A Dark and Distant Shore (58 page)

And then Luke appeared. He had stayed out of it all like a rational, sensible man. There was nothing he could usefully do. He had no right to help those who were being evicted, and he couldn’t quite bring himself to help those who were doing the evicting. So he had remained with Edward, standing by the gig on a slight rise, watching the progress of the battle. He had seen the girl who had been the cause of all the trouble go back into her cottage, and the men still working on the roof, and the first of the timbers falling. Then, later, his eye had caught the movement as the roof began to shift. The girl must have come out again without him seeing. Surely she must. Surely...He could still remember, years ago, when he had told Vilia about Wattie Gillespie being hanged, and she had lashed out at him with her tongue. ‘You didn’t care enough. If you had cared, you could have stopped it.’

He had left Edward at a run, sprinting round the outside of the mob, warding off a few half-hearted blows, his eyes fixed on the shifting roof. It caved in while he was still fifty yards away.

Now, he pushed the girl brusquely aside and said to Gideon, ‘Stay where you are. I’ll deal with this.’

It was strange inside, with some of the roof still hanging drunkenly in place while the main part, the whole of one end, was open to the sky. Before him was a nightmare jumble of heather and divots and thin timbers and ruined furniture, capped by the rooftree which had slipped down so that it was balanced like a giant seesaw weighted at one end. The floor was surprisingly empty under the raised end, where, from the looks and the smell of it, the livestock were usually penned. Thank God the rooftree hadn’t fallen quite straight. His wrist protesting painfully, he was able to pull on the high end, and swivel it until the balance shifted and he could wedge it in the angle of the wall. He hoped it would hold; he didn’t need a clout from a baulk of timber to add to his troubles.

He stood for a moment, his eyes searching the debris, and a scatter of stones flew past his head. The battle had spread, and was raging on the slope above the cottage as well as in front. Apprehensively, Luke glanced up, half expecting the belligerents to slide straight off the hill and into the cottage beside him. It wasn’t impossible. If only there were less noise, so that he could hear any sound the children might be making. Systematically, he began moving aside the turfs and thatch that seemed to be smothering everything beneath. The girl was standing behind him moaning, ‘My bairns! My bairns!’ and it was beginning to get on his nerves. ‘How many?’ he asked a trifle breathlessly.

‘There iss two. The three-year-old and the wee one who came the Ne’erday before last. They wass in the corner by the box bed. Chust over there!’ She went back to moaning again.

Suddenly, Luke was conscious of a shout from above. It was Sorley, maddeningly taking part in the scrimmage instead of looking after Vilia’s boys. There was the wildest kind of fist fight going on, but even while Sorley had one arm raised to land what was shaping up to be the most almighty punch, with the other he was pointing to a spot in the rubble by the end wall. He was right.

Sourly, Luke glanced up again at his now preoccupied form and muttered, ‘Thanks!’

There were two small figures, covered with dust and quite unconscious, almost hidden in the wreckage of the box bed. It was easy enough to free them, and Luke thought they weren’t hurt but had probably passed out with fright. Picking up the younger one first, he pushed it unceremoniously into its mother’s arms and propelled her out of the cottage before he turned to the other. The child stirred as Luke cleared the debris away, and then opened its eyes and, immediately afterwards, its mouth. It looked as if it were winding up for an earsplitting howl. Hoping to divert it, Luke stood the infant up firmly just inside the door, brushed it down somewhat cursorily, and sent it out to its mother on its own unsteady legs. And then he stood for a moment, aware of relief and a sneaking pleasure at the thought that, this time, he
had
cared enough – and that Vilia would hear about it, not from him, of course, but from Sorley and the boys.

Gideon, waiting patiently outside with an armful of damp and odoriferous baby, had spotted Theo by now, over on the left and trying to haul one of the grieve’s lads from his horse, an expression of feverish and quite un-Theo-like enjoyment on his face. And Drew. With a groan, Gideon saw that Theo had been right, though it wasn’t a pocket handkerchief he was offering one of the ladies, but a supporting arm. Courteously, chivalrously, he was assisting the Dame of the Chamber Pot over the assorted junk scattered on the ground before her hovel. Disbelievingly, Gideon watched him shoulder his way past a brawny female locked in mortal combat with one of the foresters, and heard him say in his high, clear voice, ‘Excuse me! Let us pass, if you please! Excuse me!’

The smile still on his lips, Gideon turned back to the house and saw that Luke had paused for a moment in the doorway, watching the toddler stagger into its mother’s arms. Then, quite suddenly and for no apparent reason, he dropped as if he had been poleaxed.

After a moment, Gideon went over to the young woman and politely restored the baby to her. She smiled without seeing him. Then, stepping carefully and rather slowly, he made his way to the doorway and knelt beside Luke.

It seemed a long time before he became aware of a shadow looming over him, and glanced up. It was Sorley, with Theo and Drew behind him.

‘What iss it?’ Sorley’s expression was tense, and somehow vibrant. ‘What iss wrong?’

Gideon swallowed. ‘It’s Luke,’ he said in a voice that wasn’t his own. ‘I think he’s dead.’

It was Sorley who broke the news to Vilia, because Theo had decided that he and Gideon must stay at Grianan and say what had to be said, and do what had to be done, before Luke’s body could be brought home to Kinveil. It was fortunate, in a way, that the Sheriff-Substitute and his officers were there, although if they hadn’t been, Luke would probably still have been alive. But with the law on the spot, it seemed likely that the inquiry into the accident would be completed with dispatch. One of the sheriff-officers thought he had seen the rooftree lurch suddenly free, to catch Mr Telfer at the base of the skull; the suggestion was that it hadn’t been wedged very firmly, and the vibration caused by the fight on the slope above had been enough to dislodge it and set it swinging on its axis. Something had shifted it; of that there was no doubt.

Sorley had wanted to stay, but Theo, his face shocked but his assurance unimpaired, had pointed out that someone must go back to warn them at Kinveil, and that it would be extremely improper for Luke’s guests simply to take themselves off as if nothing had happened. ‘But take the brat with you,’ Theo had added. So Sorley and Drew, unnaturally quiet, had ridden back together.

After the first, disbelieving exclamation, Vilia sat silent and stunned, quite unable to identify her feelings, knowing only that when, after a while, all the decent, correct reactions began to float into the blankness of her mind, none of them was real. It was like writing a letter of condolence to herself on the death of someone who had been neither friend, nor in the true sense lover, but just a human being to whom she had been tied by childhood acquaintance, occasional liking, and a complexity of needs. In time, when her head released the message to her heart, she would mourn the human being and remember, with a trace of sadness, something of what had been between them. But it was the hurt to Magnus and Lucy she thought of when the first moments of shock wore off, and then, foolishly, of the hurt to Mungo, whose grandson Luke had been.

The tears glimmered in her eyes at that, and then she realized that she must have been staring through Sorley for several minutes. He was watching her with a curious expectancy on his face, and she thought suddenly – I suppose he knows about Luke and me; something, anyway. He knows me so well. So well. I suppose he knows about yesterday, too. Does he know that none of us might ever have seen Kinveil again, after yesterday?

The sword of Damocles over their heads, but the thread hadn’t broken, and today the sword had been taken away. Though not as if it had never been. She hadn’t wished, even for a moment, that anything like today’s accident would happen, but she would never be wholly free from guilt at the relief it had brought her.

She said, ‘It’s all right, Sorley. I’m not going to embarrass you with tears. Were the boys upset? Perhaps you would send Drew up to me now? I am sure he is dying to tell me all about it.’

She smiled a little, ruefully, and Sorley gave a small, satisfied nod of his head, and went.

‘And Gideon must come, too,’ Vilia said. But her son’s attention was wandering, as it so often did during these planning conferences at the foundry. Exhaustedly, she said, ‘Gideon, will you please pay attention!’

He raised his eyes and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ He meant it, for he knew that she was anxious to get the meeting over and done with, and for once he knew why. Though he was fond of his mother, Gideon had never shared Theo’s curiosity about her, his fascination with everything she did or said, his passion for analysing her. When he was quite small, he had decided he would never understand her, so he hadn’t really tried. It had been easier to take her on her own terms; cool and friendly most of the time, occasionally high-handed, sometimes – though not very often in these last few years – marvellously good fun. But this morning something had happened to make him think, and he had been brooding about it ever since.

It had been no more than a minor domestic tragedy – scarcely even that, since they had expected it for some time. A cat’s nine lives didn’t usually add up to much in terms of years, and the Duchess had been almost fifteen, only a few weeks younger than Gideon himself. She had been showing her age for months, and then, yesterday, she had begun to die before their eyes. She hadn’t been ill or sick, but compulsively restless, moving from point to point of her daily round not once, but again and again. After a time, her muscles had stopped obeying her, so that her legs failed her after a few steps and she collapsed, and then staggered to her feet for another few steps and another collapse. It had been heartbreaking to watch, but there was nothing they could do, although as the hours passed the interval between helpless collapse and obstinate rising had become longer and longer. Vilia, her eyes tormented, had sent the boys to bed soon after midnight. Theo, rational and adult, had said, ‘You should go to bed, too. Domesticated or not, cats are wild animals. Leave her in peace, to die alone as animals do.’ And Vilia had looked at him and replied, ‘Perhaps. I don’t know. But she has had no existence apart from us for all the years of her life. If I can’t convey
some
sense of comfort to her now, then nothing in this whole dreadful world has any meaning.’

Gideon hadn’t slept much, and had gone down to the drawing-room soon after five. The Duchess had been stretched out, small, black and lifeless, on the fireside stool where she always slept, and Vilia had been curled up on the floor nearby, arms and head buried on the seat of a chair, her hair a loose, dishevelled screen around her. She was weeping harshly, and when Gideon took her by the shoulders to raise her, he knew at once that she had been weeping for a long time.

A few controlled, sentimental tears he could have understood. But this... It was so unlike her.

Casting back, he couldn’t remember her ever letting her emotions show. Theo said she had been very withdrawn for months after old Mungo Telfer died, but Gideon hadn’t noticed. And after Luke’s death four years ago, she had been strained and monosyllabic, but no more, not even during the trying days of Magnus and Lucy’s return and the subsequent inquiry, when everyone had been intent on blaming everyone else but the final verdict had been that the rooftree had slipped. The court had offered its commiseration to the victim’s parents, so tragically deprived of the sole prop of their declining years, which hadn’t gone down very well with Magnus. He was, after all, only forty-five. There had been an odd little episode afterwards, when Vilia and the boys had returned to Marchfield House. For several days she had been unnaturally calm and supercilious. Gideon had thought she was merely relapsing into her foundry personality, but Theo was convinced that something had happened while they had been away. Angus McKirdy, the butler, had presented her with a long list of problems that had cropped up, notes that had arrived, persons who had called, and Theo had gone around for days speculating on which of McKirdy’s messages had been responsible for her odd mood.

And then, last year, Lucy Telfer had died and Vilia had been more upset than her sons had ever seen her. Yet still she hadn’t wept. Perhaps she hadn’t had time. Cholera had reached London in February and Edinburgh a few weeks later. People had died by scores and then by hundreds as, whimsically, the plague ravaged one whole side of a street and passed the other by. The dead-carts had gone from door to door, and a sickly smell of chlorine hung in the air, and the authorities laid down overdue regulations about dunghills and cesspools. With pink, well-scrubbed Wally Richards to help her, Vilia had imposed a stringent regime of hygiene at the foundry, but even so there were men who went home from work at night and were never seen again. And then the news had come that Lucy Telfer had died of it in London. Lucy Telfer, who had borne up under her son’s death far better than Magnus had done; Lucy Telfer, who had been the closest thing to a mother or sister that Vilia had ever had. Gideon had liked her, too, for she had been possessed of the same kind of gentle detachment that he was trying to cultivate for himself. Vilia had been almost less upset by Lucy’s dying than by the manner of it, less hurt by her own sense of loss than by the thought of the misery something like cholera must have caused to the dainty, fastidious Lucy. At least it had been mercifully brief, only three days.

Death, Gideon supposed, must have become a familiar presence to Vilia. Her father, Theo Cameron; then her husband, the father of her sons; then grandfather Lauriston; then Mungo Telfer, whom she had been so close to; and Luke, whom she had known since childhood; and Lucy. And all the other people Gideon had only heard of – childhood mentors at Kinveil, like Meg Macleod, her nurse; and Ewen Campbell’s father, Archie; and old Robbie Fraser the gardener. Yet it had been the death of a small, elderly black cat that had reduced Vilia to an extremity of misery that Gideon couldn’t even have imagined. It was a mystery that had preoccupied him for most of the day.