The Last Summer, page 24
‘Will her royal brightness be in attendance?’ someone asked from further down the table. Effie couldn’t see who, but she immediately picked up on the note of sarcasm in the question.
Someone else tittered.
‘Thank you, Billy,’ Mrs McKenzie said sharply. ‘That’s quite enough.’
‘I’m only asking because last time her cat shredded the silk chaise in the Yellow Room and I had my wages docked for not declawing it first. But have you seen the teeth on that thing? How was I supposed to get near its feet?’
‘Billy, I said enough,’ the housekeeper snapped as there were more titters.
Effie allowed herself a grin; the stuffy politeness of the room was beginning to break up as people became more concerned with filling their stomachs than scrutinizing her.
She looked down the table and tried to catch sight of this rogue Billy, briefly making eye contact with the bright eyes in the impish face she’d seen earlier. He looked a year or two younger than her, she thought. He looked like trouble always found him, too.
‘So, Miss Gillies, you are a St Kildan,’ Mr Graves said, as though this explained some things.
‘Yes.’
‘That makes you almost a celebrity,’ said a housemaid opposite. ‘You’ve all been in the papers for weeks.’ She gave a sudden smile. ‘I’m Jenny.’
‘Hallo, Jenny. I’m Effie.’
‘Are you finding things . . . different, here in civilization?’ Mr Graves asked. Effie watched as he cut a slice of his pie and placed it carefully in his mouth.
‘No,’ she replied quickly, feeling an instant heat in her blood. ‘Because we were perfectly civilized on the isle too. We attended school and kirk, like you. We just had to work in a different way to feed ourselves.’
There was a small silence as the indignation in her words was received, and sidelong smirks were passed around the table.
‘Indeed. Although I understand you had never seen your own reflection before this afternoon?’ Mr Graves replied.
Effie shot a look back at the housekeeper, who at least had the decency to avert her eyes. Another titter rippled around the room, but this time no one was told to keep quiet.
‘The mirror was a novelty, I admit,’ Effie said quietly, with as much dignity as she could muster. ‘As were the stairs. And electricity. I am coming across things I previously only read about in books.’
‘You can read?’ Jenny asked, sounding genuinely surprised.
‘Is it true there are no trees over there?’ asked William to her right.
‘Quite true.’
‘So you’ve never eaten an apple or pear?’
‘An apple, yes; but not a pear . . . Not yet.’
The timid maid looked on with a look of curiosity and pity. ‘What did you do for shade?’
‘Shade?’
‘On a hot day. Here, we sit under a tree if it’s too warm outside.’
Effie thought for a moment. She’d never considered the lack of shade before. ‘We have the stone walls that throw down shadows, or we’d sit in the cleits. If it was really too much to bear, we’d go down to the water.’
‘I heard a funny thing,’ another man said, everyone growing bolder now as her novelty value cast off inhibitions. ‘That you’re an island community, yet none can swim.’
‘Aye, that was largely true,’ she nodded, seeing the ridicule in his eyes. ‘Often the water’s too heavy for fishing or swimming. Although I can swim now and I’d started to teach the bairns before the evacuation. If we’d stayed, we would all have learnt. I’d have seen to it myself.’
‘How did you suddenly learn to swim?’ Mr Graves asked, with what she could see was his customary scepticism.
‘Sholto taught me,’ she shrugged.
Every set of eyes around the table widened.
‘. . . What?’ she asked, seeing their incredulousness.
No one replied, but she caught the looks that sped like pond-skaters between the staff, and she understood that somehow she had confounded them all.
‘His lordship taught you to swim?’ Mr Graves clarified.
Hadn’t she just said that? ‘Yes. In return for showing him and his father how to climb and set snares.’
‘So you are an . . . expert on those things?’ Mr Graves couldn’t have looked more disbelieving if she had said she was the prime minister.
‘I wouldn’t have said so, particularly, but the earl seemed to value my opinion on them.’
‘Would that explain, then . . . the clothes?’
Mr Graves was looking at her with an expression that seemed intended to convey another message: one of disapproval. She pulled at the coarse wool cloth that had once been her beloved brother’s. ‘Of course. You can’t climb in a skirt. It wouldn’t be very seemly.’ She sensed that word carried weight here.
There was another silence, eyes back on the plates again.
‘It was my understanding that on your isle only the men climbed.’
‘Usually. But an exception was made, in my case.’
A pregnant silence bloomed but she left her full explanation hanging; she felt no need to give her family history to this room full of strangers.
‘So are we to understand, given your attire, that you’ll be doing much climbing here then?’
‘I’m not sure yet . . .’
‘Well, I would be intrigued to hear of where, exactly. Last time I looked, the land here was quite flat.’ More titters rippled the air as Mr Graves allowed himself a satisfied smile. It was his snide way of telling her to dress differently.
‘If his lordship doesn’t object to my way of dressing, then I don’t see why it should concern you,’ she said bluntly.
She knew from the silence that followed that she had affronted the butler, the most senior man in the room – but she refused to recognize his rank as superior to her, when she wasn’t a servant. The earl was employing her, yes, but in a capacity quite different to theirs. She wondered what they would say if they were to learn that the earl’s son had kissed her, pursued her, yearned for her . . . even if only for a little while.
‘When will Sholto be back from London?’ she asked, unable to delay asking any longer. She didn’t care what they thought of her. Let them think she was wild, primitive, savage, odd . . . It was the only thing she wanted to know. She was here. How long must she wait?
‘Lord Sholto is expected back tomorrow, Miss Gillies,’ the butler said with particular stress. ‘Though he may be delayed – partly on your account, I should add.’
‘Mine?’
‘Yes.’ The butler sighed wearily. ‘Apparently your old landlord’s factor has gone missing. No one’s seen him since before the evacuation and Lord MacLeod is working up a lather wanting to know what’s happened to his man. It’s quite the brouhaha.’
Effie felt the blood drain from her face, a twist in her guts.
‘There’s a press man on the case now, I believe,’ Mr Graves continued. ‘A Mr Bonner. Do you know him . . . Miss Gillies? Apparently he was covering the evacuation for The Times of London and stayed on the isle for the last week.’
And now he was investigating Frank Mathieson’s disappearance? Mathieson was still missing? Effie’s mind was racing, her pulse too fast. ‘. . . But why should that be anything to do with m-me?’
Mr Graves gave a quizzical smile that didn’t reach his eyes. ‘I was speaking figuratively – about you St Kildans as a whole. I didn’t mean you personally, Miss Gillies.’
‘Oh.’ She stared at her plate. The pie was only half touched but she suddenly felt sickened by the rich palate. Overwhelmed. The room felt airless, friendless. She pulled at her collar and stretched her neck. It was so hot in here. Wasn’t it hot in here? She pressed her feet to the floor, wanting to feel the ground, to root herself as images began flashing through her head again, but the leather soles of her boots were too thick to allow anything but a dull resistance. The walls of the room seemed to be pressing inwards, the floor beginning to spin. She closed her eyes, but that only made the visions more vivid. She felt so hot. So— She retched suddenly and the company around her flinched as one, like a shoal of fish.
‘Miss Gillies!’ Mrs McKenzie cried as though this was some sort of game.
Effie couldn’t reply. With her hand pressed to her mouth, she roughly pushed back her chair and ran through to the large kitchen, disgorging the contents of her stomach into the copper sink as Mrs McKenzie and Mrs McLennan followed, furiously scolding behind her. But her body was in revolt. She retched and heaved till only bile came up, her hand reaching blindly for the tap as horror washed through her.
‘Miss Gillies, what on earth has come over you?’ Mrs McKenzie demanded. ‘You must compose yourself!’
Effie, her head hanging down, watched as the bright morsels of carrots and beans began to swirl before her watering eyes, circling the drain, her breath coming fast and shallow. Frank Mathieson was still missing? It couldn’t be.
‘For heaven’s sake, child!’ The cook suddenly placed her firm hands on Effie’s skinny arms and roughly moved her two paces to the side. ‘You’ll block the pipes and then we’ll have no end of bother.’
The tap was turned off amid a flurry of tuts and God’s truths. Effie was trembling, her body enslaved to the whip-cracks of her mind. It couldn’t be true . . .
‘Well? What have you got to say for yourself?’ Mrs McKenzie demanded, folding her arms across a pillowy bosom. ‘Making a scene like that.’
Effie desperately tried to gather her thoughts, scattered though they were like broken glass. ‘The food was too rich for me,’ she whispered, scarcely able to get the words out. ‘Please excuse me.’ And she stumbled from the room, leaving the servants gawping in her wake.
She burst outside. It was raining hard and she was glad for it. She ran through the courtyard below her own window and opened the arched gate into the garden. The bright, fiery colours seemed even more vivid in the wet as she ran on gravel paths past planted beds and high brick walls. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. If she could have caught her breath, she would have screamed, but her body could only fill with a silent, gaping horror.
She ran the width of the back of the great house, tall empty windows staring down on her with ghostly censure, the lawns rolling to a stop at a deep ha-ha, with sheep grazing beyond and the landscape rolling out to a distant haze. A voice in her head told her to keep running into it, to just keep going forward into obscurity and lose herself in an unknown land. She could still escape. There was still a chance to become someone new. Leave the past and the horrors it contained behind her.
Her legs couldn’t stop wheeling, carrying her past the formal gardens towards a wood densely planted with ancient mossed trees. It looked like somewhere to disappear into and she ran headlong into the shadows, never stopping. Her hands reached out to brush the trunks as she passed, an instinctive reflex she didn’t even notice at first, her heavy-booted feet continually catching on protruding roots and making her stumble. She could feel that something was chasing her, something at her back like a shadow she couldn’t unstitch. Because even as the ship had hauled anchor and the islanders had waved their handkerchiefs at a home they were deserting, she had known it wasn’t deserted.
Not then and still not now.
She stopped running at last, her legs giving out with the realization of what this meant, her hands falling into the mud as she tried to catch her breath. She sat back on her haunches and tipped her face to the sky, feeling the raindrops on her face as they fell in a chicane through the leafy canopies.
The tourist ship SS Dunara had been scheduled to make a planned crossing – the last of the season – three days after the islanders had left. She knew that high winds over the open sea could, and very often did, scupper the timetables, but the skipper would always be looking for any break in the weather so that the tourists could have their fill of what was now the ghost isle; the delay was usually only a day or two. But if the weather break hadn’t come . . . Autumn could be rolling in across the Atlantic this very moment. The seasonal switch was usually abrupt and when it came – if it was already here – there was every chance the seas would be too high now till next spring. And then what?
She knew what.
She knew it very well. With the livestock shipped out and the paltry harvest already lifted from the ground, natural resources on the island were even more scarce. The battle for survival, always hard-fought there anyway, was tipped in the wrong direction.
It had now been eight days since the evacuation – but she had calculated on a rescue within four.
She pressed her forehead to the wet ground and sobbed. Oh God. What had she done?
Chapter Twenty
‘You’re too late,’ Mrs McLennan said over her shoulder, already carrying the breakfast plates back through to the kitchen, as Effie appeared at the doorway to the servants’ hall.
‘Oh . . . no, I . . .’ Effie demurred, her voice croaky. She had skipped breakfast quite deliberately, standing with her ear to the door as she heard the footsteps of the rest of the maids passing down the corridor, beginning their days. The last thing she had wanted was to share another meal with these strangers after last night’s humiliation. ‘I wasn’t hungry.’
The cook stopped walking as if she’d cursed and stared at her suspiciously. ‘You can’t not eat.’
‘I’m not hungry. Really.’
The cook’s eyes narrowed. ‘This is because of last night. It was too rich and now you’ve got the fear.’
‘No, it’s not that—’
‘Sit down,’ said the cook firmly, walking off with a tut. ‘I thought this might happen.’
‘Excuse me,’ a maid said impatiently, trying to get past her with a large vase full of drooping flowers.
Effie jumped out of her way, almost colliding with a valet coming in the opposite direction with an overcoat. ‘Sorry. Sorry,’ she muttered, hurrying over to sit alone at the long table, out of the way.
The servants moved past her with cold looks. The hall was a hive of activity, with footsteps echoing and voices carrying, the staff already engaged in their duties – footmen carrying in logs and polishing leather boots; maids arranging flowers on worktables, folding piles of laundry, the cooks chopping and stirring, the scullery maid drying copper pans that hung on hooks.
It amazed her that they were doing all this for Sholto. Well, his family, but to think that it required this many people to look after him – them – when over the course of that short week in May, he and his father had survived perfectly well in the factor’s house. They had had no staff, no cooks beyond the minister’s wife’s cooking. They had eaten boiled fulmar along with the rest of the village, bathed in the stream . . .
‘Here.’
She looked up to find the cook holding out a small plate with the brick-red border and ‘DH’ stamped in the middle. On it were two small oatcakes. In her other hand was a glass of milk.
‘Plain enough for you?’
Effie took it listlessly. Her stomach was completely empty. ‘Thank you.’
‘Hmph,’ Mrs McLennan retorted as she bustled off again. ‘There’s not enough of you as it is.’
Effie ate with rare timidity, feeling small. She wanted to fold herself down into tiny parts, to hide away from the world and what she’d done. She had spent most of the night – before exhaustion had won out – praying for the winds to drop, for the ship to sail, for a man to be rescued – but why should her prayers be answered now when they never had been before? She had lost her mother and brother, her beloved pet, and she had loved them.
When she had finished, she walked through to the kitchen and one of the scullery maids took the plate and glass from her hands before she could even open her mouth. Everyone was so hurried and busy, their mouths set in lines of grim determination.
Effie remembered what Mr Graves had said last night about Sholto and his father returning today.
‘What time will Sholto be back?’ she asked the maid.
The girl frowned deeply. ‘What business is it of yours?’ she snapped, turning her back and moving off.
Effie recoiled. She felt made of glass and like she might break into a thousand pieces with just one knock.
‘Well, well, I almost didn’t recognize you there, dressed as a girl.’ She turned to find the dancing brown eyes of Billy, the hallboy, twinkling back at her. His gaze fell to her feet. ‘Well, nearly. Part girl. Part . . . miner.’
She was wearing her Sunday best even though she wasn’t going to kirk; it felt . . . prudent that she shouldn’t stick out or make trouble. He gave an easy laugh, but she was in no mood for jokes, and his smile faded. ‘Mrs McKenzie’s ordered me to give you the tour and show you where you’ll be working.’
‘Oh. Yes.’ She exhaled, her body relaxing a little. It would be good to have something to do. She wasn’t used to standing idle and being in the way. She needed to be useful if she was to justify her place here. ‘Fine. Lead on.’
Billy laughed again and gave a whistle as she walked up to him. ‘Lead on? Tell me something, what exactly are you to his lordship – servant or guest?’
‘Neither. I’m their friend.’
At that Billy threw his head back and laughed. ‘Oh boy.’
‘Why is that funny?’ she asked as he led the way out of the servants’ hall.
He stopped in the small passage at the foot of a staircase and dropped his voice. ‘Listen, a word of advice. You’re sleeping and eating in the servants’ quarters, but you keep calling his lordship by his given name. Calling him your friend. It gets people’s backs up. You have to be one or the other, see? People don’t like not knowing where the boundaries are. If you’re down here with us, then use his title.’
She blinked, her cheeks hot. It hurt her to be reduced to just another member of staff when she and Sholto had met – if not quite as equals on Hirta – certainly as two free people instinctively drawn to one another. To be reduced to a servant, them and us . . . But staring back at Billy, she simply nodded. It was not Sholto who had brought her here but his father. She would only know ‘what’ she was when she saw his son again.
