The Skylark's Secret(73)

There was already a small cluster of military vehicles parked haphazardly where the road ended, just beyond the croft houses at Cove. A door opened as a frozen, bedraggled casualty was helped inside, to where Mrs Kennedy and Mrs McKenzie were doing what they could to warm those who’d managed to make it ashore through the seething waves. Flora gingerly edged the ambulance past and manoeuvred it along the rough track, pulling up behind another truck that had already stopped at the top of the cliff, its headlights illuminating the thick veil of snow and the roiling waters beyond.

‘Have you got a stretcher?’ shouted a man with a captain’s stripes on his coat sleeves. ‘Hand it over to them’ – he gesticulated to Alec and Ruaridh – ‘and bring what supplies you can. There are casualties on the shore, but be careful. That cliff path is dangerous and we can’t afford any more injuries.’

Flora gasped as she reached the cliff edge. Beneath them, at the bottom of the sheer rocky path, the beach was veiled by the driving snow. Over the fury of the wind, she could hear waves crashing on to the rocks with the full force of the Atlantic. She strained her eyes to see the foundering ship, but there was only sleet-swept blackness beyond the beam of the ambulance headlights. She started down first, with Mairi close on her heels, scrambling into the unknown as the storm grabbed at her coat and whipped her hair across her face, trying to pluck her from the rocks and throw her into the raging cauldron that roared somewhere beneath them.

It was chaotic on the shore. Torch beams wavered here and there as the rescue party searched for survivors. It was impossible to tell whether the oil-black, huddled shapes on the beach were rocks or bodies until you reached down to touch them, feeling for hard stone or yielding flesh. Every now and then there would be a cry of ‘Over here!’, the words snatched by the wind and almost lost beneath the crashing of the waves.

The crofters from the cottages at Cove had been first on the scene, summoned by the flares sent up when the ship had been beached on the rocks and by an officer who had managed to swim ashore and climb the cliff to summon help. The men had raced down to the bay, followed by the women bringing blankets and a can of hot tea. A fire had been lit and there were glimpses of huddled figures in the light of the leaping flames as they attempted to revive the survivors.

Flora and Mairi stumbled towards the faint light of one of the torches and helped get a casualty on to a stretcher. The sailor retched and choked, covered in thick black oil and coughing up seawater, exhausted from the swim to shore.

Somewhere out there, beyond the reach of the torchlight and the headlight beams of the waiting vehicles on the cliff top that illuminated the feverish dance of the snow, the vessel was being swallowed, inexorably, by the ocean. Had she sailed just a few hundred yards further on, the crew would have been able to make the turn into the safety of the loch, but in the snow-shrouded darkness they’d swung close to the shore too early and the storm had driven the ship into the rocky maw of the point. Summoned by the flares fired from the mortally wounded ship, a tug from the harbour had tried to reach the stricken vessel, firing a line across to it to pull it to safety, but the waves and the wind were too wild and had thwarted the rescue attempt.

‘Do we know the name of the vessel?’ Flora shouted to one of the stretcher-bearers as they were about to make the perilous journey back up the cliff path with their patient.

‘It’s a Yankee ship,’ he yelled back. ‘The William H. Welch.’

Anxiously, Flora turned to Mairi, about to ask her whether she knew the name of the Gustavsens’ ship. But she froze as a beam of torchlight illuminated the mask of anguish on her friend’s face. Following her gaze, Flora turned to see Alec and Ruaridh carrying a lifeless body between them. As the faint glimmer of light scanned over them, something pale gleamed for a fleeting moment, a glint of gold in the darkness. And then Flora realised, horrified, that what she had glimpsed was a strand of white-blond hair.

‘It’s Hal,’ shouted Ruaridh. As they drew alongside, Flora laid her fingertips in the soft crook of his neck, feeling for a pulse. But she could see already that it was too late.

Mairi had stumbled away, calling Roy’s name, her anguished screams like the cries of a seabird on the wind. They searched frantically, knowing he wouldn’t have been far from his brother’s side, that he must, now, be here somewhere. After an eternity they found him, washed ashore, the fronds of his hair drifting like golden weed at the water’s edge. As Flora shouted for a stretcher, Mairi fell to her knees beside him, oblivious to the icy water. She laid her ear against his chest and gave a single, wrenching sob of relief as she felt the rise of a faint breath. And then Flora had pulled her away as the medics went to work, willing him to live, to breathe again, to swim hard against the current that had already swept his brother away, fighting his way back to the shores of the living.



As the storm began to abate and a grey dawn broke – at last – over the hills, Flora and Mairi climbed wearily back up the cliff path, following the stretcher-bearers carrying the last of the survivors. There weren’t many – only a scant dozen of the crew of over seventy had managed to live through the brutal onslaught of the storm-whipped sea. The girls were soaked to the skin, shivering with shock and cold that they scarcely registered. Through the dark hours of that February morning, they had made the journey back and forth to the hospital at Gairloch three times, carrying survivors, each one a miracle pulled from the black water. The first of them had been Roy Gustavsen.