The Wild Island Page 7

  'It must have been a great shock to you,' she said impulsively. 4I mean, the death of Mr Charles Beauregard.'

  Bridie, half on her bicycle, turned her face towards Jemima. The seamed face, till now so warmly creased, so jolly in the intensity of its recollected memories, was totally transformed. Gone was the friendly, garrulous, almost effusive woman, still essentially a servant. The woman who now faced her was a person of authority. And she was aware once more of Bridie's commanding height, standing by her battered bicycle as though a charger.

  'Miss Shore, if you please,' she said after a moment's pause in a very flat voice, 'There are some things best not spoken of.'

  Jemima felt a surge of determination. Her combative spirit was aroused. The flood of family reminiscences Bridie had given her concerning the Beauregards contrasted so ill with this wall ofsinister silence. She would have accepted one or the other, but not the ambivalence.

  'I didn't mean to upset you, Bridie,' she said. 'But as I had corresponded with Mr Beauregard —' She felt she might have added, 'and as I was forced to attend his funeral by your son, his existence and death can hardly be totally ignored.' In fact she said, 'I just wanted to express my regrets to you. Before walking round the island.'

  Bridie said, with a return to her old and friendly manner, 'If it's round the island you'll be walking, Miss Shore, you'll best be wearing gumboots. It's wet underfoot here, even in the summer. And we've had a great deal of rain lately. It's slippery, you see, particularly at the far end of the island. Be very careful by the Fair Falls. Don't get too close to Marjorie's Pool, don't be curious—'

  'Curious?'Jemima merely repeated the word.

  'The pool where he drowned. Mr Charles Beauregard; of whom you were speaking just now.'

  Jemima was faintly appalled.

  'Oh, how awful of me!' she exclaimed. 'I just had no idea he had drowned here at Eilean Fas. How clumsy of me-

  'Didn't the Colonel tell you then?' said Bridie in her previous flat slightly menacing tone. 'It was I who found him there in Marjorie's Pool. Lying face down. Drownded.' She gave the word two long syllables.

  'Oh, how ghastly-and how terrible for you.'

  'Yes. A terrible death. The water filling his waders, his great boots, to his thighs. Sucking him down,' replied Bridie without expression.

  She was by now mounted on her bicycle. Over her shoulder she called: 'So be careful now. Miss Shore, won't you, as you go? We've had tragedy enough at Eilean Fas.'

  Bridie was already riding vigorously down the gravel path, before Jemima realized that she had still expressed absolutely no regret concerning the death of the late Charles Beauregard.

  CHAPTER 8

  Utmost quiet

  ‘I must always remember this,' thought Jemima, as she set out to walk round the Wild Island. 'This at last is my Paradise. The serpent has come and gone.'

  The evening sun began to create long blue shadows on her path, but it remained bright. The alternate patches of sun and shade gave a theatrical impression. The greenness of the undergrowth rustled with birds: she knew they were birds because every so often one flew out across her path, small, alien, not the sparrows of a London walk, darting purposefully.

  'Birds of paradise,' she reflected. How long since she had heard bird song? Heard and listened to it. There were butterflies too. The Rousseauesque impression returned. She felt now neither loneliness nor fear. The ground squelched under gumboots she had borrowed from the house's antlered hall. They were much too large for her. Possibly everyone in Scotland had particularly large feet: the other possibility was that no woman had ever lived in the house at Eilean Fas. The decorations certainly showed lack of a woman's touch, to put it mildly, or rather they showed the lack of any recent touch at all. The house might have been deliberately gutted to make it seem so bleak. It was in a way no wonder that Charles had thought of it for a museum and Father Flanagan for a mission: it was bare enough for either purpose.

  Above her head the vast trees rose out of the undergrowth: it was this which gave the jungle impression. Every, now and then an opening in the trees exhibited a brief glimpse of the mountains round her: they too were lit up by patches of sunshine, out of their spare darkness, in the same theatrical manner as the trees. To the left, beyond the green, were the cliffs which guarded the island. In fact the path was in a sense treacherously close to the edge of the cliff, the greenery which masked it only enhancing the danger.

  'I must watch my step,' she thought. The noisy river, ever present, should have served to remind her of the danger. But already the waters were fading in her immediate consciousness, no longer menacing, merely soothing. She had no idea where the path would take her, except she had been told by Bridie that it would take her eventually all round the island, so long as she did not turn off to the waterfall. At one end of the island, then, lay the domesticity of the house, the terraces now overgrown but symbolic of peace, the taming of the wild by man, the imposition of a human design, surviving much as relics of the Roman Empire survived into Ancient Britain. Even the view from Tigh Fas itself had an air of arrangement about it.

  Now she was approaching a much more rugged terrain. The undergrowth began to encroach across the path. She no longer felt like some lady gently wandering in her domain, but more like an explorer.

  A vista of bright red berries, heavily ornamenting a slender tree, entranced her, until it occurred to her that here at least was a hint of the future dark amidst the green present. One or two of the trees were already turning scarlet. It was after all getting on in August. Even a green paradise could not be guaranteed to last for ever.

  Turning a corner, the sight of a little stone building of Gothic design, a kind of folly, at the edge of a clearing, took Jemima completely by surprise. Suddenly the trees had fallen back. She was at the point of the island. The noise of the waters had vastly increased: the waterfall and Marjorie's Pool must be close, close but still unseen. The cliffs were now revealed to her, descending sheerly on either side of this sort of summer house, which had been built to perch precariously on the apex.

  For the first time she understood clearly the impregnable nature of the island. The fall of cliff was steep, steeper surely than at the bridge, and looked precipitous, unfriendly. A few slender plants grew rather desperately out of the crumbly sock. But they offered little comfort to the potential climber.

  Jemima decided to investigate the Gothic folly. Despite its little arched windows the interior was dark. It took her eyes some time to get used to it. No one appeared to have been inside for years. She took another step into the gloom and felt in front of her. Suddenly her fingers closed on something soft, familiar; Petals. And as her eyes grew accustomed to the interior she became aware that a vase of fresh roses, crimson, true roses, no wild roses, these, was standing on a plinth at the back of the grotto.

  Jemima's shock wasquiteout of proportion to the situation, she decided a minute later. It was just that she had convinced herself of the utmost quiet, even isolation, of her new existence. 'Utmost quiet required for TV personality': so had begun the advertisement Cherry had placed in the Times with her usual desire for positive action.

  ' We've got to get Jemima to take a break,' Cherry was overheard telling Guthrie in the Megalith office. As usual Cherry managed to emphasize more than her fair share of words in each sentence.

  'From the series - yes. After all she's not recording again till October. But from us all? I hope not.' Perhaps it was the sudden wistfulness in Guthrie's voice which irritated Jemima and inspired her to sweep into the outer office and immediately O.K. Cherry's somewhat over-dramatic advertisement, which had in its turn produced the original approach from Charles Beauregard. And now her utmost quiet was pierced once more by the manifest presence of another human being on the island.

  Above the vase was a plaque, which read:

  In ever-loving and reverent and loyal memory of Charlotte Clementina Stuart, only legitimate daughter and heiress of King Charles III of Great B
ritain. Wife of Robert Beauregard of Kilbronnack. 1746-1764.'

  A rose was carved beneath the lettering, and beneath that the motto:

  floreat rosa alba.

  There was a second plaque below which read:

  In ever-loving and reverent and loyal memory of Charles Edward Beauregard 1916-1944, lawful descendant and heir of the Royal House of Stuart. Placed here by his wife Leonie Fielding Ney Beauregard 1918-1958. floreat rosa alba.'

  Looking closely, Jemima decided that Leonie Fielding Ney Beauregard's own dates had been added more recently.

  She went back to the first plaque and puzzled over it: 'Only legitimate daughter and heiress of King Charles III...' Working it out, Jemima realized that King Charles III must be another name for Bonnie Prince Charlie, in legitimist terms. She remembered reading somewhere that there would be a problem when our own Prince Charles of the House of Windsor ascended the throne as Charles m, since loyal Jacobites would consider Bonnie Prince Charlie to have enjoyed that title already.

  At least she was beginning to have a dim understanding of the nature of the Beauregard claim to the royal throne. Or rather the claim of the Red Rose on behalf of the Beauregards. They were descendants of some eighteenth-century royal ancestress. But -'Charlotte Clementina Stuart'-she felt sure she had never read about this particular character in the history books. Charlotte Clementina had apparently been born around the time of the rebellion of the'45, just after it, no, wait, the battle of Culloden was fought in April 1746, she remembered from her Northern Guide. Some time just before or after the collapse of Bonnie Prince Charlie's bold Highland effort, he was alleged to have produced this legitimate daughter... And heiress.

  It was the legitimacy which baffled her. Who was the mother of Charlotte Clementina ? Who was Bonnie Prince

  Charlie supposed to have married according to the history books, come to think of it? She would have to enquire.

  Then her eye fell on a further notice - not chipped elegantly in stone this time, but written in ink on a piece of white paper in large flowing black handwriting.

  'In ever-loving and reverent and loyal memory of Charles Edward Beauregard, rightful King of Scotland. 1945-1975. Placed here by his sister Clementina Beauregard, floreat rosa alba.'

  There was, as Lachlan had said, blood on the rose now: the Jacobite white rose of the first two memorials had turned to red. In case there was any doubt about it, scrawled at the bottom of the white paper was the single afterword: revenge!

  Jemima felt a certain sense of relief. The flowers had been placed here by that poor distressed girl, with her obsession about the death of her brother. She had, in a sense, every right to penetrate the Wild Island. She doubted if her utmost quiet would after all be much disturbed now the flowers and the pathetic paper memorial were in place.

  Jemima rose from her knees, dusted her beige trousers and left the grotto. She was determined now to visit the waterfall. Retracing her footsteps carefully from the point of the island, with wary glances at the chasms on either side - the grotto was built like a figurehead on the prow of the cliffs, it was a wonder it did not fall into the abyss-she returned as far as that mossy parting of the ways at which she had noted a left-hand path. The rise in the volume of the water noise encouraged her. She pushed her way through the greenery: here was a path it was difficult to believe had been recently trodden. As if in sympathy with her desire to find water, the rain began its soft descent once more. Nevertheless the sun still gamely shone.

  And it was by virtue of this combination that Jemima perceived the Fair Falls for the second time under the perfect arch of yet another rainbow. Only this time she saw the arch literally doubled: there was another rainbow described inside the first one. She was reminded of that line in the ballad: 'The old moon with the new moon in its arms.' Sir Patrick Spens - another Scottish hero who had gone at his King's command to Noroway over the foam. If not very near Dunfermline town, this was still ballad country. The foam and fine spray flew upwards into the air recklessly, as the black water poured down between the rocks into the chasm below. The pool was at a vast distance below her feet and the grass so slippery that she drew back nervously even before recalling Bridie's warning.

  Could that dark and turbulent area of water really be Marjorie'sPool ? Litde as she knew about fishing, it seemed an odd place to choose to wade out. The pool must surely be too deep for any kind of wading, however high the boots. And in this case of course the boots had not been strong enough ... 'Drownded. Sucked down into the waters.' Bridie's flat voice echoed in Jemima's ears. She tried to shut it out. There was, to distract her also, a high singing sound above the noise of the water, which she could not quite place.

  The next moment her eyes were involuntarily drawn away from the pool towards the opposite bank. She was aware of a man in long dark clothes standing there quite still, staring at her. Surprise made her unsteady, she almost slipped and had to grasp a rather inadequate bush on the cliff's edge to steady herself. Recovering her balance, she half expected to see Lachlan Stuart once more. But it was Father Flanagan.

  It was not that his expression was particularly sinister or even angry. Yet with his height, his white hair and his dark clothes, he did have the air of a kind of figure of vengeance, a ghost come back from another world to demand retribution. The evening light, the rain, the spray, the rainbow whose vanishing end hovered close to where he stood, all contributed to the phantom-like impression; or was he merely gazing covetously at the island which, according to Colonel Henry, he wanted for the Church ?

  Father Flanagan continued to stare at Jemima. Then he sketched a sort of wave. It might even have been the sign of the Cross. His lips moved, but the noise of the waterfall, the chasm between them, prevented her hearing his words. Then he turned on his heel and vanished among the rocks. Jemima gazed down the river to the narrow bridge to see if he was intending to pay her a visit. There was no sign of anyone on the bridge. She was safe from intrusion.

  Jemima gazed once more into the depths of Marjorie's Pool, thought once more, despite herself, of Charles Beauregard pulled down into its depths as his great boots filled with water, and later found-floating-by the stern and unlamenting figure of Bridie.

  No, she would cast out such thoughts. She would remember only the magic of the island, her own Prospero's isle. By an act of discipline, Jemima turned from the Fair Falls and retraced her steps along the mossy overgrown path. Then she wandered more slowly in the general direction of the house.

  The undergrowth still rustled, but the birds were no longer flying so freely. The hour was approaching true dusk. Twenty minutes later Jemima found herself once more gazing at that strange Gothic dwelling calling itself Tigh Fas, the Empty House.

  This time her feeling of threat, danger, dread was quite unmistakable. It was not the lush green hospitable island which threatened her and spoke of danger. Even the waterfall and Marjorie's Pool, for all its connotations, spoke of tragedy rather than of danger. Yet the house, which should have been her refuge from all this, filled her with foreboding.

  ‘An Ancient place,' Lachlan had said. Had some foul deed been perpetrated on the site of this house hundreds of years ago ? Sighing Marjorie, who was she ? And whose death did she lament - or was it perhaps her own ? Jemima, while not believing in ghosts, was prepared, gingerly, to accept that deeds of violence from bygone times could leave behind their atmosphere of cruelty and destruction. Even the Druids' ring, she supposed, might bring some kind of atmosphere with it from ancient times. What she could not explain was, why she, rational calm Jemima Shore, Investigator, in the words of her own television series, should feel personally threatened.

  The island undergrowth spelt safety. The house stretched towards her and she longed to flee from it.

  Briskly, Jemima decided that these thoughts could no longer be indulged. She marched back up the gravel path, ignored the dark uncurtained windows, pushed open the studded door into the vaulted hall and switched on the light.

 
The rest of the house was in darkness. Clearly no one had been here since she and Bridie had departed together. Everything was just as she had left it. The old fishing rods, shooting sticks and other strange pieces of tackle still mouldered in the hall.

  She was certainly alone in the house.

  Jemima, with a delicious and exhausted feeling of freedom, went into the decaying drawing room and built up the fire with logs. Then she went into the kitchen and scrambled some eggs, congratulating herself at having beaten off the proffered ministrations of Bridie Stuart. She discovered the wine ordered in advance by Cherry-a sort of Highland Beaujolais, it seemed, the best the grocer could provide. Into the eggs went some smoked salmon, another present from Guthrie. ('I know how much you love it, and the lairds up there keep it all for themselves. You won't be able to buy smoked salmon in Kilbronnack.')

  Later, sitting by the fire, toying with the idea of beginning Old Mortality, she could not imagine greater cosiness nor happiness. It seemed indeed a pity to ruin contentment by beginning the Scott at quite this juncture. Bed and a detective story -Jemima read them by the dozen for relaxation - was probably the answer.

  The bath ran with rich brown water, disconcerting at first, particularly when mixed with her favourite Mary Chess Gardenia bath oil which made her London bathroom smell like a luxurious greenhouse. But in Scotland the water was already softer than any oil could ever achieve. In any case the mahogany fittings of the bathroom hardly suited such luxuries.

  The bedroom was equally firmly Scottish, not to say Spartan: the chintz curtains, blue and rose-patterned, hung tattered in places, like those in the downstairs rooms. There was a general dearth of furniture and ornaments - the only picture consisted of a vast engraving over the fireplace, depicting Bonnie Prince Charlie himself in a rousing scene at the battle of Preston.