Chapter 9
Hope that the war would be over by Christmas died as the twenty-fifth of December came and went.
News of it came sporadically - the sinking of ships, battles in places whose names meant nothing to the villagers - and settled into continuous grimness as the initial fever burned away.
The atmosphere in Invermory remained dark.
Men talked about the navy, blockades, and German brutality.
The word Hun began to appear in newspapers, and Rachel learned to keep her face blank in public, her mind focused only on her task at hand.
Her story - that Oskar had gone to report and she had heard nothing - seemed to have become part of the village’s accepted fabric.
In early January, a deep freeze settled over the north-western Highlands; even the sea iced at its edges, and the hills stood white and frigid.
Rachel put the hens in the peat shed, where it was marginally warmer, and walked less to the shops.
Sometimes, she took herself as far as the headland, wrapped in her warmest shawl, and stood looking out.
And each night, as the light failed over the west, she stood on the sand on her little beach, watching, as if the horizon might yet yield Oskar back.
Then one morning, a week later, she found his first note.
The wind off the Atlantic brought a freezing, needling, January rain that clung to shawls and seeped into stone the day that Rachel carefully picked her way along the path towards Calum Macrae’s cottage, carefully balancing the covered bread and soup pot.
Invermory had grown more sombre since the old man’s telegram had arrived; his son’s death had been the village’s first. The lad had been among the first from the parish to enlist, and France’s trenches had been quick to take him.
Since then, a few more local men had perished, if not from an enemy bullet, then from lice-induced trench fever, dysentery, influenza, trench foot, or simply the cold – frozen to death. Everyone knew the colour of those dreaded envelopes now.
Rachel had begun bringing him her soup on Thursdays after that, to give him both kindness and company, and to give the village proof of her unusual support, as, since the passing of his son, Calum’s hatred for the Germans was vitriolic.
And yet, he tolerated Rachel more than any other villager did, perhaps understanding that the war was hardly her lover’s fault, and that she, too, must be suffering.
She knocked, and let herself in at his answering grunt. The ubiquitous smell of peat smoke greeted her, mixed with that of salt-damp oilskins. Calum sat by the hearth mending a net in lamplight.
“You’ve a lot of holes to fix?” she asked.
“Aye,” he replied without looking up. “It keeps the hands busy, although the mind doesnae shut off.”
She set the pot near the fire. “Ham bone barley and carrot.”
“Extravagant,” he muttered. “In wartime.”
“Well it’s more a taste of ham than ham itself,” Rachel replied.
He fetched a ladle and bowls, and they ate mostly in silence at first. He was not a man for unnecessary speech, and grief had quietened him further. The ticking of the clock on the mantel filled the wordlessness between them. “You’ve still no heard?” he asked after a while.
She knew which absence he meant. “No,” she lied. “Nothing.”
“Aye. It’s hard thing, no knowin’.”
“Yes.” She kept her eyes on the steam rising from her bowl, hating deceiving him.
Outside, rain tapped against the tiny room’s single window, slivers of sea visible between the cottages beyond.
She made herself reach for bread, her heart thudding, the words on Oskar’s note whirling, memorised, in her head.
“I’ve noticed something strange,” she began. “Out on the loch.”
He looked up, interested. “Aye, an’ what’s that, lass?” he asked.
“I noticed there’s a boat been sitting beyond the Dowie’s Point headland these past nights,” she said, forcing her voice to be light. “There’s no fishing lights.”
“Aye, a trader,” he replied. “I’ve seen it.”
Of course you have, she thought. Fishermen measure the sea as farmers measure fields - any change registers.
“Danish, by the look o’ it,” he went on. “Neutral. Or says it is. It’s too steady for a weather shelter.”
She made a small frown crease her brow. “How can you tell?”
“Flag. Hull paint. Name on the stern when I glassed it.” He paused. “But traders dinnae lie quiet three nights in a row withoot sendin’ a boat ashore for water or word.”
The rain thickened, pattering against the window. She felt the moment hovering, a narrow bridge between silence and speech. She nodded, not wanting the conversation to pass like any other small talk of weather and vessels.
He got stiffly to his feet then and crossed to the window, looking out, although there was nothing to see in the rain.
Then he turned back to her. “Ye’re alone all the way oot there,” he said finally.
“An’ right close tae the water. Ye see things we canny, here in the village. And no lights on that boat, ye say?”
“That’s right.”
“Are ye no feart, a single lassie alone?”
She cupped her hands around her soup bowl. “Yes, I am afraid, because there’s talk of mines and signalling and God knows what else. And because if something comes of it and we’ve said nothing…” She let the sentence trail.
He nodded, understanding. “Yer man’s a German,” he stated suddenly then.
“Yes, he is.”
“An’ yet ye tell me about a strange-lookin’ vessel?”
“I’m Scottish,” she replied stoutly. “This is my home.”
Calum stared at her for a long time, then nodded slowly, as if assembling pieces.
“Ma laddie,” he said then, his voice thickening, “when he last wrote, talked aboot a quiet before an attack. Said ye could feel when somethin’ was no right, even if you couldnae name it.
This trader,” he continued, “doesnae feel right.”
Relief and dread tangled in her chest. “I don’t want to seem foolish,” she said.
“Ye’re no foolish, lassie.” He crossed back to the table and sat. “I’ll take the wee boat oot the morrow,” he said then. “At first light, as if for creels. I’ll take a closer look.”
She took a sharp breath. “You mustn’t endanger yourself.”
He gave a short, dry, almost humourous sound. “Do ye think I’ve much left tae endanger?”
Without thinking, she reached across the table and laid her hand over his. “I’m sorry,” she said.
He covered her fingers briefly with his gnarled hand, then withdrew it. “If it’s nothin’,” he said, “then it’s nothin’.”
“And if it isn’t?”
“Then I’ll mention it where it needs mentionin’. Tae the harbourmaster at Gairloch. Quietly.”
She nodded, exhaling with relief. She had done what Oskar had asked - burned the note and relayed its message exactly, word for word. She had simply been a pair of eyes on the water, and a voice that could carry suspicion without dragging his name behind it.
Their soup and bread finished, he moved back to the fireplace and resumed mending his net. “Ye’ve good eyes, Rachel,” he said after a long moment. “They’d see far better than ma old yins.”
She forced herself to steady. “It was just what I noticed.” When she got up to leave, the rain had eased.
“If ye see aught else, anythin’ oot o’ place, ye come and tell me, mind,” he instructed, when she reached the door.
“I will.” She stepped out into the drizzle, her heart beating hard against her ribs. Behind her, Calum’s cottage door closed with a solid, ordinary sound. Oh Lord! she prayed as she began the long walk home. If the navy intercepts that boat, please don’t let anything happen to Oskar! I beg you!
Out on the sea, beyond the Dowie’s Point headland, a Danish trader sat quietly at anchor. And at first light, an old, widowed, bereaved fisherman with nothing left to lose would row out for a closer look.