The Runaway's Gold (3 page)

For the rest of the day me head pounded as I thought of Sam Livingston and what I would say to Billy. But later that night, back in me boardinghouse, it was me brother, John, I saw again and again in me dreams. He was but a willowy
silhouette at the far end of the forge, his half-starved body rippling in the vapors above the white-hot coals that lay between us. Our eyes met as I glanced up from driving a nail into a left hind hoof, cradling a fetlock over me knee in me blistered palm. And when I looked at him, I wondered if it's possible to love a brother who'd trade your life for his. And why, even after all that happened, I missed him to me very core.

When I awoke in a cold sweat to screams and gunshots from the street below, and the hacking and wheezing of the five other men who shared me room, I knew I'd sleep no more. And it was then that me mind crept back to that night some seven months before, when me life began to unravel. And to those darting mud-brown eyes of the ewe struggling to give birth at the foot of me grandfather's chair.

It was late March and she was carrying twins, something Daa knew when he dragged her in from the storm. Our home was Shetland—the cluster of islands in the northernmost reaches of Scotland. A land of wee ponies and treeless hills, where the winds blow strong and the peat-riddled ground is so soft the roads are impassable by horse and cart. The cod banks had failed, the harvest was rot, and all but our landlord, Wallace Marwick, were hungry.

Me Daa was Shetland born, with a stiff left leg broken hauling peat, and of the last families named in the island tradition of passing down one's first name to his offspring. His father was Robert Christopherson, so Daa was named William Robertson, not William Christopherson like they do in England
and America. His sister, who lived with us, was Alice Robertsdaughter. But that wasn't good enough for Daa.

“I'll not have me family line confused with the other hafkrakked Williamsons scattered across this parish,” William Robertson announced when me oldest brother was born. “He'll do as the English and keep his grandfather's name instead.”

And that is how William Jr., John, me troublesome sisters Catherine and Victoria, and I, as well as the many generations to follow, came to keep the Robertson name.

There were few signs of affection in our croft house, the result of seven miserable people living in two smoky rooms, me Midder having died in childbirth just four months earlier and me oldest brother, William Jr., already lost at sea. Oddly, only me brother John, who often wrapped an arm round me shoulder as we trudged home from planting, or scooped up Catherine and Victoria, flipping them upside down amid a torrent of giggles, seemed able to bring warmth into the damp chill of our lives. John, the one person who'd do anything to leave.

Daa was the kind of man who was only partially honest, just enough to spread across the surface like the shimmery lüm of oil on water thinly coating many dark layers beneath. That's why, when he rolled up his sleeves to help pull the lambs from the struggling ewe, we said nothing about the lug mark cut in her left ear that showed she was from the Peterson croft.

We were supposed to think he hadn't noticed.

Shetlanders keep careful count of everything, especially
their sheep, but that March afternoon the sudden arrival of the southwesterly gale caught most of us off guard.

“Gutcher,” Daa said to me grandfather, pulling on his oiled sheepskin. “Let's see what bounty this storm has awaiting!”

The two of them battled the wind down the half-mile path along the cliffs to the stony beach, through flans of sea spray twenty feet high, searching for driftwood or anything blown ashore. Something those on a treeless island such as Shetland were bound to do. It was on his return, with three barrel staves tucked under his arm, that Daa stumbled upon the laboring ewe, separated from her flock, nibbling on a patch of rotting brown heather, her back to the storm.

“Ho, ho! What a prize she is!” he announced, herding her home through the biting blast of wind and sea spray.

By Shetland law, should a stray sheep be found and cared for, for a year and a day, and the owner not discovered, it is sold—half the share going to the finder and half to the poor. But I knew giving to the poor wasn't quite what Daa had in mind.

“See, lad,” William Robertson said with a nod to the skittish ewe, “it's me Anglican line rewarded again! You don't see good fortune like this coming to those low-life Presbyterians, now, do you?”

Our queen's Anglican Church of England, with its powerful bishops, was considered too similar to the Roman Church for most islanders' independent spirit. In fact, it had been mostly driven from Scotland since the time me great-great-grandfather
was born. But me Daa, he had to be different. His world was full of enemies—the fire-and-brimstone rule of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which we called “the Kirk,” at the top of his list, and me Midder the only exception. William Robertson, I heard our neighbors mutter, was a troublemaker—and a nonconformist of the worst kind.

And he did
look
different, after all, with his high cheekbones and large jaw—features he claimed as royal, no matter how distantly they might be traced.

As Daa herded the ewe past the table and through the door to the adjoining byre, I knew he had already calculated, to the pence, how much he could get for the extra wool she and her offspring would provide. And if he could mark the lambs as his own and then quickly return her to the scattald—the grazing area we shared with our neighbors—who would know they weren't his own? It had always worked before.

The croft house we leased from Wallace Marwick was a two-room rectangle and attached byre made of stones from the beginning of time and rafters salvaged from the wreck of the
Alice May
in 1667. The front room was dim, the air heavy with the earthen smell of peat burning in the fire in its center. Three snarling pigs rooted under our table, and when you looked up, you saw a ceiling of neatly stacked turf across a network of battens and ropes. The other wee room was for sleeping.

On most nights we could easily listen to the sounds of the cows in the byre through a many-gapped wall of stone, but that night the wind roared and moaned.

“Canna hear her,” Daa grumbled, eyeing the door.

We hadn't been seated at the table but a moment when he left to drag the ewe back inside.

She was a Shetland, an ancient breed with a mixture of brown and white fleece, all of it hanging low to the ground and matted with burrs, nettles, and mud. She paced in the glow of the fire, bleating, panting, and soiling the cleanly swept floor as we made fast work of our shrinking ration of dried fish and oatcakes. John and I sat perched at the edge of our chairs, bellies churning, eyeing the plate in the center of the table where one last shriveled piece of cod remained.

When it was clear the ewe was in trouble, Daa flipped her on her side by the fire, his stiff left leg awkwardly pointing straight ahead, his right bent beneath him. He smoothed his thick purple-and-red chapped hand over her belly as she thrashed and kicked, her stomach rising and falling in a violent rhythm.

“Soli Deo Gloria,” I whispered as she wrenched her mud-caked neck and stared at me with the same wild-eyed look I remembered on me Midder's face the night she struggled to bring our wee brother Michael into the world.

Little light made it through the croft's two windows of stretched lamb's hide. Only the glow from two smoldering lamps of foul-smelling fish oil and the orange-red flames of peat made it possible to see what little remained of last season's ling and cod hung by their tails from the rafters like a string of ghosts.

“Ooooo! Handsome Christopher's eyes are so, so blue. Ann Peterson canna keep her eyes off him.” Nosy Catherine giggled from across the table, ignoring what we all knew—that Daa was once again up to no good.

John's right brow arched, his glinting eyes taunting me from across the table as Catherine prattled on. He knew—we all knew—it was he who stole the hearts on our side of the island. He who could focus his gaze on a lass's face and make her feel like she and only she held the key to his heart.

Catherine was seven, with a mouth that never stopped. I had nearly reached me fourteenth year, and John his sixteenth. Victoria was five, she being named, at Daa's insistence, for Queen Victoria, who had been crowned queen of Great Britain the year me sister was born.

As I reached across to cuff Catherine's ear for what must have been the tenth time that day, the wind suddenly shifted, bringing a blast of damp, salty air down the hole in the roof above the fire and scattering red sparks of peat and ash over Daa and the ewe. We coughed and sputtered, waving the cloud of debris from our faces, but Daa—he never flinched. One bread-loaf-shaped hand steadied the now frantic ewe, the other was sunk up to his elbow in her warm, wet belly, searching for heads and hooves.

When the rain started to drip through the thatch onto Gutcher's oatcake, I began to wonder how much longer the thatch would hold. In a wind such as that, the stone weights hanging over the roof would surely need securing. For a moment
I even forgot that it wouldn't be long before Mr. Peterson came searching for his ewe. That the punishment for stealing was a nice long stay in Lerwick Prison, and if the sheriff took Daa from us, we wouldn't have enough hands to take in the cod we needed to meet our rent.

“Are there more oatcakes?” Victoria asked, casting her sweet green eyes on Aunt Alice as she leaned down to lick her fingers. The rest of us knew the answer without asking.

“Tuts, missy,” me aunt murmured, tucking a loose strand of grayish-blond hair back under her coarse-woven hap. “That's the last of it, I'm afraid. But I'll heat you some water and sprinkle it with a bit of the bere. That'll take away the hunger. At least till morning.”

“Catherine! Over here!” Daa suddenly cried. “Steady her head!” And as Catherine knelt at his side, stroking the beast's warm nose, Daa's well-schooled hands managed to pull out the first lamb. The second followed quickly, the rush of red-and-yellow faa spilling on the floor.

“Now will you look at that—a ram and a ewe,” he announced as John and I exchanged nervous glances. “Not a bad night, this.”

Catherine and Victoria set to toweling the newborns' noses as they had so many times before. The wee creatures, curly fleece still wet to their skin, had just started softly bleating when there was a pounding on the door.

“Robertson, you thieving haf-krak!” Peter Peterson's voice boomed through the roar of wind. The weathered driftwood
boards rattled on their iron hinges. “Open this blasted door!”

“Damn,” Daa muttered, beckoning Catherine and Victoria with a bloody hand as me heart began to race. “To the byre with them!”

Aunt Alice handed the girls each a piece of homespun wadmal in which to wrap the lambs as they slipped out the connecting door.

Then Daa, struggling to hold down the frantic ewe, looked at John and motioned to the tattered quilt tucked about me grandfather's knees. Gutcher snapped his toothless gums as John whisked the quilt from his lap, mopped up the afterbirth, and then stuffed the soiled cloth behind the basket of peat.

The ewe continued to thrash and squirm under Daa's powerful arms, bleating louder and louder, desperate to get to her lambs, her chest rising and falling faster with each breath.

“Gibbie Tait saw you slipping across the scattald with that ewe!” Mr. Peterson's voice thundered. “And may the Devil follow ya straight to Hell if you try to slip her out the back door of your byre, 'cause I'm watching!”

“Lor', Sister!” Daa hissed. He raised his shaggy, reddish-gray brows as he eyed me aunt. “Get the lad a rag!”

Wisps of hair falling across her sallow, pinched face, Aunt Alice quickly grabbed another piece of wadmal from a hook by the fire. Then she handed it to John.

“Hah!” John scoffed, pushing the cloth back at her. “I'll be no further part of this!”

Aunt Alice looked fearfully to Daa, who cursed and spat
on the floor. But he knew not to fight John. When John made up his mind, there was no going back. “Christ, woman!” Daa shouted. “Then give it to Christopher!”

I looked up from me chair, too stunned to move as she shoved the cloth into me chest, let out a faint gasp, and quickly backed into the corner.

“Use it, lad,” Daa ordered, his flat, even voice nearly drowned out by the ewe's bleating. “I canna hold her forever!”

At first I didn't understand. And then, as the bleating seemed to crescendo and Peter Peterson's pounding grew more powerful, Daa, while still pressing down on the ewe, somehow balanced on his squatted right leg and swung the other fiercely into me calf.

“Snuff her out, I say! Peterson's watching—we canna slip her from the byre!”

I grabbed the table to keep from toppling onto him, me flesh bruised by the blow. And then, suddenly, a deep chill began to creep up me back as it came to me what he wanted me to do.

Me throat tightened as I limped to the ewe's head, squatted on the icy floor, and gingerly transferred the rag into me right hand. Me shaking palm hovered inches over her soft, warm snout as I glanced back into Daa's wretched, eager eyes, praying for a sign that I had misunderstood.

Spit flew from his lips. “
Snuff her out, lad!
We haven't the time!”

At first the ewe's eyes bulged, darting left and then right,
as I attempted to seal her nose. But try as I might, I couldn't bring meself to clamp down me palm. In moments she wrestled free of me and was bleating even louder than before.

“I hear that ewe, Robertson!” Mr. Peterson's pounding grew more powerful, the door's iron latch bending under the strain.

“I said snuff her!”

She was a beast of the highest value—the proven producer of twins, an unharvested fleece on her hide, her breath hot and vibrant in me palm.