Wild Island (3 page)

Before them stretched a valley, broad but clearly denned with high mountains on either side. Glen Bronnack, valley of weeping, but looking happy enough now. Jemima knew all about it from Charles Beauregard's original letter. The road stretched forward, winding, until it vanished behind a wall of mountain. The mountains themselves were covered with dark trees, then grasses, then grass and rocks, then pure rock. There was heather-yes, it really was heather-that brilliant purple flower. The sky was still the improbably vivid blue it had been since her arrival in Scotland a few hours earlier.

There was a feeling of pristine innocence about the scene.

Once again Jemima Shore thought: this is Paradise. This is what I've come to find.

'Aye, yon's a beautiful glen true enough,' said Duncan, getting out of the car. He returned with an ever older version of himself-Old Duncan perhaps?-who was unlocking the padlocked gate.

'There's many a mon would commit murder to own a bonnie glen like that,' continued Duncan. 'And those were Colonel Henry's own words to me. The very day that Mr Charles Beauregard was drowned. And him on his way to London, and never knew the poor laddie was dead in the river.'

So saying, Young Duncan got behind the wheel again and started to drive purposefully towards Jemima's Paradise.

CHAPTER 3

Nature red

A bird rose above them into the azure sky. It seemed to hang painted above the mountains. A hawk? An eagle? Jemima knew even less about birds, she realized, than she knew about dogs.

'Colonel Henry getting the property. Of course you'd no be agreeing with all that,' observed Young Duncan. There were silver larches, she thought, or birches-anyway exquisitely beautiful trees and in such profusion, lining the road and beginning to hide the river bed. The occasional glimpse of the water showed her, however, that the gorge was deepening, the torrent increasing. The sun still shone. Jemima felt in that kind of mood when she knew that the sun would shine for ever. For her, and never mind the fact that it was Scotland. Silver and gold. The sun on the trees and dappling the water. But in patches of shadow the water was so black that she could not guess at its depth.

'You'd no agree with that,' repeated Duncan with gloomy satisfaction.

'Inherited wealth ?' enquired Jemima cautiously. Experience had taught her that radically left-wing views were frequently ascribed to those who appeared on the box, without any evidence that they actually held them. Not, however, on the whole by the Duncans of this world. More by the 
Colonel Beauregards. She was slightly surprised to find Duncan the victim of the fashionable delusion about left-wing trendies. Jemima herself, while she had never yet voted Conservative, had years ago inherited nearly £10,000 on the deaths of both her parents in a car crash. It had bought the lease of her flat.

'Women's rights, now. That's what you'll be for, I'll be thinking. My wife watched your programme the other night. She found it most instructive.'

The road was starting to ascend and curve at the same time. Duncan warmed to his theme, and turning his head on the word 'instructive', produced a dramatic roll of the car. It was not, Jemima felt, an ideal time for the discussion of women's rights.

'So you'll be thinking Miss Clementina Beauregard should inherit the property,' continued Duncan, nodding vigorously and slewing the wheel to navigate a particularly sudden corner. 'And so will she be thinking the same, I'll be bound. And so will she.'

He cackled. There was no other word for it. 'And there'll be others thinking that on the Estate too, mind you. Colonel Henry is a fine gentleman. I'm no saying any different. But there will be those saying that it should go to the lass all the same. Seeing as her father Colonel Carlo, who was a hero, as I was telling you, built the Estate up when he was young, and her mother, who was an American lady, verra rich, the sort they have over there, made it all into such a fine place.'

Jemima made a sympathetic noise. She was now looking over the tops of the larches. The bird, her bird, still hovered in the sky. She had no idea of its height.

'Ah the puir wee girl,' said Duncan, turning his head again to look at Jemima and adopting a sentimental tone rather different from his normally precise Scottish utterance. 'To lose her brother and home and all, in one fearful day. It'sno wonder she's become a little touched.'

'Touched ?' And now there was another bird. Twisting and turning with its pair.

'Barricading herself in. Says she won't give up the Castle to the devil himself. And worse. Aye, the language of the lasses these days. It's the television of course.' Aware of his solecism Duncan continued hurriedly, 'Or so my wife says. But I say they have to learn it somewhere and you can hear worse in Glasgow any Saturday night. As I was saying, Miss Clementina is possessed of Colonel Carlo's, guns there. The famous Beauregard Armoury. You'll have heard of that now, Miss?'

Jemima shook her head.

Guns did not interest her, nor did shooting as a sport. Although it was August, and judging from the gun-cases on the platform at Inverness there was a good deal of it around, she had no intention of joining in anything so lethal herself. Fishing-now that was a sport for a detached and contemplative soul in a Highland environment.

I don't know whether you are a fisherwoman [Charles Beauregard had written in his original letter], but there is not much fishing at Eilean Fas. It's also rather dangerous in places. You have to watch your step... Still, Bonnie Prince Charlie is said to have enjoyed the fishing at Eilean Fas, according to the legend. We even have a
14
lb stuffed salmon in a case at the Castle and firmly labelled 'Caught by HRH Prince Charles Edward Stuart (HM King Charles ill of Scotland) April
15
1746
.
That was Mother's doing. The only question was whether she caught the fish herself on the home beat or got the ghillie to do it for her. The Eilean Fas story has to be nonsense because no one has caught a salmon
off
the island in years, in spite of many efforts to do so. The river is too deep and too fast. The Estate Office will give you a prize of
£
100
if you do. Then we can put up the rent.

Memories of that original rather jolly letter reminded Jemima that she had quite looked forward to meeting Charles Beauregard. If not for too long or too often. Drowned. She wondered suddenly how and where he had been drowned. Not fishing, she hoped, in the dangerous water off Eilean Fas. Jemima shivered, and fixed her eyes once more on the pair of birds hovering and fluttering. Even as she watched, one of the pair made an astounding sharp, almost vertical dive to the ground. She very much hoped it was not a bird of prey.

Dogs, guns and even birds belonged to a side of country life of which she knew little. It was certainly not nature red in tooth and claw which she had come to appreciate, but Paradise, a primitive untouched Eden, a kind of Scottish Forest of Arden, in which Young Duncan could perhaps be Touchstone (a Touchstone who watched telly). She would perhaps be Rosalind in her beige doublet and hose.

Rosalind - come to think of it, Miss Clementina Beauregard was probably the true Rosalind round here. Wasn't the original plot of As
You Like It,
as far as she could recall, the dispossession of Rosalind by her father's brother? At least this Miss Beauregard was a woman of spirit. Barricading herself in indeed! Rosalind had merely taken herself off to the Forest of Arden.

Duncan swerved, apparently to avoid a rabbit. But it turned out he had swerved in order to kill it.

'Diseased. Best dead,' he said briefly.

'But not us,' Jemima wanted to add. The swerve had brought them perilously near the precipice. She thanked her lucky stars that the road through Glen Bronnack, the Valley of Weeping, had proved empty indeed. A car coming the other way would surely have been fatal. Perhaps the road was treated like a single-line railway track ? With only one car on the stretch at a time.

The car screeched to a halt. They were on the very corner of the steepest turn yet.

'There, do you see it now?' cried Duncan with enormous satisfaction. To her absolute horror, Jemima saw beside the road the carcase of what had once doubtlessly been a sheep. Surely, he couldn't be—

But Duncan was gazing at the new view before him. He must have seen it-she had no idea-a thousand times, ten thousand times if he had been brought up here, but Duncan was gazing at the prospect before him with all the wonder and delight of some Highland Cortes.

The final corner had brought them into a different terrain. It was as if they had passed through a mountain barrier or pass. Below them the land dropped away down to the river. Above them still soared the mountainside, with its trees running up to the stone level, then halting. But Jemima's attention was concentrated on the new fertility of this plain, the winding placid pattern of the river, looking like something in a mediaeval psalter in which the figure of a pilgrim might be seen at various stages ofhisjoumey. In the centre of this valley the river broadened out into a wide lake, on which could be seen pine trees, rhododendrons, other bushes more domestic than wild. Overlooking all this romantic perfection in which the sun still shone with a remorseless brightness out of its blue sky - so that she was beginning to feel she was in Greece rather than the Highlands of Scotland - was a gigantic Victorian castle.

Be-turreted and be-pinnacled, it dominated the landscape. It also looked exactly like a castle in a fairy story, from which the boy adventurer might try to rescue the princess. There was much of fantasy, nothing rough, bleak or mediaeval about it. In fact it was not even grey, like the Scottish stones surrounding it, but red, rich dark red.

Casde Beauregard: a nineteenth-century structure. A previous edifice on the same site was visited by Bonnie Prince Charlie in the course of his peregrinations round the Highlands-at any rate according to the
Northern Guide. ‘Oui, c'est un beau regard
he was supposed to have observed to some ancestor of her host's at the time. What appreciation of natural beauty historical royalty always managed to fit into the busiest schedule, and how they preserved their gracious royal good humour in the tightest corner...

If the view itself was tranquil, there was nothing particularly peaceful about the structure of this castle. From every red turret seemed to spring another turret like a series of acrobats. Even the pinnacles gave you the impression that, like some form of life, they might be spawning and proliferating while your back was turned. One large central layer appeared to occupy the role of keep. There was a flagpole on the highest turret and a flag which, however, was not stirring in the windless day.

'A fine property!' said Duncan with undisguised approval, smacking or rather chewing his lips. 'There's many Glasgow businessmen, or them from the South, would pay a fine price for it. An Arab, mebbe, looking for a place for his harem.'

Well, thought Jemima, that's one way of putting it. That's how he measures his approval.

'You can't blame a lass for wanting to hold onto it, now, can you?' went on Duncan.

In the foreground Jemima suddenly noticed a small whitewashed church, oblong, like a child's building brick. Arranged neatly around it were some grey stone graves. And a very high fence. The fence looked old.

'That barrier,' she enquired. 'So high—?'

'The church you'll be meaning. Oh, it's the deer come and eat the flowers', said Duncan briefly. 'They're unco' fond of flowers, deer. And young trees. You'll find that quick enough on Eilean Fas.'

Jemima thought poetically she would enjoy the acquaint-anceof the deer on Eilean Fas. As wild creatures, they were welcome to the inappropriate flowers of civilization as far as she was concerned.

But the church-and this was the day of Charles Beauregard's funeral, as she had already discovered to her cost. Was he to be buried here? Presumably Colonel Henry and Ossian Lucas had talked of the Glen Bronnack church. And would Miss Clementina Beauregard, then, not be attending, barricaded within her be-turreted fortress? She must have a pleasant vista for a siege.

Jemima was still meditating on the prospect before her, framed by the purple mountains at the head of the valley, a few of them snow-capped despite the season, when the car screeched to a halt. For a moment she thought that Duncan had actually hit something. Then she realized that they had been quite literally waved down.

Jemima gazed at the flag, which was made easy for her by the fact that the young man in question was now holding it aloft. Like the graffiti at Inverness Station, it was emblazoned in scarlet, with the same obscure emblem beneath. 'Up theRftd Rose', it proclaimed.

'Up the Red Rose,' repeated the flag-bearer.

'And may the Red run White,' replied Young Duncan with great fervour.