Human Face Read online

  HUMAN FACE

  ALINE TEMPLETON

  For Emma and Philip, with much love and joy

  For Mercy has a human heart,

  Pity a human face,

  And Love, the human form divine,

  And Peace, the human dress.

  Songs of Innocence

  And mutual fear brings peace;

  Till the selfish loves increase,

  Then Cruelty knits a snare

  And spreads his baits with care.

  Songs of Experience

  William Blake

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BY ALINE TEMPLETON

  COPYRIGHT

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was the moon that woke her, shining through the uncurtained casement window and flooding the attic bedroom with cold, pure light.

  It summoned Beatrice like a call to worship. She came awake, muttering and groaning as she shifted her bulky body, propping herself up at last with a wheezing groan, then rolled out of bed to sit on the end of it for a moment with her eyes shut, moon bathing.

  As the pale radiance washed over her she felt light, light and free, a gossamer thing, purged of the gross burdens of the flesh. But it was drawing her to the window and she stood up, flinching at the chill, then with infinite tenderness bent, crooning, to pick up the little shawled bundle that had lain beside her and padded across the bare boards, cradling it to her shoulder.

  There was a film of condensation on the small square panes; she pulled down the sleeve of her thick flannelette nightgown and rubbed them clear.

  Overhead, the moon was a bone-white disc in a black velvet sky that was thick with stars; there was not so much as a breath of wind. Below her, the bay was still and steely as a pool of mercury, and in late autumn some of the trees were black winter skeletons already. The garden was all shades of grey – dark grey, dove-grey, pearl-grey, dirty-white – and though it was almost as bright as day it looked sickly pale, eerie in the moonlight.

  She loved the strangeness. It cloaked everything with magic, evoked a different reality, where she could imagine herself transformed – where she could be what she wished to be, not what she was.

  ‘See, Rosamond, my precious. Wake up – see how beautiful! Come on, I’ll hold you up,’ she whispered, pulling back the cobweb-fine shawl.

  The eyes opened obediently, blue and blank above the rounded cheeks that were delicately flushed with pink, staring sightlessly out at the dream-world where a doll could become a real live baby.

  ‘You mustn’t get cold, though,’ she scolded lovingly. ‘That would never do, my darling.’ She swaddled it again, cradling it in her arms as the eyes shut with an audible click. ‘There, that’s better. I’ll pop you back into bed.’

  But she lingered a little longer, reluctant for the moment to pass, though she was beginning to shiver. She was just turning away when a movement caught her eye.

  There was a boat pulling out from the pier across the bay, a small motorboat that was, however, being rowed as if to escape attention. The ripples from the oars spread out and out, breaking the mirror surface of the sea with concentric rings.

  Her curiosity piqued, she turned to settle Rosamond gently back into bed then swathed herself in the duvet and returned to the window. The boat would arrive in a few minutes: it wasn’t far across the bay.

  There was movement below her too. Someone was coming from the house, running across the grass and down the steps to the jetty.

  Even huddled in the warmth of the duvet, she felt a sudden chill run through her.

  Adam wouldn’t like this. He wouldn’t like this at all.

  Beatrice turned hastily away, climbed back into bed. She didn’t want to know, didn’t want anything to do with it. She wouldn’t tell him, but he would find out. He always did.

  As she turned away, a faint wisp of cloud drifted across the moon and a little breeze ruffled the surface of the sea.

  Eva was shivering as she ran back across the lawn, leaving footprints in the deep dew that soaked her feet. Behind her she heard the cautious splash of the oars as Daniel rowed back towards the huddle of houses across the bay in the village, dark and silent in the eerie light.

  To anyone watching it would have looked like a lover’s tryst, and she gave a little, wry grimace. Of course he had talked of love, and the girl she once was might have believed him. Now, bruised and scarred by experience, she suspected that this was just the sort of thing men said when they were wanting something from you.

  It had been a risk taking the key from Adam’s drawer while he was away but she’d got it back safely, and now the copy Daniel had made was cold in her hand. As she went back into the silent house she found herself almost hoping it wouldn’t work. But if it didn’t …

  The hall was bright with the moonlight pouring through the long stair window, and she glanced fearfully up the stairwell that rose above her as she scurried across. I’m like a mouse, she thought, looking for the owl hovering overhead. But there was no sound from the attic floor.

  The back office, where even Beatrice did not go except in Adam’s company, lay behind a door below the stairs and Eva winced as it squeaked on its hinges and she stepped into the windowless passage. No one would see her if she switched a light on here but somehow it felt safer to grope her way to the door in the faint light filtering through from the hall. Even though Adam was away for the night, dining and staying over, she felt a superstitious fear that he might suddenly appear as she fumbled for the lock and fitted the key into it, shouting ‘Treachery!’

  Click! It turned. Feeling sick with nerves, she let herself in, locking the door behind her before she switched on the light. It was barely bigger than a cupboard, Adam’s office, created out of one of the old service rooms, probably, and just big enough for a desk with a computer on it, a couple of chairs and a large metal filing cabinet.

  She went to the cabinet, ignoring the computer; Daniel had told her it would be protected so she wouldn’t get in and that anyway the most important stuff wouldn’t be where an enterprising hacker might find it – on disks if they were lucky, ordinary files if they weren’t. The drawers, when she gave a tug, were locked and she fished in her pocket for the little bunch of metal keys he had given her.

  This was treachery, of course – a dirty word. Add that to the list Eva would have to confess to the priest, if she hadn’t stopped going to confession long ago.

  Her dream of a better life hadn’t seemed wicked at the time; it had seemed brave, the sort of feistiness Nënë had always encouraged. Her eyes prickled as she thought of her dead mother – what would she think of her daughter now, of what she had become?

  Oh, she’d pretended to herself that the relationship with Adam was a genuine attraction. It wasn’t hard, not at first; he was darkly good-looking, charming, and being the director of a char
ity for refugees surely vouched for his good intentions. But all along, at heart she had known it for what it was, and she had accepted ‘housekeeper’ status on his assurance that he would transform her into a Pole with a National Insurance number, entitled to her place in the West where the ordinary lifestyle represented barely imaginable luxury to someone who had lived in miserable poverty with a drunken father.

  Now she was trapped in this weird situation, along with the poor, sad, obsessive woman who treated her with defensive hostility; apart from visits across to the pub, and sometimes to Portree for shopping, she had no life of her own.

  She had nowhere else to go, though. She had been patient, waiting for Adam to give her the papers and leave with his blessing, but slowly the chilling realisation had dawned: that was only going to happen when he tired of her and he hadn’t, so far. She’d made the big mistake of asking when she might be able to leave; she had seen the flicker of wounded pride on his face and the relationship had cooled rapidly after that. These days she was spending almost every night in her bare little bedsitter, not in Adam’s luxurious flat.

  Eva no longer trusted him to honour the unwritten agreement. He could just turn her out and then she would have no alternative but to become what at heart she knew she was already. A ‘working girl’, didn’t they call it in Britain? There was a starker word for it back home.

  And now she had sold herself, or at least her conscience, to another man. Daniel, too, was showing her a glimpse of the Promised Land; he could give her all that Adam had offered and more, but there needed to be what he liked to call the ‘devil’s bargain’ – do evil that good may come. A Jesuit belief, he’d reassured her, playing on her Catholic education, but she was still uneasy.

  Could she trust him, any more than she trusted Adam? And what if Adam found out? No – she daren’t think of that, not even for a second. He wasn’t going to find out, and then Daniel would spirit her away to her new life. For a moment she let herself dream, holding on to the vision like an amulet against fear.

  She took a deep breath and began trying the keys. On the second try one of them worked, just as he had said it would, and she pulled open the top drawer, her hands shaking slightly. She couldn’t see any disks – just files – but he’d given her a list of the sort of information he wanted and she began checking through. When she found one, she took it to the desk and sat down, copying the information into the notebook he’d given her as fast as she could.

  It was boring work. There were two more drawers, and eventually the names and figures began to blur and in the unheated room her fingers were becoming stiff. There was one more file she should check, but it was very late; Daniel had waited until he saw Beatrice’s light go off before he came across from the village, and after Eva had nodded off to sleep twice she decided to call it a day.

  Beatrice never got up before half past seven if Adam was away, and when she did she would go straight to the main office and stay there, so if Eva set her alarm she’d have plenty of time to slip in unseen, finish off and slip out again long before Adam would be back from his leisurely country-house breakfast. With a yawn that almost dislocated her jaw, she put everything back and let herself out again.

  The moon had gone down and the hall was in deep darkness. With her hand stretched out in front of her, Eva groped her way across, terrified of losing her bearings and knocking something over that would bring Beatrice out to see what was going on.

  She wriggled down into her cold bed, desperate for sleep, but now the eyes that had kept shutting before stayed obstinately open. She was too frightened to sleep. How had her dream become the nightmare she was living now? There was a bird singing freedom somewhere, but listening to it felt like tempting fate and as she lay there the monsters of fear and guilt crept closer, closer in the darkness.

  The whitewashed croft houses of the township at Balnasheil, scattered up the low hills rising to the Black Cuillin behind, and the cottages, huddled by the shoreline, had an embattled look; its tiny bay offered only slight protection against the Atlantic storms that came roaring in across the sea.

  It was an ancient settlement, surrounded by the ghosts of its past: the Celtic standing stone; a hut circle from the Bronze Age; sad ruins that had once been houses, still bearing the marks of the fires of their destruction when the brutal Clearances drove their owners into exile.

  A close-knit community with a dwindling population, it was set in its ways, polite and cool to strangers. Very cool, when it came to the present inhabitants of Balnasheil Lodge.

  The penny-pinching Victorian magnate who had built it across the bay on the rough moorland for the shooting – ‘with walls you could spit peas through’, in scornful local opinion – had styled himself the laird. He had looked for forelock-tugging in vain from the Highlanders, who had only ever considered their own chiefs first among equals and had somehow missed out on the deference gene.

  Over the years his successors had been viewed with a mixture of tolerant indifference and quiet amusement – and even sympathy in the case of the Danish businessman who had bought the Lodge, sight unseen, and been so dismayed that he visited once and never returned.

  The Human Face charity had been welcomed at first, even admired for its canny approach in making its headquarters here instead of in fancy offices in one of the big cities, but gradually support drained away. They didn’t make use of local businesses; the directors who dropped in occasionally for a drink or a meal in the little hotel were flash and toffee-nosed and the procession of ‘housekeepers’ who came across to the pub that provided Balnasheil’s social scene didn’t help either. The general verdict was that there was something ‘not right’ about it.

  Vicky Macdonald had known she was taking a risk when she got a job at the Lodge doing the cleaning and cooking that the ‘housekeepers’ apparently couldn’t manage. Coming from the Central Belt and not having the Gaelic, she’d been considered all but a Sassenach and was still working out her probation, despite having married one of the locals more than a year ago. She was left in no doubt that she was seen as tarnished by association, not least by her own husband.

  This morning, when she said ‘Murdo, it’s time we were away. I’m running late as it is,’ the response was unhelpful.

  Murdo John Macdonald – so called to differentiate him from his father, John Murdo – was a big, quiet man, slow-spoken, dark-bearded and dark-eyed. He looked up from his mug of tea and grunted, ‘Seen the weather?’

  The view through the kitchen window was just a square of opaque white. Vicky ran her hand through her fair curly hair and sighed. ‘You’ve been out when it’s been worse than that. I can’t afford to be unreliable – we need the money.’

  She could have bitten her tongue off after she said it. She’d hurt him; under the heavy brows, his eyes were pained as he looked up at her, and she hurried on, ‘I know you’d prefer I just did whatever the hotel could offer me but when the climbing season was over I was earning next to nothing for months. Anyway, I got really tired of Fiona Ross cheating me over the hours I’d worked and snaffling the tips and I hated having to waitress while Douglas’s ministrations ruined good food. At least this is steady and I get to cook. I don’t want to lose it.’

  He didn’t reply, but she saw his jaw set in a firmer line and sighed. Once Murdo John made up his mind, you’d be better working on a project to make water run uphill than trying to change it.

  Vicky had been at a very low ebb after her mother died, feeling alone and vulnerable with the only family she had gone. She’d come to stay in the hotel for a holiday looking for comfort in the beauty and peace of the hills and then, reluctant to return to the stress of her pressured job in catering, she had taken a temporary job as a waitress. Her decision had a lot to do with Murdo John; he was very attractive, in that rugged Highland way, and he had pursued the relationship with a sort of devoted, unthreatening persistence that had soothed her aching sense of loss and won her heart. She’d have been happy just to move in with
him, but it was marriage he wanted – marriage or nothing.

  ‘I want to make sure you’re mine,’ he had said, and, happy and in love, she’d thought it very romantic at the time. And she would be part of a family again.

  The problems only appeared when Murdo John lost his job in construction. With the downturn, work slowed to a trickle and then stopped; he’d been making good money for years and now he was dependent on bar work and a bit of fishing. It hurt his pride that he couldn’t support her as, in his eyes, a husband should. He lost his self-respect; he felt humiliated, diminished and no amount of loving assurance could shift his view of himself as a failure.

  As if in compensation he was becoming more controlling, and now their relationship was showing signs of strain. He hated her associating with the dubious company on the other side of the bay, but she was digging in her toes. Even if he couldn’t accept the concept of the New Man, she was a modern woman and no amount of passive coercion was going to make her give in. When the housekeeping job had come up, she’d jumped at the chance and she was keeping it even if Murdo John would all but spit on the ground when she so much as mentioned Adam Carnegie’s name.

  Vicky didn’t like him either – creepy, even sinister, she thought – but she wasn’t paid to socialise with him, or with the ‘housekeepers’ either, though Eva was all right – a sweet girl, a decent girl, even, unlike her predecessor, who’d been a cold, brassy-looking woman who obviously knew the score and who was using Adam just as much as he was using her.

  ‘Maybe if it clears later,’ Murdo John said grudgingly, his tone telling her this was his best offer.

  She’d have to settle for that; if she tried driving round by the road, more like a track, that took you up into the foothills and across a narrow stone bridge before it dropped down to the other side of the bay, it would be nearly time to set off home again.