Shadow in Hawthorn Bay (4 page)

Mary stood for a long time as though rooted to the ground. She looked at Loch Ness glimmering in the moonlight far below. She looked up the path at Mrs. Grant retreating into the distance. Three times she started after her, three times she hesitated, and at last turned her steps downward.

She marched purposefully down the long hill and along the shore of Loch Ness for almost half the night, trying desperately not to think about Mrs. Grant, her mother, her father, or Jeannie, hearing only Duncan’s “Come, Mairi,” and over and over the mourning words,
och-on, och-on
, as though she never meant to return.

When she came to the ruins of Urquhart Castle she stopped, exhausted. She sheltered
under a low, crumbling stone wall against the cold of the heavy mist and the pre-dawn wind, sleeping fitfully, wrapped in her rough plaid until it was light enough to see what was in the packet Mrs. Grant had given her.

The packet held two English five-pound notes. With the money there was a letter.

Mary looked at the money in her lap, the money Donald Grant had been sending his mother from America for thirty years. It was so much! She stroked the worn wood of the spindle whorl. How like Mrs. Grant to give her this double amulet—a rowan wood spindle—against evil spells. She got up from the shadow of the cold, damp wall. She paced around the ruins, now putting her hands on the mossy
stones, now looking up at the grey sky from the grass- and weed-covered floor of the roofless castle hall. For one surprised moment she saw the stone floor and a black-beamed ceiling and a fire on a great hearth. A woman in a green gown stood before the fire.

“Greetings, lady,” Mary murmured politely, not wanting to be ill-wished by the
glaistig
who haunted the home of her family’s long-ago chiefs. She was used to these unexpected glimpses into the other world. She went outside and climbed down the cliff to the water’s edge.

She looked down at her small, white face reflected in the lake water, her hair hanging down on either side like two broad, black silk ribbons. She tried a friendly smile but only one corner of the reflection’s mouth turned up ruefully. She put her hand down and churned up her watery likeness.

“I cannot take the money,” she told herself unhappily, although the words “Mary, my dear one” touched her almost unbearably. “It is well and good for her to say she will not go from Drum Eildean but there is Donald.” She looked at, but did not really see, a pair of moorhens gathering twigs close by the shore. The money was more than enough, she was sure, to buy her passage and provisions to take her to Upper Canada. But the realization that Upper Canada was three thousand miles away was beginning
to sink into her awareness. She knew the journey took seven weeks when the weather was clear and the seas calm. And she had heard tales of ships that foundered at sea in the great Atlantic storms. She was going into this danger and she had spoken not a word of farewell to her family. “I cannot go!” she said aloud. The moorhens bobbed nervously off from shore.

Even as she spoke, she was beset by dizziness and Duncan’s face came to her, not as she remembered it but older-looking, as he must be now, with such desperation in his eyes that she sprang to her feet, stuffed the money and the spindle whorl into the pocket of her skirt, tucked Mrs. Grant’s beautiful old shawl under her arm, and scrambled back up to higher ground and the path that led to the west.

It was forty miles to the port town of Fort William but it seemed like forty thousand to Mary. Sometimes sick with headache and apprehension she ran, jogged, stumbled along the path, hardly noticing the brambles that caught at her clothes and scratched her arms, legs, and face, hardly feeling the sharp stones and twigs under her bare feet. Sometimes she slowed to a brisk stride, intensely aware of the mountains looming over her, the flowers blooming along the way, and the birds singing in every tree.

“I will come back again. I will,” she cried,
causing a group of travellers to quicken their steps as they passed and to scarcely nod in greeting.

She stopped for the night—during a heavy rain—to eat and sleep in a house. It was near where she crossed the River Oich, a mile or so past Fort Augustus. She frightened the kindly old couple who gave her supper and a bed by her scratched and dishevelled appearance and the distraught look in her eyes. She knew it and could do nothing about it.

Sometimes her natural good humour asserted itself. She sang with the birds in the early morning as she bathed in the river. Once she stopped to get a drink of water from a small boy at a spring. She shared their noon meal with a gang of men working on the canal that was to connect the chain of lochs along the Great Glen.

The mountains were growing higher as she neared Fort William. Late in the afternoon of the second day Ben Nevis came in sight, towering over the whole mountain range, higher than any mountain Mary had ever seen. But its great, rounded bulk, covered with snow, looked for all the world like the white wool on the back of a fat old ewe. Mary smiled.

She reached the edge of town by evening. “Here is it, then,” she told herself bravely. “Well, it is not so grand, even, as is Inverness.” She smoothed her hair as best she could and straightened her skirt.

The town was one long street running parallel to Loch Linnhe, the big sea loch that harboured the sailing ships from the west. Short, busy, narrow streets led from the high street to the piers and warehouses crowded with people shouting and calling over the screech of the big white gulls along the water’s edge. The fort that gave the town its name stood guard over the northern end of it, the red-coated soldiers visible against the grey stone walls.

Refusing to be intimidated, Mary marched into town. She enquired of an old woman selling eggs where she might find a sailing ship, and the old woman directed her to the ship owners’ offices. Mary found passage on the
Andrew MacBride
, sailing within the week.

Next she found herself lodging, at a terrible amount of money, in a dingy little room with a lumpy bed she had to share not only with bugs but with three other women. They were the Macfeeters from Invergarry, they told her, a mother and two daughters, all sailing on the
Andrew MacBride
. Mary did not like them, their dirty, unkempt hair and clothes, or their never-ceasing talk of the soldiers at the fort and the fancy clothes they meant to buy.

The following morning she found the market and bought her provisions for the voyage: oats for bannock, potatoes, cheese, and a few dried apples. Emboldened by the success of her
venture, she bought a change of clothing too: a linen shift and skirt, a pair of woollen stockings, a pair of brogans, and a comb. She was pleased with herself for having managed so well, although it seemed to her that the linen was not as finely woven nor the dye so rich a blue as that at home. The shoes were poorly made and the whole cost a great deal more than she had thought it would. She bought a basket for the food and made bundles of the clothes and lugged them to her lodging.

Flora Macfeeter was in the room changing her clothes. For an instant Mary saw an image of Flora, old, tired, and sour-looking, but she said nothing to the smiling face. Flora told Mary where she might buy a sheet of paper to write a letter home. “And we will look after your things,” she said kindly. “It will be my mother or it will be Margaret or me will be here. Och, if it were my back—on this warm day I could not bear the weight of a
single
plaid.”

But Mary was not comfortable without her old shawl and nothing in heaven or earth could have convinced her to let go of one of Mrs. Grant’s gifts for a single moment. She found the stationer’s shop and wrote her letter. “Please forgive me,” she wrote, “for I cannot help myself. You know I must go.” She signed it, “Your loving Mairi,” and left a blot by her name where a tear had fallen. By good fortune the stationer
had a relative on his way to Invermoriston whose brother was courting a girl in Inchnatarf and would carry the letter up the glen.

Mary was so relieved at how well matters were turning out that she wasn’t in the least upset to discover, on her way back to her lodging, a bill posted to say that the
Andrew MacBride’s
sailing was delayed for three days. Cheerfully she hurried to tell the Macfeeters the news.

When she got there, the room was empty. No Macfeeters. No luggage—not theirs, not hers. Frantically Mary peered into all the corners. On her hands and knees she searched under the bed. There was nothing anywhere. She stood up. For one shocked moment she stared at the empty room. Then she began to curse. “May all the devils in Scotland be after them! May they be hapless and wan, loveless and glum, shrivelled and sour. May dearth southward, dearth northward, dearth eastward and westward be always with them, those spawn of the speckled devil!” She burst into tears.

Suddenly, in the midst of a sob, she remembered that she still had both Mrs. Grant’s fine wool plaid and her own rough one. She was so relieved that she stopped crying at once. She rubbed her tears away and sat on the bed to count her money—enough to buy sparse provisions for a seven-week voyage. Nothing for a skirt or shift.

“I shall reach Canada with naught but the clothes on my back—and those in rags,” she wailed. “Och, why is it that I who see so much I do not want to see cannot see my own bad fortune on its way?” She remembered the image of Flora Macfeeter’s face, old and sour, and was glad. She looked at the few coins in her hands. She looked at her feet. “And I have brogans that pain me.” She choked back a fresh sob, reached down, and yanked off the shoes. She stood up, hung them around her neck by their laces, grabbed both her shawls, and stomped down the stairs muttering, “I will find those thieving women.”

Up and down the crowded little streets of Fort William Mary tramped. It was, as Flora Macfeeter had said, very warm. In and out of shops and taverns she went, her face white and set, her back stiff, ignoring the rude invitations of men in taverns and the persistent shoves and shouts of pedlars in the streets. The three Macfeeters (if indeed that was their name, Mary thought venomously) were not to be found.

It was well past the dinner hour by the time she had peered fruitlessly and nervously into the last tavern, and she was hungry, thirsty, tired, and dispirited. She reached into her pocket to reassure herself that her money was still there. “But I cannot spend it on dinner,” she realized with sinking heart, “or I will starve on the ship.
But how will I even last the days to the sailing if I starve now?” Wearily she trudged down to the waterfront and sat at the end of the pier from which, in three days’ time, a rowboat would take her to where the
Andrew MacBride
lay at anchor. Through the haze a large white gull appeared, diving for a fish.

Mary closed her eyes and put her tired feet in the water. Behind her, people were walking along the front. Dimly she heard them chatting and calling to each other in a dozen different accents—sometimes in English, more often in Gaelic, now and then in some unintelligible foreign tongue. Two passed by whose accents were from her own glen and she was assailed by such a wave of homesickness that she cried aloud.

Several people stopped to make sure she was not ill and a kind face leaned over her. “Such a wee lass all alone.” The woman put her hand on Mary’s shoulder. Mary sprang to her feet and hurried from the pier. She did not want to answer anybody’s questions about anything. She marched smartly through the town as though bent on some errand, though actually not paying attention to where she was going, until she found herself on the road that led, eventually, back to her own glen.

When she realized where she was headed her step lightened. She kept right on going. By evening she had reached the village of Spean
Bridge. She stopped for a meal and a night’s lodging with a large family. Happily she gathered the smaller children around her and told them stories of wicked people in bad towns. When she noticed their mother casting envious glances at the shoes she still had strung around her neck, she gave them to her.

“It was foolishness to buy them.” She smiled. “I do not need them now.” But in the night she dreamed of Duncan’s large, dark, beseeching eyes and his sad voice calling and calling. In the morning his face was still before her, his eyes still pleading. Now, with her own eyes open or shut, she could see him, hear him. She knew she could not go home no matter how she longed to; for Duncan’s sake, for Mrs. Grant’s sake—there was all Donald’s money.

“Mairi! Mairi! There is not the road to the north,” the children shouted after her as she started off.

“I am going back to the town to wait for a ship that will be soon sailing,” she called to them.

“But those wicked people will get you.”

“Do you give me your blessing, then?”

“We do, we do,” they shouted.

“Then I will fare well.” Mary returned to Fort William in better spirits.

With greater care and more canny bargaining than the first time, Mary bought food for
the voyage—what a meagre amount it seemed! Mistrustful and without money, she could not look for lodging, and she would not stay in the old warehouses where she had seen that others had put themselves up. She slung the sacks of oats and potatoes over her back and tramped out to the hills, to Ben Nevis. A little way up its great flank she found a deep corrie. There she hid her sacks on a ledge and sheltered herself from the rain and the dark. She was very hungry. But she dared not eat any of the food she had bought. Instead she foraged for what was left of last season’s nuts, seeds, and berries, and for the young, green ferns and cresses growing along the edges of the streams. For the first time in her life she was glad of the knowledge she had from Mrs. Grant about which plants were edible and which were poisonous.