by Flora Kidd
‘What did he say?’
‘Told me very politely to mind my own business. You know he can be polite and you are left wishing that you hadn’t opened your mouth.’
‘I know,’ replied Nancy with a faint smile.
‘That would be an ideal job for you,’ announced Mary brightly, pleased with her sudden idea. ‘If you looked after Neil it would mean you could stay here with your brother. I’ll mention it to Logan, if you like.’
‘Oh, no,’ gasped Nancy. ‘You mustn’t. I couldn’t. Please don’t, Mrs. Maclaine. I wouldn’t like the position.’
To her horror she began to wonder if she had protested too much, because Mary tilted her head to one side and considered her with shrewd blue eyes.
‘I wonder why?’ she murmured thoughtfully. ‘Well, seeing that you are dead set against me making the suggestion I won’t although I can’t help thinking that it would work out rather well for all concerned.’
To Nancy’s relief she stood up and said she must be going and after wishing her good luck for the future she left.
Linda and Don took the news that she wasn’t going to marry Rod after all with a calmness which surprised her.
‘Of all the good turns Rod has done for you that’s the best,’ said Don. ‘Now remember what I said the other day, Nan. There’s no rush for you to leave here. Take your time to decide what you want to do.’
Nancy smiled at him gratefully.
‘It’s good of you, Don, but I think we’ll return to Dulthorpe just the same. You can’t afford to keep the two of us on the croft and there’s no work that I could do here. All our savings are used up and Lin wants to take some “O” levels now and go to college, so I think it would be better if we go on Friday. Aunt Win will have us, I know, and I can get my job back.’
He looked rather dubious, but did not argue and went out to see Ian about harvesting the oats.
‘You’re really glad you aren’t going to marry Rod, aren’t you?’ commented Linda as they washed up the supper dishes together.
‘I must admit to having had doubts about the whole business,’ answered Nancy.
‘You could marry Logan now,’ suggested the irrepressible Linda.
‘Linda! I’ve never known anyone like you for jumping to conclusions. I thought you’d reserved him for yourself,’ retorted Nancy.
‘I never considered marriage with him,’ replied Linda seriously, then added loftily, ‘One should never marry one’s hero.’
‘Why not?’ asked Nancy, trying to stifle her laughter at her sister’s superior attitude.
‘Think how disappointing it would be to discover that he had feet of clay and wasn’t a hero after all.’
‘I suppose you have a point there. But why should I marry him?’
Linda shrugged her shoulders carelessly and said airily,
‘It was just a thought which passed through my mind. I saw him kiss you in the garden the other night.’
‘You couldn’t have seen. It was too dark,’ countered Nancy, her face flaming suddenly.
Linda laughed gleefully and did a little jig on the spot.
‘I was right, I was right!’ she chanted. ‘I couldn’t see, but I noticed that you stopped talking and that there was a long silence. Was it nice?’
‘Linda!’ threatened Nancy, snatching the first weapon to hand which happened to be Grandfather Allan’s knitted tea-cosy. ‘You should know better. People who kiss don’t necessarily marry. Besides, Logan isn’t the marrying sort. He’s said so often enough.’
‘Isn’t he?’ queried Linda, and gave some thought to the subject as she finished drying a plate. ‘He might be if he found the right person, if someone kind and gentle who would help him when he had problems came along. I guess you aren’t that type, though, Nan. You’re too bossy. All right, I’ll stop,’ she added laughingly. ‘You shouldn’t blush, Nancy. It doesn’t go with your hair.’
Laughing, she raced out through the door and closed it just as the tea-cosy which Nancy had hurled at her sailed through the air.
Thursday brought a change in the weather, but no Logan. If Mary Maclaine had relayed to him the news of Nancy’s broken engagement it had made no difference to him. Which meant that he had not been particularly serious in his feelings for her, thought Nancy, as she snapped the locks on one of her suitcases.
Rain beat on the windows and the wind howled in the chimneys all night and when Friday dawned the crops of oats in the fields were flattened and sodden. The wind-tossed stretches of grey water looked desolate. ‘As desolate as I feel,’ thought Nancy as she wandered round the garden and mourned over the battered plants and scattered leaves, which had had no time to change colour before being hurled from the trees.
Everything was ready for departure. The baggage was standing by the porch door. Ian would come for them at ten o’clock. Meanwhile Linda was saying goodbye to the younger Macraes after both she and Nancy had been over to see Miss Macrae.
It was surprising how docile Linda had been about leaving Lanmore, mused Nancy, as she kept nostalgic thoughts at bay by thinking about her sister, and how much she had changed and developed both mentally and physically during the past few months. No longer was she given to emotional outbursts when her will was crossed, no longer did she go in for fantastic daydreams. Instead she was full of plans for the future and was actually looking forward to the beginning of the school term so that she could start her course of study for the examination which would take her to college.
Don had changed also for the better. As his remarks to her about her own future had revealed he had grown up and with the measure of self-reliance which he had achieved while tilling his own land and caring for his own animals he had become more observant and more considerate of others.
Nancy supposed she had changed too, though whether for the better or not she could not say. Certainly she had slowed down considerably and had ceased to push people so much. She realised, now, how much she had used to nag at Linda, how much she had ‘mothered’ Don and how much she had been afraid of changing the familiar security offered by her engagement to Rod for the uncertainty of an association with Logan.
Now she had lost both. She had only herself to blame.
The familiar sound of a sports car’s powerful engine froze her in her tracks. Mesmerised, she watched the low green car race over the bridge, swerve round the bend and shudder to a stop in front of the gate. Still dazed, she watched Logan open the gate and stride towards her, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched. The expression on his face reminded her of their first meeting at the Roman fort on Hadrian’s Wall. Sour, he had called his mood then and sour he looked now. That he had been suffering from sleeplessness she could tell by the tell-tale dark lines under his eyes.
‘Is Neil here?’ he asked.
‘No, of course not. I haven’t seen him since Mrs. Harris came for him last week.’
He was looking past her at the cases by the porch door and he was frowning.
‘I thought perhaps he had come over to say goodbye to you and Linda. He was talking about it yesterday, saying he wanted to come.’
‘And you wouldn’t bring him,’ she accused in a low hurt voice.
He rubbed a hand over his forehead in a weary gesture and muttered, ‘I couldn’t.’
Once again he looked lonely and a little desperate as he had that day in Skye and once again the impulse to help him sprang up in Nancy, overcoming pride and vanquishing pain.
‘Do you think he’s lost again?’ she asked.
‘I’m afraid so. He must have set out quite early. Mrs. MacFadyen didn’t miss him until she went up to his room at eight-thirty to see if he was ready for breakfast. Even then she wasn’t alarmed, thinking that he must be somewhere in the house. But I looked for him and he wasn’t.’
‘Oh, how could you be so careless as to lose him again?’ blurted Nancy. ‘If you had done as he asked he would never have tried to come and see me on his own. It would have been quite easy for you to have sent him
with Mr. Harris. You didn’t have to bring him yourself.’
His eyebrows lifted in a supercilious expression and when he spoke he was urbanely polite.
‘You are right,’ he agreed. ‘Why didn’t I think of that for myself? On the other hand it would have been quite in order and possibly kinder for you to have come to the Lodge to say goodbye to him. You needn’t have been afraid you’d have seen me. I don’t spend all day with Neil, and yesterday I wasn’t at home.’
As Mary Maclaine observed, when Logan spoke to you in that polite and yet scathing way you wished you had not opened your mouth. Incapable of answering, Nancy stared at him. What he said was true. She had been afraid to go to the Lodge to say goodbye to Neil in case she had met Logan and that he had thought she was pushing in where she was not wanted by him.
He turned away and said,
‘I’d better be looking for him, since he’s not here.’
In spite of the set-down he had just given her she followed impulsively.
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘I don’t need any help, thank you.’
Shades of that wet afternoon in Skye! He had often criticised her Allan pride, but his was no better. It was a barricade he threw up as a shield when he most needed help.
‘Yes, you do,’ she asserted. ‘Don’t try to put me off with your supercilious manner, you have no idea where to look for him. You haven’t even started to think about what you’re going, to do.’
Her impetuous words had results. Instead of continuing on his way he turned and looked at her properly. Their eyes met and time was of no account. His were no longer blank and impersonal.
‘You’ll miss the train,’ he murmured, and she wondered how he knew she was on her way to catch a train. ‘Then your intended will be anxious when you don’t arrive at Dulthorpe at the right time.’
‘He won’t be there to meet me,’ she replied. ‘And he isn’t my intended any more. He’s broken off the engagement. Didn’t Mary tell you?’
He shook his head slowly from side to side negatively like a man who could not believe what he had heard. He moved a step towards her and her pulses leapt in response to the expression in his eyes. Then, apparently changing his mind, he looked away and the strange breathless moment ended.
‘Where shall we start looking?’ he asked, and there was only the slightest suspicion of a tremor in his voice.
‘I think he would try to come through the woods and over the fields because he has been that way twice before. But I can’t understand how he could get lost. Unless he’s had...’ She found she could not say the word accident to him any more because she was too sensitive to the effect it had on him.
‘Unless he’s had an accident,’ he finished for her grimly, and for the first time she noticed the lines of strain and anxiety around his mouth. She knew then that she had done right to offer him help and to force him to accept it. Logan needed her, not because he was helpless and incompetent, far from it, but because she was the person who could break through the barriers which he had erected around himself.
‘We’ll try the fields first, then,’ he said.
They crossed the road and climbed the dyke into the tussocky field in which she had met Neil when the bees had swarmed. The ground oozed water and the bum was swollen and noisy. They crossed over the wooden bridge and walked up the hillock to the little copse of trees which crowned it. Although it wasn’t raining any more water still dripped from the branches and Nancy felt the raw damp air nipping at her cheeks and striking through her raincoat. She looked down at her shoes. They were caked with mud and she wished she had had the sense to go back to the porch for a pair of rubber boots before setting out. Logan, she noticed, like the knowledgeable Highlander that he was, had come prepared and was wearing his boots.
‘He could be anywhere,’ he sighed as he looked down from the hillock across the field to the old broch, the grey ruin of a mortarless circular building close to the road opposite Miss Macrae’s house. Turning slowly, they searched the fields with their eyes, following the line of trees which marked the edge of the woods surrounding the Lodge.
‘We can’t do it alone, Nancy,’ announced Logan decisively. ‘It would take us all day, and even then we could miss him. I’ll have to round up some of the crofters to help. I’ll go back to the cottage and use your phone to contact Harris.’
Without waiting for a reply he set off immediately down the hill. Nancy stayed where she was and thought of Neil, trying to put herself in his place. She could imagine his determination to see her before she left Lanmore and she was touched by his thought for her. He would set off through the woods following the path which he knew. She hoped he had remembered to wear his boots and suitable clothing, but she feared that he hadn’t. Determined little boys setting off in a hurry on an adventure seldom thought about clothing.
She walked down the hill and across the field in the direction of the broch. She had always intended to look at it closely, but somehow had never done so. She looked at her watch. It was five minutes to ten. There would be time for a quick look before she had to return to the cottage to meet Ian Macrae. Logan would not need her any more if he was going to get the help of the crofters. For a moment, in the garden, she had thought that he had been about to declare his need of her. When she had told him that Rod had broken off the engagement his eyes had seemed to blaze with joy. But perhaps she had imagined it.
Nearing the broch, she looked up at the mossy stones, each one set carefully upon another, fitting snugly together without mortar. She knew now that it had been built by an ancient race possibly as a defence against an enemy. She knew also that such buildings were found only in the northern part of the Highlands.
This particular broch had been well preserved and there was a plaque set into the wall explaining what it was and when it had been built. Nancy walked through the shored-up entrance into the circle of wet green grass which grew inside.
‘Hello, Nancy. Look where I am!’
The childish voice floating down from somewhere on high startled her. She looked upwards to the narrow galleries which were built into the thickness of the sloping circular walls. The galleries were not very high, offering evidence that the people who had lived in them had been small. From one of them a blond head appeared.
Quelling her annoyance that the child seemed quite oblivious of the anxiety he had caused, she said calmly, ‘Hello, Neil. How did you get up there?’
‘There are steps in the wall. I climbed up them.’ He sounded triumphant.
‘I think you’d better come down now. Your uncle is looking for you.’
‘Oh. Is he cross?’
‘No, not cross. Just very worried.’
She found the rough staircase in the wall. A plaque on the wall spelled out the word Danger. She waited for Neil to come down. He came slowly and cautiously, never slipping on the wet surface of the steps. When he stood beside her he looked Up, his grey eyes at their widest and most appealing, and again Nancy had to squash an urge to spank him. She was beginning to realise that Neil had a great future before him as an actor.
‘Why did you run away again?’ she asked.
‘I didn’t run away. I wanted to see you. Uncle Logan wouldn’t bring me. He said he and I weren’t wanted over here, so I came by myself. He’s been cross for days.’
‘But why didn’t you come straight to the cottage? Why did you hide in the broch?’
His eyes slid away from hers.
‘I wanted to see what it was like,’ he muttered sulkily.
‘Well, that was very unkind of you. Your uncle thinks you’ve had an accident on the way here. We’ll go and find him now. He’s at the cottage phoning Mrs. Harris to organise a search party for you.’
She took the boy firmly by the hand and began to lead him out of the broch.
‘What’s a search party?’ asked the ever-inquisitive Neil.
‘A lot of people looking for someone who is lost.’
‘Are you cross
too, Nancy?’
‘Yes, I think I am.’
‘I’m sorry I’ve made you cross,’ he said in his most charming way. ‘I wanted Uncle Logan to come and see if I was at your cottage. I’m glad I hid in the castle.’
‘It isn’t a castle, it’s a broch,’ corrected Nancy absently, her thoughts busy with his pleasure at the way everything had turned out. It sounded as if he had planned it all deliberately for some reason. He had dressed properly after all, she noticed, in Wellington boots and raincoat, so it had not been a sudden whim which had brought him all the way from the Lodge.
‘Coooeeee!’
The call was from Linda, who was standing by the dyke waving. Nancy looked at her watch. It was ten-fifteen. If they were to catch the train Ian would have to drive very fast.
As she helped Neil over the dyke, Linda said excitedly, ‘Where was he? Logan has just finished talking to Mr. Harris. Ian’s getting impatient.’
They crossed the road and met both Logan and Ian at the garden gate. At the sight of his uncle’s frown Neil half-hid behind Nancy.
‘Where have you been?’ rapped Logan. The boy didn’t answer, so Nancy replied for him.
‘He was in the broch. He wanted to look at it.’
Exasperation twisted Logan’s mouth and made him swear softly,
‘I’ll have to phone Harris again and stop the search.’
As he swung round to walk back to the cottage Ian said in his lilting voice,
‘If we are to reach Mallaig before the train leaves I shall have to be breakin’ the speed record for the distance, Nancy. I’m doubtin’ ye’ll catch the train to-day. Howeffer, if ye would be gettin’ into the car I’ll be doin’ my best for ye.’
‘No!’ The word seemed to explode out of Logan as he turned back. ‘Nancy won’t be leaving. Neither will Linda,’ he added rather belatedly.
They all stared at him. He stared back arrogantly. Ian’s tufted eyebrows almost disappeared into his thick curly hair as he registered surprise.