Seumas shook his head slowly, the long hair flickering across his shoulder. ‘Kevin didn’t kill him, Carrie. He never found Kevin. Dominic killed himself. He went off the Achbuie cliff in the Range Rover. He must have been doing eighty when he passed me at Achbuie. God knows how fast he was going when he hit that curve.’
I covered my face with both my hands.
‘I tried to help him,’ Seumas said. ‘I went down the cliff. There wasn’t anything I could do. Christ, he wasn’t even wearing a seat belt.’
‘He never did,’ I said softly, sinking down in the scratching small bones of the old burnt-over heather.
‘I’m sorry, Carrie,’ Seumas whispered, kneeling beside me, his long arms around me. ‘I’m so sorry.’
We’ll raise horses and ride in the morning mists. Oh, Dominic.
We stayed a long time together there, crouched on the ground. Caitlin clung to me awhile, but eventually grew tired of that and toddled around, finding stones and twigs to play with. She came, running and buried her face against me when the helicopter lifted off, with Kevin McGuire and the two police officers. Seumas raised his head, signalled to them with his hand, and stood up.
I stood up, too, and we started walking, back the long miles to Sron Ban. Seumas had adjusted the straps of the pack and lifted it, with Caitlin, onto his own shoulders. I felt free and light, crossing the rough country without that weight.
Seumas said, ‘What made him do that, Carrie?’ He sounded very sad. ‘He hadn’t a chance of making that curve. What made him think he had?’
I smiled a little and shook my head. I was thinking of the three white lights in the rowan tree. So they were for Dominic, after all. I was strangely thankful for them, that the mystic spirits of Ireland had given him that much in return for his devotion.
‘What made him do any of the things he did?’ I said, still smiling.
Seumas took my hand and we walked like that, the three of us, over the rolling rocky hills, dusted lavender with September heather. The wind rose, cold and sharp. Summer was gone.
Chapter Eighteen
The house at Sron Ban is empty now. It went, with the rest of Dominic’s estate, to some distant relatives in New York. They sold it, with the distillery; Grisel tells me the new owners there are going to rent it to summer visitors.
I contacted those relatives about Caitlin, of course. But although they’d been pleased enough to look after Dominic’s property, they didn’t have much interest in his bastard daughter. I was very thankful. She belongs to me, and to Seumas ‒ legally now, too; the adoption was formally completed two years ago.
Seumas and I were married that March. He stood by me through the autumn; I stayed with the Inneses and spent a lot of time walking the browning hills, through the yellowing falling bracken, while the skies turned to winter. It wasn’t easy. Seumas let me find my own way, in my own time. When I came to him, he was waiting.
He left police work after the business at Sron Ban was finished. He had gone in initially after art college, as an ordinary bobby in London. He had first gotten involved with them, in a rather different context, after that trouble at LSE. As he put it, ‘I started out arguing with them, and ended up working for them.’ I think the job had the same appeal for him as social work, once had; it was an unromantic and difficult business that someone had to do.
When Scotland Yard got interested in Sron Ban, they found out Seumas’s old connection with Stephen Griffiths and asked him to volunteer for undercover work there. They were already suspicious before Shona Anderson was killed; and after that they began drawing real connections between Kevin McGuire and Dominic and the other people living on that hillside. They had been watching the place for days, waiting for some sign that the guns were to be moved out, when I went that afternoon to the bonded warehouse. Seumas knew it was nearly finished; he had tried to warn us.
He left the police for the same reason that he’d gone from social work to radical politics; he hadn’t the temperament for it. He couldn’t stay uninvolved. He knew it was necessary, but he never got over what happened to Dominic and me.
He blamed himself. It wasn’t his fault. The roots of it all lay far away, in Ireland, in an old war that wouldn’t die. Still, Seumas wasn’t made to stand apart so calmly from life.
So in the end he went back to the one thing he was meant for; his splendid birthright, the gift to reflect in line and colour the patterns of life.
He’s a good painter. He’s had his first big showing, in Edinburgh, and it was well received. He gets some portrait work to do; we can’t live off his earnings yet, but we will someday. In the meantime I do some typing for people in Ullapool. Seumas and Andrew finished their children’s book and sold it in London. There was a bit of money from that. We haven’t much, but we don’t need much.
Rebecca and Andrew let us have Lower Achbuie after the others left. We worked the whole summer on it, after we were married. We made it into a home.
It’s beautiful in the summer and cold in the winter, down here on the stormy loch. We love it. When we have some money, we’ll build a studio on the end and Seumas won’t have to make do, as he does now, with the cold light filtering through the dormer window in his old room.
I need that room anyhow; with two children under my roof now. Calum is nearly two. I went to Inverness, to Raigmore Hospital, to have him, because of the trouble I’d had with my daughter. There was no trouble this time; he was a strong healthy baby. Caitlin was delighted with her new brother when I brought him home. Rebecca made a shawl for him, spun and woven on her wheel and her loom, and dyed with roots and barks all the colours of the hills.
We work hard. We grow potatoes and vegetables in the old garden beside the house. Rebecca has given me two goat kids; next year we’ll have milk and cheese. I have my flock of brown hens, of course, scratching outside my window. Caitlin brings the eggs in.
She’s five now, and she’ll start school, with Toby, this autumn. She doesn’t remember Dominic, of course. I kept a few of his things for her; things I felt she had a right to, that his relatives in New York didn’t much need anyhow. I’ve put them aside for her, for when she’s older: his shepherd’s crook, the wooden crucifix from his room, some of his books of poetry, and the old Irish flag. I don’t know if I’ll ever show her that.
She’s only little now. Time passes; in ten years she’ll be a woman. Then she’ll go out searching for love, and searching for reasons about the world. She’ll have her causes, the way we had. She’ll learn to hang her life on beliefs, the way Danny and I did for peace, and the way Dominic did for his war.
When she’s old enough for that, old enough to believe in a cause with more passion than reason, I’ll tell her about her father, and how I loved him one summer at Sron Ban.
Abigail Clements
Titles by Abigail Clements
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Mistress of the Moor
Christabel’s Room
Highland Fire
The Sea-Harrower
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Abigail Clements is the pen name of the international bestselling author C. L. Skelton. You can read C. L. Skelton’s gripping historical family sagas in ebook format from Amazon.
Titles by C. L. Skelton
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Hardacre
Hardacre’s Luck
The Maclarens
Sweethearts and Wives
Beloved Soldiers
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Highland Fire: captivating romantic suspense full of twists Page 19
