Land of Heart's Desire (4 page)

Christine looked across the turret room into Dame Sarah’s searching blue eyes and knew that she had to stay.

“Here you are, at last!” Dame Sarah said.

The eagle profile, turned from the light, was no longer hard. Her grandmother smiled at her and held out both her hands, although she did not attempt to rise unaided from her chair. Christine ran forward and bent over her.

“Grandma!” she chided softly. “You ought to have let them tell me.”

“Tell you what, my child?” For a moment the fierce old eyes had been frankly suspicious. “That I was dying? That I had no more life left in me than an old, maimed bat? Well, it isn’t true. I’m tied to my chair, maybe, but it’s only my poor, silly legs that have let me down. My hand’s still as steady on the tiller as it always was, and I see all I need to see, up here in my tower!”

Christine laughed, kissing her with the utmost relief.

“You
are
still the same!” she said. “You always will be. What does the doctor really say about you?”

“He says I’ve got hypertensive encephalopathy, whatever that might be, and I’m at no great pains to be finding out. I’m eighty-five years of age and I’ve lived my life. What I die of doesn’t really matter. What does matter,” Dame Sarah added after a pause, “is Erradale. What we are going to do about it.”

Aware of reluctance to discuss Erradale and the future quite so soon, Christine crossed to the window to look out. The deep stone embrasure restricted the view to a narrow limit of hill and moor, but a mirror had been fixed at an angle outside on the grey stone wall so that the full length of the road and part of the glen itself were there to be seen by eyes that were still as sharply observant as an eagle’s.

“Rory fixed it for me,” her grandmother told her. “He knew how restricted I felt sitting up here on my own all day long. Now I can see everything,” she added with satisfaction. “All that goes on up and down the glen. When Callum comes up from the shore I can see him, too.” She sighed a little. “Callum is getting to be an old man, I’m afraid. He tells me he is seventy-five.”

“Not old by your standards!” Christine pointed out. “Has he still got the Second Sight?”

She had put the question lightly before she remembered that these things were not treated with scorn in the Isles. Living close to nature as they did, it was taken for granted by the island people that the odd seer still existed among them, the gifted person, beloved of the Nameless Ones, who had the power of prophecy bestowed upon them at birth.

Such a one was Callum of the Second Sight, her grandmother’s oldest and most faithful retainer, who lived on the shore beneath her castle wall and still thought of her as the Superior, although the old, feudal title had died with disuse long ago.

“I would say so,” Dame Sarah returned briskly. “It is a thing that remains with a person all his life, added to by the years because of the experience they bring, no doubt, maturing as all things mature, with time.” She sat for a moment in reflective silence. “Yes,” she said at last, “Callum is still the same, staunch and true as ever he was!”

“He never married,” Christine mused. “I wonder why?”

A dull, almost painful colour rose into the old lady’s cheeks.

“It is not a thing we are to be asking,” she said decisively. “Callum will have his own reasons, best known to himself. He assures me he is happy enough as he is.”

Happy to go on serving you, Christine thought with a sudden flash of insight, to the end of his days. That was loyalty, faith, trust—all three combined. And perhaps it was also love, the sort of love that Callum could offer from afar.

“I must go and see him,” she said, “as soon as ever I can.”

“Yes, go,” Dame Sarah agreed. “Callum has been waiting for you to come back—expecting you.”

Slowly Christine turned from the window.

“Expecting me to stay?” she said. “That’s what you all expect of me. That is what you wish.”

Dame Sarah shifted in her chair, her hands, oddly gnarled and claw-like, gripping the carved wooden arms.

“You are to make your own decision,” she said. “But first of all I have to tell you the truth. There is little money left. What I had of my own went into the estate long ago, and two lots of death duties have done the rest. I’ve managed to keep our heads above water for the past ten years, but only just. Erradale is not the place it was. The young people—the people we need—have been slowly leaving the island since the war. Soon there will be no one left but folk like Callum and me—and Rory. I’ve taken Rory on as our factor because I know what the island means to him, but we can’t really afford to keep him. Soon we may not even be able to afford to live here, in this house.”

Christine said: “Surely, oh, surely that needn’t happen?”

“It has happened at Ardtornish,” Dame Sarah pointed out. “There’s a stranger there in the Nicholsons’ old home. It may well be he will not stay for very long, but the fact remains that the Nicholsons have had to go. ‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new’,” she quoted with a shake of her head. “Maybe if there had been stronger stuff in the Nicholsons they could have held out a little longer, but that’s not for me to say. I’m sorry for them; sorry for Rory and Jane, and I suppose I’m sorry for Hamish, too. He never seemed to have the sense of belonging that the other two had. It’s so strong in Rory, and Jane would do anything to get back to Ardtornish. I think she’d even go so far as to marry this man from Canada, if he’s the marrying kind.”

Christine felt the deep colour of painful embarrassment stealing into her cheeks.

“Have you met him?” she asked, wondering if the Canadian could have been on the island before.

“Not yet,” Dame Sarah said. “He’s had an agent at Ardtornish ever since he bought it, a puppet of a man who doesn’t know his job and never will. Rory and he have had one or two brushes over straying cattle and rights of way and that sort of thing, and, of course, I’ve refused to see the fellow.”

It was almost as if she had said that she had refused the Ardtornish factor an audience. In some ways, Christine mused, her grandmother was still the Grand Dame of former years, the absolute Superior of the island who held its fate securely in her firm old hands, determined that no stranger should wrest her power from her, no matter how hard he might try.

Yet, even as she acknowledged these things to herself, she was aware of a tension in the atmosphere, a sense of conflict which went deeper than the natural sorrow at a neighbour’s loss. If the old order had changed for Ardtornish, it seemed to be changing, too, for Erradale. The fact that they had no money—or next to none—had come as a profound shock to her because it had always seemed in the past that there was plenty of everything at Erradale, especially money. Her own education had been an expensive one, and Dame Sarah had not quibbled about extending it to Paris for two years. There had been no hint that such a concession had involved hardship or even momentary embarrassment, and she had accepted it all as the natural order of things. To ask and be given. Nothing—nothing before this moment—had ever been demanded in return.

“Well, there it. is!” Dame Sarah said. “A poor enough heritage in some ways, but it is yours for what it is worth. If you feel that you do not want to accept it in this form, with all its burdens and the undoubtedly heavy demands it will make upon your life, we can sell it—as the Nicholsons have done.”

Her voice had scarcely altered from its normal tone. She would not show her emotion nor seek to influence Christine’s choice in any way, but her hands, clasped in her lap, tightened their grip on each other as she waited.

“I have had an offer,” she said at last. “A good offer for our half of the island.”

Christine swallowed hard. She had no doubt from whom her grandmother’s offer had come. Almost as if his voice had echoed mockingly in her ears, she heard the Canadian’s cool, incisive tones as he told her that he hoped to own all the neighbouring land one day. One day very soon. That, he had said, would surely solve his problem.

Her mouth hardened and her grey eyes grew stormy as she looked beyond Dame Sarah’s head to the outside wall where the whole deep glen of Erradale lay captured in the shining glass of the mirror which Rory Nicholson had fixed there.

“It’s ours!” she said emphatically. “It’s MacNeill land, and we’re going to keep it.”

She turned, meeting her grandmother’s questioning gaze.

“Do you want to stay?” Dame Sarah asked.

“I am going to stay,” she said.

CHAPTER II

For
the next three days Christine roamed the glen and climbed on to the moor, putting the problem of her future behind her while she renewed old friendships with her grandmother’s tenants and let all the glorious freedom of the island seep into her blood again.

It was early August and the heather was coming into bloom, while all about her the sea was clear and green with the yellow weed rising and falling against the rocks like a living, breathing thing. Far out on the wide blue sea of the Hebrides the triangular dorsal fins of a shoal of sharks rode like distant sails in line astern, and always above her echoed the cry of the sea birds, kittiwakes and divers and cormorants squabbling on the cliff or hobbling after the long-legged herons as they fished placidly along the shore.

Christine never tired of watching the birds. Her own part of the island was a sanctuary for them and in Little Loch Erradale the seals came to bring up their young. Fat baby seals frolicked and floundered in the shallow green tide, undisturbed, and the sleek dark cows watched them confidently and with pride. They knew that their young were safe, for this had been their hidden breeding-ground for years. The seals were part of Loch Erradale, an integral part, just as she herself was part of the island, Christine thought, coming down the winding white roadway from the moor. When the time came she would take up her heritage.

If something suggested that time to be now, she did not pursue the thought. Her grandmother was still alive, and Dame Sarah seemed to have taken on a fresh lease of
life since
her return. She had no idea how desperate the situation was or how soon she was to be faced with complete responsibility. All that mattered for the moment was that life was very pleasant. She was discovering again something that had long been lost to her. The spell of the Islands was upon, her and she did not want to think.

As she breasted the final rise before Erradale House came into view she picked out the path of the bi-weekly steamer as it rounded the north end of Croma, trailing its streamer of white wake behind it, and suddenly it seemed far more than three days since she had disembarked on the grey quayside at Port-na-Keal. It seemed an age in which she had remained poised on the threshold of the future, waiting, as if she were almost reluctant to step across.

Nearly at her destination, she was about to turn in between the decrepit gateposts of Erradale House when the sound of a horse’s hoofs rang sharply on the rough metalled road behind her. She had not seen anyone on the moor and she turned in surprise to be confronted by the last person she expected to meet.

Her companion of the voyage from Oban was riding confidently and deliberately towards her.

To escape was her first impulse. She did not want to speak to this man, she told herself. He was an impostor, an interloper, a usurper, a person to whom money and possession were the be-all and end-all of existence, a man who could speak of the buying and selling of people’s homes with no more concern than if he had been discussing the sort of cattle she had seen roaming in a vast, rich herd on the Ardtornish side of the ford. He had everything he needed at Ardtornish, everything that money could buy, yet he wanted Erradale, too.

The whole island. No more, no less. He had come up against a natural opposition and his ruthless answer was the purchase of her home!

She stiffened as their eyes met and her head was held unconsciously high as she waited for him to speak.

The Canadian dismounted and came towards her.

“So we meet again?” he observed, taking off the wide-brimmed hat which he had found so inconvenient on the deck of the steamer.

It only accentuated his unsuitability for his present role, Christine thought angrily, annoyed by a sudden unmistakable confusion which sent the colour flying into her cheeks in a hot wave. It might be all very well for the Canadian prairies—necessary, in fact—but here, on Croma, it was an affectation, worn no doubt to single him out from the natives, who had more to do than ride a horse across the moors on a bright August day. Horses were practically unknown on the Islands, anyway, and this one could only have been brought in for its master’s pleasure. It was an obvious thoroughbred, and she tried not to remember how well and how naturally the man had sat in the saddle, as if horse and rider were really one.

“It was not my intention that we should meet,” she told him with icy deliberation, standing squarely in his path to block his way to the house.

“So it would seem.” He looked down at her, half amused, half puzzled by her reception of him, so that the flush deepened in her cheeks. “Why didn’t you tell me that you lived here when we met on the boat?” he asked. “It would have been only, courteous, to say the least of it.”

“At first,” she returned briefly, “I could not imagine that it concerned either of us where the other lived. I had no idea that you had bought the Nicholsons’ home and were hoping to buy mine.”

He looked grave for a moment, the green eyes narrowing.

“I was honest enough about it,” he reminded her. “Or, at least, I thought I was being honest. You did not tell me that you were bound for Croma and I didn’t think to ask. You seemed to me to. belong to the Islands as a whole, not to one particular island.”

“But now you know,” she said, “that I belong on Croma, that, whatever happens, this is my home.”

Her final decision about staying on Croma had been instantaneous. This man had made it a challenge. She could not allow him to defeat her, not when he had already defeated the Nicholsons.

She supposed that he was on his way to visit her grandmother with just that end in view, with his cheque-
book in
his pocket, no doubt, and it would give her the greatest pleasure in the world to stop him.

“I don’t suppose for one moment that you have come to pay a social call, Mr.—”

“Why not?” he queried. “And the name, by the way, is Sutherland—Finlay Sutherland.” He made her an odd little bow, half mocking, half amused. “I expect you already know that, though. You seem to have gone into my credentials pretty thoroughly since we last met.”

“I know about you,” she agreed, her lips quivering because, in some odd way, he seemed to have gained the upper hand of the situation without a great deal of trouble. She had felt it to be wholly in her favour, but now she was not so sure. “I know that you have offered my grandmother a tempting sum for Erradale,” she rushed on hotly, “but I can save you a journey. We are not going to sell, Mr. Sutherland. We never had any intention of selling. Erradale is our home.”

He said, with faint amusement in his voice:

“You consider me the complete ogre, don’t you? Not even the fact that Erradale was put tentatively on the market is an extenuating circumstance, I gather?”

“No,” she told him bluntly. “Nothing could excuse your new-world brashness, Mr. Sutherland. The fact that my grandmother was—in strained circumstances could only have been known to a very few people locally, so that I can’t even begin to guess how you came to hear about it. But I can give you our answer, and I am trying to do just that.”

She took hold of the great iron gate and would have attempted to close it between them, but it had been so long in disuse that it refused to move. Embedded in the weeds and gravel at the edge of the drive, it had probably not been closed for years. Few callers had ever been barred from Erradale, until now.

Finlay Sutherland smiled as he rested a hand on the reluctant gate.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to force my way in. For your information, though, I hadn’t come up here post-haste, with my cheque-book in my hand.” His smile deepened. “It was something of a social call, as a matter of fact,” he added wryly, “but now I guess I know where we stand.”

Christine felt suddenly nonplussed and almost guilty as she looked back into the green eyes. They held disappointment and a certain desire for retaliation, yet she knew that he considered the incident closed. He continued to look at her for a moment longer before he turned back towards his mount, whose sensitive ears were suddenly pricked at the approach of a stranger.

Someone was coming swiftly towards them from the direction of the house, a tall, fair man in a dark kilt with an air of power and conquest about him which belied the fact that he was the dispossessed laird of Ardtornish.

“Hamish!” Christine cried, and all her relief and surprise were in her voice. “Where
have
you come from?”

Hamish Nicholson gave her companion the briefest of glances as he took both her trembling hands in his.

“From your ancestral stronghold, Fair Lady!” he answered. “I’ve just come in with the mail to wish you a happy birthday—when it comes!”

Christine did not know how to answer him. The shock of his return, the utter unexpectedness of seeing him there in that moment, made words impossible. She could only stare at him and marvel while her heart beat suffocatingly close against her throat and the old fascination held her in thrall again.

Hamish looked magnificent standing there with the rugged background of the hills behind him and the wind in his hair! It had always been like this, as far back as she could remember, although Hamish had never looked like this nor spoken to her in quite this way before. He had teased her and laughed at her seriousness, but in so many ways he had always been just beyond her reach. The years which separated them in age had done nothing to help her to forget him, but now they did not seem nearly so formidable a barrier as they had done in the past. The gulf between twenty and thirty was not nearly so deep as the chasm which had yawned at her feet when she had been sixteen and he twenty-six, and the past two years had helped her.

Swiftly she wondered if she had begged to go to Paris with the hope in her heart that she might meet Hamish there or even run into him in London when she returned as a more sophisticated product of the world in which he moved. But, strangely enough, here they were meeting on the old, familiar ground, meeting at last on Croma, where they both belonged!

“You must have had a special invitation!” she laughed. “The official ones are not out yet.”

“I believe I invited myself,” he admitted shamelessly, his vivid blue eyes lingering with some surprise on her tawny hair. “I found myself in Edinburgh, on business, and Croma was not so far away.”

Had he come to Edinburgh to sign away his land, finally and irrevocably? She turned, remembering Finlay Sutherland for the first time, aware that Hamish would not know who he was and desperately embarrassed at. the thought of having to introduce them.

The Canadian had gone, however. While she had been swept back into the past, while she had greeted Hamish with every pulse in her body beating madly in response to an old infatuation, the new laird of Ardtornish had mounted his horse and rode away.

“He’s gone!” she exclaimed, and Hamish looked at her with the one-sided smile that was part of his charm and asked:

“Does it matter so much? You see, I have a fairly good idea who he is.”

All her sympathy, all the resentment she felt against the fate which had left him so cruelly dispossessed, welled up to express itself in eager words.

“I’m so sorry, Hamish!” she apologized. “Sorry that this had to happen on your first day on Croma. And I’m glad that I didn’t have to introduce you to Finlay Sutherland.”

He shrugged indifferently.

“You needn’t have worried,” he told her. “I shall have to meet him some time or other. One can’t live on an island as small as Croma and not come up against—one’s neighbours.”

“Then—you’re going to stay?” Her heartbeats quickened and her grey eyes shone. “Are you, Hamish? Are you really going to stay?”

He smiled at her.

“For the time being,” he agreed, looking about him with an expectant gleam in his eyes. “The sale of Ardtornish has enabled me to pay my debts with a sufficient margin left over for me to indulge a whim or two,” he added.

“You mean the shark fishing?” She looked doubtful until she realized that it was a whim which would keep him by her side, at least for the remainder of the summer. “Archie Campbell still has his boat,” she added eagerly, “although it has been out of action for a while, Rory says.” She paused, thinking about Rory, wondering if the brothers had already met. “Hamish,” she asked, “have you seen Rory?”

“Not yet.” He put his arm about her shoulders in a comradely way as they turned towards the house. “I realize that I am not too popular in that direction just now, but what could I really do about Ardtornish? Come to think of it,” he mused idly, “what would Rory have done if he had been in my place and not just the critical second son?”

The thought that Rory would have fought to the bitter end, fanatically, seemed like treason and Christine pushed it determinedly to the back of her mind, feeling its disloyalty all the more as Hamish turned to smile at her. “Well,” he demanded, “are you ganged against me, too?”

“You know I’m not!” she protested. “How could I be?”

“Easily enough, I should say.” He tightened his arm a fraction, drawing her close. “Most people have taken it upon themselves to criticize me. Even Jane.”

“Jane was passionately fond of Ardtornish,” Christine said slowly. “But she was fond of you, too, Hamish.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “Jane has taken it all pretty hard, but she’ll get over it. I met her in Edinburgh a week ago, still looking for a suitable job.”

“Rory said she was taking a secretarial course.”

“I believe so.” He didn’t seem very sure or particularly interested. Perhaps Jane had hurt him too deeply. “She hopes to come north for your birthday party. You see, she is taking her ‘bidding’ for granted, as I have done!”