Read Online A Dark and Distant Shore by Reay Tannahill - Free Book Online

the coachman and groom on the box, and Sorley and Vilia’s maid on the outside seat, it made an impressive turn-out, and one that the ostlers at the coaching houses remembered for years to come. The horses, two bays and two greys, were very sweet goers on the road; the only problem was getting them there. Three of them were merely snappish about being fitted into the traces, but the fourth, a bay known as Moonlight Flit, was in the habit of lying down in the stable yard and refusing to get up again until he had the full attention of all the ostlers, half the post-boys, and the coachman’s long, curled whip.
    It took three weeks to cover the six hundred miles between London and Kinveil, and the travellers – except for the governess – enjoyed every minute of it. Vilia, especially, had been transfigured from the moment the journey was decided on. In London, this had been apparent only in a kind of controlled excitement, more spring in her walk and more light in her eyes. But with every mile out of town she became more vibrant, until, by the time the coach reached Baldock, she was almost fizzing with high spirits. After the months of pale, unsmiling restraint, it was a revelation to everyone except Sorley. It was also extremely catching.
    Only the governess failed to respond, sitting in petrified silence for most of the way, remonstrating faintly from time to time. It was really not comme il faut for a young lady to start up a chorus in the yard of a public inn, as Vilia did one day when the travellers were watching the coachman trying to rouse Moonlight Flit.
    Here ’s to our horse and to his right ear,
    God send our master a hap -py New Year!
    Nor did a young lady hang out of a carriage window warbling Gaelic folk songs at the top of her voice. And as for playing backgammon in the evenings – ‘shaking dice boxes in a common hostelry!’ – the poor woman was ready to die of shame. Vilia paid not the slightest heed.
    It was a truly splendid three weeks. Admittedly, the accommodation deteriorated sadly as soon as they crossed the Border. Few people other than cattle drovers travelled much in Scotland as yet, and Luke remembered his father complaining that there wasn’t an inn on the whole road fit for a gentleman. But Luke and Vilia were approaching Kinveil, and didn’t mind, while Henry, who had a curiously ascetic streak, scarcely even noticed that there were no carpets on the floors, no cushions on the chairs, no curtains at the windows, and little to eat but porridge, eggs, salt fish, and barley bread.
    In the evenings, they raided the brown holland book bag that travelled with them in the coach in search of something to fit their mood. They wept over Clarissa, yelled with laughter at Humphry Clinker, gasped over Marmion. They declaimed from Shakespeare, and never was there such a ranting as when Henry played Lear, never such a doom-struck Lady Macbeth as Vilia. Never, Luke prided himself, a more poetic Hamlet, and certainly never a younger one – not even that infant prodigy of a few years before, the famous Master Betty. Luke wondered whether the stage mightn’t be his forte.
    At Ballachulish ferry the boatmen had lost one of the rowlocks for the oars. The tide rushed up the strait, the oars slipped and skidded, the boatmen puffed and blew, and the coachman fell overboard and had to be fished out by the groom. When they reached the other shore, Henry paid up dutifully and gave the oarsmen their expected dram of mountain dew – not, he made it clear, in recognition of their seamanship but out of gratitude to Providence for their safe landing.
    At Fort William, Moonlight Flit lost his tail. This, Vilia said, was standard procedure. Local fishermen liked horsehair for their trout lines, and any horse stabled at an inn was bound to be at risk. It didn’t improve Moonlight Flit’s appearance or his temper.
    At Fort Augustus, Henry decided to hire a boat to row his charges up to the mouth of the river Braddan.