Chapter Two
The noise from overhead sounded like feet stomping on the roof. Merry squinted upwards, disoriented and confused by what she heard. How could anyone be on the roof, she wondered blearily, and how could she hear them if they were? Her flat was on the first floor, not the top… and then the low ceiling over her head came into focus and she remembered where she was. Did the birds wear boots in Orkney? It sounded like it.
When curiosity overcame her disinclination to swing her feet out of the warm bed and onto the much chillier floor, she hopped across the floor to pull on her dressing gown and headed for the door that led outside. She tugged on the boots she’d left there the night before and ventured into the crisp morning air.
The sea breeze snatched her breath and she gasped as her lungs contracted from the cold. But the view across the clifftops was more than enough to compensate: a forget-me-not sky dotted with cotton-wool clouds and sunlight dancing upon the white-crested waves. The light had a different quality to that of the sunset the night before, but it was no less incredible.
I could definitely get used to this, Merry thought, as a smile curved her lips. Then a shrill bleat shattered the peace. She leapt out of her skin and whirled around, seeking the source of the sound, and blinked in disbelief. There was a goat on the roof of the croft.
She gaped at it for a moment, her brain struggling to process what her eyes were telling it. The first issue was the roof of the croft itself, which wasn’t tiled with slate or terracotta as she’d assumed: it was grass. Long green grass that was actually growing and waving in the wind.
What kind of lunatic covers the roof of a house with grass? Merry asked herself incredulously. Just how bonkers had this Dougal been?
And then a vague memory tugged at her brain: an episode of Grand Designs featuring an earnest, ecologically sound and entirely non-lunatic homeowner, who’d explained why soil and grass made great insulation materials, as well as helping the environment and increasing biodiversity. Except Merry was pretty sure he hadn’t envisioned a snowy-white goat with a frankly insolent stare as part of that biodiversity.
The goat bleated again, as though demanding to know who she was. Merry waved her hands in a shooing motion. ‘Get down from there. Get down!’
It regarded her without blinking, its yellow eyes fixed on her for several long seconds in goaty contemplation. Then it dipped its head and pulled up a mouthful of grass, chewing slowly as it studied her once more.
‘Hey, stop eating my roof!’ she objected, taking a step closer. ‘There’s plenty of grass down here for you.’
Predictably, the animal ignored her. Merry looked around in desperation; where had the stupid creature come from? Had it strayed from a nearby farm? She scanned the empty horizon and frowned. Where was the nearest farm? Then her gaze came to rest on a metal-framed yard to the left of the croft, with a gate that was open and a food trough in the middle. There were unmistakable footprints in the dark brown mud – unmistakably cloven footprints…
A horrible suspicion presented itself to Merry. She glanced at the goat again and saw it was still watching her with detached interest. ‘Oh no,’ she said, shaking her head fast. ‘Don’t tell me you come with the accommodation.’
The goat bared its teeth and bleated a reply. Merry pressed her lips together and glared at it – she must be wrong. There’d been no mention of livestock when she’d applied for the residency and Niall hadn’t said anything about any animals when he’d dropped her off. ‘Don’t get too comfortable,’ she told the goat, folding her arms across her dressing gown in defiance. ‘I definitely don’t need a housemate.’
Back inside the croft, she checked the time: just after nine o’clock. Niall was due to arrive in less than an hour and there was nothing to be gained by ringing him to demand an explanation before then. She’d just have to hope there was some roof left by the time he turned up, she decided as a faint bleat filtered through the ceiling, and that he’d be able to put her goat-sitting fears to rest.
* * *
‘Good morning,’ he said when she opened the door an hour later. ‘How was your first night on Orkney?’
He smiled and, once again, she caught a flash of Clark Kent, although he was dressed much more casually today. Merry could see the collar of a red-checked shirt poking above his battered navy Barbour coat and his legs were clad in blue jeans. She wondered which was his normal work-day wear, the suit or the jeans. And then she wondered why she was even thinking about it and gave herself a hefty mental shake.
‘I slept well,’ she told him, summoning up an answering smile. ‘Thanks for the whisky.’
‘Ah, you’re welcome. I wasn’t sure you’d be a whisky drinker, to be honest, but thought it was worth leaving a bottle, just in case.’
‘It was very much appreciated,’ Merry said, as the memory of the smoky amber liquid danced on her tongue. ‘I’ve already recommended it to a couple of writer friends.’
Niall laughed. ‘The distillery is here on the Orkney mainland. I might have to start charging them commission.’ He paused to study her. ‘Are you ready for your tour? It’s a beautiful day.’
Merry hesitated, wondering whether to mention her run-in with the goat. She’d gone out to check on it after her shower and there’d been no sign of it. Surely it couldn’t have come back in the meantime – Niall would almost certainly have commented if it had climbed up there again. But maybe it wasn’t an unusual sight on Orkney, she thought. Maybe it was entirely normal and a goat on the roof was worth two in the yard, or something equally unfathomable…
‘Definitely ready,’ she said, pushing the whole ridiculous idea out of her head. ‘Where are we going first?’
‘It’s a surprise,’ Niall replied, as she pulled on the woollen baker hat Jess had given her as a farewell gift. ‘But I’m quietly confident you’ll like it.’
Merry couldn’t help a quick glance at the roof as they walked to the car; just as she’d suspected, there was no goat there now, or anywhere nearby, and no sign of anything untoward. The grass looked perfectly normal, or as normal as it could while growing on top of a house, and it appeared to be entirely unravaged by teeth. In fact, if she hadn’t spotted more tell-tale hoofprints in the mud outside the door, Merry might have been inclined to believe she’d dreamt the whole encounter. Even so, she decided not to say anything to Niall; novelists had a reputation for eccentricity at the best of times and Merry knew it was a fine line between having a few quirks and being several tiles short of a Scrabble set.
He’d obviously noticed her glancing up, though, because he gave her an enquiring look as the car nudged along the rough track that led to the main road. ‘Are you curious about the grass roof?’ he asked. ‘It’s a tradition that probably came from Scandinavia, but you’ll find roofs like it dotted all over Scotland. A lot were thatched, and slate tiles are more common now, but the previous owner of this croft insisted on keeping the grass and Orkney Literary Society decided to honour his wishes when we inherited it from him.’
‘Yes, I heard a bit about Dougal from Bridget yesterday,’ Merry said, suppressing a smile as she recalled the older woman’s observations. ‘He sounded colourful.’
‘He was,’ Niall said, nudging the car out onto the smooth tarmac of the main road. ‘In fact, he wasn’t a million miles away from the kind of character you might dream up for one of your stories. A bit like old Jorge in Separate Lives, actually, but not quite as funny.’
Merry shot him a startled look; it hadn’t occurred to her that he might have read any of her books. Niall caught her looking and raised both eyebrows. ‘I’m a librarian, remember? And I always try to read at least one book by the authors we offer the residency to, but in your case, I didn’t need to make a special effort. I’d already read and enjoyed most of them after we stocked them in the library.’
It wasn’t the first time a librarian had told Merry they were a fan of her work, so she didn’t really know why she felt a blush start to creep across he
r cheeks. ‘Oh. Well, thank you. I’m glad you liked Jorge – I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for him too.’
The conversation turned to other favourite fictional characters and Merry was so engrossed that it wasn’t until they pulled into a car park a few minutes later that she realized where Niall was taking her. ‘Oh!’ she squeaked, both hands flying to her face in delight. ‘It’s Skara Brae! I’ve always wanted to come here, ever since we learned about it at school.’
He parked and nodded towards the sign that welcomed them to the famous Neolithic village. ‘I thought you’d like it – writers usually do. There are so many stories here – even the way it was discovered is thrilling.’
Merry cast her mind back to the research she’d done before coming to Orkney. ‘It was uncovered during a brutal storm, wasn’t it? Back in the nineteenth century?’
‘So the story goes,’ Niall agreed. ‘But there are those who say the village was an open secret long before then, it was just that no one really gave it much thought until the storm damage revealed a few of the houses in 1850. Even then, it took another 75 years and another storm to uncover just how much of the village had been preserved beneath the ground.’
Excitement fizzed in the pit of Merry’s stomach. ‘I can’t wait to see it.’
‘Then let’s go and take a look,’ Niall replied, obviously gratified by her enthusiasm. ‘I’ve genuinely lost count of the number of times I’ve been here but it never gets old, especially when there’s someone new to share it with.’
He greeted the middle-aged woman at the ticket office warmly and introduced Merry. ‘It’s so lovely to meet you at last,’ the woman said. ‘I love your writing – it’s a real thrill to know you’re staying on Orkney and exploring our treasures.’
‘Elspeth has been counting down the days until you arrived,’ Niall said solemnly, causing the woman to turn bright red. ‘I think she’s hoping you might write her into a book.’
‘What a thing to say,’ she said, shaking her head and tutting, but Merry thought she detected a tiny bit of hope in her eyes too. ‘Although I am a big fan. Now, I’d offer you the guidebook but Niall has been here so many times that he knows the patter off by heart – he’s the best guide you could have.’
And now it was Niall’s turn to look embarrassed. ‘I wouldn’t go that far.’
Elspeth smiled. ‘No need to be modest.’ She turned to Merry. ‘There’s not much about Orkney that he doesn’t know. I sometimes think he’s like a walking version of Google.’
‘I’ll be getting my head jammed in the doorway on the way out if you don’t stop,’ he said. ‘I’m hoping it’s not too busy yet – no coach tours?’
‘We’ve only been open fifteen minutes so not yet.’ Elspeth reached below the counter and withdrew two small white bundles. ‘I take it you’ll be needing these?’
He took them with a grateful nod. ‘We’ll be careful.’
The exchange baffled Merry, but there was no further explanation. Instead, Niall tipped his head in appraisal. ‘Ready to go back in time, Merry?’
His words caused another frisson of excitement to run through her. ‘Absolutely.’
Just outside the ticket office, Niall paused. ‘There’s a replica of how the houses might have looked, but I sometimes think it’s better to visit the real thing first, to draw your own conclusions. What do you think?’
Merry considered the question; on one hand, she could understand how it might help visitors to interpret what they were seeing if they’d visited the replica first, but what she really wanted was to allow her own senses to tell her the story of the people who’d lived there five thousand years earlier. She nodded at Niall. ‘Let’s come back here afterwards.’
The path to the ancient village was dotted with stone markers that helped create the illusion they really were travelling backwards through time. It was the one that mentioned the Pyramids that really caught Merry’s imagination, though; the houses she was about to see had been in place longer than one of mankind’s greatest feats of engineering. But even that couldn’t prepare her for the sense of history she felt when she and Niall finally reached Skara Brae.
As Elspeth had indicated, only a few hardy souls were exploring the site so early on a cold Sunday morning in February. There were eight single-room buildings set into the ground, so that visitors could look down into them from the grassy mounds and raised modern walkways surrounding them. Some had stone pathways running around the outside, but several signs politely asked for people to keep their distance and stay off the grass where possible. In London, there would be ropes and alarms and probably several stern-looking stewards to keep visitors under control, Merry thought, but the lack of any real physical barriers here created the illusion that she could stroll into one of the houses whenever she liked.
As though reading her mind, Niall pulled the two white bundles from his Barbour pocket and smiled. ‘Want to go inside?’
It was the most unnecessary question she’d ever been asked. ‘Of course,’ Merry gasped. ‘Can we?’
He tugged at one of the bundles and it fell apart into two white shoe covers. ‘We can if we wear these and make sure no one copies us.’
Merry didn’t need to be told twice; she took the proffered mesh covers and pulled them over the soles of her sturdy boots. With a quick glance around, Niall climbed carefully down to the pale gravel floor of the nearest house and held out a hand to Merry to help her to follow.
She felt it almost as soon as she reached the ground: the essence of people long gone that seemed to emanate from the grey stone walls. Spellbound, she took a moment to gaze around in silent awe before walking through the narrow door that led into the nearest house. Her fingers trailed along the lichen-covered stones and she wondered who might have done the same thing, thousands of years earlier, coming home or leaving forever. It was a privilege and an unbelievable thrill to stand in that place, at that time, and feel the echo of their lives.
‘On the surface, it looks as though they had quite a simple lifestyle,’ Niall said, not far behind her. ‘They lived in one room, fished in the sea and farmed the land. The houses are all the same, which suggests no one was more important than the others, but there’s one building which seems to have been used to make tools and jewellery. So they were actually quite a sophisticated people, by the standards of the day.’
He sounded more like an archaeologist than a librarian, Merry thought, hiding a smile. Then she recalled how Elspeth had described him as a walking Google, and Merry understood exactly what the other woman had meant; she had the definite feeling she could ask Niall anything about Skara Brae and its people and he would be able to give a full and knowledgeable answer.
‘Why did they leave?’ she asked, remembering that experts believed the villagers had abandoned their homes in a hurry.
‘No one knows,’ Niall replied simply. ‘There might have been some catastrophic event, like a storm, that forced them to run for their lives. The buildings were filled with sand when they were uncovered, which is why there’s such a fantastic level of artefact preservation.’
Merry half-turned to look at him and she saw his face was alive with enthusiasm. It made him look younger, although she was suddenly aware she had no idea how old he actually was – perhaps a year or two older than her, which would make him mid-thirties, but he might just as easily be in his late-twenties. She watched him as he talked, explaining other possible theories for the abandonment of Skara Brae, and found herself idly wondering what Jess would make of him. ‘Hot,’ she heard her friend’s voice say in her head. ‘Hot, passionate and very into books – what’s not to love, Mer?’
Merry felt her face grow warm and she hurriedly silenced the voice and gazed around them as she tried to focus on what Niall was saying. But she was very aware that part of her brain was in complete agreement with the imaginary Jess and for the first time, Merry was grateful to be nursing a broken heart – because if she hadn’t sworn off men for the foreseeable future, and
certainly for the duration of her residency, she might find herself developing quite an inconvenient crush on the librarian of Orkney.
He stopped talking and it took her a moment to realize he’d posed her a question. Trying not to panic, she spooled back mentally and established he’d asked if she’d ever considered writing a historical story. ‘Not really,’ she said after a second or two of consideration. ‘I’m not sure my publisher would like it for a start – the contemporary books I write sell pretty well and I can’t imagine they’d be up for a total change of genre.’
Niall looked surprised. ‘Oh, I’d always assumed a successful, well-established author like you could write whatever they chose. Are they really so strict?’
Merry smiled. ‘Strict isn’t quite the right word,’ she said, and hesitated, thinking of the way her publisher had bent over backwards to help when she’d finally admitted there was a problem. ‘It’s more that the readers don’t always like it when an author shifts to writing another kind of book. And that makes the publisher’s job harder, because it’s tough to come back from a book that hasn’t sold well. I suppose it’s just a risk.’
‘I can see that,’ Niall said slowly. ‘But what happens when you get an idea that doesn’t fit into the way you write now?’
‘That’s never happened,’ Merry answered, and shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. The conversation was going in an unexpectedly uncomfortable direction; she wasn’t sure she wanted to talk about writing at all. ‘But you never know – maybe Orkney will inspire me.’
Coming Home to Brightwater Bay Page 3
