The Wild Island Page 9

  Jemima said nothing. In any case it was difficult to interrupt the girl in her flow of rhetoric. But she felt rising within her a genuine determination, part born of sympathy, part-she had to admit it-of feminism, to help Clementina bring her brother's murderer to justice. After reading that note, she could scarcely reassure Clementina that nothing criminal had taken place.

  It was essentially a tale of two brothers, that Clementina unfolded. Charles Edward – Carlo - and Henry Benedict Beauregard, born a year apart, brought up together totally from their earliest years, had unfortunately, said Clementina flatly, loathed each other. Far from being boon companions, Carlo and Henry were brothers and rivals.

  And how cruelly the law of primogeniture worked to exacerbate the situation! Carlo born to inherit land, wealth, a castle, the Wild Island, the Glen itself, the fishing, the shooting, the moors, the mountains; Henry to live in Kilbronnack House by his brother's permission for the period of his lifetime and -if he was lucky, and Carlo did not want to do it himself-manage his estates.

  'Can you imagine Uncle Henry accepting that for a minute?' cried Clementina bitterly. 'He always hated my father from the moment he was born.'

  'You can hardly remember that,' pointed out Jemima mildly. 'By the time you were old enough to remember your father —'

  'I don't remember my father at all,' exclaimed Clementina, in her hysterical voice. She was by now smoking frantically, wild drags and puffs, and filling every available saucer on the breakfast tray with random ash, followed from time to time by a stub. 'Don't you understand ? My father was killed on D-Day. Charles and I were born over seven months later. Over seven months my uncle had to sit and wait. And wait. And watch my mother. And think - if it's a girl, I get the lot. How he used to pray in that little white church. Oh God, let it be a girl. Oh God, give me the Beauregard Estates. And Aunt Edith, she prayed harder still because she prays harder anyway. Besides, by that time, there was little Ben, and little Rory, and little Hamish on the way —'

  'How ghastly for your mother!' Once again Jemima found herself identifying with the female in the situation. She could imagine no more ghoulish predicament than that of this young pregnant widow, waiting, waiting, for the birth of the posthumous child, and all the time watched over by her vulture of a brother-in-law.

  'You know that I was born half an hour before Charles. And they didn't even know we were twins,' remarked Clementina in her hard voice. 'Time enough for the doctor to ring up Uncle Henry and say-"It's a girl." And he said-"Thank God!" And Aunt Edith fell on her knees and began to recite some dismal prayer or other. And then' - with savage glee, the words were pronounced-' Charles was born, tiny, delicate, but a boy. And Aunt Edith had to get up off her knees again.'

  Clementina's subsequent account of her childhood had nightmare overtones from Jemima's point of view. The idea of this isolated valley - no paradise in the difficult post-war years-occupied by a grieving widow, alien to the Highlands, but nevertheless feeling it her duty to live there for the sake of her children, and employing her own vast fortune to beautify and modernize her husband's houses and estates, out of respect to his memory. Yes, the window in St Margaret's Church was a war memorial - commissioned by Leonie Beauregard in honour of her hero husband. Jemima had rightly observed the knights. There were actually two crusader figures swimming in the blues and greens of the glass: Leonie had not denied the surviving brother his place in the epic of Colonel Carlo's death.

  In the meantime that surviving brother, Colonel Henry, was in the unenviable position of actually running these same estates from day to day, a task for which his American sister-in-law was scarcely fitted. While in Kilbronnack House, Lady Edith continued to give birth to a huge family of sons-six of them. These boys were all born if not to poverty at least to a chronic lack of money; in this and in every other way their lives contrasted totally with that of their first cousin Charles -'frail and pale like me - we are, I mean were, very alike'. The Beauregard boys were born with guns and rods in their hands and loved both sports: but all the shooting and fishing for miles around belonged in theory to-their cousin Charles.

  Jemima was reminded of the line in the Christmas carol: moor and mountain, field and fountain, it all belonged to Charles Beauregard. And throughout their childhood, only one life stood between the junior branch of the Beauregard family and these far reaching and prized possessions, which they meantime watched their father control and administer.

  'A situation made for murder, that's what someone once said as a kind of hateful joke, pointing at little Charles in his cradle, with Uncle Henry standing over him. My mother overheard them. Then she used to dress us up as the Princes of the Tower, in black velvet, with our fair hair, you know, the Millais picture - partly of course to tease poor Aunt Edith who put all her boys in kilts; they slept in them as far as we could see. One day someone said to Mummy: "The Princes in the Tower, eh ?

  Aren't you afraid of Henry doing a Richard III on Charles? He's so very much in control here."'

  It occurred to Jemima that the late Leonie Beauregard, in repeating these stories to her daughter, had scarcely attempted to smooth over a delicate family situation.

  'What did she think of him? What did your mother think of Colonel Henry?'

  'She hated him,' stated Clementina in her most positive and passionate voice. 'She hated him because my father hated him, and later she hated him on her own account because he was bad and wicked, and she was right in everything she said, now he's a murderer.' The trembling began again, and the sobs.

  A little cool voice inside Jemima's head said: Hadn't the lady perhaps protested a little too much? In Leonie Beauregard's lifetime, Colonel Henry had done nothing so much as dedicate his life to the service of the Beauregard Estates; in short, the service of his nephew. Whatever the jokes and implicit threats, Charles Beauregard had survived more or less healthily till the age of thirty.

  It occurred to her that the circumstances must have been odd in another way up in Glen Bronnack; a young widow, a handsome man, married but his wife permanently pregnant, the widow and the brother-in-law thrust together... She wondered if Leonie Beauregard had always hated Colonel Henry quite so much. Half of her money had been left to the next owner of the Beauregard Estates if her own issue failed: whatever her hatred, she had not thought to alter her will.

  One last question, trivial perhaps, raised itself in her -mind.

  'That film,' she said, 'about your father and your uncle - was that all a fake?'

  'Brother Raiders? Fake from start to finish. Except of course for the battle bits. But utterly fake about them loving each other so much. Uncle Henry went and sold the film rights of his life in a typically disgusting way to pay for the boys' school fees-that was his story. Actually it was part of his mania for self-glorification. I told you, they hated each other. And when my father got the VC posthumously, and Uncle Henry only got the MC, he said: "Even in death, I'm still only Carlo's younger brother." Mummy told me that too.'

  ‘I’ll try to help you, Clementina,' said Jemima. 'At least to live with the tragedy of your brother's death. I can't promise anything more. I'll talk to Bridie for one thing: I've got a feeling she knows something more than she's telling about what happened down at the pool. In fact she dropped me a broad hint to that effect just as you arrived. And I'm dining at Kilbronnack next week, so I'll keep my ears open —'

  'I know you are. Lachlan told me.'

  'Oh.' Jemima was disconcerted. 'I must say I had not quite reckoned with the excellent intelligence service of the Red Rose. I congratulate you.'

  'Lachlan has a very good contact somewhere,' said Clementina vaguely. For a moment her vagueness sounded studied. Then she went on, 'All the people round here, I mean the real people, support the Red Rose madly. I mean, wouldn't you, against the lairds? They want a better deal, so they support the Red Rose and a new monarchy and an independent Scotland.'

  'They may get that anyway,' pointed out Jemima. 'Red oil rather than the Red Rose. D
o they really want a new monarchy, I wonder ? I mean, would you seriously like to be Queen of Scotland?'

  Clementina smiled for the first time openly and naturally, with great charm. She sprang up, still smiling, stubbing out her last cigarette, her necklaces jangling.

  'Like it? I'd adore it! I'd do anything to make it happen. Queen Clementina the First. Groovy'

  It was on that note, which Jemima half-hoped was joking and half-feared was serious, that their interview ended.

  That afternoon Jemima settled down in the empty drawing room, the grassy terraces falling away before her eyes to the river. It was raining again. But now there was no sun and thus no rainbow. Jemima wrote two letters, one extremely short and one extremely long. The short one was to Guthrie Carly le:

  'Darling, Just to say that I'm sitting here thinking about you, because I'm about to start reading Old Mortality. Love J.’ She added a heart, her trademark. As she sealed the envelope, she thought: That's not even true. Actually I'm sitting here thinking about Colonel Henry Beauregard and whether that handsome distinguished-looking man could possibly be a murderer.

  The long letter was written to the person whose opinion Jemima most respected in this world. She was also someone who, Jemima felt, kept her in touch with opinion in the next (if indeed it existed). Not only did she owe her friend. Reverend Mother Agnes of the Convent of the Blessed Eleanor, a letter but she desperately needed the nun's lucid impartial view on the world of Glen Bronnack. It was always a relief to marshal events for the consumption of Mother Agnes. Since the strange Gothic events which had brought them together a few years back, Jemima had come to use Mother Agnes as a kind of extra-worldly consultant. Several times the nun had managed to point exactly the right path for her own television career, and all by a chance reflection in one of her betters. Goodness, Jemima supposed, meant strength. But goodness being all too often its own reward, it was satisfying how the goodness - or rather the good advice-of Mother Agnes had enabled her, Jemima, to outwit Cy Fredericks over her last contract: i am reminded of the parable of the Unjust Steward,' the nun's letter on the subject had begun, 'So often misunderstood

  My dear Mother Agnes [Jemima wrote), I find myself in a very odd situation here. It's not exactly working out as the tranquil away-from-it-all holiday I outlined to you in my last letter. What was that warning phrase of yours about peace being an uncertain commodity in this world ? And how primitive communities had a habit ofbeing prey to primitive emotions. I've got a number of questions to put to you, and would like your considered opinion, taking into account the full teaching of Mother Church, as to whether a house can have an evil atmosphere. But I'd better begin at the beginning. In a way it's a tale of two brothers...

  Over the next few days the island at least recovered its atmosphere of Paradise. Other than Bridie Stuart, Jemima saw no one.

  She visited the shrine again. The roses had died and had not been replaced. But the sight of the shrine, and the three plaques, two engraved, one handwritten, reminded her. that she had not yet ironed out the exact nature of the Beauregard royal claim. The Historical Introduction to the Northern Guide, beyond providing the information that Bonnie Prince Charlie had married Princess Louise of Something or Other in 1772 and had had no legitimate descendants, that royal line dying out in 1807 with his brother Cardinal Henry Benedict of York, was not much help.

  The Prince's only recorded illegitimate offspring, a daughter, belonged to the period of his European wanderings, long after Culloden; she had been educated at a convent in France, and ended up as Duchess of Albany. All this threw no light whatsoever on Charlotte Clementina, born in Scotland just before or after the Battle of Culloden, and wife of Robert Beauregard of Kilbronnack. Nor did it establish who her mother might have been.

  Jemima decided to swallow her pride and ask Bridie, although she dreaded the flood of family information which might follow.

  She was wrong. Bridie merely smiled, faintly sarcastically; she then made some slighting reference to the nonsense talked by the Red Rose - and the late Mr Charles Beauregard-but added:

  'You'd best read the American book. It's all in the book, they tell me. I never read it mesself, I've no time for such things. It's my pairsonal opinion that we've a very good Queen on the throne and no need for another one. But coming from the television, you'd be interested in such things.'

  The next day Bridie silently handed her a privately printed red leather volume with a gold coat of arms stamped on it. A Royal Link by Leonie Fielding Ney Beauregard. So it was the author, not the book itself, who was American.

  Leonie Beauregard's style certainly owed something to her native land with its enthusiasm and colourful appreciation of all things Scottish. Nevertheless the farts, such as they were, emerged clearly enough from her narrative. The mother of Charlotte Clementina was named Marjorie Stuart, the daughter and heiress of the then owner of Eilean Fas. Purely local legend had always glorified Marjorie for the major part she had played in saving the Prince after the horrifying fiasco of Culloden. Around Kilbronnack they tended to feel that the role of Marjorie Stuart had been too much neglected, that of Flora Macdonald too much cried up in the official saga of the Prince's escape. Flora Macdonald might have behaved very bravely on the west coast. But on the east coast, immediately after Cullodcn, when the Prince's forces were routed, and he himself transformed from a prince into a fugitive, it was the lively and courageous Marjorie who had been largely responsible for his early getaway. As the legend had it, it was on Eilean Fas, secure in the secret depths of Glen Bronnack from the searching red-coated soldiers, that the young pair had lain out together. They were to all intents and purposes alone, Marjorie's father having fallen in the battle, and the property having passed to his daughter.

  Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, Marjorie was both prettier and more yielding than Flora Macdonald. According to tradition again, when the Prince finally got away to the west coast he left Marjorie behind with a permanent royal souvenir in the shape of his unborn child. But it was generally believed that both mother and child had subsequently died cruelly at the hands of the English soldiers: the baby first thrown into the pool beneath the Fair Falls, and the mother, jumping in to save her child, drowning in her turn. Hence the name of Sighing Marjorie: it was no wonder, after such a grim tale, that her phantom haunted the pool.

  But it was here that the Glen Bronnack version* as related by Leonie Beauregard in A Royal Link deviated from the accepted story. In the Glen it was said that the baby had not in fact been drowned but miraculously survived her experiences in the water. Like an infant Moses, she had been rescued by her loyal Stuart relations and baptized Charlotte Clementina, brought up among them as a supposed orphan. At the age of seventeen she married Robert Beauregard of Kilbronnack, dying a year later giving birth to a son. From this marriage the present-day family of Beauregards were directly descended, the blood of Bonnie Prince Charlie coursing through their veins together with that of a sound but otherwise undistinguished Scottish family.

  Furthermore, and here was the delicious crux of the matter, by digging about further into old tales and legends and traditions handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth, the enthusiastic author had reason to suggest that the Prince had actually married Marjorie Stuart in secret when he discovered her to be pregnant. 'Is it fanciful to suppose that our brave Prince and our courageous Marjorie thus planned to safeguard the royal Stuart descent, should he be captured and executed by the English ... ?' enquired Leonie Beauregard boldly.

  So there it was. A royal pedigree - of sorts - for the Beauregards.

  After finishing the book, Jemima contemplated leaving her own offering at the shrine, some of the yellow bog plants she had found on the island. She decided that it would be a sentimental gesture. She was no American romantic. Besides, she was only a tenant. She did not want to be permanently possessed by the island or its history, nor indeed the Beauregard family and its feuds. She was a bird of p
assage. In particular she did not want to be possessed by the house, Tigh Fas.

  She read Old Mortality - the good Scott - alternating with Burns. On her walks at least, she felt a new balm being applied to her spirit. Warming towards Guthrie (because he had once suggested it) she even began to contemplate some kind of Highland retreat of her own, a cottage of course, a real cottage this time; it might even mean marrying Guthrie, but that too might not be an utterly impossible venture. Guthrie was in love with her, an attractive lover, and unmarried, a rare combination indeed. It was certainly an ideal combination in Guthrie's own opinion: he sometimes appeared quite disconcerted when Jemima rejected the occasional proposal with which he punctuated an otherwise exceptionally easy and loving relationship.

  'I can't think why you won't marry me,' he would say. 'Millions would...' He was only half joking. There was of course the question of freedom. But no freedom lasted for ever and Jemima had enjoyed great freedom. Yes, she was beginning to feel very warmly towards Guthrie in her Highland Paradise.

  In a way the prospect of dinner at Kilbronnack House was a tiresome interruption of this personal reverie.

  The island was particularly peaceful that afternoon. The occasional small plump bird strutted on the terrace. Bridie, who had threatened to return to make her tea, despite Jemima's protests (she still could not accept this strange tenant's proclaimed self-sufficiency), did not in fact reappear.

  Jemima changed into a long dark green jersey dress, elegant, discreetly sexy (she hoped): Jean Muir, a designer in whose clothes she always felt she could face the unknown. She awaited the arrival of whichever Beauregard would drive her to dinner at Kilbronnack House. Her escort was late. Perversely, this had the effect of making anticipation grow. She had succeeded in banishing Colonel Henry from her mind for the time being in favour of Guthrie and the possible future they might have together. Now, as she waited, she found herself hoping that the Colonel had not forgotten his invitation. As she put it to herself, quite apart from anything else, she had a mission to perform for Clementina Beauregard.