An Anne Perry Christmas_ Two Holiday Novels - Anne Perry [38]
Out of an empty house falling into dereliction, Mrs. Naylor and Finn had built and repaired it, until the house was restored to its earlier comfort. Then one guest at a time, first by chance, it had become a hostelry for wanderers who needed shelter not only from the elements of the Highland winter, but from the harder seasons of life, a time to rest and regain not so much strength as a sense of direction, an understanding of mountains, of paths, and above all of hope.
When they retired after dinner Isobel followed Vespasia up the stairs, almost on her heels. “What am I going to do?” she said when they reached the bedroom they were to share. There was a note of desperation in her voice.
“What you have told Omegus that you will do,” Vespasia answered. “Mrs. Naylor won't tell people anything other than whatever you tell them yourself.”
“I don't mean about Gwendolen's death!” Isobel said impatiently. “I mean about anything! I don't want to marry Bertie Rosythe, even if he offered! Or anyone like him. I should die of loneliness, even if it took me all my life to do it, an inch a day.” Her voice was suddenly harsher, as if the anger ran out of control. “For heaven's sake, are you really so damnably complacent that you don't even know what I mean? Can't you see anything further than money and fashion, the season, knowing everyone who matters and having them know you, going to all the right parties?” She flung her hand out stiffly. “When the door is closed, and you take off your tiara and the maid hangs up your gown? Who are you then?” Now she was almost weeping. “What have you? Have you anything at all that matters? Is that what comfort has given you—that you are dead at heart—of self-satisfaction?”
Vespasia saw the contempt in Isobel's eyes and knew that it had been there dormant for all the time they had known each other. Did she care enough to strip away the armor of her own protection to answer truthfully? If not, then she was denying herself, almost as if she were making it true.
“I have too much pain and too much hope to be dead,” she replied gravely. “My best days were not wearing a tiara, or a ball gown. I carried bandages, and water, and sometimes even a gun. I wore a plain gray dress that was borrowed, and I stood on the barricades in Rome, and fought for a revolution that failed.” She lowered her voice because the tears choked in her throat. “And loved a man I shall never see again. You have no right to despise anyone, Isobel, until at least you know who they are. And we will probably none of us ever know anyone sufficiently well for that. Be happy for it. It is not a sweet thing to look down on others, or to feel their inferiority. It's lonely, ugly, and wrong. Sleep well. We must make Crianlarich, at least, by tomorrow evening. I know it's only about five miles, but five miles of storm in these hills may seem more than thirty miles at home. Good night.”
“Good night,” Isobel said gently.
he following day they traveled through glancing blizzards, one of them heavy enough to halt them for over two hours, but they reached Crianlarich before sundown, and the day after as far as the head of Loch Lomond, with Ben Lomond towering white in the distance to the south.
After that, they kept close to the water until they were past the Ben itself, and on the morning of the fifth day since leaving Glen Orchy, they bade MacIan good-bye and thanked him heartily. They took the boat to the farthest shore of the loch little more than twenty miles from