Jennie About to Be (46 page)

“Beannachd leat mo coraid!” he exclaimed.

“What is it?” she questioned eagerly. “What did you say?”

“ ‘Blessings on you, my friend,' for the man who left us that. And a bed, too.” The bracken and heather piled over fir boughs was not yet all brown and dead. “Now you must get out of those clothes before you are taking a bad chill!” He took an armful of the dry wood to the mouth of the cave, and some of the driest heather for kindling.

“And what will I be wearing besides my skin?” she asked.

“My plaid, to be sure. Will you be keeping the fire going while I set my snares?”

“I am not entirely stupid. Doesn't it worry you that someone has been here and may be back? That he left the dry wood for himself?”

“Och, he is in Fort William by now, or perhaps away on a ship. No, he left the wood for the next ones to come. ” He was on his knees getting the fire started. By the first leap of red-orange light his face showed up deeply absorbed but not drawn with apprehension. Whatever terrors had assaulted him in his sleep last night, he must have completely forgotten them. “We will leave wood for the next traveler.” He stood up. “There now. Feed it a little now and then.” He dropped the plaid on the bed and went out.

She was alone with the tiny snapping of the fire and the company of the small flames and the eternal sounds of running water outside. She stripped off her wet clothes and allowed herself the licentious luxury of kneeling naked beside the fire while she skeptically examined the plaid. It was damp on the lower edges from his plunge into the stream, and so were the folds that had been outermost over his shoulder all day, but the inside was quite dry.

“Remarkable,” she said. With some experimenting she turned it into a garment; she belted in the voluminous folds by her scarf tied tightly around her waist, and brought the upper part of it up over her head and shoulders like a particularly roomy shawl. She fastened it under her chin with Kirsty's brooch. Spacious folds fell down over her breasts, but her arms were free under the loose covering.

She sat by the fire and held her drawers to it. The warmth was delicious; even her feet, tucked in under the plaid, were warm. She didn't know how long before her clothes could be dried, she might have to put them on again while they were still damp, and the way she felt now she could have lived as cozily in the plaid as a snail in its shell; but they would have to use it as a blanket tonight. The small plaid, or guilechan, was too saturated to be of any use to her.

But we're safe, she thought, and that's the important thing. At least I've had a bath. At least this wood was here for us. Supposing it hadn't been? At least the weather is clearing again. Tomorrow the sun will finish drying our clothes as we walk. And we must be close to Fort William, or at least close as a Highlander reckons it, which could be a mere fifty miles or so.

Jennie Hawthorne of Pippin Grange and Brunswick Square was crouched before a fire in a mountain cave, naked except for a wild Gael's plaid, and the wild Gael himself out foraging for food. She had to laugh out loud at the unqualified fantasy of it, which was better than shrieking like the old lady in the nursery rhyme, “This be none of I!” Or being struck dead by horrified amazement.

The drawers were a little less damp, so she substituted her shift, turning it over and over in her hands. Now and then she gave the fire another small stick.

Alick brought water and a handful of small limp plants he began to steep in the pannikin. The cavewoman was enough a creature of her past life to hide the underwear she was trying to dry.

“What is that?” she asked.

He gave her the Gaelic name and handed a plant over to her. She recognized the delicately striped pink and lavender petals of wood sorrel. “For a fever if you have one, or to keep it away,” he explained.

“What about your wet clothes?” she asked, alarmed by the prospect of his falling ill; his mother had died of lung fever.

“They'll be drying on my back; it won't be the first time. You will keep the plaid tonight, and I'll be burrowing under the bracken there.” He stirred the sorrel broth with the horn spoon. “We won't be traveling on tomorrow. It will be a fair day, and we will lay up here, and your gown can be drying in the sun.”

You're sure it will be safe to stay?
she almost asked but stopped herself in time. She had to believe he knew what he was talking abeut, she wanted so much that day of rest and sun.

“That will be very nice,” she said primly. “Is this one of the caves that Prince Charlie slept in while he was escaping after Culloden?”

“It is said so, but it is said about many caves in the Highlands.”

“Like all the houses where Queen Elizabeth is supposed to have slept. Of course, she was a lady who did travel a good deal. I have never forgiven her for beheading Queen Mary Stuart. They say she didn't want to, but nonetheless she signed the death warrant.”

“Och, queens!” He waved them away with the spoon as if they'd been midges. “Sup this. But with care. It is very hot.”

The sorrel tea and the last bit of the bread made their supper. She heaped most of the loose dry stuff to one side for Alick to crawl into, and laid her shift and drawers on her portion. They were partly dried, and her body warmth through the plaid should finish the job by morning.

It took her some time to get comfortable because of all her sore places, but finally she settled down on her side facing the fire. Alick sat cross-legged beside it, his face faintly lighted by the small, flickering flames. Whenever he added a bit more fuel, the light sprang up and illumined his face against the darkness outside. The whip marks had almost gone, and his mouth was healed. The tremulous light seemed to give him a play of expressions around his mouth and eyes, but she knew it was an illusion as candleshine gives life to a painting or a statue's features. He was as remote from her as if he were dead. Gone as far from her as Nigel had gone, all at once, five days ago in the hollow.

It occurred to her then that last night he might have been dreaming of the gallows. She took that horror to herself and almost called out to him, just to break the spell, but restrained herself. She half shut her eyes and watched the little flames shimmer and dance through her lashes until she mesmerized herself into sleep.

When she woke up, she was stiff from lying curled in one position all night long, like a baby folded up in the womb. No wonder it hated being forced out of that warm, comfortable, dreaming darkness into the abyss of light, she thought as she tenderly moved each limb. The fire was out, and she was alone in the cave. The scent of the day came in, that of a fine morning after rain. Above the screening boulders small puffs of fair-weather clouds wandered like grazing sheep across an azure field.

She thought Alick had just left the cave and would be back in a few moments; then she would gather herself and the plaid together and go outside. She lay there waiting, warm in the nest, refreshed by sleep, optimistic even though she was hungry and they might not have anything to eat today. The calls of eagles and a kestrel's whistle were now as familiar to her as the blackbird's song. She saw herself as a minute figure in an animated miniature painting, perfect in every bijou detail, kneeling by a window in Brunswick Square and listening to the blackbird on a chimney pot.

Well, I didn't run away with the gypsies
, she thought,
but this is a fair approximation of it
.

Alick didn't come, and after a while she couldn't wait any longer. She put on her dry drawers and shift. Her stockings were still wet, but the brogues had dried, and she worked them in her hands to get some of the stiffness out before she laced them onto her bare feet. Her hair fell in snarls and tangles down her back. She belted the plaid around her middle again, but she couldn't find the brooch. She remembered taking it off last night because it pressed into her breastbone when she curled up. It would be somewhere in the crumbling dry heather, but she couldn't stop to look for it now.

Holding the plaid around her shoulders, she went outside. Gorse grew beside and above the cave, and she picked the driest approach to a protective clump, amused at her instinct for privacy when there was not another human soul in sight. Where
was
Alick, anyway? Below her, the leaves of a stand of mixed hardwoods rippled under the wind like a celadon sea streaked with bronze and silver. Beyond that, a shimmer of water must be the loch into which the flood poured from the corrie. The other side of the glen was a mountain that began in deceptively gentle stages apparently carpeted in pastel velvets; the summit of sheer rock raked the clouds.

The entire setting was magnificent and, except for her and the winged predators, empty. Alick had gone. So that's what he had been planning while she lay watching him last night, respecting his preoccupation. He had the gold, and she was too much of a care and a liability; had she not brought him to the foot of the gallows? Fort William was close enough now, and he couldn't wait.

She crumpled on the ground, hunched over her knees, and moaned, “I knew it, I
knew
it!”

Something in her maintained a rigorous control and leashed her in before she could reach hysteria. She sat up and breathed deeply a few times to steady herself, then went back to the cave. She had no intention of waiting passively in one place to starve to death, but she had every intention of walking until she dropped. The track had been very clear in places. When it was not clear—She refused to consider that. First things first . . . At least he had left her the plaid. He couldn't have taken it from her without waking her, and he intended to be leagues away before she ever stirred. He would be at Fort William very quickly; he could walk twenty hours of every twenty-four if he chose. No wonder he'd told her last night that they would lie up today; she would sleep all that more soundly.

She felt the potent temptation to go to pieces, and she said aloud belligerently, “I will
not
, and you can't make me!” She collected her damp clothing and took it outside. “Well, I have no reason to hurry now,” she went on, for the company of her own voice. “I can take time.” She spread the gown, petticoat, the small plaid, and the stockings over gorse bushes to finish drying. The sun was hot enough now so that the plaid was too much, and she took it off.

In the shift and drawers she climbed up on the biggest boulder screening the cave entrance and examined her bruises and scrapes as if it really mattered if anything became infected. So far the raw spots looked clean. Now for water. The slopes were no longer running with it, but there should be a spring or a stream nearby. There had been one at every stopping place, and he couldn't have carried the pannikin of water all the way up from the loch and had much left by the time he reached the cave. The pannikin! She slid off her perch and ducked into the cave. Ah, he had left her that, too.

The cave was hateful to her now, and she hurriedly left it and perched on the rock again. Supposing she could find cormeille on the way, how long would that and water sustain her? She would admit neither the hope nor the possibility of meeting anyone who could aid her, and dying alone in the wilderness was preferable to encountering another Jock Dallas. What about adders? She had no means of cutting a stick, so she would simply walk where she could always see her footing.

On the slope below her, Alick came out from the trees and walked up the stone-studded incline. She was incredulous at first; she thought she was deluding herself in the first stage of delirium caused by fear and hunger.

But it
was
Alick, moving at the steady purposeful gait which had set their pace for five days. He carried a slender pole in his right hand, and something swung shining from his left hand. He disappeared in the general blur as her eyes ran with tears the way the hill had run with water. She wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands, but the tears kept dripping down. Blindly she felt for the plaid and mopped her face with it. She was deeply ashamed for having doubted him, and he was not to know about it.

Then she realized that she was dressed only in her undergarments, which might shock him. Laughing weakly and still sniffling, she tied herself into the plaid again. She went into the cave and began rooting through the bedding for her brooch, not hurrying, so she'd be busy when he came.

“Good morning!” she called when she heard his step. She didn't turn around.

“I thought you would still be sleeping.”

“I'm looking for my brooch,” she said. “Where can it be?” She wasn't acting now, but truly mystified. “You don't suppose Kirsty's really a witch and cast a spell to get her brooch back, do you? If so, I'm glad she didn't claim her clothes, too.”

“I took the brooch,” he said. “I was needing it to make a hook.” He held up a string of trout, smiling at them the way he had smiled at her when he was pretending to be her husband.

“Oh,
Alick
.” She had barely enough breath for it, after what she'd gone through in the last hour.

“There was nothing in my snares this morning, so I fished.”

She giggled foolishly. “Is this a fine trout that I see before me? Or is it but a fine trout of the mind? Come, let me clutch thee! ... I know I sound drunk, but it's better than bursting into tears.”

“Aye.” He agreed with obvious relief. “Here is the pretty part of the brooch, but it will be doing you no good now.”

“The brooch is feeding us,” she said. “And Kirsty expected to have it back in her chest long before now.”

“Och, we should have asked for more. She'd have given us anything, so sure she was of her man.”

“Will you keep it for me?” Jennie asked. “Until we reach Fort William? I'd like it to remember these days by.”

“I would not think you'd be having the hard time remembering any of it,” he said. He put the brooch in the bag, which had been there against the cave wall in clear view all the while.