A Dark and Distant Shore (8 page)

It didn’t occur to him that Vilia might be feeling the same as she sat there indoors making dignified and well-informed conversation with his grandfather and the other guests. To Luke’s annoyance, Aunt Charlotte and her new husband had gone off on a round of visits, leaving only a skeleton staff at Glenbraddan and depositing the children, with their nurses and Edward’s tutor, at Kinveil. The general opinion seemed to be that Edward would be company for Luke, while little Georgiana, coming up four, would be no trouble to anyone. Unfortunately, Edward was a pompous young bore. Luke remembered him only too well from the previous year. He didn’t, in fact, say very much, but when he did it was so shatteringly commonplace that everyone else was temporarily deprived of the power of thought. Yet Vilia simply sat there, and listened, and talked, and never betrayed by as much as the flicker of an eyelash that she might have preferred to be elsewhere. Luke wasn’t going to be outdone. While she stayed, he stayed.

It was better next morning. The sun was blazing in through the windows of his tower room when he awoke, highlighting the snowy linen and striking a satin glow from furniture polished with beeswax from Kinveil’s own hives. Luke dashed from one window to another, dragging Henry with him to show him all the special sights.

Although Kinveil castle now ruled peaceably over an estate comprising almost a thousand square miles of mountain, loch, and river, it had been built in the thirteenth century as a watch-tower against Norse sea raiders. Whoever had chosen the site had known what he was about. The castle commanded all points of the compass. Set on the Hebridean coast of the Scottish mainland, on the angle of a long sea inlet that curled in from the west and then sharply to the south, it was protected on three sides by open stretches of water, and on the fourth – the east, to which it was linked by the causeway – by a steep rampart of mountains. Everywhere there were hills flanking the water, standing back a little along the western arm of the inlet, Loch an Vele, but rising starkly in the south to three thousand feet, their bare, salmon-red peaks riddled with white quartzite that glittered like salt crystals in the morning sun.

The slopes changed minute by minute as the sun moved round, rearranging the million-year-old scene with a fine, capricious sense of drama. It was a matter of planes and angles, Henry said unpoetically, as they watched Ben Dearg melt from something stark as an early woodcut into a soft, featureless wash of amethyst. Then, as the sun swam imperceptibly higher in the sky, everything was transformed again. The amethyst faded into emerald and jade, and they could see – etched with a miniaturist’s precision – every fold of ground and every tree, every patch of heather and every frond of new bracken. Even Henry became silent after a while.

Luke almost had to be held down to eat his breakfast, the porridge that was still scalding hot, as was the way of porridge, despite its long journey from the kitchen to the top of the tower. Luke had forgotten how much he liked it, eaten not as it should be with salt and goat’s milk, but with honey and warm, thin cream from the house cow, a pampered lady of indeterminate breed but unbounded generosity. Even so, he swallowed it hurriedly and then bolted downstairs to the Day Block to say good morning to his grandfather. He had his own reasons for haste, and for failing to hear his grandfather call him back as he scuttled across the causeway and took to the heather. He knew he wasn’t going to be able to avoid Cousin Edward, but on this first day at least he was going to have a rattling good try.

Vilia had been awake long, long before. She had forgotten how early dawn came in June, and lay for a while smiling dreamily at the thought of all the school books that said the sun rose in the east and set in the west. Here at Kinveil, it scarcely rose or set at all in the summer, but simply dipped below the northern horizon for an hour or two. Daylight in June lasted for twenty hours; in December for less than eight. She had always thought how confusing it must be for the birds, and how exhausting in summer – especially for the dunnocks and robins, first up and last to bed.

By five o’clock she could bear it no longer, but rose and dressed and made her way a little nervously down to the kitchen, not knowing who or what she would find. But the brawny red hands wielding the spurtle and stirring a steady rain of oatmeal into the cast iron pot belonged to Jessie Graham, and the wide, innocent smile was the same as it had been when the Camerons had ridden away from Kinveil nine long years ago. There was a trace of uncertainty in it at first, as if she weren’t sure what changes the years might have wrought in the child, but at Vilia’s cry of, ‘Jessie! Oh, Jessie!’ the doubt vanished.

She drew the pot to the side of the fire. ‘Haff you come to sup your parritch? Och, you are too soon. It will be twenty minutes yet before they iss ready!’

It was the characteristically Highland reference to porridge as ‘they’ that sent happiness surging through Vilia’s whole being. This was the real homecoming, and she was hard put to it not to weep. While the porridge cooked, she plied Jessie with one eager question after another, and Jessie obliged with all the gossip of the last years. Vilia heard about Annie Bain’s troublesome pregnancy, and Una Guffie’s slovenly housekeeping, and how Fish Ellie had dropped a herring in the minister’s teapot. And the most recent drama, of the gauger a few miles up the glen who had poked his stick in among some tree roots looking for an illicit whisky still, and found instead a wildcat’s nest with kittens in it. The mother had flown out at him, a solid ten pounds of flat-eared, slit-eyed, bottle-tailed fury, so that he had missed his footing and fallen fifty feet to the rocks below. ‘Near dead, he wass,’ said Jessie with ill-concealed satisfaction, rising to add salt to the pot, ‘when Robbie Fraser found him!’ Nobody loved an excise man.

Jessie herself had been demoted from sole charge of the kitchens when Mr Telfer arrived at Kinveil, but she was perfectly philosophical about it. ‘Och, I wass not bothered at aal, not at aal. I will neffer haff been anything but a good plain cook, and I haff neffer known what iss the difference between a
timbale
and a
turban.
It would not haff done, when he wass haffing guests with fancy tastes, do you see? So I am making the breakfast and the supper, and we haff a cook-housekeeper, Mrs Barrshaw – a Sassenach from Carlisle, but she iss a good soul chust the same – and she iss looking after the dinner. There is proper dinner effery day, you know? Soup and fish and entrées, and red meat and game and what she calls entry-metts. You will neffer haff seen the like!’

After the years of sitting tamely down to tea and toast, Vilia felt as if she were doing something gloriously improper by supping her porridge standing, in the traditional way, with the birchwood bowl in one hand and the horn spoon in the other. It was like a declaration of independence, and when she had finished she left Jessie to her duties and sallied forth to see old friends.

In the days that followed, she rarely set foot in the castle between breakfast and suppertime, sharing her midday meal with people who were not even names to Luke, people like Robbie Fraser the gardener, and Johnnie Meneriskay the herdsman, and Mary Matheson the gamekeeper’s wife, and Becky Cameron the dairymaid, universally known as Becky Dairy. There was Nanny Macleod the henwife, who also had charge of the goat, and was permanently at loggerheads with Robbie Fraser because her dratted beast was always getting into his vegetable plot, and with Becky Dairy because both women held to it, buckle and thong, that their own animal’s milk was vastly more nourishing than the other’s. And, of course, there was Vilia’s dear Meg Macleod, older now and heavier, but as bracing and loving as ever.

Vilia didn’t ask whether Mungo Telfer was a good laird. She was, after all, a guest in his house. But she looked, and listened, and drew her own conclusions.

For days she waited for the kind of weather that would offer her an excuse to stay indoors, and at last it came. Fat dirty clouds rolled in from the west, slate grey and sullen and continuous, and the rain slanted down unceasingly on an oily sea, and the greens in the landscape were as livid as stains. And then she was able to ask Mungo, casually, if she might have permission to wander round inside the castle.

‘Of course,’ he said, smiling. ‘Ye’ll not find it’s changed much.’

It was true. Vilia knew every stone of the place, and they all meant something. It was here that old Sandy Grant had slipped on the stair and given himself such a crack on the shin that he’d been able to avoid doing a hand’s turn for weeks afterwards. It was there that Betty Fraser had dropped one of the Sèvres plates and set up such a wail that everyone in the place had come running to see if she was being murdered. It was along this corridor that some of Theo Cameron’s guests had once raced view-hallooing after a fox that had inexplicably found its way into the castle. And this corner under the roof of the tower was where she herself had always gone to hide her heartbreak over some childish tragedy. She put her hand on the stones, almost as if she expected to find them still damp with her tears.

The tall, square tower was the oldest part of Kinveil. Over the centuries, other buildings had been added until the castle formed a rough U-shape with floors that, following the rocky substructure, had settled at a variety of levels that visitors were inclined to describe as ‘interesting’. There were steps and stairs everywhere. Between the tower, which housed most of the bedrooms, and the Day Block, which was Vilia’s next objective, there were four separate flights. She threw a shawl over her head against the downpour, picked up her skirts, and ran for it. That was one of the other peculiarities of Kinveil – there was no indoor access between one block and another. As each new building had been added to the old, each successive mason had come to the conclusion that there was no real need to break through twelve solid feet of stone wall merely to open up a doorway between one and the other. What was wrong with treating the central courtyard as if it were a hallway? And perhaps there
had
been nothing wrong with it in the fifteenth century, when the concept of separate rooms for separate purposes hadn’t existed and everyone had lived, eaten, and slept in the Great Hall. But even Vilia was forced to admit, though never in words, that the system was scarcely ideal for nineteenth-century living. To go from the Long Gallery to the dining-room, and then to the drawing-room, and finally to bed, meant three separate forays into the courtyard – and that, more often than not, meant three separate forays into torrential rain, biting winds, and a shower of salt spray sent up by the Atlantic rollers battering against the great sea wall which closed off the fourth side of the courtyard.

Vilia turned back her shawl, shook the worst splashes from her skirt, and began to investigate the miscellaneous small rooms housed in the Day Block. She already knew that Mungo had made himself a pleasant suite of study, living-room and bedroom, for he had told her almost apologetically that he was getting too old to have to go outdoors on a wild night when he wanted his bed. What she hadn’t known was that he had also fitted up a study for Magnus and a charming drawing-room that must be intended for Lucy –
if
she ever came here. It was a far cry from the comfortable Berkshire where Lucy had grown up, and farther still from the London that was her natural habitat. Vilia had also discovered, during her months at St James’s Square, that Lucy’s attitude towards her father-in-law
was slightly ambivalent. Certainly, it had been impressed on Luke that his grandfather was a gentleman; owning thirty thousand acres of land made him so, by definition. But the fact that it was his less than gentlemanly commercial genius that paid for everything from mediaeval castles in the Highlands to fashionable mansions in London, from Luke’s own nankeen trousers to every last pin that held his mother’s gleaming hair in place, was never mentioned. No one denied that the old man’s fortune was extraordinarily useful, but everyone knew that it would
be disastrous if society found out that it had been made in trade. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have felt as Lucy did, but Vilia was the hundredth. Like all the people of the glens, she was uncompromisingly egalitarian. The only human being most Highlanders looked up to was the laird, and that because he was a kind of Old Testament father figure to his people, a symbol more than a man. If ever they looked down on anyone, it was not for his station in life but for his personal failings.

With a sigh, Vilia turned back to the courtyard and scurried across to the building that housed the Great Hall and the Long Gallery above. Mungo, she could see, rarely inhabited the Great Hall, which still had its old familiar air of empty splendour. Vilia couldn’t remember it ever being used, largely because the fireplace that was its only source of heat needed the better part of a tree trunk for kindling. She made straight for the spiral staircase in the corner, leading up to the Long Gallery, her own favourite room and, it seemed, Mungo Telfer’s.

There was a melancholy pleasure in having it to herself. For a few precious moments it was as if the last nine years had never been. Most of the rooms in the castle were frankly chilly, for the northern sun didn’t shine vigorously enough to warm the thick stone walls, and the slit windows were inadequate as a source of light, however splendid they might once have been for shooting arrows through. But some seventeenth-century Cameron had gone to the trouble of lining the Gallery with handsome oak panelling, and, deceived by the Union of the Crowns into believing that Kinveil’s days as a fortress were past, had opened up a row of tall windows that gave a magnificent view westward along Loch an Vele to the islands.

His optimism had been misplaced. The windows had been shattered, time and again, in the course of the minor battles and skirmishes that had continued to plague the Highlands. The last time had been in 1745, when Vilia’s grandfather, Gideon Cameron, had joined the cause of the Young Pretender in his ill-fated attempt to restore the Stewarts to their rightful throne.