Air Ambulance (9 page)

“
Hushed be thy moaning, lone bird of the sea,

Thy home on the rocks is a shelter to thee:

Thy rest is the angry
wave
...
”

How did it go after that? She could not remember. Only the closing words of every stanza rose and filled her heart.
“
Ho-ro, Mairi dhu, Turn ye to me
!”

The lovely, haunting notes held all the essential sadness of the Isles, and the words were the words that faltered tremblingly on her own parted lips.

“
Ho-ro, Mairi dhu, Turn ye to me.
”

CHAPTER SIX

IT was after three o’clock before the message for which she waited came to the lodge.

“Here come Master Andrew,” Mrs. Cameron observed, looking out through the kitchen window, “as fast as he’s able! Poor bairn!” She reflected with a tear in her voice, “he’s sadly handicapped, but it just makes him all the dearer to us and to Mr. Blair.”

And his mother? Alison wanted to ask about Margot Blair, but something about the rigid back of the woman standing at the window forbade her. Kirsty Cameron had never mentioned Gavin Blair’s widow, had not, in fact, seemed to take her into consideration when she had been discussing Garrisdale House a moment or two ago. Alison had gathered that the “big house”, as Kirsty called it, was run on the lines of a home rather than a hospital, with a resident house-mother to look after the children’s welfare, and various other people to make it run as smoothly as possible. Margot, if she ever came to the island, apparently took no part in its busy life.

“Mrs. Cameron,” Alison found herself asking almost breathlessly as she waited for Andrew to reach the door, “is Mr. Blair married?”

“My goodness, no! He’s got enough on his plate without that,” Kirsty decided firmly. “Unless,” she augmented her forthright statement, “he was to get the right sort of wife. But that would only be an added problem for him at the present moment,” she said grimly. “He’s got more than himself to think about just now.”

Andrew burst in at the half-open door before she could add any more.

“I’ve to find Nurse Lang and bring her up to the house!” he cried before he noticed Alison, and then, when he did, he came rather shyly across the brightly checked linoleum to put his hand into hers. “You’re to come,” he said. “My uncle is waiting for you.”

Alison caught up her cloak, which she had left ready on the chair beside the door.

“Do you remember hoping that you could show me Heimra Beag, Andrew?” she asked. “Well, now I’m here and I’m very happy!”

She could say such things to the child, she mused as they went out into the sunshine together. The things she could never admit to anyone else.

“I can show you the birds an’ where they make their nests, an’ the seals who have their babies on the rocks, an’ the goats we keep to get their milk and make mohair from their coats!” he offered all in one breath. “Oh! I can show you everything now!”

She could not tell him that she had already been to the bird sanctuary, with Blair himself. She could not disappoint him in that way, and she could go again, many times, perhaps, and each time would hold a new experience.

“How far is it to Garrisdale?” she asked.

“A long way. I’ve been hurrying,” he pointed out, still breathing hard. “We could go a shorter way, but we’re not allowed because it’s past Monkdyke.”

“Monkdyke?” Alison repeated. “Is that another house, Andrew?”

“It’s where my mother lives,” the child announced solemnly. “Nobody is allowed to go there—except my Uncle Fergus.”

Alison was aware of a sort of twofold shock. Firstly at the knowledge that Margot Blair actually lived on the island, and secondly that Gavin Blair’s widow had forbidden her present home to her own child.

“Surely that isn’t the case, Andrew?” she said. “Perhaps your mother has been sick and needs a little rest before she has you back to live with her again.”

“No.” He shook
h
is head, distressed that she should not believe him. “No one ever goes to see her from Garrisdale. I think it’s because she doesn’t want to look at us,” he added with almost adult perception and a vague, hurt sadness.

Alison found that she could not answer him. The horror in her heart was swamped now by an all-consuming anger which made speech difficult. How could any woman do such a thing, especially to a child like Andrew? How could Margot Blair stay here, near to him in distance, yet steadfastly refusing him a mother’s love and protection? It seemed that she had shut him out of her life completely for some utterly worthless reason of her own, and that Andrew knew it.

It was difficult to deceive a child, and quite often a physically handicapped child had a more acute sense of betrayal than a normal one. Andrew knew himself unwanted and was bewildered by it, but he would have chafed under the fact far more if it had not been for Fergus Blair.

His Uncle Fergus was a god to him. There was nothing he did or said which was not the absolute law.

“Perhaps we could hurry through the Monkdyke grounds,” she suggested when they came to a bend in the path, and she saw that his feet were lagging.

“I get tired sometimes,” he admitted, “when I’ve come a long way.”

Alison looked down at his thin, inadequate little legs, and made a swift decision.

“Why shouldn’t we go the shorter way?” she said. “If it cuts off a lot of the drive up to Garrisdale.”

“Oh, it does!” Andrew murmured with relief. “And perhaps it won’t matter so much going there when I’m with you.”

Whether it mattered or not, Alison decided aggressively, they were going that way. It might cut off as much as a mile.

“There’s no hurry,” she told Andrew, who was still quite red in the face from his exertion. “Captain Gowrie may be asleep.”

“Does everybody grown up sleep in the afternoon?” he asked interestedly, although he seemed to be keeping a wary eye open in case they might be intercepted on their way through the
Monkdyke shrubberies. “Mrs. Pollock does. She’s our housemother,” he hurried on to explain, “and she knows all the stories about the Islands—about the fairy hillocks and the Water Horse, who comes up out of the lochs to feed with the other cattle in the fields; and the fairy cows who are good to the people they like. Once Mrs. Pollock’s mother had a brownie about the house,” he added solemnly. “He came and did all the work for her because she left the cream off the milk for him on the kitchen table. He did the work when they were all asleep in their beds at night, but if they ’fended him an’ he got in a huff, he broke things. Things like cups and bowls and glass dishes that they wanted to keep just kept falling out of their hands!” He paused for breath, standing in the middle of the grassy path, rather like a brownie himself, his
e
yes fixed solemnly on Alison’s face. “It would be a very good thing if Mrs. Cameron had a brownie,” he observed thoughtfully. “She has to work very hard.”

“Perhaps the brownies have all left the island now,” Alison suggested. “Did Mrs. Pollock have hers on Heimra Mhor?”

“No. She came here when she married Mr. Pollock, and he died. She hasn’t got Mr. Pollock to look after her now. Just Uncle Fergus.”

Alison smiled.

“Your Uncle Fergus seems to be indispensable to a good many people,” she murmured, knowing that he would not understand what she meant. “Are the grounds round Garrisdale as lovely as this, Andrew?” she asked as they walked on. “With all these beautiful rhododendrons coming into flower?”

“Garrisdale is bigger than Monkdyke. There’s an awful lot of grass and daffodils.”

Alison found herself wondering more and more about the forbidden Monkdyke. Was it the Dower House of the estate? She had not expected to find two houses on Heimra Beag.

“There it is,” Andrew exclaimed, hurrying a little. “Over there among the trees.”

Behind a screen of regal pines a small, square house stood overlooking a white-sanded bay. It was the loveliest house Alison had ever seen, and the view from all its windows would be unsurpassed. It had the look of a house that had been loved and gently cared for, and yet, in some ways, it looked dead.

No smoke rose from its tall chimneys, and the main door, which had been painted a gay yellow, was securely closed against intrusion, which was strange in itself in the Highlands of Scotland, where most doors were left hospitably open.

Andrew had become strangely silent, seeming to hold his breath as they passed, and when they came to a gap in the trees he tugged at Alison’s hand.

“Hurry,” he chided. “She may be looking out!”

Alison felt her blood beginning to boil. This was preposterous! No woman with any heart at all would lend herself to such a situation, she decided. Margot Blair must be the most unfeeling creature that had ever been born, and the wonder was that her brother-in-law had not put a stop to all this nonsense long ago. Fergus Blair was certainly not the man to tolerate such a position for long, especially if he had seen the reflection of it in his nephew’s eyes. It would interfere with the work he was trying to do—indirectly, perhaps, but none the less disastrously. An atmosphere of hostility to the children he brought to the island would be the last thing he wanted.

They had reached a point in the path where it came very near to the house, and Andrew had averted his eyes from the long, uncurtained windows which overlooked a small stretch of lawn.

Alison, however, would not look away. Someone was sitting out on the narrow terrace which overlooked the lawn, on a chair drawn into the shade of a large golf umbrella.

The gaudy coloured sections of the umbrella seemed curiously out of place in their present surroundings, but it appeared to serve its purpose of sheltering from both wind and sun the loveliest girl Alison had ever seen.

She was like some exotic flower as she sat there listlessly turning over the pages of a magazine without, apparently, reading very much. Her hair was
s
oft and like spun gold as it lifted gently in the wind from a brow like the finest alabaster. It hung down almost to shoulder level on either side of the girl’s perfect oval face, and the vividly-red lips were parted, as in a sigh.

“That’s her!” Andrew breathed. “That’s my mother.”

Alison took him firmly by the hand.

“Then we must go and say good afternoon,” she decided. The impulse had been instantaneous and almost as swiftly regretted, but there was no way of drawing back once they had cleared the trees. The slim girl seated in the cane chair beneath the gaudy umbrella had seen them.

She made no effort to rise to her feet as they came nearer, as Alison had half expected she would. She remained seated, with a heavy tartan travelling rug securely wrapped about her knees, but in one small, hostile gesture she appeared to draw herself up to full height, waiting for them to reach the terrace steps, like the intruders they undoubtedly were.

Alison did not hesitate after that single moment of indecision under the pines. She approached across the springy green turf with Andrew’s reluctant hand in her own, and said pleasantly: “Good afternoon, Mrs. Blair. We were taking a short cut through your garden, I’m afraid, but Andrew was so very tired and I thought it best to bring him back to Garrisdale by the shortest possible way.”

The girl in the chair—or was she already a woman, with a woman’s matured emotions reflected in these lovely violet
-
coloured eyes?—looked at her for fully a second before she replied.

“Who are you?” she asked in a voice that was almost gentle. “And why have you come here? If you are a new nurse at Garrisdale House you should have been told that I will not have any unauthorised person coming to Monkdyke. You should have been warned that this is out of bounds.”

“I had been told, Mrs. Blair,” she admitted, “but I couldn’t believe that the edict applied to Andrew.”

Margot Blair’s eyes changed from violet to a hard, glittering blue.

“You must be a fool,” she said, “to risk your job in this way. I can so easily have you dismissed,” she added as lightly as if she had been inviting them both to stay to tea. “Insubordination is one of the things that we do not tolerate at Garrisdale, nurse.”

Alison smiled, although her heart was beating turbulently and Andrew’s hand had grown hot and sticky in hers.

“I don’t think that would be at all easy,” she explained. “You see, I’m not employed at Garrisdale, although I’m deeply interested in the work that is going on there.”

“What do you mean you’re not employed at Garrisdale?” Margot Blair demanded. “You are a nurse, aren’t you?”

It was obvious that she had neither heard nor been told about the disaster to the Heron, and with a sick sense of betrayal Alison wondered if she was now revealing something Fergus Blair had sought to conceal from his sister-in-law.

It did look as if Margot lived a peculiarly sheltered life here in her small, hidden bay facing the wide sweep of the Atlantic, and although Alison could not see any reason for such seclusion, she had, after all, no right to question it, even for Andrew’s sake.

Fergus Blair might not want her to champion his nephew, and he certainly would not want her to cause trouble with his sister-in-law.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have come, but it was a big temptation when I saw you sitting here. I’ve wanted to meet Andrew’s mother.”

“Stop repeating that!” The lovely voice had risen, and it was harsh and embittered now. “You’re a stranger—a blundering stranger! Go away, and take the child with you. I’m tired!” She had scarcely moved. The rigid body and the lovely elfin face hardly seemed to belong together, and the thin white fingers plucked restlessly at the tartan rug as she waited to be obeyed.