Magic of Winter Read online

  “I need your help,” she said, and over a pot of tea and a plate of Elspeth’s biscuits, she explained, then explained all over again once Elspeth had called a handful of other women and invited them over.

  They drank tea and ate and debated—because nothing happened in the village without debate—which of the women in their own families deserved to be honored. It was a weighty decision, after all, because it wouldn’t do to include someone and slight someone else. And what exactly was a hero, anyway?

  “Well, we can all agree on Mary MacGregor. And Connal’s grandmother. There’s the distillery, too,” Flora Macara said, then she sprinted out of her chair and out through the back door as Shame, the Inn’s unruly golden retriever, gave a deep halloooo of a bark and set off in pursuit of a silver Audi that was driving toward Inverlochlarig House down at the far end of the road. “Oy,” Flora shouted. “Shame, you get back here and leave those poor folks alone.”

  Shame glanced back at her over his shoulder, ran a few steps, and then evidently decided that he wasn’t likely to catch the vehicle anyway. At least that was Cait’s suspicion, because the dog had never been known to listen to a thing either Flora or her husband Duncan said.

  Cheeks bright with the cold, Flora unlooped the battered brown leather belt that was holding up her mud-colored skirt, threaded it through Shame’s collar, and stood looking around the yard behind the kitchen. “You have a bit of rope here anywhere, Elspeth?” she asked. “The idiot dog won’t go away until I do, so I’ll need to tie him up.”

  “You’d better bring him inside here, then. Where it’s warm,” Elspeth told her, pushing the kitchen door open wider and standing back as the four other women crowded in the doorway retreated, too.

  Flora, her big-boned, almost masculine face redeemed by blue eyes that were generally as shrewd as they were lovely, marched Shame back inside and winced at the filthy prints he left all across Elspeth’s kitchen floor. Spotting Cait, the dog bounded toward her, wrenching himself out of Flora’s grasp. Cait only laughed as he stood on his hind legs, muddy paws nearly at her shoulders while he did his best to lick her face.

  “Shame! Get down. Bad dog!” Flora shouted. “I’m sorry, love,” she said to Cait. “You know how he’s always escaping.”

  Cait thought of Robbie, and the sheep, even herself. Her father. Going all the way back as far as Rob Roy MacGregor trying to escape the Duke of Montrose. Someone in the glen was always trying to escape.

  She shook her head and instructed Shame to sit, which he did with perfect amiability, his plume of a tail sweeping the floor behind him.

  “What were you saying about the distillery?” she asked when things had calmed again and they’d all sat back down at the table with their teacups.

  “You’ve heard that story, surely?” Flora insisted. “It’s your own family history, lass. Before the distillery closed, it was. Back in the world wars when most of the men in the glen had gone off to fight, your great grandmother organized the women of the glen to step in and distill the whiskey, navigating all the new wartime restrictions. They transported it, too, and found new distribution. Wasn’t until the end of World War II that they realized so many of the men had died that there wasn’t any sense trying to keep the jobs open anymore. Time of the Great War, we Scots made up ten percent of Britain’s population, but our men made up thirteen percent of the volunteers who fought. That took a toll between the wars, then come the second war, it wasn’t only the fighting that cost us. Those who didn’t march off to battle went down to Glasgow and Edinburgh to work in the factories and shipyards. And the women, meanwhile, kept the glen running same as they’d always done. Things don’t change so much. A regiment of ‘kilties’ marching to the pipes still strikes the fear of God into an enemy, but it’s the women back home who let the men go off and be heroic.”

  Cait studied the faces of the women around her, none of them particularly glamorous but each one beautifully marked by hard years of living. Excepting only herself, everyone around the table was old enough to remember fathers and grandfathers and brothers lost in wartime, and in the rebuilding that came after. They’d seen children and loved ones move away in search of opportunity and watched the tourists sweep in to transform the Highlands, the way tourists were bringing chaos and change to so many of the other peaceful places in the world.

  Cait hadn’t planned to go to the tree lighting in the village that night. There hadn’t seemed to be much worth celebrating, and the whole idea of facing the village, facing Brice, had seemed too awkward. But as the women around her spoke with excitement in their voices about the old photographs they had at home they wanted to show her and talked about the memories Cait’s project was stirring up, she remembered tree lightings with her mother and father holding hands and kissing beneath the mistletoe. She remembered carrying her first candle when she was five and Robbie lifting her so that she could clip it to the tree. Robbie had lowered her down afterwards. Then he’d tugged his wool cap onto her head because she’d stubbornly refused to wear her own hat when they’d left the house and her father had told her she could bloody well freeze, if so.

  She remembered Brice wiping the cold tears from her cheeks as she lit her candle in remembrance of Robbie the year he died.

  She had told herself, while she was away in London, that there had been too much emphasis on tradition in the glen. At Christmas and Hogmanay and Beltane and Easter Sunday, this past year, at each of the occasions that the village enthusiastically marked with some leftover ceremony whose origin no one remembered, she had told herself that she was happy to miss the fuss. But traditions were important, she realized. The things and memories that families shared, mothers passed down to daughters, and fathers passed down to sons. Too many of the young people from the glen were gone, dead like Robbie or moved away. The old folks too often had no one with whom to share the memories of their lives.

  Seeing how happy these women were to tell their stories with her, it occurred to her that change wasn’t the modern battle, and from that there might be no escape. Maybe the glen was right to embrace as much tradition as it could.

  The seeds of the idea that had begun with the photographs began to expand inside her, along with a building sense of excitement. Because it wasn’t the photographs that she would hang on the walls that ultimately mattered. The lives behind the photographs were more important, and the women—who they had been, what they had done, and what they’d passed down to their children.

  Just this morning, Cait had felt regret for the career that she had started to build for herself in London. Now she wondered if losing those fledgling dreams hadn’t simply opened up opportunities she hadn’t dreamed of yet. Whatever happened with her father, whatever happened with Brice, maybe she had a life here to carve out for herself. She didn’t know exactly how the stories and photographs connected yet, but instinct told her they would be important, not only to the Tea Room, but to her as well, and maybe to the entire glen.

  Escaping

  “Think you're escaping

  and run into yourself.

  Longest way round

  is the shortest way home.”

  James Joyce

  Ulysses

  The television needed to be smashed. Cait sent it a sour look.

  “You’re wasting away,” she said to her father, “and I won’t have it. Now stop staring mindlessly at the telly and eat this soup I made you.”

  Her father mashed the television remote with his thumb, increasing the volume repeatedly to drown her out. Cait set the bowl on the coffee table, her hand shaking enough to slosh out a floating bit of carrot and a good spoonful or two of chicken broth to which she’d added a few pieces of mashed potato, giving extra substance to the old standby Cock-a-leekie recipe she’d made with her mother a hundred times. Maybe she should have realized her father wouldn’t want to eat anything that reminded him of Mum, but what was Cait supposed to feed him? Frozen dinners?

  She strode around behind the television set
and pulled the plug out of the wall. “Now you listen to me, old man. I’m not going to let you starve yourself to death any more than I’m going to let you die any other way. You had enough energy to lie to me, and that’s more than enough to eat a spoonful or two of soup.”

  “You can go back to London anytime you like.” He glared and rolled over, turning his back on her.

  She went and sat at his shoulder. “I’m right where I want to be,” she said. “I love you.”

  “I never said I don’t love you.” Her father sat up, painfully slow, and his voice was gruff, as if the words themselves were painful. But then, Cait didn’t remember ever having heard him say them. Not to her, nor Robbie for that matter. Not even to her mother. He looked away. “What’s the point of making me draw all this out?” he asked. “It’ll only ruin what you remember of me in the end.”

  “Or give me something new that’s worth remembering. You want to tell me this is how Donald Fletcher wants to be remembered? As the man who didn’t have an ounce of fight left in him? A man who ran from the battle and watched the telly instead of fighting?”

  “What good would I be with half a leg? You don’t understand. You’ve never been useless.” The blue of his eyes had faded, too, somehow, the spit and fire within them dying down.

  “I’ve felt useless most of my life,” Cait said, knowing he’d made her feel that way. But she finally let that go. Gently, she took his hand. “But if having the leg amputated is the problem, then explain why you think it’s too hard. Show me you’ve thought it through. They have great prosthetics these days, and you’re the one who taught us that Fletchers never quit.”

  “Wish I never had taught you that. You might have given up on Brice MacLaren years ago, and you wouldn’t be here nagging at me now.”

  “Brice has nothing to do with this conversation, and he’s been good to you while I’ve been gone. You can’t deny that.”

  “That’s because he has a guilty conscience, knowing he drove you away and made you leave.” Tipping his head, Donald pulled his hand away and folded his arms across his thin chest, daring Cait to contradict him.

  Since he’d opened the door, she decided to sail straight through it however cruel it might seem. Arguing had always energized her father, lent him fuel.

  “It seems to me,” she said, “the guilty conscience belongs to you. You think you drove Robbie away, but you didn’t. He wanted to go, and he died with honor, doing what he loved. I hate the fact that he’s gone as much as you do, but I won’t let you diminish his life by making his death about you instead of about his bravery. If you want to feel guilty, feel guilty about what you’ve done to Brice. Using him the way you have.”

  “He offered—”

  “Aye, but did you ever give him a word of thanks?”

  “I must have done.”

  “There you go, revising history again. Also you know full well you’re the one who talked me into leaving that day I came home storming mad. You went and got the suitcase for me and told me not to stay or I’d end up embarrassing myself by forgiving him. That I’d only be giving him permission to cheat on me over and over again if I didn’t leave.”

  Her father looked back at her across his shoulder. “What’s so wrong about that? You’re a Fletcher, girl. You don’t stay with any man who doesn’t want you.”

  “Weren’t you the one who taught me that anything worth having is worth fighting for?”

  Her father stared at her and she stared back, reluctant to give ground. Then Mrs. Bogan chose that moment to put her front paws on the sofa and peer up at the two of them with an insistent meow, as though demanding to know what they were arguing about.

  Cait absently rubbed the cat behind the ears. “All my life, you’ve talked about what it means to be a Fletcher. Now I want you to think about what it means. Would your own father be proud of the way you’re behaving? Would Mum and Robbie? If I was the one lying there on the sofa, not willing to fight for my life, what would you be telling me?”

  It was a dirty argument, but Cait was back in the glen now and fighting dirty was the only way she’d survived her teenage years. There were none of the politely vicious office politics of London here. When someone had something to say, they spoke their mind.

  She pushed herself off the edge of the sofa and pointedly slid the soup closer to the edge. “Are you going to eat now or not?”

  “I’ll eat when I’m good and ready,” he said, but he sat up. Picked the spoon off the table.

  Letting him have the last word—at least about the soup—Cait took a few steps toward the door then paused. “Tonight’s the tree lighting, don’t forget,” she said. “The weather site says it’ll be bitter cold out, so you’ll need to bundle up good and warm.”

  She held her breath, waiting for him to answer. He slurped his soup and let the spoon clatter back against the earthenware, part of a Staffordshire flow blue set that had come down in Cait’s mother’s family. “Nice try, but I’ve no intention of leaving the house. You let me be, now, Caitie. I mean it. I’ve no wish to keep arguing with you.”

  “You talk a lot for a man who doesn’t want to argue.”

  “Only because you can’t let anyone have an opinion that isn’t the same as yours! You want to be useful, girl? Go fetch me my medicine from upstairs. Every one of my bones is aching.”

  Feeling helpless again, Cait brought him the medicine, took away the bowl when he’d eaten half the soup and insisted he wouldn’t touch another drop, and tried to count the conversation a success.

  On the bright side, for the first time in a long time, her father was being honest.

  She went out to the kitchen to eat her own soup and clean up, and when she came back a half-hour later, he was asleep again, or pretending to sleep, so she took the opportunity to climb up to the attic. Brice hadn’t exaggerated when he said he’d taken everything to the attic. He must have had help moving the furniture, and he’d stacked it along the walls, with everything else in boxes neatly marked by room.

  Seeing the remnants of her mother’s life all crammed up there, she finally sat down and allowed herself a good, hard cry. About that and about everything. Knees drawn to her chest, her back against an antique steamer trunk her mother had decorated with fashion lithographs from a torn 1850 copy of Court Magazine purchased at a jumble sale, Cait cried until she had no tears left.

  Everywhere she turned, she found something that’d had meaning for her mother. In every box, she discovered a familiar picture, a scrap of fabric, a porcelain bit of bric-a-brac. Crammed all together the way the pieces were, the memories pummeled at Cait. Most were beautiful memories, warm ones, because her mother had been the constant thread of goodness woven throughout Cait’s life. Goodness that had given Cait the space to be bad, to try and fail, to find herself. While Cait’s father had been stern and a little remote with both his children, never quite accepting of Cait, Mum had always shown by example just what it meant to love someone. Shown that true love was bottomless and unconditional.

  Thinking back on everything that had happened since her mother’s funeral, Cait couldn’t help realizing she hadn’t learned that lesson well enough.

  If her mother had lived, she would never have let Cait run away. Not from Brice, nor the glen, nor from Donald. For all that Cait and Robbie had heard so much about what it meant to be a Fletcher, it wasn’t the Fletcher side of the family that would help Cait get her father through his cancer. Or even to figure out her own mess of a relationship with Brice. All she had to do was remember the moments of her childhood, the small happy moments with her mother that had nothing to do with ambition or living a bigger life but simply added up to a life well-lived and well-loved. Both Cait and her father had been focusing so much on what they’d lost since Mum had died, they’d very nearly missed the fact that they’d had years of the kind of love many people spent entire lives without.

  In London, there had been loneliness everywhere Cait looked, people chasing happiness too fast to catc
h it. She didn’t know what to do about Brice—maybe only time would tell for the two of them. But a relationship wasn’t everything. Being here in the glen was a gift in itself. Cait didn’t know how to make her father feel less guilty about Robbie, but she could certainly show him that he was wrong about her mother. That he was wrong about her.

  He would be disappointed in her decision to stay, but he’d been disappointed in her most of her life. She would find a way to get through to him. She had to.

  Even if the new sense of closeness she’d had with him this past year and been delusion on her part and deceit on his, being here, knowing that he was sick, made her realize she’d give anything to have that kind of a relationship be real between them. Fighting with him wasn’t going to get her there. And as much as she hated to admit it, maybe the patience to accept the things that you couldn’t do anything about required more courage than fighting anyway.

  Hopes

  “Hope is the thing with feathers

  That perches in the soul

  And sings the tune without the words

  And never stops at all.”

  Emily Dickinson

  A chill wind swept off the loch, blowing the MacLaren hunting tartan of Brando’s kilt around his knees. The cold froze Brice’s breath on the sharp needles of the twelve-foot fir tree the two of them were carrying across the Inn’s cobblestoned courtyard, but the moment they reached the corner where the village tree had been put up as far back as anyone could remember, the wind cut off.

  The L-shaped Last Stand Inn looked vaguely Tudor, white-washed with age-darkened beams around the windows and a gabled roof, but it was both older than that and younger. Buildings and annexes and bits of courtyard and garden had grown from the original one-room structure throughout the centuries, and somehow, this one spot provided shelter from every direction, just about the only spot in the village where the wind didn’t blow. Flora and Duncan Macara had already hung the traditional ball of mistletoe overhead nearby, suspended from a clothesline that extended from a second story window to the grand old hemlock that stood beside the fence. Brice had plans for that mistletoe later that evening.