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  For Josephine and Norman Harris,

  in affectionate memory

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  Prologue

  1803

  1

  When Mungo Telfer saw Kinveil for the first time, it was a brilliant day in the early summer of 1803, crisp and fresh and new-minted, with neat white clouds chasing one another from west to east across a blue, blue sky.

  Even the sardonic private voice that, for all the sixty years of Mungo’s life had held his imagination in commonsensical check, fell silent – for there, a thousand feet below the summit on which he sat, saddle sore and more than a little weary, was his heart’s dream translated into reality. Floating above its image in the blue and silver sea lay a sturdy island castle, proud and solitary against a background of mountains that, at this season of the year, were draped majestically in velvet, in every conceivable tone of green and purple and indigo. Mungo sat and looked, the reins loose in his hands, and could have wept with happiness.

  He was a small, tough man with pale eyes, a nose that sprang from his forehead like the prow of a ship, and a chin that had become alarmingly firm and not a little pugnacious during the years that had transformed him from a penniless Glasgow urchin into one of the great merchant venturers of his day. Though still plain ‘Mister Telfer’, he was recognized in his native city and far beyond as one of that acute, hard-headed, obstinate, and extremely rich body of men known, because of their trade with Virginia, as the Tobacco Lords. But hard-headed or not – and, as he wryly admitted, against all the laws of probability – he had contrived to cling to his own special, sentimental vision of the land that bore him. Other great merchants might be ambitious of becoming civic dignitaries, or cultural pillars of the Sacred Music Institution or the Hodge Podge Club, or sleek country gentlemen with an interest in the new agriculture. But not Mungo Telfer. He knew what he wanted, what he had always wanted. A home steeped in five hundred years of Highland history, a castle set amid the most romantically picturesque scenery in the world. And now he was going to have it. There was no question in Mungo’s mind. Whatever it cost him, he was going to have Kinveil.

  His son Magnus drew rein beside him. Magnus was nineteen years old, tall, handsome, and indolent – and who he had inherited his indolence from Mungo couldn’t imagine. Certainly not from him. Mungo glowered at the boy as he cast a dispassionate gaze over the magnificent panorama spread out before them and drawled, ‘Devilish isolated, isn’t it!’

  George Blair, Mungo’s son-in-law and another trial to him, was still plodding phlegmatically up the slope behind. Mungo closed his eyes for a moment, and then, opening them, exclaimed, ‘Well, come on, then! Are you not in a hurry for the fine lunch the laird has waiting for us?’

  The laird came as something of a surprise to Mungo, for although George Blair lived only forty miles away and was a great one for facts and figures, he was decidedly weak on insights. All he had said about Kinveil’s present owner was, ‘Foreign kind of fellow, head over heels in debt. His father was exiled for years after the ’Forty-five rebellion, and the present man was raised abroad somewhere.’ Mungo had deduced that he shouldn’t expect a tartan savage, but he had not expected quite such a cosmopolitan gentleman as Mr Theophilus Cameron turned out to be, tall, slender, elegant, and not much above thirty.

  It didn’t matter, of course. There wasn’t a trick of the huckstering trade that Mungo didn’t know, and he soon discovered that Mr Cameron had only one of them up his slightly frayed sleeve. While it seemed that he was resigned to parting with his ancestral acres, he wasn’t going to swallow his noblesse oblige and part with them to a social inferior unless the price was very right indeed. Subtly, it was conveyed that Mr Cameron, whose pedigree stretched back into the mists of time, knew that Mr Telfer’s pedigree didn’t stretch anywhere at all.

  Except to the bank in Glasgow.

  With amusement, and quite without resentment, Mungo noticed the laird’s dilatory arrival at the water gate to welcome his visitors. And the lunch consisted of smoked salmon, the everyday fare of the glens, instead of fresh; salty butter that wasn’t far off rancid; oatmeal bannocks that would have been the better for warming through; no French wines, but a fair whisky. Though even that was served neat instead of in the genteel form of whisky bitters. Afterwards, the condescension became more obvious. The laird summoned a groom to show Magnus and George the Home Farm, and rang for his steward to escort the prospective buyer round the castle itself.

  No one had tried to put Mungo in his place for many a long day, and he rather enjoyed it. Cheerfully, he looked forward to a good, satisfying haggle.

  2

  What threw Mungo quite out in his reckoning was the seven-year-old daughter of the house, a waist-high bundle of fair-haired, green-eyed animosity.

  They met on the open stairs leading from the central courtyard up to the sea wall.

  Mungo wasn’t very good at children. He beamed at her in an avuncular kind of way, and said, ‘Hullo, lassie.’

  The lassie, pinafored, shawled and bonneted like some old henwife, fixed him with a sizzling glare and said in a light, tight voice, ‘Are you the man who wants to buy Kinveil?’ There was no accent, apart from a hint of sibilance on the ‘s’.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Why?’

  He was disconcerted. ‘I like it here.’

  ‘So do I.’ Her chin came up belligerently.

  Mungo stared back at her and, after a moment, tried again. ‘But surely you’d like to see some big cities for a change? Glasgow, maybe. Or London.’

  ‘No. I like it here.’ Her lips quivered a little. ‘I love it here.’

  He took her hand and patted it, feeling the resistance. ‘But that’s because you don’t know anywhere else,’ he said reasonably. ‘Just think! You might even see the king and queen.’ On reflection, George III and his starchy consort were hardly such stuff as childish dreams were made on. ‘Beau Brummell,’ he volunteered more hopefully. ‘And the Prince of Wales.’

  ‘Prince of Whales!’ she exclaimed scornfully. ‘I don’t wish to be acquainted with such people.’

  He gave up. ‘Never mind. I’m sure your da will take you somewhere fine.’

  There was calculation, he thought, in the clear green eyes. ‘There’s nowhere as fine as here. Come, let me show you.’

  Obediently, he allowed himself to be led up to the battlements. The wall was crumbling, he noticed, and wondered what it was going to cost him to have it repaired.

  His eyes followed her pointing finger.

  ‘Look out there to the west. That’s the island of Skye.’ She pointed again. ‘And those mountains in the south are the Five Sisters. And over there... Oh, look! There’s a herring gull dropping a mussel on the rocks to break the shell.’ She leaned over the parapet. ‘And look down below here. There’s a...’

  He sensed the violent, seven-year-old push before he felt it, and was braced. His grip on the parapet scarcely even shifted.

  He hesitated for a moment, and then turned to confront her. She was breathing fast, and her cheeks were pink with a combination of rage and fear.

  The steward scuttled up the stairs towards them, his mouth and eyes round with horror. ‘Miss Vilia! Miss Vilia!’

  Mungo said conversationally, ‘That’s a bonny name. Is it Highland?’

  The child swallowed. ‘Norwegian.’

  ‘Oh, aye?’ He shook his head at her kindly. ‘That’s not the way, you know. You’re too wee, and I’m too heavy.’ He
touched a finger lightly to her brow. ‘You’ll have to use your head to get what you want. But you’ll learn. You’re a spunky wee thing.’ A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, and he held out his hand. ‘Pax?’

  And that was a silly question, he thought. She’d not know what it meant.

  She did. Hands behind her back, she gave him a wide, green, empty stare, and then turned and ran down the stone staircase. He was not to see her again for nine years – except once, from a distance.

  When the steward, still mouthing profuse and incoherent apologies, took him back to Mr Cameron, who was waiting in the Long Gallery, Mungo settled for £10,000 more than he had intended to pay.

  3

  After seeing his visitors off at the water gate next morning, Theo Cameron returned to his study to find his daughter waiting for him. Once, when she was four years old, he had said to her, ‘I do not care to see you looking like some tinker’s brat. Oblige me by dressing in a more ladylike fashion.’ So now, when she knew she was likely to see him, she did. Personally, she thought her one ‘good’ dress quite horrid. It was of crêpe, in a dusty pink colour with a flounced shoulder cape and dark blue ribbon trim, and no improvement at all on her usual homespun. But today she had more important things on her mind than her nurse’s hopeless eye for colour.

  Not until yesterday morning had she heard as much as a hint of her father’s plan to sell Kinveil, and it hadn’t been he who told her, but Meg Macleod, the nurse who had mothered her since she was born. The servants had known for weeks, as servants always did.

  When he came through the door, not expecting to find her there, the breath fled from her lungs. He looked like a cat who had been at the cream. She knew with certainty that the unthinkable had happened.

  The quality of his smile changed at the sight of her. ‘Good morning, ma petite,’ he said, as if this were just an ordinary day. ‘To what do I owe this pleasure?’

  She gulped. ‘Please, papa. I wanted to know...’ She was not very well acquainted with her father who, like the majority of civilized people, considered that the place for children was in the nursery, not the drawing-room. But he was seldom less than charming to her, and she had always assumed, without really giving the matter much thought, that he was fond of her and interested in her welfare. Now, she knew that she had been dreadfully wrong. The words came out in a rush. ‘I have to know! You haven’t sold Kinveil, have you? You haven’t really sold it?’

  He looked at her in a kind and sympathetic way, and she told herself, ‘I am not going to be sick. I am not!’

  ‘Come and sit over here.’ When she had obeyed, he stood looking down at her, his hands loosely linked before him. ‘Yes. I fear so, little one. The man who has just left, Mr Telfer, made me a very fair offer, and I agreed. I know you must be upset and, believe me, I am truly sorry. But I have come to the end here. I have reached the stage where I cannot go on any longer.’

  I, I, I! she thought, her heart rising to choke her. What about me? ‘You mean you don’t want to go on any longer,’ she blurted out. ‘You don’t love Kinveil at all, you hate it!’

  ‘That will do, Vilia!’ It came out, as it so often did when he wasn’t thinking, as ‘Veelia’, for although he tried hard and in general successfully not to let it show, Theophilus Cameron spoke French more readily than English, and had visited the land of his fathers only once in his life before he had inherited Kinveil in 1794. Nine years had passed since then, nine years that had cost him his wife, his peace of mind, and almost every guinea he possessed. There was nothing he wanted more in the world than to turn his back on the place, and he found it ironic that the child who so passionately wanted to stay should be the living image of her mother, the only human being he had ever loved, the exquisite Nordic girl who had deployed all her considerable powers of persuasion and all her charm to make him do what he didn’t want to do – return to Kinveil and take up his heritage. His own well-developed instinct for self-preservation had recommended him to sell, sell, sell! But he had given in to her and within eighteen months she was dead. Kinveil had killed her. She had been brought to bed with the child, and the nearest doctor had been fifty miles away, and winter that year had set in early and viciously. By the time the doctor arrived, smelling powerfully of whisky, Freya had been beyond his help. Theo Cameron still found it strange that he could look at Freya’s daughter and feel nothing for her at all, not even hatred; he was too civilized for that. Only Freya had ever mattered to him. He had thought, more than once, how much better it would have been if he, not she, had died.

  With an effort, he said, ‘You must learn that what one wants, and what one may have, are not always the same thing.’ Turning, looking out at the beautiful, blue, useless water, he went on, talking more to himself than the child. ‘I have no resources at all. Kinveil has swallowed everything. The land and the people are a constant drain on my purse and I have no way of refilling it. If I could send timber, or venison, or kelp, or fish to the south to sell, things might be different, but as long as the roads are only bridle tracks, and as long as the sea passage depends on winds that are always in the wrong quarter, there is no profit to be made.’ Rationally, he was acknowledging defeat.

  Defeat, however, was something the child did not understand and could not accept. ‘But, papa!’ she cried. ‘Real roads, proper roads, are coming, you know they are! The government’s going to build them.’ That was something else she hadn’t known until yesterday. ‘Surely we can last until then?’

  With faint amusement on his face, he said, ‘My dear child, what on earth do you know about the parliamentary roads?’

  It was lucky he didn’t wait for an answer, since she was by no means sure of her facts; the trouble about eavesdropping was that you couldn’t ask about things you didn’t understand.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Even if the roads and canals were to be finished next year, instead of scarcely even started, it would still be too late. There has not been an April since I came here when I have not had to buy in whole cargoes of oatmeal to tide our people over the last of the winter. I have neither the cash nor the credit to do it even once more. It has come to the stage when even the petit bourgeois shopkeepers of Inverness will not send anything more to Kinveil until I settle what I owe them.’ His lips curled at the stubborn resistance on his daughter’s face. ‘It is no use, my child. The people of the estate will be better off under the rich, worthy, low-born Mr Telfer than under their hereditary chief. It’s the end of an old song.’

  The end of an old song. The phrase that was always used to lament the passing of some ancient tradition. There had been Camerons at Kinveil for almost five hundred years. And now – no more.

  Temporarily, Vilia was silenced. Then, after a moment, her father said with a smile of the purest amusement, ‘And confess, my child! You cannot really have enjoyed living on nothing but oatmeal, and milk and kail?’

  ‘We have boiled mutton or pickled fish once a week,’ she replied defensively.

  He laughed, and with a great sigh of pleasure leaned back and stretched his arms wide above his head. ‘Boiled mutton!’ he repeated. ‘Boiled mutton? Never again, ma petite. Never – ever – again!’

  4

  Never Again. Never – ever – again. It was a refrain that haunted Vilia, waking and sleeping, for the few months that remained to her at Kinveil.

  She had never, in her short life, known what it was to be really hurt, and the scale of her misery was greater than she was equipped to deal with. The days passed, and the weeks, and it was as if all her faculties were whirling in a vortex, so that she felt dizzy inside, and the only stable things were those from which she was about to be sundered.

  Never again to wake in the nursery at the top of the old watchtower, with its four windows looking out to the four points of the compass, its scrubbed pine floor, its rafters black as ebony and glossy as the finest varnish from centuries of peat smoke. Never again to scramble from her own hard crib into Meg’s cosy hole-in-the-wall bed, wi
th its warm knobbly mattress stuffed with heather and chaff and felted wool, only to be dragged out again, laughing and struggling, and sponged down with icy water and tumbled into her clothes. Never to scamper down to the vaulted stone kitchen for her bowl of porridge, scalding hot and sprinkled with crunchy flakes of salt, with the cup of cool milk standing beside it so that she could dip each horn spoonful of oatmeal into it before she ate.

  Never again... Vilia’s Kinveil was not the Kinveil of her father, who had betrayed her so suddenly and shockingly. He was the laird, aloof and authoritarian, and she was only a child, if a special one. She was involved in everything, and treated, like all the children in the glen, very much as if she were a puppy. Under Meg’s indulgent eye she scrambled in and out of trouble as she pleased, and Meg was always there to comfort her, and scold her, and send her off to fall into trouble all over again. Vilia knew far more about the estate and its people than her father, and because their life revolved round the progress of the seasons, there was not a moment in those last months of 1803 when she was not reminded that, next year, all the same things would be going on again – without her.

  In July she went out with Archie Campbell and his son Ewen to set the lobster pots, and as she helped drop them over the side of the boat, their wickerwork seemed to creak at her, ‘Never again.’ In August, the women and girls came back from the shielings, the high pastures to which most of them migrated every summer with the cattle and sheep and goats. Their return took the form of a great procession, with dishes, coggs, churns, blankets, butter kegs and cheeses loaded on to the crude, birch-trunk sledges that were the only form of transport in the roadless glens, and the oldest women with their spinning wheels perched on top. The uproar was indescribable, with cows mooing, sheep meh-heh-heh-ing, dogs barking, and the goats letting loose with the peculiar, gargling shriek that had more than once startled castle visitors into thinking someone was being murdered. Vilia loved the little parti-coloured sheep – the ‘little, old sheep’, as they were called – with their four horns and pink noses and round, surprised eyes. ‘Never again,’ they bleated at her as she stroked their fine, thin fleece.