It quickly became apparent that Anna needn’t have worried. Out of Jean Padgett, Douglas McKean and herself, even Anna could tell that she was the only one who sounded even vaguely reasonable. Anna looked closely at the woman accusing her of being insensitive, but didn’t recognize her. To her relief, Anna realized that the journalist had also spoken to other people Anna didn’t know but who all seemed enthusiastic about the idea of a restaurant, however small, in Crovie.
‘We could do with more places opening along this coast,’ said one man. ‘Too many closing every year. It’s a good thing, what she’s about. Cannae see why anyone would ha’ a problem wi’ it.’
Douglas McKean himself was as angry as Anna had ever seen him. ‘Taking our property,’ he spat. ‘Should be ashamed to show her face.’ The report finished with the revelation that Anna – and Bren before her – had most definitely acquired the bothy legally, and owed nothing to the furious old man.
‘You came across really well, hen,’ Rhona told her, when she called later that evening, something she’d done every day since she’d learned of the pregnancy, which touched Anna more than she could say. ‘You don’t need to worry.’
‘I’m not anymore,’ Anna said. ‘It was nice to hear a few locals I don’t know speaking in my favour. Made me think there might be more out there.’
‘There are,’ Rhona assured her. ‘So stick to listening to those voices, not the negative ones.’
‘Did you hear Douglas McKean?’ Anna asked.
‘Ach, that old fool doesn’t know how to talk sense, never has,’ Rhona said. ‘You’ve got better things to think about. Don’t give him the time of day. By the way, I bumped into Phil and Marie in the Co-Op a few days ago. Phil’s still banging on about you taking the Inn.’
‘He says the same to me every time I see him,’ Anna said. ‘He might change his tune if he knew the chef was going to be out of action for a few months with a new baby.’
‘Nah, of course he wouldn’t,’ Rhona said. ‘That place would need a ton of doing up before you could open. Bairn could be crawling by the time it was ready.’
Anna leaned over the kitchen sink to look out of the window. There was a dark smudge on the horizon, pressing down over the unsettled sea. Another storm spinning towards the coast.
‘I’d still have to raise the money,’ she pointed out. ‘My savings are going to be eaten up pretty quickly in the next few months.’
‘Have you started buying baby stuff yet?’
‘No, I don’t want to until after the scan next week. Besides, I haven’t had time, to be honest.’ She didn’t add that surely there was no point until she had somewhere permanent to live. Someplace that might actually be practical to raise a child in. Someplace that wasn’t Crovie. Anna had the feeling that would upset Rhona, who, along with everyone else, seemed to have forgotten that Anna intended to leave, and soon. ‘On top of that, I hate the thought of Pat and Frank seeing something that lets on before I’ve told them.’
‘Ach, they’d understand. Do you want me to come with you for the scan?’ Rhona asked. ‘I’m happy to.’
Anna turned away from the window. ‘That’s really sweet of you, but Liam’s going to come. He called the other day and said he wanted to.’ That had been a taut conversation, but Anna hadn’t felt as if she could refuse. Whatever happened, wherever she and Liam ended up, he was still the baby’s father. They had to find some way to make it work.
‘Fair enough,’ said Rhona. ‘Right then, I’d best be off. Got to set another firing off yet tonight. It’s all go!’
Anna went outside to drag her tubs of flowers closer to the house, the better to survive the wind, which was already getting up.
The storm made landfall overnight, rattling the windows of the Fishergirl’s Luck hard enough to wake her. She lay with one hand on her stomach, listening to the whistle and scream of the wind against the window until she drifted off again, her dreams full of indistinct shapes transcribed from nebulous fears. She had an unspoken terror that there was a second shoe about to drop, and could only hope it wasn’t a premonition about the scan.
* * *
The next morning the wind was high and it was still raining hard. Anna realized there was no way she could go ahead with lunch club. She had set up a Facebook page specifically so that she could alert would-be visitors any time she would have to cancel for any reason, and by ten o’clock she had posted to explain that the weather had forced her to cancel for the day. She immediately received a few replies, some expressing their support, others their disappointment. More than one person, presumably those who had never visited Crovie and so had no real idea of what the village or the Fishergirl’s Luck was truly like, suggested that at times like these she move lunch club indoors.
Anna closed her iPad and listened to the whistle of the wind outside, wondering what to do with her day now that she didn’t have six three-course meals to prepare. These days, her week revolved around these lunchtime services – what she would cook for them, what produce she could find from local sources, what inspiration she could take from Bren’s notebook, from her own grandmother’s. Sometimes she didn’t recognize the person she had become in the short months since she had arrived in Crovie. When she’d got here, Anna had been considering giving up cooking for good. She couldn’t begin to imagine, now, how that thought had ever crossed her mind.
Resolved to spend a lazy morning on the sofa under a blanket, Anna made herself a mug of tea and settled down with Bren’s recipe book. Even if she couldn’t cook today, she could look at recipes for future lunch services. She flicked gently through the book, searching out more of her predecessor’s neat little annotations. It was almost like time-travel, the way they flitted back and forth through the years with their sometimes cryptic memories of times past. Beside a recipe for hot ginger pudding, for example, Bren had scribbled a mention that in December 1996 she’d had to make it with ground ginger instead of stem ginger from a jar, which was fine but in future if she did so she would add a teaspoon of mixed spice to lift the flavour. In January 1979, Bren wrote an entirely new recipe, a lemon sponge cake with homemade raspberry jam stirred in alongside nibs of marzipan, and noted that this had evolved out of necessity because a snowstorm had left the village cut off for a week and she’d been using up what she had left in the cupboards.
Took a piece to each house, the note added. Even DM, though he would not accept it. Cut his nose off to spite his face, that fool would.
Anna shook her head at Douglas McKean’s stubborn determination. Then she wondered if Bren had mentioned adverse weather anywhere, particularly the event in 1953 that had changed the place forever. She kept reading through notes, all too fascinating to pass over, until she came to one that spoke of the great storm. It was jotted beside a recipe for Dundee cake. Bren’s penmanship had taken on a spiky quality, less neat than usual, and Anna could almost feel the shock, echoing down through the years.
Terrible night, terrible day. I baked in the stove, cake after cake, all through the night, just to drown out the rage of the sea. I heard the crash of the boats being torn from the shore. One hit the side of the bothy before it rolled out to its end beneath the waves. I thought I would be next, that I and this place would be swallowed up whole by the storm. But this morning, here we still are, while so much else has gone from the village. All of Douglas McKean’s boats, including my father’s, gone, gone without a trace. He can’t ever hope to replace them. He’s done for. Yet here, in this place, I was fairly untouched. A tile or two from the roof will need replacing, that’s all. In this place I made my luck, and it has always been lucky for me. In fact I think I should rename her. She’s more than a shed. She is the Fishergirl’s Luck.
Anna sat back, looking at the stove, trying to imagine Bren moving around this small space as that immense storm had ripped and battered its cruel way around her. How terrifying it must have been, and yet how safe these walls had proven to be. Immovable, like the house’s first owner. Anna was delighted, too, to have t
he knowledge of how the bothy had come by its unusual name, straight from the words of the woman who had named it.
I must tell Robert, she thought, and before Anna had registered what she was doing, she had picked up the phone and dialled his number.
The call was answered on the first ring and a harried voice on the other end barked, ‘Yes?’
Anna was taken aback, both at the tone and the timbre. It was a woman’s voice, not either of the MacKenzie boys. ‘I – I’m sorry, perhaps I’ve dialled the wrong number? I was trying to reach the MacKenzie house.’
‘You have. This is Barbara,’ said the voice, still fractious. ‘Is this about Young Robbie? If not, I have to keep the line clear.’
Anna’s heart froze. ‘What? What’s happened?’
‘Who is this?’ Barbara asked.
‘I – sorry,’ Anna said. ‘I’m a friend. My name’s Anna Campbell, I bought the Fishergirl’s Luck from Robert, and—’
‘Oh,’ said the woman on the other end of the line. ‘Yes. Young Robbie was so pleased with the baking the two of you did together.’
‘Is he all right?’ Anna asked. ‘Has something happened?’
‘He hasn’t come back from dolphin patrol,’ Barbara said, her voice laced with tears. ‘I stayed here last night because Old Robbie was with the lifeboat. When I got up this morning he’d snuck out, left a note telling me not to worry. But the dinghy’s gone! I’ve got the lads out looking for him, but – look, I’ve got to go. In case he calls – or they do.’
‘Of course,’ Anna said, her heart beating to a sick rhythm. ‘Call me if there’s anything I can do.’
Anna sat staring at the phone once they had hung up. The thought that Young Robbie MacKenzie had been out amid the storm tide was horrifying. Even if the worst of the weather had passed, the chop was still bad even now. How could a boy of ten navigate a wooden dinghy through such a swell? The cold Anna felt gave way to sweat. She sat on the sofa and put both hands over her face. Did Robert know that his son was missing? She hadn’t thought to ask Barbara. He wasn’t home, so probably not. Unless he knew but couldn’t come back for some reason. If he was stuck out somewhere on a call with the lifeboat, for example. Anna couldn’t bear to think of how awful that would be for him – not knowing where Robbie was, unable to search for the boy himself. Look at how broken he had been by his wife’s death. If his son were to—
‘Oh, Robbie,’ Anna whispered, close to tears.
She thought of the last time she’d seen the boy. It was a few weeks past now. She’d been up on the cliffs walk, headed towards Troup Head, searching to see if any of the wild gooseberries that Bren had mentioned in one of her notes were still growing where she had described. Anna had passed the cove where she’d picked the sea purslane on the day she’d first met both of the MacKenzies together. Young Robbie had been too far away to see her, but the bright flash of his yellow windcheater had stood out so vividly against the grey-green sea, like a pennant calling for her attention. He’d been bringing the dinghy into shore. That was obviously a favourite spot of his, she thought, although that wasn’t surprising, given what he’d told her on that first day, when he and his father had rescued her from the cliff and brought her back to Crovie. What was it Robbie said? That the cove was on the dolphins’ route. Anna had assumed that’s why he’d gone back there again, because it’d give him a good chance to see the pod.
Anna sat up straighter, her heart thumping. What had the boy been doing down there? She recalled him now, leaning over the side of the tiny boat, pulling at something.
A net. He’d been dragging a net out of the water.
Anna grabbed at Bren’s notebook, frantically paging through it until she found the note that had led her to look for the gooseberries in the first place. Bren had made a gooseberry fool with the small, tart fruits, but Anna had in mind to use the recipe as a base for a gooseberry and amaretto semifreddo that she thought would be a perfect way to follow a rich Cullen Skink. But there had been something else mentioned in Bren’s note, too.
Bushes laden this day, the note read. Looked down upon the shore and saw a dolphin belly-up on the beach, poor wee beastie. Rolled in a net, t’was, and drowned. August 1976.
Anna pressed the fingers of one hand to her lips, her heart racing. What else had Robbie told her, the night she’d ended up baking with him? He’d talked about how lost fishing nets were terrible for dolphins and how they were always washing up in that cove, especially after a storm.
With a cry Anna was off the sofa and out of the door, pausing only to push her feet into her walking boots and grab her coat. Outside, she crossed to the Weaver’s Nook amid a squall of wind and rain and banged rapidly on the door.
‘Anna! Whatever’s the matter?’ Frank Thorpe asked, as he opened the tradesman’s entrance.
Selkie lass,
I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. If you’re out there, keep him safe. I’ll find him. I promise I’ll never leave him alone again.
Bring him back to me.
Please. Please.
I can’t lose him too.
I can’t—
Twenty-Six
Frank insisted on coming with her, despite the wind and rain.
‘I don’t even know if I’m right,’ Anna told him, shouting into the wind as they climbed the village steps towards the cliff track.
‘Better safe than sorry, love. We’ve got to check,’ Frank shouted back, hefting the rope she’d asked for with him. He’d insisted on carrying it. Pat had tried to suggest that Anna went to David and Glynn instead, and as soon as she’d said it, Anna wished she’d thought of that herself in the first place. Once he’d heard what was going on, though, Frank was adamant. He was going with her, he was carrying the rope, and that was that.
They didn’t talk much as they rushed along the route, concentrating instead on keeping their footing on the wet ground. The rain blatted at their faces as Anna looked for the place where she’d left the path the first time she’d been up here on her own. They reached the gorse bush that blocked the way.
‘Be careful,’ she warned Frank. ‘It looks as if there’s been more slippage.’
‘Probably last night,’ he told her. ‘There’s been another over the village. Poured yet more earth on the rental’s roof. On Dougie’s place, too. It’s a mess.’
The sea was still washing rough waves against the shore, scattering tattered, breaking curls of ashy blue-green. The rain had lessened but Anna had to shield her eyes and squint to make out the lower cliff.
‘I can’t see anything,’ she called. ‘I don’t think he’s—’
Her words died in her throat as she saw something in the tide. It caught her eye, turned over by a wave, disappeared, rose again.
‘Oh God! Is that – is that the dinghy?’
Turquoise blue and gleaming white, the splintered remains of the Silver Darling were rolling in the waves, almost too small to see amid the turbulent expanse of the Moray Firth.
Frank’s face told of Anna’s own horror. ‘No,’ he muttered, ghostly white, ‘Oh, no, no.’
Anna stumbled forward, trying to see the stretch of shore she knew was beneath them. Loose stones and earth moved beneath her feet. Below, more of the wrecked dinghy revealed itself, Bren’s faithful little boat washed up in pieces no more substantial than kindling. It must have been smashed against the rocks by the waves.
No one could survive that, Anna thought, numb, frozen to the bone. Yet she kept edging down, losing her footing on the wet earth with each step, grasping clumps of foliage as she went.
‘Anna,’ Frank shouted. ‘It’s not safe. Come back! Here—’
She glanced back up at him to see that he was winding the rope around the gorse bush. Frank tied it off, then threw the coil down to her.
‘Come back up, love,’ he urged her. ‘There’s nowt we can do now.’
Anna took hold of the rope. Her feet were slipping constantly. Frank was right, there was nothing they could do. Robert MacKenzie’s
face appeared in her mind, the depth of that flash of pain she’d seen cross his face on the first night they’d met, and the breath left her lungs as if someone had crushed her chest. How could he survive this? How could anyone?
‘Anna,’ Frank shouted, again.
As she turned back to the cliff, something caught her eye. A flash, below her, barely there. Anna turned back again but it had gone.
‘Anna,’ Frank urged. ‘I’m worried this bush isn’t going to hold. You’ve got to come back.’
‘Wait,’ she said, as much to herself as to him. ‘I need – give me a minute.’
Holding on to the rope she edged lower, leaning out as far as she dared, praying that the bush would hold her weight. There it was again, so close to the cliff that the overhang on which she stood had almost hidden it from her.
A flash of yellow.
Anna screamed. No words, just an explosion of sound.
‘What?’ Frank shouted, as she started scrambling down the cliff.
‘He’s here!’ Anna yelled back. ‘He’s here, Robbie’s here!’
‘Anna, wait!’
She looked back up at Frank. ‘I can’t leave him there on his own! I can’t see how badly he’s hurt! Call the lifeguard! Call someone! I’m going down.’
‘Anna!’
She didn’t hear anything else Frank said. Anna inched her way down the cliff, more of the shoreline appearing as she did so. Robbie was a tiny figure wrapped up in his yellow waterproof, backed against the cliff.
‘Robbie,’ she shouted. ‘ROBBIE!’
The boy looked up, pushing back his hood. Anna almost sobbed with relief as he got to his feet. He can move, she told herself, the relief acute. She couldn’t even see any scrapes on his face.
‘Anna!’
She reached out an arm and he stretched out his, but there was still too much distance between them. The rope didn’t quite reach. The ground beneath her feet began to give way and she scrabbled to find her footing.
The House Beneath the Cliffs Page 20