I pulled the blankets up around my head and tried to go to sleep, but I heard the outer door scrape open and the sound of voices in the kitchen. I strained my ears and heard a girl’s voice, speaking softly, and then the harsh tones of a man’s voice raised in anger.
There was silence again, and I turned on my side, wondering drowsily what it could all mean.
When I finally dropped off to sleep, I was thinking of my mother’s final admonition. Always remember, whatever happens, that you are Black Alasdair’s son … Try to be a man … like him.
Now I understood her words for the first time.
Chapter 7
A shaft of sunlight, warming the pillow by my head, awoke me in the morning. I rubbed my eyes and yawned and stretched lazily. Blinking drowsily, I wondered how the sunlight had penetrated the high wall of the building outside my bedroom window. It was only when I opened my eyes properly, and saw my clothes hanging over the rail at the foot of the bed, that I remembered I had left London far behind.
I fished under the pillow for my watch. It was eight o’clock. Despite the lumpy chaff mattress and my troubled forebodings of the night before, I had slept soundly.
I dressed quickly and opened the door. No sound came from the kitchen. I tiptoed across the lobby, opened the front door quietly, and I stepped outside.
I stepped into a new world and the wonder of it stopped me short before I was a yard outside the house. Gone was the mist and the rain and the dismal grey of yesterday. The sun shone brilliantly from a bright blue sky flecked with wisps of the purest white cloud. The green crofts dropped steeply to the warm brown of the moor, tinged with purpling heather, and the moor ended in the sea. A sea as calm as a park lake, and of such an artificial looking shade of cerulean blue that I was reminded of paintings I had seen of Italian grottoes. It was the Sound of Raasay.
In the middle of the Sound, like a long Viking galley riding at anchor, lay the Island of Rona. I saw the silvery wash of spray, as the current creamed over the rocks on the northernmost tip of the island, and then my eyes wandered again over its dark purple shore. Rona of the long heather. But to me it did not seem possible that heather could grow on that jagged spine of rock.
To the south of Rona, clinging to the tail of the smaller island, Raasay curved across the Sound, seeming to merge with the coastline of Skye. My eyes lifted to the massive outline of the mainland hills beyond the Sound. Blue peaks standing shoulder to shoulder, like the massed ranks of a giant army, all the way from Torridon in the north to Applecross in the south.
My gaze wandered back across the still waters of the Sound and fastened on the main road, a white thread against the brown of the moor. I followed it south and saw the roof of Achmore Lodge and the gorge beyond. The road climbed out of the gorge, and I traced it across the moor until it was lost in the far horizon.
To the west of the road a long line of hills swept round in a wide arc, encircling Achmore, and extending in an unbroken line as far as the eye could see. Strange outcroppings of black rock pierced the blue of the sky, and directly to the west of the lodge towered a conical-shaped peak, trailing a white wisp of cloud. Below the peak was a black hollow, shaped like a large saucer, and the hill itself seemed to incline over it. The air was so clear I could make out every scaur and hollow in the hills, every corrie and precipice. On one green peak I picked out the tiny white dots of grazing sheep.
Mairi Beaton must have been standing beside me for a long time before she spoke.
“What is the matter?” she said.
I started, and looked at her blankly. She was barefoot and her legs were tanned a deep brown.
“What is the matter?” she repeated shyly.
“Nothing,” I said.
There was a silence.
“I was just looking,” I added lamely.
“But your face,” she started.
“What about my face?” I demanded, suddenly feeling foolish. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing,” she said, curling her toes into the grass. “Only you looked as if you were still asleep and … and dreaming.”
She had a soft, lilting voice, and she spoke English slowly, as if she were thinking first in Gaelic.
“I was just looking,” I repeated. “I couldn’t see anything yesterday for the mist and the rain, and I was sort of surprised, that’s all.”
“Do you like it?” she asked.
I nodded. “I always thought Skye would be something like this, but I never thought I’d be able to see for miles and miles around.”
I could not put into words the feeling I had of freedom and limitless space, but how could she know what it felt like to be cooped up in a city street.
“What is it like in London?” she asked eagerly.
“Oh, just streets and people and fog in the winter-time,” I said.
“Did you ever go to Buckingham Palace?” she wanted to know.
I nodded.
“Is it very big and fine-looking?” she asked.
“Yes, it’s big,” I said.
“Did you see the Queen?”
The questions were fired at me quickly, one after the other.
“No, just the palace,” I said, as casually as I could, conscious of her wide eyes on my face.
“It must be wonderful to see the palace,” she exclaimed.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “It looked sort of lonely to me. I wouldn’t like to live in it, anyway.”
“Would you rather stay in Skye?”
“Yes,” I said, forgetting her father’s long, gloomy face in the brightness of the morning. “Wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” she answered slowly. “I have never been away from Skye.”
“Would you like to go to London?”
She giggled.
“The cailleach says everyone in the cities is bad. She says they will all go to hell-fire.”
“What’s a cailleach?” I asked, puzzled.
“A cailleach is an old woman,” she explained. “We call my granny the cailleach.”
“Has she been to London?” I asked.
The girl shook her head, her dark plaits swinging from side to side.
“Well, then, how does she know?” I demanded.
“Oh, but himself says people in the cities are bad,” she declared. She saw that I did not understand her, and added quickly, “My father, I mean.”
At the mention of his name, she glanced back nervously to the house, as if afraid she would see him standing in the doorway.
A silence came between us. I was thinking of Murdo Beaton and his thinly disguised hostility to me, and I wondered why his own daughter was afraid of him. Perhaps it was because I was there. Perhaps she was afraid to be seen talking to me. That would explain her startled glance back to the house.
“You father doesn’t like me, does he?” I said suddenly.
She looked down at the ground, tracing a nervous pattern in the grass with one bare foot.
I repeated the question, and she glanced back again to the house, and murmured, “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do,” I burst out. “What did he say to you last night, when I was in the kitchen?”
“He told me to go for the cows,” she answered quietly, and then, looking me straight in the eye, “But when I came back he told me not to speak to you.”
“But why?” I asked, bewildered.
“I don’t think he wants you here,” she said, and then, the words tumbling out in a sudden rush, “My cousin in Broadford was going to stay with me at Easter, but he wouldn’t let her come.”
“But why?” I repeated helplessly.
“Maybe he hopes you will go away again, if you have nobody to speak to,” she said.
If the croft did not belong to me, I thought, he would not have allowed me to come in the first place. And now it seemed he was determined to make my stay as unpleasant as possible. I wondered why.
“Well, anyway, you can’t care, because you are talking to me now
,” I said, brightening.
Her thin brown hand touched my arm for a moment.
“You won’t tell him, will you?” she pleaded earnestly.
“‘Course not,” I said, “but what will you say if he sees you?”
“We are safe enough,” she said calmly. “He usually sleeps in until about eleven o’clock.”
“Whatever for?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “People here don’t get up very early.”
I noticed that smoke was rising from the chimneys of all the other houses in Achmore, and I sensed something evasive in her manner, but I was too glad of her company to pay much attention to a fleeting expression.
“Have you any calves?” I asked eagerly.
“Come on, I’ll show you them,” she said, and I could see she was glad to get away from the house.
I followed her down the croft to the byre. The byre was very little different from the cottage except that there were no windows in the walls, and the thatch was not so well kept. The walls were of the same mortarless, undressed stone as the cottage, and I wondered how men could have lifted such huge blocks of stone into place.
It was dim inside the byre, the only light coming from a small pane of wooden framed glass fitted in the roof, and it was some time before I made out the four stalls with the tethering swivels set in the walls. Two black calves were tethered in one stall, and when they saw us they twisted and tugged at their ropes, and gazed at us with large, pleading eyes. I scratched their heads and they thrust their moist noses against my arm. Two rough tongues, like coarse sandpaper, rasped over my skin, and I withdrew my hand quickly.
“Don’t they ever go out in the sun?” I asked.
“My father will tether them on the croft when he gets up,” she answered.
I saw the two long tethering ropes hooked over a rafter. They had a steel swivel in the middle, a noose at one end, and an iron stake at the other.
“We could take them out for him,” I suggested.
“You try,” she retorted. “They would drag you off your feet. Even a man can only take out one at a time. They are strong wee calvies.”
She patted their backs proudly, and I walked to the other end of the byre.
There was a pile of hay in the corner stall and two hens were nesting in it. They had scooped out hollows in the compressed hay so that only their backs were visible, and their small beady eyes watched me warily. I wondered how they had got in until I noticed a small opening in the thatch above the hay, and at that moment a hen squeezed through it and fluttered down to join the other two on the nest.
The calves were becoming increasingly restive, leaping madly about their stall. Mairi said they were hungry, and we had better go out and look for the cows, for the calves could not get their feed until they were milked.
“But how do you know where to find them?” I asked.
“Och, they will be out the back, on the common grazing,” she said.
“But where?” I demanded, thinking of the limitless waste of moor stretching for miles around. “What’s to stop them wandering to the other side of Skye?”
“Wait you,” she smiled. “The cows know when it is near milking time, and they won’t be far away.”
She led the way out of the byre, and up the hill by the side of the cottage. The cottage was built into a cutting so that its rear wall was almost a part of the hill, and before we had gone far, glancing back over my shoulder I discovered I was looking down on its neatly thatched roof.
The grass here was smooth and green and it ended in a turf dyke. There was a deep drain on the other side of the dyke, to prevent cattle from climbing back on to the arable land of the township. Beyond the dyke it was all rolling moorland as far as the line of circling hills.
I looked again at the strange conical peak over the saucer-shaped black hollow, but Mairi beckoned to me from the top of the dyke.
I scrambled up beside her, and she looked down at my sandals and said, “You would have been better in your bare feet. Your sandals will get wet.”
We jumped across the drain, and made our way over the rough ground. There were no cows in sight, and I asked her where she was going.
She pointed to a grassy knoll.
“To Cnoc an t-Sithein,” she said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The Hill of the Fairies,” she answered. “When the cailleach was a girl nobody would go near it in the dark.”
“What rot,” I said, but I had to admit to myself that I would not care to be alone on the moor in the darkness of the night. At that time, I did not know what desperate moves fear would drive me to.
We jumped across a small burn, and picked our way through a thick bank of heather. I wondered how she could walk on the prickly heather in her bare feet, but she did not seem to mind.
“How do you go to school?” I asked her.
“We have a scholars’ bus,” she said. “I meet it on the main road in the morning, but I’m allowed off school to help the cailleach. She’s been ill.”
“When are your holidays?” I asked, hoping she would not have to go back to school before they started.
“In a wee while,” she replied. “They start on Friday.”
“I expect you have lots of friends,” I ventured.
“Only at school,” she said slowly. “My father doesn’t like me to be talking with anyone here. He says they would be after wanting to know everything about the croft, and what himself was doing.”
I wondered again how my father could have been friendly with such a strange man, and I recalled the doubt in my mother’s mind about their friendship.
We climbed the green knoll, and the whole moorland lay before us. I could see a river winding its way east from the heart of the hills to the deep cleft of the gorge below Achmore Lodge, and I thought that some day I will trace its course up into the hills.
Mairi tugged at my sleeve.
“There you are,” she cried. “What did I tell you!”
Some cattle were grazing in a hollow, not thirty yards away from us. We raced across to them, and she went up to a great black beast and slapped it on the flank, and it moved off in the direction of the dyke, followed by a smaller black cow with a white patch on its head. The rest of the cattle went on grazing unconcernedly.
We urged the cows on with frequent slaps and shouts towards a wooden gate in the dyke. I dragged the gate open and the cows lumbered across the culvert, and headed for the cottage. Mairi helped me to close the gate for the hinges were broken, and we sat on the dyke, watching the cows go home.
I leaned back, propping myself up on one elbow, feeling the sun hot on my face. From where I lay, the dark cone-shaped peak seemed to be looking down at me.
“What is that hill called?” I asked her.
Mairi jumped down and turned round, her elbows on the dyke, and her small, brown face cupped in her hands.
“Which one?” she asked.
“The one like a cone with the hollow below it,” I said.
She squinted up at it.
“That’s Sgurr a’ Mhadaidh Ruaidh.”
“It sounds good when you say it like that,” I said, teasing her.
“But it is just as good in English,” she replied seriously.
“It can’t be,” I smiled.
“It is,” she insisted. She straightened up and glanced again at the towering peak. “It is the Hill of the Red Fox.”
Chapter 8
The Hill of the Red Fox! I felt the impact of the words like a blow in the face. I looked up at the towering peak, inclining over the dark hollow. So that was the Hill of the Red Fox, no more than a few hours’ walk from Achmore, and I had been wondering how I would find it. I could hardly believe that the hill I was gazing at could be the one named on the torn page from the diary. The message had been thrust into my hand in such strange circumstances that the whole incident had acquired a dream-like quality. That it was real, as real as the girl on the dyke beside me, was
something I could not readily grasp.
I floundered in a host of wild surmises. How had the man with the scar known I was going to Achmore? What had he hidden at the Hill of the Red Fox? What would I do if the man with the brilliant blue eyes suddenly appeared on the scene? Did the man with the scar intend to contact me again, and if so, would he take me into his confidence?
Each line of thought opened up a dozen possibilities, everyone more bewildering than the last. Chance seemed to have thrust me into a labyrinth from which there was no escape, and I wished desperately that I had someone to confide in.
All these thoughts raced through my mind in the space of a few seconds, and I was startled when Mairi cried, “Race you back to the house.”
She sped swiftly across the close-cropped grass, her pigtails streaming out behind her. I scrambled to my feet and started forward.
“Mairi! Stop!” I cried. “Wait for me.”
She did not give me even a backward glance, and I raced after her. When I neared the cottage, I saw the reason why my cries had gone unheeded. Murdo Beaton was standing outside the cottage, his hands in the pockets of his faded blue denim jacket. Mairi was not to be seen, and I supposed she had darted inside the house.
As I drew near him, I slowed to a walk. There was a dull flush on his face, and he kept digging the heel of his tackety boot into the soft turf. I knew he was angry, but my mind was in such a turmoil that, if he had not spoken first, I believe I would have blurted out the whole story to him.
“Where have you been?” he snapped.
“Out the back,” I answered, “on the dyke.”
“I heard you calling Mairi,” he said suspiciously. “Let the girl be. Time enough for fooling around when the work is done, and there is always work in this place.” He half turned, and added ungraciously, “Come on in. Breakfast has been ready this while back.”
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