Hospital in the Highlands (2 page)

“It may be very nice. I’m quite excited about it.”

“You would be. Schools are much the same anywhere. As long as you can raise knobbly muscles playing games and gorge four meals a day, your life will remain untroubled, child.”

“Och, I’ve just got a happy disposition,” Pixie said blithely. She craned to gaze into a rock-strewn valley under a mountain’s ominous frown. “I saw a long haired coo!” she announced, but her sisters were not listening. Meg was once again dwelling on her Great Sorrow and wondering if she really did look more than thirty because of it. Fay was working out how many pupils she would have to instruct in violin playing before she would have sufficient funds to enable her to revisit Edinburgh for the famous festival. It did not occur to her that she might be expected to contribute toward her keep or the running of the house that was to be the new family home. All that wa
s
Flo’s affair, as it was Flo’s house to run. Flo’s promised inheritance had matured before their father’s death. If it had not been for Miss Nightingale’s bequest of a house and small annuity, there would have been nowhere for the three beautiful Lamont girls to go to after their sad loss.

“I wonder why Flo didn’t ask us to come up and look the place over?” Fay suddenly questioned. “It seemed a way out of our mess and we seized upon it, but I refuse to live like a mole in a hole for anybody. When do these mountains stop and civilization begin? At every station there are horrible hairy m
e
n wearing kilts. If we’re expected to live like savages I shall go straight back to Edinburgh and get married.”

Meg looked startled.

“You’ve been stopping me getting married ever since I was sixteen,” Fay went on with a sly smile, “but now I don’t have to ask Father and I’m eighteen into the bargain. I don’t have to stand any nonsense from anybody,” she finished firmly.

“You—you wouldn’t marry without love, would you?” Meg gasped.

“I think so. Having seen you in love it would appear to be a most uncomfortable business. As long as the man I decide upon is in love with
me
I should prefer to stand aloof.”

“You’re a dreadful girl. Dreadful,” twittered Meg. “You say terrible things simply to frighten and upset me. We’re an awful family, really,” she added with rare self-analysis. “I’m just an—an old hen,” she decided, using Pixie’s recent description. “I made up my mind to give up living after—after Keith, but sometimes I think I haven’t lived at all on my own account. You’re no better, Fay; you’re just younger and more brash than I was. You live on the strength of your pretty face with nothing behind it.”

“What brought this on?” Fay demanded, yawning. “I really think I prefer the Great Sorrow to a sermon, if you don’t mind. The Leopard can’t change his spots simply because he’s suffered a disaster. I was brought up to be decorative and I can’t suddenly turn into a homespun product at a snap of the fingers. I don’t intend to try, either. If I must work I’ll work at what I like, or at least at what I loathe less. I shall hate giving good music lessons to horrible tone-deaf brats, but I’d rather do that than serve in a shop or something. Anyway”—she shrugged—“it won’t be for long. Tremble for your own futures, my dears;
I
intend to get out of this predicament and leave you to it. Living with Father at the studio was fun—his friends—everything. Living with you, big sister, is no fun at all.”

“You’re so cruel!” the elder girl protested, raising her handkerchief hopefully.

Pixie had watched this adult exchange with the contempt of utter familiarity with it all. Finding a pause into which she could edge her young voice she stated blandly, “Won’t it be a relief to have a bit of Flo for a change! She’s so calm and—and fair about everything. Maybe it’s because she got away from us in time. When I think of Flo I’m sorry I never knew Mummy. I suppose they must have been very much alike.”

As the train steamed into Glen Lochallan, Meg Lamont made an attempt to sink her prejudices. It was a small place, certainly, but the surrounding countryside was majestically
beautiful with towering peaks framing the dark waters of the loch; the lower slopes were alternately wooded and buttressed with black rocky cliffs on which nothing grew. There was a brooding solemnity about the scene that made one feel small and inadequate, somehow; almost humble. Even Fay was silenced as she looked around.

This might not be Edinburgh, or boast a famous festival, but it was a natural symphony in its own right. It had the music of a thousand streams homing into the loch, and the air was shrill with bird song and thick with the beating of wings. The majestic firs rustled their layered petticoats to the sharpness of the mountain breeze, and the pines sighed, swayed and leaned away, as though seeking escape from its cool caresses.

“Och, it’s no’ bad!” was Pixie’s happy summing-up. “But I can’t see Flo.”

“Oh, dear!” Meg repined, hating the idea of having to make decisions in her sister’s absence. “We have to get a taxi, or something. Can you see one, Fay?”

They wandered out of the small station into the quiet cul-de
-
sac that served it.

“Only somebody’s old jalopy here,” Fay observed, and then looked around as she heard a cough.

Leaning against the booking office window was a tall, muscular young man of such excellent physical proportions he might have used the caber for a walking stick: he was black-haired, blue
eyed and wore a pleasant harris-tweed jacket over a well-pleated kilt.

“Would you be the party for the taxi?” he asked hopefully, as though not believing his eyes.

Fay looked again at the kilt and down to the well rounded calves in their chequered hose, where a dirk peeped coyly. “Good lord!” she said rudely. “It just can’t be true!”

“We—we
are
looking for a taxi,” Meg said hastily. “Can you help us, please, young man?”

The blue eyes left Fay’s absolute—yet cold—beauty and smiled upon the older sister.

“If you’re Miss Lamont, I’m to take you to Rowans,” he explained.
“I’m
sorry my car’s only a—” he
side glanced
at Fay—“an old jalopy, but it’s mechanically sound,” he assured them.

“I’m sure it is.” Meg was trying her utmost to rise to the occasion. “It’s a—a very nice car.”

“Old cars are all right for out of the way places,” Pixie said cheerfully. “We have never owned a car of any description.”

“Get in!” commanded Meg sharply, bundling the younger g
ir
l into the back seat as though hoping physical violence would quiet her tongue. “Fay?”

“I’ll go in front beside Rob Roy,” that young lady announced in tones heavy with boredom.

“
Strathallan,
Miss Lamont,” the young man said quietly, “and I’d be obliged if you’d join your sisters in the back of the car.” There was something commanding in the gentleness of the tone, and Fay looked at him in surprise.

“If you run a taxi, the passengers surely sit where they like?” she argued.

“I do not run a taxi,” he said patiently, “and I’m asking you to sit in the back unless you want my dog to give up his seat to you.” A golden labrador sitting in the front passenger seat suddenly lifted its head, cocked one ear and barked.

Fay was at a loss and didn’t care to show it. It was one thing ragging the local taxi-driver, quite another ragging a stranger who was apparently prepared to give as good as he got. There he stood, holding open the back door of the ancient car looking more dignified than she felt as she bad-temperedly climbed in, snagging her nylons in the process.

“What savages these Highlanders are!” she decided, sitting on Pixie’s hat.

“Do be quiet!” Meg urged. “He’ll hear you!”

The dog growled uneasily, sensing ill feeling.

There was some banging about in the trunk of the car, then the young man presented himself apologetically at the car window.

“I can only manage your small luggage. I’ll come back for the rest.”

“Er—thank you,” Meg said uncertainly. “Do we need to bother you, Mr. er—? Couldn’t the railway people send it on?”

“My name is Strathallan, Miss Lamont,” he said evenly. “Robert Strathallan. We’re to be neighbors. I’m only too happy to do a neighborly service at any time, and—no—the railway people do not deliver goods. There are no facilities in such a small place as this. But we get along.”

He climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine. Looking round at Pixie he smiled kindly and said, “There was a stag browsing in the woods near Rowans when I came by. Watch out. You may see him. He was a fourteen-pointer.”

Pixie looked positively rapturous as she leaned forward in her seat.

“I think we should have come here to live years ago,” she decided.

CHAPTER THREE

Not only did Flo Lamont fail to meet her sisters at the station, but she very nearly didn’t get home at all that night.

An emergency was admitted just as she was signing off for Night Sister to take over, an emergency needing immediate surgery, and she was the only member of the staff, apart from Matron, who had enjoyed first-class surgical experience.

The Glen Cottage Hospital was really a place where difficult or under-par patients came from the nearby city to recuperate after their operations. The fresh, tangy, heather-scented air was as good as a series of penicillin injections in its curative powers. For one thing it stimulated the appetite, and when a patient is eating well he is assuredly getting better from the severest of physical setbacks.

In addition to the surgical convalescents there was a thriving maternity wing, and the small theater at the entrance to Maternity was the only one the hospital possessed. Occasionally there was a difficult birth necessitating a Caesarean section, and it was on occasions like this that Sister Lamont was called in to help. Not that the two attendant mid wives couldn’t have managed, but there was usually plenty for them to do and few hands to do it. It was better that they—and their assistant staff—should carry on with the routine with which they were familiar. In the theater their patient was being attended by the best-trained pair of hands in this part of northern Scotland.

Florence Nightingale Lamont had gained her S.R.N. and the additional S.R.C.M., at University College Hospital in Edinburgh, no less.

There were those—Matron MacDonald included—who thought Sister Lamont wasted at The Glen, and yet who found her services so invaluable they wouldn’t have remarked this for the world.

With a training passport and a gold medal presented in the city that was a world-acknowledged shrine to medicine, she would have been welcome anywhere in the world. Yet she had chosen to rusticate in a small cottage hospital that couldn’t, no matter how hard it drove her, use her professional abilities to the full.

Flo Lamont had come to Glen Lochallan at her godmother’s request, when the old lady felt herself to be failing in health. A bond of affection had stood the test of time between the two. There was never any thought of financial gain in Flo’s mind when she sat up night after night with Miss Nightingale, giving her drinks and potions, plumping pillows and bathing the fevered hands and head. Only once had the legacy been mentioned between
them.

“Flo, my dear, what am I going to do about Janet and William? They’re dependent on me and nobody else would employ them or give them a home. Will you take them on when I’m gone?”

Flo had hushed the old lady gently but firmly.

“You’re not to talk like that, dear. You’ll get better. I’m young and I can work. I have a good job and I’ve got Jim, too. You’d be happier assuring Janet and William about their future so I want you to see to them. Don’t bother about me.”

But when Elspeth Nightingale died and the will was read,
F
lo remained the sole beneficiary. Nothing had been hacked from the already small annuity to allow money gifts to either of the two old servants. Flo was requested, simply, to give them a home as long as they should require one, and where could she house two such responsibilities if she sold Rowans?

The Glen was the obvious solution to her immediate problem; what was to happen when Jim came home, and they married, she left to the future. It was hardly likely that Jim Darvie, who was a qualified mining engineer, would consent to living in a cold, rambling Scottish mansion and maintaining two equally rambling ancient retainers.

Adrian Lamont’s death had come as a shock to his second daughter, but not as a great surprise. Whenever she went home to the flat she warned him about his drinking habits, knowing he had a high blood pressure, but he shrugged off her protests and accused her of spoiling his fun.

“Since you got in with that medical clique you go around
looking for trouble, my girl. Until the day I die I intend to live without looking over
m
y shoulder all the while for the approach of the ‘dark stranger.’ You know, that’s a good idea for a picture! Self-portrait, glass in hand, and Death in the shadows behind. I’ll do it!”