A Dark and Distant Shore (83 page)

Officiously, she introduced Lizzie to the log rollers, whose task it was to lever the tree trunks into the river; then to the pole men, who manoeuvred the logs into the middle of the current, pushing waist deep into the icy water to deal with jams and obstructions; and then to the clippers, the youngest and most active of all, who raced along the river bank with their long hooked rods, ready to pounce on any log that deviated from the main stream or seemed about to obstruct the ones that followed it. Sometimes the clippers hopped athletically on to the fast-moving, slippery logs themselves, keeping their balance as if by magic.

On a bright, crisp blue day by a picturesque river, with the sound of shouts and laughter and Gaelic oaths and the roar of the water, it was marvellously exhilarating.

And then it all went hideously wrong. Juliana, with a shriek of ‘I can do it, too! Watch me, Lizzie!’ skipped from the bank on to the nearest log, and then to the next, and then the next. She found herself on a trunk that had grown smooth and straight, without any excrescences to weight it in the water. Smooth, even, resistless, it turned again and again as the current took it, so that she had to dance to stay upright. After the first, startled moment she caught the trick of it, and giggled pleasedly at the horrified faces on the bank.

Standing beside Vilia, eleven-year-old Isa Blair shrieked, ‘Oh! Oh! The pool and then the spout! Do something, Aunt Vilia! You must do something!’

Vilia was frozen, her mind estimating, calculating. Not very far away was the calm pool from which the only exit was the deep, roaring waterfall known as the spout, through which the logs shot one by one into the loch below. As the river opened into the pool there was a wild mêlée, the logs erupting from the river into the wider water, crashing and whirling. And then the spout sucked them one by one, willy-nilly, into the rocky conduit. If she ever reached there, the child would be broken. Even in the pool, the slack before the cataract, she couldn’t help but slip and fall, to be crushed among the chaos of jostling trunks.

Harriet Blair was on her knees, praying, while Edward stood uselessly muttering, ‘My God! My God!’ It was a blessing Magnus had decided not to come.

Isa Blair was still shrieking. ‘Be quiet, you stupid child!’ Vilia said, and when Isa paid no attention turned and, with unthinking force, struck her across the face. The shrieks stopped, shocked, and Vilia, scarcely aware of what she had done, turned back to look at Juliana. The child was frightened now, and fear was robbing her of her precarious stability. One of the clippers had jumped on to a log and was trying to reach her, but the current was running faster and more erratically, and although he stretched out his arms Juliana was too young and too distracted to risk a lunge that would carry her into the arms of someone she didn’t know. Didn’t know, and therefore didn’t trust. Vilia began to run, breathing fast, cursing the luck that had put one of the new men nearest to the child.

Was Juliana closer to this bank or the other one? Looking across, Vilia saw Sorley prepare to try and reach her, but knew that he wouldn’t manage it. He knew it, too, for he backed away again and resumed his scrambling run along the rough bank, keeping pace with the child. Vilia did the same, sobbing with rage at the skirts that hampered her, tangling in her legs, threatening to trip her up every time she stumbled over a rock. One of the clippers beside her exclaimed, ‘Och, the poor wee bairn!’ and made a leap, but the log whirled as his hasty feet landed on it and he slipped into the water, the violent splash of his falling setting up eddies that diverted the nearest logs from their path and rattled Juliana’s, so that it rolled again and side-swiped another, and drew from her a hysterical yelp of terror.

Still, miraculously, she succeeded in keeping her feet. But the pool wasn’t far now. Regardless of rocks and lichen and slimy mud, Vilia succeeded in tearing her boots off and, as she ran, began kilting up her skirts, tucking the hem into her belt and giving thanks that she had never succumbed to the fashion for a dozen petticoats.

Somehow, she gained a little on the child, just enough to allow her to take care as she stepped on to the first log. Even with one of the clippers running level, holding his pole out to give her something to grip while she found her balance, it was terrifying, as if the whole world were revolving under her feet. She gasped, and clung to the clip pole. Her soaking feet were bleeding from the rocks, and as she looked down she could see little tendrils of blood coming from them, to be snatched away into the whirling water like smoke in a gale. Then, conquering her shaking limbs, she released the pole and turned towards the middle of the stream.

Raising her voice above the shouts of the men and the roaring of the water, she cried, ‘Don’t be afraid, Juliana. I am here, and so is Sorley. Everything will be all right if you do as I say.’ Unless, she thought grimly, I slip at the vital moment and we both go down.

Her heart and her stomach seemed to have changed places, but gradually she worked her way towards the child. Sorley was matching her own progress from the opposite bank. How much further to the pool, dear God? Juliana, her feet still slipping and slithering desperately on the rolling log, was turning her head back and forth, from Vilia to Sorley. Don’t! Vilia thought. Don’t move like that or you might lose your footing. Don’t do anything at all!

And then she was almost within reach. But, upright, Vilia couldn’t stretch out or the child would be bound to lean towards her, and then they would both go under. Desperately, Vilia glanced back towards the bank. The man who had supported her with the pole pushed it out towards her again. There was something attached to the tip. She could just reach. A belt? Two belts knotted together? What were they for? The man pointed urgently towards her feet. After a moment of utter blankness, she realized that if she could strap her log to the next one, it would stabilize them both and make a kind of raft. Somehow she kept her balance; somehow she succeeded in looping the belts round the two logs; somehow she retreated to the first log again and pulled the makeshift rope tight. Would it work? She was soaked to the skin and her hands felt crushed and raw, but the belts held. And then she was able to slip down into a crouch and hold her hands out to Juliana. Sorley, on the child’s other side, sat astride his single tree trunk. He, too, was holding out his hands.

But neither of them was quite close enough.

For an appalling moment, they both rested there, arms outstretched and Juliana turned first to one and then the other. But she couldn’t reach. Inches that might as well have been miles.

Vilia readjusted her balance and stretched again, and so did Sorley. But the fingers that would have given the child enough reassurance to take the one, crucial step, still didn’t make contact.

Knowing that her arms were extended to their very maximum, Vilia looked at Juliana’s crumpled, tearful face, and was conscious that her own face must betray her, for Juliana let out a wail of pure terror. There was something impossibly wrong! Vilia
could
reach the child, she knew, if only she tried. But she
was
trying – wasn’t she? Momentarily paralysed, she let her eyes slip past Juliana to Sorley. He was watching her, not the child.
Watching her as if he were waiting to see whether she wanted him to make the effort or not!
His gaze said, I will do what you will do.

With an inarticulate moan, she forced her frozen muscles to life again and reached out, and this time touched the child and grasped her fingers. At the same moment Sorley reached her, too, and steadied her from behind. After that it was only a matter of coaxing and balancing the frightened little girl, with Sorley gliding nimbly from log to log behind them, and three of the clippers coming out from the bank to help. The pool was only yards away.

‘Dia!’
one of the men exclaimed when they reached the bank safely at last.

‘There wass a moment when we wass thinking you wass not going to reach her. When your muscles iss chilled they do not stretch so far. Och, but, Mistress Cameron, you wass a real heroine there. Chust so, you wass!’

She had only fainted once in her life before, and on that occasion, too, she had been trying to escape. Sorley carried her to the coach, and then Juliana, wrapped in a plaid. Then he shooed a wide-eyed Lizzie in beside them.

Harriet Blair, alternately giving thanks to God and criticizing Juliana’s lack of discipline, gave them the cold comfort of Glenbraddan for the night. They had been invited to stay there, anyway, so Vilia was able to make light of the whole thing when they reached home the next day. Juliana, a disgustingly healthy child, didn’t even catch the chill she deserved.

‘What,
more
children?’ Magnus exclaimed, making it sound as if Kinveil were bursting at the seams with them. ‘No, really, Vilia! It won’t do. I won’t have it.’

His face had the taut, scarlet look she knew so well, as if the flesh had been inflated under the skin.

He would give in ultimately. He always did, because she took care never to suggest anything unreasonable, and to allow him several days without badgering to follow the arguments through in his mind and reach the conclusion that it had all been his own idea in the first place. But it was tiresome, especially when her own thought processes were swift and efficient, and sometimes she found it difficult not to snap.

‘But the epidemic is becoming serious, you know!’ She didn’t specify which epidemic. The mere mention of the word cholera was enough to plunge Magnus into an orgy of self-pity, although it was sixteen years since Lucy had died. Vilia didn’t resent it, but there was a limit to how long one could go on making soothing noises about something that happened so long ago. ‘Harriet tells me Grace and Peter Barber are sending Petronella and Ian up to Glenbraddan, which must mean they’re worried. And it takes a good deal to worry the Barbers.’

‘Yes, well,’ he mumbled. ‘I suppose that’s true. They don’t fly up in the boughs for nothing.’

Vilia, who found the Barbers’ ostentatious calm somewhat oppressive, accepted this gratefully. ‘Everyone says that, bad as it is in England, it’s worse in Scotland. I think it perfectly natural that Drew and Shona should be anxious to send the children away.’

‘I don’t see why. Marchfleld’s a clean enough place; no bad smells that I can remember. It’s breathing an atmosphere full of – what d’ye call it? – “pestilential miasmas” that spreads the disease. That’s what those doctor johnnies say, at any rate.’

‘Yes, I know. But Jermyn is at university in Edinburgh, and Lavinia and Peregrine James at school there, and you know the Old Town smells like a pigsty. There were forty cases last week and thirty of them fatal.’

‘Why don’t they go back to Marchfield, then?’

Shona’s letter had said, ‘I would simply bring them back here until the epidemic wears itself out. But you know how strong-minded they all are! The boys, especially Jermyn, will not be persuaded that a mere outbreak of cholera should be allowed to divert them from their studies, and Lavinia, of course, feels bound to agree with them. At least if they were at Kinveil there would be no fear of them taking a quick trip into town to see their friends, or collect a few books, or listen to some lecture that it would be a pity to miss!’

There was no denying that they were a headstrong trio, but Vilia felt it would be a mistake to mention the fact to Magnus, who hadn’t seen them for seven years. She said, ‘It might not do. There’s a new theory that the – er – epidemic may be caused not by the presence of pestilential miasma, but by the absence of ozone. If that’s true, the children would be much better off here.’

Magnus glowered at her. ‘Ozone? We’ve certainly got plenty of
that
!
But I don’t like it. I don’t want them here.’

‘What a pity.’ It was said resignedly. ‘Juliana is so anxious for them to come. She and Lizzie have so little youthful companionship.’ And that, she thought, was the point at which to let the matter drop for the time being. Juliana was twelve now, and Jermyn fifteen, and it seemed to Vilia desirable that they should get to know each other better. If they were to make a match of it... It would give her almost inconceivable satisfaction to know that Kinveil would go, in the end, to a child who had Cameron blood in his veins, as if it were a kind of vindication of all the miseries and misdeeds that had resulted from her own early banishment from Kinveil. Though Magnus wouldn’t approve, not because he disliked Jermyn – indeed, he was scarcely even aware of him – but because he was Drew’s son and Vilia’s grandson.

For more than two years after Vilia’s return to Kinveil at the end of 1843, she and Magnus had rubbed along quite well. He had reconciled himself to Lizzie’s arrival, smiling on the child when something happened to draw his attention to her, and ignoring her for the rest of the time. He had even reconciled himself to Vilia’s involvement in the foundry; indeed, she thought that once his initial disapproval had faded he rather welcomed it. It gave them a rest from each other and there were always two or three weeks of something very near benevolence when she returned from her periodic visits south. She, too, was always in a good humour when she returned. Kinveil didn’t bore her – never that! – but it was invigorating to exercise her mind in another field.

Then, in 1846, she and Magnus had clashed irrevocably. It was worse than their disagreement over the Disruption of the kirk, because this time it was a matter of life and death. The potato blight that had destroyed the previous summer’s crop in Belgium, Denmark, Sweden and Canada, as well as in Ireland, had passed Scotland by, but everyone knew that this year it would strike. The portents, whether real or mystical, lent themselves to only one interpretation. And more than two-thirds of the people of the Highlands lived almost exclusively on potatoes for nine months in the year.

‘Well, they’ll simply have to live on something else, won’t they!’ Magnus had exclaimed peevishly. ‘Can’t be good for them eating the same thing all the time!’