Entry Island

Vistas appeared and disappeared. I spotted the curve of a sandy cove between a spur of hills. In the distance dark purple mountains were ringed by clouds, and through an opening to my left I saw the standing stones on the rise beyond the big beach that we called simply Traigh Mhor. And still I ran. Settling to a pace that numbed my thoughts and calmed my fears.

At last I saw the road winding across the hills ahead of me. It was rutted and muddy, rainwater gathering in cart tracks and potholes. I turned north on to it, splashing through the puddles, feeling my pace slow as my strength was sapped. The land seemed to fold itself around me, closing off the sky. I could remember seeing men labouring to build this road, but the stones they laid were lost in the mud, and the ditches they dug were full of water.

I pumped my arms as I ran to try to get more air into my lungs, and then I came to a sudden standstill as I rounded a blind bend in the road. Ahead of me a horse-drawn trap was overturned in the ditch. The horse lay on its side, still attached to the trap, whinnying and struggling to get to its feet. But I could see that one of its hind legs was hopelessly broken. They would shoot the poor beast for sure. But there was no sign of a driver or passengers.

The rain began to fall in earnest as I approached the upturned vehicle. I jumped down into the ditch, which was half-hidden by the trap, and there sprawled among the roots of dormant heather lay a little girl, blue skirts and black coat fanned out around her, black hair pinned up under a royal blue beret. Her face was deathly pale, and the contrast with the bright red blood oozing from the gash at her temple was stark. Lying beside her, on his back in the ditch, was a middle-aged man, his top hat resting some feet away. His face was completely submerged, and somehow magnified by the water. Bizarrely his eyes, like saucers, were wide open and staring up at me. I felt myself trembling with the shock of it, realising that he was quite dead and that there was nothing I could do.

I heard a tiny voice moan, then cough, and I turned my attentions back to the little girl in time to see her lids flicker open and reveal the bluest eyes.

‘Can you move?’ I asked her.

But she looked back at me with vacancy in her face. A little hand reached up to grab the sleeve of my jacket. ‘Help, help me,’ she said, and I realised that she was speaking English, which I couldn’t understand any better than she understood my Gaelic.

I was afraid to move her in case there was something broken and I did more damage. I took her hand and felt the chill in it, and I knew that I couldn’t leave her there in the cold and the wet. I had seen how exposure to the elements could take a life in no time at all.

‘Tell me if it hurts,’ I said to her, knowing she couldn’t understand, and she looked at me with such confusion in her eyes that it almost brought tears to mine. I slipped one arm beneath her shoulders, and the other into the crook of her knees, and carefully lifted her up into my arms. She was smaller than me, younger by maybe a couple of years, but still she was heavy, and I could not imagine how it would be possible to carry her all the way to the castle. But I knew I must. And now I felt the weight of responsibility for two lives in my hands.

She did not cry out, so I was encouraged to believe that nothing was broken. She flung both arms around my neck to hold on to me as I climbed back up on to the road and started off again at a trot. I had gone no more than a couple of hundred yards before the muscles in my arms were screaming with the pain of supporting her weight. But I had no choice other than to carry on.

After a while, I fell into a loping rhythm, somehow managing to keep my forward momentum. From time to time I looked down at her. Sometimes her eyes were closed and I feared the worst. At others I caught her gazing up at me, but she seemed almost fevered and I was not sure if she really saw me at all.

I was at the end of my tether, ready to drop to my knees and give up, when I rounded another bend, and there ahead of me was Ard Mor. The castle sat on a spur of land that jutted out into a rocky bay. Lawns extended from the front of it to a crenellated wall with cannon aimed across the water, the hill rising steeply behind it. The road wound down to a clutch of estate workers’ cottages, and a stone archway led to the castle grounds.

The sight of it gave me fresh energy, enough of it anyway to stagger the final few hundred yards, past the cottages and through the arch to the big wooden front door of the castle itself. Laying the little girl down on the step in front of me I pulled the bell ring and heard it sound somewhere distantly inside.

It is hard to describe the maid’s expression as she opened the door, her pink face wide-eyed with astonishment above her black blouse and white pinny.