Free Wild Island by Antonia Fraser Page B

turned her face towards Jemima. The seamed face, till now so warmly creased, so jolly in the intensity of its recollected memories, was totally transformed. Gone was the friendly, garrulous, almost effusive woman, still essentially a servant. The woman who now faced her was a person of authority. And she was aware once more of Bridie's commanding height, standing by her battered bicycle as though a charger.
    'Miss Shore, if you please,' she said after a moment's pause in a very flat voice, 'There are some things best not spoken of.'
    Jemima felt a surge of determination. Her combative spirit was aroused. The flood of family reminiscences Bridie had given her concerning the Beauregards contrasted so ill with this wall ofsinister silence. She would have accepted one or the other, but not the ambivalence.
    'I didn't mean to upset you, Bridie,' she said. 'But as I had corresponded with Mr Beauregard —' She felt she might have added, 'and as I was forced to attend his funeral by your son, his existence and death can hardly be totally ignored.' In fact she said, 'I just wanted to express my regrets to you. Before walking round the island.'
    Bridie said, with a return to her old and friendly manner, 'If it's round the island you'll be walking, Miss Shore, you'll best be wearing gumboots. It's wet underfoot here, even in the summer. And we've had a great deal of rain lately. It's slippery, you see, particularly at the far end of the island. Be very careful by the Fair Falls. Don't get too close to Marjorie's Pool, don't be curious—'
    'Curious?'Jemima merely repeated the word.
    'The pool where he drowned. Mr Charles Beauregard; of whom you were speaking just now.'
    Jemima was faintly appalled.
    'Oh, how awful of me!' she exclaimed. 'I just had no idea he had drowned here at Eilean Fas. How clumsy of me-
    'Didn't the Colonel tell you then?' said Bridie in her previous flat slightly menacing tone. 'It was I who found him there in Marjorie's Pool. Lying face down. Drownded.' She gave the word two long syllables.
    'Oh, how ghastly-and how terrible for you.'
    'Yes. A terrible death. The water filling his waders, his great boots, to his thighs. Sucking him down,' replied Bridie without expression.
    She was by now mounted on her bicycle. Over her shoulder she called: 'So be careful now. Miss Shore, won't you, as you go? We've had tragedy enough at Eilean Fas.'
    Bridie was already riding vigorously down the gravel path, before Jemima realized that she had still expressed absolutely no regret concerning the death of the late Charles Beauregard.
     
     
     

CHAPTER 8
    Utmost quiet
     
     
    ‘I must always remember this,' thought Jemima, as she set out to walk round the Wild Island. 'This at last is my Paradise. The serpent has come and gone.'
    The evening sun began to create long blue shadows on her path, but it remained bright. The alternate patches of sun and shade gave a theatrical impression. The greenness of the undergrowth rustled with birds: she knew they were birds because every so often one flew out across her path, small, alien, not the sparrows of a London walk, darting purposefully.
    'Birds of paradise,' she reflected. How long since she had heard bird song? Heard and listened to it. There were butterflies too. The Rousseauesque impression returned. She felt now neither loneliness nor fear. The ground squelched under gumboots she had borrowed from the house's antlered hall. They were much too large for her. Possibly everyone in Scotland had particularly large feet: the other possibility was that no woman had ever lived in the house at Eilean Fas. The decorations certainly showed lack of a woman's touch, to put it mildly, or rather they showed the lack of any recent touch at all. The house might have been deliberately gutted to make it seem so bleak. It was in a way no wonder that Charles had thought of it for a museum and Father Flanagan for a mission: it was bare enough for either purpose.
    Above her head the vast trees rose