Prisoner of Love (18 page)

He pointed then, holding her arm in a vicelike grip, and she saw his face, curiously distorted for a moment as his strange dark eyes peered through the driving rain. Somehow she knew in that moment that Callum could see farther than any of them in such conditions, and the look on his face made her afraid.

“The kerries!” he shouted. “The seal rock—”

He turned savagely toward the cockpit, crawling along the deck as Laura crouched beside the wet, reefed sail, holding on with all her strength and driven to her knees now because it was impossible to stand; all the while straining, straining to see beyond that awful pall of spume and rain.

The end came suddenly, almost quietly. At one moment there was nothing but an unbroken pall of grayness with all the fury of the storm loose above it; in the next she saw a vicious line of white juts, resembling bared teeth, breaking the sea ahead of them.

“The skerries!”

She was never quite sure whether she had shouted the warning or if the words had stuck somewhere in her throat. In any case, neither Julius nor anyone else could have heard her in such a storm. The gale seemed to lift her voice and throw it back at her with a mocking laugh as
Northern Bird
lurched violently to starboard. The next wave caught the boat directly. She seemed to hesitate, quiver, and plunge forward and upward, and then there was a horrible grinding sound that overlaid the wind. The engines thrashed on for a moment and died with a final shudder. They were on the reef.

A black confusion held Laura paralyzed for a second before she became conscious of Blair struggling along the deck toward her.

“The dinghy,” he yelled. “Get back to the dinghy. It’s our only hope—
”

She struggled with him toward the davits.
Northern Bird
had gone over on her side, and every savage gust buffeted her afresh. In no time the tide would pull her back off the rocks and the hungry sea would claim her.

The dinghy hung drunkenly from one running block; the other had been torn away. Blair wrenched at it savagely and somewhere behind them Laura heard Callum’s voice.

“Get Lance!” Blair’s swift command came above the howling of the wind. “He’s down below—”

Laura’s heart seemed to miss a beat as she wondered how badly the cabins and engine room were flooded, but Callum had already disappeared and Blair was helping her into the dinghy.

It looked as if it would not survive for more than a second in that boiling maelstrom of churning sea, but she tumbled in and lay crouched on the heaving floorboards, waiting for the others to come. The dinghy held five normally, but in a sea like this
...

She thrust the ugly thought from her, struggling with the heavy tarpaulin Blair had flung in after her. It would be all the shelter they would have till they reached the shore.

“You’ll have to hold on, Laura,” Blair yelled. “I’m going back. Something has happened down there—”

She knew that he had little more than a second or two. Already
Northern Bird
was slipping, inch by inch, from the savage rock that had
torn the bottom out of her; already she was listing dangerously, the waves breaking over her sloping deck. The boom had broken away and the slashed remnants of the mainsail lifted on the water like a white shroud.

Laura held on to the davit ropes with no other thought in her mind but her brother’s safety. Lance must not die like this, trapped down there in the cabin by the relentless pressure of an angry sea. There was Blair—and Callum—to bring him up.

The dinghy rose and fell with the surge of the waves against the yacht’s side and she could think of nothing now but the desperate effort she must make to hold on. Her hands were numb to the point where they felt detached from her body, and the rain blinded her. Seconds that seemed hours went by before she saw the huddled figures on the deck above her, before she heard Blair shout:

“He’s unconscious. You’ll have to watch his head when we lower him.”

She could do nothing to help except go on clinging to the davit in a last desperate effort to steady the dinghy as Lance was lowered in beside her. She could see Callum up on
Northern Birds
deck with Blair, and then
Northern Bird
herself seemed to lurch and sway like a drunken thing.

There was a moment when the wind appeared to drop altogether and the sea stood arrested, waiting to receive her, and then she began to slip slowly, gracefully back off the reef.

Blair jumped into the dinghy and Callum dived from the yacht’s deck into the waves. Laura saw Blair struggling with the outboard motor, its weight against him as he swung it into place over the stern, and then he turned to look for Callum. The outboard sputtered into life and pulled away as
Northern Bird
went down, steadily, proudly, into the waves.

They could see Callum’s head as he began to swim, wet and dark as a seal’s, and suddenly they knew that he had struck out in the opposite direction. When they looked again he had gone.

Blair circled twice, and then, with a grim mouth and darkly unfathomable eyes, he set the dinghy’s nose resolutely toward the shore.

“Julius—?” Laura asked in a small, harsh voice while she bent over her unconscious brother.

“He was in the yacht,” Blair told her without emotion. “Still in the cockpit. He was dead. There was a gash on his head where he had hit something as he fell, perhaps—” He paused for a moment, looking steadily ahead. “Callum had taken over at the tiller, but it was too late.”

She did not ask Blair if he thought that Callum had killed Julius, but she again recalled the slaughtered seal and Callum’s angry, contorted face.

There seemed nothing to think about after that but Lance. She huddled beside him under the tarpaulin and prayed that he would not die. Congealed blood matted the thick thatch of hair which had grown so long during the holidays, and his face was pale and pinched-looking about the nostrils. She was certain they would reach the shore now. The dinghy bounced like a cork, but the gallant little motor sputtered on, driving them slowly but surely ahead.

When they reached the inner headland and passed beyond it, the wind was suddenly cut off. Blair throttled back the outboard and t
h
ey drifted gently to shore.

He went right in behind the island, to the sheltered bay where
Northern Bird
had stood all winter, poised above the
machar,
waiting for the day when she would reach the sea again.

Dunraven stood darkly above them, silhouetted against the storm-wracked sky, and Morag came running at the sound of the outboard.

The keel grated on firm sand, and it was only then, perhaps, that Laura felt the full impact of the last half hour. Her legs felt as if they must give way under her, and her lips trembled as she tried to answer Morag’s questions.

Blair was down on his knees, examining Lance, and when he stood up his mouth was grim.

“We’ll have to make some sort of stretcher,” he said. “It’s going to be dangerous to move him even this short distance.”

Laura stood quite still, frozen into a helpless sort of immobility by the knowledge that Lance was seriously injured. Whatever had happened when the yacht struck the reef, it had resulted in the ugly gash on her brother's head, which appeared to be about four inches long and very deep. He had probably still been in the engine room and had struck some sharp obstacle as he fell.

Tears began to gather in her eyes, but she brushed them swiftly away.

Blair came back across the sand, carrying a deck chair. It was the best he could do, and they lifted Lance on to it, covering him with Morag’s shawl.

Even in this comparatively sheltered spot, it was a struggle to reach the house with their burden against the wind. They laid Lance down in the hall and Morag rushed to boil water while Blair went over him carefully, inch by inch.

Laura watched the sure, steady surgeon’s hands, probing gently, leaving nothing to conjecture or chance, and after a second or two Blair straightened and looked at her.

"There seems to be nothing else,” he said, “apart from the wound in the head.”

His tone turned her blood to ice.

“You mean—could it be fatal?” she asked bleakly.

“
It’s a hospital job,” he told her, because he knew that she wanted the truth.

“And there isn’t that sort of hospital within miles," she said in a frozen whisper. “That’s what you’re trying to tell me, Blair, isn’t it? It’s a specialist’s job.”

He looked away from her agonized eyes.

“I’m afraid so,
”
he said. “There’s considerable pressure—probably from a bone fracture. It would be more than dangerous to move him, and certainly we can’t take him any distance.”

Laura continued to look at him as if she did not understand, and then she said with the utmost conviction:

“You can do it, Blair. I’ll help—and Morag. There’s no other way.” She saw him hesitate, doubting himself for an instant, but her eyes continued to hold his, willing him to do this thing—for her.

“There are instruments in Julius’s case,
”
she told him calmly. “All you will need. I’ll sterilize them while you and Morag get the kitchen ready. We’ve got plenty of hot-water bottles and blankets, and—and—”

Her voice trailed off as she looked up at him. They had probably both thought about the anesthetic at the same time, but now it was Blair who was determined to sweep every obstacle from their path.

“We’ll find something,” he said. “We can’t afford to waste a lot of time. Seconds could be precious at this stage.”

He was bending over Lance again, his lean dark face animated by the challenge Laura had thrust at him, strengthened by it and guided as he used to be by a very simple faith. He had rarely, if ever, felt that he worked entirely alone.

For the next two hours the atmosphere in the big, stone-flagged kitchen at Dunraven remained electric. After Blair had given Lance the first injection, Laura kept her eyes firmly riveted on his hands, but there was no hesitation there. She hadn
’
t really expected it. She had been sure from the beginning that he could do this thing, but when it was all over and the adhesive bandages were in place on the shaven area of her brother’s head, she felt as if a dreadful, crushing weight had been lifted too suddenly from her shoulders.

The relief of freedom stunned her for a moment and then she collapsed into Morag’s arms with a long-drawn-out sigh.

“
It’s over,” she murmured foolishly. “Over—”

Blair lifted her and carried her out of the room.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“
Seven weeks!” Lance mused, stretching out full length in the sun. “It's been a super holiday!”

“By the look of you,” Blair commented, “it’s high time you were back at school, my lad! You’ll soon not be able to spell cat!”

“If we had another boat,” Lance suggested dreamily, ignoring the remark, “we could stay up here all the summer.”

“All your summer holidays, perhaps,” Blair amended with a grin. “Would it be too much to ask you to stand up so that I can check your reflexes?”

“Not at all,” Lance agreed politely. “I can stand up to anything now.”

“Even to going back to school? Well, well!” Blair smiled. “Times change!”

“Why do you say that?” Lance asked as Blair tapped professionally here and there. “Didn’t you like school much?
”

“Not a lot,” Blair admitted, concentrating on something else. “You’re as fit as a fiddle!”

“You sound surprised.”

Blair did not answer that. He was smiling very quietly to himself. “Does Laura know you’re coming south with me tomorrow?” Lance asked after a pause.

“I don’t think so.” Blair still appeared to be concentrating on something apart from the immediate future. “I may tell her this evening.”

“After I’ve been packed off to bed at seven o’clock ‘because I’m still something of an invalid
’
,” Lance grumbled.

“I don’t think that excuse is going to wear very much longer,” Laura said as she came up behind them. “I didn’t see you come down, Blair,” she added. “How do the others feel about the lodge?”

“They agree that there isn’t much point in their staying on,” he told her, “although they were generous enough to say that I had been looking after them nearly as well as Julius could have done. I suppose they’re right about not staying on,” he added. “The cure has worked for most of them.”

“And you?” she asked.

“Yes,” he agreed. “It has worked for me, too.”

She hadn’t exactly meant that. His cure was obvious. What she wanted to know was what he was going to do about the future. His own future. Perhaps she should have put it that way, she thought, because she was not at all sure that it involved her. Blair had been curiously silent and engrossed during these long weeks of Lance’s recuperation. He had remained at the lodge, treating Julius’s patients and visiting Dunraven every day to see Lance, but he had not spoken about the days ahead.

Tonight, however, she felt that she must ask him what he meant to do. She had decided to sell Dunraven because it held nothing for her but memories of Julius, but the lodge was a different matter. If Blair wished to come there from time to time, she would rent it to him. She knew that he had been happy up there and that the MacKellars were now his very good friends.

When they were alone at last, she said:

“I’ve made up my mind to sell Dunraven, Blair.”

He looked down at her and nodded.

“I think you’re wise,” he agreed as they walked toward the open door. “It’s very remote.”

“I’d like to keep the lodge,” she said in a rather unsteady voice. “In some ways I’ve been happy here—happier than I’ve ever been in all my life before. I—don’t want to lose it, and—there would be the MacKellars to come back to—if you didn’t want to use the lodge.”

He looked at her, surprised.

“I didn't know you were offering me that chance,” he said slowly, “but I have to find my feet first, Laura. I have to go back to London and see how things are going to work out for me there.”

“You know they’ll work out!” she said swiftly, turning to face him as they came to the terrace edge. “You haven’t any real doubt about that now, Blair.”

“No,” he said, looking at her with a deep tenderness in his eyes that she could no longer mistake for anything but love. “You have done that for me, Laura. You have given me back my faith in myself.”

“It would have come. Gradually, perhaps, but it would have come back in the end,” she said steadily. “You would never have gone completely under, Blair.”

“Once I came very near to it,” he said. “But why remember that now?” He held out his hands and she went swiftly into his arms. “Laurie!” he said, caressing her hair. “Laurie! If only I could believe myself worthy of your love!”

“Worthy?” She drew back a little way to look at him. “Worthy!” she repeated. “Don’t make the mistake I made, Blair. Only love is worthy of love.”

“Yes,” he said, “I think I can see that now.” When he kissed her his lips were firm and strong on hers. “I think, too, that I can go on with my work—on from here!”

“Of course you can! This is only the beginning. You’ve done a wonderful job against odds.” Suddenly her voice was not quite steady. “Lance owes his life to you, Blair. It’s the first step on the way ahead.”

He held her very close, looking toward the future with eyes that were steadily assured.

“We
’
ll walk it together, Laura,” he said, “whatever happens!”