“Anyway, Alan finally made it to the middle, but by then it was almost dawn. He’d hoped to rest a bit before he killed himself—although I find it hard to imagine why. But because the sky was growing lighter and the sun was about to appear, he realized he was going to have to make a quick job of it, tired or not. So he stood up, pinched his nostrils together—although I find that hard to imagine, too—and jumped overboard.”
“I thought this story was about the loch monster,” Gow said.
“Ah, it is. You see, just at the moment that Alan jumped, the creature rose from the depths of the loch, and Alan landed on her back.”
Gow groaned. So did Andrew, although less obtrusively.
Fiona continued. “So there he was, riding the back of a terrible water creature like a medieval rodeo cowboy. Now, drowning had appealed to poor Alan. He’d imagined his own bloated body washing up on the shore to the weeping and wailing of the village women. He’d even thought that perhaps he’d look better bloated a bit, and that maybe Verity might feel a little remorse for the way that she’d treated him. But he couldn’t imagine that even he would look any better if he was chewed into a million teensy pieces. In fact, he doubted that anyone would take the time to put his remains back together again and identify him. So Alan did the only thing he knew to do. He screamed.”
“And well he should have,” Violet said with a sniff.
“MacDougall’s darling is a very gentle creature. She wouldn’t hurt anyone, of course. She feeds on the reeds and rushes at the loch bottom, and even the fish are her friends. But Alan, being the first MacDougall to see her, didn’t know this. The smart MacDougalls—”
“Came much later,” the three guests chorused in unison.
“Exactly. So meanwhile, poor Alan screamed out his puny lungs. The creature, frightened herself now, gave a mighty buck. Alan soared through the air and landed smack dab in the middle of the boat. At first, of course, he was dazed. He couldn’t believe he’d been so lucky. Then the creature rose from the water and put her face right up against his….”
“And?” Gow prompted.
“And Alan realized that the creature was far more lovely, far kinder and more charming than Verity had ever been. Right that minute, Alan fell madly in love with her. And although she descended into the water and he never saw her again, he adored her until the day he died.”
“The MacDougalls with good taste came much later?” Gow asked.
“Oh no, Alan was the first MacDougall with good taste. And all the others who’ve come after Alan have loved her, too. Unreservedly.”
“Is any of this true, Andrew?” Gow asked.
Andrew looked straight at Fiona. “Every bit,” he said. “Although some of us have loved a woman just as well.” His voice emerged as a whisper, but he knew she had heard him. Her expression softened like honeycomb in the sun.
* * *
“That truly was a ludicrous saga,” David told Fiona. “I’ve never heard such a succession of outrageous stories. Tall tales, isn’t that what you Americans call them?”
Fiona stretched lazily in the warmth of the afternoon sun. MacDougall’s Darling was cruising back toward shore after an extended tour. Muriel and Violet were at the helm getting a boating lesson from Andrew, and David had just come back to join her. “Exactly what did you expect?”
“Nothing quite so colorful. You’re quite good at this. I’d almost think you’d had practice.”
Fiona heard more than casual praise in his voice. “Oh?”
“In fact, I’d say you are very nearly a professional.”
“I’m honored.”
“You’re famous.”
She turned in her chair so that she could see his face. “Famous?”
“I have a niece. I buy her storybooks.”
“Oh, I see.”
“I thought your name was familiar when we were introduced. I think I said as much.”
“Writers can generally escape into obscurity, particularly writers of children’s books.”
“And that’s what you wanted to do?”
Fiona suspected that was now an impossibility. “That’s what I hoped to do.”
“And well you might have, if you hadn’t made up those absurd stories today. Tell me, is Loch Ceo the Serenity Lake in your books? And is Stardust its creature?”
“You not only buy my books, you read them?”
“They are lovely stories. Brilliant. I feel I know them by heart. They’re the only books my niece will let me read her.”
“She’s a very discriminating young lady.”
“Is Loch Ceo Serenity Lake?”
Fiona considered what to tell him. David was a reporter, and she wasn’t foolish enough to believe that this would not be mentioned in his next missive from Druidheachd. “I was born here, and I heard stories about the creature as a little girl. But I left Scotland when I was only three.”
“Then it’s just a coincidence?”
She couldn’t deny the place of those stories in her life. “No. I remembered them, even though I was very young. I had a lot of time to think and imagine as a child. My fantasies were more palatable than reality.” She saw the question in his eyes. “I was badly burned as a little girl, and I was in and out of hospitals for much of my childhood. It was my way of escaping.”
He didn’t express pity. He certainly didn’t seem revolted. He just nodded. “It’s odd, isn’t it, how one’s worst misfortune can become a remarkable gift to the world?”
“What a lovely way to put it.”
“So you remembered the stories you’d heard, and you changed and embroidered them and they became the Stardust books.”
“David, I came back to Scotland because I wanted to avoid publicity.”
“I’m afraid this is a clich;aae. But there is no corner of the world so remote that we can run away from who we are.”
“You’re going to write about this, aren’t you?”
“Not if you forbid me.”
“You would agree not to?”
“Yes, I think I might. But I hope I won’t have to.”
Fiona realized that this moment had become a crossroads. She could continue to hide, as she had hidden all her life. Or she could come forward now and tell the world a little about herself. Surely there were other people like her, people who had been scarred by fire or by other tragedies, who would draw courage from her story. A picture of tiny Sara flashed through her mind, Sara, who, as she grew, would have to cope with the same sorrows that Fiona had. There was so little she could do for Sara or the other children on the burn ward. If someday Sara and others like her could draw courage from her experiences…
“I won’t ask you not to,” she said. “You’ll be fair and kind. I trust you, David.”
“Never, ever think that I can be trusted, Fiona.” He leaned forward and kissed her. He was smiling when he withdrew. “I believe that at this moment your Andrew would like to throw me to his darling. The MacDougalls who aren’t possessive of their women have yet to be created, I’m afraid.”
He stood and strolled to the side.
Fiona glanced toward Andrew, but he turned away. Whatever was in his eyes was lost to her.
At last they docked, and she stood beside Andrew as he gravely shook hands with their passengers. “We’ll talk again,” David said, as he took her hand. “We’ll have to go over details.”
“You’ll be around for a while, then?”
“For a bit. Circulation at the paper has increased noticeably since my stories of the creature have been running. I’d be hard-pressed to leave now.”
“Before you saw my darling, did it occur to you that circulation might increase?” Andrew croaked.
“It certainly did,” David said. “Surprising how things work out, isn’t it?” He stepped on to the pier and held out his hand to Violet, then Muriel. With a wave they were gone.
“Well, it went well, don’t you think?” Fiona asked Andrew.
“You certainly seemed to enjo
y yourself.”
“Wasn’t I supposed to?”
He ignored her and started back to the helm. She followed at his heels. “Andrew, David knows about my books. He figured it out.”
He shrugged.
“He’s going to write about me. I guess I can’t hide forever.”
“Why should you?”
She suspected that the gruffness of his voice wasn’t due to laryngitis alone. “Why are you angry at me?”
“I’m no’ angry.”
“You sound angry. And I don’t think I’ve done anything.”
“I’m no’ angry.”
She watched him polish the controls with a soft rag and tidy the immaculate helm. She wondered if his house was the same and guessed it wouldn’t be. She suspected that the boat was Andrew’s real home. “I told David how I remembered stories about your darling when I went to America.”
He grunted, and she went on. “It’s funny, isn’t it? A seed is planted, then it grows in the strangest ways. I remembered stories about the loch. Some of them were probably yours. But some of them were my father’s. Now people will read and remember my stories. I wonder what my father thought about that? I wonder if he even knew about the Stardust books before he died?”
Andrew looked up. “He never said?”
“No.”
“He was no’ an easy man.”
“So I’ve been told. I wouldn’t know, myself.”
He looked puzzled.
She wished she hadn’t started this. She didn’t know how the conversation had led to this point so quickly. “Look, you shouldn’t be talking. I’m sorry. I should go and leave you alone.”
He took her arm as she turned to go. “Donald Sinclair was a hard man, but he loved you,” he rasped. “Do you no’ believe it?”
“Loved me?” She stared at him. “Oh, I think not, Andrew. He never called me or wrote me, not once after the accident. And he never came to America to see me.”
“You never came here, either. You refused to come.”
“Do you think that was the way I wanted it?” She shook her head. His hand fell to his side, and she turned to leave again.
“Was it no’?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then why did you stay away?”
“It doesn’t matter now.”
“It does.”
She realized he wasn’t going to drop this. “I wrote my father when I was ten. I asked him if I could come with Duncan to Druidheachd that summer. I didn’t tell my mother. I was afraid she would forbid me to come if I did. I thought she was the one who was keeping my father away.”
She stared out at the loch and didn’t face him. Her father’s rejection was so old that she hadn’t expected it to hurt anymore. Now she found it still did. “He never answered my letter, and Duncan went off to Scotland without me. My mother found me crying one day, and she finally persuaded me to tell her what I’d done. And then she told me why my father never wrote or called, and why he refused to see me.”
She turned back to him. “He couldn’t stand the sight of me, Andrew. Oh, Mother didn’t put it quite that way. She tried to protect me by telling me that it was just the way he was, that he had always expected everything and everyone to be perfect, and that it wasn’t my fault that I wasn’t perfect anymore. But I knew what she really meant. I wasn’t just imperfect. I was ugly. Hideous. And my father couldn’t ever stand to look at me again.”
“Fiona…”
She managed a smile. “You know what? It was his loss.”
His eyes said everything his battered voice couldn’t.
She looked away, because compassion was the gateway to tears, and she didn’t want to cry. “I don’t know why I told you this.” But the moment she said the words she did know. She had told him because he deserved an explanation for why she was so frightened to let him see her scars. He deserved to know where her worst fears about herself had come from.
“I dinna believe it.”
“You don’t believe what I’ve told you?”
“I dinna believe your father stopped loving you.”
“There are twenty-two years of silence to prove it.”
“A dead man can no’ defend himself, Fiona.”
She touched his hand. Her gaze followed because she still couldn’t look him in the eye. “Yes, he’s dead, but you’re alive. Can a living man forgive a woman who’s afraid that he’ll find her as imperfect as her own father did?”
He wove his fingers through hers. “Aye, he can, if the woman someday stops hiding behind her fears.”
CHAPTER 14
Duncan and Iain were already waiting when Andrew arrived at the pub. After docking the boat he had napped well into the evening, and on waking, his voice, although not completely restored, was strong enough for conversation. He didn’t have to be forceful with his old friends. He merely needed to be heard.
Andrew greeted them and took his chair. Duncan signaled Brian, and a generous dram was placed in front of him. There was no need to shout over the rowdy good cheer of the crowd. As soon as he had joined his friends, the closest tables mysteriously emptied. As always, the men of midnight were given wide berth.
“You sound god-awful,” Duncan said. “Are you all right?”
“Nowt wrong that this will no’ cure.” Andrew held up what was now an empty glass.
“I’m hearing rumors about Gerston’s Cottages,” Iain said.
Andrew quickly filled them in while Brian came back and filled his glass again.
Duncan gave a long, low whistle. “So the lines are drawn for all to see.”
Andrew gestured to the patrons on the other side of the pub. “Carlton-Jones and Surrey have lost their foothold, but they may well gain another. There’s an air of discontent in the village and beyond. Some residents talk of selling to escape the tourists pouring in to look for my darling. Some talk of selling because the time is right—they think they’ll no’ have a chance to sell at this price again.”
“Do you remember Margaret Henley’s predictions when we were born?” Iain asked. Margaret Henley, long since passed on, had been the village seer, a woman gifted with extraordinary second sight.
“Aye. We were no’ to be separated. We were to grow up in each other’s shadows, to strengthen the bonds that began at our birth,” Andrew said.
Duncan finished the prediction. “Because a black cloud would descend over the village someday, and the three of us would have to stand together against it.”
Andrew sat forward. “Surely you dinna think this is what old Margaret meant?”
“Were you expecting something more spectacular? A war? Famine? Plague?” Iain asked. “Greed is far more insidious. If Carlton-Jones and Surrey or men like them move into Druidheachd, the village will exist no longer. There’ll be nothing left but a name and a fading history, and few who care about either.”
“I feel more equipped for full-scale war,” Andrew said. “Greed is invisible, an enemy without form or substance.”
“As difficult to pin down as a black cloud,” Iain said.
They fell silent. Andrew finished his second whisky, but he felt no better. He signaled for a third.
“I feel helpless,” Iain said. “I overplayed my hand with Martin and Nigel months ago, and now they’ve effectively neutralized me. Because of all I have, when I speak out against greed, I’m perceived as greedy myself.”
“And I’m the American interloper,” Duncan said. “More than a few people think I object to Druidheachd expanding its tourist base because more hotels will be built and I’ll have competition.”
“At least there are no fingers pointing at me,” Andrew said, holding up his glass for Brian to refill.
“Then perhaps you’ll have to be the one to finish the battle,” Iain said.
Andrew considered that. He had never thought of himself as the guardian of all that was good in Druidheachd or anywhere. He was simply Andrew MacDougall, everybody’s friend, the peasant in the odd play that h
ad cast Iain as the lord and Duncan as the clever merchant. “What can I do?”
“I think it’s time to make our fears public,” Iain said. “I think we have to call a meeting and bring all of this out in the open.”
“At the kirk,” Duncan said. “I can talk to the minister and ask for use of it.”
“And who’s to run this meeting?” Andrew asked.
Both men looked squarely at him. He shook his head, but their expressions didn’t change. “We’ll be there,” Iain said. “But we’ve come to the final act in this drama, Andrew, and I’m afraid you’re destined to be the star.”
“Surely you dinna believe that this is what we were born for? You’ve become as superstitious as the villagers who once believed that Mara was a ghost or a fairy.”
“Sometimes I’m not completely convinced that they were wrong.” Duncan didn’t smile. “There are things that happen here…”
“Aye,” Iain said. “That there are.”
Andrew stared at the two men who were closer to him than brothers. Their lives had been entwined since birth, yet he wondered if he had ever seen them this clearly before. He had been content all his days to let his friends be the things he was not. Iain was the undisputed leader. Born to privilege—as well as tragedy—he had easily mastered the world he had been bequeathed, ordering his personal life and the lives of those who were dependent on him with aristocratic compassion and precision.
Duncan had been the most aggressive of the three. He had charged into the world at the earliest opportunity and carved out his own personal kingdom with skill and intelligence. Even now, when his roles as husband and father were more important to him than financial success, he was still effectively setting the hotel on its financial feet and launching a new business on the side.
Andrew had always known exactly who he was. He was Terence MacDougall’s son, with an abundance of charm and good nature to see him through his life. Yet he realized now that even with all their own strengths, Iain and Duncan had always seen more in him than he had seen in himself.
Men of Midnight Complete Collection Page 70