Land of Heart's Desire

by Catherine Airlie

  “Hi, there!”

  The sound of a human voice was the last thing she had expected to hear. She half turned and saw him, but already she had determined not to stop. Had he been waiting—spying—to make sure that the entire populace of the island obeyed his arbitrary command?

  Finlay Sutherland hailed her for a second time. His voice was sharper now, less friendly, and he strode swiftly across the field where he had been re-loading his gun. She wondered vaguely if he would shoot to kill.

  But this was really no laughing matter. She meant to show him in no uncertain manner that he couldn’t do as he liked on Croma.

  “Come back! Hi, there, you little fool! Come back!”

  The words, carried clearly on the wind, stung her, but she would not wait. He had no right, either, to treat her like an erring child. Little fool, indeed!

  Her breath began to come more quickly as she increased her pace, walking rapidly uphill. It would be undignified to run, she decided, but she meant to let him see that she had no intention of turning back.

  It was then that she realized that he was running. He had dropped his gun and vaulted the stile before she had quite reached the cliff face, and he was close behind her when she turned round to accuse him.

  They were both breathing hard, but instead of the anger which she had expected to see in his green eyes there was insistency and what might have been the reflection of fear.

  He did not speak. Perhaps he knew that she was going to argue, to make a scene, so instead he bundled her into his arms and marched with her back along the narrow pathway to the stile.

  Before he put her down on the far side she had a moment’s awful fear that he was about to put her over his knee and smack her soundly, as if she had indeed been a disobedient, wilful child. His green eyes were blazing with anger now and his firm mouth was grimly compressed. Then, as if he had seen a suddenly amusing side to the situation, he laughed.

  “I’ve never wished for a hairbrush more in all my life!” he said.

  He was still holding her firmly by the arms, and he shook her scornfully before he let her go.

  Dazed and bewildered by the rapid turn of events, she could do nothing but stare back at him, hating him for the swift humiliation he had thrust upon her, for the way in which he had taken the law into his own hands for a second time.

  “You’re a—barbarian!” she fumed.

  “And you are a minx—nothing more, nothing less,” he told her calmly, picking up his gun.

  “I’m not a child!” she protested angrily. “And that path is a public one. You had no right to close it—no right whatever! There’s been a cliff road round the island for hundreds of years. It goes through MacNeill property, too, and I defy you to restrict it for any whim of your own!”

  The laughter died out of his eyes as swiftly as it had come. Without speaking, without stooping to argument, he took her firmly by the elbow and led her forcibly back down the path towards the shore.

  Above them as they walked the high red cliff scowled down, like beetling brows arched above a rugged face, but here and there great gaps had been torn in it close under the headland. In places the turf and loosening earth of the cliff top overhung as much as two or three yards; in others there was an ugly bite where erosion had already completed its sinister work.

  And the path she had been about to take went close to the cliff edge right along the undermined section of treacherous green turf. At any moment, with her added weight to give it impetus, the whole loosening structure might have plunged headlong to the rocks two hundred feet or more below.

  Sickened by the very thought, she shivered and closed her eyes. What a fool she had been! What a reckless, irresponsible fool!

  “What must you think of me?” she said involuntarily, not looking at her companion. “I had no idea—”

  “I’m sure you hadn’t,” he answered crisply. “But the path has been creeping steadily nearer to the cliff edge for years. Until I can flatten out a new one, I have to leave that notice up. Perhaps,” he added thoughtfully, “I might have worded it better. What would you have said?”

  She was still suffering from reaction. Her nerves were jarred and her voice was not quite steady when she said: “Does it matter? We will have to accustom ourselves to your blunt behaviour, Mr. Sutherland, so one notice, more or less, can’t make a great deal of difference.”

  “Look here,” he challenged immediately, “is that quite fair?”

  She knew that it wasn’t, that she ought to apologize at once, but his summary treatment of her up there on the cliff still rankled. Any dignity which she might have hung on to had been lost and she had not been able to clutch it back.

  “It is a bit below the belt, you know,” he pointed out. “It’s quite true that I could have said ‘Danger: this path closed temporarily because of erosion’, but there wasn’t time for that. I came along here a couple of days ago and saw the state things were in and that was the first notice I could lay my hands on. In Canada we wouldn’t think twice about a thing like that,” he added thoughtfully. “If a road’s closed we accept the fact. It’s bound to be closed for a reason.”

  “Isn’t it rather a pity,” she suggested waspishly, “that you ever left Canada, Mr. Sutherland?”

  As soon as the words were uttered she was sorry. She was being rude and very unfair, she acknowledged, but her heart had only just begun to slow down after their violent encounter and words seemed to be her only means of defence.

  She saw that she had stung him because his mouth hardened and his eyes narrowed to thin green slits beneath the beetling red brows.

  “I don’t think so,” he said decisively. “I came here with the intention of being neighbourly, though, and it’s just as well that I’m not easily scared away. It will take more than a tiff over a notice board to convince me that I’m in the wrong place.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I shouldn’t have said what I did. I suppose I must have been—rather shaken by what has just happened.”

  “I guess so,” he agreed not unkindly, although his mouth was still rather grim.

  “You have every right to be here,” she rushed on. “More than I have, in fact.” She turned back towards the causeway. “Oh—”

  Horrified, she saw that the tide had already turned. It must have been over the full ebb before she had left the other side and now it was hurrying in over the sand to lap round the shallow stones of the only way back to Erradale.

  “I must go,” she told him hastily. “I had no idea how long it had been at low water.”

  “You can’t make it,” he said decisively. “You’d be caught half way—trapped.”

  She felt trapped now. He had not needed to tell her that she could not hope to race that swift flow of water through the narrow gap between the headlands. She looked round at him helplessly.

  “There’s nothing else for it,” he said. “You’ll have to come back to Ardtornish with me.”

  “I couldn’t,” she said. “I simply couldn’t!”

  “Can you tell me why?”

  “I—” She met his eyes and could not tell him. “No one at Erradale House knows where I am,” she explained lamely. “They are bound to worry if I don’t get back.”

  “That’s easily remedied,” he assured her. “I can take you round by sea.”

  “There isn’t a steamer,” she began.

  “I have my own boat now,” he informed her. “It was delivered yesterday.” His eyes lost some of their flintiness. “That’s one reason why I’ve always wanted to live on an island,” he added.

  Possession, she thought. The new boat would be a luxurious cabin-cruiser worth a small fortune, with the powerful sort of engines necessary to get him away from Croma and across to the mainland whenever he wanted to go, independently of any steamer!

  “It’s very kind of you,” she found herself saying frigidly, “but there’s really no need for you to go all the way round to Port-na-Keal on my account. I have friends at
Scoraig, and I can wait there for the next tide.”

  “Rather a long wait,” he pointed out. “And it still doesn’t solve the problem of letting your grandmother know you are safe. What we really need,” he went on when she could not find any logical reply to that, “is a different sort of causeway over the ford.” He turned towards the narrow neck of land where the Atlantic was already foaming in over the shallow stones. “We need a road, preferably built on piers, with a substantial breakwater on either side. It would be easy enough. This present arrangement is as antiquated as the dodo. What we want is a permanent link between the two ends of the island, something strong enough to withstand the elements or anything else that might try to break it.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting,” she suggested coldly, “that all this would cost a great deal of money?”

  “That needn’t matter,” he said. “I have the money.”

  She turned to face him.

  “But we haven’t, Mr. Sutherland,” she reminded him. “And this would have to be a joint affair. One half of the causeway is on MacNeill land.”

  “That would be a detail,” he told her magnanimously. “We could do this together.”

  She looked at him pityingly.

  “I wonder if I can make you understand what money means here, Mr. Sutherland,” she said. “Or, rather, the lack of it. If we had the amount of money you propose to spend on a causeway, we could find other things to do with it. The fact that the road from Erradale to Scoraig is only open twice within twenty-four hours for a very short time doesn’t count with us at all. We have become used to it. It has been part of our way of life for hundreds of years, and we have learned to accept it.”

  “You keep repeating that,” he pointed out, “as if it were a virtue, but really it isn’t, you know. Don’t you want to move with the times?”

  “Within limits!”

  He smiled at that.

  “Need you make them such narrow limits?” he queried. “But never mind! We won’t go into the question of the causeway, here and now, although if we had it we could also have telephonic communication between the two villages—and that would at least have solved your present dilemma!”

  He turned towards Scoraig and she gave the rapidly deepening ford a last despairing glance as she prepared to follow him.

  “We had better put back the notice, hadn’t we?” she suggested.

  “Yes,” he agreed, “it would be safer.”

  She held it for him while he nailed it back on the rough post from which she had torn it, using the butt of his gun as a hammer.

  “I think you ought to have a look at your own side of the cliff,” he advised, “or let your agent do it. ‘Factors’ you call them over here, don’t you? We use the word in some parts of Canada, too. It accents our close Scottish connections, I guess. Funny,” he mused, “just the odd word and an old custom or two, but they keep the bonds forged as strongly as ever!”

  “Are you your own factor now, Mr. Sutherland?” she asked, glancing at the gun and remembering that he had said he had put up the notice himself.

  “Yes,” he acknowledged. “I sacked the man I had. I found him incompetent, and he, apparently couldn’t agree with anyone around here. He had the wrong approach, I guess.”

  She had nothing to say to that and they walked on for a few seconds in silence. Now that they were drawing away from the cliff it was easier to recognize the wealth of the Ardtornish land. The lush grass was greener and richer than anything to be found north of the ford, and there were vast fields of it, where a fine herd of Ayrshire cattle grazed contentedly in the sun.

  Beyond, as they drew towards the southern end of the island, broad fields of oats and barley swayed gently in the breeze from the sea, a yellow, golden harvest of fair promise ready to be reaped before the winter set in.

  “Your factor must have been fairly knowledgeable about farming,” Christine pointed out as the first grey rooftops of Scoraig came into sight. “All this must have been planted before you came.”

  “He had my orders,” Finlay Sutherland answered briefly. “He also had a farm manager willing enough to carry them out. It was the personal contacts which rankled with me,” he confessed, “and the fact that he was spending more than half his time in a decrepit fishing-boat, hunting for sharks. When he was forced to stay on shore he was also helping to operate an illicit still.” he added with a grin which seemed to condone the offence and suggest that it might have been overlooked if that had been the worst of his agent’s misdemeanours.

  “I thought that sort of thing had been done away with long ago,” Christine smiled. “We are more or less law-abiding, even on Croma, you know.”

  “Quits!” he grinned. “I’m not going to argue about making whisky! You’re going to be fairly hungry by the time you get back to Erradale,” he suggested. “Why not let me offer you something to eat?”

  The grey towers of Ardtornish House were already visible through their screen of trees, beech mostly, in place of the more hardy pines and firs which sheltered Erradale from the buffeting of the north-east winds. The Ardtornish beeches were a wonderful sight, especially in autumn, forming a living, burnished archway for over a mile along the broad avenue to the house itself.

  Could she, Christine wondered, go and see them again? Could she go with this man by her side? Wouldn’t it be rather like disloyalty to Hamish and Rory and Jane to enter their old home as Finlay Sutherland’s guest?

  “I won’t try to keep you for any length of time,” he promised, “and we’ll have to go through the policies, anyway, to get to the shore. You see,” he added with a grin, “I’m already using all the right words!”

  In this present mood she felt that she could not snub him to any effect, and he had promised to get her back to Erradale in reasonable time so that her grandmother need not worry about her.

  “It’s—very kind of you,” she acknowledged hesitatingly as he flung open, a side gate into the grounds.

  “You don’t need to waver,” he assured her. “I have a most efficient housekeeper. She’s a native of the island, so I’m quite sure she will meet with your approval.”

  Iseabal Dalgleish was well known to Christine. She had served the Nicholsons as a young girl and, widowed now, had come back to serve Ardtornish’s new owner—without rancour, it seemed.

  “If you can wait a wee minute,” she suggested delightedly, smiling at Christine as if it were the most natural thing in the world to see her there, “I’ll soon set another place and put on a few more potatoes.”

  “Please don’t bother,” Christine begged as her host walked towards the gun-room. “A cup of tea will do very well, Mrs. Dalgleish.”

  “Tush, now, and that would be a poor sort of welcome to be offering you!” Iseabal objected. “Not that you would really be needing a bidding to come,” she added, “for it used to be your second home!”

  Christine flushed.

  “Those days have gone,” she said wistfully. “I don’t suppose we can ever recall the past.”

  She stood in the centre of the great hall after Iseabal had moved away in the direction of the kitchens, thinking how little sign of change there was, although she had confidently expected Ardtornish to be altered out of all recognition by its new owner. But Finlay Sutherland had left it exactly as he had found it.

  Hamish Nicholson had sold his old home, lock, stock and barrel, thinking, she had no doubt, to preserve it as it always had been, even although it was now in the hands of a stranger. The massive oak furniture, the heraldic shields and great stags’ heads above the doorways were all reminders of her own youth and the lavish parties and gay, unconventional ceilidhs which the Nicholsons had encouraged in days gone by. She could not find any sign of change and was surprised and glad in the same breath.

  “Well?” Finlay Sutherland demanded, coming up behind her, “what’s the verdict on Ardtornish?”

  “You haven’t altered anything—”

  “What did you really expect?” he ask
ed with a brief half-smile. “A baseball rampant above the staircase and a stuffed moose in the great hall?”

  She was forced to laugh at that.

  “I’ve been very rude,” she admitted.

  He took her on a tour of inspection through the other rooms, to prove, she supposed, that he was completely innocent of vandalism, and she noticed that a great many necessary repairs had already been made on the structure of the house itself. The wonderful yellow pine panelling in the library had been cleaned and renewed in places where woodworm had set in, but she noticed that the books were still piled haphazardly on tables and chairs around the room.

  “This is going to be a colossal task,” he remarked. “They all ought to be catalogued.” He left her side to lift an ancient volume with a touch that was almost a caress. “I’d like it done by someone who really knows about this sort of work, so I’ve written to Edinburgh for a secretary.” He turned to look at her, his green eyes questioning. “Do you think Jane Nicholson might take on the job?”

  Christine gazed back at him, aghast.

  “Jane?” she gasped. “You’d never think of asking her to do a thing like that? How could she be expected to come back to her old home to work for—”

  “An intruder?” His red brows shot up, but he seemed only to be amused now. “I can see that I have a lot to live down round about these parts, but I have already asked Jane.”

  “You’ve asked her?” Her tone was completely incredulous. “She won’t come!”

  “What makes you think not?”

  “It’s simple. Nobody could expect Jane to come back to Ardtornish as a—as a sort of servant.”

  “That wouldn’t be the way of it at all,” he said briefly. “She would be doing a useful job of work—something for Ardtornish, if you like. I intend to add to the library as I go along. Strange as it may seem,” he added wryly, “books have always been an obsession with me. I got into touch with Jane Nicholson through her family solicitor, by the way, because he told me she had started to catalogue the library about three years ago and then had to leave it. He mentioned that she was looking for a job at the present moment and now I am waiting for her reply.”