He had slept lightly, dreamlessly, for just a few hours. It had been early morning before the Buchanans had at last left the Bell, Fergus stealing a long kiss from Shona while their parents had exchanged counterfeit pleasantries on the threshold. But he had not drunk so much and had woken brightly when the first grey light had found its way between the undrawn curtains of his bedroom. He had had no need to note his dreams and he could see no point in lying sleepless on his bed on such a day as this. So he had washed and dressed and slipped stealthily through the front door, so as not to disturb his grandfather before his first pipe of the day. He had walked the short distance to the harbour noiselessly. Finding a large coil of worn hawser, he had settled low into its comfort and, with all of the sea before him, had day-dreamed his way through the events to come.
On the empty air, the first faint sound from McCredie’s boat carried far across the water, a gentle thumping hum. One of the fulmars rose silently at the intrusion and wheeled away, while Fergus checked his watch to be sure that it wasn’t later than he thought. He still had 40 minutes before he would be disturbed. Relieved, he returned his gaze to the small ring cradled tenderly between the thumb and forefinger of both his hands. It was a slight gold loop, almost drowned by the three diamonds set into it. He remembered that, when it was on his grandmother’s finger, the gold had been all but invisible: it was the heavy gemstones that had held his infant attention.
He thought briefly of the old woman, barely present in his memory. She had died years before, when he had been very small, barely walking, and the image of her hand, white like paper, was one of the few things he had left of her. And now the ring that had resided there was to pass to Shona. This had been known and determined long before: it was destined. Neither Fergus nor Shona had understood the meaning of the word before the whole island knew that, one day, they would be married. To the elders of the island, the marriage was simply the union of two families and with it the end of centuries of feuding. Fergus knew this now, but he had not known it when he had fallen in love with Shona: even before his adolescent lusts had risen, he had known that she and he were two halves of a whole.
Even so, Fergus was beset by anxiety that morning. He knew that this was no marriage of convenience, of politics and alliance; his heart told him that she was all he had ever believed her to be, that their love was real and enduring. He even liked her parents, although he knew he could never admit that to his father or his grandfather. She was beautiful, kind and clever. He loved her. So why did these doubts crowd in, this morning of all mornings?
He turned his mind instead to how he would propose. His plans were specific but not elaborate. There would be scope for spontaneity, of course. Even so, he had been preparing for the when and the how and the where for years. Since he was 16, when he had first found his tongue inside her mouth, out by the old Dun at the western end of the island, he had known where he would propose, where the sun would be and how the light would hit the sea and the ruins of the ancient church: the previous year, on exactly this date, he had spent the day there, watching the sun and the shadows move, timing their precise positions and the effect they had on the landscape, on the stones. He rehearsed once more the plan he had spent so long constructing, imagining Shona’s delight, sinking deeper into the coils of rope.
The sun was higher now, and the spluttering of McCredie’s boat more distinct. Fergus opened his eyes. The gulls had left and a light morning breeze ruffled the sea’s surface. Some wisps of high horse tail cloud flecked the eastern sky. The Tern was close enough now for Fergus to make out the shape of McCredie in the little wheel house. Soon the letters would arrive, and sometime after that they would be in the hands of their rightful recipients. Then he would be able to begin this day, the most important of his life.
Shona smiled the smile that she kept for times like this. It was the same smile that had greeted Fergus when she had opened the side door to him at the Bell some two hours before. It had been early in the lunchtime session and Mr MacLeod had been invisible, beyond the curtain to the public bar. He would have been polishing the glasses that had sat in the machine overnight while he chatted with the eager customers sitting at the bar, customers for whom the comfort of the pub held greater appeal than the content of their mornings. They drank beer and murmured their world-weariness towards their indulgent host. Mrs MacLeod was in the kitchen, preparing simple lunches for the guests to come. Fergus could hear the clatter of crockery in a sink, arrhythmic percussion to her tuneless humming.
No words had been exchanged and the young lovers had simply kissed, just in the shadow of the doorway, out of sight of the street and at a safe distance from those inside. Shona had then smoothed her skirt before unleashing her best smile for the first time that day.
It was not a false smile. It was sincere and it was heartfelt. That she knew how it should look, how to tense her face to form it, how to recognise the pull of muscle and of skin, did not diminish its honesty. It was a simple awareness of herself, of how she appeared, nothing more. The smile was a genuine representation of how she felt upon seeing Fergus that afternoon. All the more so now that they were away at the far western end of Hinba, alone together. The village was some four miles back along the shore, and here there were no human witnesses, only the sheep and the rabbits, the sharp-eyed eagles drifting high above the blazing waters.
Within half an hour of setting off, they had left the village far behind, lost behind the slabbed hills that stepped down to the coves of the south coast, the sandy nooks notched into long slabs of harsh black rock. The road had disappeared soon after, and they had set out across the open fields. The sheep had kept themselves to themselves, bar their occasional bleating carried on the wind. Only the rabbits kept close, and their hurried movement they made the turf seethe, as they darted through the moss and derelict heather, not yet recovered from the previous season. Another hour of walking brought them to very end of the island.
‘Why’ve you dragged me out to this old sheep fold?’
‘You know why. And it’s not a sheep fold anyway. It’s an old village or something, from before the Vikings. The Irish, St Columba, you know? See that over there? That’s what is left of an old kirk. They say this is the site of the first monastery in Scotland.’
‘You mean Mr Galbraith and that sister of yours say. Anyhow, it looks like a sheep fold to me. So why did you bring me here?’
Shona scrunched up a smile, tilting her head and swinging her hips into a twist that left her seeming both knowing and naive. She had been here before, of course, on a school outing to visit the ruins that had so excited Mr Galbraith. Shona had not had much interest in St Columba, but the stone cross that still stood taller than her beside the low walls and the jumbled stone of the old church had fascinated her. Some six years later now, it still did. At its base, a scoop had been worn into the stone, cut by something long since lost, leaving only a bowl in which the rain lingered. On the face of the cross itself, the carving looked like endless, knotted braids of hair, twisting in and out of themselves, and Shona felt for her own braids before she remembered that they were long gone, that she was now a woman, no longer a girl.
In a single movement, Shona wrapped Fergus in her arms. She breathed deeply, her nose nestled in the corner of his neck, then slowly pulled away to look at him. Her own excitement was reflected back to her in his eyes and involuntarily she ran a hand through his hair, soft like spun gold. A longing sigh escaped her, and she felt her head shaking gently.
‘What’s the matter? Did you not want to walk out here? Was it too far?’
His sudden anxiety closed his face into seriousness. Shona laughed to let him know that nothing was wrong, that he had done nothing wrong, that there was nothing about him, nothing, that was wrong. The smile again.
‘No, you numpty. I love it out here, you know that. And there’s nowhere on this island that’s too far to walk! I was just sighing like a big contented cat in front of the fire. How lucky we are, to have foun
d each other, out here, in the middle of the sea, miles from anywhere. Charmed, that must be it. Maybe I have a fairy godmother. Or maybe you do?’
‘The nearest I have to a godmother is Mrs Robertson, and she wouldn’t take to being called a fairy, I don’t think. She’s a very practical lady is Mrs Robertson.’ Shona laughed once more, her hand covering her mouth, fingertips pressed lightly to her nose. He loved the way she laughed like that, the way the gentle pressure raised tiny ridges on her nose: a coil of silken cord tightened deep within him.
During the late morning a crust of thin grizzled cloud had collected over Hinba, and it had lingered all the while during their walk out along the island. Fergus had grudgingly conceded that his careful preparations had underestimated the island’s fickle weather, but just at that moment, as if he did indeed have a fairy godmother, the last of the cloud slid off to the east and the sun broke unexpectedly onto the earth. Its sudden brightness blinded Fergus before the warm light settled, casting shadows and saturating the surroundings in deep colour.
This was surely a good omen: the plans that he had laid the year before were falling into place. Pulling away from her, his hand trailing out of hers at the full extent of their arms, he sprang up onto one of the large, low, ancient slabs, spreading his arms wide in dominion, in an embrace of his beloved island, as if calling his ancestors to witness this moment. Out at sea the terns flashed across the surface, wheeling and arching before crashing beneath the waves in search of fish that gleamed silver in their beaks as they broke the surface and found the air once more. Fergus watched them for a moment, half remembering something, before turning back to Shona, smiling. She in turn was looking up at him, smiling, hands clasped across her chest as if in prayer. He felt that all of history was pointing at this one moment.
Fergus hopped from his stone to another, and then another, turning Shona until she had her back to the sea, was facing north-eastwards where the sunlight hit the cross and the remains of the doorway to the ruined church. She was standing where he had stood, exactly one year ago; was seeing, as he had, the way that the shadows lifted the knot-work of the cross to a perfect intensity and clarity, that the sunlight coaxed from the grey stone of the doorway a pinkish warmth. He stepped down onto the grass before her, breathed in a little of the air, just as he had planned, and dropped to his knee.
Shona accepted the ring offered up to her, as she had known she would, as Fergus and as everyone had known she would. Even so, her heart had begun to race a little when Fergus had dropped from the last stone to face her, his wide eyes sparkling with latent intent. By the time he had retrieved the ring from his hip pocket, her ears were full of surging blood and the rush and suck of the sea below the cliffs. She could not tell if it was his hand or hers that shook as he slid the sleek golden band onto her finger to a perfect fit. The three diamonds glinting in the spring sunshine still thrilled her, even as she had known that they would.
They remained like that, she standing above him, for several minutes. The wind toyed with Shona’s hair, buffeting her occasionally such that she would sway gently; the dampness of the grass spread across the right knee of Fergus’s jeans and he could feel a chill numbness eating into the joint, but he did not move, just watched, waited.
Shona had not yet said yes.
There was no need, of course: they had been betrothed since childhood; his grandmother’s ring was on her finger. Yet Fergus still waited, with increasing impatience and concern, for Shona to answer him, to confirm in soft, excited tones that she would marry him. That was how he had envisaged the day as he had planned it over the years and months. He waited, the sunlight breaking around the form of his soon-to-be fiancée like a halo.
‘I love you, Shona MacLeod, and want you to be my wife. I choose you. No matter what anyone else thinks or says, not your father nor mine, it was me, Fergus Buchanan, that chose you: do you choose me too?’
Shona’s abdomen twisted, so slightly that had Fergus not been at waist height he would not have noticed it. She let out another little sigh and a smile broke across her face. It was a different smile to any he had seen before: broader, with a flavour of delicious mischief.
‘Yes, Fergus Buchanan, I choose you. And I will marry you a thousand times over, in defiance of my father and my mother and all of Hinba if needs be.’
Fergus was on his feet, arms clasped around her. The warm wriggle of her lithe body reignited his ever-present desire and, as he pressed his lips to hers, his hand strayed lower down her back until it reached the flowing curve of her hip, her buttock. Knowing that he would be stopped, that Shona would pull away, chide him, he fumbled at her skirt, pulling the pleats of cotton upwards. Finding the warm smoothness of skin, he was able to run his palm up the back of Shona’s thigh until he reached the hem of her underwear. He had never before got as far as this and he hesitated, feeling Shona tensing, and instead, ran his palm gently back down her leg, the skirt dropping back into place in his wake. He let out a little groan as his hand brushed back over the bow of her before finding its way to the small of her back. Shona pulled him closer, almost purring.
‘Soon, my love, soon. We’ll be married soon.’
7
Cameron MacLeod did not like Fergus Buchanan. For a start, he was a Buchanan. That there was no love lost between the families was well known, of course. You could not stay long on Hinba without learning of the centuries of loathing. But to Cameron MacLeod, the contempt he felt for his neighbours was distinct from that felt by earlier MacLeods.
True, his own father had brought him up to dislike the Buchanans, had versed him in the ancient slights, in the unworthiness of their hold on the office of post master. Young Cameron had carried his distain dutifully into the little school room, where he had sat close by the ten year old Davey Buchanan. He had played his part in public, pretending to be at odds with everything the little prince did or said. But later, between the end of school and tea at the Bell, he would go off with Davey and the other boys to smoke and throw stones down on the beach. He had laughed with him. He had become friends with the enemy, such that he began to believe that the hatred of his father and of his grandfather was mistaken.
As the boys had grown a little older, they had become even closer: perhaps the secrecy of their friendship had bound them more tightly together. By the time they were twelve years of age, they would sit on the beach together after the other boys had left for home, talking about the future, about the world across the water. On the way back into the village, after dark, they would throw stones against the front doors of their neighbour’s houses, and hide to watch the occupant’s rising ire as they were repeatedly disturbed from their tea.
For some reason, they particularly delighted in terrorising old Mr Duncannon, the island’s mechanic. His house, isolated up on the cliff road, was set amongst outbuildings crammed with machinery and the twisted outcrops of rusted metal which made for excellent hiding places. After a few weeks of persecution, the old man tired of the game such that he began sending his young son to the door instead. Alec Duncannon was a bright, sociable boy, who would often join the other boys down on the beach after school.
Since he understood the nature of the prank better than his father, he knew where to look for his hiding classmates and one night spotted Cameron. In rebuke, he had called out his name, loudly and clearly in the darkness. Startled by their discovery, the two miscreants had raced away into the night, tearing down the lane back to the village and their mother’s food. On the way, they had passed Mr Robertson, walking up the lane from his cottage, pulling a handcart through the darkness.
It must have been him: Robertson must have been the one to break into Duncannon’s shed and to steal the tools. Hundreds of pounds worth of Duncannon’s tools. His livelihood, indeed. Had they sent the police to search Robertson’s house, Cameron knew they would have found the stolen items. But they didn’t. Instead, Fingal Buchanan accused the MacLeod boy, who had been seen by the house and who had been known to have bee
n persecuting Duncannon for weeks. There was no sign of the tools at the Harbour Bell or in any other place that Cameron MacLeod might have hidden them, but this did not trouble the islanders. Fingal Buchanan, the post master of Hinba, had declared him a thief, and it was simply assumed that the boy had thrown the valuable belongings into the sea, in an act of wilful vandalism. Cameron had looked to his friend to provide him with an alibi, to explain that, yes, the two of them had pestered Mr Duncannon but had not taken the tools. But Davey had been too afraid to admit to his father that he had been consorting with MacLeods and had stayed silent. All the while his father was beating him with the old belt that hung like a threat from the kitchen door, Cameron had cursed both Fingal for his cruelty and Davey for his betrayal.
In the circumstances, it was inconceivable that Cameron MacLeod could have any warm feelings towards the young Buchanan. Where others saw an easy charm and open generosity, Cameron viewed Fergus as self-satisfied and condescending. He had been spoiled by his mother and his father’s weakness had allowed the boy to become indulged, soft. He simpered about the island, carrying his entitlement like it was a burden rather than a privilege. No son of a MacLeod would behave like Fergus did. He was 20 years of age, but with the face of a baby, his red hair soft and long like a girl’s. And then there was the way he spoke to MacLeod, as if he were his social better: he patronised MacLeod, made an effort, made allowances. What was more, adding insult to still-smarting injury, this young Buchanan had his hands all over his daughter. It made him sick to think of it.
And yet, and yet. He could not object to the betrothal. If he put his foot down, Shona would mither and his wife would blame him for the mithering. Whether Shona had feelings for the boy or not was unimportant: simply being told what she could or could not do would raise a storm in his daughter. Maybe they had spoiled her too, he thought, polishing the last of the lunch time pint glasses from the washer.
The Cursing Stone: a gripping mystery and family saga Page 5