The Firebird
Page 21‘Not far north of Aberdeen. They have a lovely golf course. Do ye play the golf?’
Rob let her lead the conversation off again, politely, but I saw his eyes returning to the sketch from time to time, and though he didn’t show it I could sense him growing restless.
After twenty minutes more I set my empty teacup down and smiled and, thanking Margaret, said, ‘We really ought to go.’
She stood and saw us to the door, and thanked me, too, for bringing back her scarf. ‘It was always a fancy of mine,’ she admitted, ‘to own a designer scarf. Foolish thing, really, to waste so much money.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said, and smiled. ‘We all have to indulge ourselves a little bit, I think.’
She stood there in the doorway of her plain mid-terraced house, and smiled back at me, but sadly. ‘Aye, perhaps we do.’
I shouldn’t have said anything, I knew, to raise her hopes, but I so desperately wanted to leave something she could hold to, so I told her, ‘I’ll be going to St Petersburg myself, soon, on a business trip. I’ll see what I can learn about the Empress Catherine, shall I? And the British who were living there.’
A small light flicked on briefly in her eyes. It satisfied me then, but when I got back in the car with Rob and drove away I felt less sure that what I’d done was kind. I sat and wallowed in my doubts until Rob spoke, his own voice quiet, as though he were thinking too. ‘Ye ken she’s dying?’
‘Yes, I know.’ I looked away. ‘And so does she.’
‘It leaves in March,’ I told him. ‘Sixty days, the whole way round the world.’ A world that Margaret Ross had only dreamt of from her prison of a house.
We’d reached the ring road that would take us back onto the Tay Road Bridge, and just ahead the rigged masts of an old tall ship rose up against the waterline. The RRS Discovery in its permanent display dock, the same ship that had once carried Scott and Shackleton on their first trip to search for the South Pole, only to spend two years trapped in the ice while the crew on the shore met with failure.
We reached the ship and passed it, reached the turning for the Tay Road Bridge, and passed that, too. I looked at Rob.
He looked at me. ‘Nice day,’ he said, and glanced towards the sky for proof before he brought his gaze back to the road ahead. ‘We could be up to Cruden Bay by teatime.’
‘Cruden Bay.’ So I’d been right about his interest in the sketch, and its effect on him.
‘Well, given that your firebird carving’s up in Inverness,’ he said, ‘I thought we might look elsewhere for those details that you need.’
‘Oh yes? And what’s in Cruden Bay?’
He swung the Ford through one more roundabout and took the turning north before he answered me. ‘Slains Castle.’
We lost the sunshine as we crossed the River Ythan north of Aberdeen, and minutes later it began to rain. Not hard at first, but steadily. The road we were on hugged the coast but the change in the weather had flattened the light to a dull grey outside and the clouds pressed so low there was little distinction between sea and sky.
Rob was looking ahead with the faintest of frowns, and I knew he was searching for the jagged line of castle ruins we’d seen in the sketch that hung on Margaret’s wall.
I asked, ‘What is it that you feel, about the castle?’
He couldn’t put it neatly into words. ‘It’s like …’ He exhaled hard, his mouth a stubborn line. ‘It’s like I’ve someone tugging at my sleeve, ye ken, and wanting my attention. I can feel it just like that, like I’m supposed to come and see.’
‘Well, you’ll be lucky to see anything in this.’ I looked with doubt beyond the thudding wiper blades that seemed to barely pass before the windscreen was awash again. ‘It’s getting worse.’
It really was. Rob had to slow his speed because of lack of visibility, and by the time we reached the outer edge of Cruden Bay he’d conceded that, even if we found the castle, we couldn’t explore it in this weather. Not that it mattered.
I’d already mentally altered my plan for the day to allow for our coming this far up the coast. There was no way that I would be able to catch the last train down to London tonight, that was obvious. And it was even more obvious there was no way we could ever have driven the whole distance up here, and looked round Slains Castle, and driven back down again, all in one go. Rain or no rain, we’d have to find somewhere to stop for the night.
I had known this when we’d headed north from Dundee. I’d accepted the logic. But now it felt suddenly close in the car.
‘Aye?’
‘I’m sorry for making you do this.’
His frown of concentration softened as he watched the road. ‘Ye’ve not made me do anything. I volunteered.’
‘For a trip to Dundee. Not a full weekend excursion.’ I tried to see beyond the thudding wipers. ‘Margaret said they had a golf course here, which means there ought to be at least a couple of hotels.’
Steering from the road into a little car park sheltered by high hedges on two sides and on the other by the watery dark outline of what looked to be a pub, Rob switched the engine off and stretched his shoulders, leaning back into the seat. ‘How’s this one?’
Peering out my window, I could just make out the sign: The St Olaf Hotel.