As Giselle settled her canvas bag more firmly on her shoulder, her thoughts drifted to the smooth oval of black glass nestled safely inside. It was called pirate glass because it came from old rum bottles, and appeared black until a light was shone through it. When she’d held this piece up to the sun it had gleamed with a subdued yellow glow, and she’d hugged herself in delight.
Sometimes she knew precisely what she would do with her finds; other times, like this one, she would cache them, hoarding them as jealously as a dragon hoards gold, knowing that one day she’d find the perfect place for them.
Giselle made a note to take it with her when she saw Mhairi later. The old lady was always so interested in everything, and Giselle enjoyed their little chats and she had a soft spot for her landlady. Many a time Mhairi had slipped quietly into Giselle’s studio to watch her work, not saying anything, before leaving again just as unobtrusively.
As Giselle picked her way along the crescent of sandy beach, she thought how fortunate she was to have found Coorie Castle and Mhairi, and how privileged she was to live in such a magical place. Born on Skye, the island was her spiritual and physical home, and she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. This was where she belonged.
Lost in thought, she made her way along the lane towards the long L-shaped building that housed the craft centre. It was old, although nowhere near as old as the castle, and had fallen into disrepair until Mhairi, due to the financial pressure of keeping the castle running, had decided to bolster the estate’s income by transforming the former barns and service buildings into craft studios, a cafe and a gift shop. Giselle rented one of the smaller units, since she didn’t require the same amount of floor space that the glassblower, for instance, needed.
As she strolled along the cobbled walkway running the length of the studios, she noticed that several of her fellow crafters had already arrived. One of them was Tara, who made doll’s houses.
‘Any good finds?’ Tara asked, unlocking the door to her studio.
‘A stopper, maybe from a perfume bottle,’ Giselle said, ‘and a piece of pirate glass.’ Then she had to explain what that was when she showed her. ‘And I also found this weirdly shaped pink piece that looks like a shoe,’ she added. It wasn’t as weathered by wave action as she would have liked, and Giselle was tempted to return it to the sea this evening to allow it to cure for a few more years so that it became more frosted. If she did, she might never see it again, but on the other hand she might be lucky enough to find it once more. She’d show it to Mhairi first though.
‘Wow, that’s gorgeous!’ Tara exclaimed, gazing at it.
‘Not as gorgeous asthat.’ Giselle pointed to an exquisite thatched cottage sitting in the centre of Tara’s window. ‘Every time I walk past, you have another new dolls house on display.’
Giselle was in awe of all the talented craftspeople who worked at the centre. Not only that, but they were also her found family, as dear to her as her real one. With her parents in East Kilbride and her fashion designer sister based in Milan, she saw far more of the people who lived and worked at Coorie Castle than she did her family.
When she entered the studio, Giselle took her canvas bag over to the tiny sink in the corner and removed the contents. As well as the incredibly tactile pirate glass, she’d collected some small pale green fragments, a brown one, several white ones and the pink shoe-shaped one, which had possibly come from an ornament of some kind.
Along with the glass, she’d found a conical shell, a flat pebble with striations of amber and cream running through it, and some small slivers of driftwood.
After carefully washing her finds, she placed them on a scrap of old towel to dry before sorting them into colour, size and shape. The common glass colours (green, brown and white) were stored in easily accessible trays on her workbench. These were her bread-and-butter pieces, and were the ones she most often used in her art.
The rarer finds were kept in a cabinet of slim drawers and were used far more sparingly. The more common the sea glass, the less she charged for her work. Pictures made using rarer pieces commanded a higher price. And some, the few precious ones, such as the vivid red heart, would never be used. In fact, she would never part with the heart from Venice. Even if it didn’t have a substantial intrinsic value (the glass, she’d subsequently learnt, had been made with gold to give it the red colour), the value to her was enormous. That heart had set her on the path she walked today. It was because of that glorious little piece of sea glass that she’d discovered her passion.
Satisfied her studio was ready for her to start work, Giselle went in search of breakfast.
‘You look happy,’ Gillian observed as she took her order. Gillian was the cafe’s manager. A middle-aged cheerful woman, she made the best sourdough Giselle had ever tasted. Gillian winked at her. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve got yourself a fella?’
Giselle raised her eyebrows and gave her a look.
The woman uttered a resigned sigh. ‘You’ve found something on the beach, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, and it wasn’t a man.’
‘Sea glass?’
‘Of course.’
‘Will we see you in the pub tomorrow?’
Friday evenings in Duncoorie’s one and only pub were a tradition. Not everyone managed every Friday, but there was usually a good turnout.
‘Probably,’ Giselle replied.
She had nothing else planned, but that wasn’t unusual. However, she liked it that way: she wasn’t exactly a social butterfly. She didn’t do parties or late nights, preferring peace and early mornings. Izzy teased that she was old before her time, more sixty-nine than twenty-nine, but Giselle didn’t care. She was sublimely happy with her life the way it was. And she was also used to being urged (gently, for the most part) to find herself a man and settle down.
The idea of being in a relationship didn’t give her the heebie-jeebies, but neither was it a burning ambition. She simply wasn’t interested. Izzy did enough dating for the both of them. Sometimes Giselle felt sorry for her parents, and her mum, especially. Mum had hinted on more than one occasion that it might be nice to be a grandma at some point, but with no fella on the horizon for Giselle, and far too many of them for Izzy, neither daughter would be producing offspring anytime soon. Both were happy as they were, even if their lives were so vastly different. Anyway, Giselle’s body clock had yet to start ticking, so she had plenty of time to find someone to settle down with,ifthat’s what she wanted to do.
And she wasn’t entirely convinced she did.
Giselle knew that if she took her breakfast back to her studio she’d end up working as she ate, so she sat in the cafe instead, taking a table at one of the large picture windows with stunning views over the loch.
It was a view she would never tire of, and as she slowly consumed her meal, she let her gaze drift across the water to the hills on the opposite shore. Giselle had lost count of the number of times she’d recreated this scene out of sea glass and other found items, and no two pictures were ever the same, just like the ever-changing vista in front of her.
