Back at the Rock, Gaspard appeared in the kitchen, looking furious as always, a cigarette being thrown out behind him. Flora had left a huge fire bucket there to try to catch them all, but it didn’t always succeed.
“Today!” he said. “Tarte tatin with leeks from the kitchen garden. No messing. We have a million winter leeks. This rock is a good place for growing leeks. Aha, bien, ah oui, who knew. Alors: everyone learn. I will need your help to make starters.”
And they spent all afternoon learning how to perfectly roast the leeks in purest butter, made pastry again and again under his disappointed eye, rolled and blind baked and wasted butter, and marveled at Bjårk’s frankly extraordinary ability to eat remnants of pastry while carefully separating out any hint of greenery and daintily spitting it out of the corner of his mouth. By the evening, all of them had more or less presentable—and undeniably delicious—leek tatins sitting in tiny ramekins.
Konstantin stared at his in something like awe.
“Is that, like, the first time you’ve ever made something?” teased Isla quietly.
“Yes,” he said simply, still looking at it in amazement.
They sat at the kitchen table and he took a bite. Gaspard had whipped up a hollandaise sauce to eat with it too, and it was absolutely sensational, but to Konstantin it was something new altogether.
He was even more surprised when Isla, who had been looking at it all afternoon and getting annoyed by it, scooted over when they’d finished eating and lifted his coat down from the stand.
“What are you doing?”
She frowned and showed him one of the small sewing kits the hotel was full of. “Do you want to do it?”
He blinked. “You’re going to sew up my coat?”
Isla went bright red. She had genuinely barely given it a second thought; she had darned for her father and was always proud of her neat stitching, and couldn’t bear looking at the beautiful expensive coat with the tears in the fine material. It was mostly habit.
And partly gratitude; he had, undeniably, despite his bad attitude, saved Ash from at the very least a nasty hit to the head. His hands were still red and cut.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said, which made her feel even worse, like a servant he was being kind to.
“Well, you helped my friend,” she said, her voice timid and shy.
Konstantin blinked.
“You can do it if you want,” she said again.
“I don’t know how.”
“You can’t sew?”
He laughed. “Of course I can’t sew! Who can sew?”
“I can sew!” said Kerry.
“Moi aussi,” said Gaspard. “Of course. We are not animals.”
“So, everyone can sew,” said Konstantin suspiciously. If he ever ripped anything, he tended to throw it away; he thought everyone did.
The kitchen staff looked back at him.
Isla would have put money on him saying something snotty and cutting, or just leaving them to get on with it on his behalf. Instead, he sat back in his chair.
“Okay,” he said. “Teach me to sew.”
THEY HAD A little time before the cleanup and dinner service. Gaspard went off for his daily sieste. Kerry and Tam went out to collect eggs, a job Isla was absolutely terrified of but they both seemed to quite like. It depended very much where you stood on chickens. Isla was scared of their beady little eyes, but she was a little scared of a lot of things. Konstantin hadn’t been drafted yet in case Bjårk ate all the eggs. Bjårk tried to go help, but they were having none of it.
Isla retuned the radio from the shocking French pop music Gaspard liked (Flora had commented dryly that his good taste in food obviously had to be evened out somewhere else by his frankly horrible taste in music) to BBC Radio nan Gàidheal and let its gentle music run through the big kitchen.
The low winter sun briefly showed its face, illuminating the clean white tiles on the walls, the shiny metal implements, the good wooden table. She bent her dark head to his blond one and, with some swearing and a couple of pricks to the fingers (his hands, he pointed out, had never been in such a state, and she was tempted to say his hands were so soft he should be ashamed), she showed him a simple running stitch, then a cross-stitch. She made him practice on the tea towels, though; she wouldn’t let him loose on his good coat.
“You’ll ruin it.”
He looked uncharacteristically thoughtful. “I ruin a lot of things,” he said suddenly.
She looked up at him then, and the sun caught her dark hair and made her huge dark eyes shine very brightly. “Well,” she said. “You didn’t ruin the Christmas trees.”
“True.”
“And you didn’t ruin the leek tatin.”
“Mine was by far the worst.”
“Well, everyone else is a chef and I’m a baker.”
“It did taste good, though,” he added almost to himself.
“And now you can do a running stitch!” she said, and he glanced down at his handiwork.
“Oh,” he said.
“What?” said Isla, even as she noticed him smiling.
He held up his hands. “I’ve sewn the tea towel to my shirt.”
Isla burst out laughing as he stood up, the towel flapping off him. He tugged at it.
“Don’t pull it! You’ll rip another hole in your clothes! Stay still!”
And she carefully approached him, the low sun streaming in through the windows, and was suddenly very conscious of him and his long, hard body through his expensive twill shirt. She realized the kitchen scissors were in the dishwasher. There was no help for it. Carefully and deftly, as he lifted his arms, she bent toward him and neatly bit through the loop of the thread, then pulled it out, leaving no trace.
She caught a faint scent of his aftershave too, something oddly like leather or tobacco or something . . . Where on earth did a kitchen boy get all these expensive tastes? It made no sense at all.
She was blushing harder than ever as she straightened up. He was looking a bit startled too; he hadn’t realized she was going to bite it. Her face was so close to his, as the sun shone down on her shiny dark hair, that he felt . . . well. It had been a while. He felt a jolt, then stopped himself for being ridiculous. It had taken him a little bit by surprise, that was all.
“I could have got Bjårk to do that,” he said, checking the shirt again, hiding his slightly pink face just in case she could read his thoughts from it.
“Next time,” said Isla, scuttling off. “We’d better get cleaned up.”
And in a second she had her unflattering kitchen cap on again and was elbow-deep in hot soapy water with the ramekins, and everything was back to normal.
So Isla didn’t get to see Iona till later that night, and then she pointed out that Iona, despite being the supposedly great social media maven, had turned her Instagram to private after she’d flirted rather disastrously with a celebrity and forgotten to turn it back on again, and Iona reposted the entire video from the dinner again.
At first, Facebook take-up was slow, but Instagram was quick.
And then one of the Scottish papers retweeted it, then the radio stations started to pick up on it—and then it really started to move. By the time the numbers were clicking up exponentially and her phone had started to glow hot with the notifications, the girls were staring at each other, half in delight, half in horror.
Iona plugged her phone into the wall to stop it from dying and texted Flora.
Go take a look at my insta!!!!!!!!! but unfortunately by then it was after nine o’clock at night, which meant Flora was lying spread-eagle on her bed in the mansion, fast asleep, a television show playing on her computer screen to which she was completely oblivious. She was oblivious too to Joel giving Douglas his night bottle, half smiling, half wincing at the noisy snoring noises coming from the master bedroom.
Flora was taking too much on, and he probably should be doing more, he thought. She was the one who was meant to be on leave. Except . . . he wasn’t entirely sure that actually going to the hotel wasn’t good for her. She was made to be busy, Flora. He wondered, mildly, if she hadn’t overestimated how much she would enjoy sitting in a rocking chair.
He looked down at Douglas, who was sucking his bottle with an expression of exceptional happiness on his face. Douglas drank deeply, smacked his lips in contentment, and allowed himself a long, luxuriant fart.
“If you had told me,” said Joel softly to the little one, “how much I would be perfectly fine with another human being taking a massive fart in my hands, I think I’d have found it quite difficult to believe you. In the past.”
Douglas smiled dreamily, as he had taken to doing at the sound of his father’s voice, and, as usual, Joel felt the familiar catch at the heart, laced once more with sadness that his own parents hadn’t felt the same way, or if they had, they—teenagers as they had been—still hadn’t been able to look after him, protect him. Whereas now, looking down at this little face, he couldn’t think of a single thing he wouldn’t do to protect Douglas, to keep him safe, nor a single place on earth—he peered out into the dark night—that would be better for him to do it in. Yes, he should get back to work. Those damn lights, he was running out of time. But oh, it was better right here, right now.
Under the great cold stars of the North Atlantic, all was well.
The following morning, all hell broke loose.