Page 1 of The Scottish Island Inn

PROLOGUE

Dear Sorrel,

I wish you’d talk to me. Or any of us. We miss you.

Heather and I talk about you all the time. About the time you climbed the oak tree in the school playground and refused to come down. About the stories you would tell us and how you used to make us dress up as princes and princesses. About how you used to cut up pictures of furniture and interiors from Mum’s magazines and make them into collages. You always made them look so good.

Heather has just announced that she’s getting married next year. She’s marrying some guy called Matty Campbell, if you can believe it. We don’t know much about him, but Heather is head over heels.

I hardly hear from Violet, but that’s because she’s abroad all the time being a beauty journalist. I don’t know why that means that she has to travel so much, but apparently the world of beauty never sleeps and she has to be in Abu Dhabi one week and Paris the next. We are super proud of her, but I wish she would come home more – and send me some freebies, ha ha. She and Heather don’t talk much, which is sad for twins, especially as Heather is getting married. Violet says fifty per cent of all marriages end in divorce.

Blossom and Tom are still running the farm on the mainland. It’s going well, she says, even though it’s a lot of early mornings and the subsidies aren’t what they were, and the kids are growing like weeds. Her words. She brings us lots of food though, so Mum’s always happy with that. Aunt Joan says she can’t eat a steak because of her teeth nowadays, but last time Blossom brought steaks home for everyone, Aunt Joan ate her whole one in about ten seconds.

Primrose is still teaching in Edinburgh, and she says that if she has to spend one more winter inhaling the sweaty teenager stink of the drama studio she might die, but we all know that she loves it.

I can’t believe you’ve been gone ten years. We all miss you so much.

I wish you’d come back.

Your sister,

Bluebell xx

ONE

‘We’re going to have to close the Inn.’

Angus Balhennie sat down with a slump in his favourite chair and let out a long, loud sigh. His wife, Catriona, looked at him with a raised eyebrow. In thirty-five years of marriage and as the mother of six daughters – all now grown, at least – she had become accustomed to dramatic outbursts.

Angus was a good husband, though. He had been much more patient and kind with the girls when they were little than she had; as much as he could be dramatic, he was the kindest person she’d ever known. Kindness mattered deeply to Catriona; she’d been raised without much of it, and with Angus, she’d always felt as though he was a warm blanket she could wrap around herself. Angus kept the cold away, and Catriona knew all too well how cold life could be.

Catriona often said that some of her daughters’ flair for drama definitely came from the Balhennie side of the family. Her own family, the Stewarts, were farmers. Solid, practical people with little in the way of emotional exclamations or demonstrative love. That was what had drawn her to Angus, she said: Angus knew how to love. He was warm, funny, caring. A good father. But all of the Balhennie clan were prone to big feelings.

You take the rough with the smooth, Catriona thought as she sat down opposite her husband. She’d heard Angus make plenty of dramatic announcements over the course of their marriage, and the sky was yet to fall in on their heads.

‘What d’you mean?’ she asked. ‘We can’t close the Inn. Don’t be silly.’

The Balhennie Inn was part of the landscape on Skye. The stone had been so weathered by the rain, sun and wind over the hundreds of years that it had stood in its thriving, generous garden that it matched the colour of the grey sky as often as not. The rest of the time, it looked as if it was slowly being taken back by nature, with one of the side walls completely covered with ivy, and with Catriona’s pink roses that grew up the side of a wooden trellis around the imposing front door.

But as well as being part of the physical landscape, the Inn had been a place of sanctuary, warmth and love for generations. When storms shook the island and people’s homes lost power, Angus and Catriona made sure that all the neighbours gathered at the Inn. When the local school needed new equipment for the playground, the Balhennies raised money with a village fete. The Inn housed a book group, bridge and canasta evenings, and Catriona hosted a monthly tea and cake drop-in to raise money for a breast cancer charity. The Inn was intrinsic to the local community. The idea that it might have to close was unthinkable.

‘I’m not being silly, hen. We had the flooding in the basement, and there are cracks in the walls. It’s subsidence. It needs sorting out immediately. The building isn’t safe, but more to the point, our insurance is invalid until it gets fixed.’ He shook his head, worriedly.

‘Okay. So we’ll get it fixed.’ Catriona shrugged.

‘I don’t know if we can. I don’t know that we can afford it.’ Angus handed Catriona a quote written on a piece of notepaper: it was embossed with WELCOME TO THE BALHENNIE INN, ESTABLISHED 1643. PROUD TO BE A FAMILY BUSINESS at the top.

Catriona looked at the figure on the paper, and then up at her husband.

‘Are you serious?’ she asked. Now she was worried. There was no way that she and Angus had anything like that amount in the bank.

‘Sadly, I am.’ Angus sighed. ‘We can’t have any guests staying here until it’s fixed, if we’re not insured to have guests. And from this moment we are not.’

‘Oh, love.’ Catriona got up and stood in front of where her husband sat in his easy chair. She wrapped her arms protectively around him and held him to her chest as he leaned towards her. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘I don’t know, my angel.’ Angus sighed again. ‘We might have to close. Permanently. I can’t see a way out of this otherwise.’

‘We will find a way.’ Catriona set her jaw stubbornly. ‘This is our home, as well as the family business. We can’t just give up. Where would we go if we couldn’t live here? Where would the girls live, and what about Aunt Joan and Aunt Chrissie?’