NINETEEN

1588

Lilias, along with her young sister Ishbel, seemed to have taken it upon herself to be chief translator and educator of Mateo and his cousin. Mateo felt happier about this than seemed wise. She told them a little about the landscape of the island, for they had seen almost nothing of it beyond the house and its immediate surroundings, and had no idea of the extent or nature of the island to which they had come. McNeill had intimated that they were free to go where they pleased on Eilean Garbh, as long as they did not attempt to leave it, but they had had no inclination to venture very far away from the immediate vicinity of the house. For one thing, they didn’t trust the islanders to be friendly. They confessed themselves quite ignorant about the place that had offered them shelter. Ishbel seemed surprised, with an eight-year-old’s assumption that her home was the very centre of the world, and must therefore be famous, even to strangers such as Mateo and Francisco. Lilias smiled indulgently at her sister.

‘I don’t suppose you know very much about the place where they come from either,’ she said. ‘Although it’s an island as well, isn’t it?’

‘Like this one?’ asked Ishbel.

‘Not so much like this one. Or at least I don’t think so, for I am almost as ignorant,’ Lilias replied.

‘The sun shines nearly all the time,’ said Mateo. ‘And all kinds of things grow there that I think do not grow here. Flowers and fruits of all kinds.’

He said it so sadly that Ishbel left off petting the dogs, her chief occupation on this wet afternoon, and came over to hug him. ‘Oh, but we have flowers here!’

‘I have seen very few.’

‘You have seen only those few that survive into the winter months,’ said Lilias. ‘In springtime it will be quite different.’

‘You must wait till springtime and then, if you are still here, you will see flowers in plenty,’ added Ishbel.

‘I think we may still be here.’

‘Then I’m glad of it.’ The child, with a strong sense of what was fair, went over and hugged Francisco as well.

‘Leave them alone,’ said Lilias.

‘I don’t mind!’ Francisco looked up. ‘She reminds me of my little sister.’

‘What’s her name?’ asked Ishbel.

‘Sofia Isabella.’

‘But that’s your name, Ishbel,’ said Lilias. ‘Ishbel and Isabella are the same.’

Ishbel put her arm through his. ‘I can be your sister while you’re staying here. And when spring comes, we can show you some more of the island.’

‘I don’t even know how big this place is,’ Francisco ventured.

‘Neither do I,’ said Ishbel, giggling, looking to her sister for enlightenment.

The island was some seventeen miles long and seven miles wide, although a Scots mile was, so Lilias told them, somewhat longer than its English equivalent. She didn’t know at all how one would count it in English miles.

Eilean Garbh was home to a great many people, all of whom owed their allegiance to her father. There were tacksmen, those who held their land from Ruaridh McNeill, often relatives, however remote, and their dependent tenants and servants in turn. All of them were as closely interwoven as a piece of fine cloth, all relying upon each other, especially during times of hardship when their chief could and frequently did remit the rent in part or in whole. The islanders relied on the laird to oversee their troubles and their quarrels and to administer justice whenever necessary. As for the laird, he was beholden only to his clan chief, far away on the island of Barra, so Eilean Garbh was entirely his own responsibility. In any one year, there would be beasts to care for – horses, cattle and sheep in the main – as well as justice to administer and rents to collect, sometimes in cash and more often in kind. Most of all, perhaps, it was important for the chief to have a number of men whom he could ‘call out’ at need, during times of strife. But the life of the island and those living here relied on Ruaridh McNeill and his immediate family, to a greater or lesser extent, and Lilias seemed well aware of the responsibility that entailed.

‘Not an easy task,’ said Mateo, thinking of the quarrels, the troubles, the problems that so often arose for his own father with a smaller estate, a smaller area of land to oversee. He thought that his father brought some of his troubles on himself, being a harsh and autocratic leader. He knew little of McNeill, but the man seemed both firm and fair. Slow to anger, anyway.

‘No indeed. And one that certainly demands the wisdom of Solomon in all his glory,’ she said, smiling at him.

It had occurred to him that she could not resist flirting with him. They were always supervised, and since she had a certain freedom here, he had begun to realise that she prudently arranged it that she would be chaperoned. This meant that she was able to talk to him without raising the suspicions of those who might be observing them. It emphasised the innocence of their conversations. If Beathag could not be with her, or one of the younger women who helped about the house, then Ishbel was always beside her. Today, they were seated in the hall. Francisco was still given a certain amount of leeway because of his illness, and because Beathag had taken a fancy to him and seemed happy to treat him like a younger member of her family. He was sitting huddled before the fire, with one of the few precious books the house possessed lying open on his lap, although he was dozing and waking, alternately. Mateo, anxious for work, had been given the task of repairing various pieces of household equipment that had suffered in the course of the summer: a salt box whose lid had fallen off, a new pestle that needed to be whittled for the mortar – the old one having been chewed to fragments by one of the hounds that now lay contentedly at his feet. Finn and Bran had accepted him as one of the household, sooner than their human companions perhaps. It struck him that dogs would make up their minds quickly, and then seldom change allegiance.

A few days ago, a party of young people and children had climbed one of the hills behind the house where a group of fir trees stood, and had gathered splinters of resinous wood for making fir candles to see them through the winter. A good portion of these had to be hung over the fire so that they were completely dry before they could be used, and Mateo was engaged in bundling them and sticking them into the heavy links of the chain that held the big cooking cauldron.

‘There’s always work to be done,’ McNeill had told him, ‘but after the turn of the year, there will be more physical tasks, if you are so minded. You had best make the most of this quiet time.’

Today, Lilias was spinning reddish-brown wool, harvested and dyed earlier that year from the flock of four-horned sheep with their strange dark and silvery-grey fleeces, kept quite close to the house and sometimes even along the shore where they were happy to eat what Ishbel, taking Mateo confidently by the hand to show him, had called ‘sea ware’. They were brought in and housed in stone sheep cotes by night. These sheep were, Mateo had observed, rather timid creatures and McNeill himself had confirmed that they sometimes behaved as though they ‘would rather be dead than otherwise’, although the weather didn’t seem to bother them much at all, so perhaps they were hardier than they looked. They gave a very fine fleece, albeit not much of it, but it could be spun into good yarn and ultimately woven into cloth that was both light and warm.

‘May I see your spindle and the ... what is this thing?’ he asked.

‘A whorl.’

The spindle whorl was made of stone with a curious curved design.

‘It is very old, I think. My brother Kenneth found it in the old tower by the seashore. We were always playing down there when we were younger. Nobody goes there much now.’

‘Where does the colour of the wool come from?’ he asked, idly rearranging his fir strips in an effort to prolong the work and the moment in her company, rather than from any great necessity. ‘The bright yellow of your wrap and the red such as you have there.’

‘This? This wool is combed to make it finer. I didn’t do it. I have small patience with it, although my friend Morag does. And this is dyed red with the crotal, the yellow that you see on the rocks by the shore.’

‘So the yellow crotal does not give yellow dye?’

‘No. It is very mysterious. The yellow crotal gives this reddish brown and when we comb it, it will make for a very fine cloth.’

‘And the yellow? The bright yellow such as you were wearing the day I first saw you?’

He caught her blushing, as red as the wool she was spinning.

‘Ah, that was a gift, from my young brother’s foster family, the Darrochs, the last time they came to this island. A very fine gift. That wrap was dyed with the purple heather, when it is in full flower. And you would not expect that either. I’m told it needs some skill on the part of those who do the dyeing. I am rather poor at it, and too many of my colours turn into mud as you will no doubt see in time.’

‘I saw you the day McAllister put us ashore. It was beautiful.’ But he meant that she was beautiful. He knew it and she knew it. She gazed at him with her bright hazel eyes.

‘To be honest,’ she remarked determinedly changing the subject, ‘I have not seen the whole of Eilean Garbh myself, although my father has walked or ridden every last mile of it, as has my elder brother, Kenneth. When we were young, before he went away to college, I would ride or walk with him, and we would go for many miles in a day. There is some safety on an island, and my father was quite happy for me to go. That is how I know about the great well of Moire, whose water helped to heal you, Francisco. And the Sgurran Fithich, the Raven’s Peak at the top of Meall Each, not too far from here, from which you can see far out to the west, and Port Na Currich to the south. I have only been further than that a few times in my life so far. In spring, in May, they take the cattle north to the slopes of Dun Tarbh and round by Loch an Tarbh Uisge, where there is tolerably good grazing. There are houses up there and the folk who go seem to have a happy time of it.’

‘I wanted to go with them this year,’ piped up Ishbel. ‘But Father said no.’

‘Aye, well, Father and Mother said no when I asked them years ago. But I still regret that I can’t go with them, for they tell stories and sing songs and folk play the pipes for the dancing, and they seem to enjoy themselves very much.’

‘Yet they seem glad enough to come home,’ added Ishbel thoughtfully. ‘I wonder if they saw the water bull this year?’

‘What is the water bull?’ asked Mateo, intrigued.

‘The loch takes its name from the water bull, and the hill is named after the bull as well.’ Lilias shrugged. ‘I haven’t the faintest notion whether the creature is real or not, but they say it is a magical being that lives in the depths of the loch and comes out at night to mate with the cattle. It is a mild enough creature, though. Not like the Each Uisge. My grandfather had sight of one in his youth, or so they say.’

‘And what is the ... Each Uisge?’ He said the word carefully.

She smiled. ‘Ah now, that is a more fearsome proposition altogether and you would not want to encounter one of those. A water horse. They call him a kelpie in the lowlands. He will change shape. On land he can become a handsome young man. But if he catches you, he will drag you down to the bottom of the loch and you will never be seen again. So you see, you have to be very careful of handsome young men in these parts.’

‘Of course. Handsome strangers. You never can tell.’

‘There is a tale told here that a young woman very like myself once met with a fine young man, black-haired and very beautiful, on the shore of the dark loch, near Meall Each in the middle of this island. Only he was an interlowper, a water horse in human form. They sat down beside the loch, and he laid his head in her lap, and fell fast asleep. She began to stroke his hair, his dark curls were so bonnie, much like your own, Mateo, only she found that there was sand and seaweed among the curls. Which alarmed her very much indeed for she knew what that meant.’

‘What did it mean?’

‘It meant that she knew his true nature at last.’

‘And that was?’

‘Oh, not good. The Each Uisge can’t help himself. He is what he is. He does what he must.’

‘What did she do?’

‘She leaped up and ran for home, they say. The story doesn’t say where she lived. But the creature was immediately changing into his true shape of a fierce water horse, and went chasing after her. They are very fleet of foot, the water horses, and if once he had caught hold of her, even her foot or a single toe, into the loch she would have gone and she would have been lost for ever.’

‘So how was she saved?’

‘Her father had a captive water bull in his stable. A cailleach, a wise old woman who worked upon the farm, called to him to set the water bull free if he wished to save his daughter. So he did. The bull ran after the water horse, and the horse was distracted enough to give up the chase. Then horse and bull fought into and out of the water, something terrible to behold, but at last they sank beneath the waves and were never seen again.’

‘Is this a true tale?’ he asked, smiling.

‘As true as I’m sitting here. My mother told me and she never lied. Although I’m bound to admit that she was a great storyteller!’ She smiled too and glanced over at a captivated Ishbel. ‘Let that be a warning to you, sister. Do not be persuaded by dark-haired strangers, however handsome, for they may turn out to be monsters in disguise.’

‘And if he was not such a monster after all? If he was truly in love?’ added Mateo. ‘If he had elected to stay on land? To abandon his evil ways and become a man.’

‘The stories don’t tell of such things. But I suppose it might be possible. Everyone can change. Even wicked strangers.’

‘And some strangers aren’t wicked at all,’ piped up Ishbel. ‘Look at Paco. And Mateo.’

‘Well.’ Lilias raised her head from her work, and gazed into his eyes. ‘Perhaps not like Mateo. Or Paco. Perhaps we can make an exception for them.’