Henry Higgenbotham looked away from the computer screen and rubbed his weary eyes. He knew you weren’t supposed to stare at the screen for hours, but he always forgot and the result was a cracker of a headache – much like the one coming on now. He winced as the throbbing commenced.
Henry pushed his chair back and took in his surroundings again, after so long in cyberspace. The tiny, rustic room, furnished with the table, chair, laptop computer, and a single bed. There was also a small wooden washstand with a large china jug and enamel bowl. Henry went to the stand, poured some water into the basin, and splashed his face with it, using a towel hanging from a rail on the side of the washstand to dry himself.
Yes, a tiny room, and yet he preferred it to the larger but soulless chalet he’d been, until late, residing in. It was only a step from the table to the washstand, a step to the bed, a step to the door. He made that last step and went outside.
A woodland glade – sunlight filtering through the trees. Henry supposed the cable for the computer’s broadband must be buried. Didn’t matter. What mattered was that just when he needed it most he had his retreat. He heard, but couldn’t spot, a woodpecker somewhere close by. Plus a lot of other birdsong he couldn’t identify. Some druid!
Henry reached inside and lifted the chair out, placing it on the dry woodland ground. Even to his untrained eye, the country here seemed parched. Very un-Scotland-like, or so everyone told him. And even for a first-time visitor he could see it was unnatural. Plants that looked as if they should be lush seemed to be suffering. Again, what they were, he had no idea. He frowned this time. He really needed to start giving the natural history side of his philosophy more care and attention. After all, he’d first started with druidry to re-establish a connection with the natural world. But that was the one area where he’d never made much headway.
Henry shifted the chair so that he sat in a strong shaft of sunlight. His headache seemed to be subsiding, but his mind was still spinning with the information he’d been collecting. Too many loose ends, too fractured. He couldn’t see how to put all the pieces together.
He stood up. He needed to move, to let his body stretch. He usually did his best thinking on his feet anyway. Henry put the chair back into the hut, locked the door (city paranoia) and set off on a path through the trees he had become very familiar with.
The path wound circuitously through the wood – a deer path, he reckoned. Hardly wider than a foot, he’d made it slightly more distinct during the fortnight he’d stayed in the cabin. Past the solitary birch tree – he recognised that one anyway – through endless scots pines whose needles padded the forest floor with plush softness. And as he walked, the sound which was distant and indistinct from the cabin became louder, more identifiable: the sound of the restless sea crashing to shore.
Henry came out of the trees on a narrow strip of dried grass that lay between the forest eaves and a cliff that plunged to the sea. He admired the view for a moment – the cliff descended to the left, climbed to the right a short distance to a headland, and below, a rocky stretch of coast, pocketed with secluded sandy coves. He turned left and after a few steps started down a narrow path that traversed the the incline. At this point the cliff gave way to a steep but less precipitous grassy slope. Even so, he still had to scramble over boulders to finally set foot at sea level.
Oh. This was odd. Footprints. For the first time, evidence that someone had been here before him. His eyes followed the small prints of bare feet back to where they emerged around a rocky outcrop to the left. That was some relief anyway. Whoever it was had not come the same way as he had, and so was unlikely to have been near his retreat in the woods.
A shout from the sea brought Henry’s head up with a jerk. Someone was swimming. Yes, now he spotted the pile of clothes strewn across a rock to this right. Female clothes unless he was much mistaken. Narrowing his eyes, he could see blond hair and a head bobbing about 50 yards to sea. The person gave him a wave. He waved back.
He took a step closer to the clothes, then smiled. The large-size diaphanous wrap. Various pieces of copper and jade jewellery – it could only be one person – Isabella Arnott. Hmm, no towel, so it couldn’t be a premeditated swim, and yet she had left her underwear with her other clothes on the rock. Indications were of a case of opportunistic daylight skinny-dipping, pure and simple.
Another hello from the sea, and this time Henry could plainly see it was she – swimming closer in to shore, her features a bit clearer now. He settled himself comfortably on the rock next to her clothes. Not that he was dying to see Mrs Arnott in the buff, but he took an admittedly cruel pleasure at the prospect of her embarrassment. After all, she had embarrassed him often enough.
But it didn’t seem to be working. She rose from the sea like a voluptuous goddess. Henry was a bit shocked, actually. He was expecting someone more, well, corpulent. In fact she reminded him of Titian’s painting of Venus Anadyomene which hangs in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. And she was smiling and wringing her long hair, as Venus does in that famous painting.
“‘Enry,” she called out when she finally stepped from the sea to strand. “I told myself this was you. What some pleasant surprises there are.”
She was totally unabashed in her nakedness, and Henry’s anticipation of delight at her embarrassment recoiled on him – he suddenly became aware of his situation – alone on a secluded beach with a naked woman who seemed pleased to see him. He looked away abruptly, but then looked back at her just as quickly. Was this a game she was playing with him? He saw her grinning, and knew it was. Who was going to crack first? Well, it wouldn’t be him.
“Izzy,” he called cheerfully, raising his hand in salute. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“Oh, ‘Enry,” she sighed, coming over the sand to the rock where he and her clothes sat, still wringing her extraordinarily long, thick hair. Henry remained, calm, impassive, as if they were meeting in the Tuppenny Ha’penny Tea Room. “‘Enry, you are probably not knowing this, but I really ‘ate someone calling me that name.” She shuddered and broke out in gooseflesh all over her body. Henry was surprised at the physiological reaction. But he kept his cool.
“And why is that, then? It’s a perfectly acceptable pet name for Isobel or Isabella in this country.”
Surprise upon surprise, she sat next to him and took his hand. “‘Enry,” she said, “If I am telling you a secret, a story I am never telling anyone other, not Jeffrey even, are you promising to keep the secret in your heart?”
Henry was torn. He most certainly did not want to be beholdened to Isabella in any way, and yet the prospect of knowing a secret something about her past was irresistible. However, he should maintain a sense of decorum. He stood, pretending to spot an interesting shell, completely nonchalant, saying as he stood, releasing her hand and stepping away, “Why of course, Izzy, you have my complete discretion.” He stopped and gathered one or two inconsequential shells to examine.
He glanced over to find here reclining on a flat space on the rock. She caught his glance, and stretched luxuriously. The tart, he thought.
“I am forgetting to bring a towel, so this is best way for me to dry my body,” she explained, arranging herself spread-eagled on the rock. Oh, you’re good, thought Henry, Very good. But I think you’ll find I’m made of sterner stuff.
“Go right ahead,” Henry said magnanimously. He scanned the skies, hoping for a rain cloud, but rain cloud came there none.
“‘Enry,” she said, piteously. “Come sit by me here. I am telling you a deep secret that hurts me to say it. You are so far away, you might not hear my words in your heart from there.”
Henry looked over, suddenly touched by her words. She sounded to be genuinely struggling. Her face was etched with worry lines, and were those tears in her eyes? By St. Crispin, so there were! He hurried over and perched on the rock, taking her outstretched hand. “I’m listening with my heart,” he answered her.
Afterwards, thinking back, Henry knew this was when he was at his most vulnerable. Isabella could have played him for all she was worth at this juncture, and who knows what the outcome might have been.
She sighed, and seemed to relax. She squeezed his hand once, then used her hand to shade her eyes from the sun as she spoke.
“When I was a little girl, my Father spent all his money on a bad business. He was cheated by his partner, may he rot in hell!” She spat symbolically to the left. “So my Mother and Father sent me and my brother to America to live with my Uncle and his wife for awhile – until the business got better again. I called him my Uncle, we called all our man relations by Uncle. I think he was my Father’s cousin.” Her voice turned malevolent. “And he called me Izzy!
“Anyway, we flew over to their house in Mary Land. He was a touristic fisherman in the Bay of Chesapeake. He took peoples fishing for big moneys. Georgio and me went out on Uncle’s boat very often. He was a nice man, we thought. One day ….”
There was a pause as Isabella took a deep breath. Henry quickly said, “You don’t have to tell me this story, you know, Isabella. I see it’s a painful memory.”
“No, you should know this if you want to understand me, ‘Enry. I was at that man’s power. We were alone on the boat one hot summer day – why not? He very often went out with his boat, it was normal, until … one day …”
“Isabella -”
“No. I change my mind. You say you listen with your heart, but how I know you will keep what I have to say there, inside you? No, a man with too much power – is not good. I tell you, you know things about me, you have power. Mystery is better, yes?”
Henry felt miffed, without quite knowing why. He didn’t want to know this woman’s trashy secrets anyway. Still, he wanted to think he was trustworthy, and for some strange reason he wanted her to think so to.
“Isabella, I swear to you — “
“No! Don’t swear, don’t make an oath you cannot fulfill. Something bad happened that day, so from that day I make an oath to me, to never be under anyone’s power. Not my uncles, not you, not even my husband. Jeffrey and me, we have an understanding. See, our marriage is an old-fashioned one. Not for love, no, for advantage and power – and once we thought for dynasty. But no babies,” she sighed, her hands back on her belly. “No babies, even though I have not stopped trying after Jeffrey couldn’t come to my bed any more. But no matter who I try, no babies. So I know it is my womb that is barren.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Henry, though it has to be said without complete honesty.
“So, ‘Enry. Are you are thinking right now that maybe you is the one who is giving me babies?” She looked at him, slowly running her hands up and down her thighs.
For Henry that broke the spell. He almost laughed, but checked himself at the last second. Instead he managed a regretful smile. “I’m going to have to pass, Isabella. Tempting though the offer is.”
Isabella smiled again as she sat up next to him. “I have my eye on you, ‘Enry. I know you love Morag McKillop and are wanting only her. Am I right?”
Maddeningly, Henry could feel himself blushing. “That’s none of your business, my dear,” he blustered. His embarrassment caused Isabella no end of amusement, and Henry was relieved when a phone rang – Beethoven’s Fifth again – from inside the pile of her clothes.
She looked at the display, put it to her ear and said, with a purr in her voice, “Ciao Leo. Okay. Yes, tell him I am just out of the water for a swim.” She mouthed the words Do you want to speak to Jeffrey? to Henry, but he just frowned and waved the phone away as she grinned at him. “Yes, of course I am alone, who else would be with me, ‘Enry ‘Eeggenbotham?” Even Henry could hear the roar of laughter from the other end, and his eyes narrowed with hatred. “Okay, see you soon darling. Ciao,” she finished, and began to dress, chuckling all the while. “Still,” she said finally, swathed again in her swirling clothes, “don’t put all your chickens in one basket, ‘Enry. I could be a useful lover for you -” She chucked him under the chin. “-if you ever changed your mind.” And still smiling, she turned and made her way back across the sand the way she had come.
Henry shook his head, turned back toward the cliffs, and almost jumped out of his skin as out from behind a spur of the cliff stepped Hamish Donaldson.
“She’s a remarkable lady,” Hamish said wryly. “Remarkable, but very odd as well.”
“For heaven’s sake, how long have you been there?”
Hamish burst out laughing. “Long enough to be impressed with the both of you.”
“Christ,” said Henry, joining Hamish on the steep climb back up to the wood, “that was the longest half-hour of my life.”
“Aye, you’ve earned a reward, lad. How about a stiff double scotch and soda to round off your afternoon?”
Henry had to admit he hadn’t had such a good offer in a long, long time.
Posted by paulmilne 
Posted by paulmilne 
Posted by paulmilne 