Free A Dark and Distant Shore by Reay Tannahill Page A

eager question after another, and Jessie obliged with all the gossip of the last years. Vilia heard about Annie Bain’s troublesome pregnancy, and Una Guffie’s slovenly housekeeping, and how Fish Ellie had dropped a herring in the minister’s teapot. And the most recent drama, of the gauger a few miles up the glen who had poked his stick in among some tree roots looking for an illicit whisky still, and found instead a wildcat’s nest with kittens in it. The mother had flown out at him, a solid ten pounds of flat-eared, slit-eyed, bottle-tailed fury, so that he had missed his footing and fallen fifty feet to the rocks below. ‘Near dead, he wass,’ said Jessie with ill-concealed satisfaction, rising to add salt to the pot, ‘when Robbie Fraser found him!’ Nobody loved an excise man.
    Jessie herself had been demoted from sole charge of the kitchens when Mr Telfer arrived at Kinveil, but she was perfectly philosophical about it. ‘Och, I wass not bothered at aal, not at aal. I will neffer haff been anything but a good plain cook, and I haff neffer known what iss the difference between a timbale and a turban. It would not haff done, when he wass haffing guests with fancy tastes, do you see? So I am making the breakfast and the supper, and we haff a cook-housekeeper, Mrs Barrshaw – a Sassenach from Carlisle, but she iss a good soul chust the same – and she iss looking after the dinner. There is proper dinner effery day, you know? Soup and fish and entrées, and red meat and game and what she calls entry-metts. You will neffer haff seen the like!’
    After the years of sitting tamely down to tea and toast, Vilia felt as if she were doing something gloriously improper by supping her porridge standing, in the traditional way, with the birchwood bowl in one hand and the horn spoon in the other. It was like a declaration of independence, and when she had finished she left Jessie to her duties and sallied forth to see old friends.
    In the days that followed, she rarely set foot in the castle between breakfast and suppertime, sharing her midday meal with people who were not even names to Luke, people like Robbie Fraser the gardener, and Johnnie Meneriskay the herdsman, and Mary Matheson the gamekeeper’s wife, and Becky Cameron the dairymaid, universally known as Becky Dairy. There was Nanny Macleod the henwife, who also had charge of the goat, and was permanently at loggerheads with Robbie Fraser because her dratted beast was always getting into his vegetable plot, and with Becky Dairy because both women held to it, buckle and thong, that their own animal’s milk was vastly more nourishing than the other’s. And, of course, there was Vilia’s dear Meg Macleod, older now and heavier, but as bracing and loving as ever.
    Vilia didn’t ask whether Mungo Telfer was a good laird. She was, after all, a guest in his house. But she looked, and listened, and drew her own conclusions.
    For days she waited for the kind of weather that would offer her an excuse to stay indoors, and at last it came. Fat dirty clouds rolled in from the west, slate grey and sullen and continuous, and the rain slanted down unceasingly on an oily sea, and the greens in the landscape were as livid as stains. And then she was able to ask Mungo, casually, if she might have permission to wander round inside the castle.
    ‘Of course,’ he said, smiling. ‘Ye’ll not find it’s changed much.’
    It was true. Vilia knew every stone of the place, and they all meant something. It was here that old Sandy Grant had slipped on the stair and given himself such a crack on the shin that he’d been able to avoid doing a hand’s turn for weeks afterwards. It was there that Betty Fraser had dropped one of the Sèvres plates and set up such a wail that everyone in the place had come running to see if she was being murdered. It was along this corridor that some of Theo Cameron’s guests had once raced view-hallooing after a fox that had inexplicably found its way