Chapter Twenty-Two
A Blank
Beatrice was dreaming, delirious. The back of her neck was hot and there was a cool hand on her forehead. Her mum was smiling at her and she had never felt so happy to see her in her life. She knew she was crying but wasn’t sure why.
‘Mum, what are you doing here? Are we still at the inn?’
‘She’s just tired, I’m sure o’ it. Best call the doctor, though.’ Beatrice knew through the haze that it was Mrs Mair talking.
‘She’s been asleep for hours,’ Kitty’s voice was saying, and a man was asking if she’d swallowed any water and talking about something called secondary drowning.
She didn’t hear anything else for a long time, but eventually she was aware of a voice droning on and on, never stopping. It was someone talking about babies and hospitals and anaesthetics and it sounded a lot like her own voice. ‘Let me sleep,’ she called out, and the voice stopped.
‘Exhaustion, that’s what the doctor said, and no’ just from the riptide either. It’s been coming on for months, he thinks.’ Kitty’s sweet accent rang in Beatrice’s ears and she was aware the room was light but she couldn’t force her eyelids open.
Someone made the mattress compress by her side and she felt a warm hip against her body and a calloused, gentle hand settling over her forehead.
‘Rich?’ she murmured, her brow furrowing, her eyes shut.
‘Nae temperature?’ a man’s soothing Highland voice was saying, deep and soporific.
‘No, no fever. The doctor says she has to sleep as long as she needs to. Go on, you should get away to bed too and let her sleep. Standing watching from the doorway for hours on end isn’t helping her at all,’ Kitty was saying softly.
She heard footsteps withdrawing and a door closing and she slipped back into a heavy, blank slumber.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Meddling
‘You weren’t there when I woke up.’
‘Beatrice!’ Atholl dropped the sack of sweet-smelling mulch at the sound of her voice and turned to face her. He straightened his spine with a throaty growl that told Beatrice he’d been hard at work all afternoon. ‘I thought I’d better leave you to sleep and get your strength back.’
‘You all let me sleep all of Friday night and almost all of today? For twenty-four hours?’
‘Aye. And ye needed it, didn’t ye?’ Turning back to the compost sack, he tipped the last of its contents on top of the newly replanted lavender.
‘I did, you’re right. Was it Mrs Mair who came in with the soup and bread?’
‘It was Kitty. Was my room all right for you? It must have been strange waking up and not knowing where you were.’
Beatrice smiled at the memory of his room which had been warm with close summer air and the curtains drawn against the sun. There had been books on the shelves and willow sculptures in various stages of completion on the desk.
Once Kitty was sure she could stand up on her own and had left her to drink the sweet tea and take a shower, Beatrice had wandered around the room, running her hands over the willow work and over his brown leather belt and the spines of his notebooks – one of which was open on the desk, filled with willow designs and technical-looking drawings explaining how to make certain knots and fastenings and strong foundational structures to support larger sculptures. She had sipped her drink and pored over his pencil marks – delicate, confident, skilled and sensitive.
She had washed with his shampoo and soap thinking of Atholl the whole time and how this was the way he lived his life. She smelled of him now that she had washed away the salt and sand.
Now she’d found him, and she wanted to tell him all this, and maybe hold him again, but he wasn’t returning her smile.
‘I tried to see you but Kitty said you were dead to the world and nobody was to wake you. Are you all right now?’
‘I am. I don’t think I’ve ever slept the way I did, like I reallydiddrown. I think I’ve been tired for months, exhausted I think. I mean therealkind of exhausted. The ill kind. And I feel strangely altered now; wide awake and alive.’ Atholl watched her raise her hands to the afternoon sky and something in the coolness of his demeanour was deadening some of this elation.
The air was chillier today, but the sun still shone weakly through watery clouds. A change was forecast, Kitty had told her, and this must be it.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked, concerned.
‘I’m fine,’ he replied, but something in the way he was looking at her unsettled her.
