Waterfall Glen

by Davie Henderson

  Kate was still thinking about that when she fell asleep not long after the remnants of the in-flight meal had been cleared away.

  The excitement of the previous few days had exhausted her, and when she woke up it was to the captain’s cheery voice saying, “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. The cabin crew are about to start serving a light breakfast, and shortly after that we’ll be commencing our descent to Heathrow Airport in London.”

  They touched down ten minutes ahead of schedule and, with a couple of hours to kill before her connecting flight, Kate had a shower in the airport. She changed from jeans and black halter top into fawn slacks, a low-cut cream cashmere sweater, and a long Burberry coat and matching scarf she’d bought the day before because she thought they were what a Highland lady might wear. Finlay was meeting her at Inverness, and she wanted to make a good impression.

  She spent the first part of the flight north trying to imagine what Finlay would look like, and the rest of it in a dreamy doze during which her imagination conjured up a convincingly detailed picture of a kilted Tom Hanks. He was tall, dark, and ruggedly handsome, reassuringly strong but comfortingly gentle. His voice was deep yet quiet, and his smile would make her heart skip a beat. So complete was the picture that, when the plane began its descent, Kate felt as if she was going to meet someone she already knew and loved rather than a complete stranger she’d never even seen before.

  The butterflies Kate had felt on the other side of the Atlantic returned in force as she pushed her luggage-laden trolley towards the sign that said MEETING AREA. Pausing just before she turned the corner from partitioned corridor to rendezvous point, she took a compact from her handbag, finger-combed her hair, and gave herself a reassuring smile.

  Maybe he’ll be younger than Tom Hanks, with a roguish Ewan McGregor grin and unruly hair a sun-kissed shade between gold and ginger, she thought. Or perhaps he’ll be older, more like Sean Connery, with irresistible charm and a voice you could listen to all day without hearing the words because you were so caught up in the accent.

  But when she reached the rendezvous area there wasn’t anyone remotely resembling Tom Hanks, Ewan McGregor or Sean Connery; just a slight old man in grey slacks, absently picking at a piece of fluff beside the regimental badge on his dark blazer. He looked at least 70, but his posture was ramrod straight. When he became aware of passengers filing into the meeting area he held up a piece of cardboard with LADY KATE BRODIE crayoned on it.

  Kate tried to hide her disappointment. She could see he’d made every effort to look his best, from his Brylcreemed silver-grey hair and neatly trimmed David Niven moustache to the carefully folded white handkerchief peeping from the pocket of his blazer, the razor crease in his slacks, and the parade-ground polish of his shoes.

  Their eyes met and Kate smiled. At first she thought his eyes were steely and cold, but she quickly changed her mind because they had more than a hint of mischief in them when he smiled back. He had an interesting face, Kate thought as she pushed her trolley towards him. His grooming meant he was too refined to be completely rugged, yet at the same time his weather-beaten complexion and the way the middle section of his nose was knocked slightly to one side made him too rugged to look refined.

  “Are you Finlay McRae?” Kate asked, bringing her trolley to a halt in front of him.

  “That I am,” he said. “But you can’t be Lady Kate Brodie, because Mr. Cunningham told me she was 36, not 26.”

  Kate laughed with delight, all her disappointment at not being met by a Ewan McGregor or Tom Hanks disappearing. She was charmed by his accent as well as his words. He had the same sort of singsong voice as Archibald Cunningham, but the words were slower and more measured, with some syllables shorter than she was used to hearing and others longer. “That’s a nice way to welcome someone to your shores,” Kate said.

  “There’s an even nicer welcome waiting for you at Greystane: Miss Weir’s making one of her stews, with a clootie dumpling to follow.”

  Kate was scared to ask what a “clootie” was in case it turned out to be a ruthlessly persecuted small furry animal, so instead she said, “How long is the drive?”

  “It’s about forty minutes by the quickest road, but I’m thinking you’d rather go by the scenic route. It’s a wee bit longer, but well worth it for the view.”

  “I’m wiped out, but I’d like my first sight of the glen to be special.”

  “I’d like that very much, too,” Finlay McRae said, and Kate remembered that this old man’s future lay in her hands.

  As soon as they walked out of the airport terminal Finlay switched places so that Kate was on the inside of the pavement. It was a little sign of manners that her father also displayed, but something that seemed to have died out among her own generation—much to her disappointment, none of her dates had ever done it, and each had immediately gone down in her estimation as a result.

  “It’s no limousine,” Finlay said as they approached a beaten-up, dark green Land Rover, “but a fancy car wouldn’t be very much use on the road up to The Cranoch.”

  “I can’t wait to see this place,” Kate said as Finlay opened the back door of the Land Rover and started loading the luggage. Kate made to help him but he stopped her, saying, “It’s okay, Lady Kate, I’m not quite ready for the knacker’s yard yet.”

  Kate pushed the empty trolley to a pick-up point. Finlay held the passenger door open for her when she came back, and she said, “Thank you, Mr. McRae.”

  “Finlay,” he said, “You can just call me Finlay.”

  “If you’ll just call me Kate.”

  “Well, maybe when no one else is around,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to appear too familiar,” he told her, then closed the door and walked around to the driver’s side. “I’m sorry if it’s not very comfortable,” he apologized as they buckled up their seatbelts, “but Mr. Chisholm rarely left the estate, so a new car wouldn’t have been a priority even if there had been money to spare.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Mr. Chisholm? Do you know much about him?”

  “I’d never even heard of him or Glen Cranoch until a week ago.”

  “So all this must have come as quite a surprise, then.”

  “ ‘Surprise’ isn’t even remotely ball-park close, Finlay, believe me. This whole thing still hasn’t sunk in yet. I keep expecting to wake up at any moment and discover I’ve been dreaming.”

  “Aye,” he said, “I can imagine. And where would you be waking up if you had just been dreaming?” he asked, and checked the mirrors before pulling out.

  The question made Kate realize that the people of Glen Cranoch must be every bit as curious about her as she was about them. “I’d be in a small craft shop in a pretty little town just across the bay from San Francisco,” she told him.

  “Pretty enough to get homesick for?”

  “Time will tell, I guess. How about Glen Cranoch, is it pretty enough to get homesick for?”

  “I’ve only ever left it the once, and every day I was away I wished with all my heart that I was back home.”

  “Where did you leave it for?”

  “A little jaunt to France and Germany. But that was a long time ago now.”

  “And you’ve never left the glen since?”

  “Apart from trips to Glasgow, Edinburgh or Aberdeen—and Inverness, of course—for Mr. Chisholm, no.”

  “You must like the glen very much.”

  “It’s partly that, and partly that the little I’ve seen of how the world has changed hasn’t left me wanting to see any more of it. What, with traffic jams on the roads, litter on the streets and graffiti on the walls … Supermarkets where they sell food that doesn’t have any more flavour than the plastic it’s packed in and you don’t even get a friendly smile when you hand over your money, instead of character-filled corner shops where your conversation was as valued as your custom … Children giving cheek to their parents, and teenagers walking about with rude words printed on their T-shirts
… Young men with earrings and long hair, and young women with shaved heads and tattoos … No, I don’t feel at all at home in that world, not the way I feel at home in Glen Cranoch.

  “But sorry, there’s me rambling on and I still haven’t told you about your … would it be a second cousin?”

  “From what I can make out, he was my grandmother’s sister’s son.”

  Moving up through the gears, Finlay said, “I suppose there were two Colin Chisholms.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There was the Colin who went away to the war in 1940—a right handsome man, and something of a playboy, if I might say so; and then there was the Colin who came back in 1944.”

  “But the war didn’t finish until 1945.”

  “For Colin Chisholm it finished in 1944. For Colin Chisholm a lot of things finished in 1944.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Have you heard of The Few?”

  Kate shook her head.

  “When the war started we weren’t ready for it,” Finlay said. “We needed to buy some time, and the currency we bought it with was the raw courage of men like Colin Chisholm. He was a fighter pilot, and a damn good one at that. They were so heavily outnumbered they were known as The Few, and they helped hold back the tide.

  “Then, just when the tide was turning—and it looked like maybe the family’s run of bad luck had come to an end—Colin was shot down.”

  “What do you mean, the family’s run of bad luck?”

  Finlay went quiet, then told her, “I’ve maybe said more than I should … Certainly more than I meant to.”

  “Come on, Finlay, out with it.”

  “Well, I suppose it’s okay to tell you, because I can’t imagine a sophisticated woman like you believes in superstitions and the like.” All the same, he hesitated before carrying on, as if trying to find the easiest way to tackle a difficult subject. Finally he told her, “There are some people who say the Chisholms of Glen Cranoch have had more than their share of misfortune.”

  “What sort of misfortune?”

  “The kind that breaks hearts and ends lives long before their time. Take the first war: two of the three serving sons died in the trenches—”

  “That’s horrible, but I suppose it wasn’t all that uncommon.”

  “No, indeed, but the one who survived the slaughter went down on a troopship that sank within sight of the shore on the way home.

  “I suppose every family has such stories; it’s just that the Chisholms seem to have more to tell than most—at least one for every generation.”

  “You almost make it sound like a curse.”

  “There are some around here who’d use that word, but they’re superstitious people who still live in the past—I mean even further in the past than me.”

  Before Kate could inquire as to the nature of the misdeeds that had led people to believe her family might be deserving of a curse, Finlay picked up the tale of Colin Chisholm: “Anyway, like I was telling you, just when the worst of the war was over, Mr. Chisholm’s plane got hit. His canopy jammed and his face was badly burned before he managed to bail out. The doctors did what they could for him, with skin grafts and the like, but his mouth was left dragged down at one side in a permanent grimace.”

  “How awful,” Kate said.

  Finlay nodded. “He went from being the sort of person who turned heads because he was so good looking, to someone people either looked quickly away from or couldn’t help staring at in horrified fascination.” He took a sharp bend, then said, “You might have got to wondering why there isn’t a mirror in Greystane, Lady Kate. Well, it’s because Mr. Chisholm didn’t even feel comfortable in the presence of his own reflection, let alone in the company of other people.”

  “He must have led a terribly lonely life, then.”

  Finlay nodded. “The only company he ever really had was mine. We shared a love of fishing, you see. We used to spend hours just enjoying the sound of the water, the feel of the breeze, the smell of the heather, and the walk there and back.”

  Kate thought for a few moments, then said, “I don’t want to pry or appear insensitive, Finlay, but did Mr. Chisholm make any provision for you in his will? I’m only asking because you must have been far more like family to him than I was.”

  “He left me the Land Rover, Lady Kate. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Just Kate,” she reminded him gently, sensing he didn’t take anything for granted, and liking him all the more for it. “And no, I don’t mind in the slightest. Quite the opposite—I was just worried in case you hadn’t been left anything at all.”

  “You’ve nothing to worry about there. Colin Chisholm left me far more valuable things than the Land Rover. He left me memories offish landed and ones that got away, of countless quiet conversations and companionable silences standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the sun at our backs and the breeze in our face and the sweet sound of lure breaking water and line running through reel. You can’t put a price on any of that.”

  Kate thought about some of the people she’d known back home, the things they valued and talked about, and when she compared them with the old man sitting next to her the gulf couldn’t have been any greater.

  “Is there a river in the glen?” she asked to break the silence that followed.

  “Not in the glen itself but in the little hanging valley above. It tumbles into the glen in a waterfall feeding a lochan that’s mirror-flat on still days like this.”

  “A lochan?”

  “It’s a wee loch—a little lake, I suppose you would say if you weren’t from these parts.”

  “I can’t wait to see it.”

  “You soon will. We’re almost at Glen Cranoch.”

  “I love the way you say Cranoch, all ‘r’s and ‘ochs’.”

  “Its name is actually Corranoch. But that’s a sad word in the Gaelic, so we shorten it and make it sound like something else.”

  “Corranoch,” Kate said wistfully. “That sounds way too beautiful to mean something sad.”

  “Maybe so, but it does,” Finlay told her. He turned left, onto a narrow, steep and bumpy road.

  “What does it mean?”

  “It’s the Gaelic for wailing, for weeping in lament.”

  Before Kate could ask why Glen Cranoch was known as The Weeping Glen, Finlay said, “Close your eyes, Kate Brodie.”

  They were approaching the top of the grade and Kate guessed that Glen Cranoch lay on the other side. She closed her eyes as instructed. The engine beat grew increasingly strained, and the wheels spun furiously as the tyres struggled for traction. For a few heart-stopping moments the Land Rover seemed on the point of slipping backwards.

  And then without warning Kate was pitched forward as the tyres got a grip, before being jolted up and down as the Land Rover crested the hill. She was aware of the ground flattening out, the engine being cut, and the handbrake going on.

  “Just a moment longer, if you please,” Finlay said.

  The opening of the driver’s door was followed by footsteps on gravel. Without knowing it, Kate held her breath. The door beside her squeaked open and Finlay said, “You can open your eyes, now, Lady Kate.”

  Kate had spent almost every waking moment since the arrival of Archie Cunningham’s cable wondering what Glen Cranoch would look like. Her imagination had conjured up everything from bleak moor to rocky mountain valley. But nothing prepared her for what she saw when she stepped out of the Land Rover now.

  Stretching away below her was the narrow lochan, as mirror-calm as Finlay had described, but so dark that it seemed to reflect the depths below rather than the bright blue sky above or the steeply rising hills on either side. The grassy lower flanks of those hills gave way to the darker green of Caledonian mixed woodland, then the even darker green of coniferous forest. Above the treeline green was replaced by the purple and brown of heather and the grey of rugged granite peaks that were more mountain than hill.

  However, breathtaking and
beautiful as they were, lochan, hillsides, and rocky summits barely got more than a glance because her gaze was drawn to the far end of the glen, where two craggy granite outcrops were split by the foaming white of falling water tumbling into the stream that fed the lochan. A small cluster of white cottages lay at the foot of the crags, while a ruined cottage topped the crag on the right, and the other crag was crowned by an altogether more substantial structure: high walls enclosing a central square tower twice their height.

  “This is your little kingdom, Lady Kate,” Finlay told her, looking out across the glen.

  “It’s …” Kate couldn’t find the words.

  “Aye, it is,” Finlay said, knowing exactly what she meant without having to hear it expressed in words. “And I’ve seen it look bonnier than this, by far,” he said.

  “How could it look more beautiful than this?” Kate asked in a disbelieving whisper.

  “I’m not a poet so I couldn’t tell you that with words, Lady Kate. I’d have to bring you back here a dozen times so that you could see for yourself. I’d have to bring you here at dawn on a summer’s morning when low mist hangs like angel’s breath over the water and hides everything except for the crags, and they could be the tops of mountains ten thousand feet tall…

  “And again at dusk in spring, maybe, when the sunsets are at their most spectacular and the things you see now in green and brown and grey are gold and bronze and copper instead, and the lochan shimmers like a pool of molten metal or a drop of amber.

  “I’d have to bring you here on a cloudless night when watching moonlight rippling across the water is like seeing an ancient spell being cast by an invisible hand.

  “I’d have to come back with you when the leaves are on the turn and their reflection makes the lochan look like the palette of an artist who’s been mixing every shade of yellow, green, and brown and finds himself spoiled for choice because he’s come up with so many beautiful colors.