Storm Over Rhanna

by Christine Marion Fraser

  She threw the minister one of her languorous lovely smiles. ‘I’m fine, Mr James, really fine. Matthew’s here, I can sense him at my side the way he was in life. I can hear his voice, tellin’ me wee stories about how he sorted things out. I aye kent he exaggerated a bittie but he was my man and I just let him have his way. In the end all his fancies came true enough, he died a brave man, Mr James, and I’m proud to be here the day, seeing all these good folks come to say goodbye to Matthew.’ She glanced over her shoulder. ‘’Tis Granda John and Granny Ann I’m worried about. They’re no’ able to stand in the one place for any length o’ time and they wondered if it would be out o’ place for them to sit on the rocks beside us. They have brought cushions and bits o’ blankets for their knees but don’t like to bring them out in case it isny good manners.’

  ‘Och, Tina,’ Mark found himself smiling, ‘of course it’s alright. I’m sure the Lord Himself would agree to old folks having a bit of comfort at a time like this.’

  The old couple was soon settled. Mark James held up his hand. A hush fell over the crowd, the ocean sighed, the memorial service to Matthew began.

  The deep, clear voice of ‘the man o’ God’ carried over the bay, over the sea. He spoke about Matthew’s life, his honesty and integrity. ‘Rhanna has lost one of its finest sons but none of us will ever forget him, we will remember how he lived and even more, we’ll recall proudly to mind how he so bravely and selflessly died.’

  Behind him, Grandma Ann sobbed quietly, Granda John reached out a rheumy old hand to take hers and squeeze it comfortingly; Donald swallowed and stared out to sea; Eve put her arm round her mother and hugged her close.

  From the corner of his eye Mark saw Megan making her way down to the bay, accompanied by Daniel who was helping her along. They melted into the crowd yet Mark was as aware of her presence as if she stood at his elbow. His heart beat a little faster, he was conscious of it even as he glanced up at Tigh na Cladach and noticed something else, a face at one of the upper windows, the face of Steven Saunders, staring down, watching proceedings – Megan must have moved his bed to the window . . .

  ‘Mr James,’ Tina spoke at his side, ‘are you alright?’

  He realized that he had paused too long, all eyes were turned on him, waiting for him to carry on. But his throat was tinder-dry, his concentration gone. Raising his hand he signalled for prayer. He didn’t look at the window again. The singing began, rising, swelling: Rock Of Ages: O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go. The notes of each hymn, each psalm, rose up to merge with the murmur of the ocean, to meet with the vast blue dome overhead.

  Then came a hush, timeless moments of waiting – and then it came, the plaintive music of the pipes, away up there on the clifftops of Burg. Torquill Andrew McGregor, gold medallist at the Highland Games, was playing the quiet lament, ‘Fingal’s Weeping’, followed by ‘Last Farewell To The Isles’, a pipe tune composed by a Rhanna sailor of long ago, one who had left his island never to return except in his music which had been handed down through generations of islanders.

  It was a moving and never-to-be-forgotten farewell to Matthew; Torquill’s magnificent, big-muscled body was taut and proud up yonder on the skyline, his steps measured, his kilt flying in the breezes, the drones of his pipes silhouetted darkly against the azure sky. When finally he broke into the beautiful and well-loved tune ‘Going Home’, everyone joined in, one by one, their voices rising, falling, soaring to a crescendo of poignant, glorious sound that echoed round the bay and seemed to keep on echoing long after the last notes died away. Then the hankies were out, everyone wept openly.

  Tina leaned against her daughter and sobbed, ‘Ach, my bonny man, ’tis proud I am to be his wife. Was it no’ beautiful just, Eve? Never will I forget it, no’ till my very own dying day.’

  Elspeth Morrison stood apart from everyone, weeping sorely, her gaunt, stiff face pale and woebegone.

  ‘My, my, Elspeth is taking it badly right enough,’ Isabel commented to Jim Jim, ‘I doubt she’s no’ got a stone for a heart after all.’

  But Elspeth’s tears were for herself as much as for Matthew. She had truly believed herself to be making more than a friend out of Bob the Shepherd, but since the episode in Holy Smoke’s shop Bob had not deigned to look the road she was on. He was back in Aunt Grace’s camp, standing beside her now, courteously holding her bag while she patted her genial pink and white face with a tiny lace square. She was wearing one of her favourite hats that day, a worn ‘chanty-shaped felt’ to use Old Joe’s description, liberally decorated with bright red cherries which had slipped from their mooring and were dangling rakishly over one dainty pink ear, the stretched lobes of which were also emblazoned with more cheerful cherries.

  Bob seemed bewitched by her and was most attentive to her needs, smiling indulgently every time she turned to wave to Old Joe who had been carefully brought along to the doctor’s house to watch the service from one of the lower back windows.

  Elspeth winced at the sight of Aunt Grace’s bountiful contentment. Daft old harlot, she thought vindictively, a string o’ men at her skirts and herself at an age when she should be picking a plot in the kirkyard for her own burial.

  She caught Bob’s eye and attempted a watery, ingratiating smile but the old shepherd pointedly ignored the overture and Elspeth buried her face in her hanky afresh, glad of the excuse Matthew’s memorial service had given her to shed her tears of bitter loneliness without fear of curious comment.

  Captain Mac, his bearing respectfully restrained, came over and placed one big heavy hand on the old housekeeper’s thin shoulder. ‘There, there, lass,’ he comforted awkwardly, ‘just you greet and don’t be ashamed o’ one single tear. I know how you feel, ’tis fine enough to grieve surrounded by friends but ’tis sore, sore indeed to weep on your own.’

  Her head jerked up sharply at his intrusion, quick words sprang to her lips but then she noticed his eyes, swollen to brown chinks under their hairy white canopy, and his bulbous jolly nose, more swollen than ever from his own unashamed weeping.

  ‘You are a brave and sensitive man, Isaac McIntosh,’ she intoned, unable to keep a wobble from her voice, ‘’tis a sore life indeed and of all the folk here only you had the gumption to offer me a kindly word.’ Wiping her eyes with a flourish she stuffed her hanky into her bag. ‘I have a wee bunch o’ flowers I thought to put in the sea in Matthew’s memory. Would you be so good as to accompany me down for I’m that shaky I doubt I’ll never manage it on my own.’

  Gallantly he crooked his arm and they went together to join the throng who were tossing wreaths and flowers into the clean, clear waters of Burg Bay. The blooms merged and mingled, tiny wild flowers, floral sprays, expensive wreaths, spreading out all along the curving petticoats of the sea which lapped and tossed, lapped and tossed, before the outgoing tide carried its bounty to some unknown shore far, far away from those of Rhanna.

  ‘Come on, Tina,’ Mark put his arm round a lingering Tina and led her away, passing Megan as they went. She was noticeably alone in the crowd. Her surgery was strangely empty these days and while the fact niggled at her a good deal it also left her with a lot of free time for Steven. One or two of the islanders had dared to go along to Lachlan’s with their ‘wee ails’ but he was having none of it.

  ‘Oh no you don’t,’ he told them grimly. ‘I know fine what you are all about and I will no’ condone such childish behaviour. Megan’s your doctor now so just you get along there and let her deal with you.’

  Mark and Megan had not come across one another since that fateful night of the storm. Now she looked at him for a long time, her hazel eyes rather guilty as they gazed into his smoky grey-blue orbs. She was the first to turn from him and she went hurrying away, back to Tigh na Cladach and Steven Saunders who watched from his window and smiled – a crooked little smile that was oddly self-satisfied.

  Spring came to Rhanna with a suddenness that was as disconcerting as it was welcome. Every morning the sun rose up out of a calm s
ea into a honey-gold sky shot through with softest shadows of lilac; every evening it sank below the Sound of Rhanna, a great fiery ball whose afterglow turned the sea into a sheet of flame in which small fishing boats sailed homewards and elegant yachts looked like beautiful birds with gilded wings.

  Groups of islanders walked in the gloaming, the old Gaels to strain practised eyes towards the horizon for weather signs; the young ones to look at one another, the blood hot in their veins, the light of passion gleaming in their eyes.

  But the weather held, the Hebridean days stretched, grew brighter and more bountiful with each wondrous dawn. Skylarks sung endlessly from morning till night, their ecstatic voices echoing over sylvan fields, filling the great shaggy stretches of moorland with music and life. And the machair bloomed, shyly at first but soon covered with a myriad of tiny blossoms; clumps of primroses peeped from every sheltered cranny; great yellow moons rose up to bathe the island in that wonderful golden light so peculiar to the Hebrides.

  And in the paradise that was Rhanna Steven Saunders’s wounds healed, his shattered bones mended. Each day he grew stronger, more able to cope with his diminishing aches and pains, more able to cope altogether with the world he found himself in. It was so different a world from the fast-paced one he was used to, so different a people from the sophisticated set he had moved in all his life. There was no acting the part here, few pretended to anything they weren’t feeling at any given time. They were down to earth, cannily aware of the world around them, completely natural, warm-hearted, friendly – and so earth-shatteringly blunt he had had the wind knocked out of his sails almost from the word go.

  Babbie had disconcerted him completely with her straightforward manner and equally honest tongue.

  ‘Are they all like you on the island?’ he had asked once, his blue eyes sliding lazily over her pert little face with its sprinkling of freckles.

  ‘No,’ she had answered smartly, ‘I’m one o’ the milder varieties. Just wait till you meet old Sorcha and Behag – no’ to mention Elspeth Morrison – oh, and Kate McKinnon of course. She’s so natural she’ll strip you naked with just a few well-chosen words and leave you wishing you had hide to protect you instead o’ skin.’

  He grinned. ‘Perhaps I wouldn’t mind being stripped naked by this Kate woman – if she is as attractive as you, Nurse Babbie Büttger.’

  Babbie had skirled with laughter at that. ‘You’ll have to judge that for yourself – Kate is what you might call a robust woman with a tongue to match. Now – stop blethering and get into that chair or I’ll never get this bed made. The sooner you can start moving under your own steam the better for I have more than enough to do without being at your beck and call twice a day.’

  He had sighed heavily at her words, a frown marring his handsome face. ‘Well, thank heavens for you, blunt tongue and all. If it hadn’t been for you, and Eve, and Danny boy, I think I might have died of boredom these last hellish weeks. Megan only comes near me when it’s completely necessary. After me coming all this way and almost killing myself in the process.’

  ‘She didn’t ask you to come,’ Babbie flashed, eyes ablaze, ‘and it might be better for all concerned if you and Mr Smellie Smith were to pack your bags and leave just as soon as you’re able to do so!’

  ‘Why? Why the hell should I?’ His chin jutted aggressively. ‘Megan did enough packing for both of us when she walked out on me without as much as goodbye! I was devastated when she ran off and vowed she could rot in hell for all I cared. But it didn’t work out like that, she haunted me every minute of the day and night until I couldn’t stand it any longer and I’m damned if I’ll go back without her! I’ve never chased after any woman but Megan’s different.’

  Babbie studied him. His eyes were an angry brilliant blue in his fine-featured face, the full, sensual mouth was twisted into determined lines. ‘Oh ay, she’s different alright, Mr Saunders. No doubt she’s the only woman who’s ever run out on you and the truth o’ that must be a bitter pill to swallow for a man as self-centred and as spoilt as yourself.’

  ‘Don’t go too far, Nurse,’ he had gritted warningly, glaring at her. She had stared him out, her green eyes glittering coldly, and he had been the first to turn away.

  From that day he had known exactly where he stood with Babbie and could never be in a room with her without feeling that she knew just what was going on in his mind. He had fumed and fretted in the confining prison of the little room that had in the beginning soothed him with its old world charm and its view of the sea – and the thought of Megan in the same house, her room just two doors away from his.

  But she hadn’t come to him as often as he had expected.

  ‘Please, Steve,’ she pleaded, twisting her hands together and keeping her eyes averted as if he was a sight to be avoided at all costs. ‘I can’t be with you every minute of the day. I have other patients to attend to . . .’

  ‘I’m not one of your bloody patients, Megan!’ he clipped. ‘And to hell with daytime – there’s the nights. We’re alone here and we have all the time in the world.’

  ‘We’re not alone, there’s Eve and Danny to think about.’

  ‘Are you blind, Megan?’ he questioned rudely. ‘They’re so wrapped up in each other we might as well not exist! Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed that?’

  She ran a hand through her hair, her mind totally confused by everything that had happened lately. Since Steven’s arrival she had been in a turmoil, and so completely taken up with her own thoughts and conflicting emotions that she had barely been aware of anyone, far less Eve who had been so quiet since her father’s death she might not have been there. As for Danny, he always seemed quite happy to spend as much time as possible out of doors and was very seldom an intrusive presence.

  ‘I hadn’t noticed,’ she admitted frankly, ‘I’ll have to talk to them both – oh God, I wish I’d known. The irony of the whole thing is almost too much to bear. Poor Tina, she’s had enough to worry her and now Eve as well – and everyone will say I’ve encouraged it.’

  ‘Megan, what the hell’s gotten into you?’ he demanded. ‘You stand there, worrying about other people when it’s us you should be thinking about—’ his tone changed, he became the Steven she had known and loved so well. ‘Have you forgotten what it was like between us? How you loved me and couldn’t stay one second from my side?’ His eyes were burning into hers. Her heart accelerated, the old familiar ache was back in her breast. All she wanted in those moments was the feel of his arms around her, his mouth on hers. She stepped back from him, steeled herself to withstand that treacherous sensuality of his.

  ‘No, Steve, I haven’t forgotten, I’ve never forgotten – but—’

  ‘Is there someone else? Is that it? Some man you thought you were falling in love with before I came along again? Tell me, Megan, because if there is, I’ll know to stop hoping that you and I might have a life together.’

  Her eyes strayed to the window, to the Sound of Rhanna churning restlessly, its turmoil reflecting her own mixed emotions. ‘I told you before, Steve, there might have been someone else – but you’ve come back, and dear God! I don’t know where I am anymore – what to believe—’

  She had fled from him then – out of the room, down the stairs and he had hardly seen her since, except in her professional role and nearly always accompanied by Babbie.

  Everything changed after that. Eve went back home to her mother’s house, Danny back to England to soothe a lot of ruffled feathers, particularly those of Mr Saunders who, as soon as he knew his son’s life was in no danger, had been furious at everything and everyone and was demanding to know how soon the Mermaid would be seaworthy once more.

  ‘These insurance jobs take time, Mr Saunders,’ Danny, looking suitably downcast, spoke sympathetically. ‘You know yourself that the Mermaid’s been checked over and an estimate for the damage should come through any day now. When it does I’ll see to everything personally, have no fear of that.’

  Ste
ven employed Eve to write letters home, epistles that were designed mainly to appeal to his mother’s forgiving and indulgent nature. Back came the replies. Of course it hadn’t been his fault, she would pacify Daddy, meanwhile he wasn’t to worry about a thing. He must get better in his own time and come home when he was quite well. Daddy would have calmed down by then.

  Meanwhile spring had come to the Hebrides, a glorious, golden spring that beat into Steven’s strengthening body like an impelling rhapsody. Beyond his window a turquoise sea lapped the white sands of Burg Bay, islands rode ethereally on the horizon; far-flung lighthouses twinkled over midnight-blue seas; each new dawn was an incredible mixture of light and peace and vast skies opening to the wealth of the sun.

  On one such morning he woke with an unbearable longing to be out there in the awakening world and just a few hours later came Babbie and Megan, armed with clippers which snipped through his plasters till he lay surrounded by powdery crumbs and bits of shell that had encased his limbs for six long, itch-tormented, air-starved weeks.

  The scar on his leg was vividly purple against unnaturally white skin and was tacked together by a neat row of stitches sticking up out of the surrounding fair hairs. Sheer relief made him laugh aloud, his wide mouth was slightly crooked, his eyes crinkling in his disarmingly handsome face.

  ‘You’re a dab hand at the embroidery, Doctor – and if I sound like one of the islanders it’s because I’ve grown so used to listening to Eve and Nursie here I’m bound to take some of it in.’ He gazed directly into Megan’s eyes. ‘It’s strange, I never knew the doctor Megs – just Megs the woman.’

  She stepped back from the bed, dismayed to feel the colour flooding her face, to find herself staring entranced at that cruel, smiling mouth which had so often in the past transported her to unbelievable rapture . . .

  ‘Compliment Babbie – she put them in, I, I—’ She couldn’t very well tell him that her hands had been shaking so much she couldn’t for the life of her have threaded a needle, let alone sew up his leg.