Saskia's Journey Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Map

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by Theresa Breslin

  Praise for Saskia’s Journey

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  I know this place . . .

  Why does Saskia feel so disturbed when she goes to spend a few weeks with her reclusive great-aunt Alessandra up on the Scottish coast? Why does she feel such a sense of menace around Alessandra’s house when she has never been there before?

  Just as the sea may give up its bounty, will Alessandra reveal the secrets – and tragedies – of their family’s past? Somehow Saskia knows that she must understand more if she is to find the direction she needs for her future. For only then can she break the cycle, find the courage to stand up for what she wants – and be free . . .

  Saskia’s Journey

  THERESA BRESLIN

  For the people of the lands of Buchan

  With special thanks to Ann and Bert

  DEAD RECKONING – a method of establishing one’s position using the distance and direction travelled rather than astronomical observations.

  And now Saskia was aware of the sea.

  Glancing up from her book, it filled her vision at once and so completely that she drew in her breath. Without thinking she reached out her hand so that her fingers touched the train window, and the tension of the last weeks sloughed from her mind as she gave way to a familiar response of wonder and delight. Childhood memories surfaced – school trips to the seaside, long happy days playing on the beach, watching the waves; and Saskia knew that she was smiling.

  The sea had little thought for Saskia.

  It was the time of the spawning. From the Davis Strait to the Barents Sea, and beyond Rockall and Malin towards the Hebrides and the Shetlands, the shoals were moving in from deep water. Round Cape Wrath, the Butt of Lewis and the Faeroe Isles, silent streams of fish, pelagic and demersal, sought out their breeding grounds . . .

  Saskia tucked her book into her rucksack and leaned her forehead on the window glass. She would never tire of looking at the sea. The variety of its moods bewitched her as did the sensation of being caught up in light and space between her own self and the unreachable horizon.

  In the days when her parents had seemed interested in what she thought and her home was a less dangerous place to be, she had struggled with the mind of a child to explain a concept that she couldn’t grasp. She had been nine or ten and crying at the end of a summer’s day spent by the sea when it came time for them to drive home to the city once more.

  ‘Why?’ her parents had asked her. ‘Why do you like the sea so much?’

  ‘There’s nothing like it. It’s always changing and it . . . it doesn’t end . . . anywhere.’ Saskia had spread her hands out wide and then up and down to illustrate her idea of infinite dimensions.

  Now she glimpsed the North Sea from time to time beyond the line of the houses that rimmed the shore as the train slipped through a changing vista of mountain and valley. Fingers of spring were uncurling winter’s fist from the land – yellow broom and golden gorse thrusting through on the lower ground, the tops of the far hills still shawled in snow. Often the train was only metres away from the water’s edge then abruptly the line would twist inland to run through wooded areas and little towns.

  From when she was quite young Saskia had known that she wanted to learn more about the ocean; that playing sandcastles and even graduating to surfing and sailing was not enough. As she grew older, on days out she begged to be taken to aquariums or Sea World centres. She would stand for hours with her face close against the reinforced glass staring at the marine life. Once, it happened that she was suddenly conscious of her size compared to the fish within the tank; of how her great eye, magnified by the glass, might appear to the other living thing watching her. She felt a surge of power then and deliberately widened her eye with the conscious cruelty of a child seeking to terrify a smaller creature. Unimpressed, the fish gaped at her, flicked its tail and swam away.

  She was always drawn to the more unusual specimens, some mere pale ghosts of mucous jelly. The sight of these with their blindly waving translucent tendrils repelled her mother, who would shudder and call them sinister.

  Sinister.

  Interesting why that particular word should enter her mind at this moment. Was it because it best described the household she had left or the one she was going to? The only photograph she had ever seen of her great-aunt Alessandra showed a thin woman, standing alone, hands clasped in front of her, unsmiling, before a house of grey granite. Saskia had not been attracted to this relative whom her father had encouraged her to visit.

  ‘Be especially nice to her, pet, won’t you?’ Her father draped his arm around her shoulder. ‘Your great-aunt Alessandra has written and asked particularly for you to come. And I think now it’s time you saw her again.’

  At first Saskia had resisted – the place was so far away – but she found it difficult to refuse her dad when he was on one of his charm offensives.

  ‘There are lots of coastal paths there. Why don’t you take your bicycle with you and explore the area? The house is right next to the sea so you could look at shells and, and . . . erm . . . other things.’ He grinned and winked, and she was so glad to be having his attention that she mentally sidestepped the realization that he didn’t actually appreciate how much she still loved the sea, and that her interest was more than collecting pretty shells.

  Eventually Saskia had relented and agreed to take some time out in her gap year to spend two weeks with her father’s aunt Alessandra. ‘You’ll find Alessandra an odd old biddy,’ her dad had said.

  ‘Not so old,’ her mother had interrupted.

  Saskia’s dad continued as though his wife had not spoken. ‘A strange old spinster woman in a strange old house. A house full of secrets.’ He laughed. ‘Rumour is that there’s some fortune stashed away in that mausoleum she lives in. My father was her older brother. There were just the two of them so we are her only living relatives. You be really attentive to her and perhaps we can wheedle a little legacy in advance. Better us to have it than it buried with her.’ He pulled Saskia closer for a hug. ‘We could put it to good use, couldn’t we? Go on a spending spree together? It would make life easier for all of us.’

  ‘Not us,’ her mother had said distinctly. ‘Not Saskia and me. Not us. You.’

  ‘Now, darling’ – Saskia’s father’s voice purred soft and warm in her hair as he replied to her mother – ‘let’s not forget how good you are at spending money. It’s one of the few skills you possess.’

  As he spoke her father let his arm drop and stepped back to look at his wife. And in
that moment the look that came and went between her parents was both terrible and indescribable so that Saskia shook. She shivered in the train then, although it wasn’t cold.

  At Aberdeen station Saskia collected her bicycle and rucksack and walked along the platform with the rest of the passengers. She paused at the station exit, saw a man standing smoking beside an old pick-up truck lift his head and look at her carefully. He nicked out his cigarette with his thumb and forefinger and dropped the stub end into his pocket as he came forward to meet her.

  ‘Saskia Granton.’ It was a statement rather than a question.

  Saskia nodded.

  ‘I’m Neil, Neil Buchan, the taxi driver. Miss Alessandra Granton sent me to fetch ye. She said ye’d have a bike wi’ ye, so I brought the pick-up instead of my car.’

  Saskia smiled, and to make conversation said, ‘I’m surprised you recognized me so quickly among all these people.’

  The man opened the door of the pick-up for her. ‘A’body would ken yer face. Yer like the woman herself right enough.’

  And as Saskia climbed into the passenger seat she heard him add under his breath as he closed the door, ‘God help ye.’

  ‘There.’ Neil Buchan took one hand from the steering wheel and pointed ahead. ‘If ye look there ye’ll see the Granton house when we get round the top of this hill.’

  Saskia’s legs were cramped and she struggled to sit upright as the truck turned the bend in the road. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Oh, my goodness!’

  ‘Aye, it’s quite a sicht.’ Neil pulled the truck across to the other side of the road and onto the grass verge.

  Saskia wound down the window. Immediately the sound and the smell of the sea filled her senses. She pulled open the door, jumped down from the pick-up truck and walked across the stubble grass to the barrier fence almost at the cliff edge.

  Neil came and stood beside her. ‘Tak’ care,’ he said. ‘This bit of headland is apt to crumble.’

  They were standing above the southern point of a small smoothly curved indent of land. High cliffs stood back from the narrow strip of beach and at the further end, halfway down the cliff, was a three-storey house with its back set into the rock face. There was a tiny square of garden to the left-hand side and then an almost vertical drop to the beach below. Saskia could see stairs carved into the cliff which led to the beach.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought it possible to have a house there!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘A lot of the older houses on this stretch of coast were built like that. The land falls away so steeply that ye reach the top level by outside stairs. The space below the roof was used to store the fishing nets. But that house is certainly special. This is the only point on the road that ye can see it. From anywhere else ye wouldna’ ken it was there.’

  Granite stone glittered on the walls of the house shouldered into the cliff, the quartz catching the light reflected by the sun going down behind the hills on the western horizon. The windows appeared sightless, but then that wasn’t true, thought Saskia. The sun’s rays glancing on the window glass meant that she couldn’t see in, not that someone inside couldn’t see out. The reverse in fact. On an evening like this a person inside the house could watch the road without being seen. Was her great-aunt watching for her? Saskia gazed at the house and it returned her stare.

  Saskia breathed in deeply to clear her head. It had been a very long train journey north from London, and almost another hour or so in the pick-up, but despite her tiredness the imminent presence of the sea had raised her spirits. She climbed back into the cab.

  ‘We have to leave the truck here,’ Neil said a few minutes later as he slowed down and drew into an opening at the right-hand side of the road. ‘We walk down to your aunt’s house by this path. Look ye now,’ he added, as he lifted Saskia’s rucksack and left her to wheel her bicycle, ‘the nearest village, Fhindhaven, is round the next bend o’ the road, less than a ten-minute walk, and there’s a bus passes this way every hour, north to Inverness, south to Aberdeen. And’ – he paused – ‘my house is the first one ye come to on the top road into the village, the one with the red roof. There’s a’ways somebody about if ye need any help.’

  Help.

  The word lodged in Saskia’s mind as she followed Neil Buchan down the steep path to her great-aunt’s house.

  Great-aunt Alessandra was waiting for her, standing in the frame of the door at the gable end of the house. Saskia saw her step down onto the path and then stop, to wait for Saskia to come to her.

  Alessandra Granton was considerably younger than Saskia had expected her to be. She recalled her mother’s words, describing Alessandra. ‘Not so old’, she had said, but her father had spoken of his aunt as though she were ninety. Saskia did some quick mental arithmetic. She knew that her grandfather and great-grandfather had died at sea just after the Second World War, first one, then the other, only a year or so later. Her grandfather, her father’s father, had been just twenty years old and Alessandra was his younger sister. This being 1988, her great-aunt could only be in her fifties. This woman’s face, although lined around the eyes, was smoothly composed. Her hair was pulled back into a knot, twisted and held at the nape of her neck. She held her hands in front of her, just as in the photograph that Saskia had seen, fingers of one hand clasped around the wrist of the other.

  Only when Saskia was quite close to her did Alessandra offer a greeting.

  ‘Welcome, Saskia. Welcome to Cliff House.’

  Saskia shook her great-aunt’s outstretched hand. ‘Thank you for having me to stay, Great-aunt Alessandra.’

  To Saskia’s surprise her great-aunt’s face flushed. Alessandra didn’t reply, only hurried past Saskia to take the bicycle from Neil Buchan.

  ‘Let me do that for ye,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Alessandra, and she grasped the bicycle firmly, wheeled it along the path and rested it against the wall of the house.

  Now that she was in the tiny garden Saskia could see how the house was entered at two levels. The ground floor and the first floor must be connected within by a staircase. And the second level, the attic, had its own outside door. Saskia raised her head to look at it.

  And as she did something chimed in her head.

  I know this place.

  There was a path here that led to the stairs beyond the kitchen window and there were twenty steep steps to climb to the door that led into the second floor. She knew that as certainly as she knew anything.

  Twenty steps. Hewn out of the rock.

  But how did she know this?

  Her driver, Neil Buchan, was speaking to her aunt.

  ‘She’s a Granton all right. I’d’ve kent her in any crowd. She’s your living image at that age. As like you as life.’

  ‘She’s like herself,’ Saskia’s great-aunt said sharply.

  Neil dropped his eyes, then raised them again, looking into Alessandra’s face.

  ‘Let me pay you now, Neil Buchan.’ Alessandra thrust some paper money into the taxi driver’s hand.

  Neil’s face went red. ‘Och, Alessandra, dinna worry aboot that the noo.’

  But Alessandra forced him to accept the money, and he went away still muttering a protest. Alessandra took Saskia by the arm. ‘Come inside,’ she said. ‘Come inside.’

  As Saskia followed Alessandra indoors she imagined that within the impassiveness of her great-aunt’s face there was a small smile of victory.

  However, once inside the house Alessandra stopped, and she too looked intently at Saskia’s face. Taking Saskia’s chin firmly in her own fingers she turned her head this way and that, studying her features, her eyes coming to rest finally on her hair. It was the same colour as her own.

  And Saskia saw it was also the same colour as Saskia’s own father’s hair. Burnt cinnamon, Saskia’s mother called it, and when Saskia was small she had mixed the colour especially on her artist’s palette for Saskia. But where Saskia’s hair had flashes of red and copper Alessandra’s hair showed grey.
/>   ‘There’s no denying where you come from,’ Alessandra said at last and she sighed, a long exhalation of breath that contained resignation. ‘But what you make of it is for you to decide.’ She turned away then and went towards the kitchen and, as Saskia hesitated, she called over her shoulder, ‘Come. Come. You must be starving. There’s food here.’

  There was food, plenty of it: soup, potatoes, stew, fish pie, vegetable quiche, trifle, cake, ice cream.

  ‘I didn’t know what you’d like to eat.’ Alessandra waved her hand nervously over the selection of dishes on the kitchen worktop. ‘It’s been so long since I had any visitors. I know a lot of young people are vegetarian. Are you?’

  ‘For preference, yes,’ said Saskia, ‘but don’t go to any trouble, Great-aunt Alessandra. I can see to myself.’

  ‘Saskia, please just call me by my name.’ Alessandra gave a wry smile. ‘I know that I am sister to your grandfather, but I don’t feel particularly qualified to be anybody’s great-aunt.’ Alessandra paused and then continued, ‘If you want to freshen up and telephone your parents to let them know that you have arrived safely, I’ll warm some of these for you.’

  Using the phone in the hall Saskia called home and sighed as the answering machine came on. ‘It’s me,’ she paused, and then added, ‘Saskia . . .’ She waited, but no one at the other end rushed to pick up the receiver. She’d better be quick with her message. By the number of clicks she knew that there wasn’t much space on the tape. It would be filled with her parents’ friends and acquaintances calling to make dates: Rotary Club dinners, golf club fixtures, the Ladies’ Art Group classes, beauty salon appointments, luncheon club outings. Saskia spoke briefly.

  As she returned to the kitchen her aunt asked her, ‘Was Neil Buchan on time to collect you from the station?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Saskia. She felt obliged to defend her driver, who had tried to be kind to her in his own quiet way. ‘He stopped on the road to point out the house. The setting is magnificent and so unusual, hewn out of the rock, with those outside steps leading to the second floor.’