would forgive her for inviting herself, and at only three days’ notice.

Mungo was delighted.

The air was scorching and sulphurous and red, but somewhere on the margins of Vilia’s sight dusk was falling, and a heavy, sooty rain. All round were noises of sizzling and crackling, and the thud of engines, and a roaring of fire, and from somewhere in one of the buildings that surrounded the yard came the ring of helve hammers, regular and relentless as the heartbeat of some mechanical mammoth. Overriding everything, making it impossible to think, rose the splitting, shrieking whistle of air driving through the blast pipes into the furnaces.

‘What did you say?’ It wasn’t that she had failed to hear, for her father-in-law’s voice had been pitched to a level audible through the din. But somehow the sense had failed to reach her.

Sourly, he repeated it. ‘This is the coking yard, where we turn raw coal into coke for the furnaces. And what I said was that I had a letter from Andrew this forenoon, and the answer is no!’

She didn’t reply at once, too busy fighting the physical onslaught of smoke and smell and heat and unendurable noise. It was like being transported into the pages of some mediaeval painting showing the tortures of the damned. All round burned the fires of hell, live volcanoes, white-red, cracked and misshapen, tended by filthy, sweating demons who shovelled as if Satan himself stood over them with his pitchfork. Satellite goblins, grimy dwarves with downcast eyes, flitted in and out of the shadows behind, burdened with ore baskets or trundling barrows of fuel, while the air shimmered with hot currents, flakes of falling ash, and the stench of toiling humanity.

Duncan Lauriston turned away, his oversized spectacles reflecting, like twin mirrors, the building he was making for, the one with conical projections on its roof from which great sheaves of flame darted sixty feet into the sky to lick the curdled clouds. She had never seen him wear spectacles before.

She followed him in and the atmosphere hit her like a blow in the face. If the coking yard had been purgatory, this was a living inferno. She was almost blinded at first.

‘The blast furnaces,’ he said. The temperature was fearsome, and the roar and shriek of the huge bellows was something she could never even have imagined.

The men were running off molten iron from the furnaces into long troughs, or pigs, where it lay scummy and scalding, setting up swirls and surges in the air above. ‘Pig iron,’ Duncan Lauriston said laconically. ‘Furnace temperature six hundred degrees. The blast air’s fed through the pipes by a 38-inch cylinder steam engine.’