Over the Seas Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered!

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  About Bello:

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  About the author:

  www.panmacmillan.com/author/josephinebell

  Contents

  Josephine Bell

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Josephine Bell

  Over the Seas

  Josephine Bell

  Josephine Bell was born Doris Bell Collier in Manchester, England. Between 1910 and 1916 she studied at Godolphin School, then trained at Newnham College, Cambridge until 1919. At the University College Hospital in London she was granted M.R.C.S. and L.R.C.P. in 1922, and a M.B.B. S. in 1924.

  Bell was a prolific author, writing forty-three novels and numerous uncollected short stories during a forty-five year period.

  Many of her short stories appeared in the London Evening Standard. Using her pen name she wrote numerous detective novels beginning in 1936, and she was well-known for her medical mysteries. Her early books featured the fictional character Dr. David Wintringham who worked at Research Hospital in London as a junior assistant physician. She helped found the Crime Writers’ Association in 1953 and served as chair during 1959–60.

  Chapter One

  When Alec Nimmo opened his eyes for the first time after falling into a tortured sleep that he had believed would be his last, he saw above him not the cold whiteness that had been his last view of the cruel earth but a close, ill-smelling darkness that moved and muttered before his unfocused vision. He shut his eyes again, convinced that his worst fears, his dread of a deserved hell, had been realised, that he was now descended into the pit, hence the darkness, and would shortly begin to suffer his well-merited and ever-lasting punishment.

  True, he felt nothing. The agony of the last two days and nights, when he had stumbled along the snow-covered, lonely track of Glen Shiel, without shelter, without food, was over. It had been a forced march that had kept his feet from frostbite until plain exhaustion halted them. That and the sight of the loch, sheeted with steel-grey ice over the inmost, shoreward tongue of it that lay northwards from Shiel Bridge at the foot of the last of the Five Sisters of Kintail. As he struggled round this fringe of ice, staggering among great boulders only thinly covered with snow, Alec’s strength ebbed more quickly. It had been upheld for so long and so precariously by his obstinate intention of reaching the Western Isles. Or at least to find the shores of open water. He believed this icy loch, this present frozen stretch, seeing the main part led ever westwards, would take him there. He was almost upon those long wished-for shores, that other, western sea.

  Slowly he gained the farther side of the inlet. As night began to fall he staggered on beside the water, floundering in deep snow, weakening with every step, until a mere fallen pine sapling tripped him and he could not force himself to rise again. He had found just sufficient strength to unroll his plaid over his legs and thrust his hands into the folds and then, fixing his eyes on the white mountain beside and above him, to pray forgiveness of his sins and commend his soul to God.

  So when the first horror of his awakening passed, his instant fear of hell-fire provoked in him a spirit of rejection and argument and anger that very soon persuaded him he must still be alive and getting more so as the moments passed. It was not now horror that kept his eyes closed and his body limp and motionless but a very prudent caution.

  The hunters who bent over him, there were six of them, understood readily when they found him that here was no corpse but a lost traveller who, if profitable, might qualify for a grave later, but otherwise, being apparently young and well-built, might be taken as a recruit. Their local chieftain, their lord, had lost too many men in his last serious affray, one that still awaited vengeance. There could be praise, perhaps reward for them and as a secondary consideration succour for the fallen wretch, if they were to carry him back as their prize.

  They came to their conclusion in soft Gaelic voice and speech, the mutterings that Alec, had first thought to be demons’ gloating. They cut up the branches of the pine sapling over which he had fallen and made a litter on to which they lifted him, wrapping him about with their own plaids and one folded under his head. Then they set off, two at each end of the litter and one upon either side to prevent his rolling off it.

  During all this time Alec kept his eyes closed, though he made one or two little moans when they touched him to encourage them to hope for his recovery. He did not know that their first act had been to search him for any wealth of gold or weapons. Nor that when they found nothing of value, only a little leather sack of papers on a cord round his neck, they decided against destroying him in favour of presenting him to the constable of their castle.

  Knowing where the narrow track lay above the loch side the hunters moved steadily and with far fewer stops to avoid drifts than Alec on his staggering attempt. But after a time the smell of salt water and lapping of little waves on stones told him his captors or rescuers had made their way to the shore. So he was not surprised when he found himself lifted bodily on his litter to the floorboards of a wide-bottomed boat.

  He judged rightly that the men were too much occupied with their present tasks to notice him. So he opened his eyes again, ready to close them, move or groan as the occasion demanded.

  But his view was limited, for the boat’s freeboard rose beside at either hand, made of rough planking, tarred without skill or workmanship. Above him a heavy sky promised more snow. He had no land in sight, which did not trouble him, but two pairs of leather-clad legs, whose presence recommended further caution.

  He allowed himself an audible sigh of relief and pleasure when the boat was pushed off from the rocks and floated free. It was not heard, or at all events no one came to stare at him or ask a question. He rightly judged now that he was expected to live, at any rate for the present; that he was some sort of a prize, at lowest an offering. He wished he had tried harder to learn the Gaelic during his last six months of wandering in the Scottish Highlands. He had at first been too indifferent to his fate and latterly, as fatigue and semi-starvation weakened him, too incapable.

  After a time the easy rhythm of the oars checked, the blades slithering on the surface of the water. The voices of the men in the boat were raised to shouts, ropes splashed, were caught, made fast. The craft rocked to a standstill and again Alec felt hands about him, lifting him up, conveying him to some other shore. When he was lowered once more he felt at once a new and blessed warmth in his surroundings. Also he heard fresh voices on a higher note and was thankful to know that there were women there.

  He decided that the time was ripe to show some further signs of life before his rescuers lost interest and threw him in the loch. So he opened his eyes, stared wildly about him and e
xclaimed in one of the few Gaelic phrases he had acquired, ‘Where am I? What is this place?’

  He saw he was lying in a small round room, with plain rough stone walls, a brazier set against one of them and high in the roof an opening to the sky. He repeated his question, struggling to raise himself upon one elbow.

  The burst of explanation that greeted his question confused him, though it soothed his fears. He was thankful to observe in the fierce faces of the hunters a certain simple pride in their completed work. The prize lived; it had been worth the effort of saving him. He noticed the leader among them turn to a younger follower to dispatch him with a message. No doubt to announce his arrival.

  A stout elderly woman now stepped forward. When she began to question him and he shook his head she tried again, this time in the halting Scots he had encountered farther south, but nowhere north of Laggan.

  He answered in simple phrases, judging she understood about half of what he said. Enough, at any rate, to command her further compassion or perhaps only whet her curiosity. For she gave orders in firm tones and he was lifted and conveyed again, from the guardhouse or whatever that small round shelter had been, to a larger apartment, where a fine log fire burned on an open hearth near which a wooden settle stood at one side and a couple of stools the other.

  He was laid upon the settle, his soaked and frozen clothes removed to be replaced by dry ones, warmed at the blaze, the borrowed plaids laid aside, his own hung over the settle back to dry. The old woman then drew a stool close and began to feed him sips of warm broth, talking all the while in a mixture of Gaelic and Scots that would have made him laugh in happier times. But just now there was not a laugh in him, only a small new stirring of the wish to live.

  He sipped steadily, the warmth without and within creeping slowly into every part of his being. When he fell asleep as he drank, his mouth still accepting the broth though it might choke him, the old woman took the bowl away, turned him a little on his side to breathe more easily and went off to report to the constable.

  The castle or stronghold of Elian Donan, to which Alec Nimmo had been conveyed, stood on the northern shore of Loch Duich, not very far from the mouth of the loch where it entered or grew from the Sound of Sleat. A narrow causeway led from the main gates of the castle to the mainland shore, so that the waters of the loch surrounded the building on three sides. At stormy spring tides, particularly at the equinoxes, the water covered the causeway itself on the flood, so that the strong stone walls became a true island, while the ebb left a slimy slippery track impassable for a few days by horse or cart.

  Not that this was of much significance. The men of the castle went to and from the place for the most part by boat, landing on the rocky shores of the loch to hunt the deer over the mountains that rose high behind Eilan Donan, or, on the opposite side of the loch, over the slopes of Mam Ratachan. From boats, too, they raided along the fertile valley towards Kyle of Lochalsh, where the narrow sea ran between the mainland and Kyleakin on the Isle of Skye.

  The old woman, confident from the success of her act of mercy, found the constable brooding over some recent news of the MacRae, from whom he held his post under the Mackenzie, overlord of all the northern shores and slopes of Loch Duich. The garrison of Eilan Donan were for the most part MacRaes. And they were growing restless at the absence of Christopher, their chieftain.

  The constable greeted his visitor kindly, welcoming the distraction. ‘Ye have news for me! Life-saving and life-giving, I hear. Nought checks ye, even though thy dugs be dry these twenty years and more.’

  He spoke, like his men, in the Gaelic, but more familiarly because she had fostered him as a child when his own mother died. He was the sole survivor into manhood of a string of ill-fated boys, cut off in childhood by disease or accident, by drowning or rock-fall and one by the spear of an affronted follower, who had suffered a slow death for his crime.

  The constable had been fortunate in his fostering, for Mistress Biurnag MacRae held a privileged position at the castle, not only that of nurse to an orphan child, but also to the heir of the chieftain. She had been the orphan’s protector and mentor through a dangerous and difficult childhood. She belonged to the clan MacArthur, pipers to the great MacDonald of South Skye. Their skill in their art set them above many of the lesser septs who owned that chieftainship. But she had left her father’s house and allegiance in a runaway marriage to an adventurous MacRae and so come to Eilan Donan, a bride respected for her courage. In these later years of widowhood, she ruled the castle servants, kept the men occupied in useful tasks, thwarted their too frequent traffic with the maids and kept them from quarrels with the fighting men. She saw to the conduct of the kitchens and directed the constable’s own nursery, where his unwilling wife, of whom he had grown heartily sick, spent her days complaining and her nights in secret drunkenness.

  ‘Some hunting fellows brought me a rich prize,’ Mistress Biurnag answered. ‘Far spent, indeed. The likes of a hunted man, to my way of thinking. Starving and travel-worn. But he’ll mend and do us credit. A much needed replacement. An he could speak our tongue I’d swear from his stature he was MacRae and nought else. But he hath not above five words of the Gaelic. A hunted man, as I told thee. A lowland Scot made outlaw by ill-fortune. What did our chieftain want of thee?’

  ‘As ever. Men and boats. He would go into Skye though it is not a twelvemonth since he was at war again with the MacDonald.’

  ‘That quarrel will never end.’

  Mistress MacRae nodded and sighed. Men were made to be for ever at war, clan against clan, sept against sept, from the lesser chieftains like her master the MacRae, to the great overlords,

  ‘Where will he find ships?’ she asked. ‘We have none fit for the open sea. Nor men to take them there.’

  He blazed at her, suddenly furious with the truth and hearing it from her old lips. Furious, too, bcause he was but the constable with no real power in the place and ill-liked into the bargain, being considered an upstart and an orphan of an alien brood, though clever.

  ‘Back to your prize as ye call him!’ he yelled. ‘Bring him to what strength ye can before I lose patience and have him flung in the loch as a useless mouth in our midst! Has forgot it be winter and stores dwindling?’

  She hurried away before the devil that dwelt in him took control and ordered what he threatened. It was a hard, sly, cruel devil, she knew, that possessed this Torquil, her foster-son. She had known it from his early childhood, when the pretty boy, so happy, so quick in his mind, had one day come back to her from a long absence in the hills, with a pale face and secret smile and wickedness in his eye. She had feared and questioned and had discovered at last the cause of his foul hidden pleasure. With two old hags and a gormless youth who had acted as the boy’s guide, he had attended a coven with a known warlock who lived outside a neighbouring hamlet. They had roasted a live cat to call forth the Devil and from that day her charge had been possessed by this fiend, who stood at his shoulder at all times and leaped into his heart and soul whenever it had the chance.

  She hurried back to Alec, half afraid he was already threatened. But she found him still sleeping and set about preparing a more solid meal for him when he should wake.

  It took three weeks to bring the fugitive back to some kind of health and in all that time Mistress Biurnag MacRae kept him close, locking him in or rather locking others out. But by the end of that time, when he was able to walk strongly about the room and had put back sufficient of his flesh to look like a man rather than a starved corpse, as she told him laughing, he began to chafe at his imprisonment.

  ‘I owe it to my host to offer my thanks for his hospitality,’ he said stiffly, with deliberate formality.

  He could never be sure how much Mistress Biurnag understood of his Scots speech and so he had worked hard with her help to learn something of the Gaelic. He spoke now in that tongue. She was delighted.

  ‘Ye say well,’ she told him, practising her own Scots, which she in turn had i
mproved in his company. ‘I’ll tell thee now how to speak to our constable and ye shall say thy piece to him in the tongue he prefers.’

  She went on to explain that though Eilan Donan was a stronghold of the Mackenzie it was usually held by MacRae, the chieftain being Christopher of that ilk whose heir was Farquhar, though both were absent at this time.

  ‘The constable is Torquil MacGilchrist. Raised here by me but not truly of these parts,’ she told him.

  The following day Alec was taken into the presence of this Torquil MacGilchrist, who received him with polite friendliness and bade him sit down. Mistress Biurnag, at a signal, withdrew. She had offered to remain as interpreter, but this produced such an instant fiery gleam in the constable’s small dark eyes that she did not persist, but instantly moved away.

  Alec said his prepared short speech in Gaelic. Torquil bowed his head, acknowledging the compliment. A silence slowly filled the room, not menacing, but oppressive. At last the constable said in Gaelic, ‘Ye come from the south. Where from? With what purpose? At whose command?’

  ‘My own,’ Alec answered. ‘In flight from the law. Because I had killed a man.’

  The constable gave a loud, disdainful laugh.

  ‘One man? Ye killed just one man? Are they then so particular where ye come from that the law hunts a man for one death?’

  ‘It was in London,’ Alec said, watching the other’s face grow still again. ‘In England.’

  ‘So.’ There was now a childlike bewilderment where the fierce amusement had been. ‘But ye are a Scot!’

  ‘I am a seaman,’ Alec said. ‘That first. But indeed I am a Scot.’

  He had prepared his story long since, during his voyage to the Forth from London river. He had told it over and over again on his bitter journeying from Fife into the Highlands, a journey that had begun in the autumn of the year before and continued, as he had foreseen and feared, into the dark and frozen winter in these wilds where he had so nearly met his end.