The Sea House: A Novel (15 page)

I walked back to my kitchen and I was about to put the puzzle of that besom out of my mind, and then I saw. Or rather, I did not see it, but I felt it, come up from behind me like a fear. Something was very wrong for her, something was very wrong indeed for the Miss Marstone. A chill came over me that gripped my heart and I went very cold and afeared for her.

*   *   *

So a few days later, she was back, good as her word. Miss Marstone –
No, call me Katriona, dear Moira, now we shall be friends
– came into our little house where me and Maggie live, stooping low under the lintel and turning first the wrong way into the byre where the cow sleeps, and then after exclaiming at how clever this arrangement was, turning left up to where we do live. And oh how prettily the dishes on the rack do shine through the smoke, and how delightful to sit on these little low stools so close together round a fire so cleverly in the middle of the floor.

Though I did not ask her to join us, Maggie put off digging the potatoes and put on her bonnet and all of her bright trinkets in honour of this visit. She had the sooty kettle on the fire and the tea boiling so that it was good and dark. She spoons in three sugars and gives a cup to Her Ladyship before I can stop her – since I know that Her Ladyship drinks China tea with no milk. We insist that the Miss has the long bench by the wall and we seat ourselves on the stools.

Maggie gives us three songs in a voice which may be rustier than when she was a girl, yet still is true and very beautiful. I saw how the Miss was sat upright with her hands clasped together, not wanting Maggie to stop, and then I did see the tears running down her cheek, which made me angry that she should enjoy the songs of our sadness; as Maggie did sing about the Uists, where she lived as a girl before the factor there cleared them all away to live or die best they can.

Then Maggie gives a quick song with no words so that her mouth is playing music for a jig, and all with nonsense words from the time when the King did ban our Gaelic entirely, and the Miss is tapping her foot and saying, how clever, how clever, and why, I have never heard anyone so talented. If Maggie lived in London, Moira, I do believe she could have studied piano and trained to be a musician. But it would help me greatly if Maggie could tell me a story in Gaelic perhaps, something like the Reverend’s fairy story about Selkies. I can try and follow some of the words if you will translate for me, and then I can begin my book of fairy stories, which I intend to illustrate also.

Maggie does not have perfect English but she has the gist of what the Miss is saying, and for Maggie the old tales must always be told in the tongue in which they were birthed; so before I can stop her, Maggie has closed her eyes and in her sing-song voice, she begins a long story in Gaelic that rambles on, up and down the island. I am about to translate her story of fairies under the hill, but as I watch the Miss so comfy on her bench, her eyes like a little girl waiting for her bedtime story, something in me gets red and spiteful and I begin to tell another story, whispering it to the Miss’s ear, the story that I know Maggie will not tell.

‘It was when Maggie was a young woman, Miss, when your father’s father was still the laird here,’ I tell her carefully, stopping and pausing like I am following what Maggie is saying. ‘She was up in the hills here, coming back from the high shielings where they put the cows in summer. She was with her father, and they looked down on the houses that sit on the machair, those homes that were so low and so snug, with their thick thatch roofs tied down with ropes against the wind. You had never seen such a beautiful sight than the village which was Maggie’s home. But as they came down the ben, they could see that the house at the end had smoke coming up from the roof – not the mist of blue peat smoke, this was black and tarry with billows of sooty smoke. And so they began to run down the hill.

‘His Lordship’s factor had his men in the village. All the dogs were barking and the factor’s men were turning out the houses. And Maggie ran in her home and the factor’s man was holding the great bowl of milk that was set for cream, and he was pouring it on the fire in the middle of the floor – and this was the fire that had never once gone out, the fire that Maggie’s mother smoored each night with peat ash and a prayer for the Lord’s blessing, so as it would be ready to stir up in the morning to cook some breakfast. You see, Miss, there was not a house in the village where the fire had ever gone out, any more than a heart stops beating in a body, but they took the children’s milk and doused every fire with it.

‘Maggie says her father tried to cut the tweed from the loom, but they put fire to the roof and it did drop on the loom. Then they chained the doors shut and Maggie’s family had nothing but what they had pulled out before the firing of the roofs.

‘And she saw the factor’s men carrying Peigi Macuish out on a blanket because she had a new babe the night before and could not yet get up. They did leave Peigi by the ditch, though her husband begged them to let her bide another day under their roof.

‘The dark was coming down and they must walk across the coffin road to the other side of the island where the ground is rock, and too hard to bury the dead. Or they must go down to Tarbert to wait for a ship to take them to Australia. Maggie’s father knew that when they cleared Sollas, then the people went on a ship that had typhus, and they did have to throw their own children in the sea when they died. So Maggie’s family went to the barren parts of the island and that is how they did kill themselves, trying to raise crops out of rock and marsh, till Maggie did hire herself out to the factor’s wife. And now she sings in her head all day to bring back the faces around the fire – the fire where she learned her songs, before the milk they was to drink that night did splutter in the ashes. And that is the story of Maggie Kintail.’

Maggie Kintail had long finished speaking. The Miss had gone white as a sheet. Maggie had been telling her best ghost story, and so she was clucking away and saying, but it is but a tale, and best not to mind it. I translated that last part direct to Her Ladyship.

But she shook her head and said, ‘I did not know how much everyone must hate me.’ And she got up and would not look me in the eye, but fussed around with her dress like she did not know what to do with her person, like she was much ashamed. And she went out of the house, looking very ill, so I followed her, wishing I had not told her, but also rejoicing because I had put some of my pain in her soul, and this was what I dearly wanted. But she looked so wild with it, and so white, I began to fear for what I had done. I had never thought that she would take it so badly. And we walked up and down, and she stopped and looked over at the church, and all the broad sweep of green grass, between us and the sea, where the big Cheviot sheep from the mainland snatch, snatch, snatch at the machair grass.

‘I used to dream about here,’ she said, ‘when I lived far away with my mother. And I blamed her that she kept me from this place, from my father. I dreamed how I would one day come back home, as a bride, and would walk up this path with all the blue sea behind me and the honey smell of hundreds of machair flowers, and I would walk to the church where the one I loved so dearly would be waiting, though I did not know then what he would look like.’

I stood next to her in silence, and wondered if it was spite on her part, that she should be telling me about how she would one day become Alexander’s wife. So I said nothing but felt all the big empty wind fill my soul and blow away every last hope. You see, I thought, the gentry never care for long, because they never need to, and so they soon forget.

And she turned to me and I saw she had tears running down her face, and she said, ‘But it’s all spoiled now, isn’t it? It’s all too late now.’

I could not follow her meaning, so I said, ‘Miss, you are getting ill standing out in the wind. You must get home.’

So I helped her into the trap and her hand was as cold as the seawater, and off she went back to her castle with her stiff little back and shoulders bumped about by the ruts and the ridges in the track.

CHAPTER 15

Ruth

I ordered a name plate for the house from the Barvas potter, a white disk to go by the door with the words ‘
Tigh na Mara
’, the Sea House, painted in blue lettering and glazed firmly in place.

But while Michael was restoring the front door, he uncovered the old door plaque beneath thick layers of paint. The chemical stripper had scoured the brass clean as the day it was made and ‘Scarista Manse’ was engraved into the shining metal in bold letters that made my ‘
Tigh na Mara
’ in painted script look like a suggestion.

At least the post arrived correctly addressed to the Sea House – and it was mostly bills, piles of them. We were going to be very overdrawn by the time we opened and we were going to need to make serious returns in the next year.

‘If we could just get the initial money together,’ I said, pushing the account books across the table, ‘then we could offer guests trips to see seals and porpoises; basking sharks if they’re lucky. It would make all the difference to the figures. At the Lochboisdale Inn in Uist they make a mint from London bankers who come to fish for sea trout and stuff like that.’

Michael totted up the sums again, but they still wouldn’t allow for a boat.

The thing you have to understand is that the islands are not separated by the sea but connected by it. Everyone has a boat of some description, sooner or later.

That first day we sailed out on the ferry from Skye to Harris, I fell in love with the Minch. The evening was beginning to thicken and turn blue, the outline of Skye behind us nothing more than inky smudges, dark isthmuses sliding past each other as we pulled away. A low light filled the surface of the sea, glass peaks of jade rising and falling. I stared out of the ferry window, mesmerised, until a blurred reflection of the ship’s interior started to assert itself over the seascape and I realised that the lights of cottages on the distant shore were in fact reflections of electric lights hanging from the canteen ceiling.

Outside, a fierce wind blew across the deck, huge layers of cloud split against an apricot sky. I pulled my coat tighter and let the wind scour the skin of my face cold and clean. Ahead, our new life, a white house in front of a wide beach, the wind bowling in from the Atlantic; I saw the children we’d have one day, those bright shapes tumbling in and out of the front door; and down on the beach, a boat ready to explore the wide plains of sea.

Hard to let go of even a small bit of that dream.

Michael fetched a beer. We stared at the closed account book as if the answer might appear on the cover.

Jamie joined us at the kitchen table. He pulled over the discarded book. Opened it and glanced at the figures with a frown, then gave up. ‘Look, why don’t I chip in with you guys? I’ve money saved from the year I did at the bank – felt more like for ever. And Dad would always come in with us, Michael. You know Dad and boats.’

*   *   *

The day we drove out to visit Lachlan’s boat shed was one of those odd, wintery days that the island can sometimes throw up even in early summer. We headed through the middle of the island over narrow, switchback roads that turned so sharply, the van seemed to be launching into thin air.

Most islanders live over on the east side, their cottages and tin bungalows perched among stony outcrops in an unlikely landscape of grandeur and sage beauty, the sweeps of rock polished with age and running with silver burns sparking in the sun; the Minch always in sight, a vast plane of metalled, shimmering sea. Across the water were Skye and the pale outlines of the mainland mountains, everything brightening or fading beneath a sky filled with huge dramas.

We pulled up in the sparse village of Finsbay. Lachlan’s house stood next to a small loch, where the wind was casting nets of ripples across the black water.

Jamie knocked and we waited. The turf of Lachlan’s garden was scattered with empty mussel and limpet shells, as if the tide had risen during the night and retreated without anyone noticing. A large, flat rock piled with broken shells, like a Stone Age meal, showed where the gulls had been aiming in an effort to smash open their catches. Lachlan was suddenly at the door, shaking hands with everyone.

There was something very orderly about Lachlan: his perfectly white hair, a navy fisherman’s jumper and blue jeans, the disciplined bearing of an ex-navy man.

‘Come away in,’ he said, showing us through to a Nissan hut long enough to house a boat under construction. A row of esoteric-looking tools lined the wall on each side, the handles polished and crafted and pale and grubby as bulbs waiting to be planted. In the centre stood the chocked-up skeleton of a boat, a giant’s ribcage with a small square cabin in place of a heart, the whole thing a miraculous transformation from tree to ship.

‘This one’s based on a birlinn, the old rowing boats from these parts, so it’s a bit bigger than you’ll be wanting. But you’d do well to keep to the traditional shape for these waters. That way you’ll be able to sail in even the roughest weather that the Minch can throw at you.’

Arms folded, faces rapt, Jamie and Michael followed his hand movements as he sketched out our boat in the air.

‘Let’s go and make a pot and you can have a look at the plans,’ he said. ‘Or maybe we should have something stronger to seal the deal.’

Apart from boats, Lachlan’s other big interest turned out to be the history of the island. He was a proud member of the Edinburgh Historical Society. He wanted to know every last detail about the baby discovered under our floorboards and I found myself telling him what I’d found out so far.

‘The next time I am over at the Historical Society’s library I am going to have a good hunt and see what I can find for you, Ruth, but not before you’ve all come out on the
Airdasaig,
see the sort of craft you’ll be getting.’

*   *   *

Early the next morning, Leaf and I packed a picnic. I’d sent off for some cookbooks, determined to be the sort of mum who bakes cakes and does whatever it is that mums do in the kitchen – make jam? Leaf and I had taken to reading them avidly, planning lists for what we were going to try out that week. As a result, we had an ambitious picnic; quiche and a fairly successful Victoria sponge. I also packed a bag with a sketchbook and pencils, and rooted out the old binoculars. Lachlan would leave us on remote Pabbay Island for a few hours; it was the best place to see seals at all stages in the large colony out there.