Jennie About to Be (45 page)

Suddenly Alick shot upright, shouting hoarsely in Gaelic, so hard his voice cracked.

“Alick! Wake up!” she called, trying to shake him by the shoulder. He knocked her away from him with a backhand blow that sent her against the wall of the cave. She crouched there, hoping it was a nightmare and not the onset of insanity. He kept protesting and arguing with his invisible persecutors, and then all at once, shockingly, he wept.

She had never in her life heard a man weep, though she'd seen traces of it on her father's face after her mother died. She'd never heard these sounds of complete despair wrenched up from the gut. She was awed almost to paralysis, huddling against the cave wall with her hands over her ears until she could bear it no longer. Then she crept across to him and put her arms around him, pulled his head against her shoulder, and held it there, rocking back and forth as he had rocked her in the bracken.

“It was only a dream, Alick,” she murmured. “Only a dream. You're safe from whatever it was. It's gone. Only a dream, Alick. There . . . there . . .” She pressed her cheek hard against his hair, holding him so tightly her arms were aching.

She thought the paroxysms would never stop, but they slowly quieted. She kept expecting him to shake her off with a savage humiliation that would make the rest of the journey very difficult. But as the convulsions decreased, he slumped heavier in her arms as if he were totally unconscious. She was relieved and hoped he'd remember nothing of this in the morning. His nightmares must have been more exhausting to him than the day's march.
And I'm still wide awake
, she thought wryly.

She managed to lay herself down and him with her. He moaned in his sleep, and she froze, ready to tell him she had clutched at him in her own night terrors, but he didn't wake.

Lying on her side with his head against her breast and her arms around him, she found her own head wasn't comfortable; she missed the guilechan which she'd folded up for a pillow. She shifted slightly until she could lean her head against his and timed her breathing with his.

The next thing she knew she was waking up, and they had changed positions; he was holding her. She sighed, and his light embrace broke open, and she rolled away. She felt the plaid being tucked in behind her, and he left the cave.

When she heard him coming back, she sat up and stretched. “Good morning,” she said through a manufactured yawn. “Is it a good one?”

“Fair enough,” he said tersely. “What it will be half a day from now there's no telling.” She wrapped the big plaid around her shoulders and reached for her brogues, tying the laces with cold fingers. Then she went out through the stony passage. She found her spot for privacy among the furze on the upper side of the track, behind a thick sheet of lichened gneiss coming out of the ground like a tilted gravestone.

“All the comforts and conveniences of home,” she said aloud, remembering the flowered ironstone chamber that lived so complacently in the satinwood nightstand bedside her bed in Brunswick Square, and the tall china slop jar in her and Sophie's room at Pippin Grange and how they'd squealed at the touch of the cold rim on winter mornings. Consciously she was pretending that Tigh nam Fuaran had never existed; at least during her waking hours she had some control over this.

She washed with wet heather, very scratchy but better than nothing, and dried herself on her scarf. The morning was mild and smelled of rain. Everything stood out with the razor-sharp delicacy of a Japanese print. The mountaintops were inked in blues and purples and blacks, some decorated like Fujiyama with fresh snow, and draped with the lace of waterfalls.

They breakfasted on the rest of the hare, and tea steeped from more of the hawthorn and whortleberry leaves, saving the heel of the loaf and the last of the cheese for their midday stop. He had found some cormeille root, and that would help out.

The rain began as light blowing showers at first, coming and going. Wavering veils of mist obscured a distant peak; then it would reappear. Gleams of sunshine brought out the rich spring greens as emerald and peridot, and turned running water to gold and silver. It was warm in these intervals, and even during the showers one sensed the presence of the sun. But soon the storm shut down on them, the rain pelting so fast that the track was running with water. Water beat into their faces, into their mouths and eyes. Water seemed to gush from every crack and crevice.

Jennie's clothes were soaking through, her feet squelched in wet stockings and brogues, but she was not cold yet; exertion kept her warm. They stopped for breath whenever possible, once under an overhang with a curtain of water dripping before them. “We're moving down all the time,” he told her. “We'll go through a wood, and that will help. Then we have only to cross a corrie, and the cave is not far beyond that.”

She nodded, sniffling. Her nose was running, and she wiped it on the end of her sodden scarf. “Are you all right?” he asked her.

“We're alive, aren't we?”

“Aye, you can say that.” His mouth lifted slightly at one corner. “You're a stiff-necked one, I'll give you that.”

They ducked out through the screen of water.

They rested next time in the fir wood, where the rain couldn't reach them in its full strength, and the storm seethed high over their heads instead of around their ears. After they'd sat on a dead tree for a few minutes, a raw cold crept into Jennie's bones. Alick, imperturbably wringing out his bonnet and smoothing it on his knee before he put it on again, looked as if he'd never felt chilly in his life. Jennie did not take off her scarf and wring it out; her head wasn't too cold as long as she didn't disturb it.

“We have only to cross a corrie,” he said. When they reached it, the harmless trickle of a hillside brook had become a torrent. White water stormed down the rocky bed, flinging up spray wherever it met opposition, and poured thundering into the loch below.

They climbed up beside it through drowned vegetation, skidding on wet moss, looking for a narrowing, and finally they saw stones appearing at fairly regular intervals across to a low place on the opposite bank. The water slid swiftly around them but rarely over them.

Alick turned to her. Rain was running down his face and off his beard. “Across there!” he shouted above the roar, pointing. With rain beating into her eyes she could see nothing but a blur of shapes like green monsters of waves, and the towering shadow of very high land through blowing draperies of water and mist.

“Can you do it?” he shouted again, gesturing at the stones in the freshet. She nodded. She and her sisters had often hopped over flooded burns, but never in such a tempest and never across anything this wide. However, there was only one way to go, and that was forward.

An eagle glided low through the corrie, riding the wind on a level with their faces, seeing them with an eye of fearsome predatory intelligence; they saw the great wingspan, the strong beak almost as long as the head, and the glint of gold on the neck. He went on out over the booming falls and across the loch, powerful and free, and they stood looking after him, forgetting for the moment where they were and what they were about.

“All right now,” Alick said. “You'll be using your stick for balance. Set it firm each time.” He stepped out onto the first stone, turned, and held out his hand to her, and as she took it and put her foot forward, he went on to the next one. She teetered, but they gripped hands hard, and she drove her stick down with all her strength. At once the water attacked it with a giant's force, but it held.

And so on to the next stone, and two more. Occasionally water splashed over her feet, but they were soaked already. The unrelenting clamor of the flood and the sight of it sliding by so fast would have made her dizzy if she hadn't had to concentrate on placing her stick and reaching for Alick's hand. They came to a stone that was rounder, harder to balance on. Alick had no trouble, but when she stepped onto it, one foot slipped; trying to keep her balance, she involuntarily loosened her weight on her stick, and it was instantly swept off the bottom and out of her grasp. She fell headlong into the current.

Alick jumped in after her, but she was carried swiftly beyond his reach like one of the dead branches being swept along with her. It was not deep, but it was so strong there was no standing up against it. She struggled to get to the bank, but the force of tons of water in spate was too great for her to cross, and when she caught hold of a rock, her chilled hands slid weakly off. She was turned, tossed against boulders, and washed away from them before she could even try to hang on. She hit an elbow, an ankle, her head, and all the time she was thinking, in a deadly quiet spot in her brain:
When the waterfall hurls me into the loch, I will be to cold and too exhausted to swim, and so this is the end of Eugenia Hawthorne. I'm glad he still has the money. It will give him a good start in America
.

She was being dragged not by water but by hands that gripped wherever they could get a firm hold—one in her hair, one under her shoulder. She was scraped and bumped and finally heaved up a muddy slope from which clods of turf kept breaking away and taking her back down again, but by now she was clawing away for dear life.

Lifted and slung along by any means possible, she found herself on land which, if not dry, was firm, and below her the flood raced on toward the smoking falls. And Jennie Hawthorne was not going over them.

She sat up rejoicing, and shook her head to first one side and then the other, to get the water out of her ears. Her hair had come down, but her scarf hung loosely around her neck, and the little plaid hadn't become unpinned. She still had her brogues. Alick sat a little way from her, tipping water from his boots. He was drenched from his feet to his middle. She was completely soaked to the skin, but in the joy of not drowning she was hardly conscious of the cold, and the rain beating down had no impact now.

Alick looked as if nothing had happened except that somehow he'd stepped into water over his boot tops.
If there ever was a true gentleman
, she thought,
he is it
.

His stockinged feet were in very bad repair, toes and heels almost worn away. Calmly he held up one foot. “It's moggans they'll be before long,” he observed. “Hose without any feet whatever. Barefoot they'd fight in the old days but with moggans on. I could never see the sense in it.”

“Thank you for saving me,” she said composedly, not to be outdone by him.

“It's welcome you are, entirely. Did I hurt your head? Your hair was all I could reach at first.”

“I didn't feel a thing,” she assured him. Wet tendrils dripped over her forehead, but with nothing to wipe on she let the water run. “It may interest you to know that when I thought I would drown I was glad you still carried the money.”

“I am returning it to you now.” He reached inside his shirt.

“No, please keep it. It's enough to carry these sodden clothes without adding to it. The money is safe with you, and if I have another such accident and you can't save me, then use it with my blessing.”

“At Fort William I will be returning it then.”

“We will be
dividing
it then. I owe you your passage money at the very least.” Suddenly she burst out laughing. She felt a little drunk and enjoyed it. “Listen to us! What a ridiculous conversation! We ran away from murder this morning and nearly drowned this afternoon, and we sit here in the rain, drenched to the hide, talking as if we're in a drawing room.”

He actually grinned. Encouraged, she said, “And in one way my tumble was a blessing. It's sure to have drowned any fleas or worse I picked up in Castle Dallas.”

This time he laughed outright. “I would not be too sure of it! Highlanders are a hardy breed, fleas and all.” He pulled on his wet boots, still smiling. “We'll be going on now. It's not far.”

She was hugging her knees, unwilling to unfold and lose the deceptive warmth. “How will we ever dry? Wait for the sun to come out again?”

“That's often the way it must be.” He reached down a hand and pulled her up, and she was immediately aware of all the places that ached or stung, and she was unsteady. She looked down at the cataract crashing into the loch in clouds of spume and then turned quickly away, swallowing.

“It's over,” Alick said austerely, “and you didn't drown.”

“I shall probably freeze to death instead,” she said. “You could have let me go, Alick. It would have been quicker.”

He didn't dignify that with an answer.

T
HEY REACHED
the new cave in about a half hour of tortuous walking.

The rain was moving off, and the pauses in the wind were now longer than the gusts, but the traveling was the most tiring yet for Jennie, because she was lame from her pummeling in the flood, and her drenched clothes dragged at her legs. The track was washed out in spots. She was concentrating so hard on not boing a burden that she'd have refused Alick's help at these places if he hadn't firmly taken hold of her by the arm or around the waist. He shook his head when she tried to make a token protest, and propelled her on.

They had to climb over and through a jumble of big boulders on a spongy and streaming slope, and she thought it was an alternative way for one that completely disappeared, until she saw the cave opening behind it.

This was the deepest one yet, and he told her there was another chamber beyond, and a story of a passage through the mountain to the other side. “But I never was having the desire to find out for myself. I was always thinking it would be like being put alive into my coffin.”

“
Don't
!” she exclaimed, seized by a violent chill that seemed to have nothing to do with being wet. She tried to see fearfully into the depths of the cave. The southern and western skies were brightening as the storm moved off; a shaft of sunlight shot down past the large screen of boulders, across Jennie into the cave, and aimed at a large, untidy pile of dry, broken boughs. Alick laughed aloud in spontaneous pleasure.