Removed the signs

As a postscript to his piece yesterday, Willie Macfarlane says: “I was on duty on the day Kirkmichael ceased to have a police station during the spring of 1974. As a young probationer, with the old sergeant holding the ladder, it was me who removed the police station signs located within the heart of the village.

“It was a very cold and sad day as Kirkmichael was the last of the single Perth and Kinross Constabulary police stations to be shut prior to Tayside Police being formed.”

Episode 67

Lilias was looking very lovely, in a yellow gown with creamy lace at the throat and cuffs. “Is this heather-dyed too?” he asked, during a break in the music. “This? Why no, Mateo. This is a silken gown from my brother in St Andrews. He brought it for me the last time he came home. It’s the finest thing I own.”

“It becomes you very well.” “Thank you, kind sir. Whatever did I do for compliments before you washed ashore? And have you enjoyed these celebrations that are so strange for you?” “More than anything for a long time.” “Then I’m glad. I’ve never seen Francisco so happy.”

“Nor me, since we left home.”

“Is he sick for his home? Does he long for it as I would?”

“I think he is.”

“And you?”

“A little. Not just so much.”

How could he say that he was sick only for her company? That the thought of her filled his mind, all day, and half the night. Whatever work he was asked to perform, he did it with her in mind. It would not do. Her father would never permit it.

Betrothal

She had told him quite freely and cheerfully that there was a man called Seoras Darroch, who held a considerable acreage of land on a nearby island, and who could command many followers. It was the same family where her brother was fostered.

Seoras had lost his wife two years previously, and there had been some talk of a betrothal, but nothing had been formally arranged as yet. She thought that perhaps her father was not so anxious to be rid of her and so he kept putting it off.

“Do you want to be married?” asked Mateo, even though it pained him to ask the question.

She pulled a face. “Not yet. He seems like quite an old man to me!”

At last, when people were leaving, to go home to their own cottages, to the rooms above the stables, to the chambers in and around the house and wherever they could find a bed, one of the lassies threw a handful of hazelnuts on to a flat-iron griddle and thrust it on to the fire. She called out her name, Cairistiona, and the name of one of the lads, Seamus, pushing the nuts side by side with a pair of tongs, trying not to burn her fingers.

A group of girls gathered round, laughing, jostling, naming the little brown nuts, seizing the tongs and pushing them into pairs. Lilias was urged forward and chose the cobnut she fancied for herself, and then Cairistiona was pushing another nut alongside it, and whispering: “Mateo”.

Disapproving looks

All the girls burst out laughing, so much so that the elders, huddled over their drinks at the other end of the hall, looked around in disapproval.

“Daft lassies,” said Mcneill, and carried on with his discourse on the finer points of cattle-raising.

The nuts roasted and the smell of burning nutshell rose from the fire. Most leaped apart, many of them right off the metal plate and into the fire where they flamed up and disappeared. There were shrieks of mirth and disappointment. Love, like the nuts, would not last. One or two lay quietly side by side.

Mateo stared at those named for himself and Lilias. The fire crackled and spluttered and the two nuts jumped up and leaped apart. He swallowed his disappointment. How foolish, he thought. What a silly game. But then there came another burst of flame from the fire and the two nuts rolled together again, and there they stayed, small, round, brown, and indisputably as close as it was possible to be.

Lilias got to her feet. Her cheeks were flushed, although whether from the heat of the fire or from embarrassment it was hard to say.

“I must take my leave of you!” she said to the group of young women around the fire, embracing her closest friends among them. “Goodnight my friends. Sleep well.” She caught his gaze. “Mateo de Tegueste, my partner amid the flames, may you sleep soundly too. May the good Archangel Michael, bonnie fighter that he is, protect and keep you, now and always.”

She dropped him a curtsey, the yellow dress swirling about her, her vivid hair escaping from its confinement after the activity of the day, and left. He joined a sleeping Francisco in their small room, and he lay down on the bed, his hands pillowing the back of his head. But he barely slept the whole night. He was wearing a crumpled linen undershirt, and he found his fingers compulsively searching for the inner pocket, where he had concealed his sole precious possession: a small, golden ring.

Gold ring

It’s a ring, a gold band, slightly misshapen, with tiny fragments of sand still clinging to it. Cal blows on it gently to clear the sand away, then peers at it more closely. She does the same, and their heads almost collide. But it’s irresistible.

“Where did this spring from?” he says. “Did you know this was here, Hector? You couldn’t have, could you?”

“Don’t let him swallow momentarily panicked.

Hector sniffs at the ring, sneezes, backs away. Cal closes his hand round it until the dog has lost interest. She takes the ring from him, feeling the weight of it, and they bend over the find again, intrigued. “Gold?” she asks.

“Oh I think so, don’t you? Nothing else feels so heavy and comes out of the sand and out of the sea still shining like this after...” He stops suddenly.

“Well, go on. After how long?”

He shakes his head, distracted. “I don’t know.”

“But it looks old, doesn’t it?”

He stares at her for a moment or two. “I know what I think, but it’s better to be sceptical to begin with. May I?”

Carefully she transfers the ring back to his outstretched palm. He feels in another pocket and fishes out his jeweller’s loup. He looks closely at the ring, tipping it this way and that, but always carefully, holding it between finger and thumb.

He has nice hands, slender and sensitive. As she watches him, she shivers at the memory of his kiss, but she also has a sudden desire to wrest the ring from him. Mine, she thinks. It’s mine. He found it here. On my beach. I’m like Gollum, she thinks, which makes her laugh. it!” she says,

Her cheeks were flushed, although whether from the heat of the fire or embarrassment it was hard to say