Holy Terror in the Hebrides

by Jeanne M. Dams

  “Surely,” she said, her voice soft and lilting. “Climb up; I’ll see to the bags.” She dealt easily with the suitcases, climbed onto the driver’s perch, and clucked to her horse, who woke from his gentle snooze, obediently wheeled the wagon around, and headed up the village street. “Why ‘Dove Cottage,’ by the way? Does it have a dovecote or something?”

  My driver chuckled. “Ye’ll find a good many things on Iona have to do with doves. ‘Iona’ means ‘dove,’ ye see, in Hebrew. And ‘Columba’ is ‘dove’ in Latin.”

  “What a coincidence, then, that Columba happened to come here. Or does the name of the island date from after he came?”

  She shrugged. “That’s the sort of thing ye might ask the people at the Heritage Centre. They know the history of this island back millions o’ years to when it thrust oot o’ the sea. I’ll show ye the centre, if ye like.”

  “I’d like that very much, but later, perhaps. I’m tired, and I want to get settled.”

  We rode past small houses on our left, while on our right gardens stretched down to the sea in a riot of color. There were all kinds: well-disciplined gardens with roses and neatly clipped lawns, gardens left to their own sweet will with wildflowers, heather, and several different kinds of thistle, one untended garden that was little more than a weed patch, but all of them bright with blossoms. And, sure enough, hedges of fuchsia towered everywhere, so thick with purple-and-magenta blossoms that I could hardly see the leaves, and so sweetly scented that a sort of living veil of bees surrounded them. I decided to admire them from a discreet distance.

  Just before the narrow street became someone’s drive, my driver pulled her horse to a stop. “Here we are, then. Dove Cottage. If ye have your key, I’ll help ye with the bags.”

  I stayed where I was, on the high backseat of the wagon, in a sudden horrified paralysis.

  My key. The key Lynn had driven down from London especially to give me. Where was it?

  I rummaged frantically in my purse, but I already knew. I could see the key, exactly where I had put it so as not to forget it, on the little hall table right next to the door.

  I looked at my driver, who stood waiting, a quizzical expression on her face. “I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid, but I think I left the key at home. Do you know where the owners live? They might have another one they’d be willing to let me use . . .”

  I trailed off as she shook her head. “This is just a holiday cottage. The Fergusons live in Inverness, I think. The postie would know.”

  It didn’t matter, really, whether the postmaster had the Fergusons’ address. If they weren’t here on Iona, there was no practical way to get a key until tomorrow at the very earliest. Unless—“They wouldn’t have given one to a neighbor, I suppose? In case of emergency? Or left one with the police?”

  She tried to hide her amusement. “There are no police on Iona; we’ve no need of them. The nearest constable is on Mull, in Bunessen. And I doot they’d give a key to their property to anyone here on Iona; they’ve a poor opinion of islanders, have the Fergusons, and they’re none so trusting. Ye can ask.”

  But her tone of voice told me the answer.

  “No, you’re probably right. I suppose I’ll just have to find a hotel, or a B and B, if you have the time to take me around.”

  “Oh, I’ve the time, but I doot, this late in the season—the Argyll is full, I know. We passed it juist a few houses back, but they’ve a New Age group in for the week. Americans. And the St. Columba, up the hill, closed airly this year to be redone. Ye might try the Iona; it’s new, and not so many people know about it.”

  “The Iona, then, by all means.” The horse patiently turned the wagon in the narrow road, and we clopped back the way we had come, turning right when we neared the jetty to head up the hill toward the Abbey.

  “That’s the Nunnery we’re passin’. I might as well give ye a bit of a tour while we’re aboot it. It was built airly in the thirteenth century and flourished until the sixteenth, when all the nuns and monks were turned oot by the reformers. And round here, on your left, is the Heritage Centre. They’ve some fine wee bits and pieces to see, and if ye get hungry, walkin’ aboot, they do lunch. Homemade soup and sandwiches, and home-baked sweets.”

  I was starved. I resolved to check out the Heritage Centre the moment I’d found a room for the night.

  “That’s the parish kirk next to the centre. Church of Scotland, ye know, Presbyterian, you Americans call it. Yon garden belongs to the St. Columba Hotel; they grow nearly all their own vegetables. And they run the wee shop across the road, there, books and woolens.”

  It sounded an odd combination, but appealing; I made another mental note.

  “And here we are. Shall I wait for ye, in case they can’t put ye up?”

  “Oh, yes, please.” I clambered down from my high perch, feeling stiff and stupid and every minute of my age.

  The hotel was in what obviously had been a house, and a very large house for Iona. I knew that Iona used to be part of the Duke of Argyll’s vast property, and assumed that the house had belonged to him or whoever he put in charge of the island. This would be, then, a miniature version of the “country house” hotels popular in England. I pushed open the great front door, petted the friendly gray tiger cat who lay on the counter, and rang the bell.

  I was in luck. The pleasant woman who answered the bell had a charming face and a melodious, rather English-sounding voice; went to an English school, was my guess. She introduced herself as Hester Campbell and assured me that, yes, they could accommodate me, they had several rooms free, not large, but with en suite facilities (which, in Britspeak, meant a bathroom), if that would suit?

  At that point a roomy closet would have been fine, so long as it had a bed. A private bath was an unexpected luxury. I gratefully signed the register and asked for my key.

  “Key? Oh. Well—certainly there must be one somewhere—if you’d like me to look . . .” Mrs. Campbell had clearly never run into this particular eccentricity on the part of tourists, but was prepared to put herself out if I insisted. I smiled, accepted the idea that Iona was a place where police weren’t needed and hotel rooms didn’t have to be kept locked and, at my hostess’s insistence, stepped into the lounge for a moment while she went out to deal with my bags.

  There were seven people in the lounge, sitting in little silent clumps, and I recognized three of them. Teresa-not-of-Avila sat next to a very attractive young man with fair hair, dressed in a pale blue sweater and wearing one small gold earring. He shifted his feet uneasily and avoided looking at the nun. In a corner sat the two women from the bus, petulant expressions on both their faces. So they were staying on the island, were they? Well, perhaps I could avoid them.

  A burly, bearded, sixtyish man in a sports jacket sat by himself, turning the pages of a magazine, and a very thin, pale young man with big, awkward hands and bad skin sat in front of the fireplace next to a strikingly lovely silver-haired woman in her fifties, both of them staring into space. As they became aware of me, every face turned in my direction, and every one of them wore the same expression.

  Surely it was my imagination that all these strangers looked at me with naked hostility.

  2

  ALAN NESBITT TELLS me I havesound instincts, and should pay more attention to them. I will regret for the rest of my life that I did not heed my instinct then, and leave Iona by the next ferry.

  In any event, I told myself I was imagining things, turned away from the unwelcoming faces, and dismissed the matter. I went out to pay my obliging driver and book a full tour of the island for the next morning, took possession of my room, and unpacked (with the aid of the cat, who was introduced as Stan and who found it necessary to sniff every article of my luggage). A quick glance in the mirror told me I looked neat, at least, which at sixty-something is often all that can be expected, so I pulled my hat to a little more rakish angle, smiled at myself, and hied off to the Heritage Centre before they stopped serving lunch. />
  The lunchroom was a tiny room at one side of the museum; if the building had originally been the manse for the parish kirk next door, as seemed likely, this might have been a spare bedroom. The ambience was amateurish, with a distinct aura of church basement, but the thick soup was warming and delicious, the sandwiches were made of crusty homemade bread, and the woman serving me, the last customer of the day, was friendly. A short, plump, cheerful woman wrapped in a businesslike apron, she bustled about clearing tables and putting things away in the minute kitchen, chatting all the while. Finally finished with her chores, she poured herself the last cup of coffee and sat down to share the last two brownies with me.

  “This was just what I needed,” I said with a contented sigh. “I’m Dorothy Martin, by the way.”

  “Maggie McIntyre. And what brought ye to Iona so late in the year?”

  I explained about my friends and the plans that had gone wrong. “But you’re the second person to mention it being late. I would have thought September—”

  “Late for here. The storms will be comin’ soon, now. There’s no’ a trace o’ land from here to Newfoundland, ye see, and the winds can get a wee bit strong when they’ve that many miles of sea to cross.”

  “I can well imagine. Hurricanes, do you mean?”

  “No’ hurricanes, quite, but gales, wi’ rain, an’ thunder. The seas rise, an’ ye canna see yer hand before yer face, it’s that dark. And wi’ no warnin’, oot of a clear blue sky, as they say.”

  I glanced out of the window at the clear, blue sky and the leaves moving lazily in the gentle breeze, and Maggie chuckled.

  “No, ye’ve no need to worry today. It’ll be a week or two, likely, before they start, though ye never know. But that’s why the tourist season here ends at the beginning of October. I mind one year, when the storms began airly, there was a couple oot in a dinghy. Germans, they were, good people, wi’ a pair o’ bairns waitin’ behind.” She sighed and paused, remembering, and then finished her coffee and stood up briskly. “’Twas the next mornin’ before the Coastguard could get their helicopters oot to search. The boat had fetched up on Ardnamurchan, twenty, twenty-five miles northeast o’ here. He was still alive, but they never found her. I canna offer ye more coffee, for I’ve drunk the last drop, but I’d be happy to make ye a cup of tea?”

  I can take a hint as well as anybody, and the gorgeous afternoon was beckoning. “No, thanks, but I’ll be back tomorrow, I expect. So nice to meet you, and we’ll hope the storms don’t come early this year.”

  I put the sad little story out of my mind and went exploring. The Heritage Centre itself I would save for another day; it was inside and I wanted to be out, out in the sunshine, out in the air that was reviving me with every breath. I wandered across the road to the very lovely ruins of the Nunnery.

  It may sound odd to refer to ruins as lovely, but the soft pink granite of the broken walls glowed in the afternoon sun, and the few arches that still remained had lost none of their delicate beauty. A well-tended garden nodded gently in what might have been the old cloister, and here and there tiny plants bloomed cheerfully in niches of the walls. I sat on a bench in the sun and watched as small birds flitted in and out of the empty windows or perched atop roofless walls. Bees and butterflies and large, beautiful dragonflies roamed among the flowers, and in one sunny corner a small black-and-white cat sat washing itself, now and then pausing, one paw in the air, to eye the birds. The Nunnery was, in its gentle way, a busy place, but utterly peaceful.

  I sat, drowsily trying to analyze the quiet. It wasn’t an absence of sound, exactly. I could hear the beat of wings when a bird flew overhead, the clop of a horse’s hooves as one of the wagons went down the village street. Somewhere people laughed, and a dog barked.

  It wasn’t until an ancient tractor chugged noisily past the Nunnery that I put my finger on it. There was, except for the odd car or farm vehicle, no traffic noise on Iona. I knew that residents could bring cars onto the island, but they seemed to use them mostly between home and the ferry landing. Otherwise, everyone cycled or walked, so the loudest noises were natural ones, and the occasional toot of the ferry.

  I stretched luxuriously in the sun. I could get used to this.

  However, I realized shortly, I could also get what my grandmother used to call “the dead sets” if I didn’t move soon. I rose reluctantly and headed on down to the village.

  The shop displaying Scottish crafts drew me, but I resisted temptation and went instead to the jetty, the heart of the village. Perching on a post, I watched for a while. The little ferry plied tirelessly back and forth, each time taking a few passengers and bringing a few back. On one trip a garbage truck, looking very much out of place, lumbered off the boat and groaned its way down the village street, emptying trash bins with the usual hideous noises.

  That did it. Romance lay elsewhere. I puffed back up the hill and was about to turn in at my hotel when a church bell began to ring. The Abbey, I assumed from the direction, and I hadn’t been there yet. Partly from a sense of having transgressed against proper tourist etiquette, and partly because I find church bells irresistible, I panted another few yards uphill and joined the last few stragglers walking into the church.

  The service, to an Episcopalian used to a fixed liturgy, was pleasant but rather odd. It seemed to follow no particular pattern, but there were hymns and readings, some of them poetry, some from the scriptures of various religious traditions, and prayers of the sort that are designed not to offend anyone. Well, I already knew that the Iona Community, which was in charge of the Abbey, was a nondenominational group, so I hadn’t exactly expected Evensong.

  When someone—a lay person, I gathered from the absence of vestments—launched into a rather rambling sermon, my mind and eyes began to wander. I was a little disappointed in the Abbey, I decided. Though lofty and attractive enough, it held none of that sense of antiquity I had come to expect in British churches. After all, there had been a church of some kind on this spot since 563! Of course, I reminded myself, the present building, though begun in the twelfth century, had fallen to ruins by the sixteenth, and the “restoration” completed some thirty or forty years ago had really amounted to an almost total rebuilding. So perhaps it was little wonder that the ghosts of past worshipers seemed to have departed.

  Worshipers. My eyes roved over the present congregation. There were a lot of earnest-looking young people in blue jeans, part of an Iona Community retreat or some such, I surmised. The small group in garments that tended to flow were probably the New Agers from the Argyll Hotel that my guide had mentioned. And the group right in front of me, seven of them stretched out in one pew—I sighed. There was Teresa, and the pair from the bus, and the rest as well.

  On a small island, it was going to be hard to avoid the unfriendly crew from the Iona Hotel.

  I sneaked out before the service was quite over so as to escape them, and wandered around the Abbey grounds, looking at the lovely old. Celtic crosses and the graves of, among others, one MacBeth. It was while I was wondering about him—surely he couldn’t be the original of the story Shakespeare made immortal?—that the little hotel group came out of the church, somewhat apart from the rest of the congregation, and assembled in front of the largest cross. I watched from my vantage point in the churchyard as a clergywoman from the Abbey joined them.

  It appeared that she was giving them a little speech of welcome. The fitful wind caught her words and flung them at me now and again. “Iona Community delighted and honored . . . seven such stalwart laborers in God’s vineyard . . . wish you joy and peace here . . . let us pray.”

  I didn’t stay for the prayer. The wind was getting cold as twilight closed in, and besides, I was bemused. Laborers in God’s vineyard? That antagonistic bunch? It takes all kinds, certainly, and maybe I’d misjudged them, but . . . I climbed up the steps to the hotel and went to my room to put on warmer clothes and speculate about personalities.

  Dinner was included in the price of m
y room, and from the aromas wafting up the stairs, it was going to be delicious. I debated about going down to the lounge for an aperitif, but decided against it. I’d be better able to face unfriendly people with some food inside me, and in any case, I had a couple of phone calls to make. There was no phone in the room; I collected some change and went downstairs to the pay phone in the hall.

  The first call was to Lynn.

  “Oh, good, you’re there. We tried to call you earlier, but you must have been out doing the island. Isn’t the cottage delightful?”

  I sighed and explained. Lynn’s silver peal of laughter sparkled across the miles.

  “It thrills me when other people do things like that. I can’t wait to tell Tom; he’ll adore it.”

  “And how is Tom?”

  Tom was at home, asleep at the moment, and doing much better, though chafing under diet restrictions, Lynn reported. They hadn’t had to do any bypass surgery or angioplasty or anything, and his doctor had told him he could travel in another few days if he wanted to.

  “Well, when he gets up here to crab and salmon-land, he won’t mind low-fat eating. Soon, I hope?”

  “This weekend, if all goes well. But I’ll call.”

  So I gave her the hotel number, just in case it took me forever to recapture the lost key, and went on to the next call.

  “Jane? I’m so glad you’re home . . . yes, I’ve arrived, and it really is a lovely place . . . yes, well, that’s why I called. I don’t know how the cottage is; I’ve done a really stupid thing.”

  I explained about the key. “Apparently, there isn’t another one closer than Inverness, and what with the ferries and all, that’s a couple of days’ journey from here. We really are in the middle of nowhere, which is one of the things that make it so nice, but right now I wish civilization were a little closer. Anyway, do you think you could mail me the key? How long do you think it would take to get here?”

  Jane’s dry voice came over the line quite clearly. “Any place else, I’d say a day, but you’re back of beyond, there. You’d best count on two. I’ll go and post it straight off. You having a good time?”