The Posy Ring Read online

  Briefly, she opens the wardrobe doors, wonders if Viola had ever thrown an item of clothing away. It’s a vintage paradise: coats, dresses, scarves, gloves and handbags. A pathetic fox fur leers out at her, staring head and bushy tail. The room smells of camphor and feathers and is peculiarly airless. The heavy brocade curtains in here have been pulled half shut. She pushes them back, letting in the light, tries to open the window, but it’s much too stiff. The hasp has been painted shut. I couldn’t sleep in here, she thinks. I just couldn’t. She closes the door behind her and, like Goldilocks, investigates the other rooms. Will one of them be just right?

  Three of these smaller bedrooms have old-fashioned but conventional furniture – two singles and one three-quarter bed, oak chests of drawers, Edwardian wardrobes. They look as if nobody has slept in them for years. One has a whole wall of bookshelves, filled with the same odd mixture of precious old books and secondhand paperbacks that she saw downstairs. At the far end of the corridor is a bathroom, with – she’s relieved to see – a newish lavatory and an ordinary-sized bath. Next to this is perhaps the best bedroom of the lot. Or the most immediately habitable. There’s a three-quarter bed, not made up, but with a clean mattress protected by a blanket, two feather pillows, pine furniture, a wooden floor with a couple of sheepskin rugs. The curtains here have been pulled back and the room is warm and stuffy. It gives her the strangest feeling, as though she herself can remember being here, being in this room, lying on the bed reading in the afternoon, listening to music, making plans. But she has never been here before.

  It’s quite unlike the rest of the house and at first she wonders why, but then she realises that there is a definite feeling of the 1960s and 70s about it. There’s a picture of Queen tacked onto the wall alongside a vividly coloured poster for Grease, Danny combing his hair, Sandy sitting sweetly at his feet. There’s a portable Dansette record player and a heap of vinyl discs: Queen, Blondie, Aerosmith and then more folky stuff: the Incredible String Band, Planxty, The Dubliners, Joni Mitchell. The books are an odd jumble of Enid Blyton, The Wind in the Willows and Watership Down, with more grown-up paperback novels: The Bell Jar, Rebecca, Stephen King’s Carrie, a slim copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Lord of the Rings.

  This was my mother’s room, she thinks, suddenly. When she was a girl. This is the room she left to go off with my dad. She just abandoned everything and never looked behind her. This is the place she could never come back to.

  She is overwhelmed by some indefinable emotion: is it sadness, resentment, curiosity? A mixture of all three, perhaps. She sits down on the bed, her head spinning with the strangeness of it all, that she should be here, alone, in her mother’s bedroom. That her mother lived in this room when she was younger than Daisy is now. That she, Daisy, never knew, never has known anything about it.

  ‘What will I do?’ she asks, sending the words out into the empty house. ‘What on earth am I supposed to do with this place? With all this stuff? Mum? Grandma?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ says a voice from downstairs, faintly amused, echoing along the corridor. ‘What do you want to do with it?’

  FIVE

  She remains seated on the bed for a moment or two, rigid with apprehension, her heart pounding. She can actually hear it beating in her ears. Then she thinks that ghosts tend not to appear in broad daylight and shout up the stairs, even in houses as old and strange as this one. But who is he? Where has he sprung from? And what on earth is he doing in her house? For a moment she feels panic-stricken, wondering how she can evade this stranger, find a way out in case he’s blocking the doorway. Briefly she contemplates heading for the attic. Maybe there’s a back stair, one for the servants to use. Then she thinks, This is Garve. This is the island. There’s no crime to speak of here. Maybe the odd bit of pilfering or poaching. The voice is fairly young, Scottish, amused. The amusement is reassuring.

  She gets up, walks along the corridor, cautiously peers down the stairs.

  ‘Hello?’ she says, as she had done earlier. ‘Who’s there? What do you want?’

  She descends until she can see him more clearly. He has come in through the door she left open at the landward side of the house, and is standing just inside as though reluctant to intrude too far, rocking back and forth on his heels, peering up at her, hands in the pockets of his jeans.

  ‘I’m so sorry if I startled you. But the door was open and I thought the bell pull might come off in my hand, so I just...’ He shrugs, helplessly, smiling, used to charming and disarming people. She comes down the stairs in a little rush and halts in front of him.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she asks, with a certain brisk formality. There’s something faintly familiar about him, but she can’t work out what it is. And she’s still disturbed by his presence, by his uninvited entry into her space.

  He holds out his hand and she automatically shakes it. She can’t help herself. ‘Calum,’ he says. ‘Everyone calls me Cal. Cal Galbraith. I asked for you at the hotel and Mrs Cameron told me you’d be here.’

  The island, of course. Garve. She supposes everyone must know all about everyone else’s business. It must be both comforting and irritating to live here. He’s gazing around. She can see the conflict in him between civility and curiosity. He needs to reassure her, to be polite, to chat to her. But he can’t help himself. The urge to look at this room, to explore, to stare at things, is almost overwhelming. Well, she can understand that. She can see that his fingers are itching to handle things, to pick them up, to touch them. He restrains himself with an obvious effort and focuses on her.

  ‘Ah,’ she says. ‘Mrs Cameron. Yes – she’s been very interested in me. Everyone keeps asking me what I’m going to do with all this.’

  ‘That’s what you were asking yourself when I came in.’

  ‘Well, I was asking somebody, anyway.’

  ‘You’re Viola’s granddaughter?’

  ‘I am. But I never knew her. Did you? Do you belong to the island?’

  He doesn’t sound as though he belongs to the island. Not wholly. There’s only the faintest Hebridean lurking beneath a very definite and much harder west of Scotland accent.

  ‘After a fashion,’ he says. ‘My mother was born here on Garve. She was a McGugan and it seems to have been an island name.’ He puts an almost comic emphasis on the name. ‘The family moved to Glasgow when she was a wee girl. My father has some kind of island connection too, although his branch of the Galbraiths moved away years ago. He certainly painted here, back when they were first married. He’s an artist,’ he adds, by way of explanation. ‘You may even have heard of him. William Galbraith.’ She nods. William Galbraith is quite a well-known name in Glasgow, but he quickly moves on. ‘I spent most of my childhood holidays here on Garve.’

  ‘Did you?’ she says, feeling the need to take control, ask questions.

  ‘We all did, back then: me, my sister and my mum. And to answer your question, no. I met your grandmother a few times but I wouldn’t say I ever knew her. Hardly anyone did. Not well, anyway. She was a bit of an anchorite.’

  She admires his choice of word. She can see Viola as a female hermit with the community bringing her food and fuel. ‘And you’d be too young to know my mother?’

  He nods, sticking his hands in his pockets again. He seems congenitally unable to keep still for any length of time. He’s tall and spare and dark, in blue jeans and a loose white linen shirt, creased and crumpled. The energy sparks and crackles off him like electricity. She has the sudden random and bizarre thought that he could handle himself well in a fight. Like a terrier, he would never, ever give up. His brown hair flops over his forehead and his eyes are brown too, beneath dark brows, but full of good humour at the moment. All in all, she thinks he’s nice-looking. But then, as her father never tires of telling her, looks aren’t everything. Handsome is as handsome does, he would say, quoting her grandma Nancy.

  ‘Yeah,
well, I think your mother might have left by the time I was born. Or I’d be too young to remember. I’m thirty-six.’ He pulls a face as though the realisation of his great age horrifies him. ‘Mrs Cameron at the hotel would have known her, though,’ he says, after a moment or two. ‘You should ask her. Eyes and ears of Garve, she is.’

  She finds herself again wondering what he wants. And where she has seen him before. Spoken to him even. Something about him is familiar. Not in the hotel, surely. She was only in the bar for a short while last night and if she had seen him, she would remember.

  ‘Have you ever been here before?’ he asks.

  ‘No. Not in the house. We passed it once, my father and I, but he never told me anything about my grandmother. Or this place. It’s all come as a complete surprise.’

  ‘Wow!’ He looks genuinely concerned. ‘Poor you!’

  ‘Everyone keeps telling me how lucky I am. How excited I must be.’

  Inexplicably, she has a desire to burst into tears, bury her face in the dusty cushions of the Chesterfield and howl until she runs out of steam.

  Maybe he has seen her lip trembling. He smiles at her, reassuringly. ‘Well, maybe you are lucky, but it’s one hell of a responsibility, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, taking a deep breath. ‘It is. I have decisions to make. But ... why are you here?’ She wonders if that sounds very blunt, but he must have a reason, other than rampant curiosity.

  He looks sheepish, screws up his face, scratches his neck in what she will realise is a characteristic gesture when he needs time to think. ‘Well,’ he says at last, ‘I’ll admit it’s partly nosiness. Everyone is nosy about this place, let’s face it. Only a few people have ever been granted admittance. But, mostly, because they told me you were here on your own. Christ, that sounds creepy. I mean, I wondered if you could do with some help.’

  The answer fazes her. It’s true, after all, she could do with some help. But why would he offer? And yet, from what she has seen of Mrs Cameron, who is a thoroughly nice woman, the islanders must think he’s OK, must think it’s fine to send him to Auchenblae when she’s there on her own. Mrs Cameron had been very solicitous over breakfast, pausing by her table to chat, offering to accompany her, offering to send her husband instead. ‘A young lass like yourself in that grim old place? I’ll be worried about you all day long.’

  As though reading her mind, he says, ‘Mrs Cameron will vouch for my good intentions. She’s known me since I was just a baby. We have a kind of holiday house here. Nothing like this house. A but ’n’ ben really. But she knows all about me, knows where all the skeletons are buried.’

  ‘Are there many? Skeletons, I mean?’

  ‘A few. The stuff I got up to in my teens. The stolen apples, the odd fish poached and I don’t mean cooked in the hotel kitchens. The odd scrap too.’ He is suppressing laughter again. ‘But she knows I mean well. And I just wondered if you wanted some help.’

  ‘What sort of help?’

  ‘Any sort of help you want! I’m here a lot. On the island, I mean. We have a family business in Glasgow but I come here all the time. Whenever I can really. I can lift heavy things. It’s a useful skill.’

  ‘I’m not so bad at lifting heavy things myself,’ she says, buying time, thinking of all the boxes she has hauled in and out of the back of her car. It’s amazing just what you can get into the back of a Polo with the seats folded down, although occasionally she has given in and hired a van for the day.

  He wanders over to the windows facing the sea. ‘What a beautiful situation this place is in!’ he remarks.

  ‘I know. It’s amazing.’

  ‘Is that the back door, or the front door?’

  ‘I don’t know. I took that, where I came in, to be the front door, but now I’m not so sure.’

  ‘Can we open it?’

  ‘I was just going to do it. I was investigating the bedrooms. I’m booked into the hotel for another night, but after that, I was wondering if I should stay here till the end of the week.’

  He pulls a face. ‘And will you?’

  ‘Maybe. I found my mum’s old bedroom. I could sleep in that. It’s OK up there. Not damp. I haven’t been up as far as the attics. I might leave that for another day.’

  ‘What about the tower?’

  Now it’s her turn to pull a face. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Will we open this door then?’ He’s there, suiting the action to the words. ‘Do you have the key?’

  ‘I have keys galore,’ she says. ‘These are the keys of the castle.’

  It is one of her dad’s favourite tongue-twisters. ‘These are the keys of the castle, and the castle belongs to Theophilus Thistle. Theophilus Thistle is a thistle sifter by trade...’ She remembers them chanting it together: her dad, her grandma Nancy, herself, all joining in.

  ‘Wow. You certainly do have keys.’

  There is a heavy bolt on the back door. He slides it across and the noise of it echoes around the room. She’s sorting through the bunch of keys, finding the substantial labelled key that she had hooked onto the rest for safekeeping. It fits. She turns it in the lock and it opens with a satisfying click.

  ‘Well,’ he says, grinning, ‘you’ll be very secure from the sea side of this house. No pirates or Spanish sailors are going to make it through this door, anyway!’

  SIX

  1588

  Mateo paused on the shore, waiting, as always, for Francisco to catch up, and gazed at the house. It seemed grim and forbidding, although he noticed two or three small and expensively glazed upper windows with their lower wooden shutters firmly closed against the weather. So there was a modicum of wealth here. It struck him that the young woman did not have the air of a peasant. There had been a certain confidence about the way she stood still, watching them for a while, the decisive way she strode off towards the house. She would have gone to raise the alarm, even though she hadn’t looked as if the sight of them had worried her very much. But then, he thought, with a wry smile, who would be thrown into any kind of panic by such warriors as they had become? Two more wretched, beaten souls it would be hard to imagine. No threat to anyone. Inadvertently, he found his hand reaching for the spot where the dagger still lay concealed at his breast, beneath the filthy linen shirt, the padded doublet and the battered jerkin, stiff with salt, noxious with the smell of damp leather and sweat. He found himself patting the spot gently. Perhaps some threat after all, if the need arose. He would not go quietly. But perhaps the need would not arise. He hoped not.

  Mateo wondered, not for the first time, if he would be able to make himself understood sufficiently to explain their situation. He had managed it with McAllister, but he knew enough to realise that seasoned sailors often spoke foreign tongues. He himself spoke fluent English, better than Francisco certainly, whose skills all lay with music and painting. Scots was difficult but not beyond him. That being the case, he thought in passing, why were they here? Why in the name of God had he allowed his soft-hearted cousin to accompany him in such an enterprise? He had had some inkling of what lay ahead, but Francisco? None at all. He should not be here. They had been persuaded by Mateo’s father, who thought that Francisco needed ‘toughening up’.

  ‘It will make a man of him,’ he had said.

  Instead, it had very nearly killed them both, and might yet prove fatal.

  While Mateo was still very young, his father had engaged a tutor for him, a religious man of some learning who, displaced from the only life he had known in the monastery where he had lived for some twenty years, had fled England in 1540. He had then travelled bravely but perilously through France and Spain over many years, a pilgrim, and ultimately washed up like a piece of holy flotsam, like the sacred statue of the virgin herself, on the Guimar coast of Tenerife at Candelaria. The man had taught him Latin and Greek, English, a little French and more besides; something of philosophy an
d much more of his own great love: mathematics. He had inspired the same joy of numbers in Mateo. Following on from that, there had been the rudiments of navigation too, which Mateo had learned as much from a fascination with the underlying principles as from any great love of the sea. He had sailed between the islands many times with his uncle and his father, to La Gomera, where they had property, and to La Palma, where they had family. It had given him, he thought now, a false sense of his own capabilities. His father had taught him all he knew of warfare and fighting, not sparing him at all. He still had the scars to prove it. But he had been too inexperienced to know how little he really knew. What had seemed like an adventure in prospect had become a nightmare in reality. He wondered all the time if he had been responsible for persuading Francisco, who admired him enormously, to join in too. For all that his father had wished it, Mateo had exerted no real pressure, but he feared that his own restlessness may have infected his younger cousin. Francisco – Paco, they called him at home – had always followed him. And it would be true to say that Mateo had not actively deterred him. Had it been because he selfishly wanted company? A friend? Because he himself had not really wanted to go at all? The responsibility of that weighed heavily on him now, as it had done for the whole unhappy voyage.