The Skylark's Secret, стр. 9

Flora, 1939

Flora Gordon added peat to the range and set the kettle on the stovetop to boil. The waters of the loch were just beginning to turn pearly-grey in the light of the dawn. Her father would be home any minute, back from giving the animals their early feed, and he’d be needing his breakfast and a warming cup of tea.

She heard his boots on the path, accompanied by the lighter patter of Braan’s paws. The black Labrador was always at his side, whether he was checking on the ponies in the field and the working dogs in their kennel behind the steading, or out on the hill keeping an eye on the game birds and deer for which, as keeper on the Ardtuath Estate, he was responsible.

She hummed a tune softly under her breath and the kettle joined in, muttering and whistling to itself. She set the pan of oatmeal that had been steeping all night on to the heat, adding a pinch of salt and giving it a good stir. Then she warmed the brown teapot and spooned in the leaves from the caddy, her movements quick and deft with the efficiency born of habit.

Braan bounced through the kitchen door, tail wagging, looking for a pat from her before burying his snout in the tin bowl containing his own breakfast.

‘All right, Dad?’ she asked, expecting that the answer would be his usual silent nod as he took his seat at the head of the table and stretched out his feet in their thick woollen socks towards the warmth of the range.

But this morning he went instead to stand at the window looking out across the loch. ‘Looks like we have visitors,’ he said, nodding towards the water.

Drying her hands on the cloth that hung beside the stove, Flora joined him.

In the silence of the early light, a line of ships slid into view. Their grey hulls moved slowly, but with a power that parted the waves with ease. The air around them appeared to vibrate, agitating the seabirds that wheeled above them. She counted five vessels. They seemed to have materialised like leviathans risen from the waters of the loch, awoken from their slumber by the declaration, just ten days ago, that Britain was now at war with Germany.

Her father picked up the pair of binoculars from the windowsill and looked through the sights. Wordlessly, he passed them to Flora. The ships bristled with guns and antennae and as they drew closer she could hear the thrum of their engines.

‘That’ll be the Home Fleet then, I reckon,’ her father said.

Flora shivered with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. ‘But what would they be doing here? The war is hundreds of miles away.’

Her father looked at her shrewdly from beneath his shock of white hair. ‘It was hundreds of miles away, lass. But not any more.’

‘Might Ruaridh be on one of them, do you think?’ Flora’s heart leapt at the thought. Her brother had joined the Royal Navy two years before, and she sorely missed him. Like so many lads who’d grown up on that coast, he was as at home on the water as he was on the hills.

‘I doubt it. His last letter said he was in Portsmouth, assigned to destroyers. They’re smaller than those battleships out there. He could be deployed anywhere by now.’

As they watched, the leading ship manoeuvred slowly to a halt and dropped anchor with a rattle of chains audible even at this distance. Flora handed the binoculars back to her father. ‘What do you think they’re doing here in Loch Ewe?’

He shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough.’

He turned away from the window, but not before she’d glimpsed the look in his eyes. Although his bearing was as upright as ever and his manner as calm as usual, she could tell the war filled him with dread. He was fearful for what it meant for his son, far away in England, and now the arrival of these warships in the peaceful waters of the loch below Keeper’s Cottage had brought that sense of dread right up to their front door. The presence of her tall, capable father who was so at ease in these hills – a man trusted by the laird to oversee the Ardtuath Estate and a figure so respected in the lochside community – had always made her feel safe. But that glimpse of fear in his eyes made her feel that a fault line had cracked open in the ground beneath her feet, disturbing the equilibrium of their lives.

As if sensing her uneasiness, Braan pushed his nose into the palm of her hand, reassuring her. And then she turned away from the window and dished the porridge into the waiting bowls.

The post office was so busy that the queue doubled back on itself in the crowded space of the little shop. It seemed that half of the village either had a letter to post that morning or a sudden need to buy an envelope and a stamp or two. Flora joined the line, but no one was in any great hurry to reach the counter to be served by Miss Cameron, the postmistress. Instead, there was a hum of conversation that revolved entirely around the arrival of the Home Fleet on their doorsteps.

‘That big ship in the middle is HMS Nelson and they have Mr Churchill on board.’ Mrs Carmichael was a fount of knowledge on most matters, not