MAGNUS had been right, Catriona reflected, staring helplessly at the mist which crept insidiously across the harbour as she watched. He had warned her this morning, with older-brother concern, that sea-fog had been forecast and that she would be wiser not to leave Falla, but they were low on stores and Christmas wasn’t very far away. The old days when the laird’s house on Falla rang to laughter over the Christmas season might have died with their parents; they might be as poor as the poorest of their crofters, but Catriona refused to let the season pass without at least some attempt to celebrate. Hence the trip to Lerwick.

Magnus had protested that she could never manage their dilapidated old fishing boat alone, but Catriona had laughed. She knew the waters round Falla and the other Shetland isles well enough to sail them in her sleep, even if the huge oil drilling platforms anchored far out to sea were new landmarks. Her normally generously curved lips tightened sharply. Oil—how she hated that word and all it stood for! Her eyes clouded as she thought of Magnus, her once strong and fearless brother, whom she had hero-worshipped all through her teens and who had willingly taken the place of their parents when they had been drowned in a sailing accident.

She searched the sea again. The meagre stores which were all her slender purse would stretch to were already on board. She had felt the sympathy behind the kind enquiries as people asked after Magnus. There had been Petersons on Falla since the first Norse invasion of the islands, and Catriona knew that the surreptitious slipping of little extras in among her shopping sprang not from pity but from a genuine compassion. The people who lived on these islands of the far north had a deep appreciation of the hardships resulting from incapacity of the breadwinner of the family. The seas round the Shetlands were rich in fish, but the waters were treacherous and the winds which continually blew over them resulted in fierce storms.

There was scarcely a family on the Shetlands who did not have some grim story to relate of lives lost and limbs maimed.

It was no use, Catriona acknowledged, she was not going to be able to leave Lerwick tonight. Making sure that the yaol was properly secured, she headed away from the harbour, a small, finely built girl, with silver-blonde hair curling on to her shoulders, an inheritance from those far distant Norse ancestors who had claimed these windswept islands as their own. The inhabitants of the Shetlands might no longer speak the ancient Norn tongue, but in tradition and outlook they were closer to their Scandinavian cousins than their dour Scots neighbours.

Only Catriona’s eyes showed the Celtic blood of her mother, the soft-spoken redhead her father had met in Edinburgh during his university days and married; they were grey, the colour of the seas round Falla, changing with the light from softest grey to deep violet. More than one male had been captivated by Catriona’s delicately moulded beauty during her brief years in London training as a librarian, but when Magnus had had his accident she had ruthlessly cut herself off from that life and returned to their childhood home to be with the brother who needed her so badly.

She paused to stare blindly into a brightly decorated shop window, her eyes misting with tears. It was all very well for Mac to assure her that there was nothing physically wrong with Magnus and that it was a mercy that he had not been killed or seriously injured, but the man who now sat staring into space in the huge, dilapidated house on Falla was not the brother Catriona remembered from her youth, alive and alert, teasing, driving her mad with his older-brother superiority and then flying home from Oman that terrible night when they brought the news that their parents had been drowned off Bressay.

She would never forget his care and understanding then; he had been her rock in the storm of grief which had swept her, his concern total and healing, and now that it was her turn to be his rock she would not desert him.

Mac had warned her that it might be years, if ever, before Magnus recovered. He had brought them both into the world, and Catriona knew he shared her helpless grief for Magnus. They had all been so proud of him when he went to Oxford… There was no point in dwelling on the past, Catriona reminded herself. After his accident Magnus had been offered an office job by his company, but he had refused it, retreating to Falla where he could shut out the rest of the world and forget.

A night in Lerwick was an expense she would rather have avoided, Catriona reflected. Without Magnus’s salary their only source of income was a small pension. Even if she were qualified there was no employment on Falla for a librarian; the crofters fished their living from the sea, and Catriona had learned to close her eyes to the deterioration of their once luxurious home.

She paused outside the hotel she had used on happier occasions—those infrequent visits home from London when Magnus had managed to get leave to coincide with hers. He had been very generous in those days, giving her an allowance as well as paying for her education. Although only seven years separated them he had willingly shouldered the responsibility of providing for her after their parents’ death. Carefully checking the money in her purse, Catriona went inside. Like most of the hotels in Lerwick, it was run as a family concern. The girl behind the reception desk remembered Catriona and greeted her with a smile.

“How’s your brother?” she enquired sympathetically. “But he was lucky, wasn’t he?”

If one considered that lying paralysed on the ground while all around one the world went up in flames, filled with the screams of the dying, then yes, Magnus had been lucky, Catriona acknowledged, but the girl meant well, so she smiled and asked if they had a vacant room.

“I’m sorry, Miss Peterson, but we don’t. You see, a party of oilmen flew in from Aberdeen this afternoon and can’t get out again until the weather lifts.”

Oilmen! Catriona grimaced distastefully over the word. The Shetlanders had learned to live with their intrusion into their lives; to accept their busied coming and going from the mainland to the huge oil terminal at Sullom Voe and the sea-rigs.

“Look,” the receptionist suggested helpfully, “I’ll ask them if they’ll mind doubling up and leaving a room free for you. I’m sure they won’t. They’re out at the moment, but I’ll get someone to shift their things and tell them when they come back.”

She spoke with the assurance of someone inured to climatic conditions which could suddenly imprison travellers against their will, and pored thoughtfully over the register, before pencilling out a name and writing Catriona’s in its place.

She herself had no compunction about depriving the man of his room. And besides, hadn’t Magnus often said that oilmen could sleep anywhere?

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Northern Sunset Penny Jordan

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE

Northern Sunset

Penny Jordan