worse?’
‘Aftershocks,’ Hubert said wisely. He’d moved away a little in an attempt to regain his dignity. Now he clicked his fingers for Elspeth to come to him. Elspeth wriggled higher onto Robbie’s lap and Hubert had to sidle closer himself to pat his dog.
They were depending on her, Morag thought despairingly. So what was new? The entire island depended on her—when often all she wanted to do was wail.
This was an earthquake. This was truly scary. Who did she get to tremble on?
No one. Ever. She swallowed and fought for calm and for sense.
‘Hubert’s right. Mild earth tremors are nothing to worry about.’ She put Robbie gently aside and ruffled his hair. ‘Robbie, you know I need to go.’ She sent him a silent message with her eyes, saying she was depending on him.
And Robbie responded. He’d learned from birth what was expected of him as the doctor’s kid, and he rose to the occasion now.
‘Do you really have to go?’ he asked.
‘You know that I do.’
‘Can I come with you?’
‘It’d better if you stayed here for a bit.’
He took a deep breath. He really was the best kid. ‘OK.’ Elspeth got a hard hug. ‘I’ll look after Elspeth if Mr Hamm looks after me.’
‘Is that OK with you, Mr Hamm?’ she asked, and Hubert flashed her a worried look.
‘It’s fine by me, girl, but you—’
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘You know, the first quake is usually the biggest,’ Robbie volunteered. It really hadn’t been a very big shake and it was already starting to recede to adventure rather than trouble. ‘I read about them in my nature book. There’s not likely to be another bigger one. Just little aftershocks.’
‘That’s a relief.’
‘Maybe a bigger one’d be cool.’
‘No,’ Morag said definitely. ‘It wouldn’t be cool.’
‘Or maybe this was a ginormous one out to sea and we just got the little sideways shocks a long way away,’ he said, optimism returning minute by minute.
‘Well, that’d be better,’ Morag conceded, thinking about it. ‘With the closest land mass being the mainland three hundred miles away, there’s not much likelihood of any damage at all. Mind, a few dolphins might be feeling pretty seasick.’
Robbie chuckled.
And that was that.
The earthquake was over. Even Elspeth started to wag her tail again.
But she still had to check the village.
Robbie’s chuckle was a good sound, Morag thought as she started down the scree. She’d worked hard on getting that sound back after his mother had died and now she treasured it. It was a major reason she was here, on this island.
Without a life.
Who was she kidding? She had a life. She had a community to care for. She had Robbie’s chuckle. And she had flying teapots to check out.
But it didn’t stop her mind from wandering.
Even though she lived in one of the most isolated places in the world, there was little enough time for her to be alone. She had so many demands made on her. If it wasn’t her patients it was Robbie, and although she loved the little boy to bits, this time scrambling down the scree when she wasn’t much worried about what she’d find below was a time to be treasured.
She liked being alone.
No, she thought. She didn’t. Here she was seldom by herself, but alone was a concept that had little to do with people around her.
She liked being by herself for a while. But she didn’t like alone.
Always at the back of her heart was Grady. The life she’d walked away from.
There was no turning back, but her loss of Grady was still an aching grief, shoved away and never allowed to surface. But it was always there.
He’d written her the loveliest letter when Beth had died, saying how much he missed her, offering to take her away for a holiday, offering to organise things in Sydney so she could return, offering everything but himself.
She’d taken the letter up to the top of the lighthouse. There she’d torn it into a thousand pieces and let it blow out to sea.
Enough. Enough of Grady. She hadn’t heard from him for four years.
Concentrate on need.
Surely an earthquake was worth concentrating on.
Two hundred yards down the path she paused. The closer she came to the village the more it looked as if there was no damage at all.
Hubert really did treasure his isolation. The path up to his cottage was little more than a goat track on the side of a steep incline. She could stand here for a moment with the sun on her face, look out at the breathtaking beauty of the ocean beyond the island and wonder how she could ever dream of leaving such a place. It was just beautiful.
The sea wasn’t where it was supposed to be.
She blinked for a moment, thinking her eyes were playing tricks. The tide’s a long way out, she thought inconsequentially, and then she thought, No, it’s a crazy way out. The beach was normally twenty or thirty yards wide but now…the water seemed to have been sucked…
Sucked.
A jangling, dreadful alarm sounded in her head as her eyes swept the horizon. She was suddenly frantic. Her feet were starting to move even as she searched, hoping desperately not to see…
But she saw.
There was a long line of silver, far out. She thought she was imagining it at first—thought it must be the product of dread. Maybe it was the horizon.
Only it wasn’t. It was a faint line beneath the horizon, moving inexorably closer. If it hadn’t been such a calm, still day she might not have seen it at all, for in deep water it was only marginally above the height of a biggish swell, but she was sure… There was a boat far out and she saw it bucket high—unbelievably high—and then disappear behind a wall of water.
No.
The villagers were out of their cottages. She could see them. They were gathering in the street beyond the harbour. They’d be comparing notes about damage from the tremor, fearing more. They wouldn’t be turned toward the sea.
She was running now, racing up the goat path. She’d never moved so fast in her life.
At least she knew what needed to be done. This place had been the graveyard for scores of ships in the years since the first group of Scottish fishermen had built their homes here, and the islanders were geared for urgent warning. The track she was on overlooked the entire island. There were bells up here, set up to make the villagers aware that there was an urgent, life-threatening need. At every curve in the track—every couple of hundred yards—there was a bell, and every island child knew the way to be sent to Coventry for ever was to ring one needlessly.
Morag knew exactly where the closest one was, and her feet had never moved so fast as they did now. Seconds after she’d first heard her own mental alarm bell, she reached the closest warning place and the sound of the huge bell rang out across the island.
This wasn’t a shipwreck. It was the islanders themselves who were in deadly peril.
They’d have to guess what she was warning of. ‘Guess,’ she pleaded. ‘Guess.’
They heard. The islanders gathered in the street stilled. She saw them turn to face her as they registered the sound of the bell.
She was too far away to signal