500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(42)
Chapter 36
Lissa woke up on Saturday morning remembering she’d agreed to work in order to catch up on some appointments she’d missed getting lost from one end of Loch Ness to another.
But she didn’t mind, she found. She’d be quite glad of the company. And she didn’t feel bad, not really. Not stomach-clenchingly frightened. She watched the lambs jumping about the fields from her bedroom window, clutching a cup of hot tea in her hands. In the woods beside the cottage, she noticed something suddenly. She pulled a cardie over her gray Friends T-shirt, tied her wild hair back with a wide tartan band, and walked out into the waking morning in her old, soft tartan bottoms. At first she was embarrassed she was wearing her pajamas, and then it occurred to her, with a sudden burst of freedom, that it didn’t matter! Nobody could see her on the road! She could wander wherever she liked!
The birdsong struck her first as she opened the back door, the sun illuminating the dew in the grass. It was getting long. She frowned and wondered if she’d have to cut it. She hadn’t the faintest idea how one might go about doing that.
Now that she was closer to the trees, she could see it better, and she gasped. Suddenly, all at once, it seemed, the wild grasses had shimmered and completely changed; instead of having bright green shoots everywhere, it was now completely covered with a sea of bright purple bluebells. The color was so ridiculous it looked photoshopped. A sea of them—countless thousands running up and over the hill, to goodness knows where—for nobody, it seemed, except her.
She knelt and breathed in their delicate heavenly scent. It was extraordinary. She found she didn’t even want to cut some for the house; they belonged together, a great, secret sea, and she crouched down, still clasping the mug of tea, and took a dozen photographs, but none of them seemed to capture the thick velvety beauty of the sight, so she put her phone away and simply sat still. As she did so, she was rewarded with a startle of movement in the distance, the flash of something white, which she quickly realized was a tail. A doe was bolting through the forest, followed close behind by the most perfect honeycomb-colored fawn, its legs impossibly spindly—the speed of them darting through the wood, as if she’d been visited by magical creatures—and she found herself gasping, then shaking her head, amazed at herself. Next thing she knew she’d be getting wellies.
SHE TOOK THE car, as she had to drive a ways out of the village to a house that GPS was absolutely no use for, as far as she could tell, because the signal burst in and out at unexpected moments. Joan had said something along the lines of “it has its own postcode,” which made no sense to Lissa at all until she’d found the road where it was meant to be, more or less, and driven up and down it several times until she’d realized that the rusty gates that looked abandoned were, in fact, exactly where she was meant to be.
She drove up the narrow one-track road, absolutely marveling at the idea of it. Vast woodlands petered away on either side of her—the bluebells had gotten here too, a magic carpet, and daffodils burst into view over the crest of a hill. Coming toward the house, she turned the car around the gravel forecourt—there was an empty fountain that looked rather sorely neglected—and stared at something glinting behind the house before finally realizing it was the loch itself. Imagine. Imagine living here. She couldn’t.
She went up to the huge old main door and could hear various banging and music happening behind it, but nobody appeared to have heard her knock. She hadn’t been in the country long enough to realize she ought to go around the back until a little voice alerted her.
“Are you absolutely going to give us jabs?”
A small boy with too-long hair was standing by the corner of the house. Next to him was an even smaller boy with olive skin and very long eyelashes. They were wearing identical short yellow dungarees and yellow T-shirts.
“We’re absolutely twins,” the boy continued.
“Are you?” said Lissa dubiously. On the other hand, she’d seen lots of unusual things and it was very rude to assume.
“Aye!” shouted the smaller boy. “We is and all!”
“Okay then, great!” she said. “Is your mother around?”
The boys froze suddenly, then they turned as one and marched around the back of the property. Slightly spooked, Lissa followed them.
A very petite dark-haired woman with a friendly, open face came out of the kitchen door with a tea towel over her shoulder.
“Hello! I forgot you were coming! Well, I thought you were coming the other day . . .”
“Sorry about that,” said Lissa.
“That’s okay,” said the woman, smiling in a friendly way. “I know what it’s like when you first get here. Isn’t everything huge?”
“I thought Scotland was meant to be a small country.”
“I know . . . Shackleton! Get the oven.”
A tall shambling teenage boy came out with a tray of cooling scones. “Chill your boots, already done it,” he said.
“Excellent,” said the woman, introducing herself as Zoe. “Want to come in? And have a scone?”
“You’re English?” said Lissa, surprised.
“Oh yes! You too! Ha, we’re invading the place. Oh God, Mrs. Murray will have a fit.”
“Is that the woman who runs the grocery?”
“Don’t mind her, her bark is worse than her bite,” said Zoe. “You could say that about a lot of people round here,” she continued, as they passed an older lady who was cleaning boots rather ferociously by the sink.