In the Far Pashmina Mountains Read online

  Now you get up, Mother! He willed her to follow, yet he couldn’t see how there would be room for them both. It was no bigger than the kitchen shelf where the crockery used to be stacked.

  She hesitated and then pulled off her plaid and raised her voice to be heard over the wind. ‘Wrap this round you, Johnny.’ She stuffed it around him. ‘Bundle yourself up like a parcel.’ She smiled at him as if they were playing a game.

  But you’ll get cold, Mother. He gazed back at her. With one last effort she stood on tiptoes and pushed him as far into the crevice as he would go. For a moment she gripped his arm – a hard, possessive squeeze – then, with a sigh, she let go.

  ‘I’ll be right here just below you,’ she called, ‘so don’t be afraid.’

  All John could see was whiteness but he burrowed into his mother’s plaid and felt warmth creep into his limbs, knowing that she kept watch just out of sight. The light drained away. John slept.

  Drovers returning from the south found the boy two days later, wrapped in his mother’s plaid, stiff with cold and heart barely beating. The woman was long dead, frozen and half standing up as if keeping watch; they wouldn’t have noticed the boy if she hadn’t been there. They met a search party from Ramanish led by the strong boatman Norman MacAskill, worried that his widowed daughter and grandson had not arrived from Foxton. The first and last time the drovers ever saw the hard-faced Norman fall to his knees and weep like a child was over the corpse of his favourite daughter.

  He carried his grandson through the melting snow of the mountain pass, willing him to live, refusing attempts by the men to take their turn in carrying the boy.

  John felt his limbs coming back to life; they burnt with pain. His first sight of Ramanish was from a great height – an eagle’s view – as he descended with his grandfather to the coast. The mountain gave way to cultivated strips like ripples in a patchwork bedcover. Beyond, sheep and cattle grazed on open pasture that ended abruptly in a huge crescent of grey sand and rock. Thatched houses dotted the hillside, but it was the black fortress that stirred his interest. It clung to a long finger of land that jutted out to sea. Around it on the rocky shore, fires smouldered and smoke rose and drifted over the castle as if an enemy were laying siege.

  ‘Ramanish Castle.’ His grandfather pointed it out. ‘The home of our chief – though he’s far from home just now.’

  John puzzled over this wandering chief and who he might be and why nobody seemed concerned that their enemies were setting fire all around his castle. He wanted to ask his mother but she didn’t seem to be with them. Where had she gone? She had promised to stay with him but now she had vanished.

  John was taken to a low thatched cottage that he thought was a cattle byre – there were stocky black and tawny cows tramping in and out of a muddy entrance at one end – but at a far door a woman flew out to meet them, flapping her arms like a hen.

  ‘You poor wee lamb!’ she cried, and wrested him from his grandfather’s tired arms. She was strong but ungainly, with a huge lump on her back. She hugged him tight. Her eyes were like his mother’s, though she smelt of peat smoke and not lavender. ‘I’m your Aunt Morag and I’ll look after you now, don’t you worry.’

  Once inside, he struggled to see in the smoky dark. An old man, skinny as a bird, was squatting by the fire. As John’s eyes adapted to the gloom, he saw the man give him a gappy smile like a baby’s, his skin as wrinkled and brown as a walnut.

  ‘I’m Grandpa Carlos,’ he said in a reedy, high-pitched voice, rising stiffly and hobbling over. He touched John’s face with bony fingers. ‘You are my first great-great-grandson. You will be a soldier like me.’

  John was not sure if this was an order. He stared and stared at this man that his mother had said was over a hundred but just couldn’t imagine him as a sword-wielding soldier. A puff of wind could carry him off.

  ‘Enough talk about soldiers,’ Aunt Morag declared. ‘John needs something to eat.’

  Mother will need to eat too. He squatted next to the old man but would not touch the porridge his aunt gave him. I’ll wait for Mother. John sat, his stomach aching with hunger, while his anxious aunt chivvied him to eat. But he wouldn’t eat without his mother. He sat till his bottom was numb and the porridge cold, yet his mother did not come. Eventually his aunt pulled him into her arms and began to sing softly just like his mother did. Suddenly he was crying. And as he sobbed and she sang, John felt her tears in his hair too.

  CHAPTER 3

  Northumberland, 1818

  Sit still, Alice,’ Effie cried in exasperation, ‘or I’ll tie your legs to the chair!’

  Alice squirmed and wriggled; she hated having her hair combed and pulled into plaits. What was the point? Her flyaway red-gold hair always came loose the minute she went out in the wind. She was restless to join her brothers outside; Danny and Sam were on the cliffs hunting for birds’ eggs. They wouldn’t wait for her; they never did. Danny said girls shouldn’t climb cliffs and Sam always knew she’d catch up with them anyway. They had been cooped up in the lighthouse for days by spring gales and lashing rain and she was almost bursting to be out.

  ‘You’ll help me with the washing, so don’t think you can go running off,’ said her mother, reading her mind.

  ‘Oh please, Mammy,’ Alice cried. ‘Just for an hour and then I’ll do whatever you want.’ She did her best to sit still and sweeten her mother’s mood. ‘I’ll milk Sandy, then we can make cheese.’

  ‘Washing first.’ Effie was firm. ‘It’s perfect drying weather. I’m sick of fighting through wet washing hanging in the kitchen.’

  Alice appealed to her father, who had just descended from the bedroom, where he’d been catching up on sleep after the night’s watch.

  ‘Da, can I go and milk the goat?’

  Arnold looked warily between wife and daughter. ‘You must be a help to your mother, Alice.’

  ‘I will, I promise. But I want to see that Sandy is all right and milking is helping, isn’t it?’

  He retreated to the horsehair sofa and picked up last week’s newspaper, studying it as if he hadn’t already read it from cover to cover.

  ‘Well, Arnold?’ Effie said, pulling the hair ribbon tight. ‘Tell Alice her duty is here with me. I can’t manage all that washing on my own.’

  ‘It’s a day for being outdoors,’ he said without looking up. ‘Let her get some fresh air first.’

  Effie rolled her eyes but Alice seized her chance and jumped up. ‘Thanks, Da.’ She was through the hatch and swinging nimbly down the ladder as an argument broke out between her parents.

  ‘You’re too soft on the lass,’ Effie complained.

  ‘She’s still young,’ Arnold said.

  ‘At eight years old I was out mending fishing nets with the women and carrying creels of fish from the shore.’

  ‘We want something better for Alice, don’t we?’

  ‘Nothing wrong with hard work.’

  ‘And nothing wrong with a bit of play too.’

  ‘Play?’ Effie retorted. ‘She runs around the island like a wild thing . . .’

  Alice hurried out of earshot down through the boys’ bedroom with its spartan beds. Clothes and detritus collected off the shore spilled out of wall cupboards. She stopped long enough to pull on a pair of Danny’s breeches – he was the older but smaller and slighter of the two brothers – and discard her skirt and petticoat. Down again she descended to the windowless storeroom below. With light from the open door through which her brothers had already escaped, she sidestepped sacks of flour and sugar, crates of potatoes, milk churns, water barrels and coal buckets, coils of rope and boxes of candles. She loved the smell of this cavernous room, a mix of tallow and dusty sacks, wooden oars seasoned with linseed and the sourness of maturing cheese.

  Taking a huge breath, she filled her nostrils with the heady smell, and then she was out of the door and scampering down the iron ladder to freedom.

  Alice loved Black Harbour Island; she pitied children
who had to go to the mainland school and sit in rows and have the teacher whip them with a birch cane when they got something wrong. That’s what Danny said happened in the parish school where he had gone until he turned fifteen; where Sam aged thirteen still went when weather and tides allowed. Gillveray, the eccentric owner of Black Harbour House – a horse breeder, botanist, traveller and amateur inventor – had set up the school, appalled at the lack of learning among the sons of the local fishermen and labourers.

  It never crossed her parents’ minds to send her to school. Arnold taught Alice after a fashion and answered her incessant questions about plants and birds, the stars and the sea. From him she learnt how to tell the time by the sun, to predict when a storm was coming by observing the fish disappearing into deep water, to trim the wicks on the candles in the lighthouse lamp-room and mend the wing of an injured swan. He had taught her not only to swim but also to read and write – a waste of time declared her mother, but it had opened up a fantastical world of books.

  Arnold would read to her during stormy winter days; stories of Ancient Greeks, Egyptian pharaohs, medieval knights and French kings; heroic men called Hannibal, Roland, Ossian, Richard the Lionheart and Alexander the Great; heroic women called Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Boadicea and Saint Hilda; Bible stories, fairy tales, Arabian Nights and poetry. Her father bought books whenever he went to the mainland and salvaged them from chests brought on the tide from shipwrecks. Her mother complained they were a fire hazard and confined half of them to the lower storeroom. Alice loved their musty mildewed aroma and the sepia stains like age spots on their creamy pages.

  But better than all the stories was her island playground; a treasure trove of rock pools and swaying grasses, sheer cliffs and sheltered harbour, home to colonies of raucous birds, tiny shrews, migrating geese and glistening jellyfish that vanished as mysteriously as they appeared. Above all of this towered the lime-washed lighthouse, like a guardian angel with its all-seeing fiery eye that winked and glowed through the dark to warn away ships and keep everyone safe.

  Sandy the goat had got loose from her tether; Alice found her grazing on the eastern cliff alongside her brothers. Danny had lowered himself over the edge and was reaching out with a long pole, his legs planted astride a thin chasm that dropped to foaming sea below. Cautious Sam was up above, lying on his stomach, holding out a basket for Danny to fill.

  Alice’s stomach curdled to see the risk Danny took, yet part of her yearned to be beside him. Heights thrilled her.

  ‘Can I come down?’ she called.

  ‘Be quiet!’ Danny hissed.

  ‘You’ll disturb the nest,’ Sam whispered, patting the grass beside him. Alice crouched down at his side.

  They watched as Danny eased the pole with the makeshift net into the nest. With a sudden shriek, the gull lifted and flew at Danny. He recoiled, dropping the pole. It clattered down the rock face. Danny wobbled and grabbed at thin air. Alice screamed. He was going to fall. Sam scrambled forward and flung out an arm, grabbing at Danny’s jacket. It was just enough to stop his brother toppling forward. Danny regained his balance and a sure footing on the ledge below.

  He stood heaving for breath while Alice sobbed with relief.

  ‘Come back up, Danny,’ she pleaded. ‘Forget about the eggs.’

  His thin, handsome face puckered into stubborn lines. ‘I’m not going to be beaten by a stupid bird.’

  He inched back along the ledge and leapt across the narrow chasm. Alice clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle a scream. Sam looked on, his body tense but round face expressionless. His older brother would do whatever he wanted and the opposite of what anyone else suggested.

  Danny plucked the nest from its cleft in the rock and, clamping it against his chest, he jumped back across. He threw the nest and eggs onto the cliff top. One of the eggs toppled and smashed. Alice quickly gathered the two undamaged ones and placed them gently in the collapsing nest; she looked around guiltily for the mother gull.

  ‘Give us a pull up, Sam,’ Danny ordered.

  His stocky younger brother hauled him back up top. Danny collapsed in the grass, panting and laughing. In relief, Alice giggled and threw her arms round him.

  ‘Get off!’ Danny pushed her away, but he was still grinning, pleased with his daring.

  ‘I wish I was as brave as you,’ Alice said with an adoring look.

  ‘You can’t be – you’re only a girl.’

  Alice didn’t like to be reminded of this. She sat up and pointed. ‘Look, I saved the other eggs from rolling over the edge.’

  Danny stood up and thrust his hands in his pockets, staring out to sea. He had lost interest in the eggs.

  ‘Ship went on the rocks out on the Farnes last week. Reckon there was silver plate from Holland for the taking.’

  Alice always wondered how Danny knew so much about life off the island when he spent most of his time taking it in turns with their father to man the light.

  ‘One day I’m going to captain a ship – bring gold and spices back from the east, and make a fortune.’ Danny’s face shone with excitement.

  Alice felt dismay; she didn’t want Danny to leave or for anything on the island to change. ‘But who will work the light with Da if you go?’

  ‘Sam will – or you can. I don’t care.’

  ‘I don’t want you to ever go away,’ Alice said, seizing his hand.

  He shook her off and laughed. He was just teasing her, as usual; she could tell. Abruptly, he swung his foot and kicked the nest and the eggs over the cliff. Alice gasped in shock. It made Danny laugh louder.

  ‘Just a stupid gull’s nest.’

  He turned away so he didn’t see Sam launch himself at him. Sam knocked him to the ground. Winded, Danny looked up in surprise as Sam stood over him.

  ‘What did you do that for?’

  Sam shook with anger. ‘I helped you get them eggs too.’ Then he strode away.

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ Danny shouted after him. ‘You didn’t dare. I did it all myself!’

  Alice was torn between running after Sam and staying with Danny. She hated it when her brothers argued.

  ‘Soft in the head,’ Danny muttered once Sam was out of earshot. Alice could tell he was working himself up into a bad mood.

  ‘I have to milk Sandy,’ she piped up. ‘Will you help me take her home, Danny?’

  He sighed, picked himself up and held out a hand. ‘Come on then. I’ll help you catch her.’

  Alice grabbed his hand in relief. When Danny smiled at her it was like the sun coming out.

  As Alice grew older, her brothers had less patience with her tagging along in their wake.

  ‘Stay and help Mam,’ was their constant refrain when she tried to follow. She hated being confined to doing chores in the lighthouse even though Effie nagged her to stay and keep her company.

  ‘We lassies need to stick together – and you’ll never make anyone a good wife if you can’t cook and sew and keep a tidy home.’

  ‘I won’t need to,’ Alice would reply with a toss of her plaits. ‘I’m going to be an explorer and travel the world on Danny’s ship when he’s a captain.’

  ‘Danny’s going nowhere,’ retorted Effie, ‘and neither are you, lassie.’

  At fifteen, Sam left school and joined his father in manning the lighthouse, relishing the lonely hours in the lamp-room tending the temperamental candles and filling in the logbook with times and observations. Danny, a man now at twenty – though he looked no older than his brother – spent all his spare time off the island, rowing himself ashore to Black Harbour and disappearing on spurious errands.

  ‘Gillveray wants help on his boat,’ or ‘Gillveray has offered me a day lifting carrots.’

  Arnold was unhappy at the increasing time his eldest son spent away but he could hardly protest at him helping out their landlord; Gillveray was an enthusiastic supporter of the lighthouse and gave money for its upkeep.

  But sometimes Danny would come home smelling of drink o
r not at all. He was vague about the company he kept or where he went and his parents’ worry mounted.

  ‘Where do you get the money to drink?’ Arnold confronted him. ‘Not from me.’

  ‘Gillveray pays me for the odd jobs I do. A man’s entitled to quench his thirst at the end of a day’s graft.’

  One day, Arnold had made a rare trip off the island to buy books and tobacco. That evening, when Sam had gone up to the lamp-room, a terrible argument broke out with Danny.

  ‘You’ve lied to me and your mother,’ Arnold accused. ‘Gillveray has hardly set eyes on you these past months. You haven’t been working for him at all.’

  ‘I have,’ Danny protested, his slim face reddening. ‘I brought back carrots, didn’t I?’

  ‘Not from his farm,’ Arnold snapped. ‘You bought them, didn’t you?’

  ‘What if I did?’

  ‘Where are you getting the money?’

  ‘Earned it.’

  ‘Where? In the Black Harbour Inn? ’Cause that’s where I hear you spend most of your time. You’re the talk of the village – swaggering about with the riff-raff of the county, giving us a bad name.’

  ‘That’s lies!’ Danny cried, squaring up to his father.

  ‘Gillveray doesn’t lie! He says you’ve been seen out with wreckers.’ Arnold hissed the name in disgust, grabbing his son by his jacket. ‘Tell me the truth or by God I’ll take the rod to you!’

  Alice sprang forward. ‘Please, Da, don’t hurt our Danny.’

  Arnold released his grip and Danny shook him off, his bullishness returning.

  ‘So what if my friends are wreckers? I’m proud of ’em.’

  ‘Oh, Danny,’ Effie gasped.

  Alice slipped to her mother’s side and squeezed her hand.

  Arnold exploded. ‘That a son of mine – a lighthouse lad – should sink so low. You’re a thief as well as a drunk—’

  ‘I’m no thief!’ Danny shouted. ‘There’s nothing wrong with salvaging what comes in from the sea. It’s God-given; that’s what the priest says. Are you calling the priest a thief too? Wreckers are helping their families by saving what the sea would take.’