Read Online An Island Apart by Lillian Beckwith - Free Book Online

to tell me that the dinghy is also named for the two of you, surely?’ she teased him archly.
    â€˜No, indeed. We named her Katy after our mother,’ he answered gravely.
    â€˜How frequently do you get supplies and mail?’ she asked.
    â€˜The boat calls twice a month with supplies and mails.’
    â€˜Only twice a month?’ she echoed dubiously.
    â€˜But we don’t depends on the boat just,’ he hastened to tell her. ‘When we take our fish to the mainland we can collect any mails and pick up anything we might be short of. We manage well enough.’
    She tried to recall shortages in her Granny’s time when snow blocked roads or ferries had been harbour-bound by the weather. ‘Bread?’ she asked. ‘My Granny used to think it a great treat to get city bread from time to time.’
    â€˜Ach, we can get bread any time we’re across. Not that we eat so very much of it. My brother has no liking for city bread. Since my mother learned him how to make good girdle scones and bannocks, he spurns city bread even as a treat. No, we do not miss bread.’
    â€˜Your brother sounds a right “lad o pairts”,’ Kirsty complimented him. ‘You tell me he is a good scholar and a good fisherman, a good shepherd and a good baker. Is there anything he is not good at?’
    He’d rested his chin on his hand and had appeared to be considering deeply. ‘He’s not so good with the cattle,’ he allowed. ‘He gets mighty cross with them when they’re being stupid and he miscalls them.’ He glanced at her with a grin that had verged on the impish. ‘Indeed the minister wouldn’t be best pleased to hear the way he miscalls them sometimes.’ His glance changed suddenly to one of anxiety as if he feared he might have shocked her. She treated him to a complaisant smile.
    â€˜It’s the cattle just he miscalls,’ he resumed. ‘You’d never hear a bad word from him at any other time. Mostly it’s myself sees to the cattle except at sale time when it needs the two of us to round them up.’ She nodded. ‘And he doesn’t take much to do with the hens, so I see to those myself. But he is good with his brain and with his hands. It’s himself that made much of the furniture in the house from good pieces of driftwood we have found on the shore from time to time, and didn’t he repair the water tank, the one which the Laird had built beside the burn with the idea that his son would have water piped down to the house. The tank had leaked for a while and the piping was rusty and broken in places. My father had taken no heed of it, being always used to carrying water from the burn or the well but my brother wasn’t finished with school before he had it sorted. My mother was never tired of praising him for that, seeing she no longer had to carry pails of water.’
    â€˜You’re saying you have water from a tap like there is in the city?’ There was scepticism in her tone.
    â€˜Indeed we have so,’ he asserted and smiled at her expectantly.
    She again looked at the kitchen clock before rising from her chair. ‘I must take the guests their evening tea and biscuits,’ she said, knowing, and guessing that he also knew, that she was stalling for time before giving him her decision.
    While she was preparing the trays and taking them into the Smoking Room her mind occupied itself with assessing what Ruari MacDonald was offering her. A good house, he’d promised, and she was prepared to believe him; regular supply of milk and eggs, of fish, of fresh water and of peats. It sounded like all the necessities for a fairly comfortable life, but if he was to be her man what else would she want of him? Could she grow fond of him? Was she willing to try? While there was nothing about him that in any way repelled her, neither was there anything that kindled more than a feeling of leniency towards