Prisoner of Love

by Jean S. MacLeod

  “Conditions couldn’t be better!" Blair said, looking up into a cloudless sky. “It’s almost like a summer’s day.”

  They began to climb up through the line of birch and alder that skirted the mountain and on over an ear of rough scree before they reached the first pinnacles of rock that would test their skill.

  “We’ll rope together for safety’s sake," Blair suggested, and Julius uncoiled the rope, watching Blair knot it securely about Laura’s waist. When their hands inadvertently touched, he looked away.

  “You next, Lance,” Blair said. “Sorry, old fellow, but I must insist,” he added when Lance made a face at him. “It’s all of us or nothing, and we must make sure about Laura.”

  “O.K.!” Lance agreed. “Is Julius going to lead?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  The next half hour was a tremendous experience for Laura. She had never done any hazardous climbing before, but she felt safe and assured, plodding on up with the rope stretching behind and before her. When they attacked a difficult stretch Lance or Blair was invariably by her side, encouraging and helping her, and she began to feel the exhilaration of these high places and the stimulation of success.

  They stood once or twice to admire the view, but not for long, because it had become colder, although they had not yet touched snow.

  “We won’t go up to the snow line,” Blair said. “There’s only one really difficult stretch before we reach the plateau. That will be high enough for the view we want. We’re coming to it now,” he added. “Don’t worry about it, Laura. It’s not nearly as bad as it looks.”

  Laura raised her eyes to the gaunt rock face above her. It seemed as though there could be no way past it, and then she saw the dark corrie on its side, with a sheer drop beneath it of several hundred feet.

  Fear, sudden and uncontrollable, took possession of her for a split second, but the others were moving on, confident in their attempt to scale the side of the corrie and arrive safely on the narrow plateau above it.

  After that, concentrating on finding the exact holds used by Lance, she forgot her nervousness and was at the top before she knew it. She belayed the rope around a conveniently jutting boulder, and the three of them stood side by side to watch Blair make the ascent.

  What went wrong she never quite knew. There was a rattle of stones, a sickening, slithering sound of metal on rock. She saw Blair’s tall figure in the bright blue anorak suddenly tilt, then she closed her eyes for one desperate instant as the rope took the full weight of his fall.

  When she opened them again she saw it, taut and vibrating, going down into obscurity. Then, before she or Lance could speak or move, there was the swift flash of steel in the sunlight. Julius had slipped out his knife. One swift hack at the rope would have been enough, but as the knife came down to send Blair hurtling into space, Lance had thrust out his hand.

  He gave a little sharp gasp of pain as the blade bit into his flesh, but that was all. Julius put the knife away, saying through clenched teeth:

  “He could have taken us all down with him!”

  “But he didn’t!” Laura had never heard Lance speak like that before. It was a suddenly adult voice, yet the words of accusation were still those of an emotional child. “He didn’t. And you tried to kill him! You would have cut the rope and let him fall!”

  Julius chose to ignore him. They had still the task of bringing Blair up, slowly and laboriously, from the corrie.

  Laura could not think. Her heart was in shreds. “He tried to kill him! He tried to kill him!” a voice kept repeating inside of her, but her own voice answered endlessly: “No, Lance—no! It was an accident.”

  She kept seeing over and over again that dreadful moment when Blair had hung on the end of the rope before he found a foothold and the knife had come down. Julius must have thought they were all going over the edge. To sever the rope had been the only way.

  “He broke his own fall with the axe,” Lance said, pointing down to where Blair was scaling the rock face with the added help of the rope. “Blair knew what he was doing.”

  Laura never quite remembered how they came down from the plateau.

  The great walls of rock, which dropped almost sheer from the summit and which Blair had called the Caisteal Liath—the Gray Castle—seemed to scowl down on them like something cheated of its prey, and high above the Bealach Mor a giant peregrine falcon swung out and hovered menacingly against the cloudless blue of a sky that looked suddenly bare and desolate.

  Blair had made light of his fall, and he had been quick to apologize to Julius for his carelessness. Lance had been wise enough not to repeat his first bitter accusation against Julius, although his eyes still held a suggestion of shock.

  They reached the scree and then the woods, and climbed into the car rather silently for the drive back.

  “You’ve had a harrowing first experience,” Blair reflected. “I’m sorry, Laura.”

  “I don’t think I ever want to climb again,” she said, shaken by the recurring memory of his fall. “Morag was quite right when she said we were all ‘out of our minds’!”

  He smiled, saying no more, and Julius drove swiftly back to Dunraven, his hands gripped tightly on the steering wheel, his thin lips set in a cruel, hard line.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  They celebrated Christmas at Dunraven mainly because of Lance. The glen reserved its main efforts for the New Year and Laura looked forward to them with interest.

  “An entirely pagan conception of festivities,” Julius pointed out, although to Laura’s surprise, he seemed quite prepared to take part in them. He even accompanied the party as it walked across the moor from the lodge to Garvie to “first-foot” the MacKellars and drink Cathie’s homemade wine.

  Yet, underneath it all, Laura was aware of tension, the watchfulness of a cat that plays with a mouse just long enough to amuse itself. And with that feeling came the sure knowledge that her marriage was crumbling. There was no trust between her and Julius now; only a terrible, soul-destroying suspicion.

  When she tried to fight against it she was defeated before she started because it was almost impossible to reason with overwhelming jealousy.

  She would not let herself believe that Julius had tried to kill Blair up there on Suilven. She could not let herself believe it, even though Lance had accused Julius directly. If he thought her in love with Blair—

  In love with Blair? She closed her eyes, seeing Blair’s face so plainly that he might have been standing by her side. It was not the face of the confident man who had stood on the high plateau above the Bealach Mor a week ago, but the ravaged face of the man she had first met, a face that had stirred pity in her and something more.

  Quite soon, she thought, Julius would send Blair away. It was inevitable, part of his preconceived plan, she supposed, yet Blair had still quite a lot of leeway to make up. He ought to stay at the lodge till the spring.

  “It will take the best part of a year to put Cameron securely on his feet again,” Julius had said in the beginning. “Relapses are the things we have to guard against.”

  Blair could not afford to have a relapse now, and when Lance had been packed safely off to school near the end of January, she approached Julius about it.

  “You’ve done so much for Blair, Julius,” she pleaded. “Don’t undo it all by sending him away now. Cathie and Zachray MacKellar have been good for him. Their friendship has helped Blair a lot.”

  He turned her to face him, searching her eyes in the cold gray light from the north. It was a cruel light, coming over snow, harshly revealing, and when he had looked long enough he turned away with an enigmatical smile.

  “We shall see, Laura,” he said. “Do not think that your friend, Doctor Cameron, is out of the wood yet—or is he your lover?” he added almost casually.

  “You know that isn’t true!” she cried. “You’re vile, Julius! Vile!”

  “Perhaps that is so,” he said. “On the other hand, I may be only quick-sighted than
most.”

  Laura was in despair. What could she make of this man who allowed himself to be torn by jealousy and suspicion at every turn? If she had ever given him cause for his distrust of her, she was truly sorry, but she knew that was not so. Something Cathie had said lingered in her mind. “Julius pursued her with his strictest censure. She had no freedom. He locked her away here in the wilds...”

  Cathie had been speaking about Helene, and no doubt Julius had been jealous of Helene, too. If she had loved Zachray—

  But, somehow, Laura knew that Zachray MacKellar had never spoken to Helene about his love. She had seen it in his eyes, the suggestion of passion withheld now forever; it had been in his lonely music, played out against the hills.

  No, if Julius had been suspicious of Helene the lack of trust had sprung only from his own overmastering possessiveness, from the dark evil root of his jealousy.

  And now there was Blair. Laura’s lips began to tremble as she thought of him and all that Julius had said. But Julius must not be allowed to send Blair away before he was fully cured, she thought desperately.

  It did not seem, after a while, that Julius intended to abandon his patient, after all. The days passed and dropped into weeks; Julius went to London and came back again, and Laura went with him once again when it was half-term at Ashleigh.

  In all this time she had not seen a great deal of the MacKellars, simply because, for several weeks, they were completely snowbound at Garvie Lodge. In the glen, however, the snow did not lie for very long. It was too near to the sea. It fell on the island and on Dunraven, but there was little left of it after a day or two; only the stern reminder of it lying thick on Suilven and putting a white mantle on the farther hills.

  By March it had gone from all but the highest peaks and the sun had come out again in renewed splendor. Already there were days when there was a soft, warm feeling in the air—the feeling of spring.

  Activity had been spasmodic in the glen, and during these latter weeks Laura had seen little of Blair. Julius had gone regularly to the lodge because he had several patients there now, but he never invited her to accompany him and there was no work being done on the yacht because of the inclement weather. Their small “shipyard” was idle, and Laura found herself wondering what Blair did to occupy his time. She knew that he had been writing a book about his Antarctic trip, but she was not sure how far he had got on with it.

  Lance was almost on his way home for the Easter vacation before she discovered something of the truth. It was Morag who told her that Blair was “not so well.”

  “But, Morag,” Laura protested with a small, chill feeling at her heart, “why weren’t we told?”

  Mrs. Finlayson drew in a deep breath.

  “I wouldn’t be knowing that,” she said, “any more than you would. He’s had some sort of relapse. I’m hearing from Callum, but what it is or what has caused it I couldn’t be saying. No doubt,” she added, “Doctor Behar will know.”

  Laura endured two days of indecision, waiting for Julius to mention Blair, and finally she asked him outright.

  “Blair hasn’t been down here for a long time, Julius,” she said, trying to keep her voice quite steady, not to show her anxiety. “Is there anything wrong?”

  They were finishing breakfast, a meal that Julius liked to take early, and he pushed his table napkin to one side and rose before answering her. With one arm along the high mantelpiece, he stood at the hearth and regarded her reflectively.

  “He has had a relapse," he said slowly. “It was—rather to be expected.”

  “But he was so well!” she protested. “Before Christmas he looked as if he had made a complete recovery.” Her voice was slightly unsteady now. “How could it have happened, Julius? He had put on weight and he was, taking an interest in everything—the yacht, and his book, and the garden at the lodge—How could it have happened?” she ended despairingly.

  Julius surveyed her critically.

  “Surely you have forgotten your training, Laura,” he said. “You ought to know how swiftly a relapse can overtake a patient in a case like this. They can go to pieces in a couple of days, as a matter of fact.”

  “Not when they are as well as Blair was three weeks ago!” she argued. “He was talking of going to London—of seeing us there—but he wanted to finish Northern Bird before he went. He wanted to see her in the water again and take her out to the Islands to her new mooring—”

  “The best laid plans o’ mice and men’!” Julius quoted with a shrug.

  “Can’t you do something?” she begged. “Can’t you try something else—some new approach to the whole treatment?”

  His eyes were almost opaque when he answered her.

  “I’m trying that now,” he said. “Don’t interfere, please, Laura.”

  Her heart sank, but surely she could go and see for herself how Blair really was.

  “May I go and visit him?” she asked. “He must be thinking me most indifferent and unkind.”

  “By all means,” Julius agreed. “You may not find a great deal of difference in him, after all. He has just pulled out of a difficult patch, although he is still not sleeping very well.”

  “Are you giving him something to help?”

  “Sedormid,” he answered. “I have also given him a barbiturate on occasion.”

  She tried to remember what she had learned about barbiturates as she climbed the glen road. In the ordinary way, they were no more than an aid to sleep, a sedative given to a patient over a short period to help build up his natural restorative powers, but if given over a long period they were apt to produce loss of memory, depression, drowsiness and a general feeling of lassitude. The patient became sluggish, not wanting to make an effort, either physical or mental.

  Why was she thinking these things, going over them detail by detail in her mind? She pushed them out of her thoughts, climbing resolutely toward the lodge.

  Blair, she learned, was out. He had gone down along the burn, Callum thought.

  Laura drew a deep breath of relief.

  “So he’s feeling better, then?” she said. “I’m so glad.”

  “There's no reason why Doctor Cameron shouldn’t be out and about when he is able.”

  Laura turned to find Nurse Scyler at her elbow, her cold, expressionless eyes peering shortsightedly from behind the thick lenses of her spectacles.

  “No,” she agreed, “of course not. Perhaps this better weather will help him on to his feet again,” she added conventionally.

  She did not like Nurse Scyler and she was not prone to sudden dislikes. The woman had an almost furtive way of walking—creeping up on you from behind—and her attitude to Julius was so servile that it had become nauseating. She came to Dunraven regularly once every week, and Laura entertained her to dinner; but the woman made it only too plain that it was Julius she came to see, so that friendship of any kind had been impossible between them. Even Cathie MacKellar had found difficulty in “knowing” Nurse Scyler, so that Laura felt that she was hardly alone in her instinctive dislike of the woman. She had a fairly shrewd idea that all her own movements were most carefully watched and her doings reported in a delicate way to Julius afterward.

  A tale-carrier? No, not exactly. A very clever mischief maker, perhaps. “Shall I try to find Doctor Cameron for you, Mrs. Behar?” she asked. “He can’t be so very far away. He only set out about half an hour ago.”

  “Don’t trouble,” Laura said. “I’ll go back along the burn side and if I come across him down there I’ll have a word with him. If not, will you let him know I’ve called?”

  “Certainly, Mrs. Behar. The doctor was only saying yesterday that it’s a great pity about these relapses, coming after young Doctor Cameron seemed so well, but with his problem of course, one never knows. It can remain in the system for years. But then you know that, I’m sure,” she added with a peculiarly forced smile. “I understand that you were in the nursing profession yourself at one time.”

  “Yes,” L
aura said immediately. “Before I was married.”

  She turned, ruffled by the contact, and walked away toward the line of silver birch and mountain ash that marked the course of the burn. She had climbed nearly to the humpbacked bridge before she saw Blair.

  He was sitting on the bank above the deep rock pool where Lance had landed his first salmon with such disastrous results, and suddenly she was remembering that moment afterward when he had carried her to safety in the shallows beneath the bridge. She felt his arms about her again, his nearness, and the comfort of his quiet assurance as he held her close against him, and she closed her eyes at the intensity of the emotion sweeping over her. It shook her to the very depths of her being, as the wind shakes the pliant birch, leaving her tremblingly aware of a strong new force in her life propelling her to some inevitable end.

  When she opened her eyes and looked at him again Blair was still unaware of her standing there. She saw how thin and stooped he was now, and as she watched he put his head down in his hands and' sat there, unmoving, until she reached him.

  “Blair,” she said, “I’m so sorry about this. I only heard from Morag at the beginning of the week. I had no idea you had been ill again.”

  He looked up, his face haggard for a moment before he forced a smile. “These things happen,” he said almost indifferently. “It looks pretty much as if I shall always be like this.”

  “That’s nonsense,” she protested. “Look at the progress you were making before Christmas!”

  “And look at me now! Not a very encouraging picture, you will have to admit.”

  It was so unlike him to give way to depression like this, unlike the Blair she had come to know!

  “It’s only a small setback,” she tried to say encouragingly. “They will get fewer and farther between as time goes on.”