Chapter Five #2
He had one more errand on the island before he sailed back to the rock.
Walking across the machair, he looked for the Great House, the baroness’s home at Clachan Mor.
The island was not large, seven miles long and just three wide at its broadest point.
The manor house, he had discovered, was just two miles from the harbor that faced the rock.
Following the previous night’s rain, the sky was summer-blue and filled with puffy white clouds carried by brisk winds.
As he walked, he heard the soothing rush of the waves and the constant call of seabirds.
Glancing at gulls wheeling overhead, he remembered that the baroness seemed to care very much about the island, the rock, and the birds.
He could hardly blame her. Caransay had a strong, peaceful beauty, a balance of water, air, earth, rock, sunshine, and breeze.
The magic of the place was also due to its earnest, handsome people and their fascinating legends.
He would never deliberately disturb the beauty and serenity, no matter what the baroness thought.
Climbing a low slope, he saw a grand stone house on a heathery hill. A pathway led down to a small bay and a crescent of beach. He wished the baroness was home; he would knock on the door, preferring direct conversation to the delay of letters.
Strolling closer, he heard laughter and women’s voices, and soon saw women and children.
With them, hair a golden glow in the sunshine, Margaret MacNeill sat on a blanket on sand, legs curled under her skirt, a straw bonnet beside her.
She held a book in her hands as she watched two other women.
He recognized Norrie MacNeill’s wife and elderly mother playing with a chubby baby and a young boy.
A fourth woman waded in the water, her elaborate black swimming costume ballooning around her.
The little boy waved at Dougal, who lifted a hand in response, recognizing the bold wee lad who had climbed the headland the other day. The women turned, and Margaret stood quickly as Dougal crossed the beach toward them.
A breeze fluttered her hair and blew her skirt against her body, revealing long slender legs, graceful hips, taut body, firm breasts.
Lust plunged through him. She was honey bright and lovely, too much so, and he wanted her with a surprising quake of spirit as well as body as he recalled powerful shared kisses—
But those were followed by a stinging slap. The awkward matter between them could not be addressed here. He paused.
She stared at him, then walked to the water’s edge. Her attitude warned him to be cautious; it would need time to clear the matter between them.
The little fair-haired boy, dressed in short trousers and a linen shirt, padded barefoot over the sands toward him. “Hello! Are you Mr. Stoo-ar?” he called.
“Stewart, aye, lad. Who might you be, young sir?”
“Sean MacNeill, I am.” He puffed out his chest and pointed to himself.
“Norrie MacNeill is my great-grandfather, and he is a fisherman. I will be a fisherman someday too. Did you come here to catch a fish?” His English was good for such a small Hebridean.
Dougal smiled. He was inexperienced with children, knowing few of them, but judged this one to be five or six years old, a fine, fair, healthy child with wide, very green eyes.
A fearless creature, too, from the way he had swarmed up the rocky headland before Margaret had plucked him down.
Dougal bent to shake the boy’s hand. “Pleased to meet you, Master MacNeill. I came out to find Clachan Mor, hoping to see the lady who lives there.”
“I know her! She is my mother. She owns all this, every bit.” He spread his arms wide.
Mother! So the baroness had a son here, perhaps a husband? He was puzzled, but it was not really his business to know. “Is she here on the island, then?” Dougal asked.
“She’s here,” Sean said. He gestured vaguely behind him with a closed fist, then opened his fingers to reveal a periwinkle. “I found a shell. See?”
“Very nice! The lady is here? Which one?” Dougal asked, surprised.
The boy pointed toward the water, where Margaret MacNeill splashed barefoot in the surf, her back to them as she put on a straw hat against the sun.
Norrie’s wife and old mother were close to the water too, while the lady in the black costume walked farther out.
“The one in the water?”
“Aye,” Sean answered, distracted as he poked in the sand with his fingers. “I have other winkles, too. I have a whole bucket of them. Crabs too. Some are alive,” he added. “Come see.”
“I would like that. Is your mother the lady with the big hat?”
Sean glanced around. “Oh, that’s Berry.”
Confused by that, Dougal heard Sean’s name called as Thora MacNeill hurried forward to take the child by the hand. The elderly lady followed, moving fairly quickly given her age. Elga, he remembered.
“Sean, do not bother the gentleman,” Thora said. “Greetings, Mr. Stewart.”
“Good day, Mrs. MacNeill. And Mrs. MacNeill.” He nodded to both older women. Elga, the very old one, tiny and wrinkled, stared at him intently.
“Mr. Stoo-ar,” she said, her elderly voice shaking. “Left your great black rock, did you?”
“Aye. I will go back soon,” he said, wondering why she ogled him so.
“And sure you will,” Elga said.
“Come, Sean,” Thora said. “We’ll go down to the water the way you like.”
“Will you carry me the way you would carry old seanair out to his boat when you were young?”
She laughed and bent so Sean could clamber onto her back. Then she hefted the child, grabbed his legs, and began to walk. Dougal smiled and strolled beside her.
“So that is how Hebridean women bring the fishermen out to the boats?” He had seen fishermen’s wives bend to take their husbands on their backs, wading through the water to keep the men dry for the long day at sea.
Thora was wide and strong, and he could well imagine her toting long, lanky Norrie out to his boat for a day’s fishing.
“It is the way, aye,” she said.
“Young Sean says he wants to be a fisherman someday.”
“Och, the lady wants him to be educated. He already has a tutor, and he so small. He takes lessons at Clachan Mor when the lady visits.”
“Is his mother the baroness?”
She set Sean down at the water’s edge and tapped his bottom to send him on his way. “Did he say mother? Och, that lad! Just a kinswoman, she is.” She shrugged.
Dougal glanced toward the lady in the swimming costume, who now floated in gentle waves, wide straw hat shading her face. Along the lacy edge of the surf, Margaret strolled, lifting her skirt hem to splash along. He was sure she was ignoring him in particular.
“Aye. She will hire tutors for his cousin, Baby Anna, when she is older,” Thora said.
Elga followed them as they walked, now carrying the plump fair-haired baby.
“It is generous to educate them, but then they might want to leave the island when they are older. We have a good life on Caransay. The baroness made us safe here as her tenants, free from the land clearings that have gone on elsewhere. We make a good living from fish and lobster, and from the kelp and salt and birds’ eggs we collect and trade to the mainland.
We have nothing to worry about nowadays but the weather. ” She laughed.
“Wicked, our weather is,” the old one said. “Have you been caught in a storm, Mr. Stoo-ar?”
“Sometimes,” he answered.
“I knew it!” Elga said.
“It is truly a paradise, your island,” he said.
“You like Caransay,” Elga said. “You like the ocean.”
“Oh, aye. When I was a child, I swam like a fish.”
“I knew it!” Mother Elga grinned and shifted the baby on her hip.
Puzzled, Dougal held out his hands, thinking the child was a burden for so old a woman. “Shall I carry the little one for you?”
“You shall not have our babies!” Mother Elga snapped.
Startled, Dougal wondered if he had offended her by offering to take the weight of the baby off her old bones. Was there some island taboo against men holding children? Perhaps they had misunderstood his English.
The boy ran in and out of the lapping surf, going back and forth to Margaret. Out in the mild waves, the other lady’s head, capped in a wide straw hat, bobbed on the surface like a buoy. “I hope the baroness will give me a little of her time,” Dougal said.
“You must not disturb her!” Thora said. “She is a proper lady and does not want to be disturbed on her holiday.”
“Ah,” he said. “Perhaps I could call on her before she leaves the island.”
Mother Elga stepped closer, studying his face, then poked at his arm with a stiff finger. “Man of the sea,” she said. “Will you return?”
“She does not like visitors. Leave the lady be, sir,” Thora said.
“Go back to your rock, water-man.” Elga seemed to examine him, walking around him, carrying the baby. She stared at his booted feet, wet in the foamy surf. “Do you have webbed feet?”
Good lord, what a question. She was clearly eccentric in her old age. “No, madam. Perhaps you both could tell the lady that I will visit another time. Tell her I am not the ogre she believes.”
Elga spoke in Gaelic, and Thora answered. Elga grinned. “Kelpie!” She pointed to him.
“I will try, sir,” Thora said. Dougal wondered if she meant to help or hinder him.
He saw Margaret walking up the beach, calling to the boy. Behind her, the woman in black surged out of the water like a small glossy whale. He had not pictured Lady Strathlin to be quite so mature, Dougal thought tactfully.
“Turn away your eyes, sir,” Elga said. “She is not wanting a man to see her now.”
“Of course,” he said, turning.
Thora snatched up a blanket from the sand and hastened to meet the woman in the bathing costume, wrapping her in the covering. They walked together, pausing to talk to Margaret, who stood watching Sean, playing in a rocky tidal pool. Margaret looked toward Dougal then.
His gaze met hers. She stilled, and he sensed a message there. Wary. Fearful. That explained her reluctance to come near him. He had to find time to speak with her before too long. Just now, he was preoccupied with Lady Strathlin’s rejection—and his need to return to the rock soon.
“I had best go. Good day, madam,” he told Elga. He reached out and touched touch the baby’s soft pale curls. The little girl laughed, showing four tiny teeth.
Elga backed away as if he meant to snatch the baby. “Good day to you, water-man!”
He nodded and turned to go. Glancing again toward Margaret, he saw her pause to catch his gaze again. This time the look she sent was plaintive, full of longing and vulnerability. He felt the deep pull of it within.
On impulse, he whirled to walk toward her.