Jennie About to Be (44 page)

“
Jennie
.” Alick was there, and she began to cry. He sat beside her in the bracken and held her in his arms, smoothing her head and murmuring Gaelic comforts as if she were a child. Finally he said in English, “It is all right now. He won't follow, I swear it. Are you able to stand now?”

“Yes, yes,” she sobbed. “Now that you're alive.”

Footnote

* Gaelic for whisky

T
HEY WENT
on up through the pines at a good stiff pace. They had lost their sticks, but hardly felt the need of them, they were in such a hurry. At first Jennie kept looking back with the regularity of a nervous tic, but Alick caught her at it and said curtly, “It's the way ahead you should be watching. He'll not be following us.”

“Are you
positive
?”

“That I am. But we will be meeting bad weather up above. So don't be spending yourself in backward looks."'

“I can stand anything!” she exulted, rather breathlessly. “Rain, hail, snow, a tempest, now that we're free of him! I've some sturdy clothes, and Kirsty's brogues helped me to run from him, and we had a good meal, and you still have the hare for our supper. Alick, you cheated Old Nick at his own game!”

“You'll not be singing hosannas,” Alick said grimly, “if we are caught in wind and snow. You will be praying not to be blown off the mountain.”

The earlier dull silvery light had changed now. Back in Northumberland she'd seen late snows, perilous for the new lambs, those cold blue-black clouds rushing from the northeast and the trees creaking and swaying over their heads as the wind rushed through the tops with the long roar of surf. But in the euphoria of escape she was unafraid of anything nature sent against them.

She had lost the wifely cap somewhere, and she tied her scarf around her head and knotted it under her chin. The thick wool gown and petticoat over the substantial undergarments, the small plaid and the heavy stockings were all more protection than the riding habit had been; she was free of her stays, and the brogues felt light yet substantial on her feet. Her body was heated inwardly by the hearty meal. So even with the air wintry on her face and hands she felt snug, though she saw the irony of that cozy, homely word when they left the shelter of the wood for the windswept ridge of the watershed.

There was a brief lull, and they stopped for a few moments to get their breath. Tarnished sunlight with no warmth to it broke through a ragged hole ripped in a great swatch of bruise-dark cloud. Below them, the wood hid the corrie, and the thick boscage on the other side seemed utterly foreign to her, as if they'd never followed a whistling Jock Dallas through it.

“Is this really a shortcut to our road?” she asked, and he laughed. He sounded genuinely amused, and she said defensively, “I thought he might be telling the truth about
one
thing. Some people do, to salve their consciences.”

“And what would be making you think he had a conscience?”

“
Had
?”

“No, I didn't kill him, though it was in my mind and in my hand too, when I had my knife at his throat. When he stopped and bent down that time, he pulled a sgian dubh from his stocking, and that would have sliced
my
throat soon enough. He's still alive, but with all he can do to crawl home on his hands and knees. I broke his crutch and threw the pieces in two directions and his dirk in another.”

“But why would he want to kill you if he didn't know we had money? She'd have seen the bag when I changed clothes, but I didn't have it then.”

“He would kill me and ransom you back to your family. Even if we'd told him no story at all, there was still those clothes of yours and the Sassenach voice, and myself as I am, wild and common as gorse!” He said it all without emotion. “He knew he'd get your name from you soon enough, once you'd seen me murdered and you were left with them, afraid to close your eyes for fear he'd be at you when he was drunk enough. I think he has no sense whatever when he's in drink, and to call him a beast dishonors decent and innocent beings.”

The memory of Jock Dallas's grin and eyes and his soft, laughing voice sickenend her so she could not say what she was thinking:
He would not need to be drunk
.

“I saw,” Alick said, as if he read her mind. “And so did she.”

“Do you think
she
—”

He shrugged. “She is his creature. Who knows? We'd best be moving on. I have a shelter in mind, but we are a long way from it on Jock Dallas's short road.”

She looked into the saturnine bearded face and said painfully, “And if he had molested me, then he couldn't return me, could he? Even to set me along on the road to Fort Augustus? For fear they'd be combing the mountains for him when they knew what he'd done.”

“Aye. You'd die, too. He'd lose the fortune in ransom, but he'd still have the gold he'd found around my neck.”

The first flakes spun past their faces. Alick took her by the arm and started her moving. The wind whirled about them, the snow blew stinging into their faces, and it was an invisible world. Jennie knew that if this storm had caught them before they met Jock Dallas, she'd have been much more terrified. She was uncomfortable, the wind sometimes took her breath, and the snow whipped blindingly into her face; but they'd just escaped murder and rape, and she had no intention of collapsing and dying in a May snowstorm.

When the track became too narrow, he put her behind him and shouted for her to hang onto his plaid. “It won't last! How is your courage?”

“Stupendous!” she shouted back at him.

It didn't last. The storm went whirling and writhing and ghosting out into space, and the sun shone; white peaks dazzled against a blue sky. On every twig of whin and heather snow crystals flashed all colors of the spectrum and died in glory. Jennie's hair hung wet where the scarf had slid back; their clothes began to steam like the terrain about them. Their faces were red from the wind and stinging snow.

They walked all day on what they had eaten that morning, across stony water courses, sliding scree and through corries, and along the lower sides of mountains. The cries of upland birds echoed in the great silences; deer appeared below or above them or across a glen. Eagles rode the wind above it all.

Alick cut them new sticks in a grove where they rested and drank. Late in the afternoon they picked their way across a spongy bog where pools mirrored the sky, and frogs croaked. Small flies rose up in tormenting clouds and made Jennie frantic with annoyance until they climbed up to a heathery ridge into a fresh breeze, and here they walked through a ruby sunset light.

“We're all alone on a red planet,” she said. “This must be like walking on Mars.” Alick didn't answer. The light changed to a brassy afterglow, and the thin white moon moved with them through the long twilight, seeming to give off cold as the sun gave off heat.

At dusk they were up on a hill again, with a glen full of night below them. Suddenly the hill broke in two, and they went into a narrow defile where she stumbled drunkenly among boulders. Alick came back and took her hand and led her into a cave.

The narrow approach to it cut off almost any light from the sky except just at the entrance. She knelt down, felt around for a flat place, and stretched out on it without a word. Alick set about his chores as surefootedly as if it were broad daylight. He collected dead wood and dry twigs, started a fire, skinned and dressed the hare by its light, and cooked it.

She crawled groggily on her hands and knees to the fire. The meal was all in silence until he offered her another portion on the tip of his knife and said solemnly, “It's sorry I am that it's not venison and wine we're dining on, with a song from Jock Dallas. It's the grand ceilidh we'd be having, wouldn't we now?”

Jennie laughed, and wanted to, which was surprising. “Do you think he's home yet?”

“Not by himself,” he said thoughtfully. “I may have broken his other leg. They would have to come and drag him home.”

“I think the deformed foot is really a cloven hoof,” said Jennie. “I have no pity for him, only for the children. I don't know about Kirsty. She could simply
not
return from Fort Augustus someday, or take the children and go when he is off stravaiging, as he calls it. Alick, were they all lying this morning, do you think?”

“I think he was away from home,” he said, “but the woman was neither sick nor fearful, because he is often away from home. I think we are not the first travelers to meet three pathetic bairns who can fill their eyes with tears and put the tremble in their voices.”

“They can't be such little horrors!” she protested. “Surely their mother made them believe she was sick, and worried about their father. Remember how glad they were to see him!”

“To know what he'd brought home this time. Where did they all run to? ‘Go and see what I have brought,' he said to them, ‘and be quiet about it.' Och, that was slipped quickly in, like a hot knife through butter. . . . Beulach, she called him, and she was right. I distrusted him from the start.”

“What does
beulach
mean?”

He searched for words. “You might say he was too charming altogether.”

“I thought that was just Highland courtesy.”

“But one Highlander can always tell when another is a liar.”

“ ‘When Greeks joined Greeks, then was the tug of war!' ” said Jennie. He looked up quickly, and she said, “I can't take credit for that. What was it he brought home beside the trout, I wonder?”

“I think he came home riding on it. I left him for a minute of privacy—you understand—and I slipped away from where he thought I was, just to look around without him. There was a black pony grazing below the bothy.”

“Couldn't it have been his own?”

“The saddle is in the bothy with the venison. Too good a saddle, too well taken care of. And that is a pony that has been cherished on oats.”

She lost appetite for the hunk of roasted meat in her hands. “What are you trying to say?”

“I wonder how far the mysterious traveler is now, he who passed our way two nights ago. Something tells me he is food for the ravens and the foxes, and his clothes and saddlebags are in one of those chests.”

“She told me,” Jennie said, “that she could always find something in her chest to take to market.”

“And that's no wonder, as long as there's a traveler to pass by within a few miles.”

“Alick, you tell me all this and expect me to sleep tonight!” she cried fiercely.

“What's done is done,” he said. “We can't bring the dead back to life, and we're safe for the night. Think only of that, and of good food in your stomach.”

“And what if we meet another outlaw, or a pair of them? You never expected to meet a murderer when we stopped in that lovely glen.”

“No,” he agreed gravely, “and no one can tell about tomorrow, unless we had poor Fergus here. So we sleep safe while we can.”

There was now no discussion about sharing the plaid. They lay side by side on the sandy floor and Alick seemed to fall asleep at once, but she stayed awake, staring out at the narrow wedge of pale moonlit sky and dim stars. It was much quieter here than down in the glen; the silence was unearthly.
Still, I shouldn't like to hear something stirring in the depths of this cave
, she thought. Her body was fatigued, but her mind wouldn't rest; she went over and over the incredible events of the morning. Faces circled in procession before her; eyes, beginning with the black and gold stare of the goat twitching at the plaid, and then the children's eyes, one pair bottomless black, the others purple-blue as gentians. Lovely eyes to cast the spell of death.

Then the man himself. If she believed she'd ever met evil before, it was nothing compared to this. In the weakness of exhaustion, with the loneliness of the hour emphasized by the sleeping man beside her, she wondered if the Devil did indeed exist in spite of Papa's explanation of Satan as merely the name of a symbol for evil. Why could he not have sons on earth, as Jesus was God's son, and she had just met one of them?

“Jennie Hawthorne, you are a fool,” she whispered. “A
disgusting
one.” Alick stirred, and she went on excoriating herself in silence.
You're alive; so is Alick. None of the things took place that could have happened. So don't be an utter ass. Perhaps Alick is wrong about the traveler, perhaps he's right, but forget him. We can't bring the dead back to life
. . . . And she thought about Nigel.

His death had been an accident which he brought upon himself, but from a distance, and not only that of geographical miles, she saw him now clearly as a mere boy driven wild with bewilderment at his wife's inexplicable behavior. He'd seen nothing wrong with his own—he wasn't ordering a wholesale massacre! These people, such as they were, would exist somehow, and when they were out of sight, nobody needed think about them again. Turning the land into sheep walks could only enrich his wife's existence. How could he have expected she'd be in such a taking, she who had melted into his embrace from the first? How could she speak to him with such rage and contempt? He loved her as much as ever, didn't he? What happened with other people, and peasants at that, had nothing to do with Nigel and Jennie, the lovers.

He simply couldn't see what he had done. Yet he must have known that those others whom he had betrayed had loved him from the time he was born. For weeks he had known what he was about to do to them, and he was perfectly carefree, except that he would not face them until the day when he came with men and torches. And in his perverted and deadly innocence he couldn't understand what this had destroyed in his wife.

She wanted to turn over, but she was afraid of disturbing Alick's sleep; she envied the way he could drop off so suddenly. She had taken off the brogues, and now she lay wriggling her toes, flexing her ankles.
I'm rid of those damned stays
, she thought,
and those boots I didn't dare take off. And we must have walked for twelve hours today. So why can't I sleep?