‘Hi.’ Kirsty’s voice rises above the roar of the wind and the sea as she jumps down smiling into the hollow to join me. I can hear the happiness in her voice, and I try not to let it affect me. She stoops to kiss my cheek and I turn my head away to avoid it.
I feel her tension immediately. She stands up straight. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Your father’s what’s wrong.’
I don’t look at her, but I can hear the immediate anger in her voice. ‘What do you mean?’
I stand up and turn to face her. ‘Do you know what he’s doing?’ She just stares back at me, her face a mask of confusion. ‘He’s forcing people out of their homes and setting their houses on fire so that they can’t come back.’
‘He is not!’
‘And he sends constables and estate workers to force them on to boats to sail them off across the Atlantic against their will.’
‘Stop it! That’s not true.’
‘It is.’ I feel my own anger fired by hers. ‘I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Folk I know beaten and kicked. Neighbours at Sgagarstaigh, kids I was at school with, made to leave the houses they were born in, and forced to watch as the bastards set them on fire. I saw them ferried out to a boat in the loch and put in chains if they tried to escape. Just ordinary folk, Ciorstaidh. Folk whose ancestors have lived here for generations. Folk whose parents and grandparents are buried here on the machair. Forced to leave it all and sent off to some godforsaken place on the other side of the world, just because your father wants to put sheep on the land.’
I see the shock on Kirsty’s face. Her hurt and bewilderment, her desperate desire for it not to be true. ‘I don’t believe you!’ she shouts in my face, giving voice to that desire, but I have no doubt, too, that she can see in my face that it is.
The tears that have been brimming in her eyes spill from them now, and are spread across her cheeks by the wind. Her hand comes out of nowhere, its open palm catching me squarely on the cheek. I almost stagger with the force of it, and feel how it stings my skin. I see the distress behind her tears. And as she turns and climbs back out of the hollow to run off between the stones that stand proud on the hill, skirt and cape flowing out behind her, I realise that I have just destroyed her world. And mine.
I so dearly wish I could run after her and tell her that none of it is real. But I can’t. And I understand fully for the first time how both our lives have changed, and how nothing will ever be the same again.
It is low tide, and the smell of the sea fills the air. A rich, rotting seaweed smell that is so familiar. For once there is no wind and the sea is a placid pewter reflecting a sky that lies low above my head, a sad, unbroken grey. It laps tamely along the shore, licking around the ragged tendrils of Lewisian gneiss that invade it from the shore, ancient hard rock encrusted with shellfish and made slippery by the kelp that grows here in profusion and covers it so abundantly.
I have two wicker baskets that sit at angles on the rock as I hack at the seaweed with a long, curved blade, shredding my fingers on shells like razorblades as I pull it free of the rock to throw in the baskets. My back aches, and my feet, which have been in the water off and on for hours, are frozen numb. The baskets are nearly full and I will shortly make the return trek to the croft once more to spread the kelp on our lazy beds.
I have not been aware of her approach, and only now as I glance up do I see her standing there on the rocks looking down at me. She wears her cape buttoned for warmth, the hood pulled up over her head, and with the light behind her as she stands silhouetted against the sky I cannot see her face. It is some days since our confrontation in the hollow and I had thought I would never see her again.
I straighten up slowly, stepping out of the water and on to the rock. Crabs scuttle about in the pools that gather there, scraps of reflected light scattered randomly amongst the sombre green seaweed.
Now I see how pale she is, dark shadows staining the pure unblemished skin beneath her eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, her voice so tiny I can barely hear it above the breath of the ocean. She lowers her eyes. ‘It seems I’m always having to apologise to you.’
I shrug, knowing that whatever it is she feels, my remorse is greater. ‘What for?’
‘For slapping you.’ She pauses. ‘For not believing you.’
I don’t know what to say. I can only imagine the pain and disillusion that would have beset me if someone had dismantled the belief I have in my own father.
‘It’s still so hard for me to believe that daddy could be responsible for such things. I knew I couldn’t ask him straight out. So I asked the serving staff. At first no one would admit to knowing anything. Until I pressed them. It was my tutor who told me in the end.’
She sucks in her lower lip and seems to be biting on it to control her emotions.
‘Only then did I finally confront my father. He was …’ She closes her eyes in wretched recollection, ‘… he was incandescent. He told me it was none of my business and that I simply didn’t understand. And when I told him that what I didn’t understand was how he could treat people like that, he did what I did to you.’ She draws a trembling breath and I see her pain. ‘He slapped me. So hard he bruised me.’ Her hand moves up to her face instinctively and her fingertips trace the line of her cheekbone. But there is no sign of the bruising now. ‘He had me locked in my room for two days, and I’m not sure that I stopped crying once. My mother wanted to reason with me. But I wouldn’t even let her in the room.’
She lowers her eyes to the ground and I see defeat in the slump of her shoulders.
‘My tutor has been dismissed, and I am confined to the house. I managed to slip out the kitchen door this morning. They probably don’t know I’m gone yet, though I’m not sure I care if they do.’
I step close now and take her in my arms, feeling her tremble as I draw her into my chest and hold her there. Her head rests against my shoulder and she slips her arms around me. We stand like this for an age, breathing in time with the slow beat of the ocean. Until finally she releases me and steps back from my arms.
‘I want to run away, Simon.’ Her eyes fix me in their earnest gaze and I feel the desperate appeal in them. But running away is not a concept that I can easily understand.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean I want to leave here. And I want you to go with me.’
I shake my head in confusion. ‘Go where?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Anywhere but here.’
‘But, Ciorstaidh, I have no money.’
‘I can get us money.’
I shake my head again. ‘I can’t, Ciorstaidh. This is my home. My parents and my sisters need me. My father can’t manage the croft on his own.’ The whole notion of it is alien to me. ‘And anyway, where would we go? What would I do? How would we live?’
She stands staring at me, her eyes filled with betrayal and tears. Her face is bleak and hopeless, and suddenly she shouts at me, ‘I hate you, Simon Mackenzie. I hate you more than I’ve ever hated anyone in my life.’
And she turns and strides away across the rocks, both hands pulling her skirt and cape free of the kelp and the pools of seawater, until reaching the grass where she runs off into the morning gloom, leaving sobs of distress in her wake.
And me with a debilitating sense of guilt.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Sime sat bolt upright and wondered if he had really called out loud in the dark, or just imagined it. In the silent aftermath he listened for any sign that he had disturbed Kirsty. But there was no sound from upstairs. All he could hear was his own rapid breathing and the pounding of blood through his head.