Chapter 9 #2
Normally, he visited the gym five or six times a week, and early starts were something he was used to, as well as late finishes – Beverly expected it.
A good workout on the treadmill followed by twenty minutes of weights set him up for the day.
He’d hardly run a step since he’d arrived in Duncoorie, and the heaviest thing he’d lifted was a fork to his lips, so fresh air and exercise would do him good.
Rocco was waiting outside the castle as instructed, on the dot at five o’clock the following morning.
It was already light but somewhat chilly, the sun not having yet poked its head above the mountains. The air had that peculiar still quality he associated with the dawn, despite the chirping and tweeting of numerous small birds in the surrounding trees and bushes.
A slim figure came into view, striding along the road, and his heart skipped a beat at the sight of her.
He found it annoying the way it kept doing that, but he couldn’t seem to help his reaction every time he saw her.
It didn’t help that today Giselle was wearing shorts, and when his eyes were drawn to her slender legs, he had a flashback of those same legs entwined around his waist. Oh, God…
‘Morning,’ he said. His voice was hoarse.
If she was surprised he’d turned up, she didn’t show it. ‘What have you got in there?’ she asked, nodding at his borrowed rucksack.
Cal hadn’t asked why he needed one, and Avril, who’d been manning the reception desk, hadn’t as much as blinked when he’d enquired about a flask yesterday evening.
Cook, with a suspicious expression, had wordlessly provided him with two lots of cheese and pickle sandwiches, wrapped in some kind of beeswax cloth to keep them fresh.
He’d stored them in the mini fridge in his room overnight, along with two slabs of moist sponge cake that he’d purloined from the kitchen.
He hoped Giselle liked strong coffee, but if not, he had a bottle of water with him.
And yes, he had been in the Scouts when he was a boy, although not for long.
‘Just a couple of things that might come in handy,’ he said in answer to her query, remembering how he’d ordered more food than he could have possibly eaten that day in Venice, when she’d knocked his table over.
Giselle had been (and still was) one of the most stunning women he’d ever met.
With her floaty white dress, silver hair and waif-like figure, she’d reminded him of an elf or a fairy, and he’d remembered thinking that Tolkien would have had a field day.
From her looks, Rocco had assumed she was Scandinavian, until she’d spoken, revealing a soft Scottish accent.
Giselle gave him a dubious look, her eyes more navy than blue in the morning light. Her hair was braided in a thick rope down her back, and her lips were shell pink.
Sod the sandwiches – Rocco wanted to eat her up. ‘Which way?’ he asked, his voice gruff.
She pointed north, towards the woodland. His woodland. He’d seen some of it on the first day when Cal had shown him around the estate using a golf buggy.
They set off down the track, the scent of earth and growing things filling his nostrils, along with the occasional waft of Giselle’s perfume, light and flowery.
The trees soon gave way to more open heathland of tussocky grass dotted with butter-yellow gorse, as the track joined a narrow, tarmacked lane.
Rocco sniffed, inhaling deeply. ‘What’s that smell?’
‘If you’re referring to the coconut and vanilla smell, it’s the gorse.’
Coconut and vanilla, that was it! ‘A heavenly scent for such a spikey plant. Those thorns look lethal.’
‘They are,’ she confirmed. ‘But wildlife love it. Birds nest in the bushes, bees love the flowers and red deer and rabbits will graze on it.’
Cal had also mentioned deer, and Rocco glanced around hopefully. ‘You won’t see them down here,’ she told him, correctly guessing what he was looking for. ‘They’ll be up on higher ground at this time of year.’
‘Pity. I would have liked to see one.’ His tone was wistful.
‘If you weren’t going back tomorrow, you could have asked Cal to take you. He knows all the best places. And if you wanted to see orca or dolphins, there’s a guy who runs whale- and dolphin-spotting trips. Maybe next time?’
‘Maybe.’ His reply was non-committal, although he was fairly sure he wouldn’t be returning to Skye. It was a shame, though, so perhaps one day he would pay it another visit and see more of the island. Or perhaps not; cities and culture were more his thing if he wanted a holiday.
The lane continued to run parallel with the loch, and Rocco had to admit that the scenery was outstanding. If it wasn’t for the road they were walking along, he could believe he was in the wilderness, because there were few signs of human habitation, just sky, sea, mountains and gorse.
At one point he asked, purely out of curiosity, ‘How much further?’ and when he was met with, ‘We’re not quite halfway yet,’ he began to wonder whether he’d brought enough food.
He estimated it would take another fifty minutes to get to where they were going, wherever that was. Luckily (for him, at least), there weren’t any steep climbs. The road was mostly undulating and tarmacked, so was easy underfoot.
But eventually the road ran out.
Beyond a metal kissing gate lay a dirt track through the tussocky grass, stony and uneven. Shaggy cows gazed at them through their fringes of ginger, chestnut or black hair, their jaws working as they chewed. Rocco eyed their long horns and solid bodies warily.
‘Those are the iconic Highland coos,’ Giselle said. ‘They’re placid enough.’
‘Hmm.’ Rocco wasn’t convinced, and he was relieved when they went through another small gate, which meant there was thankfully a barrier between them. The track was now more of a grassy path, intersected by a small stream with stepping stones, and ahead lay a dry-stone wall with a gap in it.
Beyond the wall the ground rose, and when they reached the top of the incline he was rewarded with a spectacular view, and he halted to take it in. ‘Oh, wow!’
In the distance was a crescent of beach nestled in a small bay. Emerald grass, azure sky, pale sand, and the sea was a bright turquoise where it met the beach, darkening to cobalt as the water deepened.
‘That’s where we’re going,’ Giselle said.
The stunning view was definitely worth the trek.
‘And we’ve got it all to ourselves,’ she added happily.
‘It’s a bit off the beaten track, so it’s never heaving, but give it an hour and there’ll be more people about.
This is why I come here so early, because there’s no one else around.
’ She beamed at him. ‘Just wait until you see what it’s made of. ’
The track led downhill to the shore, the water’s edge flanked by burgundy-coloured lines of seaweed along the high-tide mark, which lay on the dark volcanic rocks and pebbles.
The sea was calm, its glassy surface broken only by the gentle lap of small waves, and overhead a skein of geese flew wingtip to wingtip, low enough for Rocco to hear the wind through their feathers as their haunting calls broke the silence.
A hill rose behind the beach, a craggy backdrop, purple-hued with heather in the morning sun.
It was breathtakingly beautiful.
It wasn’t until Rocco set foot on the beach that he realised what Giselle had meant. ‘Are those shells?’ he asked, peering down for a closer look. The ‘sand’ consisted of broken shells, some of them quite large, others mere fragments, and was crunchy underfoot.
‘This place is called Coral Beach,’ Giselle said, kneeling and picking up a handful to show him.
‘But it’s not really coral. It’s the calcified remains of red coralline seaweed and millions of snail shells, crushed by wave action and bleached by sunlight.
Legend has it that crofters used to use it to spread on their land to improve the soil.
’ She allowed the fragments to trickle to the ground, then got to her feet and dusted her palm on the seat of her shorts.
Once again, his gaze was drawn to her legs, and once again he brushed the accompanying image away. ‘So, what are we looking for?’ he asked. ‘I know you showed me the blue glass you found, but what else should I be looking for?’
She gave him a quizzical look. ‘It was you who found the sea glass at the lighthouse on Murano.’
‘To be honest, I had no idea what it was. I just picked up some random stones because they looked nice.’
‘OK, let’s see if I can find some and I’ll show you, although we’ll probably have better luck among the rocks.’
Head down, eyes on the ground, he walked alongside her, so close they were almost touching, and instead of concentrating on what was underfoot, he found most of his attention was taken up with Giselle.
She was engrossed, her gaze focused, and he kept shooting her little glances out of the corner of his eye.
He couldn’t seem to stop looking at her.
‘Here’s a piece,’ she said, stooping to pick up a small bit of what seemed, to his inexperienced eye, to be a frosted pebble. He’d found something similar all those years ago, he recalled, and a heart-shaped red one along with some others.
She handed it to him, and he tried not to react as her fingers brushed the palm of his hand. Her touch was electrifying.
‘I know it doesn’t look much on its own, but you’ve seen what happens when several pieces are arranged together.’
‘Magic,’ he breathed. ‘That’s what happens.’
‘Pardon?’
‘It’s awesome,’ he backtracked. ‘Do you ever use the coral itself?’
The bleached strands of hard seaweed looked remarkably like real coral, with their twiglet shapes, and amongst them were hundreds of tiny shells.
‘Never. Taking a handful mightn’t seem like much, but if everyone did it, there’d soon be none left. I don’t take any shells from here, either. I occasionally use them in my pictures, but I’m really careful about taking too many. Glass, on the other hand… It’s an endless supply.’
She removed the fragment of glass from his hand and popped it into her canvas bag, and they carried on walking, eyes on the beach.
Finally, after an hour and several more ‘finds’, one of them being a fragment of what Giselle thought was costume jewellery – not glass but paste maybe, perhaps from a brooch or an earring – she called a halt, saying, ‘I hope you’ve got breakfast in that rucksack.’
Rocco’s eyes widened. ‘How do you know?’
‘Avril, via Cook. Otherwise, I’d have brought a snack myself. Cheese and pickle sandwiches?’
He nodded.
‘My favourite. Let’s eat it up there.’
Up there was the impressive hill on the northern end of the beach.
He must have looked as apprehensive as he felt (that hill looked steep), because Giselle said, ‘Don’t worry; its bark is worse than its bite. It’ll only take five minutes to reach the top, but the view is so worth it.’
Not wanting to appear a wimp in her eyes, he agreed, but even though the hike to the top couldn’t have been more than thirty metres, he was puffing like a steam train by the time they got there. He clearly needed to do more work on the stepper next time he went to the gym.
But once again, the view was astounding, and Rocco couldn’t think of anywhere better to eat breakfast.
Hardly able to drag his eyes away, he unpacked the rucksack. Before he ate, he took a long drink of water. It had been thirsty work hauling his backside up that hill.
‘It’s so peaceful,’ he observed, unwrapping his sandwich.
‘Shh. What can you hear?’
‘Nothing, that’s what—’
‘Listen,’ she urged, as he was about to take a bite.
He lowered the sandwich and did as he was told.
He could hear the wind, a gentle breeze playing about his ears, but he could also hear faint peeping sounds, and realised they were coming from the seabirds patrolling the shore now that the humans (in other words, he and Giselle) had left them in peace.
The sound of the waves carried on the wind, and he was surprised at how still the sea was, the wispy clouds above reflected on its mirrored surface.
A short distance offshore lay a low island, a ribbon of land sheltering the beach, and movement caught his eye, grey shapes on the darker rocks.
‘What are those?’
‘Seals.’
Awed, he turned to look at her. ‘Wow.’
‘They haul out onto the rocks to rest and sun themselves. When the tide is really low, you can wade across to the island. I wouldn’t recommend staying long, though, as you don’t want to get stranded.’
‘Couldn’t you swim back?’
‘Best not. The currents can be unpredictable in the channel.’
‘It really is wild,’ he marvelled. ‘And so beautiful.’ Suddenly he was glad he’d come to Skye, and hadn’t simply instructed Jermyns to sell the castle, sight unseen. He’d have missed out on all this beauty.
He would have missed out on seeing Giselle. As the thought slipped into his mind, he glanced at her out of the corner of his eye and faltered.
Once again something stirred inside him, but this time he couldn’t put a name to it. All he knew was that he wasn’t ready to leave Skye just yet.