Authors: Jean S. Macleod
“You’ll get all the sun there is here, Mrs. Behar,” Mrs. Finlayson said. “There is never much in the mornings, but you will see it set across the Isles, and that is a sight in itself. If you would be climbing the hill yonder on a fine day,” she added, “You can see as far as the Cuillins in Skye and out across the Minch to the Long Island.” She gave Laura a quick, appraising look. “You will be fond of walking, I have no doubt,” she stated.
“I hope to get around quite a lot,” Laura said, conscious of her husband
’
s sudden silence. He had crossed to the window and was looking out, his back to them, waiting for the housekeeper to go. “I shall have to appeal to you for advice, Mrs. Finlayson, once I start going about on my own.”
Morag Finlayson turned to the door. There was still a reserve about her that suggested caution,
the characteristic wariness of the Scot about offering too much on first acquaintance, but even allowing for such natural and fundamental reticence, there seemed to be an added restraint.
“There’s no need for you to worry about getting about on your own, Laura,” Julius said as soon as the door had closed. “I shall have nothing to do for the next two weeks but show you the countryside.”
“I suppose I meant if we came back again.”
She crossed the room to stand beside him. The deeply embrasured windows overlooked the sea and she saw the surf breaking on a row of skerries at the mouth of the loch. Within their shelter the curve of pale sand she had seen from the high road formed a tiny bay and the sun made the rocks on either side a warmish red. In the tiny anchorage they formed a yacht lay moored, its dazzling white hull faithfully reflected in the calm green water.
“Julius,” she asked, “have we no near neighbors?”
He turned sharply.
“No,” he said, and then more abruptly: “Does one need neighbors on a honeymoon?”
“Of course not!” Laura agreed. “But I thought when we come back later on, perhaps, it might be nice to know somebody is within visiting distance. You said that we would probably come quite often.”
Her stumbling words had been an appeal for the friendship she needed to counteract the sudden claustrophobic reaction she had felt at the thought of their complete isolation, but Julius apparently did not seem to think that friendship was necessary to either of them.
“Later in the summer,” he told her, “I hope to bring a few patients up here as an experiment. I have a theory about some of the nerve cases I’ve been handling recently that could very well be put to the test in a place like this.”
When she showed her complete and utter surprise, he added: “You needn’t worry about our privacy, my dear. They won’t be here, in the house. I intend to put them up in a small shooting lodge at the head of the glen that goes with the estate. I can keep an eye on them there quite nicely, although my theory is mainly to have them self-supporting.”
Laura was immediately interested.
“I’d love to help,” she volunteered. “It would be something for me to do, Julius—”
She broke off at sight of the sudden coldness in his face. It was like a mask, the old impenetrable mask whipped into place at the first infringement on his professional life.
“Try to remember, Laura,” he said, “that you are no longer a nurse. You are my wife.”
Stung by the harshness of the rebuff and deeply hurt by his lack of understanding, she turned from him.
“I shall always be a nurse,” she said quietly. “Marriage doesn’t change one completely, Julius.”
He glanced at his watch without answering.
“Shall we go down now?” he asked. “Mrs. Finlayson will have a meal ready.”
Everything about Dunraven was extremely well organized, Laura realized as she washed swiftly and combed her hair, deciding not to change because she had stood with Julius at the window for so long. There was nothing she could possibly wish for, nothing she could have improved upon. Mrs. Finlayson saw to it all, running the house to Julius’s entire satisfaction, it would appear.
Yet behind that facade of perfection there seemed to be a vague disquiet. Laura began to feel it with every day that passed, but she could not bring herself to ask her husband about it. Some of the reserve she had first noticed in Morag Finlayson seemed to have descended on him, too, at least where any reference to the past was concerned. He studiously avoided taking her into company, even when they drove back into the hills or along the winding coast road for a whole day’s motoring to the unbelievable beautiful Loch Maree. A picnic basket was always packed for them and put into the back of the car. It contained enough for both lunch and tea, so that they need not stop at an hotel for a meal. There were so many lovely, isolated coves and promontories along the shore that Laura did not think it at all strange at first. After all, they were on their honeymoon.
If Julius was almost aggressively possessive, she supposed that must be natural, and perhaps he hadn’t really meant to be unkind about her offer of help with the patients. When they returned to London he might think differently about it.
Whenever she thought of London it seemed very far away. Even at this early stage the Highlands of Scotland were beginning to weave their subtle spell about her impressionable heart. Later, when they had bound her to them by the bonds of love, she looked back to those early days of confused impressions and vague, half-formed doubts with the knowledge that they had been the first stepping stones across the dark gulf of experience she had been forced to cross.
Then, quite suddenly, at the end of the first week, Julius was recalled to Harley Street.
“Let me come with you,”
s
he begged. “I don’t really mind giving up part of my honeymoon, Julius.”
“That’s quite unnecessary,” he told her almost sharply. “I shall be busy in London and you would only be at a loose end.”
“There would be Lance,” she suggested, “and the girls at the flat.
”
“Holmes has taken Lance to the Channel Islands,” he said, mentioning the fact quite casually, “and I don’t really think you need to go visiting your tenants, Laura.”
“But, Julius!” she protested, “they are my
friends
.”
“One doesn
’
t need friends—intimate friends—once one has married,” he said.
She stared at him incredulously.
“I just don’t see that,” she said. “Gillian and Anne were my bridesmaids. I thought later on, when we were more settled, that they might even be able to come up here for a week or two—if you didn’t mind,” she added tentatively.
“Mind?” He turned to look at her. “My dear Laura, I certainly
do
mind. I have no intention of letting you turn Dunraven into a hostel for tired businesswomen.”
“Oh!” Laura gasped, unable to believe that they were on the point of quarreling for the first time.
But were they? Julius did not quarrel. He had simply made a statement and it was up to her to obey. He was intolerant, secretive, domineering, she raged inwardly. And then, like an icy hand laid suddenly against her heart, she was aware of something more. It was part of that vague disquiet she had sensed lying so uneasily beneath the surface of their relationship when she had first met Morag Finlayson and had felt the strange reserve in her frank blue eyes. It had something to do with Julius; something to do with the past.
Impulsively she attempted to thrust the disturbing impression to the back of her mind.
“How long will you be away?” she asked.
“Not any longer than I can help.” He appeared to be marshaling the events of the next few days and dismissing them as swiftly as possible. “This is something I did not expect to happen, but I can’t evade the issue. It’s a matter of professional integrity, I’m afraid.” He paused for a moment before he added: “I may be bringing a patient back with me, by the way. One of the nerve cases I spoke to you about. I’ve been seeing him in London and he has agreed to the experiment, but you needn’t worry about him. He will be going straight up to the lodge. I have made all the necessary arrangements up there.”
The shooting lodge lay in a fold of the hills about four miles inland, high up and almost as isolated as Dunraven itself, but Laura had never been there. She presumed that there was a caretaker in charge and perhaps a nurse, but Julius had cut all her enquiries short. His one visit to the lodge had been paid while Morag had been teaching her how to bake shortbread, and he had not spoken about it on his return.
Now, however, it seemed that the lodge was ready to receive its first patient, but that was all she was likely to hear about the progress of Julius's experiment unless he decided to change his mind about allowing her to help.
He took the car with him to the train the following morning, presumably to leave it there till his return, and Laura was faced with at least three days of loneliness.
Curiously enough, the isolation did not seem to matter so much now. She had become accustomed to it and Dunraven was really a charming spot, while loneliness was more or less impossible with Mrs. Finlayson.
Morag seemed to expand as soon as Julius had gone, and they spent hours together in the sheltered kitchen garden where the Highland woman grew her herbs and the delicious raspberries of which she was so justly proud.
“I brought them from Skye,” she explained. “There are no others like them for size and flavor anywhere.”
Laura laughed outright.
“Spoken like a true native of the Misty Isle!” she said. “How long have you lived here, Mrs. Finlayson?”
“I came seven years ago to take care of the old lady at Garvie Lodge,” Morag said almost guardedly. “When she died the family spoke to the first Mrs. Behar about me and I came here.”
Swift color flew into Laura’s cheeks at the mention of Helene Behar’s name. Morag had hesitated for no more than an instant before using it, but she had been quick to detect the reluctance behind the words, the reserve in the quiet Highland voice and the look of watchfulness in the vividly blue eyes.
“Mrs. Finlayson,” Laura asked directly, “were you a nurse?”
Morag nodded.
“I trained in Glasgow before I was married,” she said. “Then, when I was widowed early in life and I had need of the money to support myself, it was the only thing for me to do. It was the job I knew best and loved most.”
“And—Mrs. Behar was your patient?”
Laura asked the question as if it had been forced from her. She supposed she had no right to question Morag like this, but somehow it seemed imperative that she should know the truth about Helene.
“She was my patient toward the end,” Morag said slowly. “I came here in the first place as a housekeeper. Mrs. Behar was a lovely young woman, but she was far from strong.
”
She gave Laura a penetrating look before continuing in the brief, matter-of-fact way that made all her statements ring true: “She was not the sort of woman he needed. The air up here seemed to sap her vitality right from the first, and perhaps the doctor got tired of her always ailing. He never took her to London with him. She sort of—withered here. But I shouldn’t be saying that to you,” she added hastily. “You’re part of this world. The young mistress wasn’t.”
Laura turned away. She did not want to hear any more. She should never have listened to so much.
“People differ, Mrs. Finlayson,” she said briefly. “We are not all made alike.”
“No,” Morag said, presumably unperturbed by the snub. “And we should be thankful for it. Would you be visiting the MacKellars while the doctor is in London?”
Laura looked at her in amazement.
“The MacKellars?” she repeated. “But—
”
“They’re your nearest neighbors,” Morag informed her with a touch of firmness in her voice. “Near as distance goes in these parts. Garvie Lodge is no more than five miles away across the moor.”
The information hit Laura like a pot of cold water flung full in her face. Surely Julius had said repeatedly that they had no neighbors within visiting distance?
“These people at Garvie Lodge are the people you worked for, Mrs. Finlayson?” she asked, serving sugar over the raspberries with a slightly unsteady hand.
Morag nodded. “They have lived there for four generations. Mr. Zachray farms the land. It is sheep mostly. I don’t
think he will go away now.”
There seemed to have been some doubt about Zachray MacKellar staying at Garvie Lodge in the past then, although these old families generally accepted the tradition of son following father on the land from one generation to the next Perhaps Zachray MacKellar hadn’t been the eldest son, of course.
Laura thought about the MacKellars a great deal during the next two days, wondering why Julius had almost gone out of his way to deny their existence up there on the moor. She could not understand his reluctance to make friends locally. Friendships, she would have thought, would be essential here.
These two days had passed much more quickly than she had expected them to. She experienced an odd sensation of lying back and drawing breath, almost as if Julius’s lovemaking had exhausted her. It was as if she had been granted some kind of respite, a time to think, yet she could not bring herself to think clearly. Still bemused by the wonder and swiftness of his wooing, she viewed Julius once more from a distance and found him desirable.
She wondered what he was doing in London, what “matter of professional integrity” could have induced him to curtail his honeymoon and go off alone. It would be something of importance, she felt sure. A new honor, perhaps.
She had no idea when Julius would return, but it did not seem possible that he could come back before the following day. Twenty-four hours stretched ahead of her. It was a windless day with a high, bright sun in the sky and a lark singing its heart out far above her. Her own heart lifted at the sound of it and she walked with a light, quick step, taking the only road there was. It penetrated deep into the narrow glen that ran down to the Loch.