“Lori, Lori, Lori,” he said sorrowfully. “Pumping your sons for information? For shame. For no good purpose, either. I promised your dear husband that I’d keep our destination secret, and secret it shall remain. For a few minutes longer, at any rate.”
“A few minutes,” I echoed thoughtfully. It was the closest thing to a hint I’d heard since he’d mentioned Gretna Green, though admittedly it wasn’t a very helpful one. If we were only a few minutes from our destination, it had to be on a coast, but since Great Britain was an island, there were a lot of coasts to choose from. Sighing, I peered through the window and tried once more to figure out where Sir Percy was taking us.
The sky was a pale, misty blue, but the sea was dazzling, a wrinkled sheet of aquamarine slashed with silver shards of sunlight. I spotted a small fishing boat floating among the glittering waves below us and an enormous oil tanker far out at sea, plowing steadily onward. It wasn’t until Will shouted “Land, ho!” that I looked away from the tanker and saw that we were approaching a small island.
“Erinskil,” Sir Percy announced through the headphones. “The jewel of the Scottish isles and my little home-away-from-home. Yours, too, until it’s time for you to leave.”
“The Scottish isles!” I exclaimed. “How wonderful!”
“I’m glad you approve,” said Sir Percy.
If I craned my neck to look through the windows on the twins’ side of the cabin, I could see a series of larger islands in the distance, but it was difficult to tell how far they were from Erinskil. If I squinted, I could just make out an even larger body of land beyond the islands.
“Is the west coast of Scotland off there to our right?” I asked.
“It is,” Sir Percy answered, and continued in the singsong voice of a well-practiced tour guide, “the golden isle of Erinskil lies forty miles west of the Scottish mainland, thirty-two miles from the nearest neighboring island. Fewer than two hundred souls live on Erinskil, spread comfortably over twenty square miles of occasionally arable land. The ferry visits our pleasant shores once a week, but tourists seldom come to call, thanks to our somewhat primitive landing facilities. An ideal retreat for those seeking peace and privacy, wouldn’t you say?”
“I would,” I agreed wholeheartedly. Sir Percy’s solution to our security problem was, to my mind, nothing short of masterful. I’d sleep much better while Abaddon was on the loose, knowing that the twins and I were protected by such a formidable moat.
“Shall I give you an aerial tour?” Sir Percy inquired.
“Yes, please,” I said eagerly. I’d been to a good many places in Great Britain, both before and after I’d chosen to live there. I’d traveled from Lands End to John o’ Groats, from Wookey Hole’s depths to Mount Snowdon’s summit, but I’d never set sail for the fabled Western Isles of Scotland. Although I would have preferred to visit them under less stressful circumstances, I couldn’t help feeling a tingle of excitement at the prospect of finally experiencing island life firsthand.
“Look, Mummy!” Rob’s voice piped in my headphones. “Windmills!”
Erinskil was longer than it was wide, like an oval platter with a badly chipped rim, pointing north. As we flew over its southwestern tip, I saw a forest of windmills planted on a towering headland. They were modern windmills with long, graceful propellers clearly designed to generate power, but their bases were surprisingly stumpy.
“Why are the windmills so short?” I asked Sir Percy.
“Because they’re perched atop three-hundred-foot cliffs,” he replied, “in a spot where the wind hasn’t stopped blowing since Adam first met Eve. If they were taller, the winter gales would knock ’em over. It’d be dashed inconvenient to be without electricity from September through March, don’t you think?”
“Winter lasts from September through March up here?” I said incredulously.
“We’re not in the Bahamas, Lori,” Sir Percy pointed out. “Even now, in the latter days of April, Erinskil’s no place for the fainthearted.”
“I guess not,” I conceded, and continued to peer downward while Sir Percy flew in a series of S curves that allowed us to view the island from coast to coast.
Erinskil’s long central valley was surrounded by a necklace of steep hills. Along the coasts, foaming waves unfurled on white-sand beaches or crashed with a flourish against tall, craggy cliffs. Hundreds of thousands of seabirds rose in swirling clouds from the cliffs as we passed, their beaks open nearly as wide as their wings as they objected raucously to our intrusion.