A Dark and Distant Shore Read Online Free PDF

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    Vilia had never discovered what her father feared, because at that inopportune moment, Betty Fraser, the second housemaid, had rounded the bend of the stairs and let out a soft-voiced squeak of, ‘Sorley McClure! Whateffer are you doing here? And Miss Vilia. Och, you wass neffer listening at the Laird’s Lug, wass you? Think shame!’ And that, despite Sorley’s spirited attempt to defend his goddess’s right to eavesdrop in her own castle any time she wanted to, had effectively put an end to Vilia’s information-gathering for the day. She had finished up very little the wiser about how the man Telfer’s mind worked.
    The memory of that day still hurt dreadfully, even after eight years. For Mungo Telfer had been right – damn him! she thought, dredging up the only blasphemy she knew – and the government had put up the money for the roads. It would be a long time, still, before the Caledonian Canal was completed, and only a few of the roads were finished, but they and Mungo Telfer’s money had begun to transform life on Kinveil. Every January, Vilia received a letter from Meg – a short one, because Meg’s writing was large and she kept her news to a single page to save Vilia having to pay to receive a second sheet – and she knew how things were changing. If only, if only her father had been willing to try and survive for another few years!
    It was a struggle to hold back the tears of self-pity and regret, but she managed it. She hadn’t time for weeping. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, go to live with the Telfers. There must be something else she could do! If the worst came to the worst, she would run away. Why not? For a moment her spirits soared, but only for a moment. Only until she realized that the one place in the world she would ever run to was the one place in the world forbidden to her. Kinveil. And then the thought slipped into her mind that, if she went to live with Magnus Telfer and his wife, she might be invited to go there – legitimately.
    Ten minutes later, she rejoined Mr Pilcher. ‘I apologize,’ she said. ‘Your suggestion came as something of a shock. Are you quite sure there is no alternative?’
    He was relieved to see that she had resigned herself. ‘Quite sure,’ he replied, prudently ignoring the reference to shock. ‘There are too many advantages. You will be a guest in their house and will not be expected to make any financial contribution. Your income will be entirely at your own disposal, to use for clothes, and pin money, and to pay your personal servants, of course. The Telfers are quite prepared to take in your governess and abigail, you know, so you will not be cast into a strange house entirely on your own.’
    ‘And Sorley McClure,’ Vilia said.
    ‘I beg your pardon?’
    ‘Sorley McClure, my page.’
    Mr Pilcher said, ‘I hardly think... Do you really need a page-boy? I would have thought one of the Telfers’ footmen could run errands for you.’
    ‘Sorley McClure,’ she repeated stubbornly. ‘I made my father bring him with us from Kinveil. He is thirteen years old and it would break his heart if I abandoned him.’
    She couldn’t say to a man like this that it would break her heart, too. Sorley was the son of a good-for-nothing father who suffered from the strange lethargy that afflicted many Highlanders almost like a disease, although it seemed to have no physical origin. Too much whisky and too little food did nothing to cure it, but it was essentially a malaise of the spirit, as if man’s fate from the moment of birth was simply to wait for the moment of death. Yet Sorley, who had never even had kail to go with his brose except when he had slipped into the castle kitchen, was brim full of all the energy his father lacked. He was skinny, ginger-haired, and amazingly freckled, with the sunniest smile it was possible to imagine. He adored Vilia unreservedly, and as long as he was with her Vilia continued, deep down inside her, to hope. Kinveil was a