The House Between Tides

by Sarah Maine

  “Whyever not? That’s what agents are for! Let them do their job, for God’s sake. They’re professionals.”

  “So why didn’t they send me the report?”

  “They’d only got it themselves a couple of days ago, and they wanted to look through it first, evaluate it, and then explain the key points.” He made it all sound so reasonable. “But what I don’t understand, Hetty, is why you just took off like that, without a word?”

  The sudden shift caught her off guard, and they looked at each other across the table. She’d known she’d have to try and explain this to him somehow, but she was unprepared. There’d been no time to work things through in her own mind, no space in her head for Giles these last few days. They’d reached this point too quickly, and she retreated from it. “I needed space, Giles. To think.”

  “I hated you going like that. I thought you’d left me.”

  His expression sought reassurance, but it was not so simple. “No. I didn’t leave because—”

  “Thank God for that!” He didn’t wait for the rest, but his relief was a further reproach. “Look, I’m sorry, love, but frankly, I wanted an excuse to come up and find you, and so Emma’s call was a godsend. But I shouldn’t have brought them, I see that now. Clumsy of me. But believe me, Hetty, it was well-intentioned, and as they’re here now, just down the road . . . ?”

  The evening ended on an uneasy truce, but she lay sleepless beside Giles through the night, listening to his snores and thinking how incongruous it was that he was here. And he seemed to think he had arrived in some remote colonial outpost. “What! No mobile signal at all? I thought you were just not replying. How do the natives cope?” It was almost funny, especially when she found herself defending the shortcomings of Dùghall’s dreadful cottage.

  Next morning, however, indifferent to Giles’s protests regarding salt water and shoe leather, she refused to wait to be collected by her uninvited agents and said that she would walk across. “You wait, by all means,” she said as she pulled on her jacket, but Giles seemed disinclined to quarrel again, and so they left a note pinned to the cottage door and left together.

  “Great Scott! What a place,” he said, as they squelched up the track from the foreshore. “Stuck out here in the middle of nowhere.” And as he strode up the drive, she felt her resentment reignite. He was trespassing.

  Then she looked back across the strand and saw a Land Rover leaving the far shore. Not a battered workhorse but a shiny black model. It drove slowly across the strand and halted at the bottom of the track, unwilling to tackle the mud. Giles went down to meet them while Hetty waited at the front door, keys in hand, and watched the three of them stepping carefully to avoid the worst of the mire as they came up the old drive.

  “So nice to meet you at last.” Emma’s red lipstick framed perfect teeth, and she kissed the air beside Hetty’s cheek. “I feel I know you already.” Hetty smiled briefly and turned to shake Andrew Dalbeattie’s hand. But you don’t, she thought, as Dalbeattie beamed at her, well polished and confident in wax jacket and Galway boots.

  Then, to her astonishment, she saw that another Land Rover was crossing the strand, a familiar, battered one. Emma had seen it too. “Good, this must be Mr. Cameron. I phoned him earlier this morning and luckily he was free to join us. Seemed sensible.”

  This was too much, and Hetty felt her cheeks flame with annoyance. “I think you should have—” But Emma had already set off down the drive.

  Giles glanced uneasily at her as the muddy vehicle pulled up the track, passing the other Land Rover, passing Emma, and parked beside the house. “I honestly didn’t know,” he said.

  Emma doubled back to greet James. “So good of you to turn out at short notice,” Hetty heard her say as she introduced herself. “But an opportunity not to miss, us all being here together.” James shook her hand briefly and was introduced to the others, and his eyes lingered on Giles’s face a moment, then he looked across at her and gave a curt nod.

  “So, let’s get started, then, shall we?” Dalbeattie was clutching a copy of the report, and he took James aside.

  “He’s not quite what I expected,” murmured Emma, but Hetty ignored her and followed them.

  “. . . Buttressing and ties would hold things together while the underpinning was done,” Dalbeattie was saying.

  “Of course. But with that wall fundamentally weakened, it’ll be—”

  “I’ve seen worse.” Dalbeattie turned to beam at Hetty. She looked at James, but his expression was unreadable.

  “What were you going to say?” she asked him.

  “What I’ve already said.” He looked steadily back at her. “The cost to—”

  “But cost isn’t your problem, is it?” Emma had joined them, and she placed an admonishing hand on his arm. “That’s our bit.” James looked down at her hand until she withdrew it.

  While Dalbeattie took up the discussion with James again, Giles scanned the pasture behind them. “What about the land? How far does the estate stretch?”

  Emma took out a large-scale map, which rattled noisily in the breeze, and gave him a corner to hold. Red highlighter described a large irregular tract of land, larger than Hetty had imagined, which Emma now traced with a glossy fingernail. “And it includes that stretch of land further to the west.” She recognised it as where she had walked and saw a rectangle marked with the word ruin in brackets, beside a small cove. Not a ruin now, she thought, and glanced across at James.

  “And that’s the bit you see joining up with the links?” Giles asked. “Making it an eighteen-holer?”

  Emma smiled back. “World-class.” James abandoned Dalbeattie mid-flow at that point and, taking hold of part of the map, he studied it intently, his brow furrowed.

  “What’s the shooting like up here, Mr. Cameron?” Giles asked him, but James didn’t look up. “What is there? Snipe, duck, plover?”

  “All of those.” James’s face was expressionless as he turned to Hetty. “You’re aware that the bird reserve abuts the land over that way?”

  “We know all about the reserve, Mr. Cameron,” said Emma. “And the links will provide something of a buffer, a sort of green belt for the birds.”

  James looked blankly at her, then he turned back to Hetty. “They oppose the development, as you know, they could hardly do otherwise. An expensive shoot next door to one of the country’s most important bird reserves? What’ll that do for—”

  “I’ll tell you what it’ll do,” Emma said, her lips a thin line. “It’ll put the place on the map.” And she gave him a twinkling smile.

  “New jobs, new money,” Dalbeattie added.

  James looked from one to the other, and then directly at Hetty, but Emma moved quickly, before he could speak again. “Let’s go inside while the weather holds good, shall we?” She gestured to a cloud bank building on the horizon.

  James remained where he was. “And the patch of land you have in mind for extending the golf course is not estate farmland. It’s croft land—”

  “These plans were drawn up from the land registry.”

  “—And the tenant is John MacPhail,” he continued. “He grows his potatoes there.”

  Andrew Dalbeattie gave a short laugh. “Then I’m afraid he’ll have to grow them somewhere else.”

  Hetty saw a glint again in James Cameron’s eye. “I’ll leave you to tell him that,” he said, and he went to retrieve two hard hats from the Land Rover. He put one on himself and gave the other to her. “I only have two,” he said to Emma.

  “We should have thought,” she replied with another, more brittle, smile.

  Hetty pulled out the keys as they went up to the front door, then cursed to herself as she struggled with the unfamiliar lock.

  “Shall I?” said James, behind her. It opened for him, of course, and he stood back, gesturing them into the house and followed her in. “This was a surprise,” he murmured.

  “I didn’t know—”

  “No?” The others were al
ready eulogising the hall, flashing the beams of their torches around the walls, and Dalbeattie called to James and took him off into the morning room. Hetty hung back, and scraps of conversation reached her from Giles and Emma in the dining room.

  “. . . pity about the fireplaces . . .”

  “. . . easily replaced, and it’s got such potential . . .”

  She stood alone in the hall and looked up the wrecked staircase to the broken landing. Things were moving too quickly. Stay in control, James Cameron had warned. Easy to say. She went and stood at the door of the drawing room, now half lit by daylight from the front door, and saw before her those muted images: a grand piano, draped with a lacy cloth; the chairs pulled up to the fire; and the woman, a pale ghost, seated alone at the window—but much harder to know where her allegiances should lie.

  “Oh God. The body! I’d forgotten. It was found here.” Emma’s strident tones reached her across the hall, and Hetty heard her telling Giles what the local media had said; they’d clearly milked the scant facts for all they were worth, bulking them out with conjecture. “Who do you think it is, Mr. Cameron?” James gave a curt response as he led them back into the hall, and Emma flashed a smile at Hetty. “It’ll add interest, whoever it is. A real live murder mystery!”

  James’s face was set hard. “If there’s nothing else—”

  “What a place!” Giles said as he joined her, squeezing her arm.

  “. . . in a pretty poor state, alright,” Dalbeattie was saying, “but the right contractors can work miracles.”

  “Shh,” hissed Emma. “We’ll talk tonight, over dinner.”

  James passed her without a glance and stood at the door while they filed out. He banged the door shut behind them and fixed the lock while the visitors stood together, still talking. He looked down at the keys for a moment, then slipped them into his pocket, glancing up at Hetty as he did. “I’ll be off, then,” he said. “But you know where to find me.” And he was in the Land Rover before she could protest. The vehicle bounced down the track towards the gateposts and swung out of them, spraying mud along the side of the shiny black Land Rover as it went.

  Chapter 21

  2010, Hetty

  Next morning, Giles offered to go to the shop to fetch fire-lighters. Neither of them had been able to get the peat to light, and the storage heaters were again refusing to cooperate. Giles had gone off with a readiness which seemed to acknowledge the coolness there was between them. The chill had deepened over dinner last night with Emma and Andrew, where there had been plenty of talk of partnerships, finance packages, and shared risk. They had all talked across her, and while much of this was unfamiliar to her, Giles had compounded her annoyance by telling her, in kindly tones, that he would explain things to her later. She was only just able to remain civil. Later she had tried to explain to him how she felt, but had been rewarded again with an injured look and an assurance that he had only come up to help.

  She glanced in consternation at the plans behind her on the table, left there after Emma and Andrew’s departure. They had brought some artist’s impressions, done from old photographs, they told her, showing how the house might appear when restored. It looked fabulous but could be achieved only at a cost. That much she had learned.

  At least she could try again to light the fire, so she went and knelt by the hearth. Giles had left her just a handful of sticks, as well as a litter of failed matches, and it was pretty pointless anyway, as they’d have to go for the ferry straight after lunch. But it was cold and wet outdoors, and she was childishly determined to get it lit before he returned. Then she heard him banging on the door. Too late.

  “It’s open, just push hard. It jams,” she called and struck another match. Footsteps crossed the kitchen and stopped.

  “You’ve used all of those sticks in a week!” She looked round and there was James, not Giles, leaning against the door-frame, arms folded, in characteristic pose. “But then Dùghall’s given you poor peat, the old miser.” He straightened and stepped forward, holding out the keys to Muirlan House. “I forgot to give you these.”

  She looked at them, then up at him. “No, you didn’t.”

  He gave a faint smile and dropped them onto the table. “No? I just drove past your . . . Giles, isn’t it? Which is good, as I want to talk to you on your own.”

  “Do you.” She rose, but his eye had been caught by the plans, and he stopped, then pulled out a chair and sat, elbows on the table, studying them with the same intensity he had shown yesterday. After a moment he glanced up at her, pointing to the red highlighter line on the estate plan. “This is what you believe to be the boundary?”

  “Yes.”

  He said nothing more, but his finger traced the line, his lips moving as if committing it to memory.

  “You wanted to talk to me,” she said sharply, and he sat back, looping his arm around the chair back, and looked at her.

  “Are you sure you want to go along with all of this?” he said at last.

  “Meaning?”

  “Are you really committed to what’s being proposed?” He gestured to the artist’s drawings. “This lot will cost millions. Much more than I suggested. You know that, don’t you?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “I’m assuming you don’t have millions, so you’ll have to borrow them or go into partnership, which means either huge debts or huge compromises. You do realise all this?”

  “You imagine that I don’t?” He was as bad as Giles.

  His eyes flashed a smile, quickly gone. “You do. Then good. But make sure you understand what you’re getting into before you’re in too deep.” She remained silent. “And believe me, it goes deep.” He looked back at the map. “Besides, your man’s wrong,” he said, tapping the sheet. “This shows the estate at the time of Blake’s death, before Emily Armstrong made a number of settlements to existing tenants.”

  “How can it be wrong?”

  “God knows.” He bent over it again. “It shows the reserve, alright, but not the Forbeses’ land or the land made over to the crofters. It even seems to claim the old farmhouse is still part of the estate.” He sat back and contemplated her. “But land ownership is only part of it; the machair is a rare and valuable habitat. The reserve will fight you tooth and nail—”

  “With your support?”

  “—and you’ll find yourself in dispute with tenants who can claim—”

  “They can claim what they like, but facts are facts.” Giles had stepped unnoticed through the open back door and now stood, fire-lighters in one hand and a bottle of malt whisky in the other. “Otherwise why bother to come and warn her off?”

  James rose slowly while Giles slipped off his jacket and hung it on the back of the chair where James had been sitting. Marking his territory.

  “Drink?” asked Giles, proffering the bottle with an affable smile. James began to refuse and then seemed to change his mind and sat again. Hetty went to get glasses. “What did you mean, Forbeses’ land?” she heard Giles ask. When she returned, he had pulled up a chair opposite James. She sat too, at the head of the table, in neutral territory.

  James pointed to the map. “That land belongs to Aonghas Forbes, the man who owns the old factor’s house.”

  “Really?” Giles slid a glass towards him. “I imagine the agents will have done their homework.”

  James looked across at Hetty. “Blake created new crofts at the far end of the island a few years before his death, and they’re still worked even if not inhabited.” And she thought of the socks on the washing line . . . “Emily Blake formed a trust with her brother’s remaining money to be used for the benefit of the islanders, but she made the farmland over to Donald Forbes, along with the farmhouse.” Setting things right after her brother’s death?

  “But if that was so—” she began.

  “Then Mr. Forbes will have the deeds.” Giles stretched out his legs with another genial smile, his hand cupping his glass. “And it’ll be officially recorded in the normal way.” He took a d
rink, raising an eyebrow at James. “Don’t you think?”

  James nodded grimly. “There’s documentation. Aonghas has it.” He sat forward, tapping the plans again. “And that patch of land has an existing tenant.”

  “Ah, yes. The potato man.”

  James glanced towards Hetty, that odd look in his eye again. “I strongly advise you not to challenge John MacPhail over his rights—”

  “But all this can be sorted out through the official channels, Mr. Cameron,” Giles interrupted, “and Hetty has lots of support, you know. My own firm has represented her family’s interests for several years. And, let’s face it, the property is hers.” He turned to smile at her. “Besides, the house is of national importance, Scottish national importance, Mr. Cameron.”

  “It’s a rich man’s conceit.”

  Giles’s jaw dropped. “Theodore Blake—” he began.

  “Blake was a gifted painter and it’s his paintings which are his legacy, not his father’s house. Those paintings captured the spirit of this place, the same spirit which bound the islanders to the land. That’s his legacy. And the island has preserved its special quality because of his reclusive years, so we can thank him for that too.”

  “But the house—”

  James ignored him. “Did you find the place in your painting, Hetty? Was it Torrann Bay?”

  “Yes.” Had he used her name before?

  “And what did you see there?”

  She paused, considering. “Why, nothing . . .” His eyes held hers. “Only the sand, and the sea.”

  “What else?”

  He spoke quietly, encouraging her, and the scene rose again before her: the light shafting across the wet sand, the tang of salt on the soft air, wind rustling through the silvery grasses, and the gulls’ cries blown back from the sea. Emptiness— “Rocks, and waves breaking along the beach. Shore birds—” she said, addressing the expression in his eyes and Giles looked from one to the other, uncertain.

  James held her gaze for a moment longer, then nodded and gave her a smile as he got to his feet. “Just so.” It was a smile of approval. Then he glanced again at the plans. “I said what I came to say to you, and returned your keys.” He picked them up and took her hand, pressing them into it. “You heard what the man said. It is all yours. And that includes Torrann Bay, you see. That’s uncontested land. Unprotected, to do with as you think right.” He closed her fingers over the keys, and they dug into her palm. “And you know where to find me. Ruairidh too. When you need us.” He left his drink barely touched, nodded briefly at Giles, and was gone.