The Skylark's Secret

by Valpy, Fiona

  Carefully, so as not to disturb Daisy, I untangle myself from the blankets and pull on the dressing gown that hangs on the back of the bedroom door. I fling open the front door, ready to confront the inconsiderate person who’s making such a din at this unholy hour of the morning.

  The words die on my lips, though, at the sight of the man who stands there, outlined against the steel-grey waters of the loch, the wind ruffling his hair.

  Taken aback, I run a hand over my own dishevelled curls and pull the dressing gown cord a little tighter about my waist.

  ‘Can I help you?’ My voice is icy, despite the warmth of his smile.

  ‘Hello, Lexie. I’m Davy Laverock.’ He pauses for a moment, as if the name should mean something to me. There’s an awkward silence while I rack my brains. Nope. Nothing. Other than ‘laverock’ being the Scots word that Mum used to use for the skylarks nesting in the hills above the loch. I stare at him blankly.

  He looks away, his smile faltering slightly, then holds out a carrier bag. ‘Bridie said to bring you these.’

  I take the bag from him and glance inside. It’s heavy with a haul of squatties, the langoustine-like squat lobsters that fishermen often catch in their creels. My mouth waters at the sight of the tangle of coral carapaces: there’s no commercial demand for them but they are absolutely delicious boiled in a pan of water drawn from the loch and served with a dish of mayonnaise or garlic butter. The hard work involved in extracting the meat from their armoured tails is well worth a broken fingernail or two.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘And thanks to Bridie, too.’

  ‘She said you’d just arrived back. Thought you could use them.’

  The gossip-wires are already humming, then.

  We stand there awkwardly, and I scan his face again, looking for any clues that will help me place him. He has the open, buoyant expression of a man completely at ease with himself, slate-blue eyes set in a weather-beaten complexion. He clearly belongs to the area and thinks that I will know who he is, in the taken-for-granted way that everyone here knows where they – and everybody else – fit in.

  ‘Sorry about your mum,’ he says at last. ‘Is everything okay in the house? I know Bridie’s been in to check a couple of times. But if you need a hand with anything, just let me know.’ He glances past me as he says this. His expression flickers and I sense that his attention has been caught by something behind me. Looking round, I realise it’s the sight of the gin bottle standing next to a half-empty glass. I know what he must be thinking. And at this time in the morning, too. Then I catch sight of the kitchen clock and see it’s later than I thought – nearly ten. But even so . . .

  I look back at him defiantly. ‘Yeah, that’s not what it looks like. It’s about as far as I got with supper last night.’

  He shrugs. ‘I’m not judging.’

  Aye, right. I give it half an hour, tops, before that titbit is fed back to Bridie.

  ‘Anyway, enjoy the squatties. If you’d like more ever, I’m out most days with the creels. Leave me a message on the jetty.’

  I relent a little, realising how ungracious I’ve been. ‘Thanks, really. I’ll enjoy these.’

  ‘No bother. Well then, be seeing you around.’

  I watch as he strides back to a Land Rover parked at the side of the road, whistling a snatch of a tune as he goes. He has the broad shoulders and loping gait that are typical of a fisherman. I recognise the song as it’s the one Mum used to sing so often. He gets in and starts the engine, glancing briefly back towards the cottage and raising a hand in salute as he pulls away.

  I tip the flat remnants of last night’s drink into the sink and stow the gin bottle away in a cupboard. Then I stash the bag of squat lobsters into the fridge, and find that I’m humming a verse of the song he was whistling, which is now running on a loop in my head. I even try a few words of the chorus: ‘Will ye gang love . . .’ But I stop when my voice cracks with emotion.

  Something stirs in the depths of my memory. Maybe there was something familiar about those slate-blue eyes of his, but I can’t quite place him. I reach to grasp at dim thoughts, but they dart away, just beyond my reach, slippery as fish.

  I fill the kettle from the tap and set it on the stove to boil. As I take the old brown teapot down from its place on the shelf, a breaker of grief crashes over me, knocking the breath from my chest. Mum’s voice seems to fill the kitchen around me, singing that same song, and I hug the pot to my heart.

  ‘Oh dig my grave both lang and deep

  Put a bunch o’ roses at my head and feet

  And in the middle a turtle dove,

  Let the people ken that I died o’ love . . .’

  She always had a pot of tea on the go, forever bringing me a mug whether I wanted it or not. But the sight of that old teapot makes me realise that they were never just cups of tea she was giving me. They were some of the punctuation marks that helped make sense of our story together – those little pauses and connections that I took for granted. Those cups of tea were just one of the ways she let me know she loved me, several times a day.

  With the words of her song still echoing in my head, I go through to the sitting room and take the photo of my dad off the mantelpiece. His dark eyes are unfathomable, hidden in shadow in the picture, which is the only one I have of him. His name was Alec Mackenzie-Grant, he was in the navy, and he died before I was born. But I know little else about him. When I’d pester Mum to tell me stories of him she always spoke of his kindness, of how he’d loved her and how he would have loved me had he known me. But when I pushed her to tell me more, when I asked her about his parents – my grandparents – and his life as the laird’s son up at the big house, she’d been evasive. She’d always change the subject, saying, ‘Did I tell you about the time Alec and your Uncle Ruaridh went out in the boat to catch mackerel and saw a basking shark?’ And although I’d heard the story a hundred times, I’d let her tell it again.

  It was only as I grew older that I realised how hard it must have been for her, contemplating the life she might have had as mistress of Ardtuath House and perhaps regretting the life she’d not been able to give me. And so I learned to stop asking those questions, which only made her look so sad. But I always wondered about my dad – who he really was and why Mum was reluctant to talk about his side of the family. Her stories were of the innocence of childhood, an innocence that the tides of war must have swept away. It’s understandable that there were things she wanted to protect me from, things she wanted to forget. But now I regret not asking her again. I regret not knowing their story. I regret that it’s a part of my own story that is now lost to me.

  I set his picture back in its place, next to the one of my mum. I don’t even have a photo of the pair of them together and that thought saddens me even more.

  The kettle whistles as the water comes to the boil, calling me back to the here and now, and I wipe a tear away on the sleeve of my dressing gown. Back in the kitchen I warm the pot, spoon in the leaves from the tin caddy on the counter and let them steep. A proper pot of tea, just the way my mum, Flora, always made it.

  And then I hear Daisy stirring and I hurry back to scoop her up from the bed and make her day begin with a smile.

  Flora, 1939

  Flora Gordon added peat to the range and set the kettle on the stovetop to boil. The waters of the loch were just beginning to turn pearly-grey in the light of the dawn. Her father would be home any minute, back from giving the animals their early feed, and he’d be needing his breakfast and a warming cup of tea.

  She heard his boots on the path, accompanied by the lighter patter of Braan’s paws. The black Labrador was always at his side, whether he was checking on the ponies in the field and the working dogs in their kennel behind the steading, or out on the hill keeping an eye on the game birds and deer for which, as keeper on the Ardtuath Estate, he was responsible.

  She hummed a tune softly under her breath and the kettle joined in, muttering and whistling to itself. She
set the pan of oatmeal that had been steeping all night on to the heat, adding a pinch of salt and giving it a good stir. Then she warmed the brown teapot and spooned in the leaves from the caddy, her movements quick and deft with the efficiency born of habit.

  Braan bounced through the kitchen door, tail wagging, looking for a pat from her before burying his snout in the tin bowl containing his own breakfast.

  ‘All right, Dad?’ she asked, expecting that the answer would be his usual silent nod as he took his seat at the head of the table and stretched out his feet in their thick woollen socks towards the warmth of the range.

  But this morning he went instead to stand at the window looking out across the loch. ‘Looks like we have visitors,’ he said, nodding towards the water.

  Drying her hands on the cloth that hung beside the stove, Flora joined him.

  In the silence of the early light, a line of ships slid into view. Their grey hulls moved slowly, but with a power that parted the waves with ease. The air around them appeared to vibrate, agitating the seabirds that wheeled above them. She counted five vessels. They seemed to have materialised like leviathans risen from the waters of the loch, awoken from their slumber by the declaration, just ten days ago, that Britain was now at war with Germany.

  Her father picked up the pair of binoculars from the windowsill and looked through the sights. Wordlessly, he passed them to Flora. The ships bristled with guns and antennae and as they drew closer she could hear the thrum of their engines.

  ‘That’ll be the Home Fleet then, I reckon,’ her father said.

  Flora shivered with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. ‘But what would they be doing here? The war is hundreds of miles away.’

  Her father looked at her shrewdly from beneath his shock of white hair. ‘It was hundreds of miles away, lass. But not any more.’

  ‘Might Ruaridh be on one of them, do you think?’ Flora’s heart leapt at the thought. Her brother had joined the Royal Navy two years before, and she sorely missed him. Like so many lads who’d grown up on that coast, he was as at home on the water as he was on the hills.

  ‘I doubt it. His last letter said he was in Portsmouth, assigned to destroyers. They’re smaller than those battleships out there. He could be deployed anywhere by now.’

  As they watched, the leading ship manoeuvred slowly to a halt and dropped anchor with a rattle of chains audible even at this distance. Flora handed the binoculars back to her father. ‘What do you think they’re doing here in Loch Ewe?’

  He shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough.’

  He turned away from the window, but not before she’d glimpsed the look in his eyes. Although his bearing was as upright as ever and his manner as calm as usual, she could tell the war filled him with dread. He was fearful for what it meant for his son, far away in England, and now the arrival of these warships in the peaceful waters of the loch below Keeper’s Cottage had brought that sense of dread right up to their front door. The presence of her tall, capable father who was so at ease in these hills – a man trusted by the laird to oversee the Ardtuath Estate and a figure so respected in the lochside community – had always made her feel safe. But that glimpse of fear in his eyes made her feel that a fault line had cracked open in the ground beneath her feet, disturbing the equilibrium of their lives.

  As if sensing her uneasiness, Braan pushed his nose into the palm of her hand, reassuring her. And then she turned away from the window and dished the porridge into the waiting bowls.

  The post office was so busy that the queue doubled back on itself in the crowded space of the little shop. It seemed that half of the village either had a letter to post that morning or a sudden need to buy an envelope and a stamp or two. Flora joined the line, but no one was in any great hurry to reach the counter to be served by Miss Cameron, the postmistress. Instead, there was a hum of conversation that revolved entirely around the arrival of the Home Fleet on their doorsteps.

  ‘That big ship in the middle is HMS Nelson and they have Mr Churchill on board.’ Mrs Carmichael was a fount of knowledge on most matters, not only restricted to those directly relating to her pivotal role as chairwoman of the local branch of the Scottish Women’s Rural Institute. With all three of her sons off to the war with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, it was generally acknowledged that she was entitled to hold forth on military matters, too. And now that her husband, Archibald Carmichael, had assumed the role of air-raid warden, her source of local information was second to none.

  ‘What is it they’re doing here in Loch Ewe?’ asked Bridie Macdonald, who had reached the front of the queue and was busy licking stamps. She handed her letters back to Miss Cameron for the postbag. ‘A quarter of pan drops, too, please.’

  The postmistress reached the tall jar of sweets down from the shelves behind her and weighed them out, tipping the mints from the scales into a white paper bag and twisting the corners to seal it. ‘There you go.’ She sorted the coins Bridie handed over into the till.

  ‘It’s top secret, Archie says,’ Mrs Carmichael replied.

  ‘They’re probably scouting out places to base the Fleet, ready to defend us if there’s an invasion of U-boats from the north.’

  ‘Wheesht, Bridie, you know what they say . . . careless talk costs lives.’

  Bridie was about to point out indignantly that Mrs Carmichael had just announced to any German agents who happened to be waiting in the queue for stamps and sweets that the First Lord of the Admiralty himself was on one of the ships out there on the loch, but she thought better of it and popped a mint into her mouth instead. Mrs Carmichael was, in build and in temperament, not unlike one of those battleships and Bridie was neither brave enough nor foolish enough to give her any cheek.

  ‘Instead of standing about gossiping, you can come along to the hall this afternoon and lend a hand. The Rural is knitting scarves for our boys at the front and we need all the help we can get. Can I count you in? You too, Flora?’

  It was impossible to say no to Moira Carmichael. Both girls nodded obediently. ‘Very good. Three o’clock sharp. Bring your own needles. Wool will be provided.’ She picked up her basket as the door pinged. ‘Ah, Mairi, I hope we can count you in as well?’

  Flora turned to greet her best friend with a smile.

  Mairi Macleod shrugged cheerfully. ‘Count me in for what?’

  ‘We’re knitting scarves for soldiers,’ Bridie chipped in, the pan drop in her mouth clicking against her teeth. ‘Three o’clock sharp, in the hall.’

  ‘I’ll expect all three of you girls to be there then,’ said Mrs Carmichael, sweeping regally out of the door.

  The queue shuffled forward, filling the not inconsiderable gap.

  ‘Any word from Ruaridh?’ Mairi asked.

  Flora shook her head. ‘Not since last week.’ She held up the envelope she was carrying. ‘I’m just sending him a letter now.’

  Glancing out of the window toward the hulks moored in the bay, Mairi said, ‘I wonder how long they’re going to stay?’

  One of them had a plume of dark smoke rising from its funnel and from another, small launches were being lowered into the leaden water. There were signs of activity on the decks of the others as well, figures hurrying purposefully to and fro.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Flora replied. ‘Maybe they’re just passing through on their way to somewhere else.’ But Bridie’s words still rang in her ears. Could they be scouting for places to harbour ships? Was this something more permanent? Only time – and perhaps Mrs Carmichael – would tell.

  Flora and Mairi sat by the range, chatting companionably as their knitting needles flew. The balls of grey wool that had been handed out at the meeting of the Rural two days before were rapidly being transformed into scarves, made to Mrs Carmichael’s exact specifications.

  ‘This grey is a bit drab,’ sighed Flora, setting her knitting aside to put the kettle on.

  ‘I know,’ agreed Mairi. ‘But I supp
ose it’s regulation issue.’

  ‘Ach, surely a little bit of colour can’t hurt. Look, I have this remnant of red. I’m going to add a wee stripe of colour, just at one end. That way, whichever soldier ends up wearing it will know we wanted to cheer him up.’

  Mairi laughed and dug into her workbasket, holding up a skein of daffodil-yellow wool. ‘Good idea. Even just a row or two will make it a bit more personal.’

  From the loch, the blast of a ship’s siren caused a flurry of sandpipers to rise from the shore, taking fright. Over the past couple of days, more ships had arrived, including one that was said to be laying anti-submarine nets across the mouth of Loch Ewe.

  ‘What’s going on now?’ Mairi raised her head from her work, craning her neck to see out of the kitchen window.

  ‘More ships coming in,’ said Flora, absent-mindedly tucking a strand of her russet-gold hair back into the braid that hung down her back. ‘Maybe Bridie’s guess was right the other day. There do seem to be an awful lot of them now.’ The stretch of water between the shore and the island teemed with vessels of all sizes, from the great battleships with their vertical prows and towering turrets to smaller and faster destroyers and cruisers. The launches that buzzed back and forth between the gathering fleet appeared tiny alongside the imposing grey hulks.

  Slower and more cumbersome than the launches, two fat tugs chugged back and forth in the distance, out towards the mouth of the loch. They were rumoured by Bridie, who’d heard it from Mrs Carmichael, to be laying a boom that stretched from the end of the island across to the rocks on each of the opposite shores in order to protect the harbour, keeping out any U-boats that might manage to slip past the nets fixed across the mouth of the loch.

  Flora set the tea to steep and picked up her knitting again, splicing in a strand of the red wool and deftly working another row of neat stitches. When the front door opened she barely glanced up, expecting Braan to come bouncing in ahead of her father, the pair of them just down from the hill. But the next moment she had jumped to her feet, knitting thrown aside, and flung her arms around the young man in his blue and white naval uniform who stood in the kitchen doorway.