Air Ambulance (7 page)

“Did MacLean manage to get word back to his base?”

“I think so. I think Ron knew we would have to come down even before we knew we were near Heimra. We had to fly high and ice began to form on the wings, forcing us down.”

“But what about the de-icing system, the rubber affairs on the edge of the wings?”

“Something went wrong. Perhaps it was the rain freezing so quickly as it touched us.”

She shivered involuntarily, and his fingers tightened over her arm.

“They’ll send out another plane.” He looked up towards the northwest, where already the clouds were beginning to disperse. “All this is clearing up.”

Alison did not think it was clearing. The day seemed to be growing steadily darker, but she stumbled on by his side. Strange, she thought, how much confidence he gave her. His strength seemed to reach out and buoy her up. The pain in her side had intensified, stabbing relentlessly, but she could not tell him about it. Not yet. He would leave her somewhere, and go back for Ronald. That was the important thing.

They came to a road, a narrow, winding pathway across low fields, rising at last to a gently-wooded slope. She felt as if she had been walking for hours, and she had been answering his questions automatically for the past five minutes.

“I’m going to leave you here, at the lodge, for the present,” he told her. “You’ll be all right. I’ll get someone to look after you.”

“Please don’t worry. Please go back as quickly as you can.” Her lips had gone dry, and she had to force the words out. When they came to a high iron gate she almost stumbled against it.

Blair caught her, lifting her bodily for the second time and striding with her into the lodge.

“Mrs. Cameron!” he called through the half-open door, and instantly a small, dark-haired woman came from an inner room. She gasped something in Gaelic, and held the door wide. “There’s been an accident,” Blair explained. “A plane has come down over beside the skerries—the Air Ambulance. Will you see what you can do for Miss Lang? I shall have to get Dougal and something we can use as a stretcher. There’s no time to go on to Garrisdale,” he added. “It would be impracticable, anyway. I don’t think the children heard anything amiss. They would have been asleep. Try to keep them out of the way, if you can.”

“I will that!” The little Highland woman followed them into the room from which she had come. It was a large, cheerful-looking kitchen with a peat fire already burning in the grate and a black kettle steaming on the hob, suggesting a perpetual welcome.
“
Is the lassie badly hurt?”

Alison shook her head, trying to smile her acknowledgement of the little woman, although all she wanted to do was to sink down on the velvet sofa against the wall and allow the blessed relief of oblivion to envelope her.

Blair put her down on the sofa, and stopped to take her pulse. “Will you find Dougal, Mrs. Cameron?” he asked without looking around.

“Ay. It won’t take me long. He’s over at the peats.” Mrs. Cameron hesitated at the door. “You’ll be needing blankets and plenty of hot water when you get back,” she suggested. “There is a kettle on the boil if you are needing it now.”

“I don’t think so.” Blair was still looking down at Alison. “Where’s the pain?” he asked.

“My ribs, I think.”

He ran his hands gently and expertly over her diaphragm, pressing a little, and she tried not to cry out when he came to the seat of the pain.

“I see,” he said, straightening. “I think we might be able to put that right without a great deal of trouble. What about the arm?”

“It’s rather painful—yes,” she admitted. “But I don’t think there’s anything broken. It’s only that I can’t move my fingers very well.”

“We’ll look at that too, when I’ve got Gowrie up to the house,” he decided. “You must promise me to stay where you are.”

She nodded.

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“There must be no doubt about it,” he told her as he turned away.

“Well, then, I promise.”

“That’s better. Mrs. Cameron will be back in a second or two. She’ll make you a cup of tea.”

He went out, leaving her alone in the warm room, and she closed her eyes, allowing her senses to swim, but just not passing into unconsciousness. The kitchen was the sort of room Ronald Gowrie had described to her when he had spoken of his mother’s home on Heimra Mhor, the real living-space of the house. Everything about it was warm and scrupulously clean, with brass gleaming from every corner to reflect the orange glow of the peat fire. There was a dresser with white and blue china along one wall and a “set-in” bed on the other, veiled by lace curtains and covered by a hand-made counterpane of fine crochet work. A loom and a spinning-wheel stood near the window, and a large black cat sat in the hearth gazing implacably at the two china dogs on the high chimneypiece above him.

When Mrs. Cameron came back into the kitchen Alison opened her eyes.

“I’m really quite able to get up,” she began, but the older woman shook her head.

“You lie where you are, and I’ll make you a cup of tea in no time,” she commanded, disappearing into an inner room. “Just let me get Mr. Blair a blanket or two and a wee drop of brandy, in case he needs it.”

“He’s given morphine,” Alison murmured automatically.

She could hear voices outside, Fergus Blair’s and another, possibly Dougal’s. He was no doubt Mrs. Cameron’s husband or her son. Neither of the men came back into the house, and she supposed that they must be improvising some sort of stretcher to carry down to the beach.

I wish I could go, she thought. I ought to be there with them, helping. But all she could do was to lie back and close her eyes again and try not to breathe very deeply because of the pain in her chest.

She might have drifted into sleep or even a brief semi-consciousness, because, when she looked up again, Blair of Heimra was standing in the room. It was full daylight, and the lamp which had been burning on the round table beside the window had been extinguished.

“Ronald?” she questioned rather desperately. “Have you brought him in?”

He came across to the sofa, standing between her and the light so that she could not see his face very clearly.

“Half an hour ago. We took him straight to Garrisdale. It was the best thing to do.” She thought that he spoke with pity, but she could not be sure. “He’s pretty badly damaged, I’m afraid.”

“Oh...”

All the blood had left her cheeks, and she clenched her hands by her side as she said:

“You think there isn’t a lot of hope?”

“Good gracious, no,” he said. “There’s always hope. What I was trying to say was that he may have to remain here for some time.”

Out of the blue, the memory of Ronald Gowrie’s voice came to her, fierce with bitterness:

“Seclusion is necessary to some people, and Blair of Heimra guards his assiduously!”

“And that would annoy you?” she heard herself saying with reflected bitterness. “Your island’s privacy would be hopelessly violated if we stayed.”

“That’s ridiculous,” he said briefly, frowning down at her. “There can be absolutely no question of personal feelings in this. I am a doctor, and my first duty is to a badly injured man. Surely you understand that? You’re a nurse.”

“Yes, I understand,” she told him weakly. “But I’m going to be something of a burden to you, too—at least till you can send for another plane to take me back to the mainland.”

She thought that he smiled, but could not quite be sure. She was very tired, and the pain round her ribs stabbed incessantly now.

“We’ll see about that in a day or two,” he said.
“
B.E.A. will probably send their own doctor out from Renfrew when they come to have a look at the Heron. Meantime,” he added somewhat dryly, “I can do my best to make you comfortable, even though you prefer to behave like an unwilling prisoner.”

That wasn’t it at all, she tried to tell him, but suddenly felt too weak to argue.

“This is going to be quite painful,” he told her almost ruthlessly as he rolled up his sleeves. “I’ll give you a shot of something when I can, but we’ll have to find out first where exactly the trouble is. There’s bound to be torn muscle, but we’ll see what we can do first to ease the pain.”

“I can’t remember falling,” she said vaguely as he swabbed an area of skin and ran a hypodermic needle expertly beneath the surface.

CHAPTER FIVE

WHEN Alison wakened the following morning she found herself strapped securely from just above her ribs to the top of her thigh. There was very little pain left. In fact, most of the discomfort she felt was in her arm, which had not pained her at all the day before.

Was it the day before? Had she slept all day and all night? She knew that it was early morning because it was cool and grey outside, and somewhere a cock had crowed.

Cautiously she looked about her. She had been moved from the kitchen—by whom?—to a small, airy bedroom in another part of the lodge. Upstairs, she imagined, because she could just see the tops of trees through the small lattice window on the flat wall, and a patch of sky which was rapidly turning blue. There was the smell of the sea, too, coming in over a weed-strewn shore.

The sea! She shivered as she thought of the events which had brought her here. What had happened to Ronald, and Ginger and the plane?

For a long time she lay re-living the nerve-shattering events of those last few minutes before the Heron had crashed, hearing the steady throb of the engines and experiencing again the intensity of the silence as they had cut out.

It was madness to keep thinking about it, she told herself, yet her mind reverted to those tensely-packed seconds of drama again and again. If it had not been for that soft spot in the sand they would probably have made a perfect landing. Ginger had said that, cursing the fate which had caused the wheels to touch at just that spot. There could be no reflection on Ronald Gowrie as a pilot. He had done a wonderful job against tremendous odds.

Had Fergus Blair told her the truth about Ronald?

She started up, only to find to her cost that she could not put any weight on her injured wrist. It was swathed expertly in an ordinary crepe bandage, so that she knew it hadn’t been broken, but her fingers were still stiff and rather useless.

Staring at the bandage, she smiled a little. How long was it since he had learned to do that? It was a tidy job, the sort of thing she would have expected of Blair, she supposed. He was so sure of himself.

But he had been kind, too. “This is going to be quite painful, but I’ll give you a shot of something when I can.”

The “shot of something” had kept her under all day and all night, letting her rest. She lay quite still, wondering about Fergus Blair, wondering what he was really like. Then she thought of Andrew, and her heart lifted. It would be good to see the child again.

Andrew’s wish had come true. He had wanted her to see Heimra Beag.

Fergus Blair had not been so keen. He hadn’t answered Andrew when the boy had begged him to invite her to Heimra.

And here she was—uninvited. An unwanted guest in his house. Well, if not exactly in his house, at least on his island.

Slowly and a trifle painfully she swung her bare feet to the floor. There was a sheepskin rug on the waxed boards and it felt warm and comforting to the touch.

When she had drawn a deep breath she crossed to the window to look out. The breath had been a little painful, but she could walk without difficulty, for which she was thankful.

She found her clothes on a wicker chair, neatly folded on the gay chintz cushion.

It was something of a struggle to get into them, and they fitted badly because of the bulky strapping over her ribs, but at least she could move about—go out, perhaps.

Alison went towards the door, to be met by a cheerful voice as she opened it.

“And now, what is this you are doing?” Kirsty Cameron demanded. “And Mr. Blair saying that you were to stay in your bed till he had seen you!” She set a breakfast tray on the table beside the bed. “You’ll be getting me into fine trouble with him!” she added with a smile. “
‘Kirsty,’ he said, ‘these are the strictest of orders I’m giving. She’s not to get up and go out before I have been to see her’.”

“But I’m perfectly all right, apart from the bandages!” Alison protested. “If I stayed in bed I’d feel a fraud, Mrs. Cameron.”

“All the same, Mr. Blair did not want you to go roaming all over the islands,” Kirsty admonished.

“Oh!”

So, that was it, Alison thought. It wasn’t her own welfare Fergus Blair had been worrying about, but his precious privacy. It was the fact that his island had been invaded in spite of every prohibition of which he could think, in spite of Coirestruan and the barrier tides. The airstrip which he had sought to deny to the islanders on Heimra Mhor had been used in an emergency, and she was there in consequence, but he would not have her roaming all over Heimra Beag if he could prevent it.

What was it that made Heimra Beag so precious to him? Of course, it was a lovely island. Green and gently undulating in the south, it rose to a rocky crest in the north which dropped steeply to the sea, and round it a score of tiny hidden bays made privacy complete.

Suddenly her desire to explore it, to capture at least a little of its gentle magic, was greater than her fear of Blair of Heimra’s possible displeasure.

“I’ve just got to go out, Mrs. Cameron,” she declared as she started to eat her breakfast. “When I first flew over Heimra on my very first flight with the Air Ambulance, I had a notion that they held something special for me. Fantastic, perhaps,” she smiled, “but now I feel that I have to prove whether it’s true or not.”

“Nobody who comes to the Islands ever goes away the poorer,” Kirsty said. “But I wish you would wait till Mr. Blair could take you himself.”

“He wouldn’t want to do that,” Alison said with conviction. “I can’t be anything more to him than—an interloper.”

“Ah, well, if you must,” Kirsty conceded with resignation. “I can tell him where you’ve gone. But I think you misjudge Mr. Blair. His only reason for forbidding a lot of people to come to the island is because of the birds and the children.”

She could have asked Kirsty more about Fergus Blair and his children, Alison thought as she went slowly down the narrow flight of wooden stairs which led into the kitchen, but somehow she didn’t want to do that. She wanted to go out and explore Heimra Beag alone.

“Mrs. Cameron,” she asked at the open door, “have you heard how Captain Gowrie is?”

“Mr. Blair’s got him up at the big house, but he says he’s not to be disturbed. Maybe you’ll be able to see him after you’ve had your walk, though,” she suggested, and Alison had to be content with that.

There was only one road as far as she could see when she had left the lodge behind. It appeared to go right round the island, but she did not hesitate about her direction once she was outside the gates. She went towards the craggy headland which formed the north end of the island, where hundreds of sea-birds clamoured and squawked among the rocks. They rose in a great cloud as she approached—terns and guillemots and little white-chested puffins, and all the gulls she could name, and more.

Never had she seen such a variety of birds and in such numbers. Fascinated and a little tired by her walk, she sat down on a tuft of grass among a patch of young heather shoots, watching them with the eager pleasure of a child, her lips parted, her hair blown back, her grey-green eyes alight with a new wonder.