‘When he arrived?’ Kate questioned. ‘What do you mean?’
James looked at Kate as they walked. He was quite tall and she could feel herself almost jogging to keep up with his long strides.
‘Has Mum not explained the family history to you?’
‘No.’
He exhaled. ‘God, where do I start?’
‘At the beginning?’ She smiled.
James raised an eyebrow and half-smiled in return as he launched into the story.
‘The estate never used to be Dad’s. He lived and grew up in a house in London,’ James said. ‘Dad was an artist …’ This explained the modern artwork around the sitting room, Kate thought. ‘Not the tortured kind, more the jovial kind,’ he continued. ‘But certainly the kind that never made any money. He and Mum lived happily in London with holes in the ceiling and the boiler forever going wrong. It’s why Invermoray’s fared the same in terms of maintenance. I think it’s an attitude thing. Anyway, he inherited Invermoray in the 1980s, when relations of his passed away. Very distant relations from what I could work out. Either way, it was his. Dad quite fancied playing lord of the manor and so we sold the London house and decamped completely up here when I was a kid. In truth, I’ve never quite forgiven them.’
They stopped as they reached a clearing. ‘I just assumed it had been in your family for generations,’ Kate said.
‘It has been, since it was built in the early Victorian era. But for the other branch of the family, the McLays. Our last name was … is … Langley but the will asked for the McLay family name to be carried on, bolted on to ours. You can’t dictate that kind of thing from beyond the grave, the solicitor said, but Dad did it regardless; felt he owed it to them. So we became Langley-McLay, officially. Dad used it. Mum still does. But I don’t.’
‘Why not?’ Kate asked.
‘I suppose I felt like an idiot, changing my name, and a bit resentful at having moved up here. Invermoray never really felt like home. Never really felt like me.’
‘So who were the McLays then?’ Kate was curious now. ‘Who asked you to adopt their name in exchange for the house, which by the way sounds like a really fair trade?’
‘Fair trade? It’s the worst kind of trade. This house is a bloody drain on us. Always has been.’ James screwed up his face as he thought. ‘It’s some boring connection,’ he told her. ‘One of Dad’s cousins or something like that. He and his wife were elderly. I think he died in the early Eighties and then she followed not long after. It’s all a bit odd really if you think about it. They had two grown-up children, I believe. There’s portraits of them in the house. Mum found the pictures buried in the attic a while back.’
Kate remembered the portraits on the stairs, the young man in RAF uniform, the girl in the silver-grey dress. She wondered if they were who James meant.
‘They should have inherited, one or the other of them, according to Mum,’ James continued. ‘But for one reason or another they’d lost touch with their parents, or maybe died. I’m not sure. There was a family rumour they had been disinherited years and years earlier but Dad and his parents didn’t take it seriously. So it was a complete shock when the line of inheritance missed out the McLays’ direct descendants for whatever reason, skipped sideways and landed on us Langleys.’
Kate hadn’t been paying too much attention to her surroundings. Instead she’d been entranced by James’s strange tale. It was with some surprise that she found they had reached the cottage. James had been right. From the direction of the loch, the hedges had tangled into thicket and had built up to a high level, camouflaging it from view. It was unlikely she would have seen it had she been alone. Instead they had doubled round and approached the cottage from the direction of the road that ran to the front of the estate. James’s battered Land Rover was parked some distance away on the track. It was a marvel he’d managed to locate her really.
‘Thank you,’ Kate said.
He frowned. ‘What for?’
‘Making the effort to find me, out there.’ She gestured to what she had now decided was The Wilderness.
He shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it. You might have found it eventually.’ He raised his eyebrows theatrically. ‘Then again … you might not.’
She couldn’t help but laugh.
James bent down and pulled the brass key out from underneath the mat.
‘That’s a really brave place to keep it,’ Kate said. ‘Anyone could find it.’
‘Out here?’ He rolled his eyes as he unlocked the thick wooden door. ‘You couldn’t.’ He looked pleased with his own joke. ‘Besides, it’s not here permanently. I left it there so the roofer could finish and pick up his tools. At least it’s watertight now. As I said—’ he indicated the cottage ‘—it’s not much.’ James turned the handle and Whisky beat his tail as he caught up with them, impatient to be let inside. ‘In fact some of the ghillie’s stuff from before the war is still here. Dusty. Moth-eaten. The McLays couldn’t be bothered to chuck it all out it seems, and neither could my dad. I did have half a mind that I could tosh the furniture up a bit instead of buying new. Holidaymakers love that reclaimed look, apparently. So don’t be surprised if you think it looks like a museum. Because it does.’
He opened the door, pushed it open and they stepped inside.
The cottage door slammed open, the metal catch clanging as it crashed against the stone wall inside. Constance was breathless; she’d been running so hard. In the woods she’d realised with every pounding step that, with a combination of duty and a longing to help him, she was desperate to see the pilot before he left as he’d sworn he would.
‘You’ll never have to see me again,’ he had said. And for one awful moment as Constance stood at the threshold and looked in, she believed it was true. As she’d left the cottage last night he had been drifting to sleep by the armchair. But the space he’d inhabited was now empty. During the night he must have thrown a few more logs on the fire, their charred, smoking remains reduced to dim embers in the grate.
She ran upstairs to see if he had chosen to sleep in the bed, but the bedclothes remained unruffled and the scent of settled dust lingered in the room. With her heart full of disappointment, Constance descended the staircase.
He had gone.
The pilot, Matthew, had moved one of the spindle-backed dining chairs from its position by the kitchen table and over to the fireside. Over the back he had draped her dress. She imagined him picking it up from the floor after she had left, touching it, taking the effort to look around the room, to find something appropriate from which to hang it; putting it a suitable distance from the fire so it would dry easily but not shrink from the proximity to the heat. She touched the dress with her fingertips, wondering at the effort he had made for her; such a small act but it held meaning that Constance couldn’t understand. He hadn’t just left it crumpled on the floor as others might have done. She stood, not quite knowing what she should do next. Somehow, going back to the house, back to her daily life, didn’t feel right. It was almost as if the events of last night, the aircraft disappearing into the water, swimming out to find the pilot, relief at finding him alive, sitting with him in this very room, held meaning, held an opportunity for … something? Not excitement. No. There had been plenty enough of that last night, heart pounding, frightening excitement. But something else nonetheless. The opportunity to be useful, to break free