Prisoner of Love

by Jean S. MacLeod

  “Legend,” he said, “is the belief of ignorance. Take Callum, for instance. He firmly believes in what he calls ‘The Seal Folk,’ a race of people presumably descended from the gray Atlantic Seal!”

  “Callum is—different,” Laura said gently, but she was remembering the terrible look on Callum’s face when Julius had brought the slaughtered seal ashore.

  “He certainly is,” he agreed. “Men like Callum are prone to take fanatical likes—and dislikes—to people. Callum has certainly taken a tremendous liking to Doctor Cameron.”

  Laura was remembering how Blair had called Callum his “personal Brownie” on that first visit to the lodge, and she smiled, forgetting Julius for a moment.

  “I take it, then, that you have no real objection to having Cameron here?" he asked at last.

  “No.” Laura turned, and suddenly she wanted to withdraw that swift acceptance of his plan. Why, she wondered, had Julius chosen Blair? “Unless—there’s anyone else you would rather have under your direct supervision?” she tried to say steadily.

  Blair was standing close behind her, so close that the slightest movement would have taken her into his arms.

  “No one,” he answered. “I am still very interested in Doctor Cameron.”

  Laura could find nothing to say to that, and when Blair came to Dunraven the following afternoon she tried to assure herself that it was a perfectly natural arrangement. Blair had been Julius’s patient longer than any of the others and he had made considerably less progress. His case was not straightforward, and Julius might even be baffled by it, seeing it as a challenge to his skill. Under the circumstances, it would be only natural to bring Blair to Dunraven, since someone had to come.

  Laura had prepared his room, but she left Morag to show him up to it. “Thank you, Laura,” he said when he came down, “for a pleasant view.” He knew, then, that she had chosen the room overlooking the sea, with its wide windows affording him a view across the bay and out toward the North Minch.

  “I thought you would like to be high up,” she said, “but if the stairs bother you, Blair, I can quite easily find you another room.”

  “At the moment,” he smiled, “the stairs are a detail. I’m at the peak of my graph again—on the upbeat!”

  “One day it will stay that way,” she said eagerly. “The fever could very well be wearing itself out, couldn’t it? One day we’ll find that the graph is quite steady, that it doesn’t go down anymore.”

  She thought of these terrible plunges down into the depths, shown so plainly in her personal chart, wondering if Blair had accepted them now as inevitable. Although he was still far too thin, the past week had seen a tremendous difference in him. He looked alert and competent again, and he had dealt with Nurse Scyler’s emergency as efficiently as Julius could have done. Yes, the past week had set him on his feet again—the week when Julius had been in London.

  She thrust the ugly thought from her, wondering what part Blair would be allowed to take in the life at Dunraven. Julius could not very well exclude him from their friendship, although he was still a patient.

  Julius did not want to do that. He even appeared to encourage Blair to consider himself more of a guest than anything else, and certainly Lance was overjoyed at the new arrangement.

  “Now we’ll get Northern Bird out!” he gloated. “Now everything will go just right!”

  “We must not ask too much of Doctor Cameron," Julius warned. “He is still a sick man.”

  Lance looked bewildered.

  “But he can do so much,” he objected. “He’s so strong!”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Julius said, and left the argument there.

  Lance went to look for Blair and Laura turned to the window.

  “Do you want me to help with Blair?” she asked steadily.

  “You might be useful, Laura,” he answered unexpectedly. “I have a little theory I would like to try out, as a matter of fact. Something that might bear results. It is not as if you would need to be in a sickroom all day.”

  “I’m used to that, and—if it would help Blair—I’d gladly do anything you ask. He can’t be left like this, Julius!” She turned to face him. “There must be something we can do.”

  He took a cigarette out of his case and lit it.

  “Indeed,” he said, “yes, there must be something we can do.”

  Curiously chilled by his noncommittal answer, she left him. What was happening? They seemed to be all struggling in a web, caught up in the invisible mesh of suspicion and counter-suspicion; yet during the next few days Julius seemed to be too busy at the lodge to worry about Blair.

  And Blair himself was frankly in his element. Sitting high on Northern Bird’s prow, he holystoned the deck, with Lance and Callum in attendance, and sometimes when she heard their discordant singing borne on the wind far across the machar, Laura told herself that she must have passed out of a bad dream. Blair seemed to be putting the winter and its recurring relapses behind him and fixing his eyes steadily on the future.

  Northern Bird was ready to be put back into the water by the following weekend, and Julius seemed pleased and grateful to Blair for all the work he had done to make her seaworthy again.

  “Are we going to sail her?” Lance asked anxiously as they watched the yacht settling at her moorings in the outer bay. “You said we might be able to take her across to Harris if the weather stayed fine.” Unconsciously he had addressed Blair as the only real authority where Northern Bird was concerned, and Laura felt almost nervous as she looked across at Julius. He was smiling, however.

  “Why not?” he said before Blair could answer the question. “The Minch looks as smooth as glass.”

  “It’s a treacherous sea,” Blair warned, “although it looks fair enough today. We can chance it if you like.”

  “We’ve stores and water to put aboard,” Julius said, “but that won’t take so very long.” He turned to Laura. “You’ll come, of course?”

  “Of course!” Already a little thrill of pleasurable anticipation was tingling along her spine. “I’m anxious to see what Northern Bird can do.”

  “What about the others at the lodge?” Blair asked. “We almost need a third hand.”

  “We’ll take Callum,” Julius decided. “I’m not really maintaining Northern Bird for the benefit of my patients.”

  Laura looked swiftly at Blair, but he didn’t seem to mind the snub. Julius’s cynical rejoinder had apparently left him unmoved. But perhaps Julius no longer considered Blair as a patient, she thought with relief.

  They set out early the following morning, carried by a gentle northeast wind across a sea that was as blue as turquoise with hardly a ripple on its surface all the way. Laura sat out on deck, hugging her knees and watching for porpoises, but the water seemed curiously devoid of life. Even the seals that Blair said sported by the hundreds around the Shiant Isles and Scalpay were conspicuously absent though it was a day to be lying in the sun.

  Even so early in April it could be warm up here in the Islands, warm and healing, with the first promise of summer tiptoeing up from the south. As easily, however, it could change. Winter could come back with a vicious snarl, and that had been Blair's reason for advising caution.

  Yet there was no sign of change anywhere on all the broad horizon, no tiny cloud hovering on the skyline warning of a storm. Even Blair seemed to have forgotten everything but the sheer joy of feeling a tiller in his hand again and the pull of wind in a sail.

  The Shiants came up and fell away to leeward, ghost islands riding gently on the blue water with a plume of white seabirds on their crest The sound between them and the Lond Island, Laura noticed, was choppy and difficult, and Blair had to give his full attention to the sails. Callum, too, looked uneasy, but it was for another reason.

  “This is a bad place,” he said, regarding Laura with large, earnest brown eyes. “The Blue Men of the Minch live here, waiting to trap a boat that has only a sail to help her escape.”

  Beh
ind them Julius laughed derisively.

  “They must all be away for the day, Callum,” he suggested, “laying their spells elsewhere!”

  “You would not be able to tell,” he said. “You would not be able to see them.”

  Laura bit her lip. There had not been any real scorn in Callum’s voice, only an assurance of truth. Julius was not the kind of person who saw water-kelpies to be warned by them. Callum’s eyes dilated when he thought of how Julius had killed the seal that day coming back from beyond Tanera Mor. He was a murderer.

  Julius put in at East Loch Tarbert and they went ashore.

  “I’ll row back, I think,” he said, sitting where he was in the dinghy. “When you’ve done your sightseeing you can signal me from here.”

  Lance was eager to explore and Laura felt that she would like to see something of this lovely Hebridean isle now that they had come so far. She had no idea what particular whim had prompted her husband to return to the yacht, but at least he wasn’t leaving her alone with Blair. He had that assurance.

  They walked a short way out of the little port on the winding road that skirted the Atlantic. There was a whaling station tucked into a secluded bay, and they spent an hour there, with Lance asking so many questions that Laura felt almost ashamed.

  “Blair!” she laughed as they retraced their steps along the shore, “you must be exhausted! Lance is a veritable sponge when it comes to soaking up information about the sea.”

  “No more than I was at his age,” Blair admitted. “It’s rather a pity that we haven’t longer to walk on a bit, but—Julius may be waiting.” He glanced at the watch strapped to his wrist. “We’ve been well over an hour.”

  It had seemed far shorter than that, a moment snatched from time, a second in a long eternity, Laura thought, as a desperate surge of love and longing rose in her heart. Oh, Blair! Blair! she cried wordlessly. If we could only live this little hour forever!

  The peace, the murmur of the sea, the sheen-white sands where no foot had trod, all caught at her heart.

  “I suppose we ought to go,” she said reluctantly.

  They had stopped on the brow of a hill, waiting for Lance to catch up with them, and all the wide vista of both the Tarbert sea lochs was spread out beneath them. On one side there was nothing but the limitless horizon of the Atlantic; on the other the eastern waters of The Minch. Only the short stretch of road before them linked the two; only a step to take between fantasy and the land of the heart to—reality.

  Blair was standing close behind her, so close that the slightest movement would have taken her into his arms, and for a split second he did not move. The moment passed and he turned away, facing the wide blue sea loch to the east where Scalpay guarded the entrance to the “Stream of the Blue Men.”

  Laura could not look at him because she knew that he had been as shaken as she had been in that moment of silent revelation, and when Lance came over the brow of the hill they both turned toward him almost with relief.

  “Look!” Lance exclaimed when he had gained their vantage point. “Over there! It’s Northern Bird. Julius has taken her out on his own!”

  It was true enough. The yacht was cruising slowly in the sheltered waters of the loch, and before they had reached the little port it had disappeared beyond the islands.

  Blair’s anger was obvious. Julius had yet to learn to handle the yacht with confidence, but there was some consolation in the fact that Callum was still on board with him. They had turned into the “Stream of the Blue Men,” Callum’s haunted sound, where every puff of wind so Callum would believe, would be against them. His expression sharpened as he scanned the empty sea, and Laura realized that he was keeping his temper in check with the utmost difficulty. When they reached the harbor he said abruptly:

  “We’ll see if they have left a message for us. They may have come ashore again before they set out.”

  It was a ridiculous situation, Laura thought, and one that could quite easily lead to trouble. Blair had said that they should make their way back to the mainland as early as possible, and they had decided to not even wait for a meal on shore. Laura had planned to cook it in the galley while they were sailing homeward, but now it would seem that Julius had thrown all thought of caution to the winds. He was prepared to let them wait for him until he saw fit to bring Northern Bird back.

  Blair, who knew the Outer Islands well, had stumbled upon an old acquaintance, a crofter-fisherman who made a profit out of catching lobsters and who had come down to the port to augment his stores and buy extra string for his pots. He was a well-educated and exceedingly intelligent man, a Celt with a strong mixture of Norse in his ancestry, tall and fair, with vividly blue eyes belying his age and giving him the look of a boy, although Blair told Laura afterward that he was seventy-three. He spoke English with great beauty and accuracy. It was an acquired language and therefore formal and graceful, with no accent whatsoever. He would not speak in his native tongue when he discovered that Laura “hadn’t the Gaelic,” merely giving Blair the briefest salute in that language as they met.

  “Will you take a dram?” he asked as they moved toward a small hotel above the harbor. “It is a long time since we met.”

  “Ten years,” Blair calculated, although it seemed by the way they smiled at each other that it could have been yesterday.

  “Yes, it will be all of that,” the old man said. “Have you been well?”

  “Most of the time.” Blair evidently did not wish to dwell on his present troubles. “I have been abroad, Lachlan.”

  “Is that so? You look thinner than you were, but this is the air to put a man back on his feet again!”

  “It has certainly kept you steadily enough on yours, Lachlan!” Blair smiled. “Ten years hasn’t made a scrap of difference to you!”

  “No,” Lachlan smiled, “that is perhaps so.” He stood back to let Laura precede him into the hotel. “It may be that I am going to live as long as the Jura MacCrains, although what I would be doing with myself at one hundred and twenty years of age I do not know!”

  The landlord came forward and Blair asked if a message had been left for them, but apparently Northern Bird had pulled up her anchor without anyone coming ashore.

  “They went out as soon as you were landed,” he was told, and Laura saw Blair frown as he bought Lachlan a drink.

  Lance was waiting out on the quay, watching for the first sign of the returning yacht, and when they had wished Lachlan a polite goodbye, Blair and Laura joined him.

  It was half an hour before Northern Bird sailed around the south end of Scalpay, and it was Callum who rowed ashore in the dinghy to collect them. He was and looked completely scared.

  “Yon man should never be allowed to handle a boat!” he said before Blair could stop him. “He’s frightened—fair frightened of the sea!”

  The atmosphere aboard Northern Bird was tense all the way back to the mainland. Blair had no right to question Julius, and no explanation had been offered for the yacht’s unheralded cruise with Julius in complete command, yet Laura knew why her husband had taken Northern Bird out alone. He had been determined to prove to himself that he could handle a boat as well as Blair could, with only a fraction of his experience.

  It was a strange conviction, but she knew that it held truth. In so many ways now, Julius was Blair’s enemy.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “It’s no use blinking the fact,” Morag said. “All these injections and things are no good to anybody. Doctor Cameron is nearly back to where he was when he first came here, and you’ll not tell me that they haven't something to do with it!”

  Laura bit her lip. She had been pretending to herself for days that the present state of affairs was no more than a very slight relapse, but Blair was not picking up as he should have done.

  For the first time, too, he seemed to be suspicious of the injections Julius continued to give him, although Julius had been careful to tell him each time what he was using. When a new drug came onto the mar
ket he had tried that, too, with Blair’s full consent, but now it seemed almost as if Blair had ceased to care about an ultimate cure. The hoped-for improvement in his health was not making itself manifest and Laura was too inexperienced in these matters to be aware of the immediate effects of some of the lesser-known drugs.

  Julius had kept a record of his patient’s reactions, together with a list of injections and the dosages given, and she added her own report whenever Blair was left in her charge, a rare occurrence.

  Once or twice she had wondered if Julius might not be using the wrong type of drug in the circumstances, taking a risk because he hated to be defeated by anything.

  She remembered the risk he had taken that day on the far side of the Minch, and shivered. Was it only a week ago? Could anyone have gone down as Blair had done in just over seven days?

  She dared not question Julius. It would only result in her being withdrawn from the sickroom altogether, and somehow she felt it imperative to keep some sort of link between herself and Blair.

  Lance fretted and grew restless, waiting for Blair to get well.

  “It was going to be such a wonderful holiday,” he grieved. “We were going to do so much once Northern Bird was in the water!”

  And now Northern Bird rode at anchor in the bay, a deserted ship because a week of violent storms had kept her sheltering there. Even Blair would not have taken her out under these conditions, Laura realized.

  “Why don’t you go up to Garvie Lodge for a day?” she suggested. “I’m quite sure the MacKellars would be grateful for some extra help, and—you could tell them about Blair,” she added, her heart beginning to pound slowly and heavily as she remembered the last time she had spoken to Zachray and the warning he had seen fit to give her. “Tell Cathie that I’d like to see her if she can spare an afternoon to come down,” she added. “I haven’t seen her for weeks.”

  Lance went off rather disconsolately. The moor was no real substitute for the sea so far as he was concerned, but a visit to Garvie would take up most of the afternoon, and that would always be a few hours nearer to Blair’s recovery.