Chapter Eight
As the last guests drifted away, Bella found her fiancée sitting on a bench at the edge of the courtyard. She slid into the space alongside him, leaning in towards his body. ‘How are you doing?’
He shrugged. ‘I keep thinking about what McKenzie said.’
‘The guy who wants to buy this place.’
‘Well not so much this place. More the land.’ Adam shook his head. ‘That wouldn’t be right. Splitting the land from the house. But…’ He closed his eyes.
‘But what?’
‘I know Grandmother isn’t having any of it, but McKenzie definitely reckoned Father was thinking about it.’
Bella wasn’t sure what all that meant for Adam. ‘He didn’t mention it to you.’
He shook his head. ‘But… honestly I hadn’t talked to him that much lately. Nothing happened… you know. I was busy and he was never big into phoning. And he wouldn’t go near social media so…’
‘So maybe he was thinking about it?’
‘Maybe. It doesn’t seem…’ He turned to Bella. ‘Are you OK to walk?’
‘Yep.’ She stuck out her foot. ‘Fully recovered.’
‘Then I want to show you something.’
She followed him out of the castle, but instead of turning to the road or down to the riverside, or jumping in the aged Land Rover, Adam turned the other way, across a field on the castle side of the river, and up a steep path. He paused here and there to take Bella’s hand and help her scramble up where the path all but vanished and they had to clamber over rocks. Eventually they came to a stop at the top of a high cliff. Bella spun around to get her bearings. She’d walked this way with Dipper before. It was already one of her favourite views around Lowbridge. The ever-changing blues and greys of the sky and the way the colours bounced off the water and deepened and intensified drew her here. Even so she didn’t quite know what she was looking out at. The lines between lake and sea and headland and island seemed to blur here, leaving Lowbridge sitting on its outcrop like a single solid thing in the middle of this space between the sea and the land.
Adam took her hand and pointed with his free arm towards the island opposite them. ‘That’s Raasay. Beyond that is Skye, and then Uist and then… well, America, no Canada I guess.’ He turned her around to look back towards the castle. ‘This inlet is Loch Abercross.’
‘I thought loch meant lake.’
‘It does. Kind of.’ Adam was suddenly energised, pointing out features as he described the landscape. ‘This is a sea loch. Abercross means at the mouth of the cross. It’s a bit anglicised but the river is the Crosan, so it’s at the mouth of the Crosan. And so originally this would have been Aber Crosan Castle. Like centuries ago, and there would have been a tiny settlement over here. Maybe a few fishermen, not much else, but then the story goes that the first baron fell in love with a girl from the village but her father was dead against it.’
Bella laughed. ‘Dead against a baron? Tough crowd.’
‘He had her engaged to a nice fisherman’s son from the next cottage along. But she loved the baron and he loved her, and he built the very first Low Bridge across the river so he could visit her even after she was forced to marry the fisherman’s son…’
‘Bastards.’
‘Quite. Even after she was forced to marry the fisherman, the baron would still creep into the village to see her, until one day her fisherman husband went out to sea and never came back.’
‘That’s convenient.’
‘Not for him.’
‘Fair point.’
‘Anyway that meant the girl was free to marry her baron. Not very long after the wedding she had a baby.’
‘How long is not very long?’
‘Well close enough that nobody was ever quite sure whether the son she had was really the baron’s or whether he was the fisherman’s boy. Either way, the baron loved him and raised him as his own.’
‘Good baron.’
‘Yeah. He did the right thing. I mean, assuming he didn’t have the fisherman bumped off. There’s a lot of that with your early Scottish lairds.’
‘Bumping off fishermen?’
‘Bumping off love rivals. Any sort of rival really. They were usually rival lairds though.’ He shook his head. ‘Anyway, my father told me that story when I was about seven or eight years old. The point, he said, was that it meant that we weren’t lords over the village. We’re not above it. We’re part of it. They’re part of us. Whether we’re descended from that fisherman or not doesn’t matter, because we’re all part of one thing. We’re not in charge of Lowbridge. We…’ He stopped.
‘What?’
‘It sounds ridiculous.’
‘We are Lowbridge. The village is the house. The house is the land. It’s all one thing.’
Finally Bella thought she might be beginning to understand. ‘And so selling part of it is hard to get your head around?’
‘Something like that.’
She nodded. ‘Like when you saw the bridge all broken down.’
‘What?’
‘Well, the bridge represented how everything’s linked together didn’t it? The community, and the castle and the landscape.’
‘Yes, and not just represented it. It was the connection. Literally. Without it, how does anyone come from one to the other? It’s like pulling up the drawbridge and saying, “We’re separate from you.”’
The understanding that was trickling into Bella’s head started to crystallise. ‘And selling off part of the land rips the whole thing apart?’
He nodded.
They sat next to one another staring out across the loch. Bella thought she was starting to understand. It wasn’t just that the village and the castle and the land were all one. It was that Adam was too. He wasn’t the lord of Lowbridge. He was Lowbridge.
And that meant they weren’t going back to Edinburgh, were they? There was, Bella saw now, no way she could ask him to leave. If Adam was her future, her future was here. She stared out across the bay, and tried to imagine what a life here might look like. Was she ready for her life to be Ladies’ Group and community fundraisers and village gossip? Was she ready to spend her days with one man, working to make this castle a place fit for the twenty-first century, working to make Lowbridge come to life and retain its place at the heart of a community, working to make it a place where, one day a very very long time in the future, her own child might become the next Baron Lowbridge?
‘What are you grinning at?’
Adam’s question pulled Bella out of her reverie. She was grinning, wasn’t she? She rested her head against his shoulder. ‘I didn’t realise that I was.’
Was Bella ready for all that? Maybe that smile meant she was.
‘I think I need to see McKenzie’s place.’
Bella could understand that. From what she’d heard at Ladies’ Group the McKenzie estate was a well-oiled money-making machine, exactly what Lowbridge wasn’t. Checking out the enemy was a good idea. Even if they didn’t want to go in the same direction, there were bound to be ideas they could repurpose and adapt. Looking out at the view from the clifftop above the castle the possibilities seemed endless. Weddings, weekend breaks, a teashop – a thousand and one ideas were sparking through Bella’s mind…
‘Let’s go then.’
‘Right now?’
No. It had been a long and tiring day already, and Bella could see that her fiancé needed to rest. ‘Tomorrow?’
He nodded. ‘Tomorrow.’