Jennie About to Be (41 page)

Beside her Alick was motionless. She couldn't hear his breathing and knew he was awake.
I must sleep
, she thought.
Please let me sleep. How can I walk fifteen miles tomorow if I don't sleep? It will be daylight before I know it
. It was better in a cave, to curl up and sleep like a badger in his sett. Old Brock, fearing nothing.

Coire na Broc
. She tried it aloud, timidly. “Does that mean ‘corrie of the badger'?”

“Yes.”

“I wanted to learn Gaelic,” she said. “I love the sound of it.”

He said suddenly, “You mind that you asked me this morning if I had the second sight? I do not, but there are whole families with it in the Western Isles, my mother said, and she could tell strange tales. But it was not in her family.”

She wondered what he was coming to, but she was glad he was talking.

“There is a wee touch of it in Fergus. His grandfather, now, they tell stories about him. I am thinking that perhaps Fergus saw Tigh nam Fuaran without you in it, and it frightened him away.”

“Now
I
am frightened.” She tried to make light of it, but the gooseflesh was tightening along her arms and legs.

“I am just supposing, you understand,” he said gently.

The theory of second sight had always fascinated her when her father used to talk about it, but when it touched her existence, she was repelled. If someone like Fergus could see what was to happen, it was as if everything had been laid out for her and she had mindlessly followed the plan. Still, if one could believe that hard enough, it should take away guilt; but Jennie Hawthorne did not wish to believe that she was anyone's or any
thing's
puppet, and if guilt was the price you had to pay for such insolence, so be it.

Fergus had gone away simply because he missed Mrs. MacIver and the girls; they had been his only family for so long. Lizzie Lindsay's accent had been harsh and upsetting to him, and the way she'd looked at him the first time he ventured into the kitchen, even if she'd meant no harm.

“What will you do in America?” she asked.

“I am willing and able to do anything with my hands. They must be building roads and making cities. My back and my legs are strong. It will have to be hard labor because I am a man of no learning whatever.”

“How much is ‘no learning'?” she asked. “If you mean you are not a scholar, neither is Archie, nor my Uncle Higham. Nor—” She almost said “Nigel.”

“I am a man who cannot write his own name.”

That silenced her, and he added with a bleak smile, “An ignorant peasant.”

“No, no!” she protested. “The way you speak, the way you use the language, I would say you had a good store of learning.”

“Och, that's the Gael of it. Words we love, and we all have the great memories on us, because everything must be passed on by word of mouth. I could give you stories and odes by the hour, with not one word changed from the way I learned them, but that would be in the Gaelic, and no good to you whatsoever except to put you to sleep.”

“Did you ever wish to write and read, or were you contented as you were?”

“In my grandfather's will he desired me to be educated. I didn't know that until my uncle Linnmore, Archie's father, him they call the Old Laird, died. I was around ten, and upset and worrying about what was to become of us with him gone; he had always a kind word for me. I thought,
Shall we be driven away?
So my mother told me about the grandfather's will. The roof was safe over our heads. Then I wanted to know when I was to go to school, and she hushed me as if I'd asked how to call up the One we don't name. I was not to ask questions of
anyone
.”

“The Old Laird had ignored his father's wishes then,” she said. “You should have been learning long before ten.”

“Och, he was a bit careless,” he said tolerantly. “But an honest man. Who is to know what he'd have done if he had lived? He must have thought there was time enough.
He
is not the one I blame.”

“Who then?”

“My mother died of a lung fever when I was thirteen. I was fair wrung out at the graveside, and the Reverend Doctor Macleod”—he pronounced it with sardonic precision—“was kind enough to pat my shoulder. So I asked him, through my snuffles and my hiccups, if he would teach me to read and write.”

“
That one!
” said Jennie scornfully. “What did he say?”

“He put me off with his poor excuses. I know now that he feared the ill opinion of Linnmore House, Archie and his mother's kin who had caused Nigel's mother to go away. But then I would have cursed the reverend gentleman if I'd had the mind and the strength after the days and nights of weeping. I think that he saw it in my eyes.”

There was no drama in his voice, which made the story all the more chilling. “Who took care of you after that?”

“The woman who tended my mother in her sickness was a widow with her sons away in the Army, so she stayed with me until I was seventeen. One son came home alive, and he was done with this country and England, so he took her to America. They asked me to go, but I said I would never leave Linnmore.”

And now you're running from it
, she thought.
Because of me
.

“What about Mr. Grant?” she asked. “Would he have taught you?”

“He had serious troubles. A wife slowly dying, and him worrying about clearing ever since Bliadhna nan Corach.”

“Everyone kept saying the Old Laird would never clear.”

“He wouldn't, but when he was dead, then Archie's mother's people came in and the possibilities began.”

“What sort of woman was Archie's mother?”

“Och, if she'd had the strength, she'd have been another Christabel, but she was forever losing a child, the poor woman. Only Archie survived, and he was a prince to her.” His short dry laugh could have meant anything. “My mother did the fine laundry at the house, and the smoothing, the goffering, the mending of lace and silks. She had the delicate hands on her, and they could be light as a moth's wing. When I was small, I went with her, and played about the stables. All the servants were Highland then, and the cook would give me a strupach, and the men gave me a rag to polish a bit of harness. And they'd set me on a horse's back. Man!” Laughter leaped into his voice. “High up, I was, with my hands in the mane and my knees clenched tight, thinking I was holding the great beast in, when he could have shaken me off like a leaf.”

She knew what it had felt like when she'd been lifted to the back of a huge shire horse, but she didn't speak for fear of interrupting the flow. He might have nothing else to say for the rest of the journey.

“One day I wandered around the house and followed the brook down to Linn Mor. I had heard the maids talking about wild swans that lighted there. Archie was a great gowk of a lad then, and myself this tall.” He lifted one arm and measured from the ground. “He saw me and tried to set his father's dogs on me, but they knew their playmate from the stables and bounded to me with laughter . . . and dogs
can
laugh, or so I knew in those days.”

“Yes,” she murmured.

“Archie kicked a stone bench in his rage and nearly broke his foot. After that his mother forbade me the place. You'd think I had smote the lad hip and thigh. My mother left me at the cottages the next time, but I soon followed her, thinking of the strupachs and my friends the horses and dogs. But I stayed out of sight of the mistress and Archie. The Laird was often out at the stables and gave me many a penny in those days. Indeed, he was often at the cottages, riding his horse everywhere on the estate, the deerhounds with him but foridden to harry a goat or a hen.”

“Archie was afraid of those deerhounds, Nigel said—” Her voice shut off; her heart gave a great flurry of beats that frightened her, and she pressed her hand against her breast. He turned his head to look at her. Compassion or curiosity? She licked her lips and said resolutely, “Did you know the second Mrs. Gilchrist at all?”

“She was a fine woman. Like you, she loved the moors and wanted to know every inch of the estate, and everyone on it. She would have been good for Archie; he was fond of her. A great pity it was that the master died before his time, and Archie's mother's kin came in like carrion crows. She was crowded out and took her young lad back to the Sassenach country.”

“Did you know
him
then?” It took courage.

“I was eight when he was born, and I mind the celebration. There was feasting for everyone on the estate. And with all those who came for the christening, there has never been that many people at Linnmore House since. A new prince was born.”

Again she couldn't be sure if he was being ironic. “His nurse was aunt to Morag, sister to Hamish. She brought him often to Loch na Mada, and it was everyone's darling he was, with the pink cheeks and the eyes blue as gentians, the yellow hair, and the grand smile on him. The cailleachs, the old women, called him Grian, for the little flower that comes so early in the spring. It means ‘sun' in the Gaelic. . . . After his mother took him away, and he'd gotten some years on him, he came back for his school holidays. Archie cares for him as much as he could care for anyone, I think.” After a little silence he said thoughtfully, “For years he was still the darling about the cottages.”

“I gathered that.” The words scraped her throat. “By the way they wanted to welcome him. But he wouldn't go near.” She squeezed her eyes shut and her hands into fists, as if so doing would squeeze him out of her brain.

Suddenly the man said roughly, “I've been running on like a drunken bodach.”

“I wanted to hear it. I appreciated it.”

“It's as I told you. The Gael is full of words, pressed down and running over. It's a wealth that's no good to us, and it's a curse to be able to put words to the sorrow and rage that's in you. They only drive the blade deeper into your heart.”

“I know,” she said. “How well I know.” It was almost too much to admit. She struggled for a solid handhold like someone caught in the breakers.
Don't give in, don't go under
. . . . “You can learn to read and write in America,” she said over the tumult. “You can hire someone to teach you.”

“I'm too old,” he protested.

“You are not. Let me tell you about the Ettrick Shepherd, James Hogg. He didn't know how to read and write until he was twenty-six, and now he's a famous poet. ‘Kilmeny' was one of our favorite poems; it's about a girl who was stolen by the fairies. I loved it long before I ever dreamed I'd see Scotland. Listen.

“Aye, that would have to be the land of the Fair Folk, wouldn't it?” he said gruffly. “‘Where sin had never been . . .' Twenty-six, you say. But he was no common man. He had the great gift waiting to be born.” She started to speak, and he said, “Go to sleep now.”

His manner was cold and forbidding. She knew he was regretting his weakness in talking too much; he was ashamed of his ignorance and of admitting it to her, of all people. There'd be no more talk tonight, and perhaps no more all the way to Fort William. He possessed the fatal pride that would forgive neither himself nor her.

She shut her eyes and tried to breathe into sleep, or make him think she was sleeping. In a few moments she felt him stir, half raise up, and then the plaid fell lightly over her.

Later something woke her. She heard it in her sleep and was left with the fading echo of it in her consciousness: the cough of a deer, or a fox barking. The air had grown much colder. Alick was curled on his side away from her. She moved as close to his back as she could without touching him and spread half the plaid over him. He sighed in his sleep, and she held her breath, but he didn't stir. She lay back. Lulled by the voice of the stream and the warmth generated by the closeness of their bodies, she slipped under the surface of sleep.

S
NATCHING
at the blanket and pulling it off her was no way to wake her up. “Nigel, stop!” she tried to protest, but her throat felt thick and dry. What a joker! With her lids still fastened shut, she seized the thick wool to hold on, and it was yanked even harder. He exclaimed in Gaelic (how very odd of him!), and she forced her eyes open and looked into a long piebald face topped with horns; the yellow eyes that returned her stare with equanimity had horizontal pupils. They belonged to a goat, which gave the plaid another peremptory twitch.

“Leave that alone!” Jennie said angrily, hanging on. Her voice started up a chorus of infant bleatings, and two kids peered around their mother's flank as she strongly opposed Jennie's possession of the plaid. Jennie bundled the plaid to her breast. “Are they wild?” she asked, not wanting to take her eyes away from the goat's.

Alick sat up. “She's that tame, she's one of the family!” He sprang up, scattering bracken. The spotted kids cried “Mama” again and ran to the far side of their mother. She herself didn't move; she was too enamored of the plaid.