Page 60 of The Midnight Secret

Another silence bloomed. There was so much to say and yet words couldn’t help them now. Feelings couldn’t compete with facts. She had had no idea that his wink as he had left her with a drunk teenage viscount, back in the Gathering Hall in Portree, would be their last moment together.

Perhaps it was better that way. She never could have faced him and said goodbye; she would have clung to him and begged him to reconsider, even though she knew they were out of options and out of time. Events had overtaken them, and perhaps there was mercy in that.

‘Goodbye, Sholto. I’ll pray for her. I’ll pray for you all.’

‘I love you, Effie...’ His voice broke. ‘I’m sor—’

She replaced the handset, feeling the sob break free from her too. But the fates had spoken, the axe fallen. Their predicament could not be undone. She had known loss before.

She felt the sorrow rise up through her body in rolling waves as she staggered over to a high-backed library chair and sank into it, weeping pitifully at the loss of her only dream. She could see no future without Sholto in it. How was she supposed to smile again when her heart had been ripped from her body, still beating...? How was she—

Behind her, the library door opened, a crescendo of laughter carrying down the hallway. Effie froze, knowing it would be Gladly or Colly or Archie looking for her; she didn’t want anyone to see her like this, weakened and pathetic. She couldn’t speak to them in this state, say out loud that the engagement was over, that she was going to slip back into the obscurity from which she’d come...

She waited for the door to close again – she was hidden from view here – but instead she heard footsteps coming in. She lifted her feet off the ground, lest they could be seen, huddling into a small ball. The chair backed onto the room from here; she would only be seen if her friendly hero insisted on walking all the way round to find her – but the footsteps stopped halfway along; she heard a light tapping on the book-lined wall behind her, the squeak of a hinge.

Effie bit her lip, realizing it must be her host, a man she scarcely knew, attending to private business in his own library. Immediately she felt like an intruder, her desire for privacy transformed into something more shady.

She didn’t stir, even her tears slowing their march down her cheeks. She heard something jangling lightly before the hinge squeaked again and was followed by a click.

Footsteps, retreating.

Effie waited for the door to open again, but something...an instinct had her hackles up. As she heard the twist of the knob, she quickly peered around the wing of the chair.

What she saw made her blood run cold. It made no sense – there was no explanation at all that she could think of to account for it.

What washedoing here?

Chapter Sixteen

MHAIRI

5 January 1931

Oban

Mhairi could hear the children next door fighting. In her home, growing up, her brothers would never have landed more than two thumps before they would have been separated and scolded, but different rules applied here. The father was scarcely ever around – she’d heard he had lost his job when the distillery had closed and spent his days drinking in the pub – and the mother was either defeated or unbothered by her children’s feral ways.

Mhairi hummed to herself, trying to drown out the noise as she plumped the pillows on their bed, the room cool and freshly aired. She smoothed the wrinkles out of the knitted blanket and refreshed the water in the glass of snowdrops, picked from the spinney around the back this morning.

She had been forced to make the walk there barefoot when she’d found her boots – left outside the door to dry after a heavy downpour – filled with dog excrement. Ordinarily such a thing would devastate her day, but this time she had merelywashed them out and stuffed them with old papers in the hope they would dry before Donald got back.

He had no idea of the reign of terror the women had exacted over her in the two months they had lived here: her bedsheets mud-spattered on the washing line; ‘slut’ daubed in smuts on the front door; the butcher ignoring her at the counter; a dead crow left on her step; a smirking wall of silence from the women whenever she walked past. The gossip about her had travelled to the laundry of the hotel where she worked, killing off the green shoots of some fledgling friendships so that she had no one here at all but Donald. No friends. No family. No neighbours.

Of course, whenever she and Donald passed the neighbours in the street on Sundays, they were polite tohisface, tipping their hats; but when she was alone, there was an unrelenting viciousness to their actions that took her breath away. And it would never stop, she knew that.

It would always be like this. The truth about their lives – their love story – would never be known and they couldn’t escape here; David hadn’t taken his suspicions about Norman to the police in the end. In his most recent letter, he had been despairing that Jayne had stopped him, refusing to admit to the horrors in her marriage nor to listen as he tried to explain his greater fears about what could have happened that final night. There was a part of Mhairi that had wanted him to do it anyway – anything that might get Donald off the hook once and for all – but, in her heart, she knew not having an alibi wasn’t reason enough to put another man in the frame. Norman was a bad husband, that much was true; but a murderer? He could swing for it – and why? Because his wife hadn’t come home that night and he couldn’t prove he’d been in bed at home, alone?

If David didn’t understand why Jayne was covering for her husband, Mhairi did. In the absence of rock-solid proof, Jayne could take no chances. Sleeping outside beside another man that fated night, innocent though it had been, wasn’t the sort of thing Norman would take well. A man who used his fists so freely didn’t care much for the finer details, and Mhairi knew Jayne was simply making the sacrifices that had to be made to get through another day.

Weren’t they all just surviving the best they could? Silence had been Mhairi’s best form of defence living here, and she had thought she could bear it indefinitely; that had been her intention, certainly. There had been a saying back home: ‘A man may do without a brother, but not without a neighbour.’ And yet it wasn’t true – within the four walls of their tiny home, she and Donald led a life of blissful happiness. Up until now, she had no need for more than she had with him here.

But everything had changed again, and that quiet refuge was no longer enough. Hard decisions had to be made.

She checked on the stew she had made him, pleased with the richness of the aroma. It filled their home, a perfect welcome after a hard day. She only wished she would be here to eat it herself, but she had been here once before and she knew, this time, what was coming. In a few weeks she would start to show and the neighbours’ campaign would become vitriolic, if not downright dangerous.

She propped the letter she had written on the counter and walked over to the door, picking up the small case containing the few worldly gifts she owned – a change of clothes, a copy of the Bible and the photograph of herself and Donald, taken for a shilling at the market. She looked back into the room one final time, proud of the loving home she had created. A silk purse from a sow’s ear, her mother would have said.

She wished it could have been enough – them against the world – as she slipped through the door and walked out. She didn’t bother trying to be quiet this time, and the doors opened one by one, a low crowing rising up behind her as they saw the case in her hand.

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