A Dark and Distant Shore (2 page)

When he came through the door, not expecting to find her there, the breath fled from her lungs. He looked like a cat who had been at the cream. She knew with certainty that the unthinkable had happened.

The quality of his smile changed at the sight of her. ‘Good morning,
ma petite,
’ he said, as if this were just an ordinary day. ‘To what do I owe this pleasure?’

She gulped. ‘Please, papa. I wanted to know...’ She was not very well acquainted with her father who, like the majority of civilized people, considered that the place for children was in the nursery, not the drawing-room. But he was seldom less than charming to her, and she had always assumed, without really giving the matter much thought, that he was fond of her and interested in her welfare. Now, she knew that she had been dreadfully wrong. The words came out in a rush. ‘I
have
to know! You haven’t sold Kinveil, have you? You haven’t
really
sold it?’

He looked at her in a kind and sympathetic way, and she told herself, ‘I am not going to be sick. I am
not
!’

‘Come and sit over here.’ When she had obeyed, he stood looking down at her, his hands loosely linked before him. ‘Yes. I fear so, little one. The man who has just left, Mr Telfer, made me a very fair offer, and I agreed. I know you must be upset and, believe me, I am truly sorry. But I have come to the end here. I have reached the stage where I cannot go on any longer.’

I, I, I! she thought, her heart rising to choke her. What about
me
? ‘You mean you don’t
want
to go on any longer,’ she blurted out. ‘You don’t love Kinveil at all, you hate it!’

‘
That will do,
Vilia!’ It came out, as it so often did when he wasn’t thinking, as ‘Veelia’, for although he tried hard and in general successfully not to let it show, Theophilus Cameron spoke French more readily than English, and had visited the land of his fathers only once in his life before he had inherited Kinveil in 1794. Nine years had passed since then, nine years that had cost him his wife, his peace of mind, and almost every guinea he possessed. There was nothing he wanted more in the world than to turn his back on the place, and he found it ironic that the child who so passionately wanted to stay should be the living image of her mother, the only human being he had ever loved, the exquisite Nordic girl who had deployed all her considerable powers of persuasion and all her charm to make him do what he didn’t want to do – return to Kinveil and take up his heritage. His own well-developed instinct for self-preservation had recommended him to sell, sell, sell! But he had given in to her and within eighteen months she was dead. Kinveil had killed her. She had been brought to bed with the child, and the nearest doctor had been fifty miles away, and winter that year had set in early and viciously. By the time the doctor arrived, smelling powerfully of whisky, Freya had been beyond his help. Theo Cameron still found it strange that he could look at Freya’s daughter and feel nothing for her at all, not even hatred; he was too civilized for that. Only Freya had ever mattered to him. He had thought, more than once, how much better it would have been if he, not she, had died.

With an effort, he said, ‘You must learn that what one wants, and what one may have, are not always the same thing.’ Turning, looking out at the beautiful, blue, useless water, he went on, talking more to himself than the child. ‘I have no resources at all. Kinveil has swallowed everything. The land and the people are a constant drain on my purse and I have no way of refilling it. If I could send timber, or venison, or kelp, or fish to the south to sell, things might be different, but as long as the roads are only bridle tracks, and as long as the sea passage depends on winds that are always in the wrong quarter, there is no profit to be made.’ Rationally, he was acknowledging defeat.

Defeat, however, was something the child did not understand and could not accept. ‘But, papa!’ she cried. ‘Real roads, proper roads, are coming, you
know
they are! The government’s going to build them.’ That was something else she hadn’t known until yesterday. ‘Surely we can last until then?’

With faint amusement on his face, he said, ‘My dear child, what on earth do you know about the parliamentary roads?’

It was lucky he didn’t wait for an answer, since she was by no means sure of her facts; the trouble about eavesdropping was that you couldn’t ask about things you didn’t understand.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Even if the roads and canals were to be finished next year, instead of scarcely even started, it would still be too late. There has not been an April since I came here when I have not had to buy in whole cargoes of oatmeal to tide our people over the last of the winter. I have neither the cash nor the credit to do it even once more. It has come to the stage when even the
petit bourgeois
shopkeepers of Inverness will not send anything more to Kinveil until I settle what I owe them.’ His lips curled at the stubborn resistance on his daughter’s face. ‘It is no use, my child. The people of the estate will be better off under the rich, worthy, low-born Mr Telfer than under their hereditary chief. It’s the end of an old song.’

The end of an old song. The phrase that was always used to lament the passing of some ancient tradition. There had been Camerons at Kinveil for almost five hundred years. And now – no more.

Temporarily, Vilia was silenced. Then, after a moment, her father said with a smile of the purest amusement, ‘And confess, my child! You cannot really have enjoyed living on nothing but oatmeal, and milk and kail?’

‘We have boiled mutton or pickled fish once a week,’ she replied defensively.

He laughed, and with a great sigh of pleasure leaned back and stretched his arms wide above his head. ‘Boiled mutton!’ he repeated. ‘Boiled mutton? Never again,
ma petite.
Never – ever – again!’

Never Again. Never – ever – again. It was a refrain that haunted Vilia, waking and sleeping, for the few months that remained to her at Kinveil.

She had never, in her short life, known what it was to be really hurt, and the scale of her misery was greater than she was equipped to deal with. The days passed, and the weeks, and it was as if all her faculties were whirling in a vortex, so that she felt dizzy inside, and the only stable things were those from which she was about to be sundered.

Never again to wake in the nursery at the top of the old watchtower, with its four windows looking out to the four points of the compass, its scrubbed pine floor, its rafters black as ebony and glossy as the finest varnish from centuries of peat smoke. Never again to scramble from her own hard crib into Meg’s cosy hole-in-the-wall bed, with its warm knobbly mattress stuffed with heather and chaff and felted wool, only to be dragged out again, laughing and struggling, and sponged down with icy water and tumbled into her clothes. Never to scamper down to the vaulted stone kitchen for her bowl of porridge, scalding hot and sprinkled with crunchy flakes of salt, with the cup of cool milk standing beside it so that she could dip each horn spoonful of oatmeal into it before she ate.

Never again... Vilia’s Kinveil was not the Kinveil of her father, who had betrayed her so suddenly and shockingly. He was the laird, aloof and authoritarian, and she was only a child, if a special one. She was involved in everything, and treated, like all the children in the glen, very much as if she were a puppy. Under Meg’s indulgent eye she scrambled in and out of trouble as she pleased, and Meg was always there to comfort her, and scold her, and send her off to fall into trouble all over again. Vilia knew far more about the estate and its people than her father, and because their life revolved round the progress of the seasons, there was not a moment in those last months of 1803 when she was not reminded that, next year, all the same things would be going on again – without her.

In July she went out with Archie Campbell and his son Ewen to set the lobster pots, and as she helped drop them over the side of the boat, their wickerwork seemed to creak at her, ‘Never again.’ In August, the women and girls came back from the shielings, the high pastures to which most of them migrated every summer with the cattle and sheep and goats. Their return took the form of a great procession, with dishes, coggs, churns, blankets, butter kegs and cheeses loaded on to the crude, birch-trunk sledges that were the only form of transport in the roadless glens, and the oldest women with their spinning wheels perched on top. The uproar was indescribable, with cows mooing, sheep meh-heh-heh-ing, dogs barking, and the goats letting loose with the peculiar, gargling shriek that had more than once startled castle visitors into thinking someone was being murdered. Vilia loved the little parti-coloured sheep – the ‘little, old sheep’, as they were called – with their four horns and pink noses and round, surprised eyes. ‘Never again,’ they bleated at her as she stroked their fine, thin fleece.

She heard the same refrain in September, when Meg took her up to the top of Carn Beg to watch the cattle swimming across, in their hundreds, from Skye to the mainland, on the first stage of their journey to the market at Falkirk, two hundred miles away to the south-east. And in October, when she helped with the reaping, she was near to hysterical tears when it looked as if she were going to be the one to cut the last sheaf, an act of dreadful ill omen.

In November, for the last time, she helped to bait the long, many-hooked lines that would catch white fish for salting and drying. In November, too, with cold wet gusts of wind, sharp with the smell of the sea, flaying through their bonnets and shawls and boots, she and Meg went for the last time to paddle through the bogs in search of buried pine knots for making into candles.

And in November, straight-backed, dry-eyed, and withdrawn, she said good-bye to everyone and everything.

They took the track south round the end of the loch, instead of rowing across, because two hundred of the men from the estate were escorting them ceremonially to Fort Augustus, where the road began and carriages and servants from the south were waiting. The cavalcade also included fifty ponies, harnessed with bog-fir ropes to sledges laden with family portraits, silver, and books, the only things from Kinveil that Theo Cameron ever wanted to see again.

The sledges smelled strongly of peats and fish, and when the clouds lifted and a watery sun came out, the ponies began to steam, and so did the sheepskins the men wore slung over their shoulders. An unmistakable miasma of mutton fat drifted over the canvas-wrapped baggage, which had been smeared with tallow to protect it against the elements.

‘Phew!’ said the erstwhile laird of Kinveil to his daughter. ‘Take care not to breathe in,
ma petite
! I think, on the whole, that we might be forgiven for riding on ahead of this very pungent escort of ours!’

It was not slowly, therefore, but at a canter that Vilia Cameron rode away from Kinveil. It helped, a bit, for she had made up her mind that, whatever happened, she would not look back.

From the summit of Carn Beg, Mungo Telfer watched the long, ragged procession make its way along the shore until it disappeared at last into the defile between the mountains. He had made sure that his own ponies were tethered below the skyline, and had found himself a vantage point among some rocks where he was unlikely to be seen from the other side of the loch. He was desperately anxious that the child shouldn’t think he had come to gloat.

But he hadn’t been able to stay away. Kinveil would not become his, legally, until the first day of January 1804, though on any other basis today was the day on which the reign of the Camerons of Kinveil ended, and the reign of the Telfers of Kinveil began. It should have been the happiest day of his life, the crowning point of his long, distinguished, self-made career. Yet somehow it wasn’t.

He knew very well that, if he hadn’t bought the place, someone else would – someone who would certainly have paid less for it. Absently, he wondered how much of his £60,000 had gone on settling Cameron’s debts, and hoped – without any great conviction – that it hadn’t been
too
much. He knew Cameron had leased an expensive house in London, and the man had struck him as one of those over-bred, over-civilized fellows who felt they owed it to their position to live beyond their means, whatever those means might be. It wasn’t an attitude Mungo had ever been able to understand. But in spite of everything he sat there feeling guilty.

Conscious of a movement beside him, he turned to find George Blair pointing his double Joe Manton at a great bird gliding smoothly, insolently, above them in the pale sky. It was one of the most beautiful things Mungo had ever seen, powerful and predatory and hooded with gold in the thin November sun.

‘What is it?’ he gasped.

‘Vermin. Golden eagle. Don’t know if I can reach it at this range, but it’s worth a try.’ The stolid, unimaginative finger tightened on the button.

With a sweep of his forearm, heedless of the danger, Mungo struck the barrels down.

‘Not on
my
land,’ he said.

Vilia had been sitting for more than an hour, pale, attentive, and monosyllabic, wishing that Mr Pilcher would come to the point. But it was beginning to seem as if he never would, and she wondered a little desperately if there were something in the rules that forbade a lawyer to say plainly what he meant. She had no experience of people like Mr Pilcher. Even his looks were non-committal – he was middle-aged, middle-sized, middle-coloured, middle-everything. It was as if even his Maker had been sitting on the fence when He created him.

‘Perhaps a trifle improvident... but a natural reaction on being relieved of financial care... though only temporarily, alas... One would have recommended investment... drain on capital... last year’s economic crisis... desirability of retrenchment...’

‘Yes,’ Vilia said.

‘On the other hand...’ It seemed to be one of Mr Pilcher’s favourite expressions. ‘Your late father could scarcely have been expected to anticipate that his – er – demise would be – er – quite so untimely.’