As if he had read Andrew’s mind, Duncan spoke. “You might have fooled the rest of the world, but you never fooled us. We know exactly what you’re capable of, Andrew. Iain and I have done all we can. I stood up to Martin and Nigel when they tried to buy the hotel. Iain stood up to them when they wanted his land. Now it’s time for you to step forward. You have the confidence of the villagers in a way we never will.”
Andrew stared at his empty glass. Three whiskies and he wanted another. Did he want it because he hoped to silence the voice inside him whispering that his friends were wrong? Did he want it because he had always known that at heart he was no different from his father and that someday he would end up exactly like him? Or did he want yet another mind-deadening dram because deep inside he was afraid to take his rightful place beside Iain and Duncan, to be someone more than he had ever believed he could be?
Just like Fiona.
For the first time he truly understood Fiona’s fears. For the first time he realized how insidious his own had become.
“A week from Sunday, at seven, if we can get the kirk,” he said at last. “Post a notice in the lobby, Duncan, and one here. I’ll put up something at Cameron’s, and I’ll speak with the old men and women who have nowt better to do than gossip. That way we’ll be certain that everyone will know.”
He stood and looked down at his friends. “I suppose that it does no’ matter if this is what we were born for or just an obstacle that’s been put in our paths. We’ll see this through, and I’ll be thankful you’re standing beside me.” For a moment his voice seemed to fail him once more. It fell to a lower octave. “There are no finer friends anywhere in the universe,” he said gruffly.
He had always been the most sentimental of the three men. But Iain and Duncan rose to their feet as if they were one body and flung their arms around his shoulders in fierce, male hugs.
The lights in the pub flickered and died. For a long moment complete, astonished silence reigned.
Then Andrew began to laugh.
* * *
Fiona had been watching dark clouds roll in over the village all evening, so the power outage didn’t surprise her. Somewhere in the far distance, where the storm was raging, a line was probably down.
She sat at one of the windows in her suite and gazed over the green. The street lamps were dark, and not a glimmer could be seen from any building. She’d been given candles for such an event, but she preferred not to light them. She wasn’t afraid of the dark, but later, the smell of lingering smoke might trigger another nightmare.
When the knock sounded on her door, she felt her way across the room to answer it. She expected Mara, but it was Andrew who was standing there. Andrew, smelling of whisky, who was nothing more than a dark, imposing outline of a man. Before she could speak he put his hands on her shoulders. “You’re all right, Fiona?”
“Sure. Why shouldn’t I be?”
“I thought you might be frightened.”
“No. Darkness has never bothered me.”
“I nearly killed myself climbing the stairs.”
“Then I think you’d better come in and make yourself at home until the lights come back on. Climbing down the stairs might be even worse.” She stood aside to let him enter. When she had closed the door, she groped for his hand. “I’ll lead you across the room. Take it slow.”
Safely across the room they fell on her sofa together. “You sound a lot better,” she said. “Your powers of recovery are amazing.”
“I think no’.”
“Then you’re still feeling bad?”
He was silent. He had dropped her hand upon reaching the sofa, and it was too dark here to see him. Still, she experienced his presence in the oddest way, as if there were a space in her life that was filled now, when before it had been empty.
“I’m well, Fiona,” he said finally. “But I’m only just beginning to understand how little I’ve recovered.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither did I until tonight.”
She waited for him to go on, but the silence fell again. When he did speak, she thought he had changed the subject.
“Do you remember my father, Fiona?”
“Not at all.”
“Did you know he was enchanted with you? Whenever he encountered you in the village he treated you like a bonny dolly. For your third birthday he carved you a wee walking stick with a dragon head, and you used it to bash my legs whenever I refused to do what you wanted.”
She laughed. “Really, I don’t know why you still speak to me.”
“There was another side to my father.”
She turned so that she was facing in his direction. She could just make out his shape against the white wall. “Was there?”
“He was an alcoholic.”
She had never heard him use that word. “Yes, I know.”
“On my climb up the stairs, I remembered a night much like this one. When I was a lad we were often without power, most often because my da had no money to pay our bill. We were less often without food, although that happened from time to time. My mother had a large vegetable garden, and when my da was sober he fished. At the end of winter, when there was no food left in our cupboard, my granny was there to help.”
Fiona hadn’t realized that Andrew’s childhood had been so bleak. He was not a man to complain. “What happened that night?”
“That night there was neither power nor food. Our telephone had been disconnected, and our car had no’ run for weeks. It was too cold to walk to my granny’s, and by the end of the evening, we had run out of peat. My mother gave me a piece of bread with honey she had scraped from the bottom of a jar, then she put me to bed, under a thick layer of blankets. But I was still too cold and hungry to fall sleep. I lay there and listened to my parents fighting.”
“And you remember it still?”
“Aye. I remember hearing my da cry, then my mother cry, too. He told her that he had no choice, you see. He was exactly the man God had made him, a weak and foolish man at that. He wanted to be different, but he could no’ be anything but what he was. That was his excuse for all his failings, and I suppose it was a way of denying all his strengths, too. Because if he was just as God made him and had no control over his life, then nowt he did, no’ good or bad, was his to claim. That’s how he lived his life, a puppet to any force that pulled his strings.”
Fiona’s heart ached for Andrew, but considerably less so for the man who had fathered him, Terence MacDougall, who had allowed his own child to go hungry. “Did you believe him? Did you believe it wasn’t his fault?”
“I was only a wee laddie. My choice was to call my own father a liar or to believe that he truly had no choice, that he could no’ help what he was. So for years, that’s what I told myself.”
“And now?”
Andrew was silent. Fiona wanted to touch him, to reassure him somehow, but she didn’t know what to say. She still didn’t understand exactly why he had told her this, although she was more than touched that he had.
The silence extended. Outside she could hear the storm approaching, the light sprinkle of rain at its border tapping against the old slate roof. On the street below there was a scurry of feet and a shout as someone ran for shelter. She felt and heard Andrew stand. She stood, too, and she was in his arms. He didn’t kiss her; he just held her against him and stroked her hair. He lifted one curl and brushed it against his cheek; then he stepped away. “There’s something I must do,” he said.
“Would you like me to come with you?”
“No. I’ll do this alone.”
“Be careful outside. There’s thunder in the distance.”
“Aye.”
Fiona heard his footsteps. She yearned to call him back, to offer herself as solace, but her devils were as relentless as his. The door opened, then closed again, and she was alone.
* * *
The full bottle of whisky that Andrew had bought from Brian felt almost warm under his anorak, mo
stly, he supposed, because it was dry and nothing else that was touching his skin was. The heavens had opened, and it was difficult to tell where the rain ended and the loch began.
Beneath his feet MacDougall’s Darling cruised slowly forward. Her lights swept the water, but nothing except mist and rain was illuminated. Only a fool would be out on the water tonight, a fool or a man who had experienced an epiphany.
The rain had long since washed away the whisky he’d had at the pub, completely sobering him. Some whispering voice deep inside him begged for more, for something to dull the pain of his revelations, for something to persuade him that the course he had set for himself could be altered.
But the bottle stayed against his skin and his hands stayed steady on the wheel. He was piloting the boat by feel, sensing both his location and destination.
He knew exactly where he wanted to go. Iain had traveled this path before him. Iain, too, had been haunted by his past and his destiny. Months ago he had drowned both in the deepest part of the loch, and it was to that spot that Andrew headed now.
Lightning split the sky, and he thought about the night he had rescued Jamie and Peter Gordon. It would be like his darling to show herself tonight, but he wasn’t here to find her.
He was here to find himself.
Minutes passed, and the rain fell harder. He reduced his speed once, then again, until he was barely moving. The boat rocked harder under his feet, and he grasped the wheel until his knuckles turned white. Satisfied at last, he switched off the engine, and then, holding fast to the railing, he felt his way toward the stern.
Drenching rain sluiced over his brow and down his neck. Water sloshed over his shoes, and icy waves crashed over the sides. Once he nearly lost his balance, but he clung stubbornly to the railing, afraid that if he fell the bottle would shatter.
He reached the stern at last and wedged himself between a seat and the side. He knew the danger of being swept overboard. Almost no one bathed in frigid Loch Ceo and lived to tell about it.
Safe for the moment, he unzipped his anorak and pulled out the bottle. It was Brian’s recommendation, the pub’s finest whisky.
Andrew had wanted nothing but the best.
Rain streaked the glass almost immediately, and the bottle slid through his hands. He was cold, and his fingers weren’t steady. It took him nearly a minute to get a good grip and unscrew the cap. It gave with a reassuring sigh, almost as if the whisky had a mind or a life of its own. That seemed entirely appropriate to him.
“A life for a life,” he said.
Unaccountably, he thought of a night much like this one when Terence had taken him fishing. He had been an adolescent, both vulnerable and hostile, and above all certain of his own immortality, as only a boy that age can be. But there had been whisky on that cruise, too, and they had very nearly not made it home alive. By the time Andrew had fought the boat in to shore with his father passed out on the deck, his mother, waiting on the pier, had been as pale as a corpse. She had clasped his struggling adolescent body against hers, and she had made him promise that he would never go out in the boat with his father again.
Terence had died six months later.
But Andrew did not have to die young. He did not have to wonder the rest of his days if in this, too, he would someday be like his father. Like Terence, he was exactly the man God had created him to be. And that man, like all men everywhere, had been given choices.
He unscrewed the cap all the way, then he leaned forward. The boat bobbed dangerously beneath him, but he hardly noticed. He turned over the bottle and watched as the pub’s most expensive whisky poured into the water.
He was not an alcoholic. Not yet, and perhaps, even if he continued to drink, not ever. But now he would never have to face that possibility. He would never have to wonder if someday, like his father, he would walk too far along the whisky road to ever find his way back.
He had been given a choice. He had made his.
He thought then of Fiona. From the beginning he had thought himself unworthy of her. He had never believed he had the potential to be a loving husband and responsible father. He had seen the best and the worst in Terence, and he had believed himself to be the same.
He was not.
He stood drenched and shivering, staring at the water. Eventually the storm blew over, the waves calmed, the last raindrops fell. Still he stood there.
At last Andrew went down to the cabin, but he wasn’t ready to leave. Instead he pulled out his bagpipe, stowed in the safest, driest place on board because he often played for his guests. He breathed air into the bag through the blowpipe, tuned the drones to the chanter and blew a short passage. When he was satisfied he went to the stern and lifted the blowpipe to his lips again.
And he began to play.
CHAPTER 15
Even though more than a week had passed since the night of the storm, the haunting wail of a lone bagpipe still seemed to drift through Fiona’s window. She didn’t know what trick of the wind had carried the music straight to her room that night, or even why she was so certain that Andrew had been the piper. She only knew that she had never heard anything so poignant or wrenching, and that if she lived to be a hundred, she never would again.
Now she stood at the window and gazed at the darkening sky. Even after the pipes had grown silent, the music had played on in her mind, like a background score for the unfolding events of her life.
“Fiona?” Mara pushed open the door, which Fiona had left ajar. “Am I disturbing you? I brought you some soup. It’s Frances’s cock-a-leekie. I know you like it.”
“You’re so thoughtful.” Fiona crossed the room and took the small tureen from Mara’s hands. “I was just about to make a sandwich.”
“Soup’s perfect on a night like this one.” Mara followed Fiona inside. “It may be summer, but the air’s far too damp and cold for my taste. And another storm’s brewing.”
The past week had seen nothing but storms. Dark clouds had hovered over the village, spilling rain at regular intervals and never quite dissipating. Fiona still hadn’t grown used to the persistent chill. “Will you share some soup with me?” she asked.
“I ate earlier with April, when you were out. Andrew stopped by, and we fed him, as well.”
“I’m surprised there’s anything left for me.” Fiona kept her voice light, although trying to fool Mara was futile. Not only was Mara gifted with second sight, she was one of the most astute people Fiona had ever met.
“He asked about you.”
“He’s a considerate man. I suspect he also wanted to know how April was doing in school, how your yarn is selling at the shop, and whether you’ve broken ground for your new house.”
“Aye, but no’ with the same amount of interest. I told him you’d gone with Duncan to visit Sara.”
Fiona jumped on the new subject. “It’s hard to believe Sara’s on her way home to England right now.” That morning, just hours before the little girl’s discharge from the hospital, Fiona had visited one final time. She had missed not having Andrew at the hospital with her, but he had made the trip earlier in the week to say his own goodbyes.
The farewell had been every bit as hard as Fiona had expected. She had presented Sara with an original watercolor of Stardust, framed and ready to put on the wall of her new bedroom. Then, as the little girl blew kisses, Fiona had stripped off her hospital mask and gown and gone downstairs to meet Duncan for the ride back to Druidheachd.
“You’ll miss her,” Mara said. It wasn’t a question. Mara had little need to check out her observations.
“A lot.” After the goodbyes Fiona had been filled with sharply contrasting emotions. She was glad that Sara was finally well enough to leave the hospital, but she wasn’t glad that she wouldn’t be seeing her regularly.
She set down the tureen and toyed with the lid. “You know, on the way home it occurred to me that there are still ways I can help her. She’s going to have questions as she grows up, questions that only anothe
r burn survivor can really answer. I think I’ll visit once she settles in and keep in touch after that. Her grandmother invited me, and I think her aunt and uncle will be grateful for help.”
“It’s only just beginning to occur to you that you’re needed, isn’t it?”
Fiona looked up and smiled a little. “I’ll be going back to the burn unit, too, as a volunteer. The sister in charge asked if I would. She says that the children ask for me when I’m not there. And do you know why? Not because of my stories or my drawings, although they like those well enough. But because I tell them that I was burned, too. When they see me, they start to believe that maybe someday they’ll be whole again, like me.”
“Are the children right, Fiona? Are you whole?”
It was a strange question, but Fiona understood perfectly. “Almost.”
“You have things to face, yet. But you’ve come so far, so fast.”
Fiona thought of Andrew. All roads led back to him. In the past week she had seen him from a distance twice, and once he had stopped her in the lobby for a casual conversation. But there had been no further moments of intimacy. At an early age she had adapted herself to solitude; now she was discovering all over again what it meant to be lonely.
“One thing I have to face is the fact that this book may never be finished,” she said, guiding the subject in a less personal direction. “I wish my editor was better at math. If she calls once more in the middle of the night because she can’t master the time change, I may blurt out the truth.”
“And the truth is?”
“I’ve done over a hundred sketches for the last part of the book, and not one of them is right.”
“It will come.” Mara took Fiona’s hand and squeezed it. “Have some soup now. You have tomorrow to try again.” She crossed the room, and the door closed soundlessly behind her.
As she dished up and ate the soup, Fiona thought about Mara’s news. Andrew had been at the hotel tonight. She wondered if he had known that she was in Glasgow. Perhaps he had chosen a time to visit when he was sure he wouldn’t have to confront her.
Men of Midnight Complete Collection Page 71