Highland Fire: captivating romantic suspense full of twists

by Abigail Clements

  Seumas dropped down to his knees on the floor beside me, peering at me with what was meant to be a look of pure evil, and twisted an imaginary moustache. ‘Good lady, will you come and see my etchings?’ he purred.

  ‘Och, man, some originality, please,’ Rebecca said, wincing. ‘Go on with him, Carrie. Caitlin will be fine with me.’

  I hesitated; Lower Achbuie was a place I had intended to avoid after my first visit there. But this would be different, Seumas would be with me. And if I should meet Dominic there, or on the road? I shook that thought off. He wasn’t going to rule me so.

  ‘Okay, thank you,’ I said, getting up. ‘I’d love too.’

  He took my hand and pulled me to my feet, and we went out the door into the sunshine and down the path, pushing the maa-ing goats aside, and out the gate.

  Seumas was barefoot, as he was more often than not, and he strode down the rough road like an Indian with long bouncy strides. I had to half-run and skip to keep up with him.

  He went down the shadowy wood path from the road to Lower Achbuie, leaping in great bounds. I laughingly stumbled after him, still holding his hand.

  We scrambled over the broken wire fence, by the disused vegetable garden, giggling and hanging on to each other for balance.

  ‘Well, how jolly cheerful,’ said a hard feminine voice. Diana, hunched into her army jacket, her hands in the back pockets of her jeans, had appeared around the corner of the house.

  ‘Ah hah, the dragon lady,’ said Seumas gaily, giving a playful tug to one of her thick shining plaits of hair. She jerked away with annoyance, sizing us up carefully with her beautiful cold eyes. Then she turned her back and stalked down to the beach.

  I watched her go. On the shore there was a long dark-painted wooden boat. A sailing boat, with a double boom lowered beside the mast, a gaff-rig I thought, being used to boats from the Island.

  Two men were working on it, tinkering with the auxiliary inboard engine. One straightened and glanced up as Diana approached them. Then he stood right up, staring hard at me and Seumas. It was Kevin McGuire.

  He said nothing and returned in a moment to his work. The other man was on his knees inside the boat with the engine, his back to me, but from the length of him and the dark hair, I recognized Stephen Griffiths.

  I was curious, not having remembered a boat here before.

  ‘Is that new?’ I said to Seumas. ‘I didn’t see it here last time.’

  ‘I think they usually keep it farther down the shore, past those trees.’ He pointed down the loch. ‘They’ve just got it up here while they are working on it. It’s a better landing down there, or something.’

  I glanced down the shore. I couldn’t see why it would be; there was nothing wrong with the landing here, the beach was smooth and free of rocks.

  ‘Who does it belong to?’ I asked.

  ‘Kevin McGuire,’ Seumas responded, looking curiously at me, ‘and Dominic.’

  I looked up, startled. He had never mentioned owning a boat. But we had discussed boats; I remembered with a queer feeling of unease that odd angry conversation about salmon fishing when I’d said I’d seen a boat on the loch at night.

  He’d talked about local fishermen. But I had been sure I had seen the boat go to shore at Lower Achbuie. Had it been this boat? Dominic had defended the ancient rights of those Highland fishermen so vehemently. Did he really mean the same rights should extend to these educated dropouts from a comfortable society?

  ‘What do they use it for?’ I said sharply.

  ‘The boat?’ Seumas had caught my tone and was regarding me oddly. ‘Fishing, I suppose, or just knocking around out in the loch.’

  ‘Really,’ I said coldly.

  Seumas couldn’t have missed the anger in my voice, anger at Dominic and his friends and their self-indulgent hypocrisy. But he didn’t say anything at all, but led me through the door into the dark, dank house.

  Mary Fraser was standing alone in the bare room by the window. She had been watching the work on the boat, or watching us. Our eyes met as I came into the room, and she stood very still, her slim body defiant and straight, holding my glance with her slanting brown eyes.

  ‘You two have met?’ Seumas said, as neither of us spoke. He looked from one to the other of us, seeing how we regarded each other, not understanding. What was between us had nothing to do with him. I realized then that she was as jealous of me as I was of her.

  ‘We’ve met,’ Mary said shortly, breaking her glance and turning and walking out of the room, into the kitchen. I heard low voices and in a moment Daniel Morrison appeared around the corner of the door and waved.

  ‘And how are you?’ he said, smiling. His voice was cultured and precise and there was something strikingly intelligent about him. There was something different, too; he lacked the sourness of the others; he seemed to be seeing a joke where no one else saw humour. I respected him instinctively and almost liked him. But his presence in the house, his close connections with the others, kept me suspicious of him.

  And Seumas, I thought. Why not Seumas? He lived here, too. He lived here, but somehow he was not one of them, and Daniel Morrison, though aloof and intellectual, was.

  Still, I smiled in response and greeted him. Seumas said, ‘Carrie’s come to see my etchings.’

  ‘Oh, watch him, watch him,’ said Daniel, touching my arm in a gentle, teasing, and somehow fatherly way. He was my own age, or less, yet he seemed older than Dominic. He strolled back to the kitchen, calm and assured, and Seumas led me to the stairs and up them to his own room, under the slanting low ceiling.

  The room was at the east-gable end of the house, and stretched from front to back. It had a north-facing dormer window and one narrow skylight at the back.

  Seumas said, ‘The light is terrible, but it’s the best in the house.’ He sounded serious and professional. ‘They were kind to let me have it. Stephen comes here to paint, too, of course.’

  I looked around the room. It contained one rickety wooden chair, a bed, unmade, and an easel. The rest of the available space was covered with literally dozens of canvases.

  ‘All yours?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Seumas answered. ‘Those are all Stephen’s.’ He pointed to one corner. I would have known without being told. It was filled with massive, undisciplined abstracts, great earthy splotches of colour put on heavily with a free hand and a wild eye. Seumas, watching me, said gently, with no condescension, ‘Well, Stephen has his own special vision of the world. It’s not mine, but it’s real to him.’

  It wasn’t Seumas’s vision. Seumas’s vision was one of brilliant clarity, a reflection of the world in an eye that saw beauty in everything. Seumas was a realist.

  He drew and painted everything around him with a fiercely accurate eye. The room was full of faces, some of them strangers, some of them people I knew: Rebecca, awkwardly beautiful, Daniel Morrison, bending over a book, his sharp clear features tense with concentration.

  There was a painting in oil of Mary, half-finished on the easel, already showing the bitter beauty of her thin, classically Highland Face, the dark hair like rain around it.

  ‘Oh Seumas,’ I said softly, circling the room, studying the canvases. I stopped in front of one that caught my attention and held it above all others.

  He was watching me and he smiled, saying, ‘You’ve got good taste, that’s the best of the lot.’

  I laughed because it was a painting of himself. But he went on explaining.

  ‘I’m really not as vain as all that. But it is the best. That was my “final” at the art college. I’d had such trouble with models ‒ you know how people are, they sign up, then they get tied up and don’t show ‒ well, for that one I couldn’t take the chance, so I used myself for a model. That way I’d know I’d be there.’ He grinned.

  He’d painted it from a mirror, a portrait of himself painting himself; in the background the walls and furnishings of the studio. One of the doors stood ajar in the foreground of the pain
ting, so that the artist was shown again, in a distorted reflected image in the glass of the door. The glass looked so real I wanted to touch it.

  The two reflected images seemed to face each other like two different people, as if there were two of Seumas, one light and clear, leaning gracefully back from his easel, the long brush in his hand; and the other, dark and different, a shadowy ghost standing aloof from his creator. I shivered. ‘It gives me the willies,’ I said.

  ‘It did the same to me when I finished it,’ he said honestly. ‘That one says something I didn’t put in it.’

  ‘Is that possible?’

  He smiled and shrugged and started to lead me out of the room. I stopped just before the door. There was a sketch lying flat on a heap of unused canvases. I hadn’t seen it before and I leaned over it now, studying it. It was of Dominic.

  Seumas stopped and watched me silently.

  ‘When did you do this?’ I asked softly.

  ‘One night, when he was down here,’ he said, watching me carefully.

  ‘It’s very good,’ I said. He had caught the rough features, the tangle of grey-black hair, the troubled eyes, so beautifully. The drawing caught at me, making me sad.

  ‘He’s got a good face,’ Seumas said. ‘I enjoyed doing that. I’d like to do an oil, but he’d never sit still long enough.’

  I smiled. ‘No,’ I said, ‘he wouldn’t.’ I turned away from the picture and followed him out the door and down the stairs. Seumas put a gentle arm around my shoulders, just lightly, as we left the house and climbed back up through the ruined garden.

  When we were back on the road, walking through the green and gold birchwood toward Achbuie Farm, Seumas said suddenly, ‘What is between you and Dominic, Carrie?’

  I brushed back my hair, shaking my head slightly. Then I said slowly, ‘I don’t know, Seumas, I just don’t know.’

  ‘Are you lovers?’

  I turned quickly. It was a gentle question, asked for my own sake. I shook my head again. ‘No.’

  ‘Do you love him?’

  ‘I think so. Sometimes. Sometimes I love him very much.’

  He stopped suddenly, turning me to face him, holding me with his strong quiet hands on my upper arms. He looked very steadily down at me for a long while and then he said, ‘Carrie, look, I know I’m not very good at hiding my feelings. You must know how I feel about you. I’m telling you that so you’ll know how serious I am about what I’m going to say to you.’

  ‘What?’ I asked uneasily.

  He took a long breath and then said quickly, in a rush, ‘If you love Dominic, get him out of here. Go back to America. And get him to go with you.’

  ‘Why?’ I said, amazed.

  ‘I can’t tell you why, but do it.’

  I paused, looking away from him, and then I said quietly, ‘He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t leave here. Everything he has is here. Why would he leave all that?’

  ‘He’ll lose it and more if he stays.’

  I shook my head hopelessly. ‘I don’t know why you’re asking this,’ I said, ‘but it really doesn’t matter. Dominic won’t leave Sron Ban.’

  ‘Not for you?’

  ‘No,’ I said painfully, ‘not for me.’

  ‘Try, Carrie. I think he will. He loves you.’

  I turned away, and he let me go. I stood looking into the bright leafy woods. ‘Maybe he does,’ I said honestly. ‘Maybe he does, to the best of his ability, anyhow. But that wouldn’t make him leave here. I know him better than that.’

  Seumas said slowly, ‘You must know better than I do.’

  I nodded, and facing him again, asked, ‘Can’t you tell me what this is about?’

  He shook his head abruptly, flinging the blond hair back from his face. ‘No, I can’t, Carrie. And more than that ‒ you must tell no one that I’ve said this to you. No one. Not even Dominic. Do you understand?’

  I nodded a bit uncertainly, still confused, and he said with a new sharp edge in his voice, ‘Carrie, I mean that. This is important. I know I joke a lot, but I’m not joking now. It’s serious. It’s deadly serious.’

  ‘Deadly serious to whom?’ I asked weakly.

  ‘To me.’

  He took my hand and started to walk again, back through the shining white trees. I followed, trailing behind him, our arms extended between us. I said, ‘Why are you telling me this? What has Dominic got to do with you. Why do you care what he does?’

  He stopped short and turned to face me again. ‘I like him,’ he said simply, ‘And I love you. I want you to be happy.’

  ‘With Dominic?’

  ‘If you want. And if you can.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Could I? Could anyone?

  I was standing at the window after putting Caitlin to bed that night. It was dusk. Dominic had just come home, and I watched him walking, head down, hair ruffled by the wind, to the door. Could I ever be happy without him?

  I knew now I had been wrong about Seumas. He was one of them at Lower Achbuie, after all. He had a part, too, in this game they were all playing, and Dominic was playing also.

  Seumas may have risked a lot to warn us; I didn’t know, but he had been terribly serious, and he was not accustomed to being serious at all. I was bound to pass that warning on, though I was sadly sure that Dominic would not listen. I was searching for a way of doing it that would not bring me too near to betraying my source, when Dominic came quietly into the room.

  He shut the door behind him and stood in front of it, his hands in his coat pockets. He kept his head down and was looking up at me through his thick lashes, and I knew I was in trouble.

  ‘Where were you today?’ he said in his low, soft voice.

  ‘I went to the Inneses’,’ I answered uneasily.

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘I went to see Rebecca,’ I returned, furious.

  ‘You were with Seumas.’

  ‘And what if I was?’ I demanded. ‘What business is it of yours?’

  ‘So you were,’ he whispered, and he bounded into the room, catching my wrist, hurting it.

  ‘Let go of me,’ I shouted indignantly.

  He didn’t. Instead he caught my other hand that I had flung up to fight against him and forced them both down to my sides so that we were standing very close. ‘Don’t lie to me,’ he said, again under his breath. Then he released both my hands with disdainful ease and turned away from me.

  ‘I didn’t lie,’ I returned bitterly, rubbing one sore wrist. ‘I went to see Rebecca. Seumas came there. I didn’t know he would. What was I supposed to do, run away?’ I flung sarcastically at his back.

  ‘You were at Lower Achbuie.’

  ‘He asked me down to see his paintings.’

  Dominic turned, leaning easily against the mantel of the fireplace. ‘Really?’ he said, smiling a little.

  Then he strode calmly across the room and out into the hall. I heard him go into the office and he called, ‘Come in here, Caroline, I want to speak to you.’

  Reluctantly I followed him into the office. He was sitting behind the desk, very businesslike, very unlike him. He was writing something. He finished it and handed it to me. It was a cheque, for two months of my wages.

  ‘What’s this?’ I said.

  ‘I’ll sort out your air ticket when I’m in Edinburgh tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You can leave on Monday.’

  I stood absolutely stunned for long silent moments. Then I said sharply, ‘I’m not leaving here.’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘And you can keep this,’ I finished, furiously slapping the cheque down in front of him on the desk. That was foolish, because I was going to need it while I looked for another job.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, woman,’ he said coldly. ‘That’s your severance pay. I’m not doing you any favours.’

  ‘I don’t want it,’ I returned, sticking to my pride.

  He shrugged, not touching it. Then he got up and walked to the window, and looking out into the evening, said, a bit more so
ftly, ‘I’m sorry, Caroline, but I did warn you.’

  ‘Warn me what?’ I demanded. ‘That you’d have your spies watching me? Who told you? Kevin?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  After a long time I said, ‘No, I don’t suppose it does. You needn’t bother about the air ticket, Dominic. I’m only going as far as the Inneses’. I’ll speak to Rebecca tomorrow and then I’ll move down there with Caitlin on Sunday. We’ll be away by Monday.’

  ‘You’re not taking Caitlin,’ he said without turning.

  ‘You can’t stop me,’ I returned instantly, angry that he should even suggest that.

  ‘Believe me, Caroline, I can.’

  That shook me and I crossed the room, caught his arm, pulled him around to face me.

  ‘What right have you to say that?’ I demanded.

  ‘More right than anyone else, I imagine,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m her father.’

  Even while I was shaking my head dumbly, trying to reject it, a part of my mind was saying, of course, of course, why didn’t I ever see? She took after her mother in looks and colouring, but the eyes, the dark, dark blue eyes; how many times had I seen them looking at each other like two solemn reflections, each a mirror of the other?

  But you see only what you expect to see, what you want to see. Some things you don’t see at all.

  He had turned from me, to the bookshelf, taking down a heavy black-leather-covered book. A bible, a Gaelic bible. He flung it down, open, on the desk, and flicked through the pages, finding the loose paper he was looking for.

  He handed it to me. I took it to the window ‒ there was no light in the room other than the blue dusk outside. It was dim, but I could clearly read the green-printed form with the seal of the Inverness Registry of Births and Deaths. The parents’ names, his and Shona Anderson’s. The child’s name was entered on a line to itself: Caitlin Roisin O’Brady. His choice, surely.

  He had cared enough about his bastard child to choose her name, and have his own on her birth certificate. What had he cared then, for her mother?

  ‘You and Shona?’ I said weakly.