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On the far side, Kate turned back by the tree line and faced the house. It really was a handsome building: imposing, baronial, stately – especially from here, where the view across the water and the ornamental garden gave the house an immaculate air, masking the near dilapidation inside. Kate smiled at her luck having landed a job here, then headed into the woods.
How long had she been walking? Half an hour? An hour? She really hadn’t thought this through at all. The large pine trees loomed skinny and tall and their leaves rustled overhead as a hint of a breeze swept through before growing silent almost as fast as it had started. The ground was blanketed in green spindly ferns. It was a job to know where to place her feet, hoping they landed correctly on the ground, out of sight, beneath the deep greenery. Every few yards or so a clump of tall purple foxgloves grew, unexpectedly sturdy and tall between rocks and crevices. Further along, Kate smiled to see thistles, feeling like a tourist at having spotted Scotland’s national flower. The purple flowers crowned them, completely juxtaposed with the rest of their oversized spiky appearance, transforming them into a thing of unexpected beauty. A large rock protruded by a series of trees, grouped together. She had passed this; she was sure she had. Was she going round in circles? What had first appeared striking woodland now appeared almost malevolent.
Kate stood still and listened. To her left she could hear the soft sound of running water, which couldn’t be the loch. She was too far inside the forest. Other than the sound of moving water, there was silence. She walked in the direction of the sound to find a wide stream running through the woodland, its water tumbling over rocks, and its mossy banks dipped gently, easily accessible. Kate felt a bit like Bear Grylls all of a sudden and knelt, putting down her notebook and pen and dipping her hands into the cold water. There was Bear Grylls and then there was idiocy, so she sniffed the water dubiously. It smelt fine and, parched, she drank it. It didn’t taste odd so she cupped her hands into the water again, feeling rather proud of herself at the same time.
‘So you can take the city out of the girl,’ James said from behind her. Still crouching, Kate whipped her head round. He smiled and there was a flicker of a handsome man hiding underneath his sullen exterior. And then the smile left his face and frown lines returned as if he’d just remembered he was waging his own private war against her. His Labrador bounded up to Kate, gave her a nudge with his nose and then turned his attentions to the river and began drinking.
‘Sometimes,’ Kate replied with a small smile, drying her hands on her jeans before retrieving her pad and pen as she stood. ‘Where did you come from?’ She glanced around. He’d not been following her haphazard route on foot; of that she was sure.
He gestured over his shoulder. ‘I drove round. I just knew you’d get lost.’
‘Not that lost,’ Kate countered. ‘You found me.’
‘Not easily. I’ve been in these woods for about twenty minutes. And you’re about ten minutes’ walk from the cottage. In the wrong direction.’
‘Oh,’ she said quietly.
‘I did try and tell you,’ James said.
They stood and looked at each other. He was obviously a man who had to have the last word and Kate wasn’t in the mood for a fight.
‘What’s your dog’s name?’ She changed the subject.
James smiled. ‘Whisky. I didn’t name him. He was my dad’s dog. He’s just sort of become mine since Dad died.’
‘Good name,’ Kate said. ‘Appropriate, given we’re probably surrounded by distilleries.’
‘True. Although depending on the mood he was in, it was often difficult to tell if Dad was yelling for someone to bring him a stiff drink or if he was summoning the dog for a walk.’ James looked wistful and as he smiled there was a hint of mellowness in his eyes. He was almost pleasant when he let his defensive barriers down.
‘Shall we look at the cottage then?’ Kate suggested.
‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ James replied as he turned. She followed him. ‘It’s not been lived in since before the war. The house hasn’t had a ghillie since then, so it’s fallen into disrepair. I’m in the process of doing it up. I want to get it ready to let, then that’s one thing ticked off the never-ending list of jobs. We’ll get some incoming cash and it can help fund us while we sort the main house and whatever else we intend to do.’
Kate nodded. ‘That actually sounds like a good idea,’ she confessed.
‘Actually?’ James queried. ‘You weren’t expecting me to have come up with a decent plan myself?’
She sighed. It was disappointing how quickly he reverted back to defensive. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘Anyway,’ he continued as they trampled through the thick undergrowth, snapping twigs and dodging nettles as they trod. ‘As the main house started to fall away, so did the ghillie’s cottage. After the war, there weren’t as many staff, no ghillie, no real estate management – either land or financial from what I could gather. It was a case of trying to eke the coffers out as far as they’d stretch.
‘Even my father, when he arrived some years later, with all good intentions, didn’t have it in him to cast his eyes further than Invermoray House itself.’
‘When he arrived?’ Kate questioned. ‘What do you mean?’
James looked at Kate as they walked. He was quite tall and she could feel herself almost jogging to keep up with his long strides.
‘Has Mum not explained the family history to you?’
‘No.’
He exhaled. ‘God, where do I start?’
‘At the beginning?’ She smiled.
James raised an eyebrow and half-smiled in return as he launched into the story.
‘The estate never used to be Dad’s. He lived and grew up in a house in London,’ James said. ‘Dad was an artist …’ This explained the modern artwork around the sitting room, Kate thought. ‘Not the tortured kind, more the jovial kind,’ he continued. ‘But certainly the kind that never made any money. He and Mum lived happily in London with holes in the ceiling and the boiler forever going wrong. It’s why Invermoray’s fared the same in terms of maintenance. I think it’s an attitude thing. Anyway, he inherited Invermoray in the 1980s, when relations of his passed away. Very distant relations from what I could work out. Either way, it was his. Dad quite fancied playing lord of the manor and so we sold the London house and decamped completely up here when I was a kid. In truth, I’ve never quite forgiven them.’
They stopped as they reached a clearing. ‘I just assumed it had been in your family for generations,’ Kate said.
‘It has been, since it was built in the early Victorian era. But for the other branch of the family, the McLays. Our last name was … is … Langley but the will asked for the McLay family name to be carried on, bolted on to ours. You can’t dictate that kind of thing from beyond the grave, the solicitor said, but Dad did it regardless; felt he owed it to them. So we became Langley-McLay, officially. Dad used it. Mum still does. But I don’t.’
‘Why not?’ Kate asked.
‘I suppose I felt like an idiot, changing my name, and a bit resentful at having moved up here. Invermoray never really felt like home. Never really felt like me.’
‘So who were the McLays then?’ Kate was curious now. ‘Who asked you to adopt their name in exchange for the house, which by the way sounds like a really fair trade?’
‘Fair trade? It’s the worst kind of trade. This house is a bloody drain on us. Always has been.’ James screwed up his face as he thought. ‘It’s some boring connection,’ he told her. ‘One of Dad’s cousins or something like that. He and his wife were elderly. I think he died in the early Eighties and then she followed not long after. It’s all a bit odd really if you think about it. They had two grown-up children, I believe. There’s portraits of them in the house. Mum found the pictures buried in the attic a while back.’
Kate remembered the portraits on the stairs, the young man in RAF uniform, the girl in the silver-grey dress. She wondered if they were who James meant.
‘They should have inherited, one or the other of them, according to Mum,’ James continued. ‘But for one reason or another they’d lost touch with their parents, or maybe died. I’m not sure. There was a family rumour they had been disinherited years and years earlier but Dad and his parents didn’t take it seriously. So it was a complete shock when the line of inheritance missed out the McLays’ direct descendants for whatever reason, skipped sideways and landed on us Langleys.’
Kate hadn’t been paying too much attention to her surroundings. Instead she’d been entranced by James’s strange tale. It was with some surprise that she found they had reached the cottage. James had been right. From the direction of the loch, the hedges had tangled into thicket and had built up to a high level, camouflaging it from view. It was unlikely she would have seen it had she been alone. Instead they had doubled round and approached the cottage from the direction of the road that ran to the front of the estate. James’s battered Land Rover was parked some distance away on the track. It was a marvel he’d managed to locate her really.
‘Thank you,’ Kate said.
He frowned. ‘What for?’
‘Making the effort to find me, out there.’ She gestured to what she had now decided was The Wilderness.
He shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it. You might have found it eventually.’ He raised his eyebrows theatrically. ‘Then again … you might not.’
She couldn’t help but laugh.
James bent down and pulled the brass key out from underneath the mat.
‘That’s a really brave place to keep it,’ Kate said. ‘Anyone could find it.’
‘Out here?’ He rolled his eyes as he unlocked the thick wooden door. ‘You couldn’t.’ He looked pleased with his own joke. ‘Besides, it’s not here permanently. I left it there so the roofer could finish and pick up his tools. At least it’s watertight now. As I said—’ he indicated the cottage ‘—it’s not much.’ James turned the handle and Whisky beat his tail as he caught up with them, impatient to be let inside. ‘In fact some of the ghillie’s stuff from before the war is still here. Dusty. Moth-eaten. The McLays couldn’t be bothered to chuck it all out it seems, and neither could my dad. I did have half a mind that I could tosh the furniture up a bit instead of buying new. Holidaymakers love that reclaimed look, apparently. So don’t be surprised if you think it looks like a museum. Because it does.’
He opened the door, pushed it open and they stepped inside.
CHAPTER 9
August 1940
The cottage door slammed open, the metal catch clanging as it crashed against the stone wall inside. Constance was breathless; she’d been running so hard. In the woods she’d realised with every pounding step that, with a combination of duty and a longing to help him, she was desperate to see the pilot before he left as he’d sworn he would.
‘You’ll never have to see me again,’ he had said. And for one awful moment as Constance stood at the threshold and looked in, she believed it was true. As she’d left the cottage last night he had been drifting to sleep by the armchair. But the space he’d inhabited was now empty. During the night he must have thrown a few more logs on the fire, their charred, smoking remains reduced to dim embers in the grate.
She ran upstairs to see if he had chosen to sleep in the bed, but the bedclothes remained unruffled and the scent of settled dust lingered in the room. With her heart full of disappointment, Constance descended the staircase.
He had gone.
The pilot, Matthew, had moved one of the spindle-backed dining chairs from its position by the kitchen table and over to the fireside. Over the back he had draped her dress. She imagined him picking it up from the floor after she had left, touching it, taking the effort to look around the room, to find something appropriate from which to hang it; putting it a suitable distance from the fire so it would dry easily but not shrink from the proximity to the heat. She touched the dress with her fingertips, wondering at the effort he had made for her; such a small act but it held meaning that Constance couldn’t understand. He hadn’t just left it crumpled on the floor as others might have done. She stood, not quite knowing what she should do next. Somehow, going back to the house, back to her daily life, didn’t feel right. It was almost as if the events of last night, the aircraft disappearing into the water, swimming out to find the pilot, relief at finding him alive, sitting with him in this very room, held meaning, held an opportunity for … something? Not excitement. No. There had been plenty enough of that last night, heart pounding, frightening excitement. But something else nonetheless. The opportunity to be useful, to break free of the confines of the house and to embrace the war effort, even if it was only starting with keeping a stricken pilot safe while he recovered and came to his senses. It was a start. She looked around. All trace of him had gone.
It wasn’t really for Constance to worry about, but she was worried for him. She couldn’t help it. And now she would return home and see Henry, who had stayed the night, and her family at the breakfast table, other than Mother, who always took a tray in her room. Douglas would be talking non-stop about flying, about the ‘Hun’, about training or some such other nonsense. Henry, oh she didn’t know what to do about him, but in all likelihood he would be shooting daggers at her for spurning his advances last night. Or would he remain as confident as ever, as if nothing had happened at all? The boys were due to return back to their base at Kinloss today. Henry had seemed pleased that he’d been posted there, but Douglas was livid. He wanted to be down in the south of England, down in what he called ‘the real thick of it.’ He was desperate for his squadron to be posted almost anywhere other than on his own doorstep.
Constance thought him rather lucky. He wasn’t exactly out of harm’s way up here what with all the docks and Royal Navy Fleets to protect. But he didn’t seem to relish being a defender of his own patch of Scottish sky. She would have given anything to do something for the war. But until it became obligatory for women to join, if it ever became obligatory, Father had forbidden her. ‘Work isn’t for women like you,’ he had said. But Constance was twenty-one now. Didn’t that count for something? Was there really nothing she could do that would take her away from the incessant, stifling boredom of Invermoray? They were no longer travelling down to spend time at the London house each year and most of her friends had joined the war effort, travelling far and wide for whichever of the services they’d entered and sending letters about how they were wearing the ‘most ghastly uniform’, and ‘eating the most frightful rations’. But their letters had been tinged with excitement, happiness, purpose. Father had closed up the London house the moment war was declared, deeming it foolhardy to decamp to a city where bombs may fall any minute. ‘What kind of father would I be?’ he had asked. ‘If I took us into the eye of the storm?’
And so now they were shut up here for the foreseeable future. She felt as though her home was her prison. She would not go back to the house. Not yet. Constance often took herself off on long walks around the loch or the estate, for exercise and for something to do, and so they would not worry for her. She’d gone to bed with the story of her headache and had risen to walk it off. That’s what they’d think. No one would care enough to ask. She folded the gossamer dress over her arm and reluctantly stepped out into the cool morning air. Perhaps the pilot was right. Perhaps running away was the answer?
What if she did as he had done, arrived somewhere in the middle of the night, no one at home any the wiser as to where she had gone? What if she packed a bag and made her way into a city where she might engage in some kind of war work? But what could she do? What were her skills? After her governess, there had been finishing school. That had instructed her how to be fashionable in polite society, what to say and what not to say in her native tongue and in French, which she had promptly forgotten the moment she’d set foot back on Scottish soil, although she had tried so hard to remember. In essence, it had primed her for marriage. But it had given her no useful skill in the middle of war. She thought of her brother and how men were given the gift of thorough education and the expectation that ran alongside it. Constance was expected to do very little and allowed to do even less.
Pinecones crunched underfoot as Constance walked. She knew the forest so well she paid scant attention to her direction. Before long she would find herself at the road that ran along the edge of the woodland. She didn’t want to see a soul. Not that she would. Not since petrol went on the ration almost the very moment war was declared. Many of those living in Invermoray village didn’t have cars anyway. That level of modernity had yet to stretch to her corner of Scotland and there was no danger of the bus passing at this time of day to and from Beauly.
After a while the rumble in her stomach alerted her that she should probably return home. She would sneak into the kitchen and see if she could snaffle a few treats left over from her unwanted birthday party. She would disappear into the pantry, as she often did, and Mrs Fraser – the cook – wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Constance and Douglas were forever below stairs; had been ever since they were children. With hardly any other friends nearby, they had frequented the kitchens and spent time with the loud, laughing Highland staff. It had felt more familiar than above stairs.
With her father’s nose perpetually in a book and her mother attending the plants in the hothouse, Constance had made herself scarce most days when her governess was not present. As a child, as long as she was neither seen nor heard she had elicited no strong words from either parent. And so, with very little else to entertain her, Constance had been taught to skin the rabbits she had caught when out with the ghillie. It had given her a huge sense of silent satisfaction at dinner when she looked at her parents elegantly eating from their plates, not knowing that their daughter had both caught and prepared their food. They would have been horrified and found her some other, proper yet awful way to express her energy or, heaven forbid, employed her governess for the vast majority of the time rather than just a few days of the week.
And then when Douglas had returned home from school at summer and Christmas, Constance’s life had been complete again. He often joked that school had been his undoing and that if he’d stayed behind – like her – it would have made more of a man of him. He followed Constance and the ghillie about the estate, discovering patches of it he’d long since forgotten, helping to keep the deer populace down but closing his eyes at the last minute when he pulled the trigger, the bullets always missing their mark until he gave up one summer and decided, ‘never again’. He’d never quite bought into the much-lauded idea that with no wolves in Scotland anymore it was the estate’s responsibility to keep a check on its own numbers. Constance and the ghillie had admired his sense of decency but had often taken the gun from him and continued the job themselves while Douglas sighed resignedly behind them; happy to help wrap the venison into brown paper and string parcels but preferring to play no part in the animal’s actual death.
It had always been Douglas who had been fussed over by the staff, his time with them precious, before he returned to a school he loathed. She hadn’t minded a bit about that. She was just grateful for her brother’s return – a bit of company for a few short weeks, a few times a year. But that was then, when they were younger, back when they’d had more staff. Now it was just Mrs Fraser and Mrs Campbell – the housekeeper – along with a couple of local daily girls who cleaned for them. But Mrs Fraser had mentioned there’d been rumblings the daily girls were intending to join the war effort. For one thing they thought they would be paid more, which was probably true. Constance didn’t know, but at least then they’d meet people. Other people. Anyone. Whenever Constance mentioned work, she faced an onslaught of argument from her parents. No one married a girl who worked.
Her stomach rumbled again. She realised she hadn’t eaten a morsel last night, what with so many guests to talk to and thoughts of escaping Henry, there simply hadn’t been time.
After she’d eaten something she would sit in the window seat in the library and read or stare out at the loch, which now held a Spitfire within its murky clutches when yesterday, it hadn’t. She wondered if she would ever reveal that to anyone. Perhaps to Douglas, one day. But not yet. She would give the troubled pilot time to move on. She would not be responsible for a search party assembling.
In the middle of the forest, she walked towards the trickle of the river, intending to scoop a few handfuls of water to drink. The ghillie had spent many an hour showing her how to tickle trout out of the river, before he had gone to war with the rest of the male staff, other than the gardener who was too old to fight and the gardener’s boy, who was too young. Eventually Constance had got the hang of gently ushering trout from the stream of flowing water with nothing more than the tips of her fingers. She wondered what her mother and father would say if she did it now, returning casually to the house with tonight’s dinner in her arms. She laughed out loud. She’d be condemned as a heathen.
The splashing of the stream was louder than usual and as she approached she realised that there was someone in there. The sound of blood swooshed in her ears as she realised it was him – the pilot, Matthew. She was overjoyed. He was still here. She still had the chance to help him and to apologise for her appalling behaviour yesterday. He hadn’t seen her but she had seen him. His clothes, or rather the ghillie’s, were piled up on the mossy bank. He was standing facing the other direction and Constance could see he was completely undressed. He was splashing himself clean in the icy cold water.
He hadn’t heard her approach over the rushing of the water so she took the opportunity to move. She would not hail him. His nakedness embarrassed her into moving quickly to stand behind the trunk of a tall tree. She hoped she was hidden. She turned and pushed her back against the trunk, her fingers splayed out behind her, her nails almost dug into the bark as she stared into the forest, full of joy that he was still here; that he hadn’t yet left.
She moved, just a fraction, intending to peer round the trunk – just to see if he had got dressed yet, just to see if it was safe to come out from her impromptu hiding place, but then all thoughts of movement were interrupted.
‘Is there someone there?’ he shouted from the water.
Constance’s chest tightened as she inhaled sharply.
He repeated himself and then, sounding nervous, added, ‘Come out. Show yourself.’
She was trapped. She couldn’t stay here all day hiding in a cowardly fashion but likewise couldn’t just spring out. She stalled, thinking.
‘I swear to God if there’s someone there …’ he called loudly, aiming for threatening, Constance was sure.
‘I …’ Constance called but further words failed her. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, it’s me. I’m here.’
There was no reply. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t see him naked again, she just couldn’t. The embarrassment of it. Her fingernails dug further into the trunk and she stared straight ahead into the forest. The pine trees swayed of their natural accord but she was almost unseeing of anything around her. What was he doing?
The answer became clear as the pilot appeared suddenly in front of her. He’d put his trousers back on but they clung damply and tightly to his skin.