Free A Dark and Distant Shore by Reay Tannahill Page B

into the castle. And this corner under the roof of the tower was where she herself had always gone to hide her heartbreak over some childish tragedy. She put her hand on the stones, almost as if she expected to find them still damp with her tears.
    The tall, square tower was the oldest part of Kinveil. Over the centuries, other buildings had been added until the castle formed a rough U-shape with floors that, following the rocky substructure, had settled at a variety of levels that visitors were inclined to describe as ‘interesting’. There were steps and stairs everywhere. Between the tower, which housed most of the bedrooms, and the Day Block, which was Vilia’s next objective, there were four separate flights. She threw a shawl over her head against the downpour, picked up her skirts, and ran for it. That was one of the other peculiarities of Kinveil – there was no indoor access between one block and another. As each new building had been added to the old, each successive mason had come to the conclusion that there was no real need to break through twelve solid feet of stone wall merely to open up a doorway between one and the other. What was wrong with treating the central courtyard as if it were a hallway? And perhaps there had been nothing wrong with it in the fifteenth century, when the concept of separate rooms for separate purposes hadn’t existed and everyone had lived, eaten, and slept in the Great Hall. But even Vilia was forced to admit, though never in words, that the system was scarcely ideal for nineteenth-century living. To go from the Long Gallery to the dining-room, and then to the drawing-room, and finally to bed, meant three separate forays into the courtyard – and that, more often than not, meant three separate forays into torrential rain, biting winds, and a shower of salt spray sent up by the Atlantic rollers battering against the great sea wall which closed off the fourth side of the courtyard.
    Vilia turned back her shawl, shook the worst splashes from her skirt, and began to investigate the miscellaneous small rooms housed in the Day Block. She already knew that Mungo had made himself a pleasant suite of study, living-room and bedroom, for he had told her almost apologetically that he was getting too old to have to go outdoors on a wild night when he wanted his bed. What she hadn’t known was that he had also fitted up a study for Magnus and a charming drawing-room that must be intended for Lucy – if she ever came here. It was a far cry from the comfortable Berkshire where Lucy had grown up, and farther still from the London that was her natural habitat. Vilia had also discovered, during her months at St James’s Square, that Lucy’s attitude towards her father-in-lawwas slightly ambivalent. Certainly, it had been impressed on Luke that his grandfather was a gentleman; owning thirty thousand acres of land made him so, by definition. But the fact that it was his less than gentlemanly commercial genius that paid for everything from mediaeval castles in the Highlands to fashionable mansions in London, from Luke’s own nankeen trousers to every last pin that held his mother’s gleaming hair in place, was never mentioned. No one denied that the old man’s fortune was extraordinarily useful, but everyone knew that it wouldbe disastrous if society found out that it had been made in trade. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred would have felt as Lucy did, but Vilia was the hundredth. Like all the people of the glens, she was uncompromisingly egalitarian. The only human being most Highlanders looked up to was the laird, and that because he was a kind of Old Testament father figure to his people, a symbol more than a man. If ever they looked down on anyone, it was not for his station in life but for his personal failings.
    With a sigh, Vilia turned back to the courtyard and scurried across to the building that housed the Great Hall and the Long Gallery above. Mungo, she could see, rarely