The Wild Island Page 3

  Jemima made a sympathetic noise. She was now looking over the tops of the larches. The bird, her bird, still hovered in the sky. She had no idea of its height.

  'Ah the puir wee girl,' said Duncan, turning his head again to look at Jemima and adopting a sentimental tone rather different from his normally precise Scottish utterance. 'To lose her brother and home and all, in one fearful day. It'sno wonder she's become a little touched.'

  'Touched ?' And now there was another bird. Twisting and turning with its pair.

  'Barricading herself in. Says she won't give up the Castle to the devil himself. And worse. Aye, the language of the lasses these days. It's the television of course.' Aware of his solecism Duncan continued hurriedly, 'Or so my wife says. But I say they have to learn it somewhere and you can hear worse in Glasgow any Saturday night. As I was saying, Miss Clementina is possessed of Colonel Carlo's, guns there. The famous Beauregard Armoury. You'll have heard of that now, Miss?'

  Jemima shook her head.

  Guns did not interest her, nor did shooting as a sport. Although it was August, and judging from the gun-cases on the platform at Inverness there was a good deal of it around, she had no intention of joining in anything so lethal herself. Fishing-now that was a sport for a detached and contemplative soul in a Highland environment.

  I don't know whether you are a fisherwoman [Charles Beauregard had written in his original letter], but there is not much fishing at Eilean Fas. It's also rather dangerous in places. You have to watch your step... Still, Bonnie Prince Charlie is said to have enjoyed the fishing at Eilean Fas, according to the legend. We even have a 14 lb stuffed salmon in a case at the Castle and firmly labelled 'Caught by HRH Prince Charles Edward Stuart (HM King Charles ill of Scotland) April 15 1746. That was Mother's doing. The only question was whether she caught the fish herself on the home beat or got the ghillie to do it for her. The Eilean Fas story has to be nonsense because no one has caught a salmon off the island in years, in spite of many efforts to do so. The river is too deep and too fast. The Estate Office will give you a prize of £100 if you do. Then we can put up the rent.

  Memories of that original rather jolly letter reminded Jemima that she had quite looked forward to meeting Charles Beauregard. If not for too long or too often. Drowned. She wondered suddenly how and where he had been drowned. Not fishing, she hoped, in the dangerous water off Eilean Fas. Jemima shivered, and fixed her eyes once more on the pair of birds hovering and fluttering. Even as she watched, one of the pair made an astounding sharp, almost vertical dive to the ground. She very much hoped it was not a bird of prey.

  Dogs, guns and even birds belonged to a side of country life of which she knew little. It was certainly not nature red in tooth and claw which she had come to appreciate, but Paradise, a primitive untouched Eden, a kind of Scottish Forest of Arden, in which Young Duncan could perhaps be Touchstone (a Touchstone who watched telly). She would perhaps be Rosalind in her beige doublet and hose.

  Rosalind - come to think of it, Miss Clementina Beauregard was probably the true Rosalind round here. Wasn't the original plot of As You Like It, as far as she could recall, the dispossession of Rosalind by her father's brother? At least this Miss Beauregard was a woman of spirit. Barricading herself in indeed! Rosalind had merely taken herself off to the Forest of Arden.

  Duncan swerved, apparently to avoid a rabbit. But it turned out he had swerved in order to kill it.

  'Diseased. Best dead,' he said briefly.

  'But not us,' Jemima wanted to add. The swerve had brought them perilously near the precipice. She thanked her lucky stars that the road through Glen Bronnack, the Valley of Weeping, had proved empty indeed. A car coming the other way would surely have been fatal. Perhaps the road was treated like a single-line railway track ? With only one car on the stretch at a time.

  The car screeched to a halt. They were on the very corner of the steepest turn yet.

  'There, do you see it now?' cried Duncan with enormous satisfaction. To her absolute horror, Jemima saw beside the road the carcase of what had once doubtlessly been a sheep. Surely, he couldn't be—

  But Duncan was gazing at the new view before him. He must have seen it-she had no idea-a thousand times, ten thousand times if he had been brought up here, but Duncan was gazing at the prospect before him with all the wonder and delight of some Highland Cortes.

  The final corner had brought them into a different terrain. It was as if they had passed through a mountain barrier or pass. Below them the land dropped away down to the river. Above them still soared the mountainside, with its trees running up to the stone level, then halting. But Jemima's attention was concentrated on the new fertility of this plain, the winding placid pattern of the river, looking like something in a mediaeval psalter in which the figure of a pilgrim might be seen at various stages ofhisjoumey. In the centre of this valley the river broadened out into a wide lake, on which could be seen pine trees, rhododendrons, other bushes more domestic than wild. Overlooking all this romantic perfection in which the sun still shone with a remorseless brightness out of its blue sky - so that she was beginning to feel she was in Greece rather than the Highlands of Scotland - was a gigantic Victorian castle.

  Be-turreted and be-pinnacled, it dominated the landscape. It also looked exactly like a castle in a fairy story, from which the boy adventurer might try to rescue the princess. There was much of fantasy, nothing rough, bleak or mediaeval about it. In fact it was not even grey, like the Scottish stones surrounding it, but red, rich dark red.

  Casde Beauregard: a nineteenth-century structure. A previous edifice on the same site was visited by Bonnie Prince Charlie in the course of his peregrinations round the Highlands-at any rate according to the Northern Guide. ‘Oui, c'est un beau regard he was supposed to have observed to some ancestor of her host's at the time. What appreciation of natural beauty historical royalty always managed to fit into the busiest schedule, and how they preserved their gracious royal good humour in the tightest corner...

  If the view itself was tranquil, there was nothing particularly peaceful about the structure of this castle. From every red turret seemed to spring another turret like a series of acrobats. Even the pinnacles gave you the impression that, like some form of life, they might be spawning and proliferating while your back was turned. One large central layer appeared to occupy the role of keep. There was a flagpole on the highest turret and a flag which, however, was not stirring in the windless day.

  'A fine property!' said Duncan with undisguised approval, smacking or rather chewing his lips. 'There's many Glasgow businessmen, or them from the South, would pay a fine price for it. An Arab, mebbe, looking for a place for his harem.'

  Well, thought Jemima, that's one way of putting it. That's how he measures his approval.

  'You can't blame a lass for wanting to hold onto it, now, can you?' went on Duncan.

  In the foreground Jemima suddenly noticed a small whitewashed church, oblong, like a child's building brick. Arranged neatly around it were some grey stone graves. And a very high fence. The fence looked old.

  'That barrier,' she enquired. 'So high—?'

  'The church you'll be meaning. Oh, it's the deer come and eat the flowers', said Duncan briefly. 'They're unco' fond of flowers, deer. And young trees. You'll find that quick enough on Eilean Fas.'

  Jemima thought poetically she would enjoy the acquaint-anceof the deer on Eilean Fas. As wild creatures, they were welcome to the inappropriate flowers of civilization as far as she was concerned.

  But the church-and this was the day of Charles Beauregard's funeral, as she had already discovered to her cost. Was he to be buried here? Presumably Colonel Henry and Ossian Lucas had talked of the Glen Bronnack church. And would Miss Clementina Beauregard, then, not be attending, barricaded within her be-turreted fortress? She must have a pleasant vista for a siege.

  Jemima was still meditating on the prospect before her, framed by the purple mountains at the head of the valley, a few of them snow
-capped despite the season, when the car screeched to a halt. For a moment she thought that Duncan had actually hit something. Then she realized that they had been quite literally waved down.

  A young man with a flag had, as it seemed, appeared suddenly out of the hillside itself, and Duncan had had to brake sharply in order to avoid hitting him.

  Jemima gazed at the flag, which was made easy for her by the fact that the young man in question was now holding it aloft. Like the graffiti at Inverness Station, it was emblazoned in scarlet, with the same obscure emblem beneath. 'Up theRftd Rose', it proclaimed.

  'Up the Red Rose,' repeated the flag-bearer.

  'And may the Red run White,' replied Young Duncan with great fervour.

  CHAPTER 4

  Blood on the rose

  Slowly Jemima took a measured look at the flag-bearer.

  He was in fact an extremely young man. He had the black curly hair and blue eyes, the kind of bull-like looks traditionally associated with Ireland. He was wearing a kilt, and a white t-shirt on which a large red rose was emblazoned - or perhaps splashed would have been a better word-for there were splashes of red emanating from the rose. It took her a moment to realize that the rose was in fact intended to be dripping blood. Beneath the rose, also in the colour of blood, was the emblem which she had noticed on the station platform.

  And behind the man's ear - improbable touch - was a real red rose. The shirt was pristine. But the flower was overblown and slightly wilting. Jemima did not think it would survive many more expeditions of this sort.

  'Up the Red Rose,' repeated this unlikely dandy, shaking his flag. His expression was quite amiable.

  'If you say so.' To her own ears Jemima's voice sounded over-gracious.

  'And may the Red run White,' joined in Duncan for the second time.

  'Quite correct. Ah, Mr Duncan, it's you driving, is it? I thought mebbe it would be Sandy.' There was a pause. 'And you'll be Miss Jemima Shore?'

  There seemed no point in denying it.

  'Yes, I'm Jemima Shore. And who might you be?'

  'He's Lachlan Stuart from Torran,' said Duncan.

  'Captain Lachlan, ADC to the Chief of the Red Rose.'

  'Captain Stuart, why don't you lower the flag,' said Jemima persuasively. She was happy to give him his military rank. Captain Stuart. Captain Shore. She thought for an instant of her father. A very different kind of military man. More like Colonel Beauregard, as glimpsed in the Railway Hotel. The image vanished. She went on, 'And then we can talk.'

  Captain Stuart seemed a harmless enough crank, Scottish style.

  'Aye, it will be a pleasure to talk to you,' said Captain Stuart. 'A guid talk. I've a guid deal to tell you of the greatest interest. Never you fear. But no' just now. Just now I'm inviting you on behalf of the Red Rose to view the coffin of his Majesty.' This flummoxed Jemima completely. The coffin of his Majesty. Were there two coffins ? Was the glen full of coffins ? No, that was going too far, even in this fantastic world in which she found herself.

  'Mr Charles Beauregard's coffin.. ‘ she began cautiously.

  'The coffin of his late Majesty King Charles Edward of Scotland. Who you'll mebbe be knowing by the name of Charles Beauregard,' replied Captain Stuart, drawing himself up into a passable military pose.

  Heaven have mercy, thought Jemima. What on earth was he talking about? She wished she had a firmer grasp on Scottish history, to know what on earth Captain Stuart could be meaning, with his reference to majesties and kings. Scottish history was an absolutely closed book to Jemima apart from a few salient points like the '45. She had been busy studying Scottish topography for her holiday, and had brought with her the poems of Burns and a couple of Walter Scotts in paperback. The Burns-the love poems-had been a present from Guthrie Carlyle. He had inscribed it: 'Maybe you will invite me to your island ...' Jemima had accepted the book and made a mental resolution to do no such thing. The Scotts on the other hand, Old Mortality and The Heart of Midlothian, had been recommended to her as 'the good Scotts' - as though there could be bad Scotts like bad people-by Marigold Milton, her brilliant if didactic girlfriend from Cambridge days, now suitably teaching English to a widening circle of terrorized but fascinated students at London University. Neither Burns nor Scott, national heroes as they might be, struck her as likely to be particularly helpful in the present situation.

  It seemed that she should have been studying the ancestry of the Scottish royal family. There was some kind of Stuart pretender; she dimly recalled ceremonies in which, surely, a white rose rather than a red had been involved. But wasn't the fellow a Bavarian prince anyway?

  Of course it was up to her whether she chose to discover the answer to these questions. She imagined she was perfectly free to refuse Captain Lachlan's courteous invitation on behalf of the Red Rose. She would simply express her wish to reach her destination as soon as possible (true enough) and pass by on the otherside from the flag-waving self-styled ADC to the Chief-... Curiosity, at once her best and her worst quality, got the better of her. The funeral was hardly likely to last long, and she was keen to satisfy a certain low desire to find out more about this surprising Beauregard family in a painless manner.

  But with Lachlan installed in the front seat of the car, she discovered almost immediately that she was wrong on one count: the funeral was not intended to be brief.

  'We intend to see that the late monarch gets a full royal funeral,' explained Captain Stuart. 'As far as is possible in the present circumstances. And will ye be driving with more care, Mr Duncan. We don't want anything to happen to Miss Shore while she's under the protection of the Red Rose.'

  Well, thought Jemima, he may be a Royalist nut, but at least we agree about Duncan's hair-raising driving ...

  'So ypu got yourself a job, did you now ? An ADC, do you call it ?' countered Duncan sarcastically to the quip about his driving. 'After you were thrown off the Estate.' But he did slow down his driving, Jemima noticed.

  Lachlan Stuart gave Duncan an extremely dirty look. Jemima thought it wise to intervene. 'Look here, Captain Stuart—*

  'Captain Lachlan, if you please, Miss Shore. We have no surnames in the Army of the Red Rose. For security reasons, you understand.'

  Security with regard to surnames was surely an idle matter, with Duncan there to provide the necessary information, like a vindictive chorus. Nevertheless Jemima was not disposed to argue the point.

  'Captain Lachlan, what on earth is my part in all this? I'm simply on my way to Eilean Fas—'

  'Aye, we know that-. We had the information from the Castle.'

  'From whom?' He ignored the question.

  'And we're taking you along purely as an observer.'

  'But an observer of what—'

  'Why, to tell the world of the royal funeral of his late Majesty. You'll be representing the world's press and television. And then we'll let you go to make your report. It'll be the making of your career, mebbe,’ added Captain Lachlan kindly, 'to have such an opportunity.'

  Curiouser and curiouser. Madder and madder. The press and television indeed! Did he imagine that she carried television cameras with her, somehow concealed in her expensive luggage, to say nothing of travelling crews.

  'And what's the Colonel going to say to all this? And Mr Lucas the MP, all the way from London?' enquired Duncan gleefully. It was a question which had been vaguely worrying Jemima.

  'The usurper, Colonel Beauregard as you call him, won't get here. By orders of the Red Rose,' responded Captain Lachlan confidently. 'My men are posted further down the road.'

  'He was the Colonel to you quick enough. When you worked on the Estate,' Duncan put in in his sing-song voice, apparently unable to resist intervening.

  'There's blood on the Red Rose now, Mr Duncan,' answered Captain Lachlan with intensity. 'You know that. Everyone on the Estate-as you call it, but I've another name for it-everyone knows that. Who killed Mr Charles Beauregard? Tell me that now. Never tell me he drowned. Him knowing the river all wa
ys since he was a boy. Who would go fishing in Marjorie's Pool ? Just when he was setting up the memorial and all ?'

  Duncan said nothing. His silence worried Jemjma more than the presumably wild accusations of Lachlan Stuart. She had expected him to rebut them furiously. But he said nothing.

  'And where was Mr Ben Beauregard on that occasion ? Fishing down the river,.. His own cousin, and who hated him since they were boys—* Captain Lachlan stopped. There had been genuine emotion in his voice. He seemed ashamed of having expressed it.

  'Drowned,' he repeated much more calmly. 'Aye, there's blood on the Red Rose.'

  Duncan's only response was to drive faster as though to get away from Captain Lachlan's passion.

  'Mr Duncan, I warned you,' said Captain Lachlan after a brief silence. 'The Red Rose wouldna like it if anything was to happen to Miss Jemima Shore.'

  The road was descending into the plain. It seemed appropriate that the brilliant sun, coruscating on the waters of the loch, and which had accompanied Jemima since her arrival in Scotland , had now disappeared. Clouds were massing at the head of the valley. The heads of the high peaks had vanished. Even the heather had lost its vivid purple. How very sombre was its colour without the sun, she thought. And mountains; so often allegedly blue, were actually grey, anthracite grey, or even something darker. The loch, reflecting the sky, had not so much lost its colour as gained an angry positive darkness.

  By the time they reached the simple white-washed church, there was no feeling of light or sun in the valley at all.