Bride of Alaine

by Rose Burghley

  Judy, faintly surprised, sensed this.

  “What do you want, then?” she asked, as if anxious to make amends.

  “Nothing.” Amanda gathered up the soiled underwear that littered the floor, and had been lying there since Judy stepped out of her clothes the night before, and stowed it away in the washing basket. “I only want to know what you’re going to wear to-day. Do you want slacks or a dress?” She swung open the door of the cumbersome wardrobe and ran her hand along the line of dresses. “Once you’ve made up your mind I’ll see if there’s enough hot water for a bath for you.”

  “I’ll wear slacks ... and a sweater.” Judy sighed at the possibility of having to miss her bath. “What a place this is! When I take over the entire hot-water system will be renewed.”

  “Amongst other things?” Amanda enquired drily.

  “Amongst a whole heap of other things.” Judy swung one white foot out of bed. “Between you and me and the bedpost I don’t think it would be a bad idea to pull the Tower down and rebuild it, but that, I know, would be sacrilege. Besides, Alaine would almost certainly prove obstinate and refuse to grant permission.”

  “You really do intend to try to marry Alaine, don’t you?” Amanda said more slowly, as if she found it hard to believe that a personable young woman like Judy could be willing to attempt to acquire something that it was by no means certain, as yet, was actually within her reach.

  “Of course.”

  “Why? Because you’re in love with him, or because you’re in love with the idea of a Macrae returning to the old homestead and doing something about it? Setting it on its feet again?”

  “Something like that ... perhaps.” Judy’s head tilted backwards, and her eyes grew languorously amused. “But I am, as you said just now, in love with him...”

  “You think you are!”

  “And you know that you are!” The accusation came so unexpectedly that Amanda swung round and faced her with suddenly distended eyes. “You haven’t the least little bit of doubt about it, have you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Amanda was really rather badly startled, and she both looked and sounded it. She also attempted an indignant denial. “I don’t know where you got such an extraordinary idea from, but it’s not merely ridiculous, it’s ... laughable! I in love with Mr. Urquhart? Why, I hardly know him!”

  “You know him as well as I do,” her friend reminded her, “and you probably think you understand him better. And you’ve surely heard,” with brittle dryness, “that it’s possible to meet a man and fall in love with him at first sight? Alaine Urquhart is the kind of man it would be hard not to fall in love with. Camilla Greystoke is finding that out. She came here because Miss Urquhart invited her, and it seemed a romantic notion to spend a few days in a centuries-old Scottish tower. But she wasn’t prepared to fall in love with the laird. She has to disentangle herself from an association with Michael Manners that has probably gone on for a number of years, before transferring her affections elsewhere. All the same, the temptation is already great, and it will prove greater as the days go by. That’s why I wish I could think up a plan for getting rid of her, but I can’t.”

  Amanda laid the slacks on the bed, and lifted a pale rose sweater out of a drawer and laid it beside them.

  “You really think that about Miss Greystoke?” she asked, as if the idea had not occurred to her before.

  Judy nodded.

  “I’m not as simple as you,” with some sarcasm, “and I don’t need all my i’s dotted or my t’s crossed. If Camilla could fit Alaine and his Tower into her background without upsetting the general pattern of her life she’d do so ... and probably will do so if she gets the chance. But you can take it from me, she won’t get the chance!”

  Amanda simply looked at her.

  “And neither will you,” Judy added viciously. “I’m not deceived by that innocent, ignorant air of yours. And if you think that playing the part of the poor little Cinderella who is overlooked by everyone else but the kindly and considerate host will eventually land you with the prize I advise you to have second thoughts and face up to the difficulties that beset your path. To begin with Alaine is a hardened bachelor, and it’s very difficult to break through the defences of a hardened bachelor ... or spinster, if it comes to that. To go on with he’ll almost certainly count the cost of marrying any woman—to his freedom, I mean. And to conclude—and what a conclusion, rather like scaling Everest or crossing the Atlantic in a rowing-boat!—he’s not in a position to support a wife and maintain his precious Tower and any children of the marriage that might come along unless he has the forethought to marry a rich woman who can do it all for him, and you can take it from me, Alaine, when the time comes, will have the forethought! Love for love’s sake amply won’t enter into it, so put away your girlish dreams. Where he’s concerned, to use a vulgar phrase, they simply won’t wash!”

  This time Amanda felt so revolted that she turned away, and she was about to leave the room when Judy called her back, rather sharply.

  “After all that you understand the position, don’t you?” she said. “And if you’d rather go on to London and leave me here I won’t mind. I’ll make the sacrifice!”

  “I’ll leave you here as soon as Jean has secured some local help,” Amanda replied. “But not,” she added, with unusual firmness, “a moment before!”

  During the next few days, while Jean continued to grow hot and flustered in the kitchen despite the assistance she received from Amanda and Duncan, and rumours of likely handmaidens in the village on the mainland turned out to be abortive rumours because most of the young women had fled to the towns and those that remained were already employed , locally, Amanda made every effort to keep out of the way of the rest of the guests as much as possible, and even Miss Urquhart was obliged to appeal to her when she wanted help with a zip fastener or someone to carry her letters across the loch to the post. Miss Urquhart had a pretty shrewd idea why Amanda considered herself dispensable on Ure except in a purely domestic or helpful capacity, and she became quite expert in devising pretexts that would summon the girl to her room, and once there Amanda usually had some difficulty in escaping.

  She began to suspect that Miss Urquhart was bent on getting to know her as well as possible for some reason of her own, and since she herself could see little point in Miss Urquhart establishing, or rather, cementing, a kind of friendship with herself, she was not always on hand when wanted, and indeed it provided her with an excuse for remaining outside the Tower as much as possible.

  She went for long, lonely walks that enabled her to get to know the island, and she was surprised after half a dozen forays of this sort how extensive it was. At one time there had been a village on the island itself—a little community that had had its own small church and meeting-place—but those days were gone, and the church and the meeting-place and the few cottages were no more than ruins.

  The island was a positive bird sanctuary, and a happy hunting-ground for deer. No one was allowed to set foot on Ure for the express purpose of diminishing the game stock except with the permission of Urquhart himself. The river was full of trout as well as the occasional fat salmon, and on summer afternoons the cool gurgle of it was sweet music in the ears of someone who lay stretched out in the cool grass, or perched on a fallen tree-trunk, waiting for the moment when Jean, at the Tower, would be wanting help with the shelling of the peas or the peeling of the potatoes—and Amanda had never realised before how many potatoes were needed to fill an outsize vegetable dish to be carried to a long refectory-table in a crumbling great hall of a dining-room, around which hungry, visitors would soon be seated.

  Taking advantage of the long, light evenings, she also stole out of the house after dinner and listened to the voices of nightingales singing love songs in lonely thickets. While Miss Greystoke entertained the rest of the party in the drawing-room with ballads and arias that experience had taught her were suited to her husky, lovely, warm and exciting
voice, and Judy with her own best interests at heart fought against betraying the fact that she was acutely bored, Amanda watched the night steal down over Ure and heard the lonely crying of the wild birds that haunted the island’s ridges, as well as the more intimate warbling of the nightingale and wondered how soon she could with a clear conscience make her getaway, and say goodbye to the strangely fascinating island of Ure for ever.

  For once she left it she would never see it again. That was a thought that disturbed her unaccountably when she dwelt on it. She whom Duncan had mistaken for some mythical bride of a long-dead member of the Urquhart family would go her way into the wide world, and Judy very possibly would reign as the island’s queen ... if Alaine was not too hardened a bachelor to propose to her.

  Sometimes Amanda found herself wondering a good deal about Alaine ... wondering whether he would ever marry. He was so picturesque, so romantic a figure—particularly in Highland evening dress— that it was small wonder Judy was so obsessed with the idea of marrying him and becoming the mistress of Ure.

  But there must have been other women in Alaine’s life who had wanted to marry him ... not all of them with money, perhaps, but with as much determination as the Australian girl. And, judging by Aunt Grace’s anxiety to get her nephew married, she was becoming a little desperate as a result of past failures. Alaine, with his singular, dark attractiveness, was as elusive as the deer on his island, and it was quite likely he had no intention of marrying ... not even to save Ure.

  Yet another thought nagged at Amanda with curious persistence during her lonely vigils in the evenings after dinner. How was it that Alaine, with a limited bank balance, managed always to appear to so great advantage from the purely personal angle? His clothes were not the kind that were bought off pegs, and he was never anything but impeccably dressed. The wines that were served at dinner were expensive wines ... a connoisseur’s choice. In conversation with Jean Amanda had elicited the fact that Urquhart spent about six months of the year on Ure. The rest of the year he wandered about the world, apparently for the sake of diversion, and because he liked travel—and travel was expensive.

  Jean had also let drop the fact that her master owned a flat in London, which he visited not infrequently. Apparently he liked London, too.

  Then why did he need a rich wife, and why was Miss Urquhart so very anxious that his wife, when he finally decided to take one, should be rich?

  It was all rather a mystery ... and on Ure mysteries flourished. The very atmosphere was thick with them, slightly overcharged with a lack of reality that no doubt accounted for the fact that Duncan could solemnly welcome a stranger with cries of “It’s the Bride of Alaine!” and genuinely look as if he had seen a ghost, and all because a little mist wreathed the island and Amanda was looking slightly pale and distraught for the very best of reasons, since she had been fighting her way through undergrowth in an attempt to locate a dwelling that persisted in remaining elusive.

  And, once she had found the dwelling, and been received into the warmth and light by Alaine himself, Amanda had ceased to be quite the old Amanda ... easily recognisable by herself.

  It was almost as if she had been bewitched, come under some sort of a spell.

  It was not the spell of Urquhart Tower. Judy might covet that, but Amanda, while becoming quite attached to it, would not have sold her soul to the devil in order to gain possession of it as Judy seemed prepared to do, just because she had been born a Macrae.

  CHAPTER XII

  TO add to the enchantment the fine weather continued on Ure. There were long, bright, sunshine-filled days that ended in brilliant sunsets and moonlit nights, and the guests of Urquhart took advantage of every moment of these extraordinarily perfect days. They went for picnics, long excursions by boat, trips to the mainland. They fished, swam, lunched at the Three Goats—even danced there after Judy made the discovery that Alaine danced, as she put it, ‘like a dream,’ and she was able to persuade him to indulge her desire for the bright lights of the holiday resort on the mainland—and sometimes Amanda accompanied them, and sometimes she remained at home.

  Miss Urquhart gazed at her quizzically from time to time. She seemed to think her behaviour a little odd—which, no doubt, it was—and she also seemed to derive a certain satisfaction from the fact that Alaine never pressed Amanda to accompany them.

  His attitude towards Amanda was rather incomprehensible. He was kind to her, but he also teased her a good deal ... and then, apparently, forgot all about her when he went off with Judy and Camilla Greystoke, with Michael Manners to make a balanced party, on some jaunt that had been hastily arranged at breakfast, or with deliberation the night before.

  He didn’t seem to think it in the least odd when Amanda asserted sturdily that she had no wish to be the odd man out, and she would be much happier in the garden, thinning out lettuces or hoeing the flower-borders for Jean. It was not her job to act the part of an unpaid housemaid-cum-parlourmaid-cum-odd-job-girl, but Alaine plainly accepted it as the result of some whim on her part, and was not in the least embarrassed by seeing her wait on his guests.

  Miss Urquhart objected strongly, once or twice, when Amanda went round collecting coffee-cups and tidying up the litter the uninvited guests created, but Alaine never objected. He would watch Amanda thoughtfully for a moment, smile at her when he caught her eye, and then cross over to Judy or Miss Greystoke and engage one or other of them in conversation. And Amanda, feeling hot and resentful, would escape out into the kitchen and half determine to stay there instead of rejoining the others.

  Judy, who reported great progress nightly to Amanda, often told her that Alaine thought her a quaint little thing, and advised her not to be hurt if he seemed to be taking her services for granted, for he would probably pay her before she left, or make her some sort of a present.

  “I told him I don’t pay you, but you’re terribly useful, and I think he’s rather got the idea that it’s a good plan to take advantage of your usefulness while you’re on Ure,” she explained one night when Amanda was washing out some stockings for her in the adjoining bathroom. “Of course, as I also made it clear to him, you and I will be parting company quite soon, so he knows the arrangement is very impermanent. Jean will have to look for someone else to help her out when you’re no longer here.”

  Amanda rolled the stockings in a towel, and carried it to the door of the bathroom, where she stood looking at her friend.

  “And you?” she asked. “Have you yet made it clear to Mr. Urquhart that your stay on Ure is not to be impermanent, if you can get him to say the word and ask you to be his wife, that is?”

  Judy gazed at her a trifle haughtily.

  “It isn’t a question of ‘getting him’ to say the word,” she said. “So long as the Greystoke woman remains we’re not as free as we might be, and Alaine has to remember his duties as a host. But as soon as she goes...”

  “And when is she going?”

  Judy shrugged her shoulders, and looked petulant “How should I know?” she asked. “I simply can’t imagine why she stays on here. It really isn’t her environment at all, and Michael Manners is getting very peeved because she insists on remaining. She has engagements to fulfil, and apparently she’s losing money while she stays here. But that doesn’t alter the fact that she insists on staying.”

  Amanda smiled slightly.

  “Then she’s probably remaining in the hopes of outstaying you,” Amanda suggested brightly. “I expect she’s made up her mind that Alaine and his Tower are worth more than a few concerts in Milan. After all, you think he and his Tower are worth a great deal, don’t you?”

  Judy glared at her.

  “If I thought that...”

  “Yes?”

  “Oh, nothing!”

  “What would you do?” Amanda asked, watching her closely, and just a trifle uneasily, for Judy was capable of a good deal, and if she had inadvertently triggered off an idea, it was just possible it could recoil on Amanda’s head. Although
how, and why, it should recoil on her own head Amanda, at that stage, couldn’t think.

  She only knew, uneasily, that it could.

  The next day Judy rushed up to her bedroom after breakfast with a piece of information to pass on to Amanda while she made the bed,

  “What do you think?” she asked. “Alaine and I are going off on our own for a day on the mainland. It was his idea entirely—” looking at Amanda almost defiantly, as if she dared her to think otherwise. “Miss Greystoke isn’t feeling too good, and she’s remaining in her room all day. Michael is going off somewhere on his own, and I know Jean couldn’t possibly spare you, so that leaves Alaine and me to go off on our own.”

  “And Miss Urquhart?” Amanda enquired.

  Judy shrugged, as she turned over to her dressing-table to re-make up her face.

  “Miss Urquhart, too, is having a quiet day,” she said. “She was awfully tired after that long climb up the slopes of Ben Wishart yesterday, and she’s doing what she calls ‘putting her feet up.’ You probably won’t see much of her, so there’s no reason why you, too, shouldn’t go off on your own if you feel like it. I know you love mooning about in the woods, so why don’t you put yourself up some lunch and take it with you to one of your favourite haunts?”

  “Perhaps I will,” Amanda answered, and thoughtfully tucked in an edge of the sheet. After Judy and Alaine had departed she went out into the garden to take advantage of the sun. It was a warm, still, windless day, with an almost painfully blue sky hanging like a sheet of blue gauze over the motionless waters of the loch, and the tall pine trees on the crest of the island looking like etchings against a sea of cobalt Amanda felt as if she had been deserted by everyone. She also felt, for some reason, acutely depressed. Alaine, before he left, had looked at her a little oddly and enquired as if it had suddenly occurred to him whether she would not like to accompany them after all. He was looking almost debonair in a well-cut tweed suit, but for some reason his strange agate eyes were not in keeping with the rest of his appearance. For a moment, as Amanda put back her head and met them fully, he even looked a little anxious, a little uncertain. He moved over to her and put a hand lightly on her shoulder, and attempted a quizzical smile.