Rich kept his eyes on the road ahead. ‘Oh, come on! Will you justpull over!’ He rammed the heel of his hand into the car horn starting a string of beeps and headlight flashes all along the slow-moving convoy. ‘Holiday drivers! Sorry, Beatrice, what were you saying?’
‘I was talking about true pairs, mated for life?’ She shook her head. ‘Never mind.’ She scanned the sky again looking for the bird, but it was safely in its nest with its mate. With a flash of sudden awakening, she spoke.
‘Rich, stop the car.’
Chapter Thirty
All Change at Port Willow
Atholl reached for the canopy above The Princess and the Pea bed and pulled it away from the bedposts, disturbing the faded green curtains and a decade’s worth of dust. Coughing, he passed the ancient material to Gene who bundled it into boxes as Kitty opened the windows.
‘Are you sure this wants doing today, Atholl? Can’t we have a day of rest to recover from Harvest Home?’ Gene asked.
‘I want to work,’ Atholl replied, making a start on stripping away the lacy duvet covers. ‘We should have done this years ago. Nobody wants to sleep in a fusty old room. We need to modernise a wee bit. Make it nice for families to stay in. And I’m not fit for sitting around drumming my fingers today.’
‘We’re keeping the princess bed though, right?’ Gene asked.
‘Of course.’
Along the bay a train horn sounded and the rails rattled, heralding the arrival of a new crop of crafters to the village.
‘Some of this lot could be my Gaelic students,’ said Kitty, looking out the bedroom window along the waterfront to the station. ‘I trust you’ve got their bookings right this time, Gene?’
Everyone smiled grimly and thought of Beatrice’s arrival ten days ago, but nobody spoke of it.
Gene shuffled out the door with the box of bed hangings saying he’d have them sent to the dry cleaners in Lochalsh and Kitty eyed Atholl from her vantage point by the window where she wiped the condensation from the glass with a cloth and made a show of dusting the ornaments on the sill.
‘Will you be all right?’ she said once Gene had gone.
‘Hmm,’ Atholl concentrated on stripping the silk roses and ribbons from the bed’s ladder, gently pulling at the delicate old wires that hadn’t been untwined since his mother had decorated the room all those years ago. ‘I’ll just have to be. I’ve little right to moan and mourn. Beatrice has a life of her own and a home to sort out… and a husband she clearly isn’t free of. And she has a broken heart for her baby to heal. The grief forced them apart, I think. But now Richard’s come to his senses and they’re on their way back to their home town together. Maybe all she needed was a break here away from her old life to recuperate. And now she’s reunited with her man, making a fresh start. Like Maggie did with her man…’
‘Pfft, that was altogether a different kind of situation. Maggie was out for a fling, for revenge of some kind. Beatrice wasn’t like that at all.’
‘Either way, she was here to escape her old life for a few days, no’ to throw in her lot with a bunch of strangers.’
Kitty turned back to the window, processing Atholl’s words and watching Echo dashing along the pavement down below, barking at the new guests as they wheeled suitcases towards the inn.
‘It’s only right she should have a chance at healing with her own husband,’ Atholl continued. ‘Richard is, after all, the father of her bairn and they must have a long history together that I’ve no right interfering in.’ He settled into the task of hauling the mattresses from the bed and throwing them onto the floor, his brow furrowed with the effort. ‘If I keep myself busy here and at the workshop all winter, seeing through all my plans, allBeattie’s plans, I should say, for the shop and the café and the classes, I’ll survive, I’m sure.’
‘She certainly shook things up around here and for the better. We’ll miss her,’ Kitty was saying, having taken one last look out the window before picking her way slowly towards the door on tiptoe.
Atholl barely noticed her retreating, and he certainly hadn’t seen the sudden flash of light in her eyes as she stole away to greet the inn guests.
‘Aye, we will miss her.Iwill. I cannae remember a time before she arrived. It’s as though I was sleeping all these years, letting the inn dwindle, trying to keep Gene from dying away from his grief at losing Lana and letting my own life sit stagnant as though my own dreams meant nothing to me.’ Atholl folded bedsheets against his chest and piled them on the floor, his back to the door Kitty had just crept out of. ‘I never imagined somebody could come into my home and chase away all the obstructions that we’d let lie in our paths all these years, let alone someone so… alive, and so bonny. And yet, I let obstructions get in the way of me and Beattie. If I could go back to the day she arrived, I’d not have let my stubborn pride rule me and I’d have been kinder and not held back when I felt myself falling for her in spite of every rational objection I threw in our path, too afraid to tell her how I felt…Och…’
Atholl’s words stopped in a frustrated cry as he started on the task of pulling the empty drawers from the ancient corner cabinet that had seen far better days. ‘She told me she was dreading the winter, but now that’s how I feel. Even with all the work ahead of me at the But n’ Ben I dinnae ken how I’m supposed to get through it without seeing her, Kitty.’
Met by silence, Atholl looked around the room wondering why Kitty didn’t answer. His eyes fell on the suitcase just inside the doorframe and the woman standing there holding a crystal on a long silver ribbon, the light reflecting off it as it swung in her hand, turning the daylight into rainbows scattering in dancing bands over the worn carpet.
‘Atholl,’ Beatrice said, through smiling lips. ‘I thought we might spend the winter together, here, if you’d like?’
Atholl had crossed the floor and wrapped Beatrice in his arms before she’d finished her sentence. ‘Beattie, you’re here to stay?’
‘Yes, please, if you’ll have me.’
‘What about Richard?’
‘He’s on his way back to his own place, I imagine. We said everything that needed to be said last night and as we were driving away I realised that I didn’t have to go back tomyold place, and I don’t have to be where I don’t want to be. I’m not going to let the tide drag me back there against my will. That would drown me for sure. I can make a fresh start here, with you, if that’s what you want too.’
