by Rikki Sharp
When she turned to climb back up the slope, James had already opened the door. She was sure he had a magnificent epitaph for their battles running through his head, something elegant and clever. But all he mouthed at her through the maelstrom was, ‘Goodbye’. Then he slammed the door shut in her face.
Taking his bad temper out on the twisted scaffolding and the waterproof sheets, Donald had been true to his word and covered the few weak spots left in the Grange’s roof as best he could. Sheltered by the swaying trees, the wind lost some of its power up here. Nervously he looked at the four brick chimneystacks and hoped they would survive the frightening storm.
Then he thought of the spiteful things he had said to his aunt and China, and he felt ashamed. What a fool he had been! What a fool he was, driving away the one woman he had ever loved, whom he had waited for all these years. Locking up the old house, he pulled his waterproofs tighter and began to head back down the hill.
The rain flattened him to the floor as he skidded and slipped in the mud, loosing his footing. What had once been hard earth paths were now streams and rivulets of rushing water, so he had to take a different way down, as whole rocks and broken branches were being swept down the hillside.
He was nearly at the level of the school when a familiar grey shape loomed out of the driving rain. Morgan, water pouring off him in silver threads, flattened him to the sodden grass with two paws firmly on his chest.
“What are you doing out in the storm, you mad bugger?” he yelled at the hound.
Morgan just barked, moving a few feet away and then running back. The dog was a notorious coward when it came to storms. Something urgent must have upset him to conquer his fears.
Then Donald just knew. By some sixth sense, he knew. “China . . . What the hell have you done now?” With one hand gripping tight to Morgan’s sodden fur, he allowed the dog to guide him past the cottages by the pier and down towards the short cut to the Kirk. Man and dog, moving as one through the elements, dreading what they were going to find.
The Kirk gave another shudder as more stones peeled away and fell into the terrible sea, as China hung on to the end of one of the pews for dear life. If she could just get up to the door, she felt sure she could kick it open. Then she made the cardinal mistake of looking back towards her aunt’s pew, now only feet from the new edge of the cliff.
There was something sticking out from the shelf below where the family bible had sat. First one, then a second, and finally a third spine of the familiar green books could be seen, hidden in the dark cubbyhole.
“Oh, Aunt Bea! You’d brought those missing journals here to read in peace then forgot them. All the family secrets . . . my dad . . . my mum . . . you wrote about them in those books!”
She stopped halfway to safety. Watching the pew as it shivered and moved a little closer to the abyss. She had to go back for the journals.
As she turned again to inch her way down the slope, the door creaked open once again. In its stone archway was another figure, but this time she recognized the grey eyes and the light-coloured hair.
“Donald! Aunt Bea’s journals . . . all the answers . . . they’re in her pew!”
Whether he could see them from the doorway was doubtful, but he could see what China was about to do.
“Reach out and take my hand!” he shouted above the shriek of the wind. “Let them go! Let them all go! I can’t lose you again!”
“But . . .” she began, just as Donald lunged towards her and grasped her arm.
“Come back,” he whispered in her ear. “Come home.”
She closed her eyes and buried her face into his chest as he guided them to safety. It was only when they got to the Kirk door that she could see a second figure lying prone amongst the gravestones.
“I met James coming out, so I knew where you’d be. Always thought he had a glass jaw!” He grinned, rubbing the bruised knuckles on his right hand.
There was another shiver beneath their feet as more of the stone church dropped into the sea. Even though she had hopefully found the will, China closed her eyes again and fought back the tears at the thought of all those written memories gone forever. Then she opened them in surprise as Donald shouted, “You mad dog! What on earth?”
Hopping over the doorstep, Morgan dropped three familiar books at China’s feet. As they had struggled to get out of the collapsing church, for some reason the dog had gotten it into his head to retrieve Beatrice’s diaries, seconds before the Stuart pew slipped into the sea.
“Good dog!” China and Donald said in unison.
China quickly picking the books up from the grass, spiriting them away inside her coat before they got too wet. Morgan, unused to that particular phrase being directed at him, cocked his head to one side.
In the howling storm, with parts of the cliff still sliding away into oblivion, the lovers somehow found themselves laughing at the trusty hound.
Chapter 15
After all the high adventures, the passion and the pain, here she was sick as a dog. China blew her nose. Just like her to catch a steaming cold. Dressed in her Hello Kitty PJs, she wandered around the pub quoting lines about her childhood from the rescued journals, to anyone who would listen. Those books and a man-sized box of tissues were her constant companions for the better part of a week. Then, of course, there was Morgan, keeping an eye on his new charge.
Somehow between them, she and Donald had dragged the unconscious body of James McKriven back down the twisting paths and to the safety of the Inn, with Morgan bravely leading the way. As James came around, a captive of all the people he had tried so hard to ruin, they found his sidekick, Japes, hiding in the empty cottage next door and locked the pair of them in the pub cellar.
Exhausted and dripping wet, China lay the small Stuart bible on the bar counter as her friends gathered round. Like a magician, she opened the book to where a black ribbon marked a page, and there it was—a single sheet of paper written on one side in her aunt’s familiar hand, witnessed by Mrs. Baxter. She had found the last will.
The next day, the sea was as calm as a duck pond and the islanders came out of their homes to assess the damage. The first boat in was the police from Benbecula to pick up James and his henchman, who had been babbling nonstop all night about the crimes they had committed. Whereas James McKriven was charged for attempted murder, after China described how he had tried to lock her in the doomed Kirk, Martin Japes was charged with tampering with scaffolding up at the Grange.
Everyone gathered in silence to watch the two handcuffed men being led in shame onto the boat. There were no last bitter words from James McKriven, who knew when he was beaten.
“Sergeant Fitzgerald’s been dying to try out those cuffs for years,” Mrs. Baxter remarked casually, causing a nervous round of laughter to move through the crowd.
Despite her streaming cold, which kept China and Donald at arm’s length for a few days, she’d managed to move all the plans forward for the island’s rescue.
“National Heritage is already inspecting what’s left of the Kirk. They say it’s quite feasible to move the remains and by rescuing most of the original stones from the base of the cliff, they can rebuild it further inland. With a Lottery grant I’ve applied for, we should be able to construct a concrete wall on the shore to prevent any more cliff erosion.
“We’ve the press heading in to report the storm and the damage to the 14 century Kirk. Evidently it’s the only one of its kind still partially standing. All that publicity can only help attract more businesses to the island. The phone company is already going to pay a disgusting amount of money for a new satellite mast around the other side of the hill on Stuart land. What we get from that will rebuild both boatsheds and then some!”
The list went on and on. Now that it had been legally proved that China was the true beneficiary of all her aunt’s property, things could really get moving.
But it was the quiet moments during all the comings and goings that China enjoyed the best. Wrapped
up in bed, with Morgan squeezed in down the side of her like a great hot water bottle, albeit a slightly smelly one, reading her aunt’s journals. Finding all the missing pieces of her life.
Then there were the meals for two by candlelight in one corner of the snug, as she dressed in her best and she and Donald got to know each other by just talking and talking. Or talking and sniffing in China’s case.
Finally, looking fit and well again, China gathered the group of fiends together for a celebratory drink and the official launch of the Butterfly Island Sanctuary.
“Reading Aunt Bea’s diaries, I’ve finally managed to find out why my mother and I left the island,” she announced when there was a lull in the business conversation. “All the tales of mum and dad fighting, Aunt Bea throwing my mum out, great family rows up at the Grange, all have a grain of truth in them. But this is what really happened.”
Life on Butterfly Island had all started to go wrong for the Stuarts when Eve Stuart was diagnosed as having mild Agoraphobia. It wasn’t just the fear of wide, open spaces, but the fear of panic attacks brought on by the insecurity of where she was. Living on a tiny dot of rock in the middle of a wide, open sea and beneath the endless skies became the worse place for Eve to be.
China’s father, Campbell, had wanted them to leave the island and find a more secure home on the mainland where his wife could receive proper medical attention. That was what had started the rows, as Eve refused saying her husband’s duties to the island, his aunt, and the Stuart line had to come first. That she would ‘muddle through’.
But the panic attacks grew more frequent and more violent. As Campbell started to make arrangements for them to leave Butterfly Island, then came the tragic accident at sea where he was washed overboard from the Brunhild and never seen again. Eve had lost her love and her best friend. The only person who could talk the fears away as she now spent the entire time locked away in a single room in the Grange with little China. So Bea and Eve made the sad decision together, China and her mother had to leave the island. What strength it had taken to make the journey to the mainland was unthinkable.
“Aunt Bea was devastated at mum and myself leaving. They kept in touch for a few years, but normal stuff like paying bills, shopping, or writing a letter just became too hard for mum. We were drifting about so much as she found casual nighttime cleaning jobs, that they lost contact with each other,” explained China to her captive audience.
“Why mum never told me all this stuff, I’ll never know. I guess she thought there was always tomorrow. She’d tell me tomorrow, or the next day. Then she died suddenly of heart problems, the past was lost, and I created a new life for myself. I wish I could hold my mother and tell her how sorry I was for all the things I thought about her . . . all the things I said, but I can’t. So now I’m here, here to stay if you’ll have me and I can finally lay the past to rest.”
The sky was that shade of china blue Eve Stuart had named her daughter after, and the sea, like a moving mirror, as Donald and his love stood hand-in-hand above the fields that led down from the Grange. It was that time of year once again. That moment the two of them had always spent together when the butterflies hatched.
“The old temper is holding out well, Donald.” She sighed, glad for a perfect moment together like this.
“I like your way of shutting me up when I go off on one best. Silenced with a kiss. But I think I let off a head of steam by punching McKriven out in the storm. You should have seen it! Bop! Down he went!”
“Well, you make sure you don’t build up that head of steam again, mister, or you’re chucked!” She laughed to defuse his discomfort and snuggled close. “I remembered, by the way.”
“Pardon? Remembered what?”
“The words you whispered to me the day we left the island. ‘China Stuart, when we’re grown, will ye marry me?’ So sweet!”
“And?”
“Oh, go on then. That cottage next to the Inn is going begging. We’ll have to lock Morgan in the kitchen at nights, though, he’ll get jealous.”
“He’ll howl.”
Morgan’s head went to one side as he heard his name mentioned.
“Bad dog. Whoa, here we go!”
Below them, as the sun rose to its height and warmed the rock strewn fields, the first few scarps of colour began to flutter up from the long grass. Holding each other’s hands tight, as they had so long ago, the two lovers ran laughing down the hillside and a vast cloud of butterflies of every colour rose up before them and fluttered away into the endless sky, their dog bouncing along with them barking all the way.
It was then that China Stuart knew that she had finally come home.
