Highland Mist (2 page)

“As exciting as last night?”

She shook her brown head quickly, the soft hair swinging on her shoulders.

“Oh, no. I’ve a feeling that this is going to be ... a different sort of journey!”

CHAPTER THREE

A matter of hours proved her right. Late that afternoon, when an unseen sun was setting behind a group of sturdy pines, they were decanted from the train which had carried them much farther north into the teeth of a howling blizzard. For the first time Toni saw Charles Henderson look downright appalled.

“And what,” he enquired, of no one in particular, “happens to us now?” His coat collar was up about his ears, his eyes were bleak, his mouth grim. A porter came up behind them and demanded their tickets.

Charles fumbled in every pocket for them, and then swore because he couldn’t find them.

“You’ll have to take my word for it that I had them when we left Edinburgh, but I haven’t a clue where they are now.”

The porter, dour and Scots, looked suspiciously at the first-class compartment from which they had emerged. Although the snow was coming at them in a wild flurry, and it was many degrees colder than it had been in Edinburgh, he seemed determined to carry out his duties to the letter.

“If ye canna find them ye’d better come with me to the stationmaster’s office,” he mumbled, and Charles swore uncontrollably.

“Damn it, but I’m not trying to do anybody! I tell you that I’ve lost the confounded things...” Then he noticed that Toni was shivering violently, and after the warmth of the carriage, she looked a little dazed. Her nose was blue, and her teeth were chattering. “But we’ll come with you to the station-master’s office. Perhaps he’ll offer us a mug of something warming while you rustle up a taxi for us,” with dry emphasis.

“Nae hope of ony taxis meeting this train,” the porter muttered.

“What?” Charles spoke sharply. “Then what in heaven’s name are we going to do? Where’s the hotel—?”

“There isna’ ony hotel nearer than Inverechy. This is a wee bit halt. Now, if you’ll step this way and explain about those tickets...”

Charles took Toni’s arm.

“Let’s follow him,” he said. “He must be talking through his hat when he says there aren’t any taxis, but at least we can do our arguing in a warmer spot than this.”

The stationmaster’s office was very warm, with a brightly leaping fire. In actual fact it was the sitting-room of his cottage, and he was in his shirtsleeves and smoking a pipe when they all entered. He rose to the occasion much more promptly than his solitary porter, and offered Toni a seat in the corner of the horsehair sofa, and looked inside a large brown earthenware teapot to see whether there was any tea left. When he discovered that there was he ordered a couple of thick white cups to be brought, and Toni found herself sipping a thick and treacly beverage, that was nevertheless very hot and very sweet, gratefully.

Charles produced a wad of notes, and offered to pay the price of the lost tickets. But the station-master shook his head.

“That’s all right, sir.” It was obvious to him immediately that Charles was not the type who took any pleasure in defrauding British Railways. “Willie Bride is ower conscientious sometimes, but he means well. A wee bit dim in the heid, as ye might say, but gey guid at his work. I wouldna’ be without him up here at Inverada.”

“And how far is Inverada House from where we are now?”

The stationmaster scratched the top of his hat.

“Twa miles ... a bit more. Every bit of twa miles, perhaps three.”

Charles glanced at Toni.

“Your mother said it was practically on top of the station!”

Toni felt she had to say something to excuse her mother.

“I’m afraid it’s years since she actually came here herself. It’s easy to make a mistake about distances when you haven’t visited a place for years.”

Charles still looked distinctly grim.

“I don’t do that kind of thing myself, but then I’m not Celia.” He addressed the stationmaster. “I understand it’s impossible to get a taxi, but we must have a car of some sort. We’ve got to reach Inverada House tonight.”

The stationmaster’s eyes grew somewhat wide, and he scratched the top of his hat more wildly.

“I can’t think of onyone who’d take ye, unless—” The door of the office was pushed wide open, admitting a current of icy air and a whirlwind of fat white particles, and a giant of a young man with curly brown hair speckled like a thrush’s chest with snowflakes, and piercingly blue eyes that fastened at once upon Toni, stood filling the aperture. He wore an old duffle coat and some thick leather gauntlets, and the one thing that could be said about him was that he and the weather seemed suited to one another. He was tall and strong, and the weather was harsh and formidable. “Unless Mr. MacLeod will be offering ye a lift,” the stationmaster concluded, as if inspired. “He has to go at least part of the way to Inverada.”

Charles Henderson met the remote blue eyes of the newcomer and felt an instantaneous upsurge of dislike and antagonism.

“It’s not going to be the slightest use to us if Mr. MacLeod is going only a part of the way to Inverada,” he observed. “We want to go the whole of the way.”

Euan MacLeod regarded him without the smallest sign of interest, and spoke in a voice as detached as his eyes.

“Do you have to go Inverada House tonight?” Henderson replied impatiently.

“It’s either that or camping out here where we are at present. And I don’t imagine that would be a popular suggestion if I made it.”

MacLeod seemed to reflect for a moment, and then his glance swung back to Toni, sitting uncomfortably on the horsehair sofa and wishing she didn’t feel quite such an interloper from an unfamiliar world. Unfamiliar to him, that is, in his patched and darned duffle coat with the missing leather thongs, and his floating tartan scarf that had seen so many winters that it couldn’t have much warmth left in it.

“I’ve no doubt we can get through, if the weather doesn’t worsen,” he remarked at last. He had a cultured voice with a faint Highland accent. “At the moment it’s not really a blizzard, but threatening to become one before the night’s out.” He picked up a couple of the suitcases occupying the middle of the floor. “Is this all your luggage, or have you any more?”

“I should imagine that’s quite enough unless you have a reasonably large car,” Charles replied with a note of disdain which he might, or might not, have been aware rendered his voice distinctly ungracious.

Euan MacLeod merely looked at him.

“I can shove them away in the boot.”

Toni felt herself blushing for Charles, just as a minute or so before she had very nearly blushed for her mother, with whom Charles was temporarily out of patience.

“It’s awfully good of you, Mr. MacLeod,” she said impulsively, and with one suitcase balanced on his shoulder, another under his arm, and yet another in his free hand, he turned and looked at her.

“Not at all, Miss—?”

“Drew,” she supplied, with nervous eagerness. “Antonia Drew.”

“Delighted, Miss Drew,” he assured her smoothly. Then he looked at Henderson, and his blue eyes hardened. They made Toni think of hard blue stars on a frosty night. “I’m not at all sure I can get through, but I’ll do my best. If I fail it’ll be up to you!”

“If you fail,” Charles retorted curtly, “we’ll be in the devil of a mess. So I sincerely hope you will not fail!”

Looking back on that drive in after days, the wonder of it was to Toni that they ever attempted it. If the two men had been different types—or if they hadn’t taken such an instantaneous dislike to one another, with the result that a strange sort of obstinacy entered into each of them, and discretion was temporarily banished to the winds—they might not have attempted it. They might have listened to the stationmaster’s half-hearted effort to dissuade them at the last moment.

“If you get stranded with the lass it’ll no’ be very comfortable for her. Why not stay here for an hour or so to see if the wind drops?”

“In that case we’ll be here all night,” Euan MacLeod snapped back at him, and Charles Henderson agreed. It was practically the only thing they were to agree about for the next twenty-four hours.

The night, now it had closed down, was very dark, as well as full of the blinding white particles driven by an icy wind. MacLeod’s car was a fairly roomy one, and its boot accommodated the better part of the luggage—Toni kept her feet on the only case that wouldn’t go into the boot—but it was very old, and it smelled of oil and spare parts. There was a box of provisions on the seat beside Toni, but she didn’t realize they were provisions until some time afterwards. There was also a sack of flour.

Charles sat in the front beside the driver. In the dim light from the dashboard Toni could see his dark head—bare as it always was, even when he was attending a fashionable wedding (in which case he carried his top hat in his hand)—shining as it had shone in the ray of light from her sleeper doorway the night before. Euan MacLeod’s luxuriant curls were just a dark thatch in front of her.

For a half-mile or so the going was not impossible, although as the windscreen wipers failed to function, it was necessarily very slow. Even so, the car had been built for speed, and occasionally it picked it up and they roared blindly into the night, with MacLeod bending forward to peer through the windscreen and rubbing fruitlessly with his handkerchief at the inside of it. Henderson offered the suggestion more than once that they stop and clear the windscreen of snow, which they did, although MacLeod said he knew the road like the back of his hand.

“In that case we’ll almost certainly arrive some time or other,” Henderson observed dryly. “Although whether in one piece or not I wouldn’t like to say.”

The other man frowned fiercely at the little he could see of the way ahead.

“Normally I don’t go as far as Inverada House,” he explained. “And I was referring to my own particular stretch of the road.” His thick brows knitted themselves together as he was forced into a skid to avoid a sheep that blundered recklessly right in front of his headlights. “I suppose you know what you’re going to do when you get to Inverada?” he asked curtly. “There’s no one looking after the place at the moment, and in fact, it’s empty.”

“Empty?” Charles sent a startled look at his profile. “But what about the caretaker and his wife? There
is
a caretaker, and he’s been notified of our arrival!”

Euan shrugged his shoulders.

“Fine, but the last I heard of old MacTaggert he’d broken his leg and been rushed off to hospital. Mrs. MacTaggert had a bad dose of ’flu and had gone to stay with her sister-in-law. Of course, she might have returned ... but I doubt it, in this weather. Inverada’s not an ideal place for recuperation in the dead of winter, and with Mac in hospital there’d be no one to fetch in the wood, or do anything like that.”

Charles barked at him.

“Don’t be such a fool, man. The MacTaggerts are paid to do their job by Miss Drew’s mother.”

Euan said nothing, and Toni leaned forward across the front seat.

“Of course, if they’re ill...” she said uncertainly. “But it seems odd that they should both be ill.”

“At seventy nothing is really odd,” the driver of the car remarked bleakly. “At least, it’s not odd that they should neither of them be as spry as they once were. They looked after old Angus, until he died, and then they should have been pensioned off.”

Toni was silent.

“Everyone imagined they would be pensioned off, and the house sold, or shut up. It’s not fit for occupation.”

“Not fit—?

Charles remarked on an odd note of satisfaction: “That doesn’t altogether surprise me. But it’s inconvenient to hear of such things now.”

Another sheep blundered across the road in front of the headlights, and MacLeod explained that they were mountain sheep, being driven to lower levels by the bad weather. He was finding it increasingly difficult to make any progress, and in fact they had now slowed to a crawl, and the car was full of the eerie whine of the wind, and the snow was beating at them like a mad white wall that dissolved into frenzied particles when it touched them. A sudden violent lurch—much more violent than that caused by the skid to avoid the first sheep—and Charles at least realised they were in the ditch. He made a gloomy pronouncement that was not without an undercurrent of satisfaction.

“It seems you’ve had it, MacLeod! Unless I’m very much mistaken we won’t see Inverada House tonight.”

The relish in his tone made Toni’s eyes grow round.

But MacLeod opened the door on his side and stepped out into the storm. A brief inspection of his front wheels—one of which was firmly embedded in a deep declivity at the side of the road—and he returned to make a pronouncement, also.

“We won’t be able to go any farther, but matters could be worse. As it is, my cottage isn’t more than a quarter of a mile away, and we should be able to make it with ease. I hope you’re both wrapped up fairly warmly?”

Toni clutched her tweed coat and wrapped it round her. The collar was already wet with snow that had found its way in through the faulty windows, and although she had worn a hat when she left Edinburgh she must have left it behind somewhere on the journey in between. Seeing that she was bareheaded Euan MacLeod took off his tartan scarf and handed it to her to make use of as a head scarf.

“But won’t you miss it?” she said, through chattering teeth, as they stood together in the darkness and the snow. Charles came up behind her and put his arm round her.

“Sorry about this, infant,” he muttered. “I ought to have had more sense than to let you leave the shelter of that one-eyed halt where we could have spent the night. But this young man was almost as over-confident as I was, and with less excuse, for he knows his district.”