Land of Heart's Desire Page 3

  “Yes,” he agreed, “that’s true enough.” He looked round at her swiftly. “Are you home to stay?”

  “I don’t know.” Was it possible that she could still remain uncertain, that she could still be determined to spread her wings and fly off in another direction? “It’s difficult,” she tried to point out, “when you have made up your mind about a career, Rory.”

  “Painting?” he said with scarcely concealed scorn. “You could do a thing like that anywhere.”

  “Not without the necessary markets, Rory. You need somewhere to sell your work.”

  “So,” he concluded, “you don’t really mean to stay?”

  “I haven’t had time to think.” She was almost angry with him now. “And I have come back. I mean to stay till after I’m twenty-one.”

  He did not answer that, driving faster along the road and scattering the straying sheep before him. They looked vaguely surprised as they turned to watch the disappearing car, and Christine remembered then what she wanted to ask Rory.

  “Do you want to stay on Croma, Rory? Do you think you could find something to do on the island?”

  “I’m your grandmother’s factor,” he said with some pride. “She retired Duncan MacKenzie a month ago. He was sorely crippled, like herself, and could not get about. In any case, he just took on the job as a stopgap after McQueen’s death, and he was glad enough to be resting.”

  “I’m glad we’ve got you, Rory!” she told him, not trying to hide her relief. “I’m glad my grandmother has someone like you to help.”

  “It kept me on the island,” he said almost gruffly.

  “And Jane?” Christine asked.

  “Your grandmother has invited her here for a holiday before she finally starts work,” he told her.

  “That’s wonderful!” Christine smiled. “We’ll all be together quite soon, then?”

  “Yes. Your grandmother wants us all there for your coming-of-age.”

  Christine’s smile faded.

  “I wish she had had a grandson, Rory,” she said. “I shall never be able to fill her shoes.”

  He looked round at her, affronted.

  “Why not?” he asked. “You’re her own flesh and blood.”

  “It isn’t the same. No one could be quite like my grandmother. She’s a fighter, Rory—a wonderful old woman who has done a man’s job all her life without losing her charm. She has held Erradale together and faced all her personal disappointments and her tragedies with a smile and a new determination to succeed. When my father died,” she went on, “and Dick was killed in Korea she knew what she had to do and accepted it. She had to go on and fight back, and what a grand job she’s made of it!”

  “And now she’s old and sick and infirm and needs you,” Rory said slowly. “No career is worth tossing that aside for. It’s your duty.”

  She looked round at the thin, dark face, at Rory’s too-large hands clutching the steering wheel, and was aware of an intensity of purpose in him which would attempt to force her to an acceptance of her responsibilities where Erradale was concerned. It made her feel ashamed and rather humble, but she did not answer him, for already they were on the brow of the hill, at the old familiar spot where the first glimpse of Erradale House was to be seen between the trees.

  In some ways it was a bleak old place, grey and remote and darkly turreted, standing silhouetted starkly on its jutting headland against the sky. Built on a rock, it was Scottish baronial in style, its stout walls rising steeply from the sea above a narrow curve of pure white sand. It was in no way sheltered, but to the south a deep sea-loch cut into the land, giving it a more gentle aspect from that side, and trees had been planted far into the glen which stretched beyond it. Everywhere else, the dark, grey-blue crags of Scuirival reared their jagged heads, rising one above the other into the clouds.

  When they had crossed the hump-backed bridge which had once spanned a moat, Rory brought the estate car to a halt and Christine saw him glance involuntarily at one of the turrets whose narrow lancet windows commanded views on every side.

  “Is my grandmother in her room?” she asked, knowing that they were both thinking about Dame Sarah.

  “Yes,” he said with a strange sort of finality which beat against her mind to awaken fear in her for the first time. “She’s always up there. She will have seen you arrive.” The great iron-studded door lay wide open, as it always did during the summer months, even when the fine rain swept in from the west, and Christine ran in and up the peculiar short flight of stone steps leading to the hall. They were narrow and hollowed out by the passage of many feet, yet they would last her generation and many more.

  In the high, raftered hall the original oak banqueting table stood squarely in its accustomed place, and old flags and broadswords and claymores, relics of battles long ago, hung against the walls.

  She felt very small and very inadequate as she mounted the great branching staircase to her grandmother’s room, and all the old allegiances kept tugging at her heart.

  Dame Sarah sat in a high-backed chair beside one of the long windows. In her youth she must have been a very beautiful woman, but now she was magnificent. She had a grandeur and dignity about her which Christine knew she would never acquire. Strength and pride and resourcefulness looked out of the direct blue eyes which had lost none of their beauty to age, and if Dame Sarah’s profile had a certain hardness in it her pleasant mouth retrieved it with a smile. Life had been kind to her in many ways, although in others it had demanded sacrifices. At forty years of age she had ceased to be a woman and had become an institution. She was Erradale, and some of its granite hardness had entered into her soul. She had striven for it, and demanded and fought for it; she had stepped into her husband’s empty shoes to preserve it for her only son, and when that son had died she had taken up the cudgels again in defence of her grandson, who had been Christine’s twin. Richard MacNeill had been killed flying in a remote war, and now Christine was all that was left. The last of the MacNeills. Her grandmother’s only hope of survival for an ancient house.

  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 Callu
m 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.