Lightly Poached (6 page)

‘Ach, but there's always the slugs to spoil a garden,' responded Tearlaich nimbly. ‘It's that damp on my croft the slugs are near as big as mice. I grew some cabbages last year and I could lie in my bed at night and listen to the slugs gnawing through them.'

I laughed.

‘It's as true as I'm here,' he assured me with great earnestness. ‘Honest to God, those cabbages were as full of holes as a herring net by morning.

From the shore came the rattle of oars being shipped.

‘Have Erchy and Hector gone down yet?' I asked.

‘Aye, they're away. They told me to call in and tell you to be ready and for me to pick up that rope fender Erchy dropped over your dyke a while back.'

My croft being situated conveniently near was the repository for precious objects retrieved from the shore. There were times after a storm when my croft resembled a museum of flotsam.

‘I'll go and get a coat,' I said. ‘Don't let them go without me.'

Tearlaich still hung back, apparently unable to drag his attention away from the garden. ‘Those things, there,' he pointed. ‘Are those trees?'

‘They're supposed to be,' I confessed with a rueful glance at the row of baby conifers which I had planted early in the spring in the hope they would thrive and eventually provide natural shelter.

‘They don't look as if they'll like to live,' observed Tearlaich without optimism.

‘I doubt it very much myself,' I agreed, assessing the miniature branches which still showed faint traces of green tips but otherwise looked as if they had been pressed and scorched with a hot iron.

‘Where did you get them?' asked Tearlaich.

‘From that tinker. You know, the one they always call “Buggy Duck”. He promised me last year he'd bring some next time he was round and this spring he turned up with these.'

‘Were they like this when you got them?'

I nodded.

‘I hope you didn't give him money for them?'

I admitted that I had paid Buggy Duck the price he had asked.

‘Ach, I could have got you a few from the laird's place if I'd known you wanted them. He'd never miss that many.'

‘I don't want illicit trees in my garden,' I said firmly.

Tearlaich looked at me and there were both pity and amazement in his expression. ‘Why then did you ask Buggy Duck to bring you some?' he demanded. ‘Like as not they came from the laird's place anyway but not so fresh as you'd have got them from me.' He threw the conifers a final disdainful glance as he turned away. ‘I doubt they'll live the winter,' he informed me. ‘They've been too dry.'

‘I told Buggy Duck when he brought them they looked too dry to survive but he got quite indignant. He said they couldn't possibly have got too dry because he'd been sleeping with them inside his bedding for the last three months.'

Tearlaich and I exchanged amused glances. ‘If a tinker's been sleeping with them for three months I doubt you'll have a lot of other things growing in your garden supposing you don't get any trees,' he comforted.

Even standing on the shore I could see the boat was grossly overloaded and when we came alongside in the dinghy I estimated there was hardly more than eighteen inches of freeboard. There were coy screams from some of the young girls aboard as Tearlaich jumped heavily on the gunwale causing the boat to rock spectacularly.

‘She's fairly ready to sink with the weight of folks in her,' Erchy told him with a touch of irritation,

‘Ach, it's calm enough,' retorted Tearlaich and squeezing himself between two of the girls sat grinning cheerfully with an arm round each of them.

It was a lustrous evening of velvet calm with remnants of the sunset still glowing behind the dark hill peaks and the unruffled sea reflecting the pale celadon of the sky save where the outlying islands cast sable shadows. Sea birds were everywhere, puffins, guillemots and razorbills, all bobbing and diving for late suppers while above them terns wheeled and dipped in flight.

Erchy assessed the number of heads aboard. ‘Where's Johnny Mor?' he asked. ‘He swore he was comin'.'

‘I've seen no sign of him,' said Tearlaich. ‘Ach, he was out on the hill today seein' to his sheep. Maybe he's fallen in a bog.'

‘Well, if he has we're not waitin' till he gets out of it,' said Hector with a bland smile. He started the engine while Erchy attended to the mooring of the dinghy.

Are we no' takin' the dinghy?' asked Hector as the rope was cast off.

‘No damty fear,' replied Erchy. ‘If nobody comes to meet us at Rhuna Miss Peckwitt can swim ashore an' get a hold of one of their dinghies.' I gave him an arch glance. I am a poor swimmer but the fact that I could keep afloat in the water at all astonished the Bruachites. The skirl of compassionate murmurings directed at me from the female passengers gave way to small shrieks and squeaks of excitement as the bow of the boat cut a sweeping arc through the water and turned towards Rhuna. The postman soon produced a mouth-organ and gradually coaxed most of the passengers into the singing of Gaelic and Scottish songs, the mixed choir of voices surging and ebbing over the water while the throbbing of the engine and the strains of the mouth-organ compounded into a makeshift orchestra.

‘When you're on the sea,' Erchy had once confided to me, ‘you either want to sing or you want to swear.' I stole a glance at him as he stood with one hand on the tiller, his head raised and his mouth wide open as he sang lustily. I watched the receding shore, the feeding birds and the evening settling over the water.

‘Oh, look! A seal!' I cried as a sleek dark head bobbed out of the sea about fifty yards behind us. The rest of the company turned to give the seal a moment or two of its attention and then the singers, whose voices had only wavered at my interruption, were at full volume again. It was sometimes difficult for me to remember that sights which thrilled me were to the Bruachites so regular as to be commonplace; that they were as used to the presence of seals around their shores as I had once been to the presence of hawkers in town.

‘There's another of them been following us for the past twenty minutes if you're that keen to see them,' shouted Tearlaich. ‘It's the singing that brings them.'

‘I sing nearly every time I go out in a boat,' I yelled back, ‘but I've never managed to lure a seal to follow me yet.'

From the stern of the boat Erchy's voice came piercingly. ‘That's because you sing in English. It's only the Gaelic that attracts them.'

For some time the two seals accompanied us, submerging and re-emerging at varying distances from the boat but always it seemed keeping us under observation with such timid yearning in their large dark eyes I was reminded of pictures of hungry waifs locked out from a feast.

As we approached the dark mass of Rhuna the island slowly yielded up its secrets. The bastion-like cliffs revealed themselves as being riven into steep sea-washed caverns and tiny shingle coves; shadowy hollows betrayed the entrances to secret caves; craggy pillars of rock were tenanted by uneasy shags, while on the tumbled boulders, still wet from the retreating tide, stood confident gulls watching us with half-hearted interest. Erchy steered the boat toward the mouth of a burn where two dinghies were moored by ropes to the shore. While we watched two men came out from one of the cottages and began to pull in both dinghies preparatory to rowing out to meet us.

‘It's Roddy an' Calum that's comin',' announced Erchy. Hector stopped the engine. ‘Aye, an' seein' tse're bringin' two dinghies they must know we have a good load,' he observed.

‘They're no' blind, are they?' Tearlaich told him.

If the boat had been overloaded the dinghies were even more so, there being barely three inches of freeboard on either of them. But no one worried. It was a calm evening and a short row. We clambered out on to the shingle without mishap.

‘The cailleach has a strupach ready,' said Roddy, thus obliquely conveying to us that whoever we might wish to visit during the evening the real ceilidh was to be at his mother's house. She had staked her claim to our company.

‘We'd best away an' get our hazels first,' Erchy told him. ‘We'll take a strupach when we get back.'

‘I'll take a look in at her,' Morag promised. ‘But I couldn't swallow a mouthful till I've undone myself from the knot I was in aboard that boat. Indeed my legs was that stiff I thought I'd have to leave them behind.' She rubbed her knuckles into the small of her back.

‘I want to go and see that apple tree,' I said firmly.

Rhuna boasted an apple tree which was reputed to have been grown from the pips of apples washed ashore when an American schooner foundered off the island during the Great War and on a previous visit, late in the autumn, I had discovered beneath the tree two rotting apples which I had taken home and planted. Despite lavish attention, however, the seeds had not germinated and, since I hoped to try again, I wanted to go and inspect the tree to satisfy myself it was still flourishing.

‘I'll come along with you,' said Behag promptly. It transpired that most of the party had friends they wished to see or things they wished to do before gathering for a final strepach so it was agreed that Roddy was to tell his mother we would all return in about an hour's time for our ceilidh with her. The party therefore split up into various groups and went their different ways. Behag and I were joined by Tearlaich and by Roddy's brother, Calum, who, because he had spent much of his time at sea, was almost a stranger to Behag and to me. We ambled along slowly and Morag, who had nipped into the cottage to exchange polite greetings with the ‘cailleach', soon caught up with us.

‘You didn't tell me your sister Marie was home,' she accused Calum.

‘Aye, she's home. She's gettin' married at the back end to some doctor or other so she's home for a rest first.'

‘She'll need a rest first if she's goin' to marry a doctor,' remarked Tearlaich with an obscure smile.

‘To a doctor,' echoed Morag. ‘Do I know of him?'

‘Indeed I don't know him myself,' returned Calum, ‘except that he's from some hospital in Glasgow where she was once nursin'.'

‘Aye, well, I've no doubt the girl will do well for herself,' said Morag in much the same tone as I might have said, ‘She could do worse, I suppose.'

We followed Calum along an erratic track that skirted rags of crofts where tousled grass contested with drifts of heather its right to grow among the innumerable out-crops of stone. Calum stopped frequently to point out places of interest.

‘It was just there my father dug up a barrel of salt butter when I was a boy,' he told us. ‘An' it was still good.'

‘An' how long would that have been there?' asked Morag.

‘God knows,' replied Calum. ‘Twenty-five years maybe. There was nobody livin' then who remembered it bein' put there.'

‘That's most interesting,' I commented.

‘I'd be more interested if you dug up a barrel of whisky,' countered Tearlaich wistfully.

‘An' that was a fairy house, there,' said Calum at another juncture, indicating a smooth green mound covered with flat stones. ‘An' this we're comin' to is what's always known as the “Red Bum”.'

‘Why red?' I asked.

‘Because of all the blood that flowed in it.' His tone became grave. ‘In days long ago, Miss Peckwitt, there was a wicked factor lived hereabouts an' once every year the crofters used to gather here to pay him their rents. Any man that couldn't pay was just murdered an' his body thrown into the burn. That's how it came to be known as the “Red Burn”.' He looked at Morag. ‘You'll surely have heard the story?'

‘They say it was all true, right enough,' agreed Morag. ‘It must have been,' asserted Calum. ‘Why else would the cows refuse to drink from it, even to this day? No, nor walk through it, even.' ‘Is that so?' asked Tearlaich with polite interest.

‘It is so,' maintained Calum. ‘I've seen a cow that's been tethered all day on the croft without water an' when she was loosed she made straight for the well on the moors sooner than go anywhere near that burn.'

There must be the smell of murder in it yet,' declared Morag with apparent conviction.

‘Aye, an' another thing,' continued Calum. ‘Supposin' the cows are over this side of the island an' you need to drive them back to the crofts you can put half a dozen people an' dogs on to their tails but the beasts will never cross that burn. You'd have to walk a good mile out of your way an' beyond the loch before you'd get them home.'

We crossed the ‘Red Burn' by the stepping stones and in doing so I noticed a promising-looking clump of watercress growing on one of its boggy banks.

‘Look, watercress!' I pointed it out to Behag. I turned to Calum. ‘Tell me,' I said, ‘do the people of Rhuna believe like the Bruach people that watercress should be left for the fairies?'

‘Aye, so they do.' He nodded back towards the burn. ‘I seen a couple of them here the other night just, gatherin' great bunches of it.'

‘Fairies?' I asked.

‘Aye.'

‘Did you see them yourself?' breathed Behag in an awestruck whisper.

‘I did. I was out after a rabbit an' I came back this way pretty late an' there they were. I saw them as plain as I'm seein' you.'

‘How did you know they were fairies?' I asked in a steady voice.

‘Who else would be wearin' little green jackets an' red caps,' he retorted with a trace of asperity. Behag and I exchanged quick glances.

Our path led us towards a lichen-patterned heap of stones which had once enclosed a small patch of ground and I was delighted to see the apple tree not only growing vigorously but bearing an abundant crop of sizable though still unripe fruit. Tearlaich picked one but after tasting it he threw it nonchalantly in the direction of a late lingering hoodie crow which was picking at an ancient cowpat. Calum volunteered to bring me over a creelful of apples as soon as they were ripe if the Lord spared him.