Air Ambulance

by Jean S. MacLeod

  “Yes, I understand,” she told him weakly. “But I’m going to be something of a burden to you, too—at least till you can send for another plane to take me back to the mainland.”

  She thought that he smiled, but could not quite be sure. She was very tired, and the pain round her ribs stabbed incessantly now.

  “We’ll see about that in a day or two,” he said. “B.E.A. will probably send their own doctor out from Renfrew when they come to have a look at the Heron. Meantime,” he added somewhat dryly, “I can do my best to make you comfortable, even though you prefer to behave like an unwilling prisoner.”

  That wasn’t it at all, she tried to tell him, but suddenly felt too weak to argue.

  “This is going to be quite painful,” he told her almost ruthlessly as he rolled up his sleeves. “I’ll give you a shot of something when I can, but we’ll have to find out first where exactly the trouble is. There’s bound to be torn muscle, but we’ll see what we can do first to ease the pain.”

  “I can’t remember falling,” she said vaguely as he swabbed an area of skin and ran a hypodermic needle expertly beneath the surface.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WHEN Alison wakened the following morning she found herself strapped securely from just above her ribs to the top of her thigh. There was very little pain left. In fact, most of the discomfort she felt was in her arm, which had not pained her at all the day before.

  Was it the day before? Had she slept all day and all night? She knew that it was early morning because it was cool and grey outside, and somewhere a cock had crowed.

  Cautiously she looked about her. She had been moved from the kitchen—by whom?—to a small, airy bedroom in another part of the lodge. Upstairs, she imagined, because she could just see the tops of trees through the small lattice window on the flat wall, and a patch of sky which was rapidly turning blue. There was the smell of the sea, too, coming in over a weed-strewn shore.

  The sea! She shivered as she thought of the events which had brought her here. What had happened to Ronald, and Ginger and the plane?

  For a long time she lay re-living the nerve-shattering events of those last few minutes before the Heron had crashed, hearing the steady throb of the engines and experiencing again the intensity of the silence as they had cut out.

  It was madness to keep thinking about it, she told herself, yet her mind reverted to those tensely-packed seconds of drama again and again. If it had not been for that soft spot in the sand they would probably have made a perfect landing. Ginger had said that, cursing the fate which had caused the wheels to touch at just that spot. There could be no reflection on Ronald Gowrie as a pilot. He had done a wonderful job against tremendous odds.

  Had Fergus Blair told her the truth about Ronald?

  She started up, only to find to her cost that she could not put any weight on her injured wrist. It was swathed expertly in an ordinary crepe bandage, so that she knew it hadn’t been broken, but her fingers were still stiff and rather useless.

  Staring at the bandage, she smiled a little. How long was it since he had learned to do that? It was a tidy job, the sort of thing she would have expected of Blair, she supposed. He was so sure of himself.

  But he had been kind, too. “This is going to be quite painful, but I’ll give you a shot of something when I can.”

  The “shot of something” had kept her under all day and all night, letting her rest. She lay quite still, wondering about Fergus Blair, wondering what he was really like. Then she thought of Andrew, and her heart lifted. It would be good to see the child again.

  Andrew’s wish had come true. He had wanted her to see Heimra Beag.

  Fergus Blair had not been so keen. He hadn’t answered Andrew when the boy had begged him to invite her to Heimra.

  And here she was—uninvited. An unwanted guest in his house. Well, if not exactly in his house, at least on his island.

  Slowly and a trifle painfully she swung her bare feet to the floor. There was a sheepskin rug on the waxed boards and it felt warm and comforting to the touch.

  When she had drawn a deep breath she crossed to the window to look out. The breath had been a little painful, but she could walk without difficulty, for which she was thankful.

  She found her clothes on a wicker chair, neatly folded on the gay chintz cushion.

  It was something of a struggle to get into them, and they fitted badly because of the bulky strapping over her ribs, but at least she could move about—go out, perhaps.

  Alison went towards the door, to be met by a cheerful voice as she opened it.

  “And now, what is this you are doing?” Kirsty Cameron demanded. “And Mr. Blair saying that you were to stay in your bed till he had seen you!” She set a breakfast tray on the table beside the bed. “You’ll be getting me into fine trouble with him!” she added with a smile. “ ‘Kirsty,’ he said, ‘these are the strictest of orders I’m giving. She’s not to get up and go out before I have been to see her’.”

  “But I’m perfectly all right, apart from the bandages!” Alison protested. “If I stayed in bed I’d feel a fraud, Mrs. Cameron.”

  “All the same, Mr. Blair did not want you to go roaming all over the islands,” Kirsty admonished.

  “Oh!”

  So, that was it, Alison thought. It wasn’t her own welfare Fergus Blair had been worrying about, but his precious privacy. It was the fact that his island had been invaded in spite of every prohibition of which he could think, in spite of Coirestruan and the barrier tides. The airstrip which he had sought to deny to the islanders on Heimra Mhor had been used in an emergency, and she was there in consequence, but he would not have her roaming all over Heimra Beag if he could prevent it.

  What was it that made Heimra Beag so precious to him? Of course, it was a lovely island. Green and gently undulating in the south, it rose to a rocky crest in the north which dropped steeply to the sea, and round it a score of tiny hidden bays made privacy complete.

  Suddenly her desire to explore it, to capture at least a little of its gentle magic, was greater than her fear of Blair of Heimra’s possible displeasure.

  “I’ve just got to go out, Mrs. Cameron,” she declared as she started to eat her breakfast. “When I first flew over Heimra on my very first flight with the Air Ambulance, I had a notion that they held something special for me. Fantastic, perhaps,” she smiled, “but now I feel that I have to prove whether it’s true or not.”

  “Nobody who comes to the Islands ever goes away the poorer,” Kirsty said. “But I wish you would wait till Mr. Blair could take you himself.”

  “He wouldn’t want to do that,” Alison said with conviction. “I can’t be anything more to him than—an interloper.”

  “Ah, well, if you must,” Kirsty conceded with resignation. “I can tell him where you’ve gone. But I think you misjudge Mr. Blair. His only reason for forbidding a lot of people to come to the island is because of the birds and the children.”

  She could have asked Kirsty more about Fergus Blair and his children, Alison thought as she went slowly down the narrow flight of wooden stairs which led into the kitchen, but somehow she didn’t want to do that. She wanted to go out and explore Heimra Beag alone.

  “Mrs. Cameron,” she asked at the open door, “have you heard how Captain Gowrie is?”

  “Mr. Blair’s got him up at the big house, but he says he’s not to be disturbed. Maybe you’ll be able to see him after you’ve had your walk, though,” she suggested, and Alison had to be content with that.

  There was only one road as far as she could see when she had left the lodge behind. It appeared to go right round the island, but she did not hesitate about her direction once she was outside the gates. She went towards the craggy headland which formed the north end of the island, where hundreds of sea-birds clamoured and squawked among the rocks. They rose in a great cloud as she approached—terns and guillemots and little white-chested puffins, and all the gulls she could name, and more.

  Never
had she seen such a variety of birds and in such numbers. Fascinated and a little tired by her walk, she sat down on a tuft of grass among a patch of young heather shoots, watching them with the eager pleasure of a child, her lips parted, her hair blown back, her grey-green eyes alight with a new wonder.

  Once or twice she found herself laughing aloud at the antics of the puffins, and when a great skua sailed slowly overhead she suddenly remembered the disabled Heron stranded behind her on the beach beneath Garrisdale and made up her mind to return at once. It had been selfish of her to come out here for her own pleasure while she still knew next to nothing about Ronald Gowrie’s condition—whether he would live or die.

  When she rose to her feet she found that she was not alone.

  There had been no indication of Fergus Blair’s presence on the headland behind her, not even from the birds, who had made such a commotion at her own approach. He had come up over the heather, and she had no idea how long he had been standing there watching her unobserved.

  Because of the fact, she felt the colour stealing into her cheeks, and wondered if she had spoken her delight in her surroundings aloud, as she often did.

  “How did you know about the birds?” he asked.

  “I saw them from the lodge window, but since I’ve been sitting here watching them I’ve remembered what Mrs. MacIver said that day at the inn. It’s a wonderful sanctuary,” she added. “What made you think of the idea?”

  “My brother and I used to come out here when we were very young,” he explained briefly. “We hated to see the birds robbed of their eggs and shot at, and we were determined to protect them on our own property. Of course, there’s a protection law, but it’s difficult to enforce in these out-of-the-way places. Gradually,” he added, “the whole thing grew, and we became an island of birds.”

  “Do you know them all by name?” she asked. “All the different species?”

  “Yes. It’s a wonderful pastime. And occasionally one gets a rare visitor, or a little fellow who’s been hurt.”

  She felt surprised and vaguely ashamed of her former condemnation.

  “It must be a wonderful place for your children,” she observed.

  It was Blair’s turn to look surprised.

  “Who told you about the children?” he asked.

  “Mrs. Cameron. And you mentioned them yourself when you told me about seeing the plane. You said they would be asleep when we crashed.”

  He smiled.

  “Some of them were awake, apparently, even at that unearthly hour! They heard the Heron’s engines, and I had quite a lot of explaining to do. Twenty boys and girls can be something of a handful when they all want to tear down to the beach at the one time!”

  She gazed at him in complete astonishment.

  “Twenty?” she echoed incredulously.

  “Yes. Didn’t Mrs. Cameron tell you about our ‘colony’? Or hasn’t she had time to get round to all that yet?”

  His smile was amused, and suddenly Alison began to laugh. “I thought they were your children!” she confessed. “Somehow I didn’t envisage twenty, though! Are they from Glasgow?”

  He nodded, his face serious again.

  “They’re mostly spastics,” he explained. “I have a feeling that a great deal more can be done for them in a place like this, under the right guidance. It eliminates any feeling of inferiority, for one thing, when they live and work and play with people as handicapped as themselves and don’t see normal children quite so often. Then,” he added, his fine, sensitive voice quickening to his subject, “there’s all the hundred and one things they can do on Heimra and the things they can learn to do. The bird sanctuary, for instance, is a tremendous help to them and a never-failing source of delight. It’s surprising how much they know about the various species before they have been here for any length of time, and how much more they want to know. In fact,” he added smiling, “I don’t have a great deal of work to do on Heimra. I get most of it done for me, and one voluntary labourer, as we used to say in the hospital, is worth a dozen pressed men!”

  “But this is magnificent work!” Alison declared, her eyes shining, her lips parted as she looked down towards the rocks where the birds swarmed in their thousands, squabbling perpetually. “This must be ample compensation to you for the loss of your career.”

  Blair glanced at her quizzically.

  “How did you guess that?” he asked.

  “Anyone could imagine what your career must have meant to you,” she told him. “I—when you left the Victoria we all expected to hear about you again.”

  “And so I have disappointed you in some ways?” he queried. “It’s quite often a fact, you know, that the brilliant student fails to get there in the end.” He paused, staring down into the sea. “But enough of me,” he declared at last. “I really came up here after I found that you had disobeyed orders to see what you were doing and to tell you about your friend Captain Gowrie.”

  “How selfish of me coming out like this before I knew!” Alison turned to him, her face suddenly pale in the bright morning sunshine. “Don’t try to spare me anything,” she begged. “I’m a nurse.”

  “He has a very nasty fracture at the base of the skull, I would say, and some injury to his left arm. Luckily, I had Sir James Corrington at Garrisdale as my guest when you crashed, and I was able to call on him for expert advice. We’ve done everything we can for Gowrie, and only quiet and a considerable period of rest will put him on his feet again. That’s why,” he added slowly, “Sir James didn’t think it wise to have him ferried back to Glasgow on the next ambulance plane. I keep a good deal of equipment here in case of injury to the children when they are playing around on the rocks, so that we’ve done quite a good patching job of Gowrie. The main thing now is rest, and for all practical purposes he could not be in a more convenient place than Garrisdale.”

  This time she did not protest that they were possibly infringing on his privacy. The isolation he desired was not for any selfish reason, she had learned, but because of the work to which he had dedicated his future among his little “colony” of handicapped children. She felt utterly ashamed of her former resentment, wondering, in an agony of self-reproach, what he had thought of her when she had denounced him so openly. Her remarks, viewed in the light of this new knowledge of him, seemed childish and petulant in the extreme.

  “I’ve got to apologize,” she confessed. “I thought at first that you had shut yourself away on Heimra for some selfish reason—that you wanted the island for yourself alone. Now that you know,” she added, “I expect you despise me. You have every reason to.”

  “Why should I?” he asked. “A good many people on Heimra Mhor believe that I have an entirely selfish reason for keeping Heimra Beag and Garrisdale House out of bounds to them. Some of them used to come out here in search of gulls’ eggs and take pot-shots at the other birds, ‘for the fun of it’. That didn’t appeal to me,” he added grimly, “and when I brought my first half-dozen children to the island it wasn’t entirely safe, either. I intended that they should have the freedom of the whole of Heimra Beag, not just the enclosed policies of the estate. After a while,” he added slowly, “there were—more personal reasons for seeking complete privacy.”

  His voice had grown taut and a little hard, the firm, well-formed mouth a little tighter, and the grey eyes, leaving the distant reaches of the sea where he had been watching the powerful flight of a fulmar, were suddenly as cold as steel.

  Alison knew that she was not likely to hear about these personal reasons of his for seeking his own particular privacy. Their confidences had come to an abrupt end. He had told her about the children and his work because he thought she would be interested in that, but his personal problems were not to be shared with a stranger.

  She thought that it might be something which he could not share with anyone, a reason locked into his heart forever that no key had the power to free.

  Looking at the tense, squared jaw, she knew that he was a deter
mined man. He had made up his mind about Heimra Beag and Garrisdale, and nothing would induce him to change it. He would run the gauntlet of criticism and unpopularity for himself, if need be, once he had decided what was best for his project.

  And in the same manner he would stand by any personal decision he might have made, right to the bitter end.

  “Do most of the birds migrate in the winter months?” she asked, unwilling, suddenly, to leave this lovely sunlit headland where the beat of wings held its own peculiar magic and she had come near to knowing a man who she had thought might be impossible to know.

  “Some of them are visitors,” he told her. “The great Arctic skua goes north in the summer, but most of the others are Heimra natives. They have made the island their home. They know that they are safe—especially the puffins, who seem quite willing to perform for one at any time, like clowns they are!”

  Alison, watching the comical little puffins, laughed delightedly.

  “How the children must love them!” she said. “I’ve always thought people were like birds in a good many ways,” she confessed. “You know-all the hundreds and hundreds of ordinary sparrows, and the starlings in the city with their chattering and their drab coats, with here and there a gayer bird—a robin in his red waistcoat or a chaffinch or a wren in a suburban garden, maybe, to stand out among them. The gayer, brighter birds! And then, out where it’s free and lovely under a vast sky, the birds that soar highest—the gull and the hawk and the eagle!”

  “What about the heron?” he asked with a quick smile. “I didn’t think you would leave him out.”

  “Because of the plane?” Her eyes were serious again. “When can I see Captain Gowrie?” she asked. “Is he able to have a visitor?”

  “A special visitor,” he agreed. “He has been asking for you.”