Shadow in Hawthorn Bay (21 page)

She could fight it no longer. Towards dawn she got up and went down to the big grey rock by the edge of the black water. It was snowing lightly and ice had formed in winded ruffles along the shore. The marsh marigolds and bull-rushes that had been so bright in the brief warm spell early in May had all gone. The few birds had gone into the deep woods for shelter. All was cold and silent and strange.

“Mairi, come.” Duncan’s voice was soft, cajoling now. She sighed. Slowly she put off her shawl, pulled her shift over her head, untied her skirt and let it slip from her. She took off her moccasins and her stockings. She stood naked in the snow. She did not feel the cold. She reached around and unbraided her hair. It fell like a black mantle around her shoulders.

Softly she began to sing in Gaelic a song for the dying, and as she sang she stepped off the rock into the bay. She walked out until she stood waist-deep in the water.

“I am coming,
mo gràdach
. I am coming to be where you are.” She looked down into the black water and there she saw Duncan lying beneath the surface, his dead white face turned towards her, his black hair floating around him like the fronds of a fern. His eyes were open, his hands were outstretched, waiting.

Mary stared at the apparition. It was as real as though Duncan’s body itself floated there. She closed her eyes. She opened them. The apparition was still there. She understood, at last. And came to herself.

“Duncan, you did this!” she accused him. “You drowned yourself in this water, and you would take me too. But I will not follow you to the grave.” Frantically she turned and began to push her way through the water towards the shore. She stopped and turned back. The image was still there. She leaned down. She could see her own distraught reflection superimposed on the image of Duncan. She took a deep, shuddering breath. “Duncan
dubh
, in death as in life you would have bound me to you. It cannot be. I will not come. I will do my best to forgive you and I wish you safe journey to the land of the dead.” She reached down and gently, as though Duncan
were there in body, she put out her hands and closed his eyelids. She said for him the blessing of the dead and waded back to the shore.

The ends of her hair were stiff with ice, her teeth were clattering, she was blue and covered with goose-bumps. She grabbed her clothes and dashed into the house. She stirred up the fire, drank the hot water that was in the kettle, dried and dressed herself, and wrapped around her all the shawls and blankets she had.

When she had warmed to the point where she could begin to think, the thoughts charged at her like an assaulting army: “It is true, I have been as one daft since I came here—since before that. I knew. I did know that you were dead. Inside myself I knew that you had drowned yourself. It was on the ship, it was when Kirsty Mackay went under the sea. I knew it but I did not want to know, I would not let myself know—and now I have lost so much.” She saw again Henry’s frightened face by the light of the Andersons’ fire—and Luke’s angry one. Tears spilled down her cheeks and fell on her clenched hands. But the thoughts did not stop.

“We were as one, it is what we both thought—did we think about it at all? Reflections, our mams said, and we could not see, not you, not me, that life could be without the other. But—” Mary had a flash of understanding that made her gasp and spring to her
feet. “But Duncan,” she cried aloud, “I did go on without you! Even at home after you had gone. But you could not go on without me. You turned from me for four years—four long years. When you wanted to die, then you called. You wanted me to die with you.” She sank back into her chair. “What you did was not my fault,” she whispered, “it was not. Luke was right. A shadow, he said.” Wonderingly she repeated it aloud. “A shadow. Alive and dead, you were like a shadow. And I thought I could not manage life without you. I thought you were so strong because you were beautiful and exciting. Time was I would follow you anywhere. When you called me I could not believe evil of you. I thought it must be a devil. Mam was right.”

The realization of what had happened struck her anew. “But not into that other world I would not follow. Duncan, it was not strong to drown yourself so, it was evil to come after me. It was evil that you would take Henry because he was my comfort. That was not love, Duncan.” She put her head into her hands and wept.

In time her tears ceased to flow and she sat, subdued but peaceful, wrapped in her old shawl, the blankets from her and Henry’s beds, and the fine wool shawl Mrs. Grant had given her the night she had left the glen. “To be married in,” the old woman had said.

“Better to warm myself in it today than be
buried in it tomorrow,” Mary thought ruefully. “I will not be buried now for a long time, but I have taken a queer stitch in my life and the Lord knows what will become of me.” She stood and stretched her stiff legs and back.

Outside the snow had stopped falling. The day was cold and clear. Mary went down to stand again on the big grey rock. A breeze was moving along the water so that it lapped against the frozen shore, making little icy curls. The water itself was transparent, revealing every twig, every stone beneath. A school of minnows darted past under the surface. There was nothing else.

Mary smiled. She left the shore and walked up past the house and across the road. She stopped by Duncan’s grave.

“I am going into the forest now,” she said. Without hesitating she walked on until she could see nothing in any direction but trees. There she stopped. And stood. And wondered.

She had not expected silence. At the edge of the forest and in the clearings the sound of the wind soughing, sighing through the tops of the great pines, was everywhere and almost constant. Here, deep in the evergreen forest itself, there was no sound, the light was as dim as it must be under the sea. All around were the huge tree trunks, gigantic columns hundreds of years old, rising beyond where her eyes could
find their tops, columns far enough apart for an ox-cart to pass between. There were no small trees, no underbrush this deep in the woods—not enough sunlight reached the forest floor for them to survive; only the giants growing out of a carpet of pine needles, soft and dry. There was no sign of the snow that clung to the ground outside. Nor of the cold.

Gradually Mary unclenched her fists, her jaws, the muscles in her neck, and then her whole body. She listened for the sounds of the forest as she had once listened for the sounds of a fairy hill. And she heard the silence.

After a long time, she sat down on the soft pine needles with her back against a tree and let the silence settle into her. In time she heard little sounds—the fluttering and cheeping of small birds in the lower branches of the evergreens, a woodpecker tap-tapping against a dead trunk near the edge of the woods, small animals scurrying round the roots, scampering up into knot-holes. She lifted her eyes towards the treetops, where a glint of sun had shot through an opening like a diamond sparkling in a dark mine.

“I feel no spirits of people gone,” she thought, and remembered Luke telling her that no people had lived in these forests ever. Even the Indians had never settled here, they had merely traded and travelled the lakes and along
the shores of the island. There had always been only the trees.

“And the water—and the ice.” Mary thought about the heartbeat in the bay’s sudden freezing. She thought about the forest. She ran her hand along the smooth pine needles and knew that this new land had reached out to her. She leaned back against the tree, smiling.

Luke

M
ary emerged from the woods half an hour later feeling she had been blessed. All the world seemed to reflect her feelings. The stones in the road sparkled under the bright mid-morning sun, the exposed tree roots had taken on a honeyed sheen. The wind no longer seemed to moan or cry. It sounded to Mary like a hymn.

At that moment, Luke appeared from around the corner of her house. His head was down and he did not see her.

“Luke,” Mary called.

He started, looked up, and ran towards her. She ran forward to meet him. He clutched her shoulders. “You … you didn’t. You’re all right.” His voice was strained and his face was grey. “Oh, Mary.” His fingers tightened on her arms.

“Luke, what is it?”

“I thought.… Mary, I.…”

“Luke!” Mary knew. “I did not. I meant to, but I could not. Och,
mo gràdach!”
She threw her arms around him and they hugged each other until Luke stopped shaking.

Disentangling himself, he drew his sleeve across his face and looked at her, fear still dark in his eyes but the colour beginning to return to his cheeks.

“Mary, I didn’t mean to say all those miserable things. I was mad, I was so mad. I only got cooled down a little while back. I got to thinking what I’d said about you being crazy—I don’t think that! Then I got to thinking what happened to Duncan Cameron and—and I was so scared! But you’re all right. And I don’t want you to go away. But I will give you the money I’ve got saved if it will make you happy.”

“Luke, you have no need to give me anything. I have been so unkind to you.”

“No, you haven’t. You’ve been powerful kind. It’s us who wasn’t. You would have gone home lickerty-split when you found out Duncan was dead only I fetched you to care for the baby, then you stayed to tend Henry, then I brung him to you after when all you wanted was to be by yourself. Then Sim … well, Henry got scared. He got to thinking you could make him disappear and he didn’t want to.”

“And I will do it if ever I find him acting like Sim!”

“I never met anybody like you before.” Luke stared fixedly at a spot somewhere just above Mary’s head. “It’s what I told you—I never give a thought to marrying before you come,” he said slowly and this time he did look at her. “But I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t like they say about getting sweet on someone, it was like looking at someone I was supposed to be with, and I wasn’t even all that surprised. It just felt natural and I guess I figured you’d be bound to feel the same sooner or later. I guess I been pestering. I’m no better than Sim when it comes right down to it.”

“Luke! You are
not
like Sim, not the smallest mote of dust like Sim. Luke, if you still want I will marry you now. I will, really.”

“No,” said Luke, “you don’t have to say that. I’m just glad you’re all right. You
are
all right, aren’t you?” He paused. “Mary, something’s changed in you. Mary! You been in the woods!”

“I have.” Mary was suddenly very tired. “Luke, I will tell you. I will tell you about going into the forest and … and other things, but I think I must go to bed now. Please go home. Go home and tell Henry that if he is good I will not make him disappear.”

Luke grinned. “I will tell him what I should have told him in the first place, that Sim run off because he said too many bad things and was ashamed for ’em.”

“God would smite you for such a lie, Luke Anderson,” Mary said severely, but the corner of her mouth twitched.

Luke insisted on walking with her to her front door, said good morning, and started off. He hadn’t taken more than a few steps when he came back.

“There’s something changed about this place, too.” His face was puzzled.

“There is.”

Luke waited for her to continue. When she didn’t, he looked around once more, said goodbye again, and left.

Mary didn’t sleep and she was still not hungry. She ate a corncake, drank a cup of root coffee, and swept out her house, letting the knowledge of what had happened—to Duncan, to herself—settle deep into her. At noon she went to the Collivers’ to see to the lambs.

Charity Hazen was looking out for her as she came up the road. “Hey, Mary Urkit, there’s mail for you. Feller named Macleod on his way to the Crossing left it for you, said he’d be back in a week and a half to look you up.” She handed Mary a small parcel.

“Sandy Macleod from home,” Mary breathed. “Sandy Macleod, cousin to Johnny Fraser.” She looked at the small parcel wrapped in blue linen. She held it against her cheek for a moment and inhaled the scent of the cloth. She
swallowed hard. “Thank you,” she told Mrs. Hazen and tucked the parcel away in the pocket she wore inside her skirt. She wanted to wait to open it when she was in her own house alone.

All afternoon, as she worked in the barn with Zeke and Arn Colliver feeding and comforting a pair of orphaned lambs, she reached now and then into her pocket to touch the parcel. When at last she was back by her own hearth, she took it out. Trembling, she cut the stitches that held it fast. Inside was a letter folded around another parcel, this one wrapped in white linen. She put the letter with the scrap of blue cloth and unwound the white linen to reveal a further wrapping, and another, until at last, shining up at her from its nest of cloth, lay the Urquhart cairngorm brooch.

Through the tears that would come, the peaty-brown colour of the cairngorm glistened like a Highland burn in the spring sun, under the dappled shade of rowans and alders. Mary could almost hear Duncan’s impatient, little-boy voice calling, “Mairi, Mairi, come quick! There’s a fish, a fish for us.” She blinked. The image was gone and the cairngorm lay there in her lap.