Prisoner of Love (5 page)

“They’re very attentive,” Laura murmured. “But then, Julius, you must be used to that by now.”

“I suppose so,” he shrugged. “It can be irritating on occasion, though.” He stood watching her in the confined space of the sleeper. “I’ll smoke a last cigarette and give you more room,” he suggested. “We could have flown north and avoided the train journey,” he added, “but I wanted to bring the car. It will let us get about a bit while we’re there.”

He went into the corridor, closing the door behind him, and Laura undressed and washed as quickly as she could. Her heart was beating fast, seeming to drum in unison with the flying wheels as the train thundered on. Then, without a sound, Julius had come back into the compartment. She was unaware of the opening door until she sensed him standing behind her and his hands came down swiftly and possessively on her bare shoulders. He kissed her briefly on the nape of the neck.

“You’re very beautiful, Laura,” he said thickly as he turned her to face him.

CHAPTER
FIVE

Wh
en the sun broke through the blinds they were already in Scotland. There had been only one stop during the night. Laura had been vaguely aware of it; aware, too, of Julius, restless and unsleeping, fumbling with the blind at the narrow window. She had not spoken because he had believed her asleep and because she sensed that he might resent intrusion at that moment. His uneasiness seemed to be more of the spirit than the result of any physical discomfort, and he had not occupied his berth for long.

She dozed and slept again, tired after the excitements of the day before, which seemed to be receding farther and farther into the past with every mile they traveled. The more secure past.

The suggestion troubled her a little as she rose and dressed. Julius had gone, probably to order their breakfast, and she took the opportunity to wash and dress in the confined space while he was away.

Outside the sun was very bright and high hills dominated the horizon. She knew that they were somewhere in Perthshire and a new excitement kept her beside the window. Jagged peaks pierced the sky, high and dark against the morning blue, remote mountain tops of great beauty, with white clouds sailing serenely above them. Sudden bright flashes of loch water gleamed far below the track and were gone, and all sound was muted as the train plunged into the dark green heart of a vast pine forest. The tops of the trees seemed to touch the sky and the mountains vanished, only to reappear again cradling a blue river in a mighty gorge.

They thrust their way through a narrow pass with blue water gleaming beyond it, and Julius came to tell her that they could have breakfast whenever they liked. He was remote again, no longer the passionate lover of the night before, all his ardor veiled behind the mask of the successful physician.

“We’re through the Grampians,” he explained. “We should be coming to Aviemore. This is perhaps the finest scenery you’ll see till we reach the west coast.”

Laura was looking through the wider corridor window.

“The other side was Rob Roy country, wasn’t it?” she asked. “And here—that other book
—The Wolf of Badenoch
—”

“Yes,” Julius said close behind her, “It’s pretty much unchanged, I should think, down through the years.”

Was Dunraven as remote as this? But if it was also as lovely, so full of beauty and silence, she could hardly wait to get there.

At Inverness Julius went to see his car being taken off the train and Laura stood beside a little island of luggage, waiting
.
She drew in deep breaths of the crisp Highland air, filling her lungs with it gratefully after the stuffy atmosphere of the carriages and wondering if they would remain long enough for her to see something of this fair and lovely city on the banks of its wide river with its broad background of distant hills.

“We’ll push on as far as Garve for lunch,” Julius decided as the porters helped him to stack their luggage into the capacious boot of the car. “There’s no point in delay.”

As the deep straths and rugged mountains of the west came steadily nearer, she held her breath in wonder. Never had she seen such scenery; never had she known such utter isolation. They drove for miles after Garve across wild moorland without passing a township of any size, the great rounded shoulders of the hills of Wester Ross shutting them in and crowding close on either side of the narrow road, which Julius told her was the only way to their destination on the distant Atlantic seaboard.

Great rugged scars of rock reared themselves up at intervals and he named them for her—Sgurr Mor and the Beinn Dearg, both over three thousand feet high, dominating the lesser hills with a fierce and haughty pride. And everywhere she looked there were sharp, bright glimpses of loch water and gleaming cascades of waterfalls sliding down the dark faces of the mountains. From a distance they seemed to hang there arrested, like a silver curtain, and over it all lay a silence and a loneliness that were all but tangible.

Laura felt it like a hand gripping her throat for a moment, yet she knew that she was going to love this land of blue water and distant mountains with its still lochs and silent straths and its air of wordless mystery which penetrated deeply to the heart of nameless things.

Her inner excitement grew as they neared the coast. Already the tang of salt was in the air, the presence of the sea very near. Yet the road still made its way through what appeared to be impenetrable forest in places until, at last, it climbed high and the whole Atlantic seaboard lay before them, the fair land of the West, where Vikings had come and conquered long ago.

A vast sea loch bit into the land far beneath them, blue and fair and studded with little islands, and the hills above it were red. Their higher slopes were almost bare of vegetation and they plunged down steeply into a deep chasm.

“Corryhalloch,” Julius said. “It’s a grim sort of place. I believe the Gaelic name means the Ugly Corrie. It reveals, more than any other place I know, the utter unexpectedness of these hills.”

A small shudder ran through Laura as she looked, something cold and intimidating, born of fear, perhaps, or a sudden uncertainty, but in the next moment they were slipping across the ravine by an attractive bridge and the thunder of a splendid waterfall was in their ears.

“Please, Julius, stop!” she cried impulsively.

The river was high and the water came down in a great overpowering surge, slipping over the smooth rounded hollows that gave the falls their name.

“
Easan na Miasaich
—the Place of Platters!” Julius translated for her. “When there is less water you can see the shallow, platelike hollows worn by the falls in the rock.”

Laura was surprised at his knowledge of a language that had little significance south of the Highland Line.

“Have you lived here long, Julius?” she asked, thinking how little she really knew about him or his immediate past.

“You’re wondering about my command of the Gaelic,” he smiled as they stood above the dark pool where the falls dropped into immeasurable depth. “I learned that for convenience’ sake. The people up here speak it as their first language, and I did not want to feel that they could discuss me fairly openly without my being able to understand what they said.”

“Shall we go on?” she asked, suppressing something that was like a shiver. “I know you’re anxious to get home, Julius.”

He made no answer to that, and she forced herself to look away from the nearer, darker hills across the magnificent panorama of the Fannich Deer Forest to the mountains of white quartz which rose, beckoning, to the south.

They drove on, through scattered townships kneeling close to the vividly blue water of narrow Loch Broom, through Ullapool, which had surely stepped straight out of a Norse saga, and beyond it, northwards into the void.

When they finally turned off the coast road there was little beyond them but sea and sky. They wound along a narrow track out on to what appeared to be a broad promontory, like the prow of a ship cleaving its way through the gray blue Atlantic swell, and here there were no houses. Bays and tiny, isolated sea lochs bit into the land, all remote and curiously detached.

Other islands rose and took shape in the sea before them; Tanera Mor and the red skerries lying farther out on the blue bosom of the North Minch, islands that caught at her heart because of their loveliness and their greenness under the sun.

“Have we far to go, Julius?” she asked.

“Not very far.” He turned to look at her with a faint smile. “I warned you about our seclusion,” he pointed out.

“Yes,” she said uncertainly, and then more warmly: “I’ve never seen anything more beautiful, Julius. It has a wonderful grandeur. But words aren’t any good, are they? One has to
feel
a place like this and keep some of it to oneself.”

She hesitated,
confused a little by the revelation and hardly surprised when he said:

“That’s what brings me back, time and time again. I came here by accident about six years ago, on a fishing holiday. A patient I had in London offered me the use of his lodge for a couple of weeks and that was when I first discovered Dunraven. The Fortress of the Raven!” he mused slowly, braking the car as they rounded a dark outcrop of rock in the breast of a hill. “There it is—at last!”

Laura looked down from their vantage point and knew that she could not have imagined such a change of scene. There had been wildness back along the road over which they had traveled, dark, harsh corries out of which all light had been excluded by the beetling escarpments that rose on either side, but here the great red sandstone massif, which rose, towering, behind them seemed to have thrust a dark tentacle of rock right down into the sea, where it had been gashed into the deep gully of a hidden loch.

Secret and remote, the water lay blackly in deepest shadow, yet far in the distance Laura could see the gleam of a white-sanded bay and the shimmer of green islands riding the surf in full sunlight. Were they the same islands, she wondered, that she had seen before they had rounded the headland?

Before Julius could point out the house to her she looked down and saw it. A grim old castellated tower, built within the gray walls of a former fortress, it stood out perhaps three hundred yards from the shore, isolated on a tiny islet, with no trees anywhere near it to give it shelter and its stern face turned toward the sea.

She was aware of Julius watching her closely, waiting for her reaction.

“Well,” he asked, “what do you think of Dunraven?”

Laura took a full minute to answer him, her breath held, her heart thumping madly against her ribs.

“I don’t know, Julius,” she said. “I don’t know.
”

He let in his clutch and the car slipped forward down the precipitous incline to the shore.

As they drew nearer Laura saw that the house was bigger than she had thought. It was a substantial fortress, with deeply embrasured windows and a stout central tower rising above the original, ruined walls of a former castle, and on the west face the whole edifice seemed to rise sheer from the sea. It looked as if it had grown out of the rock itself, but on the eastern and more sheltered side it was linked by a substantial causeway to the land.

It was the causeway that gave the house a kindlier aspect, Laura thought. At least it was no longer remotely isolated on an island of its own. The causeway had been recently repaired and the bridge that linked it with the island was firm and strong.

As Julius drove across it she looked back toward the narrow head of the glen down which they had come, and almost with relief she saw sunlight lying gently on the broad hills. In the afternoon, as the sun dipped slowly toward the western horizon, the whole glen would be full of light.

“We are expected,” Julius said as they drew up before a massive stone porchway beyond which a heavy iron-studded door lay wide open. “Mrs. Finlayson must have seen us coming over the hill.”

Feeling suddenly shy and rather nervous at this first meeting with the domestic staff who had probably known and worked for Julius’s first wife, Laura got out of the car and stood hesitating on the broad stone step. A light wind from the sea came up and blew coldly against her cheek, stirring her hair across her brow, but she had scarcely time to smooth it into place before a tall woman in a gray knitted dress came swiftly toward her out of the shadows.

That first meeting with Morag Finlayson was to stand out in Laura’s memory for all time. She was a handsome woman, tall and very fair, with the evidence of her Norse ancestry in her direct blue eyes and the proud carriage of her head. There was nothing of servility in her manner. She greeted Julius with quiet dignity, waiting for him to present her to his wife.

“Mrs. Finlayson will take care of you, Laura,” Julius said. “She has managed Dunraven admirably for the past few years and looks after the rest of the staff for me. If there is anything you want you must ask her.” Laura smiled into Morag Finlayson’s blue eyes, seeing them slightly watchful for a moment before they cleared and their owner said, in the wonderfully gentle tone of the Celt:

“I would be welcoming you home, ma’am. My wish is that you will find great happiness here at Dunraven.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Finlayson,” Laura said, wishing that she did not feel that vague suggestion of reserve hovering in the atmosphere between them, as if Morag found it difficult to give her all her allegiance right away. “We’ve had rather a long journey and I would like to wash and change. After that,” she suggested with a smile that lit her eyes and illuminated her whole face with a youthful eagerness, “I want to see everything—all over the island!”

She fancied that Morag looked sharply in Julius’s direction as she turned away, but she could not quite be sure.

“Shall I help you with the luggage?
”

“Niall will do that.” A tall, dark-visaged youth ambled into view round the end of the house and he threw an instruction to him in Gaelic. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking some of these people are half-witted,” he warned as he followed Laura into the-house. “They can be as astute as the very devil when it suits them, and they always know what they want. They'll serve you so long as you treat them with a certain amount of equality, but fundamentally they prefer to be their own masters, no matter how near to the starvation line it may bring them.”

“But surely in a place like this there’s nothing very much for them to do?” Laura suggested.

“There’s the fishing—lobster fishing mostly—and if they can scrape a bare existence from the family croft they prefer it that way. You have to know the art of employing them. I confess,” he added abruptly, “that I find it difficult at times.”

Mrs. Finlayson followed them in and led the way up the broad pine staircase and Laura climbed it behind her, wondering if Helene Behar had found it difficult to live here, far from London and the sort of life she had known. But perhaps Helene hadn’t come from London. Perhaps this had been her own country, the place where she had lived and died. Julius had spoken so little of his first marriage. It seemed something in the past that he wanted to forget.

When the housekeeper opened the door of a large bedroom overlooking the loch, Julius followed them in.