A Dark and Distant Shore (5 page)

Luke turned dazedly back to his mama, but, as she went on, his blank incomprehension gave way to a strong feeling of ill usage. ‘You don’t remember, of course, because it all happened before you were born. But the gentleman from whom your grandfather bought Kinveil had a little girl, who was just about your age at the time. Anyway, Mr Cameron – that was the gentleman’s name – went to heaven not very long ago, and left his little girl all alone in the world.’

1811 minus 1803 made eight. Plus seven made fifteen.
Little
girl?

‘So she is coming to live with us, just for a year or two until she is grown up. She must be very lonely and very sad, so you will promise to be kind to her, won’t you, and treat her as if she were really your sister? But I know you will. You are such a
good
boy!’

He was a furious boy. A stranger coming to live. An intruder. Someone he would have to be polite to, and put himself out for. Someone he was going to have to share his mother with. And as if all that wasn’t bad enough – a girl! Clothes and hair-styles, giggling and gossiping.

His mother looked at him anxiously, and with an enormous effort he returned her gaze. For a moment, his voice refused to obey him, but at last he managed, ‘Yes, mama. Of course, mama.’

‘That’s fine, then,’ his father intervened jovially. ‘I’m sure you’ll get along famously.’ Then, as if Luke had suddenly become invisible, he went on to his wife, ‘Though I must say I still have doubts about her upbringing. What if she turns out to be a hoyden? From all accounts, she was wild as a gipsy when she was at Kinveil. You remember what Charlotte had to say about her!’

‘But that was years ago, my love. Charlotte saw her in the most uncivilized surroundings, being dragged up by servants. I am sure she will have learned London manners by now.’ Lucy Telfer always thought the best of everybody. It was one of the things that made her so soothing to live with. ‘After all, whatever his faults, Mr Cameron was a gentleman and knew what he owed to his position. You will be charmed to find how correct and ladylike she has become.’

‘I hope so.’ Magnus didn’t sound convinced.

‘And she is probably feeling quite crushed, poor girl. Never to have known her mother, and now to lose her father when he had scarcely passed forty. We must try very hard to make her feel at home.’

‘Mmmm. I only hope we don’t find ourselves wallowing in a vale of tears, that’s all. Dashed depressing!’

‘I will take care you are not inconvenienced, my love. You know that your comfort is always my first concern.’

He nodded absently. ‘I know I have asked you before, but are you quite, quite sure it is not going to be too much of an imposition? There is still time for you to change your mind.’

She smiled. ‘Indeed, no. She will be no trouble. She will be like a sister to me, as well as to Luke.’ There was a pause, and then she said with an expression that, in another woman, might have been ironical. ‘And what else can we do, in any case? If your father wishes it...’

Entranced, Luke wriggled on his perch, which had the unfortunate effect of attracting his papa’s attention. ‘Ah, yes, my boy,’ Magnus said. ‘You needn’t stay. Off you go, back to Mrs Weekes.’

Dragging his feet a little, Luke departed. But he was rewarded with another nugget of information as, slowly, he closed the door.

‘...still don’t understand
why
he wishes it! Dash it all, if Cameron has drunk and gambled his way through all the money my father paid him for Kinveil, it can hardly be laid to the Telfers’ charge...’

‘Master Luke!’ said a minatory voice from the stairs.

Luke turned away from the door. ‘Hullo, Weeky,’ he said with a brave attempt at nonchalance. ‘Did you know there was a girl coming to stay with us? We must try to be very kind to her.’

At noon on Friday, Magnus’s town carriage drew up outside 14 St James’s Square and decanted the master of the house and three females of assorted shapes and sizes. To Luke’s jaundiced eye, they all appeared thoroughly shabby-genteel. However, he was primed to be gracious and perhaps a touch patronizing. He had no idea what to expect of Miss Cameron, but in view of the gipsy upbringing and the drunken father, he didn’t expect much.

Magnus, looking surprisingly benevolent, led one of the females forward. She was of middling height, very pale, and as far as Luke could see under the shadow of her hood, very fair-haired. Her eyes, cast down towards the front steps, were not immediately visible.

Beside him, Luke heard his mother give a faint gasp – not, he suspected, of sympathy, but of stark horror at the girl’s clothes. Unrelieved black bombazine was not the most becoming of fabrics, especially on a thin, wan, fifteen-year-old. Luke was just deciding that she looked like a crow when she raised startling green eyes and he suddenly wondered what she had done with her broomstick. She was precisely his idea of a witch. And a witch who had never shed a tear in her life, which was probably why his papa was looking so pleased with himself.

Lucy Telfer stepped forward, her arms half outstretched, but if she had thought Miss Cameron was going to rush to their shelter she was sadly mistaken. The girl’s face didn’t change, nor did she recoil, but her rejection couldn’t have been clearer if she had put it in words.

She curtsied politely, and held out a slim, black-mittened hand. ‘This is most kind, Mrs Telfer. I promise I will not be a trouble to you.’

The other two females had now been joined by a lanky, red-haired boy who had been seated on the box. He had the most astonishing collection of freckles Luke had ever seen. He was about thirteen or fourteen, and growing out of his livery – an extraordinary outfit consisting of tunic and breeches in a complicated check pattern of green and yellow on a bright scarlet ground. The narrow neckband and cuffs were faced with plain red that should have fought with his carrotty hair, but didn’t, because of the white lace ruffles in between. It was to be years before Luke discovered that Vilia and Sorley had designed this outfit between them.

Luke’s mother said, ‘Come in, my dear, out of the cold. Such an unpleasant day!’

Within minutes, one of the anonymous females had been confided into Mrs Weekes’ care, the other to that of Lucy Telfer’s maid, and the page-boy had been handed to the butler. The two females, whom Luke had promptly christened The Downtrodden Duo – he was rather proud of ‘Duo’ – were haled off, murmuring, upstairs, while the pageboy was passed like some undesirable parcel to the second footman, and vanished in the direction of the nether regions.

Luke’s father, ushering the ladies into the library, said, ‘You, too, Luke. Come along!’

Reluctantly, he followed. Miss Cameron was already glancing at the bookshelves, her eyes smack on a level with some elderly copies of the
Turf Remembrancer
and the
Annual Racing Calendar.
The books had been bought with the house from a gentleman whose interest in horses had been disastrously matched by his lack of skill in backing them, but Luke’s father had never troubled even to have them rearranged. Although his attitude to sport was tepid, he would have admitted, if pushed, that he considered the history of Ascot a better furnishing for his shelves than the plays of Aeschylus.

Her face expressionless, the girl turned back into the room and sat down neatly in a straight-backed chair. Now that she had shed her cloak, it was possible to see what she really looked like. With her high-necked black gown, tightly folded hands, and pale unsmiling face, she was no one’s idea of a merry little playmate. Even her long, white-gold hair looked serious-minded. Instead of tumbling down to her shoulders, as a girl’s should, it was swept into a coil at the nape of her neck, so heavy that it seemed to tilt her head backwards. In the indoor light of a November afternoon, her eyes had lost all their colour and brilliance. To Luke she appeared stiff, drab, and unapproachable.

He paid very little attention to what was being said at first. His father, after a dutiful fifteen minutes, had made himself scarce, pleading an engagement, and his wife had seen him go with the expression of a drowning man, despairing but resigned, watching a straw being swept away on the tide. Distantly, Luke heard his mother and the girl go through all the boring details of rooms and mealtimes and servants and domestic protocol. The girl seemed to be listening carefully, and she nodded once or twice and asked an occasional question. It was a relief to discover that her voice was soft and cultured, with no accent other than a faint elongation of the ‘s’ when it came at the end of a word. Her manners were perfectly respectable, and she didn’t appear to be any more stupid than most girls. Perhaps she wasn’t going to shame them after all.

‘Yes,’ she said in a reply to a gently probing question. ‘I have found it necessary over the last year or two to exercise some supervision over my father’s household. His illness made him neglectful at times.’

She sounded terribly grown up and more than a little prissy.

Lucy Telfer’s quick sympathy was aroused. ‘You poor child! What a responsibility for such young shoulders! But you need not trouble your head about such things any longer. I know how you must be pining for your father – so sad! – but we will try what we can do to cheer you up.’

Luke could tell, and he wondered whether the girl could, too, that the first targets for cheering up would be clothes and hair-style.

‘We want you to feel perfectly at home here. So, if you have no objections, my dear, I propose to call you Vilia, and I hope you will call me Lucy.’ She smiled with the sweetness that was peculiarly her own.

The girl coloured very slightly, but produced no answering smile. ‘You are most kind, Mrs Telfer. But I cannot think it would be proper for me to address you so familiarly.’

Lucy Telfer, seldom defeated, accepted this gracefully. ‘Very well, my dear. You must do as you wish, of course. But when you feel more comfortable and at ease with us, I hope you will change your mind. Now, I have something for you, a little welcoming gift. While I go and fetch it, you and Luke can become acquainted.’

With a whisper of rose-coloured skirts she departed towards the front of the house.

There was a moment’s nonplussed silence. The girl suddenly looked much younger.

Luke said stiltedly, ‘My governess, Mrs Weekes, and I are accustomed to take a stroll every day in the gardens of the square here. I do not know whether you might care to accompany us?’ He had been rehearsing it, sullenly, all morning.

‘Thank you, but I believe I must leave that to my own governess to decide.’

He had no idea which of The Downtrodden Duo was the governess. Neither of them had even looked capable of deciding to come in out of the rain.

He waited, but she said nothing more. She seemed prepared to go on sitting there, saying nothing, until his mother came back.

He tried again. ‘I believe you used to live at Kinveil? My grandfather lives there now.’ It didn’t occur to him that it might sound like a gibe.

‘Yes.’ Her eyes dropped to the hands clasped in her lap. They were very thin, long-fingered hands with shapely, well-kept nails. On the middle finger of the right was a ring far too large and heavy for it, an amethyst seal engraved with some kind of circular design and mounted on a plain gold band.

Perseveringly, he said, ‘What a handsome ring! Does the design have some meaning?’

‘It was my father’s. The signet of the Camerons of Kinveil. The design represents the Loch an Vele whirlpool.’

‘I didn’t see any whirlpool.’

‘It only occurs under certain conditions of wind and tide. You wouldn’t see it. I imagine you have only been there in the summer.’

It sounded disparaging. What was more, it didn’t seem right to Luke that this girl should be flaunting a ring belonging to Kinveil. He felt quite strongly that it should have been handed over to his grandfather with the other furnishings.

Motivated by a desire to put her in her place, he said loftily, ‘Oh, I know Kinveil very well. My father takes me there and we have a delightful time. I caught my first salmon when I was only six.’ True. Six years, eleven months, and twenty-nine days still counted as six.

‘Where?’

‘Where? Oh, I see. In Loch an Ee-ahs... In “the osprey’s loch” above Carn Mor.’

‘Oh, yes. That’s always full of fish.’

He was indignant. ‘No, it isn’t!’

The green eyes looked up in detached surprise. ‘Of course it is.’

‘It
isn’t
!’
He came very near to stamping his foot. ‘I had to make several casts, and it was almost an hour before I got a bite!’

She shrugged. ‘You must have been unlucky. Ospreys always choose their lochs well. They don’t need rods and lines and flies, they just pounce. That’s why we call the osprey “Allan-the-fisherman” in the Highlands.’

We
in the Highlands, indeed! When she hadn’t been near Kinveil for eight years. Very rudely indeed, Luke said, ‘Pooh! What do
you
know about it, you horrid girl!’

There was a moment’s appalling silence. He wouldn’t have thought it possible for her face to turn paler than it already was. Her eyes expanded into great dark pools, and her lips began to quiver. Her voice, too, was shaking when she spoke, and by the time she had finished he could scarcely make out the words.

‘You – you – stupid little boy! What do
I
know about it? I know everything about it.
Everything.
Far more than you ever will, if you live to be a hundred. You’ll never be anything but a Sassenach. You don’t even know what that means, do you! It means an Englishman, a stranger, a foreigner. But
I
know. I know because I belong there. It’s my home. It’s
mine
!’

Her voice broke down completely into gasping, agonized sobs that seemed to rack her whole body. Luke could see the tears pouring, like snow water, down her cheeks, and her throat muscles standing out like cords with the effort she was making to control herself. Anguish was something that had never intruded into his well-ordered life before. He had no idea what to say or do.