Christmas at the Island Hotel - Jenny Colgan Page 0,54

it.”

“Well, seeing as you know everything about me, I don’t think I have to answer that question,” he said as they each carried on with the butter, then put the layer to chill for twenty minutes in the fridge. A silence descended.

Isla got up and made coffee. Konstantin was delighted.

“So, tell me what’s great about Mure then,” said Konstantin, sipping the coffee, which was in fact excellent, surprisingly enough.

“You really want to know?”

“No, but I’ve got to wait twenty minutes and I don’t have any credit on my phone.”

Isla sniffed. “Well, you obviously just haven’t been paying attention.”

“I have,” said Konstantin. “But the wind keeps blowing my hat over my eyes.”

Isla almost smiled. “Well. It’s got the most beautiful views everywhere you go. It’s just a wee island, but when you stand on the ben, it feels huge. You feel like you’re nowhere near anybody, but if you want company, then everyone is pleased to see you, or at least will be happy to have a chat. You’re safe wherever you go. Nothing bad is going to happen to you as long as you don’t fall in the harbor.”

“Does that happen often?”

“When I was wee,” said Isla, smiling despite herself, “I heard that someone had fallen off the gangway to the ferry and the selkies took them, and I was so terrified.”

“Did you know them?”

She shook her head. “It was always someone’s friend’s cousin who was visiting from the mainland. Then my mum said she’d been told that when she was small, and her mother too back when it was the old boats. I think it’s just something they tell children to keep them away from the water.”

Konstantin smiled. “What’s a selkie? A drowned person?”

“Not quite. A seal person would take you to play with you. And sometimes they send a seal back in your place who would be good-looking but weird.”

“We have something like that too! The King of Ekeberg. He hated his own children, so he would swap his for yours. So if you woke up and your child was different . . .”

“That’s strange,” said Isla. “That there’s different stories about changeling children.”

Konstantin shook his head. “I don’t think so. Most cultures have them. I think it’s how they explained autistic children before science.”

Isla hadn’t thought of that before. “Goodness,” she said, thinking of the legends of the children, so beautiful but so strange behind their seal eyes. “That’s so sad.”

“Well, it comes on at about that age . . .” He stopped himself. “It’s not always sad, though, is it? Just different.”

Isla thought of Flora’s train-obsessed big brother Hamish, who had never been able to leave home or really be trusted walking down to the shops by himself, but was adored by everyone.

“I suppose you’re right,” said Isla. “They must have been so frightened, though.”

“Oh, I think people are very frightened now,” said Konstantin. “They think it’s an evil doctor with an injection.”

“They do,” said Isla, pondering. “Gosh.”

The ding on the timer slightly startled them both, speaking about changeling children under a dark and freezing moon.

Together they jumped up and rebuttered and folded their dough companionably, chopped it up into twelve crescents each, then popped the trays in the hot oven and refilled the coffee machine.

“This can’t be good for you,” complained Konstantin. “This is a heart attack amount of butter. Why aren’t the French all dead?”

“Because it’s good butter,” said Isla soothingly. “That’s the other great thing about Mure. Everything we make here is pure and local. There’s a cow, there’s some rain—”

“Quite a lot of rain,” added Konstantin.

“And some grass, and salt from the salt pans, and there you are.”

“Okay,” said Konstantin, breathing in the warming scented air. “If that tastes as good as it smells, you’ll absolutely have convinced me.”

This time he brought Isla a coffee, and they sat together, and he let her tell him all about the myths of the land—the princess who stepped onto the iceberg to escape the Vikings, the witches who ran ships aground—and he told her about the trolls of the great dark forests and the elves who came to give strange gifts in his northern homeland. And then finally the croissants rose up, warm and steaming and light as a feather and absolute miracles, and they added, to their giggling shame, even more butter, and ate one, which was too hot, and then another, frankly, because they couldn’t help themselves, they were so airy, crunchy on the outside and yielding and miraculously light underneath, the most