Ruby
As the short weeks of summer draw to a close, the pace of work on the croft seems to intensify.
There’s the sense that time is limited now, and the endless days begin to balance themselves out again as the nights return.
Autumn is on the way, and beyond it lies the darkness of winter, months when the daylight will dwindle to just a few precious hours, time that will be treasured rather than squandered.
Hanna’s mood has been darker, too, but I suspect it has more to do with the evening I spent at Greystane House than with the tipping of the seasons.
Trying to redeem myself, I work alongside her, harvesting onions, potatoes, and kale, freezing what we can and making jars of rowan jelly and bramble jam.
She’s preoccupied, though, and when I try to coax her to tell me more of her memories of what happened when she returned to Norway, she shuts me out.
I feel as if I’m on the board of a game of snakes and ladders.
I’d been making good progress until I landed on the head of a snake and slipped all the way back down to the beginning.
That same snake attempts to make more trouble, driving up to the farmhouse one day as we’re stacking peat in the porch by the front door, which Isobel’s husband Geordie has brought down from the castings for us.
I’ve learned to tell the difference between the brown, mossy peats, which are good for starting fires, and the dense blue peats, which are used for baking, as they produce a steady and more intense heat.
Donald Kilgour steps out of his car carrying a pile of the art books he’d shown me on that evening when I joined him for dinner.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Williamson,” he says, his tone falsely friendly. “A busy time for you, I see, but then it always is, of course. I was just bringing Ruby these books. She expressed an interest in them when she visited Greystane the other evening.”
The lines drip from his tongue, poisoning Hanna’s mood, and I can see how she bristles with anger, directed toward both him and me.
“That’s very kind of you,” I say. “But I won’t deprive you of them. We’re far too busy with everything here.”
A flicker of annoyance passes across his face as he grasps that I’m not going to play his little game.
“You may feel very differently in a couple of months’ time,” he says, with forced jollity.
“You’ll find you have plenty of time on your hands when winter comes.
” I hold up my palms, which are covered with peat dust, and shake my head.
“Ah, well, it was just a thought,” he says, smoothly regaining his composure.
“It’s a shame there won’t be time for you to come for dinner again one evening, Ruby, before I leave for London.
I’m off tomorrow. I like to spend the winter there and escape the dark months here.
” He gets back into his car and drives away.
As we carry on with our peat-stacking, I say to Hanna, “For the record, I will never be having dinner with him again. I’m sorry, I didn’t know quite how unpleasant that man is.”
She grunts, briskly clapping her hands together to shake the dust from them as if she’s ridding herself of him, too.
But she relents enough to say, “He’s a threat to this whole community, but it’s Igdrasil he’s targeting for now.
He knows it won’t be long before I can no longer keep the croft going, and Lord knows I’ve no one to pass it on to.
He has all the crofters in his sights. In time, he’ll pick each of us off, one by one, and turn the whole place into a desert, running his sheep across everything and overgrazing the land. ”
I nod. “I understand that now.”
She scrutinizes me carefully. Then, grudgingly, she seems to thaw a little more. She turns away, saying, “Well, my advice is to stay away from him. Right, then, I’m going to see Geordie and Isobel. We need to discuss when he can bring the tractor to cut the hay meadow. Do you want to come too?”
I metaphorically seize with both hands the ladder of trust that’s being offered again and clamber up it, relieved to be in her good books once more.
I don’t think I’d understood how much her approval means to me until I’d lost it.
Hearing some of her story has given me deep respect for the determination and integrity that lie at the core of her character.
“Bring a bag,” she says. “We’ll pick rosehips on the way, and we can take some to Isobel.”
We meander along the road, foraging in the hedgerow as we go, and to my relief I find she’s forgiven me enough to tell me what happened after she left Lunna with her wireless set and caught the Shetland Bus back to Norway.