The Sea House: A Novel (25 page)

CHAPTER 27

Moira

My cousin had heard that I had died along with my parents and brothers and sisters, so my letter to her came as a great surprise. She had to ask the schoolmaster, Mr Carmichael, to read it out to her twice over.

When she saw me in her doorway, she fell upon me as if I were back from death itself, but though she sat me down and gave me a hot cup of water and was heartily glad of the gifts of tea and jam and a fresh whey cheese I had made, I could see that she was hard pressed to want that I should stay.

She and her husband had thrown together a small house made from rocks taken from the shore, but the only bit of earth left for the new squatters was boggy and raw land. The children’s feet did sink into it, down at the end of their house where the cattle should be kept – not that Annie had herself a cow. They never had time to let the floor harden before they must live in there, and no one had the heart or the strength to get up a ceilidh to dance the floor hard and pack down the earth in the old way. The bairns were playing a jumping game to see how far they could sink down in the mud until Annie gave the boys a slap – something I had never seen her do before.

I told Annie of my life so far, of the days of the coughing disease that carried off my dear ones. She said she had heard of the place and that no one will touch the rocks of our walls now lest they catch the disease. I told her how I worked at the manse, but I did not tell her I was not going back, since she cried and said it were a great good fortune that I should eat so well each day, and I did then promise to send her more provisions with my pay. I helped her with preparing a pot of limpets taken from the rocks for our supper, a meal of salt and gristle that no man will choose to eat except when he be starving.

On the morrow, we must all get up early, for Norman Paul, the travelling evangelist, had come to preach on the hill behind the village. He gave a sermon full of great hellfire which was mostly directed to the oppressors of the people. And though he did term them the Egyptians who oppressed the Israelites to wander the desert, we all did know who he was referring to as we looked about the poor lands and the great rocks pushing through the rough moor like some beast waking up from their sleep. Indeed, this land my people have to live on, at first the eye thinks it is all rock and desolate of any life, till you begin to see rags of land, a little moss and rushes, some patches of crops no bigger than a blanket. And every last inch must be drained and fed with endless baskets of seaware brought up from the shore if it is to grow stubby rigs of potatoes.

The people who had been moved here a while back had accustomed themselves to the harshness, and by plucking a living from the sea, and by the women weaving all night, they might survive. But the fifty new people come from the cleared islands like mine own – who had been first cleared to Uist and Sollas and then cleared again to here – they had nothing but their chains to hang a pot over the fire, and their peat tongs and their bowls and their pots. How they were to get food to put in their pots with no boats and no line and no land was a cruel question. They had no choice but to take loans from His Lordship’s factor to buy meal that came from his stores, so they were now entirely in His Lordship’s hands, in debt to him for every last mouthful they supped – and with no means at all to pay.

I stayed with Annie through that week, helping to dig out some of the moor peat into banks to let the soil drain, going down to the foreshore where the bay is ringed with rocks covered in brown seaweed like heads covered in long hair; the great heads of old gods about to rise up from under the water, it felt to me, as I filled my creel, the water lap, lapping against the rocks, the oyster catchers piping their sad and lonely notes. Then we must climb the hill with baskets of weed to turn the soil less sour. It was a marvel to see how those that had long lived there had crofted a farmland from barrenness, and heartbreaking to see how small the plots.

But it was this improvement in the soil and grazings, so hard won out of necessity, that had got the factor’s eye on the place to put more of his big sheep and disallow the incomers from staying. On the wall inside the schoolroom porch, the factor had put up a notice in English. Annie took me up to read it to her, to know if the people had understood it correctly. It was an advertisement for a ship leaving to Canada. All those who could not pay back their debts for the winter meal they had took from His Lordship were to be evicted, and must sail on the ship.

‘If they make you go, Annie,’ I told her, ‘then I will come with you and we will make a life in Manitoba.’

That night, I dreamed again of the dogs barking, back in my home on our island. It was the dogs that first smelled the rot in the fields, and by morning we could all catch the bad smell in the air. My father walked up to the rigs, and the stench there was worse than the rotted seaware, having a smell like something burned and then left to wetly rot. He turned over one of the plants, and all the roots that should have had little white fists of potatoes came away in a black, stinking mush.

I woke up and realised I was in Annie’s house, but I heard the dogs barking still, all around the bay. I wrapped my shawl round my shoulders and found Annie up too, alarmed by the din. We went to the door, and picking our way along the track in the white mist lying on the ground, we saw three mounted men silhouetted on a rise against the half-awake sky. They were moving down the track to our village, and behind them, on the hill brow, we saw men walking with rifles on their shoulders: the guard that Lord Marstone kept down at Rodel.

Carmichael was out too, in his nightshirt with his coat thrown over it, and he was running over to them. The people were coming out from their houses.

Out in the bay, I saw that there was a boat waiting, a dark shape floating on a white sea, and big enough it was to ship out the whole village to Stornoway where the ship to Canada was anchored. A pink stain was spreading into the water beyond, all the way towards the mainland, but it was no good looking over there for I knew that no one would be coming to help us, no one to see that His Lordship dealt fairly with us. I saw that my people, harassed from bad place to worse place had nowhere left to go now but choose to go upon the sea.

I walked fast up to the men on horses, so filled with anger that I felt sure I had the strength to stop every one of His Lordship’s rotten soldiers. Carmichael was already trying to reason with the factor, and appealing with gestures to the man sat alongside him. I reached where they were gathered, and I had the shock of my life, for the man sat next to the factor and come to evict us was none other than my own Reverend Alexander.

The Reverend did look as if he were half kidnapped, and I saw plain he had been up all night, riding out with them and no doubt sneaking round the coast with the factor to collect the men at the garrison at the Rodel customs house before they set out here.

‘Reverend, if you will,’ the factor said. Alexander took out a paper and looked at it as if he did not comprehend what he saw there, but then he made a little speech about how he was obliged to do his sad duty, and I heard him read out the order of eviction for every last soul, every man and woman and child who was in debts of arrears to the Marstones.

I could not think, as my breast filled up with anger, how it had come to be that our people, who was born of this land and had lived in these islands for generations before time was remembered, were now gypsies to be chased away as worthless paupers.

There was a silence, and then an old
cailleach
screamed that the Reverend would die young, that his gravestone would never stand upright for the wickedness he had brought with him that day. I saw Alexander go very white and Carmichael looked away from him.

The factor set up a table in the village, and his men began to turn out the houses, making a list of the things he would keep to pay for the people’s removal, and saying what they could take on the boat.

I saw Alexander wandering up and down among the scattered
caschroms
and pieces of broken looms, the upturned stools, and someone’s precious bothy blanket trodden into the mud. He was thinking to speak to the people to give comfort, but no one would stay to speak with him. I hung back and would not go near him, though he walked towards me. I turned and I walked quickly away from him.

I was determined to get in the boat that was filling up with those good, strong men trembling and shaking with the shock of that day, their wives and children crying so that the wailing carried across the water and haunted the land all that long day. And not one man there fought back, since there was nothing more to be done.

The factor’s men began to carry an old
cailleach
out from the poor bothy she had on the shore. The old woman was too sick to get up and leave her bed, but the soldiers were pulling the canvas sail that was her poor roof from off the walls. Then Alexander did go and remonstrate with the soldiers but was pushed away hard. I saw how he staggered and, falling, he hit his head upon a rock.

I was set to go with Annie. I was carrying her youngest bairn, and my heart was set hard against ever coming back to that place, but when I saw that no one was going to look to the Reverend as he lay there with his head against a rock and with the blood running into his eye, then I gave the bairn to his sister. Even as I ran to help him, I knew I was not going on that boat, because though I hated him now along with the Marstones for such cruelty, I could not leave him any more than I could leave myself and go.

I sat with his head in my lap while the boat filled and I held my shawl to his head until the bleeding began to stop, his face so sunk into sleep and unguarded. The crying and the loading of the boat went on around us for many hours, and even after the boat was gone from sight, the sound of the people wailing their grief could be heard across the water for a long time.

By the end of that terrible day he was stirring back to life, the bay quiet now, the boat with the people of Finsbay gone from that place.

The soldiers were still there, loading what they would take onto a cart, firing the roofs of the hovels so no one would come back, stopping to make a joke or light up their smokes, a boot on a broken table.

They got the Reverend up on his horse. He was awake now, but slumped and not yet right at all. When I told them I worked at the manse, the soldiers let me walk by his horse and watch that he did not slide off, and they must make coarse comments behind my back as I walked, which I heard clear enough, so I did turn and spit at them.

CHAPTER 28

Moira

The journey on the horse across the rough paths jolted his sick head so that his condition worsened. The Reverend had stopped speaking and his eyelids had fallen shut by the time we arrived back at the manse. I had to get two of the farm boys to help me fetch him down from off the horse’s back, and still he could not move his feet to walk, even when they took one arm each over their shoulders. So they carried him up, and none too careful; I saw them bump his head against the newel post.

They did take off his clothes for me and get him in his nightshirt, and then they left. It was just me and the silent Reverend in that big house then. His breath was so quiet and shallow that I had to keep stooping over to see he was still alive.

I had not thought to pray very much before, but I prayed hard those days. He lay fallen into a sleep so sound that the doctor began to say how the Reverend might never open his eyes.

At least there was one blessing. She did not come back to the house. Not once, as he lay sick and near to death.

Then on the fifteenth morning, he opened his eyes, and from then on each day brought a small improvement. He was able to sit up, come down to his study, and in time, walk outside and look at the sea and the weather.

One month after the Sollas people and my cousin Annie were cleared from Finsbay, he was saying how he must start to give the sermon on Sunday, anxious to relieve the cleric from Tarbert who travelled down to do his duties.

The doctor told him this was too soon. He examined the Reverend’s skull and told him the fracture was healing, but that he was in need of a great deal of rest and sleep if he was not to suffer in some permanent way. The doctor pulled me aside after, to say that I must make sure the Reverend did not read more than two hours a day, and that he slept of a night for at least nine hours.

This near scared me to death, since I knew that what the Reverend did was read for nine hours, and sleep scarcely two. When I came in of a morning to do his study, I would see yet more books open, the notes growing in piles on his desk. I could fair work out how he had spent the night and follow his feverish thinking, just by looking at the passages he had read.

And each morning he told me outrageous fibs about how refreshed he felt after staying tucked up in bed all night – forgetting that I had eyes in my head to see how his own eyes hung like faint lamps in the cloud of darkness round them. I saw the tight lips he pressed together from his headaches that left him feeling sick to the stomach so that he pushed away his plate. And I was afeared to see how he had become but skin over a skeleton, and every precious ounce of him too dear to lose.

Now his fevered studies were not just for his mermaids and seal men, but he must also find out all he can about the Finnmen, a savage kind of body that lives in the northern snows. So I must look at pictures of the Finnman’s tents all made from skins, and their sledges and their spears and the Finnpeople’s strange clothes sewn from animal furs.

‘Sit down, Moira,’ he says one morning. I see his tea has gone cold on his desk, his hair standing up on end from where he has passed a hand through it, and I would like to smooth it back down. I first fetch hot tea before I will agree to sit with him a moment.

He reads me the story of the Selkie again, but this time it is a story from Orkney Islands, far in the north, and this time it is the story of a seal that takes off his seal skin with the express purpose of becoming a Finnman.