Coronach, page 10
Mordaunt said nothing, controlling what he knew was a fatal impulse.
“You fucked her, didn’t you? I can see it in your face. Didn’t you?”
“No.”
“You’re a liar.” There was silence: he was watched with a bitter, quizzical smile. “You bloody, bloody liar. What do you think I am, what the fucking hell do you think I am? Take me for anything, but not a fool! You went for a woman, did you think I didn’t know? Any woman, any whore— that was all you wanted, wasn’t it, you cunt-struck bastard.”
“That is not true.”
“It is true.”
“It is not true, and if it were, it would be none of your God damned business.”
There were cards lying on the table. Bancroft began to rearrange them.
“Get out,” he said. “You sicken me.”
Mordaunt picked up his hat. The movement seemed to take hours to accomplish.
“Achill.” He stood with his back to the room, his hand motionless on the latch. “Achill, stay. Stay. I thought you was dead, you was gone so long.... Christ, do you want me to grovel? Be a friend to me tonight, only for a little while.”
He stood, the iron latch beneath his fingers cold now with his sweat.
“Help me. Stay with me. I thought such strange things while you was gone.”
Outside, from the street, the faint sound of voices and hooves. The rain had begun once more, whispering in the darkness.
“Achill—”
He thought of sleep, and the release it would bring from the memory of her, the taste, the touch, the exquisite sexuality. The yearning to lose himself in it, in the peace of a lover’s arms.
Bancroft was staring at the cards, his hand moving amongst them: the patterns he made were known only to himself.
“I never asked for this. I thought it would pass. I tried to rid myself of it. Now I let it be. I think I have paid enough, but you make me pay more every day.” He turned up a card, put it aside. “Sometimes― are you there? Are you listening?”
Mordaunt said nothing.
“I want to leave the army― I’ve thought of it, but I can’t. I have nowhere else to go, do you see. I could live in London but I hate that house now....” He closed his eyes. “Christ, sometimes I think I’m going mad. I go down and down to such darkness.... I dreamed of you dead tonight. And when I woke... my God, how I wept for you, and you won’t even look at me. I would have died for you a hundred times — why can you not love me?”
“You must not talk like this. Not to me, not to any one.”
“Why not? Are you ashamed? I am not. I would die for you, die for you, and you repay me this way, you give yourself to some poxy whore, some punk.... Can you doubt me? Can you think I would not love you? That I would hurt you, betray you? That I would do you harm? You go to some whore when you know that I— could— give you love, I could care for you―”
“Stop this, Aeneas. I cannot listen to it.”
Bancroft stared at him, anguished.
“Do you fear me? Have I given you cause to fear me?”
“No.”
“Look at me.”
“Aeneas―”
“Look at me! Yes. I see. You have tried to hate me, haven’t you? And I have tried to hate you― but you still care for me, don’t you? You was my friend once, you came to something in me, whatever it was.... I have not changed, I am who I was then, still the same man... I am still that man who was your friend.”
“Aeneas―”
“Dear Christ, why am I judged because I love? Is it not enough that I love? Why do you hate me when I offer it to you with such― oh God― such— tenderness... when I would not hurt you for the world. You hurt me, again and again until you could not hurt me more if you should kill me.”
“Aeneas―” It went unheard. “These thoughts do you no good. Nor me. Leave them.”
But they could not be left. Bancroft was speaking again, vague, wandering reminiscences, shot with moments of horrifying clarity: betrayal, blackmail, degradation, names, places, acts committed, letters written and burned. A lost, agonized litany of things impossible to listen to, things no one should have heard... ending with a hopeless, bitter gesture of love, of desire, of submission, without caution, without reserve. When it was not acknowledged he said only, “I thought you had changed your mind.”
Then, “Please go. I shall ask nothing of you. You may do as you wish about this. But I will bear no more from you. If you hurt me, I shall not be responsible for what I do. Go.”
He said it again, almost gently, and Mordaunt left him, knowing that one way or another it was for the last time.
III
The twilight of night became the dawn; a fine rain was still falling. Margaret Campbell had not slept, although the children seemed at peace who lay against her, her son’s back to hers and the heir of Glen Sian, James Gordon Gunn Stirling, aged five years, in her arms. There was no sound from the other side of the shieling where Elspeth Stirling was sleeping.
She was a white lily of a girl, Franco-Scots and convent-bred, and she thought Margaret a whore and a savage. Their only language of communication was French, which Margaret had almost forgotten. Neither spoke English.
Elspeth was fretful, restless, and pregnant, and obsessed with a privacy which could not be maintained in a single room. She had wept most of the night, and sank into an exhausted sleep an hour before dawn: small wonder, Margaret thought, that her son had left her and sought his bed among humbler company on the floor.
She touched his face now, and as if he sensed this small betrayal her own son Malcolm woke.
She stroked his sallow cheek and kissed him, although he did not like physical contact.
“Dhia dhuit, mo laochan.”
He ignored the blessing and said, “Where are you going?”
She moved silently, trying to warm herself: the fire had long been doused.
“Down to Ardsian. Be quiet now.”
“I’ll come with you,” he said.
“No. And don’t let her follow me, when God knows what she could find.”
“I have a knife.”
“I will not want your knife.”
There was no further argument. He rose lightly, so as not to disturb the sleeping child, and pulled on his breeches: as always, he covered his nakedness as quickly as possible, and she found this dignity in one so young both affecting and amusing. She smiled at him with great tenderness. He did not respond.
“Go and wash your face, mo laochan.”
He moved like a shadow to the door. She whispered his name, and he halted.
“Are you feart?”
He said, “I’m not feart of anything,” and went out.
Approaching Ardsian from the rear, she saw the smouldering piles of furniture and carpet they had burned to give their officers the impression that they had fired the house. She could not imagine what perverted mercy or indolence had prompted this action.
She went first to the stables, from which every horse had been taken. The three corpses were still hanging, drenched with the morning’s rain: after obscene effort she cut them down. She sat for a time on the wet cobbles with the head of the youngest in her lap; eventually she left them to the curious peace, the rain whispering, and walked into the house.
The same grey soft peace, the silence of rain. She was shoeless and her feet made no sound, and her footprints were blood.
She found the dead, the man who had crawled like a bleeding snail, his bowels spilled on the floor, the decapitated Coinneach Stirling, his genitals hacked and placed in his hands. And others, men and boys, some little older than her son. She examined them all, searching for Ewen, and when she could not identify him she vomited with horror and relief.
The sound of the rain filled the house with whispers, the voices of the dead.
She came upon Siubhan MacGregor on a blood-soaked bed upstairs, bound with the cords of the hangings. The rain was running on the mullioned panes with a sigh like breathing, and she thought her alive, then she went further into the shadows of the room and saw the bone-handled knife protruding from her vagina. The red-gold hair had been cut from her head; it would fetch a fair price from some southern wigmaker, despite its unfashionable colour.
Numbly, and with a terrible dread, she freed the dead wrists and ankles, and took the wet plaid from her own shoulders and covered her.
The beauty of God is in thy face, the Son of God is protecting thee, the King of the stars is before thee....
She walked along the gallery. The house seemed full of whispers, of the sound of the rain.
As she descended the spattered stairs she saw that she was not alone.
She knew who he was, although she had not seen him for several years, and time and war and privation had killed the youth of memory. But she recognized the eyes, and the tawny hair, and the chieftain’s bonnet he affected, held loosely now, with the broken eagle’s feather brushing a raw-skinned thigh.
“God and Mary be with you, Mairéad. Now, and in the days to come.”
She gazed at him, unable to look away from the gently swaying bonnet. One of his fingers had been severed.
“You had better go on to old Caelighn’s house now, and see what your kinsmen did there.”
She dared not pass or turn her back on him, but he made no further gesture, nor spoke, and when she brushed by him he stood motionless, head bent, hand lightly resting on the hilt of his broadsword, staring at the mutilated corpse.
It was perhaps two miles’ walk, and she encountered nothing, neither the living nor the dead. The doors of the house were standing open. She entered, knowing what she would find.
She covered their faces and left them, fearing them in death, believing in their spirits. The sound of the rain went on.
When her tears came, it was not for them or for Murdoch or for Ewen, but for herself and her son that she wept.
The roar of Sian water seemed louder in the morning stillness.
They entered Glen Mor, leaving the sound of the waterfall for the silence of the track. Mordaunt rode without speaking.
The rain grew lighter and ceased: the sheer slate walls crept closer and the crofts were visible. Brevet reined in with some inanity, and he swore savagely at him to keep quiet. Brevet flushed and said in a controlled voice, “I am a King’s officer, sir, as you are, and I will not be spoken to like a dog.” He spurred to the rear of the column and lashed out a command. The drum was silent.
Bayonets were fixed, although Mordaunt did not recall having given the order.
They had marched on dry bread and water, five miles on a cold morning at seventy-five paces to the minute. The air was unbearably sweet with the fragrance after rain, and a lark was mounting eastward into a torn sky.
Three children were driving cattle into a field white with weed: one was an adolescent girl, taller than the others, and they were all singing and shouting in high voices, driving the cattle with sticks while a dog ran bounding in the weed. Then they stopped, seeing the men and the horses, and the cattle were forgotten.
He killed the girl first, to spare her what a slower death would mean.
The rest was never possible to recall in sequence, or with clarity. He remembered approaching the manse, the fulsome blood-red roses, the wall, the gate, the graves. His hands were running with blood, although he did not know how he had acquired it, and his clothing was spattered with blood: he seemed unable to speak or reason, as though in the grip of nightmare. A woman was screaming and the sound was unbearable; a child cried, and was abruptly silent.
He stared down at the bleached knuckles on the hilt of his sword, blood congealing on the fullered blade, the lanyard soaked with blood. There was blood beneath his nails. His arm and his shoulder were trembling.
He covered his eyes with his bloody hand and there was silence... silence, and then, as though in nightmare or in madness, indistinguishable voices... an endless litany of voices, among them, unrecognized, his own.
Oh God— help me. Help me.
She was standing on the doorstep of the manse, as if going in or having just come out. She wore the dark red gown of the previous night.
Her eyes seemed to hold his, and her lips moved, but whatever she was attempting to say to him he could not understand it: it might have been a plea for mercy, for intervention, or a curse. Then she broke away and began to run; the heavy mud in the street sucked at her ankles and was clinging to her skirts. He fired once, meaning only to delay her; she staggered as though at some impact he could not perceive, and then was running again.
The second and third shots were fired simultaneously, by himself and by another. One shot smashed into her back. He thought she died instantly: the ball had penetrated her spine.
He did not remember moving: if any one was there to witness. The body lay with outflung arms, the right hand a bloody tangle of bone and sinew. The back of the head was wet, although her hair concealed the reason. He turned her face toward him.
One eye was open, the lashes fanned beneath the brow. Of the other nothing remained but a gaping socket, fragments of bone, the matter of the brain. The socket was steaming faintly, blood and vitreous fluid welling from it, running in tendrils over his wrist. And subtly, from the hair he held, rose the sweet, bitter perfume.
Smoke now. They were trying to fire the dwellings in the street, but the heather thatching was soaked and would not burn. A private soldier was standing at the manse gate with an uplifted torch. There was no sign of Brevet.
He came to his feet, priming and loading mechanically. The ball struck stone with a scream, and he heard the incredulous curse. No one else disturbed him.
He knelt again, staring into her face, closing the remaining eye. The lashes and the mouth, except where her blood and the humours of the shattered eye had splashed them, were as beautifully drawn as when his lips had touched them. He stroked the strands away from her cheek and turned the spilling socket into her hair, then he covered the wounded hand with a fold of her gown, taking an exaggerated care with the fingers. The hideousness of her death concealed, he left her and went into the house.
He walked through it, the lanyard stiffened around his wrist, the grip biting into his palm. The kitchen. He bent his head to enter. The light here was grey, and the same candles were on the mantel, burning; there was a kettle on a crane over the fire, boiled dry. The papers were still beneath the hearthstone, the stone scattered with paper-dry petals.
He burned them and extinguished the candles, then he turned his attention to the child.
In the years and the nightmares and the imperfect recollections that followed, he never left her: in nightmare, others fired the house and he burned with her, as she would have burned; sometimes in dreams he killed her, as others would have killed her, with the point of the sword, by strangulation, by smashing the tender skull; sometimes, hideously, the dream of death was perverted by the memory of sexual abuse he had witnessed, and had been powerless to prevent. In his dreams, he died with her. He did not recall leaving the house.
Glen Mor when they withdrew was wrapping itself in a shroud, veils of mist descending from the heights to mingle with the smoke.
He rode to the rear, having given Brevet his place in the van. After one startled glance at him, Brevet made no objection.
In Glen Sian he dismissed the men and sent Brevet away. There was no doubt where he would go first: he would be more than eager to carry the news. He went to his quarters.
He threw his hat on the floor and sat, ignoring repeated summonses from a sergeant to attend on Bancroft. At length he became aware of a cold voice outside, demanding that he open the door: the latch came up and Brevet stepped in, flicking some indefinable speck from his lapels. His haughty young face was rather pale.
“Colonel Bancroft requires you to wait on him at once, sir.”
“Tell Colonel Bancroft to go to hell.”
Not a muscle of the face moved.
“With respect, sir―”
“Please carry my message, Lieutenant.”
Brevet executed a stiff salute, turned on his heel, and went out.
Time went on, and the silence, and the rain. Brevet returned, his manner remote.
“You are ordered to report forthwith to Colonel Bancroft. I am to escort you there. I shall do so under arms if necessary.”
He looked up. The face seemed to swim in his vision: the fine, girlish features and dark eyes, the full red mouth. His head was aching, his neck, his shoulder.
He stood. Brevet’s eyes ran distastefully over his bloodstained clothing.
“Your hat, sir.”
“Leave it. I won’t want it.”
Bareheaded, he walked out into the rain, stood a minute outside Bancroft’s quarters with his face uplifted to it.
Brevet opened the door and stepped back, to let him go in first.
By evening most of it had become obscured, and would never be remembered, no matter how often he was questioned. The first words Bancroft spoke to him, what he said in return, what he was asked concerning Glen Mor and his behaviour there. He remembered only that his answers did not please, and Bancroft struck him first, an open-handed slap across the face.
He hit back, not once, although once was enough, was criminal. Bancroft fell and attempted to rise, spitting blood and obscenities: he remembered dragging him to his feet and slamming his body against the rough stone wall, the fluent curses in his ear and Bancroft’s knee jabbing for his groin. He remembered his own hands, shaking and bloody, clenched in Bancroft’s hair, smashing his head repeatedly against the wall, tearing the gorget from his throat and gouging his thumbs into the frantic pulse. The right arm came up in a grotesque, instinctive attack and he seized the bandaged wrist with his left hand and ground the stump into the wall. There was an almost sexual gratification in the scream of pain.
