“The other side was Rob Roy country, wasn’t it?” she asked. “And here—that other book—The Wolf of Badenoch—”
“Yes,” Julius said close behind her, “It’s pretty much unchanged, I should think, down through the years.”
Was Dunraven as remote as this? But if it was also as lovely, so full of beauty and silence, she could hardly wait to get there.
At Inverness Julius went to see his car being taken off the train and Laura stood beside a little island of luggage, waiting. She drew in deep breaths of the crisp Highland air, filling her lungs with it gratefully after the stuffy atmosphere of the carriages and wondering if they would remain long enough for her to see something of this fair and lovely city on the banks of its wide river with its broad background of distant hills.
“We’ll push on as far as Garve for lunch,” Julius decided as the porters helped him to stack their luggage into the capacious boot of the car. “There’s no point in delay.”
As the deep straths and rugged mountains of the west came steadily nearer, she held her breath in wonder. Never had she seen such scenery; never had she known such utter isolation. They drove for miles after Garve across wild moorland without passing a township of any size, the great rounded shoulders of the hills of Wester Ross shutting them in and crowding close on either side of the narrow road, which Julius told her was the only way to their destination on the distant Atlantic seaboard.
Great rugged scars of rock reared themselves up at intervals and he named them for her—Sgurr Mor and the Beinn Dearg, both over three thousand feet high, dominating the lesser hills with a fierce and haughty pride. And everywhere she looked there were sharp, bright glimpses of loch water and gleaming cascades of waterfalls sliding down the dark faces of the mountains. From a distance they seemed to hang there arrested, like a silver curtain, and over it all lay a silence and a loneliness that were all but tangible.
Laura felt it like a hand gripping her throat for a moment, yet she knew that she was going to love this land of blue water and distant mountains with its still lochs and silent straths and its air of wordless mystery which penetrated deeply to the heart of nameless things.
Her inner excitement grew as they neared the coast. Already the tang of salt was in the air, the presence of the sea very near. Yet the road still made its way through what appeared to be impenetrable forest in places until, at last, it climbed high and the whole Atlantic seaboard lay before them, the fair land of the West, where Vikings had come and conquered long ago.
A vast sea loch bit into the land far beneath them, blue and fair and studded with little islands, and the hills above it were red. Their higher slopes were almost bare of vegetation and they plunged down steeply into a deep chasm.
“Corryhalloch,” Julius said. “It’s a grim sort of place. I believe the Gaelic name means the Ugly Corrie. It reveals, more than any other place I know, the utter unexpectedness of these hills.”
A small shudder ran through Laura as she looked, something cold and intimidating, born of fear, perhaps, or a sudden uncertainty, but in the next moment they were slipping across the ravine by an attractive bridge and the thunder of a splendid waterfall was in their ears.
“Please, Julius, stop!” she cried impulsively.
The river was high and the water came down in a great overpowering surge, slipping over the smooth rounded hollows that gave the falls their name.
“Easan na Miasaich—the Place of Platters!” Julius translated for her. “When there is less water you can see the shallow, platelike hollows worn by the falls in the rock.”
Laura was surprised at his knowledge of a language that had little significance south of the Highland Line.
“Have you lived here long, Julius?” she asked, thinking how little she really knew about him or his immediate past.
“You’re wondering about my command of the Gaelic,” he smiled as they stood above the dark pool where the falls dropped into immeasurable depth. “I learned that for convenience’ sake. The people up here speak it as their first language, and I did not want to feel that they could discuss me fairly openly without my being able to understand what they said.”
“Shall we go on?” she asked, suppressing something that was like a shiver. “I know you’re anxious to get home, Julius.”
He made no answer to that, and she forced herself to look away from the nearer, darker hills across the magnificent panorama of the Fannich Deer Forest to the mountains of white quartz which rose, beckoning, to the south.
They drove on, through scattered townships kneeling close to the vividly blue water of narrow Loch Broom, through Ullapool, which had surely stepped straight out of a Norse saga, and beyond it, northwards into the void.
When they finally turned off the coast road there was little beyond them but sea and sky. They wound along a narrow track out on to what appeared to be a broad promontory, like the prow of a ship cleaving its way through the gray blue Atlantic swell, and here there were no houses. Bays and tiny, isolated sea lochs bit into the land, all remote and curiously detached.
Other islands rose and took shape in the sea before them; Tanera Mor and the red skerries lying farther out on the blue bosom of the North Minch, islands that caught at her heart because of their loveliness and their greenness under the sun.
“Have we far to go, Julius?” she asked.
“Not very far.” He turned to look at her with a faint smile. “I warned you about our seclusion,” he pointed out.
“Yes,” she said uncertainly, and then more warmly: “I’ve never seen anything more beautiful, Julius. It has a wonderful grandeur. But words aren’t any good, are they? One has to feel a place like this and keep some of it to oneself.”
She hesitated, confused a little by the revelation and hardly surprised when he said:
“That’s what brings me back, time and time again. I came here by accident about six years ago, on a fishing holiday. A patient I had in London offered me the use of his lodge for a couple of weeks and that was when I first discovered Dunraven. The Fortress of the Raven!” he mused slowly, braking the car as they rounded a dark outcrop of rock in the breast of a hill. “There it is—at last!”
Laura looked down from their vantage point and knew that she could not have imagined such a change of scene. There had been wildness back along the road over which they had traveled, dark, harsh corries out of which all light had been excluded by the beetling escarpments that rose on either side, but here the great red sandstone massif, which rose, towering, behind them seemed to have thrust a dark tentacle of rock right down into the sea, where it had been gashed into the deep gully of a hidden loch.
Secret and remote, the water lay blackly in deepest shadow, yet far in the distance Laura could see the gleam of a white-sanded bay and the shimmer of green islands riding the surf in full sunlight. Were they the same islands, she wondered, that she had seen before they had rounded the headland?
Before Julius could point out the house to her she looked down and saw it. A grim old castellated tower, built within the gray walls of a former fortress, it stood out perhaps three hundred yards from the shore, isolated on a tiny islet, with no trees anywhere near it to give it shelter and its stern face turned toward the sea.
She was aware of Julius watching her closely, waiting for her reaction.
“Well,” he asked, “what do you think of Dunraven?”
Laura took a full minute to answer him, her breath held, her heart thumping madly against her ribs.
“I don’t know, Julius,” she said. “I don’t know.”
He let in his clutch and the car slipped forward down the precipitous incline to the shore.
As they drew nearer Laura saw that the house was bigger than she had thought. It was a substantial fortress, with deeply embrasured windows and a stout central tower rising above the original, ruined walls of a former castle, and on the west face the whole edifice seemed to rise sheer from the sea. It looked as if it had grown out of the rock itse
lf, but on the eastern and more sheltered side it was linked by a substantial causeway to the land.
It was the causeway that gave the house a kindlier aspect, Laura thought. At least it was no longer remotely isolated on an island of its own. The causeway had been recently repaired and the bridge that linked it with the island was firm and strong.
As Julius drove across it she looked back toward the narrow head of the glen down which they had come, and almost with relief she saw sunlight lying gently on the broad hills. In the afternoon, as the sun dipped slowly toward the western horizon, the whole glen would be full of light.
“We are expected,” Julius said as they drew up before a massive stone porchway beyond which a heavy iron-studded door lay wide open. “Mrs. Finlayson must have seen us coming over the hill.”
Feeling suddenly shy and rather nervous at this first meeting with the domestic staff who had probably known and worked for Julius’s first wife, Laura got out of the car and stood hesitating on the broad stone step. A light wind from the sea came up and blew coldly against her cheek, stirring her hair across her brow, but she had scarcely time to smooth it into place before a tall woman in a gray knitted dress came swiftly toward her out of the shadows.
That first meeting with Morag Finlayson was to stand out in Laura’s memory for all time. She was a handsome woman, tall and very fair, with the evidence of her Norse ancestry in her direct blue eyes and the proud carriage of her head. There was nothing of servility in her manner. She greeted Julius with quiet dignity, waiting for him to present her to his wife.
“Mrs. Finlayson will take care of you, Laura,” Julius said. “She has managed Dunraven admirably for the past few years and looks after the rest of the staff for me. If there is anything you want you must ask her.” Laura smiled into Morag Finlayson’s blue eyes, seeing them slightly watchful for a moment before they cleared and their owner said, in the wonderfully gentle tone of the Celt:
“I would be welcoming you home, ma’am. My wish is that you will find great happiness here at Dunraven.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Finlayson,” Laura said, wishing that she did not feel that vague suggestion of reserve hovering in the atmosphere between them, as if Morag found it difficult to give her all her allegiance right away. “We’ve had rather a long journey and I would like to wash and change. After that,” she suggested with a smile that lit her eyes and illuminated her whole face with a youthful eagerness, “I want to see everything—all over the island!”
She fancied that Morag looked sharply in Julius’s direction as she turned away, but she could not quite be sure.
“Shall I help you with the luggage?”
“Niall will do that.” A tall, dark-visaged youth ambled into view round the end of the house and he threw an instruction to him in Gaelic. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking some of these people are half-witted,” he warned as he followed Laura into the-house. “They can be as astute as the very devil when it suits them, and they always know what they want. They'll serve you so long as you treat them with a certain amount of equality, but fundamentally they prefer to be their own masters, no matter how near to the starvation line it may bring them.”
“But surely in a place like this there’s nothing very much for them to do?” Laura suggested.
“There’s the fishing—lobster fishing mostly—and if they can scrape a bare existence from the family croft they prefer it that way. You have to know the art of employing them. I confess,” he added abruptly, “that I find it difficult at times.”
Mrs. Finlayson followed them in and led the way up the broad pine staircase and Laura climbed it behind her, wondering if Helene Behar had found it difficult to live here, far from London and the sort of life she had known. But perhaps Helene hadn’t come from London. Perhaps this had been her own country, the place where she had lived and died. Julius had spoken so little of his first marriage. It seemed something in the past that he wanted to forget.
When the housekeeper opened the door of a large bedroom overlooking the loch, Julius followed them in.
“You’ll get all the sun there is here, Mrs. Behar,” Mrs. Finlayson said. “There is never much in the mornings, but you will see it set across the Isles, and that is a sight in itself. If you would be climbing the hill yonder on a fine day,” she added, “You can see as far as the Cuillins in Skye and out across the Minch to the Long Island.” She gave Laura a quick, appraising look. “You will be fond of walking, I have no doubt,” she stated.
“I hope to get around quite a lot,” Laura said, conscious of her husband’s sudden silence. He had crossed to the window and was looking out, his back to them, waiting for the housekeeper to go. “I shall have to appeal to you for advice, Mrs. Finlayson, once I start going about on my own.”
Morag Finlayson turned to the door. There was still a reserve about her that suggested caution, the characteristic wariness of the Scot about offering too much on first acquaintance, but even allowing for such natural and fundamental reticence, there seemed to be an added restraint.
“There’s no need for you to worry about getting about on your own, Laura,” Julius said as soon as the door had closed. “I shall have nothing to do for the next two weeks but show you the countryside.”
“I suppose I meant if we came back again.”
She crossed the room to stand beside him. The deeply embrasured windows overlooked the sea and she saw the surf breaking on a row of skerries at the mouth of the loch. Within their shelter the curve of pale sand she had seen from the high road formed a tiny bay and the sun made the rocks on either side a warmish red. In the tiny anchorage they formed a yacht lay moored, its dazzling white hull faithfully reflected in the calm green water.
“Julius,” she asked, “have we no near neighbors?”
He turned sharply.
“No,” he said, and then more abruptly: “Does one need neighbors on a honeymoon?”
“Of course not!” Laura agreed. “But I thought when we come back later on, perhaps, it might be nice to know somebody is within visiting distance. You said that we would probably come quite often.”
Her stumbling words had been an appeal for the friendship she needed to counteract the sudden claustrophobic reaction she had felt at the thought of their complete isolation, but Julius apparently did not seem to think that friendship was necessary to either of them.
“Later in the summer,” he told her, “I hope to bring a few patients up here as an experiment. I have a theory about some of the nerve cases I’ve been handling recently that could very well be put to the test in a place like this.”
When she showed her complete and utter surprise, he added: “You needn’t worry about our privacy, my dear. They won’t be here, in the house. I intend to put them up in a small shooting lodge at the head of the glen that goes with the estate. I can keep an eye on them there quite nicely, although my theory is mainly to have them self-supporting.”
Laura was immediately interested.
“I’d love to help,” she volunteered. “It would be something for me to do, Julius—”
She broke off at sight of the sudden coldness in his face. It was like a mask, the old impenetrable mask whipped into place at the first infringement on his professional life.
“Try to remember, Laura,” he said, “that you are no longer a nurse. You are my wife.”
Stung by the harshness of the rebuff and deeply hurt by his lack of understanding, she turned from him.
“I shall always be a nurse,” she said quietly. “Marriage doesn’t change one completely, Julius.”
He glanced at his watch without answering.
“Shall we go down now?” he asked. “Mrs. Finlayson will have a meal ready.”
Everything about Dunraven was extremely well organized, Laura realized as she washed swiftly and combed her hair, deciding not to change because she had stood with Julius at the window for so long. There was nothing she could possibly wish for, nothing she could have improved upon. Mrs. Finlayson s
aw to it all, running the house to Julius’s entire satisfaction, it would appear.
Yet behind that facade of perfection there seemed to be a vague disquiet. Laura began to feel it with every day that passed, but she could not bring herself to ask her husband about it. Some of the reserve she had first noticed in Morag Finlayson seemed to have descended on him, too, at least where any reference to the past was concerned. He studiously avoided taking her into company, even when they drove back into the hills or along the winding coast road for a whole day’s motoring to the unbelievable beautiful Loch Maree. A picnic basket was always packed for them and put into the back of the car. It contained enough for both lunch and tea, so that they need not stop at an hotel for a meal. There were so many lovely, isolated coves and promontories along the shore that Laura did not think it at all strange at first. After all, they were on their honeymoon.
If Julius was almost aggressively possessive, she supposed that must be natural, and perhaps he hadn’t really meant to be unkind about her offer of help with the patients. When they returned to London he might think differently about it.
Whenever she thought of London it seemed very far away. Even at this early stage the Highlands of Scotland were beginning to weave their subtle spell about her impressionable heart. Later, when they had bound her to them by the bonds of love, she looked back to those early days of confused impressions and vague, half-formed doubts with the knowledge that they had been the first stepping stones across the dark gulf of experience she had been forced to cross.
Then, quite suddenly, at the end of the first week, Julius was recalled to Harley Street.
“Let me come with you,” she begged. “I don’t really mind giving up part of my honeymoon, Julius.”
“That’s quite unnecessary,” he told her almost sharply. “I shall be busy in London and you would only be at a loose end.”
Prisoner of Love Page 5
