by Emma Fraser
Chapter 2
Isabel curled up on the window-seat in her bedroom and gazed across the water at Dunvegan Castle. A shaft of sun split the clouds and wrapped the castle in a golden, mystical light. She would ask Papa who lived there. Perhaps a girl of her own age. Someone like Lucy, the heroine of Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor. A girl she could be friends with. Whatever Papa said, he couldn’t expect her to be friends with the local people. Most didn’t even wear shoes. And the girl who had snatched her scone was simply vile. Thank goodness she’d be going to a proper school in Edinburgh after the summer.
Skye was a funny place and she wasn’t at all certain she liked it. So far, the only good thing about being here was that Papa was living with them again. She was still a little shy of him, although she’d missed him terribly when he’d gone to South Africa to help look after the wounded soldiers. He’d been away for three long years and she’d almost not recognised him when he’d returned six months ago. Oh, it had been Papa, all right, even if his whiskers were now grey at the edges, but in her memory he was a tall man with a vigorous walk and a ready smile. The man who’d come back to them seemed smaller and, although he still laughed and teased her, so much sadder. And now he walked with a limp. A sword wound to his leg, he’d said. He’d got one to his chest too, and it sometimes made his breathing loud and harsh; the smog that hung over Edinburgh worsened it. That was why they’d come to live on Skye. The air here, he said, was much cleaner.
Her mother hadn’t been happy to leave Edinburgh. Before they’d departed for Skye, Isabel had overheard her telling Papa that he had no right to uproot them and take them away from all her friends and her work. She wasn’t sure what Mama meant by ‘work’ unless it was the endless committee meetings she attended. But Papa had put his foot down. He had said that he was the head of the household and would make the decisions. Andrew would stay at school in Edinburgh and live with his and Isabel’s older brother, George, and his family but Mama and Isabel’s place was beside him in Skye.
‘You don’t intend that Isabel should go to the local school? Really, William! What are you thinking of? Have you forgotten that your daughter is the great-granddaughter of a countess?’
‘No, my dear. I doubt I could forget,’ Papa responded drily. ‘There are only a few weeks left of school before the summer holiday. In the autumn she will return to Edinburgh to complete her education. Until then I want my daughter with me.’ There was a rustle as he shook his newspaper. ‘You’ve overindulged her, Clara, while I’ve been away. If she still wants to be a nurse, it will be to her benefit to see how the common people live. They will be the people she’ll look after – not countesses and ladies.’
Although Isabel heard the smile in his voice, his words made her burn with indignation. How could Papa say she was overindulged? And she was used to common people. They had servants, didn’t they?
‘I have the impression our daughter thinks nursing is about mopping fevered brows and little else,’ he added.
Isabel’s cheeks became hotter. Of course she knew that there was more to nursing than that. She’d read the stories about Florence Nightingale. Papa didn’t know her at all!
‘William, I have no intention of allowing Isabel to become a nurse.’
‘I don’t imagine you’ll have to worry about it for long, but our daughter is headstrong, so perhaps it would be as well not to forbid it.’
Every word made Isabel more determined. She would show him. He would find out she was not a girl who could be put off her course once she’d made a decision.
Not long after that conversation, they had packed up the house in Edinburgh and taken the train to Kyle of Lochalsh, then a small boat across to Skye. It had been almost dark when they’d arrived and Isabel had had only the briefest impression of clean air, scented with sea and a sweet smokiness.
After spending the night at a local inn they’d continued their journey, by carriage, the following morning. The mist had lifted and on either side of the road the sea and lochs glistened in the sun, sending sparks like miniature shooting stars into the air. Mountain ridges, their spines like the backbones of prehistoric animals, loomed over them. They passed several villages with people working outside, mending creels or carrying enormous baskets laden with clumps of dark earth on their backs. Small boats, some with their sails unfurled, bobbed along the shoreline.
As the carriage trundled along in the shadow of the mountains, Papa pointed to his left. ‘There are fairy pools over there. One day soon, Isabel, we must come to see them and have a picnic.’
‘Don’t be silly, Papa. I’m almost fourteen and I know perfectly well that fairies don’t exist.’ Really! Sometimes he treated her as if she were a baby.
‘You can’t know anything for certain, Isabel.’ Her father’s eyes creased at the corners. ‘A lot of people here still believe in things they can’t see.’
Several hours later, the carriage turned down a tree-lined track. Isabel craned her neck, eager to catch the first glimpse of her new home, but, hidden beyond a wood of ash, oak and beech, it was several more minutes before it came into view.
The lichen-encrusted house sat, hugged by the sea, on its own small peninsula. If she threw a stone from where she was sitting it would land in the water.
The carriage drew to a halt and, while the servants lined up to greet them, Papa jumped down to assist Mama, who was studying their new home with a frown of disapproval.
Inside, the house was big – bigger even than the one in Edinburgh – although much plainer. On the ground floor there were the usual reception rooms, and another room, close to the front hall, with a desk and a long, narrow steel table.
‘This will be my consulting room,’ her father said. ‘The patients will wait in the hall.’
Mama’s mouth twisted as if she’d sucked a lemon, but she didn’t say anything.
Upstairs there were seven bedrooms, one for each of them, including Andrew when he came home from school; Mama would use another as her sitting room, and the remaining two, she said, would be kept for visitors. ‘If anyone ever comes to this god-forsaken place to see us,’ she’d added, but quietly so Papa wouldn’t hear.
Now, only a week after they’d arrived, Isabel had already had enough of sitting in her room after school was over, doing nothing except read, read, read. As the discordant cry of a seagull came from outside her window, she let her book drop to the floor and uncoiled herself from the seat.
Deciding not to ask Mama’s permission, lest she say no, she slipped out of the house, found a narrow, well-trodden path behind the stables and set off up a hill. It would have been easier to take the dirt road but then people would have seen her. Although it was unlikely that Mama would be talking to the villagers – or even notice that she’d left the house – someone might mention to her father that she’d been out on her own and he wouldn’t be pleased either. He’d been very insistent about her staying close to the house and not wandering off, telling her that the cliffs could be dangerous, especially when the mist came down. Papa and Mama worried too much. The sun was shining, with barely a cloud in sight, and Isabel could see for miles.
Skye was so different from Edinburgh. Here, it was as if someone had come along with a big broom and swept away the hustle and bustle until there was nothing left but land, sky and water.
The track became increasingly overgrown with bracken, making it much more difficult to find her way. Sometimes the hill fell away sharply, and when she’d peered over the edge she’d been alarmed to find that the cliff dropped vertically into the sea.
On her other side, huddled in the shoulders of the hills, she could see a scattering of crofts. At times a house would disappear from sight with only the chimney smoke to identify its presence; then it would come suddenly and dramatically back into view, as if the fairies the islanders believed in had waved their magic wands. Even when she lost sight of the cottages, the clanging of metal on metal, the dull thud of an axe on wood, the voices of women
calling to one another over the occasional squeals of children were reassuring.
Then, from the direction in which she was heading, she saw someone walking along the track towards her.
As the figure drew closer, she recognised him. It was Archie, the boy from her class. He was wearing the same wool jacket with patches on the elbows, but his trousers had large holes in both knees and were held up around his waist with a piece of string. His bare feet were stained with peat and grass. However, if he felt discomfited by his appearance he didn’t show it. He might have been wearing a dinner jacket, complete with starched shirt and bow-tie, if his bearing was anything to go by.
He carried a gun in one hand and a brace of rabbits in the other. Although Isabel hadn’t spoken to him since that first day, she’d been aware of him watching her in class and in the playground where she spent the breaks reading.
‘Hello,’ he said, with a smile. ‘What are you doing out here?’
She liked the way he spoke, almost as if he were singing, or as if each word was a precious object to be savoured.
‘I was just walking,’ she said.
‘On your own?’ He lifted an eyebrow.
As if it were any of his concern! ‘You’re on your own.’
‘But I know these hills like the back of my hand,’ he said. ‘There are places where you could sink to your knees in a bog or go over a cliff, if you don’t look out. Anyway, I didn’t think girls from the big houses were allowed out without a chaperone.’ The way he said it, with a sarcastic curl to his mouth, made her bristle.
‘I’m allowed to go where I please,’ she lied. ‘Now, may I pass?’
Instead of moving aside, Archie fell into step beside her. ‘I might as well come with you.’
She considered ordering him to leave her, but there was something about his otherness and his casual acceptance that he was no different from her that she found intriguing.
‘How do you like it here, then?’ he asked, his eyes tracking the flight of a crow with evident displeasure.
‘I prefer Edinburgh.’
Archie whistled through his teeth. ‘I can’t imagine anyone liking a place better than Skye.’
‘I take it you’ve been to Edinburgh to have such an opinion?’
His eyes darkened. ‘I haven’t, but my dad was there and one day I may go too. After Inverness.’
‘Inverness?’
‘I’ve won a bursary and will take my school leaving certificate there. After that, I may do anything I like. Go anywhere.’ There was no mistaking the pride in his voice.
‘You don’t want to live here? In the place you love so much?’
‘Pah! Remain here? As a crofter? To work all the hours God sends just to have enough to eat, yet not enough to buy proper clothes? No, it’s not for me or for my sister, Jessie. She’ll win a bursary too and go away to school. She’s determined to be a nurse and she’ll make a fine one – if she can keep her head out of the clouds, that is.’
‘I’m to be a nurse, too,’ Isabel told Archie. It didn’t seem quite as interesting now she’d discovered Archie’s little sister was to become one. ‘I might go to university first, though.’ The idea had just come to her. She didn’t want Archie to think she was going to be an ordinary nurse.
His mouth turned up at the corners. ‘Girls can’t go to university!’
‘Yes, they can. If they want to badly enough.’
‘And if they have a father who can pay for them.’ Despite his words, the look he gave her was one of admiration. ‘My dad says it’s good to have ambition – that nothing in life is ever achieved without people wanting to improve themselves. I wish I could go to university,’ he added wistfully, ‘but there’ll never be enough money for me to do that. Not until I’ve worked for many years.’
They had been walking up a hill as they talked, and as they came to the top, Archie pointed to a clearing.
‘This is Galtrigill,’ he said, with a sideways look at Isabel. ‘Or, at least, what’s left of it.’
Instead of cottages with people bustling around, the houses were roofless and empty, their stone walls crumbling into the nettled ground.
‘What happened?’ Isabel asked. ‘Where did the people go?’
Archie’s lips twisted. ‘The Earl of Glendale’s manager forced them out about forty years ago.’
‘Forced them? What do you mean?’
‘He needed the land. For his sheep.’
‘His sheep?’
‘When the price of wool soared, the landowners could make more money from their sheep than they could from the rent.’ Archie sat down on a rock, carefully placing his rabbits and his gun at his side. ‘They tried to stop the crofters using the grazing for their cattle back in ’eighty-four, but my dad and a few of the other men made a stand against them. They were taken to prison in Edinburgh. It was before I was born, but it’s still talked about.’ He smiled.
His father had been to prison! And he didn’t have the sense to be ashamed! He really was a strange creature.
‘My father was one of the Martyrs of Glendale,’ he continued. ‘He’s known throughout Skye. One day people will know my name the way they know his.’
Isabel sat down on a patch of prickly heather. She had the feeling that this boy, with his ragged clothes and bare feet, could do anything he wanted to. She pointed to the rabbits with distaste. ‘Why did you shoot them?’
‘To eat, of course.’
‘But they are only babies!’
Archie eyed her with amusement. ‘The smallest are the tastiest. Killing that which you can eat is never wrong as long as you do it quickly and cleanly. In fact,’ he jumped to his feet and held out his hand, ‘I’ll show you how to get a tasty meal. C’mon, the tide’s on the way out so it’s the perfect time.’
She ignored the proffered hand and scrambled to her feet. Without looking back to see if she were following, Archie set off towards the cliff with long, easy strides.
Curious, she went after him. He stopped at the edge and waited for her. It dropped steeply into a little bay with a narrow stretch of powder-white sand. Looking down made her feel giddy.
‘If we go down to the bottom we can pick mussels from the rocks,’ Archie said, tugging off his jacket and tossing it onto a clump of purple heather.
‘How do we get down there? Fly?’
‘We climb. I’ve done it thousands of times. Just do exactly as I do and you’ll be safe.’
The sun beat down on her back and she was uncomfortably hot in her long-sleeved cotton dress. She longed to feel the cool water on her skin but, more importantly, she didn’t want Archie to think her a coward. Her heart was pounding with fear and excitement in equal measure.
‘Of course, if you’re scared…’ His blue eyes glittered like the loch. ‘You’re a girl, after all – although my sister Jessie’s climbed it often.’
‘I’m not scared,’ Isabel retorted. ‘I can do anything a boy can – but it isn’t seemly for a girl to be scaling cliffs.’
His grin grew wider. ‘Suit yourself.’ He draped the brace of rabbits around his neck and slung the shotgun over his shoulder.
He was whistling as he disappeared over the edge. Isabel hesitated. Then she sat down to take off her boots and thick stockings. Realising her skirts were going to get in the way, she tucked them into the knee elastic of her drawers. If Mama could see her now she’d have a fit of the vapours.
She took a deep breath and followed Archie over the side.
How she made it to the bottom without falling she didn’t know. But make it she did.
She turned, expecting to find Archie looking at her with admiration, but instead he was using a rope to pull a small, blue-painted rowing-boat towards him. In front of her was a sandy, shallow bay, where the boat was moored, and to her left a ramp that sloped gently upwards from the shore.
‘We could have walked down that!’ Isabel said, pointing.
Archie grinned. ‘We could.’
‘Why didn’t we,
then? We might have fallen.’
‘I wouldn’t have fallen and I was watching you. You were in no danger.’
Isabel resisted the urge to stamp her foot. He had risked their lives for nothing.
‘Anyway, where would have been the fun in coming down the easy way?’ Archie continued, passing her the rope. ‘Hold this while I fetch your boots.’
Hiding her annoyance, Isabel did as she was asked. She noticed that Archie took the easy way up and down when he went for her things. Had he been testing her? If so, she hadn’t been found wanting.
After he’d handed her the boots and stockings, he took the rope from her. ‘Let’s leave collecting the mussels for another day. Mam wants some salmon for dinner and the tide is right for fishing.’
‘Then I shall come with you.’ She hadn’t risked her life just to go home.
‘Very well. But we have to be quick. There’s a storm on its way.’
She glanced up. Some clouds had gathered but most of the sky was still bright blue. ‘Why do you think that?’ she asked.
‘Because I can smell the rain in the wind.’
‘That’s a funny thing to say!’ She lowered her voice to a mocking whisper. ‘Did the fairies tell you?’
Archie glowered at her. ‘Don’t ridicule me.’
She was instantly contrite: if anyone knew how to behave correctly it should be her. ‘I’m sorry. Of course, if you think a storm is on the way then it must be.’
If he had heard her apology he gave no sign of it. He brought the boat right up to the edge of the water and helped her in. It had no sail, just oars. There were two planks to use as seats and she took the one at the rear.
As he pushed away Isabel leaned back and trailed her hand in the water. ‘Do you like school?’
‘I like learning,’ he replied. ‘Except poetry – that’s for girls.’
‘But poetry’s wonderful! I read it for pleasure. I particularly like Tennyson’s “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal”.’