She hesitated, freezing at the thought of going back there. ‘Will that be all right with your parents?’
He took her face in his hands and kissed her again. ‘It’ll have to be. I’ve been thinking about it – being on watch at two in the morning gives you quite a bit of time for that. My father’s going to have to get used to the idea of us from here on in.’
Ardtuath House was completely dark as they walked up the drive, its turrets black against a sky hung with stars. Flora felt herself tensing in anticipation at having to face Sir Charles on the other side of the blackout and reached for Alec’s hand. But the front door was locked and Alec’s knock echoed in the darkness, met with a resounding silence.
‘Looks like they’re not here,’ he said. ‘Come on, we’ll go round the back.’
He unlocked the kitchen door and they stepped into the stillness of the empty house. The range had been left to go out and it was barely warmer inside than out.
‘Perhaps they’re at the Urquharts’，’ Alec commented. ‘Come on, let’s light the fire in the library and see what we can forage in the larder.’
Half an hour later the logs were blazing cheerfully in the hearth and they’d spread out a makeshift picnic before it. The atmosphere in the house was completely different when Sir Charles wasn’t there. Flora eased off her shoes and knelt on the rug to toast some slightly stale bread on the flames, wriggling her toes in their thick stockings as she luxuriated in the warmth. Once each slice had browned, she removed it from the toasting fork and passed it to Alec to spread with butter while she made the next piece. They ate it with slices of ham and washed it down with a couple of bottles of ale that they’d found lurking in a forgotten corner of the larder.
‘Best meal I’ve had in ages,’ Alec grinned. ‘But that may have as much to do with the company as it does the menu.’ He stretched out contentedly in front of the fire and rested his head in her lap.
‘So what was it like? Out there?’
She stroked his hair, watching the firelight dance across his face as he gazed into the flames and told her about the journey. He described the mixture of fear and excitement as they’d set off, which had soon turned into a kind of dull dread as they faced the monotony of the grey Arctic waters, day in, day out, never knowing whether they were being watched and what might be lurking below the waves.
A storm had blown up a few nights in, sending towering waves of icy green water crashing over the deck of the ship. In the bitter temperatures, the water had frozen, forming a thick shell of ice on the windward side of the ship. They’d taken it in turns to tie on a lifeline and brave the treacherously slippery, listing deck as it pitched and rolled, taking an axe to the ice to prevent the build-up of weight from capsizing the ship.
Radio silence had to be maintained so that the German listening stations didn’t pick up the convoy’s presence, so although they travelled as a group with each ship holding its position in the line, there was a sense of isolation that was only amplified by the sight of the Arctic ice floes in the distance. That winter ice narrowed the channel available to them, forcing them to navigate a fine line between icebergs to the north and the German-occupied Norwegian coast to the south. But the short winter days brought fog as well, which covered the sea in a lowlying blanket – so thick, Alec said, that you could hardly see the jackstaff from the bridge of the Isla. Ordinarily they’d have cursed it as another hazard to be negotiated, but in those dangerous waters they’d given thanks for the white shroud that concealed them and allowed them to slip past the north cape undetected. Finally, with relief, they’d turned their bows to the south-east, hugging the Russian shore as they entered the Kola Inlet which led to the port of Murmansk.
Flora passed Alec her glass and he raised himself up on one elbow as he replenished it from the bottle. Then he reached across and fished another log from the basket, throwing it on to the fire where it settled in a cascade of sparks as tongues of flame licked around it.
‘What’s Russia like?’ she asked.
‘Cold. Dark. Vast. But with a terrible sort of beauty as well. We were met by a pilot vessel to guide us in and were pretty pleased to see it, I can tell you. It’s a deep fjord but the channel’s so narrow there you need to keep your wits about you. We had steep mountains to starboard and were jolly glad to think that they stood between us and the Germans. And the most extraordinary thing happened as we neared Murmansk . . . All the upper works of the ships, the masts and the yards, suddenly started to glow with a white flickering light. I’d heard of it before – they call it St Elmo’s fire – but that’s the first time I’ve ever seen it. In the mist, everything becomes charged with static and it discharges from anything that has a point. It was like our own personal lightning show. We were mightily relieved that it hadn’t happened off Norway, I can tell you. We’d have been lit up for the Jerries like Christmas trees!’