Stormy Petrel by Mary Stewart Page A

are steps going up to what’s left of the top level, with a view.’
    â€˜It sounds terrific,’ said Megan.
    Ann made a face. ‘You can have it.’ Then, to me: ‘We went to Orkney last summer, and she made me crawl in through a ghastly tunnel into some underground charnel-house. Never again! It’s bad enough now, but it must have been really something when it was occupied. Apparently they ate nothing but shellfish, and just dropped the shells on the floor when they’d finished. You can imagine.’
    â€˜Unfair to Celts,’ said Megan. ‘Racist. We had middens, and—’
    â€˜Yes, just outside the front door. We saw those, too . . .’ Ann turned a laughing face to me. ‘Dr Fenemore, would you like to come with us? We’d love you to, and you can tell Megan all about her wretched broch. She’s been reading them up for days.’
    â€˜Yes, do!’ Megan joined her plea to Ann’s, with such eager sincerity that I laughed and agreed.
    â€˜I’d love to. But Megan can do the lecturing. I don’t know the first thing about brochs. Look, why not come down to my cottage now, and we’ll have lunch there – I never have much more than just a picnic myself – then we can go across this afternoon, and maybe take tea to have on the island? But on one condition, that you stop calling me “Dr Fenemore”. We’re a long way from Cambridge now, and my name is Rose.’
    We shared our resources for lunch – the girls’ picnic sandwiches and a cold pie and some fruit I had bought that morning – and ate it comfortably in the cottage kitchen, with its grandstand view of the bay. To our delight we also got a grandstand view of the original owners of the bay – the otters. An adult, presumably the female, came close inshore, followed by two young ones, and she seemed to be teaching them to fish, but after a few splashing sallies with no success she gave up, and dived away. The pups slithered out onto the weedy boulders, not forty feet from the cottage window, and waited expectantly until she reappeared carrying a sizeable fish, which the two of them ate together, wrestling over it among the sea-tangle. Then the three of them swam away into the deeper water under the headland.
    â€˜They’ll come back,’ I said comfortingly to the girls, who were lamenting that they had forgotten to bring a camera. ‘Surely they will. This isn’t called Otters’ Bay for nothing. And if they come when my brother’s here, he’ll get some marvellous shots of them, I promise you, telephoto lens, the lot, and I think he’s got a video camera now, too. He’ll make prints for you. Now, anyone for coffee?’
    â€˜It is thought by some,’ said Megan, in a smooth lecturer’s voice from which all trace of her faint Welsh lilt had vanished, ‘that the Scottish brochs may be an extension of the southern round-house culture, as exemplified in some sites of south-western England, but this seems unlikely, in view of—’
    â€˜The Scots’ll be pleased to hear that,’ said Ann. ‘But I’m just not enthralled, and I’m sure Dr – I’m sure Rose isn’t either.’
    â€˜Do I really sound like that?’ I asked.
    Megan gasped and went scarlet. ‘It wasn’t – I didn’t –’ Then she saw me laughing and flopped her hands forward in a gesture of relief. ‘Of course you don’t! I was quoting, anyway. I’ve been reading up on brochs, but when you’re actually there it’s really just the setting that’s so marvellous, and trying to imagine the sort of life they lived.’
    â€˜Raw shellfish for breakfast,’ muttered Ann.
    She was ignored. ‘Weren’t they really forts?’ I asked. ‘Defensive places?’
    â€˜Yes. They must have been the Iron Age equivalent of the mediæval castle with