Tide (21 page)

Midnight Hall is silent and empty with Hamish gone. The boys are sleeping in their beds. From my room I can see the black, black sky over the cliffs …

Sarah looked out of the window to the scene that Morag described. The sky was darkening slowly – winter was wrapping Islay in an eternal night, it seemed. Sarah could picture Morag at the window, her proud, straight back, her blonde, wavy hair gathered in a knot at the nape of her neck.

… I’m listening to the wind coming off the sea. It howls all around Midnight Hall. Mairead has woken again. What a restless baby! Not like her brothers. They slept peacefully, hour after hour. I nearly had to wake them to feed them, they were so mellow. Mairead just won’t settle, she won’t stop crying – I have no choice but to leave her to it.

I must stop now and go to my bed, in case a dream comes. She will stop crying, sooner or later.

I shall write again soon. And remember, I don’t blame you for what happened with Angus.

Yours,

Morag Midnight

Sarah laid the letter down and put a hand to her mouth.
So Eliza wanted to die. She couldn’t take the dreaming. And poor Mairead, to suffer like that from the moment she was born!
The full horror of the legacy swept over Sarah like a cold wave.

Right at that moment she contemplated the idea of thrusting the letters into the fire, one by one, as she’d done with her dream diary. She didn’t want to know how the story unfolded. She didn’t want to be part of it. She didn’t want to be part of that line of women with such a burden. But she was, and there was no choice to be made.

A knock at the door made her jump.

“Sarah?”

It was Nicholas. “Come in,” she called, trying in vain to erase the shock from her face.

“Hey, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Just … reading about my family.”

Nicholas wrapped his arms around her, his woodsmoke scent enveloping her once more. “Oh, family. Yes. Families can mess you up big time.”
Wait until you meet my father.

Sarah waited for the wave of dizziness to come, the one she so often felt when Nicholas was around – that sense of her thoughts disappearing and strength leaving her.

It didn’t happen. It hadn’t happened for a while, she realized.

“Do you want to be alone?”

Sarah thought about it for a moment. “No. Stay. I want you to know.” She freed herself gently and handed him the letter she’d just read.

Nicholas sat at the fire and read while Sarah studied the flames.

“Poor girl,” he commented finally. “Elizabeth, I mean. She was broken.”

I’ve seen a broken girl before
, he thought.
I broke her.

“I just hope the same doesn’t happen to me,” said Sarah.

Nicholas felt cold. “Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know.” Sarah shrugged. “Just a feeling I’ve always had. That one day I won’t be able to take it anymore. That all this,” she gestured at the room around her, full of photographs of her family, “will end up destroying me. And you know,” she leaned her head on his shoulder, “I really want to live. Have a proper life, I mean. Like everyone else. Play my music …”

“Yes. I understand.”
Believe me, I do
. Nicholas leant towards her and placed a soft kiss on the top of her head.
And I’m going to take it all away from you
. He felt ill, ill with the cruelty of it all. With the inevitability of it all. He held her tight once more. Too tight.

“Nicholas, you’re hurting me.”

“Oh, sorry,” he whispered, and loosened his grip.

“Hey, you’re shaking,” said Sarah softly, looking into his face.

“Am I? Well, it’s quite cold in here.” Nicholas avoided meeting her eyes.

A sense of foreboding crept over Sarah, covered her like a black shroud. She sensed that the story about to unfold would be a terrible one, and that the ghosts of Midnight Hall were not going to leave her alone until she’d heard it all. Nicholas felt her anxiety rising and tried to distract her.

“Look,” he whispered, and pointed at the fire. From red, the flames started turning blue, yellow, green and then all black, and red again. “Like your stained-glass window.”

Sarah smiled. “It’s beautiful.” She touched Nicholas’s wounded cheek gently. “Does is still hurt?”

“No. Don’t worry about that. Don’t worry about anything.”

“Why did the ravens attack you, Nicholas?”

“I don’t know.”

You do. But you’re not telling
. “Don’t keep secrets from me.”

“Sarah,” Nicholas replied wearily.

She waited for him to tell her he wasn’t hiding anything from her. But he didn’t.

“Can I stay with you tonight?” he asked instead.

Sarah drew in breath, softly. She wasn’t expecting that.

“Nicholas …”

He put his hands up. “It’s not like that, not if you’re not ready.”

Sarah shook her head and looked down. She wasn’t.

“I just don’t want to be alone tonight. And maybe you don’t want it either,” he whispered, lifting her chin tenderly with his hand.

All of a sudden, a name crossed Sarah’s mind:
Sean
. It was like a stab in her heart, a loss too painful to bear.

She looked Nicholas in the eye. “Yes. You can stay.”

They fell asleep in each other’s arms, but it wasn’t long before Sarah woke. Nicholas was tossing and turning, moaning in his sleep. Repeating the same word over and over again, a word Sarah couldn’t quite make out.

“Nicholas! Wake up! It’s fine, it’s just a nightmare.” It was the first time in her life that she had to comfort someone who was having a bad dream, and not the other way round.

“Martyna!” he called.

Martyna?

Sarah frowned, and took hold of his hand. “Nicholas. Shhhh. It’s OK. I’m here. Wake up, you’re safe.”

Nicholas’s black eyes opened in the darkness, and he sat up with a jolt. Sarah embraced him at once, stroking his hair, caressing his back, cradling him gently. She felt something wet against her cheek, and scalding hot. His burning tears.

“Nicholas.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He clung to her in a way he’d never done before.

“Hey, it’s OK. It’s OK.”

“Sarah. I’m sorry.”

“It was just a bad dream. Go back to sleep.”

It wasn’t a bad dream. It was my life. It
is
my life
. “I can’t. I can’t go back to sleep.”

Sarah nodded. She knew very well what this felt like, not wanting to close your eyes again. “I’ll light the fire and I’ll make you some tea, OK?” She swung her legs over the side of the bed. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

She tiptoed out of the room, closing the door behind her, made her way towards the stairs, but just as she reached the top step she stopped in her tracks. There was a figure standing on the landing, shrouded in shadows.

Sean.

“I heard a noise. I thought I would come and check on you,” he said.

“It was Nicholas. He was having a bad dream.”

“Right.” He didn’t move.

“It’s not what you think. We aren’t—we didn’t—” Words failed Sarah. She just couldn’t explain. And why did it feel like a betrayal?

She turned and walked away without looking back.

Seasons have tempered us

Like water to a burning sword

Nicholas was finally asleep, but Sarah was wide awake.

She couldn’t lie in bed any longer. The house was calling her. Since they’d arrived she’d barely had time to walk from room to room, to hear Midnight Hall’s whispered welcome to its rightful owner.

She got up and slipped her white jumper around her shoulders. Quietly, she opened a drawer of her mother’s dressing table; of course, they were still there. Every room was equipped with an emergency kit of candles, matches and a torch, as there were often power cuts on Islay. The torch would have been more practical, but Sarah preferred the golden, soft light of candles. She took hold of one of the two silver candlesticks sitting on either side of the mantelpiece and stood in front of the dressing table. The match sizzled feebly as she lit it, and she turned towards Nicholas to make sure he was still asleep. He didn’t stir.

The candle’s small, warm light flickered and danced, revealing the draughts in the room. It lit up Sarah’s face with a honeyed glow, and she was surprised as she caught her reflection in the dressing table mirror to see how much her face had changed. There was a strength in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. Her eyes widened as she realized how much she looked like her mother.

Sarah’s footsteps were too light to make a sound as she walked out of the room, protecting the flickering flame with her cupped hand. To walk with a candle in her hand made her think of her ancestors, her grandmother, before electricity came, and their nightly walks through the house, guided only by the light of this tiny fire between their fingers. The whole house was asleep and there was no noise to be heard.

She wasn’t sure where to go, but her feet took her down the corridor, past the stained-glass window and down the stairs. She was shivering in spite of her jumper, and her feet felt cold on the steps. Still, in a strange way, she enjoyed feeling the stone against her bare skin, as if she were feeling the house itself, settling and creaking and breathing like a living thing. She put her right arm out, her fingers brushing the wall lightly. Step after step, the light of the candle illuminating her naked feet, and then the vast, high-ceilinged vestibule. She stopped for a second and breathed in. The house smelled of peat, of damp and of something else, something she recognized but couldn’t quite place.

Lilies?

She closed her eyes and inhaled again.
Yes, lilies.

Sarah smiled to herself. She knew now where she wanted to go. Past the small living room where Niall had been taken when unconscious, past the library whose walls were covered floor to ceiling with bookshelves, past her grandmother’s study. The grand hall opened dark and cavernous to her left, but she turned right instead.

She entered the music room, where she’d spent so many peaceful hours listening to her grandmother and her parents playing, and practising the cello herself. She stepped into the darkened room, illuminating in turn a piano, a harpsichord and the shape of a covered harp, taller than her, resembling a bulky hunchbacked figure. Her fingers lingered on the piano. Carefully she opened its lid and played a few notes, balancing the candle with her other hand. The sound echoed in the silence of the night. Her mother Anne had been an extraordinary pianist, she remembered sadly.

Sarah closed the piano lid as the notes reverberated. She didn’t want to wake anybody, and she didn’t want to be disturbed in her journey through memory and time.

She walked on, towards the wall opposite, and fingered the soft, aqua and gold wallpaper. Under her touch, an invisible door hidden by the wallpaper opened. Sarah smiled, her secret hideout, the cosy, protected place where she went to read and daydream, was still there. It hadn’t been secret at all, of course – everyone knew of its existence – but it felt like that to her, as a child.

It was a tiny room – more of a cupboard – whose purpose had been unknown even to Morag and Hamish. They had no idea why whoever built the house many generations before had decided to carve that small chamber just off the music room. There was no rhyme or reason to it.

Sarah stepped in, the light of the candle illuminating the small space. It was covered in the same aqua and gold wallpaper as the music room, and along the back wall ran a small wooden ottoman. Knowing that Sarah loved sitting in there with a book, Morag had had the ottoman covered in blue velvet cushions. Sarah smiled to herself again, remembering her grandmother’s act of kindness. She placed the candlestick on the wooden floor carefully and kneeled in front of the ottoman, opening its velvet-covered lid.

It was full of treasures, intact from the last time she’d been in the room. As a teenager she hadn’t used the hideaway as much; the prized possessions she had placed in the ottoman must have been there for at least five years. Inside, there was a pink fabric bag, embroidered with little pink sequins. Sarah opened it, and gasped in delight to uncover the treasure it hid. It was a tiny wooden box painted with blue and green flowers – she had forgotten all about it. She lifted the lid, and smiled upon seeing a pair of blue butterfly-shaped earrings that her father had given her on his return from a trip to London when she was ten years old. Those earrings had been her very first piece of jewellery. She slipped the box in the pocket of her jumper.

Next, she took out an address book, with a white kitten on the cover. It was full of phone numbers of former classmates.

Mary Elizabeth McGregor

Sophie Singh

Patrick Thomson

Patrick Thomson! Her first crush. How she’d sighed because of him. And still, when he’d finally noticed her and asked her to go for chips, she’d chickened out of it. The poor guy had waited for an hour and a half in front of the chip shop. She felt a pang of guilt at the memory. Poor Patrick. One of the many boys who’d fallen for her shy, prickly charm and her lovely dark looks, only to be bitterly disappointed. Nobody had ever come close to her, not even remotely.

Nobody, that is, until Sean arrived.

Her eye fell on a book with a green cover and the image of a red-haired girl in a dress and straw hat sitting on a rope swing staring up at her. She took the book in her hand:
Anne of Green Gables
. How much she’d loved that book. She’d read it endless times. She opened the first page.

Happy Birthday, Sarah! From Aunt Juliet to Sarah, October 2005.

She’d been eleven years old.

The feelings of joy and tenderness gave way to a wave of sorrow. Aunt Juliet was gone and would never come back. She recalled their last day together, when she’d been so hard on her, so impatient. Like she’d always been, really. Only now Sarah was beginning to realize how present Aunt Juliet had been throughout her life, and how often she had rebuffed her for it, instead of being thankful. Now Aunt Juliet was gone – and her Uncle Trevor, and surely her cousins, didn’t want anything to do with her anymore. She’d been severed from the last of her family.