Land of Heart's Desire (13 page)

Upset and confused, she began to walk back towards the house long before the bonfire had burned itself out.

“Let’s go back indoors!” she called to her laughing guests. “Let’s dance again!”

She tried to forget about the bonfire, hoping that Dame Sarah had not seen the flaring beacon light on. Askaval, but when their last guest had gone and she helped the old lady up to her room the glow was still flickering against the northern sky.

“What’s that?” Dame Sarah asked, crossing to the window. “The light up there on Askaval?”

“It was Hamish’s idea.” Christine’s throat felt constricted but she did her best to make light of the whole unfortunate incident. “He thought it would be a nice gesture if I had a bonfire on my birthday, too.”

There was a small, tense silence before her grandmother spoke. Dame Sarah’s expression had remained unchanged, but her eyes were pinpoints of angry light.

“He should have known better,” she said. “Even if he doesn’t believe in these old hoodoos himself, he could learn to respect other people’s beliefs. He was born on Croma and he lived at Ardtornish long enough to know what the islanders think. It has never done us any harm to respect their superstitions and no good to defy them.” She drew a deep, impatient breath. “There are two kinds of people in this world, it would seem,” she added briefly. “Those that destroy and those that build. Be careful of the destroyers, Chris. They can wreck one’s life as easily and as unthinkingly as they smile.”

Christine put her arms about the stiff old shoulders.

“I’m sorry about all this, Granny,” she said. “I don’t suppose Hamish meant any harm. It was all just—terribly unfortunate.”

She had not mentioned Rory’s warning nor the fact that Hamish had defied it. It did not occur to her until some time afterwards, and then she thought it unwise to bring up the subject of the bonfire again.

Yet, when she went to her own room, happily tired, and stood for a moment or two with her back against the closed door, as if she might re-live all the exciting events of her special day in one exquisite, culminating moment of delight, she could only see the yellow flare above Askaval where a last defiant flame had sprung to life among the embers of Hamish Nicholson’s fire.

It seemed to leap out at the darkness, revealing the harsh face of the rock in sullen relief, and then it sank again and flared once more before it died.

Impulsively she crossed to the window, reaching up to draw the heavy curtains against the night. Down in the bay, within the arc of the harbour wall, she could see the riding-lights of a score of small craft, the little yachts and cabin cruisers that had brought their guests to Croma, and suddenly she had forgotten Hamish and the strange yellow glow above Askaval in the memory of their friendship and the goodwill with which they had surrounded her.

She knew most of the boats by name, and somewhere down there the Ardtornish yawl waited the morning tide, with the new laird of Ardtornish safely on board.

What had he thought about the bonfire, she wondered. What had he
really
thought?

CHAPTER VI

Two days after her birthday party, Christine saw Jane off on the bi-weekly steamer for the south end of the island. The September gales had descended upon them earlier than usual and the ford was unsafe in consequence. Besides, Jane had a good deal of luggage to take with her and the tender from Scoraig would put out to meet the steamer in the bay.

“Something will have to be done about the causeway,” Rory reflected as they waved their good-byes on the quay at Port-na-Keal. “If we had the money we could build a sea wall, with a road over it, maybe.”

“We’ve never had a road, Rory,” Christine pointed out. “The ford has always been easy enough to cross.”

“Not in winter,” he disagreed. “And we’re always at the mercy of the tide.”

“Do we need a road so very much?” she asked.

“If we are to be one island we do,” he said.

“Who mentioned anything about being one island?” Her voice was suddenly sharp. “Has Finlay Sutherland been trying to convince you, too?”

“I have always been convinced about that,” Rory answered thoughtfully. “And my belief is that it could be done quite easily, without friction.”

“Not if the new laird of Ardtornish wants Erradale as well!”

They walked along the quay in silence.

“Are you coming back in the brake?” Rory asked when they reached the road.

“No, I’ll walk.”

She wanted to walk to get her thinking straight. Always, even as a child, her restless energy had prompted her to action when there was something to be thought out, some decision to be made, but this time the problem itself eluded her. It was a nebulous thing that was no more than an impression at the moment, a vague frustration in the mind to which she could not put a name. It was like setting out on a journey and not being sure of its end, not being quite certain of where one was going.

She turned away, raising her hand to Rory in brief salute. Hamish had not come to see his sister off on her journey to Scoraig, and Christine supposed that they should excuse him because it must be painful for him to think of Jane returning to the old family home as a paid employee of the new laird. He had gone off on a fishing trip which would probably last the remainder of the week, although whether it was after sharks this time or not she did not know. Rory had said, rather sourly, that it was time Hamish was looking for a permanent job instead of sharks, but that had been all. Hamish would no doubt think about a job when the shark fishing was over for another year, which would be at the end of the present month.

She tried to think constructively about Hamish and could not. What would he do when he left the island?

And if he left—

Footsteps hurrying on the path ahead of her arrested her flying thoughts. She had turned in at the stout oaken door in the high stone wall which surrounded Erradale House and was halfway along the shrubbery path when someone approached from the house itself, and wings of a sudden, unnamed fear fluttered in her heart. She hurried forward, aware of a sense of time suspended, of her small world hanging on a word, a gesture, a command.

Agnes Crammond came round the bend ahead without hat or coat and still in her house shoes. She moved like an automaton, catching Christine’s hand in hers.

“What has happened?” Christine asked, her heart beating suffocatingly close against her throat. “Is it—my grandmother?”

Mrs. Crammond could only answer by nodding her head. She was breathless because she had been running, but there was no colour in her face.
“It is that,” she gasped at last. “Another of these nasty strokes and me not knowing what to do for her in case it might be the wrong thing! I’m away for Mirren Lang and hoping to heaven the woman’s in her own house for once!”

“I’d be able to get there quicker, Crammy,” Christine said, torn between the urgency of finding the District Nurse and going back look after her grandmother. “I might be able to pick up Rory with the brake if I went across the fields.” Her heartbeats suddenly seemed to choke her. “Go back to her, Mrs. Crammond,” she pleaded. “Don’t leave her alone, and I’ll be with you as quickly as ever I can. I’ll find Mirren somehow.”

Agnes Crammond looked relieved. Her breathing had become a pain in her chest, sharp and stabbing. She had not run like that for years, and she turned back towards the house with a sigh of relief.

Christine hurried to the boundary wall, thrusting the reluctant, moss-covered door back on its hinges to scan the empty expanse of the road to the Port. Mirren Lang might be somewhere in the village or she might be miles away, in one of the distant crofts on the far side of the glen.

If it was Mirren’s day for the glen her one hope would be to try to contact Doctor Mc
I
lroy on the neighbouring island of Heimra, where he went twice a week to open a surgery and clinic for the islanders.

She ran down the road, her breath coming swiftly between her teeth, almost sobbing her relief as she heard the sound of a car’s engine coming up from the direction of the harbour.

“Rory!” She ran alongside the brake as he pulled up on the narrow road. “Try to find Mirren Lang,” she begged. “They’ll tell you in the village where she is likely to be. It’s—my grandmother. She’s had another seizure, only Mrs. Crammond thinks it’s worse than the last one. I’m going back to the house now. Do what you can, Rory—and be quick!”

He had let out his clutch before she had finished the last sentence, and she stood for a moment staring blindly at the little swirls of dust raised by the wheels on the road. Then she turned and began to run back by the way she had come, through the door in the wall into the cool green depths of the shrubbery where the moss-grown path was still moist and wet in places after the summer rains.

The rambling old house looked shadowy and brooding when she reached it. Silhouetted against the blue wash of the sea and the distant line of the horizon, it seemed to hold all the centuries of MacNeill living imprisoned within its grim walls, yet she could only see it now as her grandmother’s home, the place where Dame Sarah had lived and ruled for so many years.

She found the door standing open and a waiting silence in the hall. Not lingering even to go in search of Mrs. Crammond, she mounted the stairs, two at a time, pausing only when she reached the heavy door of the turret room.

Inside there was the sound of voices—her grandmother’s and someone else, talking slowly in the Gaelic tongue. She knew that it would be Callum come up from the shore at the first news of disaster, and the old man rose from the chair at the bed as she went in.

“Don’t go, Callum,” she said as she passed him. “She may want you to stay.”

“We have said what we wanted to say.” Callum moved, cap in hand, towards the door. “I will be coming back if there is anything you want me to do.”

“Thanks, Callum!” Christine pressed his hand. “Will you tell Mrs. Crammond when you go down that I’ve come back?”

Dame Sarah was lying back among-her pillows, a gentle smile in her eyes.

“Such a fuss!” she said. “Such a fuss about an old woman!” Her speech was very slightly slurred and there was a stiffness about the right side of her face which loosened fear in Christine’s heart again. “Agnes Crammond is getting old and nervous!”

“You’re all right?” Christine asked anxiously, stooping to kiss the wrinkled cheek. “You’ve been doing too much.” Dame Sarah shook her head. She did not attempt to speak again for several minutes, and Christine subsided into the chair beside the bed. After a moment or two Dame Sarah’s eyes fixed themselves on the mirror outside the window which held the image of the glen, as if she would embrace again each well-known detail of the land she loved.
“Callum said you had made me a work-box,” she mentioned unexpectedly. “One made of shells. I used to have one like that long ago.”

“It isn’t quite finished.” Christine half rose to her feet. “It was to be a surprise for your birthday.”

The vividly blue eyes met hers across the white counterpane.

“I’d like to see it,” Dame Sarah said.

Christine nodded. Her heart felt as if it must burst, yet she knew that she must hide her anxiety as best she could till the nurse or the doctor arrived. Fumbling in the cupboard in her own bedroom, she felt the tears stinging at the back of her eyes, but she could not let them fall. She was not ready for this. She could not let her grandmother go!

Clutching the box, she hurried back along the narrow, stone-walled corridor, conscious of a sudden sense of chill as she looked at the bare grey walls and the lofty, timbered arches of the roof-span far above her. Golden September sunshine slanted down from the high, mullioned windows on to the minstrels’ gallery as she crossed it, but it did not seem to touch her. All warmth and light were suddenly remote.

Mrs. Crammond was in the turret room when she got back. The old servant had carried up a tray, but Dame Sarah had waved any nourishment aside. She held out her left hand for the box, her thin, wiry fingers fastening on it eagerly.

“It isn’t finished,” Christine found herself repeating almost stupidly. “There’s quite a lot more to do—”

“Never mind!” Dame Sarah’s eyes were on the delicate shells already glued into place on the lid, on the intricate pattern which set off their beauty to such advantage and the muted, mother-o’-pearl colourings already trapped for ever under a coat of clear varnish. “I can see how it’s shaping.”

Her eyes took on the distant look which Christine always associated with Callum in his moments of prophecy. It was as if she could glimpse the future in the small, half-finished object under her hand, the final effort on her granddaughter’s part-which would complete what she had begun.

After a minute or two she laid the box aside and closed her eyes.

“Maybe she’ll sleep for a while,” Mrs. Crammond said.

“Yes.”

Christine bent over the bed, but Dame Sarah’s eyes remained closed. She was breathing shallowly, but a faint trace of colour had stolen back into her cheeks.

“I’ll sit beside the window, Crammy,” Christine said. “I’ll wait up here for the doctor.”

How long she waited she did not know. It seemed ages since she had met Rory on the road from Port-na-Keal and had watched the little swirls of dust rising from the brake’s wheels as he had reversed and driven away.

When the nurse came at last, she brought a message to say that Doctor Mc
I
lroy was on his way. Someone with a boat anchored in the harbour had gone across to the neighbouring island to fetch him.

Forced to keep her vigil downstairs for the moment, Christine supposed that Rory must have gone back to the Port with the brake to wait there for the doctor, but when the family physician made his appearance shortly after five o’clock it was Hamish who brought him. A flood of relief and gratitude rushed into her heart as she went to meet him. She had thought him halfway across The Minch, but he was here, after all, at the moment when she needed him!

“We had to come back into the Port with engine trouble,” he explained. “We were mooring at the quay when Rory came down with the brake.” He put his arm about her. “I’m sorry about this, Chris—about the old lady, but she
is
old, you know. We must be prepared for this sort of thing...”

She gazed at him, uncomprehending for a moment, but the words of protest that rose to her lips were never uttered. Someone called her from the top of the staircase—Agnes Crammond, with her hands clasped tightly over her black apron and difficult tears struggling in her eyes, and she went slowly towards the old housekeeper up the broad stairs.

That night her grandmother, hard, determined, tender, brave Dame Sarah, died in her sleep.

There was no sign of her going; only a sound as of a little wind that might just have stirred the topmost branches of the pines above Glen Erradale or filled out the sails of a ship riding the dim horizon’s rim.

Slowly, in the first penetrating light of the new day, Christine went back down the staircase to the deserted hall where, less than a week ago, laughter had echoed among the rafters that were now steeped deeply in the greyest shadow.

She stood at the head of the long banqueting table, aware of loss as she had never known it before. Bereft of both parents in early childhood, Dame Sarah had comprised her world, and it was only now that she became fully aware of how wide that world had been made by her grandmother’s decree. She had not been made to feel bound to Croma in any way.

Conscious of a desperate void in her life, she went to the kitchen to make tea. Agnes Crammond was still upstairs in the turret room and the house felt cold and empty, although she had built up the peats in the grate and pale morning sunshine was already flooding in at the high windows.

As she carried a tray back towards the fire she became aware of a movement near the door—someone waiting there.

“Hamish!” she said, laying down the tray and going towards him.

The sense of forlornness had mounted in her heart and she held out her hands to him in the shadowy doorway.

“All right,” he said, taking her in his arms. “Don’t worry any more. Leave me to take charge. I’ll see to everything for you. Just relax and try to get some sleep—now that it’s all over.”

His voice was kind and reassuring and she was so very, very tired.

“Hamish,” she whispered, remembering that he had gone for the doctor, “I’m glad you came back, so glad that you were here when Doctor Mc
I
lroy had to be brought across from Heimra.”

He smiled, not troubling to contradict a wrong impression, and it was many weeks before Christine was to discover that it had been Finlay Sutherland’s boat that had gone across to the other island to bring the doctor back in time.