Billie's Kiss by Elizabeth Knox Page B

mustn’t be offended if I attempt to press a few pounds on you, a little extra for the unexpected. You don’t want to put a hole in your savings.’
    Ian’s grave. A hole in his savings.
    Geordie took the purse; he took it to be kind. Both men shuffled, looked awkward. And then Meela Tannoy appeared, breathless from running, the two layers of amber silk blown back from her white hair. The footman was puffing and blowing in her wake. She took Geordie’s hands and said, ‘Please take care. Be as long as you need, but please let us know how you are.’ She squeezed his hands.
    Geordie boarded the ship for the fifteen-hour trip from Oban to Stolnsay.
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    MISFORTUNE, NOT mismanagement. A bad investment, a court case, an illness, two funerals. One thing on top of another. A big rock balanced on a cliff top.
    The ship was in the Minch, its open water, the voyage half-gone, the sun going. It was a white evening, white and gold, white and rose, the sky an expanse of godly flesh, its white solid and warm. Geordie hooked his arm over the rail and looked down into the water in time to see a seal surface, its sleek head turned to look at the looming side of the ship whose engines were a discomfort that flushed it out from the waves and its pursuit of fish. It was a fur seal, not a sea lion, small, and soon lost again to Geordie’s eyes. How delightful it was, Geordie thought, just to look down and chance to see something alive in the water.
    Ian had been, by profession, an officer’s orderly. The first man he worked for, a major in the Black Watch, had, on hisretirement, recommended Ian to a friend of the family. Ian had wanted to travel. Murdo Hesketh, whose mother was Swedish, was a captain in the household cavalry of King Oskar. Ian did have some trouble learning a new language, but there was quite a group of ‘Scottish Norsemen’ in the household, and he took an instant liking to Captain Hesketh, a charming, clever but reckless young man. They had their adventures – the excesses and hard play of bored men in barracks, the fierce games, the pranks, intrigues, romantic diversions. They went about the countryside on royal warrants and travelled with the young princes to Russia and Denmark, Holland and Norway.
    Ian was, with people, as a keen reader is with books – he lived on his observations, he took everything in, he enjoyed the life around him as the audience of fiction will the play of character. Gossip wasn’t quite the right word for what Ian did, because he seemed to need to share his observations only with his elder brother.
    Ian and his employer had five good years, then Murdo Hesketh gave up the army and began to look around for some unstrenuous and gentlemanly occupation. He had money, a modest inheritance, and the pay he’d saved. He stayed in Stockholm – where he had some hopes of a young lady. Besides, his sister was there, his younger sister, Ingrid, and her husband, Karl, who was a friend of his.
    This is what Geordie knew. What Ian had told.
    It was this Karl Borg who persuaded Murdo to invest money. It wasn’t Borg’s own financial venture, but that of a friend, a man in whom Karl had complete confidence. The business had, Ian said to Geordie, looked sound on paper. He had even thought to put a little capital in for himself, but he had so little, and looking at the figures – no huge profits were promised – it didn’t seem worth the paperwork, or the worry. Ian did worry, he didn’t quite know why, but wrote later to his brother that, on meeting ‘the man’, he had found himselfunable to read him. ‘He was like a certain kind of clergyman. A man with a very clear conscience. His brow was utterly unmarked by lines – odd in a man of forty. It was as if he had never bunched his brow muscles, had never been moved to frown, had never lifted his eyebrows in surprise at the world. When I say I couldn’t read him,