Ruby
After a few hours of troubled sleep, I wake early the next morning.
I pull on my clothes and walk across the grass to Hanna’s door, the crunch of my boots on the gravel announcing my presence.
The farmhouse door stands slightly ajar, and I tap on it gingerly, calling a soft “Hello?” There’s no reply, but I can hear voices coming from the bedroom, so I head upstairs.
Then he grins at her. “Looks like you just might be needing a helping hand around here after all. Famous last words, hey, Hanna?”
She studiously ignores me. I feel excluded from their conversation and just a little miffed that she’s clearly called him instead of me, when I was the one who came to her rescue last night.
I hate to think what might have happened if I hadn’t been there, if she’d hit her head on the rocks and lain there until the tide came in…
. But then I remember the fear in her eyes, and a wave of compassion washes through me.
I sense she’s someone who needs patience and careful handling. And that, after all, is my job here.
“I’ll bring you some tea and toast, shall I, before we head to the hospital?”
She nods reluctantly, fiddling with the bandage covering her wrist and lower arm, still not looking at me. Eventually, though, she raises her head and fixes me with a beady glare, addressing me directly at last.
“You could give Pip his breakfast—you’ll find tins of dog food in the cupboard by the sink. And what I’d really like is my morning coffee. Do you know how to make a proper cup? You’ll find the beans in the freezer compartment of the fridge. There’s a grinder beside the toaster.”
It’s pretty ungracious, but at least she’s talking to me. Her accent is hard to place, a mixture of things: a Shetland lilt overlies the deeper-seated inflection, which sounds slightly foreign. If she wasn’t so cross and frightened, I think her voice would be rich and deep.
I shoot a glance at Jamie, but he just grins and raises his eyebrows quizzically. “Better do as she says, Ruby. She’s a stubborn old bird, your new employer.”
“I’m not her employer,” she snaps. “It wasn’t my idea to have her here.
Those bossy, interfering children of mine, thinking they know best…
” In her agitation, she gesticulates with her hands, momentarily forgetting her injury.
Whatever else she was going to say about her offspring is cut off by a gasp of pain.
She cradles her right wrist with the other hand, unable to conceal how much it’s hurting.
I keep my voice gentle, trying to calm her. “Right, then, you can tell me what to do. I’m here now, so I might as well learn how to make a proper cup of coffee. I could certainly do with one myself.”
“I need to be getting off,” Jamie says, glancing at his watch. “I’ll let the chickens out and give them their feed on the way past, and then you can tell Ruby what else needs doing when you get back.”
I follow him downstairs. “Thanks for that,” I say. “She’s not the easiest of patients, is she?”
His gaze is calm and even, but his smile fades. “She’ll come round. And when you get to know her, you’ll understand. It’s a good thing you’re here, Ruby.” I can’t miss the concern that flickers in his face for the briefest of moments.
I nod. “Perhaps now she’ll realize I’m on her side and give me a chance. She seems a formidable lady.”
He laughs, and his tone is friendlier as he says, “That’s an understatement.
She’s lived here more than fifty years now and been running the place single-handed ever since her husband, Euan, died—must be about six years ago.
Robert and Helena have been on at her for a while to sell up and move to a nursing home in Edinburgh, nearer to both of them.
There’s no way she’d ever agree to that.
You’re the compromise. It’ll be hard work, though,” he warns.
“Crofting’s no easy ride, especially in Shetland.
Farming a piece of wild land, tending the sheep, and trying to coax what you can to grow, despite everything the weather throws your way.
I hope you don’t have any romantic notions of it being like some sort of cross between Gardeners’ World and Balamory. ”
His words annoy me again, and I’m about to protest that I’m far more capable than he thinks, but he’s already walking away, disappearing around the side of the house.
I busy myself in Hanna’s kitchen, putting bread in the toaster and trying to work out how the old-fashioned coffee pot works, hearing a frenzy of squawks from the henhouse as its inhabitants are liberated.
I grind the beans, fill the base of the pot with water, and tamp the grounds into a central section, then set it on the stove and light the gas.
The room—which looks even more cluttered by daylight than it did last night—fills with a rich aroma as the coffee brews.
I feed Pip who, unlike his mistress, seems happy to see me, although I suspect a good deal of his enthusiasm may well be down to cupboard love.
Then I set a plate and some cutlery on a tray and sigh.
I square my shoulders and march back upstairs, determined not to be daunted by a cantankerous little old lady.
After breakfast, once I’ve helped Hanna get dressed, we set off. It takes me a while to get the hang of the clutch on Hanna’s ancient car, but half an hour later, we reach Lerwick without too many lurches or engine stalls, and she directs me to the hospital.
Accident and Emergency seems surprisingly busy for a Sunday morning, until I realize that Saturday night is clearly a wild time on the streets of the islands’ capital, many of the casualties only making it to the hospital in the aftermath.
As we sit and wait, slumped on hard plastic chairs between a girl with a broken ankle and a guy who holds a wad of kitchen towel to his bloodied nose, I feel a growing sense of anxiety rising inside me.
I hate hospitals at the best of times. The smell of disinfectant and overcooked food makes my stomach churn, and recent memories of Lucy flood back.
I think about the impossible decisions ahead of me, too, the choices I’ll have to make. Try as I might to avoid them, they encroach like a slowly rising tide as time ticks on, and I feel the dread swell deep within me.
As the waiting room slowly empties, I’m so wrapped up in controlling my own emotions that it’s a while before I notice Hanna is shaking.
She’s hunched over, too, shrinking into the chair, as if she’s trying to make herself invisible.
I take a clean blanket from a nearby trolley and drape it round her shoulders, careful not to touch her sore arm.
I suppose it might be the aftereffects of her accident, or perhaps hospitals make her feel as sick and anxious as they do me.
“Hanna.” She looks up at me as I softly get her attention. “May I ask what you were doing going out onto the island in the middle of the night?”
“I was looking for the alamooties,” she replies, her voice wavering.
Ah, I think. Maybe she has a concussion from her fall, as well. She’s talking nonsense.
But she must notice my blank expression, because she goes on to explain, slowly and clearly, as if I’m the one who’s lacking on the brains front. “That’s what they call storm petrels in Shetland. They nest among the stones of old walls, like the remains of the broch on the island.”
So those tumbledown walls were once an Iron Age fort.
I’ve read there’s a much bigger and more intact one on the island of Mousa, which lies just off the eastern edge of Mainland.
As she talks, her voice begins to strengthen.
I notice the trembling has calmed a little, and her eyes shine with a light that’s not been there before.
“I see,” I say. “And did you find these…what did you call them?”
“Alamooties. Yes, I did.” She turns her face toward me and actually smiles.
It’s the first time I’ve seen her do so.
“They’re back for the summer. We had them in Norway, too.
My father used to say my sister and I were like a pair of storm petrels—happiest out on the water, in the long days of summer. ”
As her expression lights up and the frown lines disappear, I can see how beautiful she must once have been.
Her face is deeply weathered, by a lifetime of working outdoors, I presume, but her high cheekbones and wide-set blue-grey eyes give her a dignified, patrician look, and there is a natural grace to her posture as she sits up straighter, warming to her subject.
“I’d love to see them sometime,” I say. “Perhaps we can go across together one night and you can show me where they roost?”
Immediately she’s on the defensive again. Her expression grows wary, and she frowns. “They’re a secret. You’re not to tell anyone they’re there. Otherwise we’ll be overrun with tourists trampling all over the place, wanting to see them for free instead of paying for the Mousa boat trip.”
“Of course,” I assure her. “My lips are sealed.”
So now I know the faint trace of an accent I’d detected is Norwegian.
Somehow it doesn’t surprise me to learn that my feisty and stubborn charge is of Viking descent, like so many Shetlanders.
I’m prevented from asking more questions, though, by the arrival of a nurse with a clipboard.
“Mrs. Williamson?” she asks. “Please follow me.”
She leads us to a curtained cubicle, where she carefully removes the bandaging from Hanna’s arm, very gently touching the swollen flesh around the wrist. “Ouch,” she says.
“You’ve certainly given it a good bash, haven’t you?
You’ll be having an X-ray, and then we’ll get the doctor to see what’s needing done. ”
After the X-rays are taken, Hanna sits trembling, her left hand wrapped protectively around her damaged right arm as we wait in the corridor outside the radiology room for the film to be developed. I try to get her talking again as a distraction.
“So did you grow up in Norway?” I ask.