Magic of Winter

by Martina Boone

  What sort of a daughter did that make her?

  Easing herself down to the edge of the sofa beside him, Cait gave his shoulder a gentle shake. “Dad? Wake up.”

  He stirred and groaned, smacked his lips a time or two, then pulled the blanket toward his chin.

  “Wake up, Dad. I’m home.”

  This time his eyes finally opened. He blinked slowly, then struggled to sit up. “Caitie? What are you doing here? You’re not meant to come until tomorrow.”

  “I decided to drive straight up this morning—I was worried,” she said, “and it seems I was right. Look at this place. It’s a tip. And look at yourself. What have you been doing?”

  He ran a hand through gray hair that seemed sparser than she remembered. Sparser and longer, and where had the whiskers come from?

  Slumping back against the cushions, he twitched the blanket back across his feet. “Less of the parental tone of voice if you please, my girl. I’ll not be having you lecture me in my own house.”

  “I wouldn’t need to lecture if you’d tell me what was going on. Something’s clearly wrong.”

  “Nothing a bit of rest won’t fix. I’ve been working too hard, that’s all.”

  Cait pushed to her feet and swallowed down the obvious rebuttal. She retrieved Mrs. Bogan from the cat carrier instead, then crossed back to the picture window with the little warm body pressed tight against her chest. Mrs. Bogan purred loudly, not a contented purr, a nervous one—as if she sensed Cait’s frustration—and Cait relaxed her hold and rubbed the cat behind the ears.

  Only when she could trust herself again, did she finally look her father in the eye. “I stopped at the Tea Room on my way here,” she said. “Since you’d told me you couldn’t afford to close the place, I assumed that was where I’d find you.”

  He swung his legs off the sofa and fumbled for a cane that lay beside him on the floor. His right foot was encased in a walking cast, his sock-clad toes peeking out the open front, and even leaning on the cane, he swayed lightly as if it was hard to balance his large, ungainly frame. “I decided to close the Tea Room early,” he said sullenly, not looking at her. “I don’t have to be there all the time.”

  “You haven’t been there in a good long while, judging by the state of it. How long has it been since it’s been open? And why does Brice have a key?”

  “Because I felt like giving him one. Enough questions. I’m tired, so I’m going up to bed. We can talk this over in the morning.”

  “Brice said I needed to make you tell me what’s going on.”

  Her father exhaled sharply. “Brice’s mouth moves faster than his mind. Always has. Should have known better than to trust him with anything.”

  “Why did you? You’ve always hated him.”

  “Because you weren’t here.”

  Cait felt the blow land, but shook it off. “Nice try, but I know your tricks. You’re the one who told me I needed to leave the glen, and you’ve been lying to keep me from finding out whatever you are hiding. Now you’re trying to distract me, and you’re scaring me instead. Tell me the truth.”

  “You’re making a fuss where none is needed. All right, if you must know, I did a bit more than sprain my ankle. If I’d told you it was broken, you’d have tried to come home, and I didn’t want you doing that. Only what with having to take it easy on the leg and Mairi quitting and Kirsty due to have her baby soon—”

  “Mairi quit?” Cait stared at him.

  A flush crept over his cheekbones. “Said keeping up the library was too much for her. She’d gone soft in the head. And don’t go listening to her. There’s nothing wrong with my temper, whatever she claims.”

  Cait laughed at that. “No, nothing at all. Not a single thing.”

  “Anyway, it seemed like the perfect time to spruce the place up. Brice is always looking for money, so I hired him to do some painting. Blame him if you want to blame anyone. He should have finished long since.”

  “So that’s all you’re doing? Painting?”

  “Aye, I told you.”

  “Where are the bookshelves then? And where are all Mum’s things here at home? Where’d you put them?”

  “What are you asking me questions for? We needed to see the walls to paint them, didn’t we?” Her father snatched a medicine bottle up off the table and slipped it in his pocket. “This is exactly why I don’t tell you anything, if you must know. You’re always poking your nose in where it isn’t needed. I am still your father, Cait. I can paint what I bloody well want to paint.” He released a sigh. Shaking his head, he hobbled slowly, painfully, toward the corridor leaning on his cane.

  Cait trailed him to the stairs, feeling helpless, trying to think of something to say that wouldn’t make things worse between them. He stopped briefly on the bottom step. “You should get some rest yourself. You’ve had a long drive. And I don’t know why you had to bring that stupid cat. See you keep her away from me, at least.”

  He climbed the stairs, looking more like an old man than like the father Cait had loved and hated and feared—a little—for the best part of her life.

  She wanted to go and shake him. Instead, she lowered her arms so Mrs. Bogan could jump silently to the floor, and she ran up to hug him on the steps. He felt frail in her arms, as though he’d lost half of himself somewhere along the way these past months since Mum had gone.

  It was possible, Cait had to acknowledge it, that looking like a fool in her father’s eyes might have been part of the reason she hadn’t argued when he’d urged her to go to London that day after her mother’s funeral. As often as she’d defended Brice, insisted that she loved him, as long as Brice had been the bone of contention that had driven a wedge between them, the idea that she had been wrong all along and her father had been right, had made it easier to agree when he’d insisted she should leave.

  “I love you,” she whispered, deciding there and then that whatever was going on, she wasn’t going to abandon him again.

  He put his big paw of a hand on her hair, let it rest there a moment trembling, then dropped it back down to his side. “I’ve missed you, Caitie girl. But I never asked you to come home. I wish you had stayed away.”

  Dumbstruck

  “What should I do

  about the wild and the tame?

  The wild heart that wants to be free,

  and the tame heart that

  wants to come home.”

  Jeannette Winterson

  While Mrs. Bogan was busy gobbling, in a most unladylike fashion, the last bit of a dried-out piece of salmon from the fridge, Cait fetched her cases from the boot of the car and lugged them upstairs. In her old room, she pulled an old-favorite stretched-out fisherman’s sweater from the box of discards beneath the bed and paired that with black leggings and heavy socks to ward off the chill that had settled in the house. Then she headed back downstairs.

  The kitchen smelled of smoked fish, dust, and disuse. Even the clean dishes in the drying rack had dried specks of food on them and that greasy non-quite-clean feeling when she ran a thumb across them. By the look of it, nothing in the house had been given more than a cursory wipe-down in months. As much to burn off the confused emotions that were spinning through her like electricity as anything else, Cait dug out the cleaning supplies to give the place a proper turn-out.

  After rewashing the dishes, she cleaned out the near-empty refrigerator and wiped down the baseboards and cabinets. But like the rest of the house, her father had stripped the kitchen of anything that had belonged to her mum—or that her mum had cared about. The more places Cait looked, the more things she found missing. Even the book of recipes handed down generation to generation in her mother’s family was gone from its customary place on the little bookshelf in the corner.

  Cait wiped the dust from the telephone directory, which was the only remaining book. And suddenly the unanswered questions were more than she could bear. How was she supposed to sleep? Though it felt much later, the wall clock assured her it was only
half past eight, so she flung down the dust cloth and pulled a heavy coat from the hook by the kitchen door. Then realizing she had no shoes, she ran upstairs to get them and to collect the keys to the Mini as well.

  Driving along the loch road to Elspeth Murray’s Breagh House, she told herself she would knock only if it looked as though Elspeth were awake. But of course, even if she’d retired to bed already, Elspeth wouldn’t be sleeping yet. Elspeth always had been a night owl, and she was likely to be working downstairs in the section of the house that she’d converted into a museum of Highlands history. Fake Highlands history, usually, though well intentioned. Most of the items Elspeth claimed to have belonged to Rob Roy MacGregor or the Revered Robert Kirk or other historical figures from the glen were pure fabrication on her part. For all that, though, Elspeth knew the deep-down truth of human nature better than anyone else in Balwhither. If anything in the village was ever worth knowing, Elspeth Murray would be the one who knew it.

  Pulling the Mini to a stop in the circular drive of the Gothic revival house that had belonged to the Murrays for several centuries, Cait took stock of the building. Lights inside, and still more all along the flower beds forming a welcoming path from the edge of the drive to the wide front steps, suggested that Elspeth was still awake.

  Elspeth’s was one of Cait’s favorite houses in the glen. These days, it was second in size only to Connal MacGregor’s Inverlochlarig House that sat in stone splendor a short way down the road at the far end of Loch Daoine, the smaller and more distant of the glen’s two lakes. But across the water, on the opposite shore, the ruined Stewart house had once been slightly larger, and so had the old Fletcher home that had become the Library and Tea Room. Wandering through Elspeth’s rooms as a child, Cait used to imagine what it would be like to live in a place this grand, where Highland chieftains used to meet to discuss war or cattle raids and beautifully-dressed women had come to dance.

  It struck Cait abruptly that all things crumbled. Buildings. Families. The old Stewart home was a crumbling ruin and, aside from Mad Mackenzie, the Stewarts themselves were gone. With Robbie dead, her father was the last of the Balwhither Fletchers, too.

  Cait had left him in the glen alone.

  She swung out of the car and took a deep breath of air that smelled of nothing except peat and soil and water. No exhaust fumes or gasoline stench. No restaurant waste rotting in the dumpsters behind the corner pub near her London flat. The glen smelled wild as the wind, and lonely.

  “You coming in, then?” Elspeth Murray called from the top of the steps. “Or d’you plan to stand out here all night and catch your death?”

  Cait hadn’t noticed the door opening, but seeing Elspeth standing there, her feet launched themselves down the path of their own volition. Feeling Elspeth’s arms wrap around her, she allowed herself to be gathered into the warmth and comfort, and somehow it made her lonelier still. She’d missed this. The simple connection of someone holding her. Embracing her.

  But she wasn’t going to cry. She wasn’t the type to cry.

  “Och, you let it all out,” Elspeth said, patting her back. “I can feel you holding the weight of the world inside you as though it will all come crashing down if you ease yourself an inch. Is this what they’ve done to you down in London?”

  “I was all right in London. It’s being home that’s done it,” Cait said, drawing back.

  Elspeth, dressed in a dark blue sweater, a pale tweed skirt, and oversized bedroom slippers in place of her usual sturdy shoes, was the only person Cait had seen in the glen so far who seemed entirely unchanged. Her gray curls were still chin length, no lighter or darker than Cait remembered, and even with the gray days that shrouded the Highlands in December, her cheeks were still pink and weathered from walking the track to the village and back each day. Most of all, she wore her listening face, the silent promise of a willing ear and as much—or as little—advice as someone wished.

  She grasped Cait by the elbow and pulled her inside. “Come on inside, poor love. I’ll put the kettle on, and I’ve got some pastries that Brando’s Emma brought over from the hotel this morning. You haven’t met her yet, but she’s American—like my niece. Brando found her in Cornwall, of all places, when he went to his sister Janet’s wedding, and as long as we’ve all been taking bets on when some girl would snatch him up, none of us saw that coming. They’ll be getting married next summer. Another lovely wedding in the glen. But before I go getting pastries, have you had your supper? I could easily fix you something.”

  “Honestly, I haven’t much of an appetite at all.”

  Inside the house, the stained-glass windows and the chandelier suspended from the ceiling in the foyer were a far cry from Cait’s much simpler home, all those things having been left behind when the Tea Room was converted. Still, like Cait’s mum, Elspeth had a knack for making the place seem warm and inviting. She shuffled to the kitchen sink to fill the kettle, and Cait flopped down in the chair at the table by the wall. Briefly, she bit her lip, trying to decide where to begin. But her mother had always taught her that for any difficult conversation, it was best to start at the beginning and come straight to the point.

  She folded her hands on the table. “What’s wrong with my father?” she asked. “He’s been telling me he’s fine, and he clearly isn’t.”

  “He hasn’t explained?” Elspeth slapped the water off and turned. “Even now you’re home?”

  “Explained what? I saw a medicine bottle on the table, and the house is a proper mess. And I know he’s renovating the Tea Room. What I can’t fathom is why, and Brice—the knob head—refused to tell me.”

  Elspeth’s lips tightened. Her chest rose and fell again deeply, and she crossed to the stove to set the kettle on the burner. “It isn’t Brice’s fault, though he’s no different than Donald when it comes to things like pride and promises. Of course, you know a thing or two about pride yourself, don’t you? Well, perhaps we all do, come to that.”

  “You’re not exactly speaking plainly,” Cait said.

  Sighing again, Elspeth came to sit in the chair beside Cait’s and covered Cait’s hand with her own where it lay on the scarred wooden table. “Your father has bone cancer, Cait. None of us knew until this morning when I ran into Brice. We’d all thought he’d fallen and broken his leg, but it was cancer that caused the break.”

  Cancer. The word echoed in Cait’s ears until the peal of it had set her muscles trembling. She hadn’t let her thoughts wander in that direction yet. Hadn’t dared to. She’d thought her father’s arthritis must have gotten worse, or heart problems, a dozen other things, but mostly it had been the obvious signs of depression that had worried when she saw him.

  Cancer? She couldn’t take that in.

  Not when the ugliness of the disease had stolen her mother away already.

  “How bad?” she asked with her mouth gone so dry that the words were indistinct.

  “Bad, love.” Elspeth’s answer was flat. “From what I gather, he put the pain down to arthritis and didn’t bother going to the doctor until he stepped wrong and the leg fractured—”

  “He only told me twisted an ankle. Claimed it was nothing to worry about,” Cait said, shivering again as her body temperature dropped.

  “Aye, well. We knew he’d broken it—he admitted that much. But he locked himself in the cottage and sent everyone packing when they tried to help. This morning was the first we’d heard about the cancer, and I only know because he had no choice but to confess to Brice once he knew you were coming home.”

  “No choice? I don’t understand,” Cait said.

  “Brice had thought he could have the work done long ago, but he’s had a project he’s been working on that he needs to finish by Christmas, and he didn’t think the Tea Room was much of a rush. I suppose he hoped Donald would come to his senses, too, anyway. Then with you on your way back, your father rang and begged Brice to make it look like the place wasn’t closed. Brice refused, and to get him to agree, Donald final
ly told him the truth. And before you ask, Brice had already promised to stay out of any business between you and your father before he found out Donald hadn’t been telling you the truth. Until this morning, I haven’t seen him as furious over anything since the day you left the glen.”

  “But why didn’t anyone think to call me when Dad broke his leg? I would have come home.”

  “We thought you knew. He said you did. Said you were busy with your job and he didn’t want you having to put that aside to come back and nurse him. And he’s been full of himself as a young bull about how well you’re doing at the newspaper—he shows everyone every article that’s got your name on it. As if we haven’t all been keeping up ourselves. He’s proud of you, you know.”

  Cait shrugged that off. If he was, he’d never said as much to her. All she could think of were the lies that had piled up through the months. The way he’d kept her in London deliberately. Kept her away from him. She couldn’t help thinking that he wouldn’t have done that to her brother. He’d have told Robbie what was wrong.

  Robbie would have known.

  She felt dizzy with the thousands of questions swirling around her brain. “What about treatment for the cancer? What have the doctors said?”

  Elspeth rose as the kettle began to whistle, but paused briefly to squeeze Cait’s shoulder in reassurance. “From what he told Brice this morning, your father doesn’t see the point of chemo and radiation when they’d only prolong the end a little while. I’m sorry, love. You know how stubborn the man can be. You might phone the doctor yourself and see if he’ll talk to you. That’d be my advice. That and a cuppa with a good dose of sugar for the shock of it. I can’t help you with the first, but I’ll have the tea for you in just a tick.”

  Needles of ice laced Cait’s blood, and her hands and feet felt numb.

  Elspeth went and switched the kettle off, then shifted to the refrigerator to get a pastry box and set it on the table. With her usual efficiency, she had the box open and an intricately braided miniature apple shortbread tart served up on a plate before Cait could even protest. “Here, eat this. You need some sugar. If you get any more pale, we’ll lose you in the snow outside.”