Coronach, page 47
She was twisting the rings around her fingers as he had seen her do that morning, when the silk on these walls had been a discoloured yellow, and the carpet had been stained with blood.
“If there are repercussions, all improving measures must be stopped immediately, for the people’s good.”
The wind was rising, driving the snow: he heard it like a faint, demented song.
“You are not an independent agent now, Mr. Scott, whatever liberties you took upon yourself before.”
He said, “Is that all?”
“Yes, that is all. You may go.”
“Thank you.” And as he turned his elbow caught the edge of the hideous Italian vase on the mantel. It fell and smashed into gaudy fragments, and he glanced down at the pieces but made no move to pick them up.
“A pity,” he said.
He had been climbing for three hours, through snow and sleet and equally blinding explosions of sunlight, from the leafless wood where the dead deer lay in the drifts that bore the signatures of visiting predators: the sharp encircling prints of foxes, the brushstrokes of wings and the gaping holes between the ribs where eagles had torn out hearts and lungs. Then across the empty hills, following the tracks of the deer, climbing until he had surprised a dozen ailing hinds huddled in the snow, and farther on thirty stags together, driven down from their accustomed wintering place by the cold.
He climbed now with effort, sucking the clean harsh air in laboured gasps. To fall was to die: to slip, to die more slowly, broken by the teeth of many projecting rocks in an endless, icy descent. Now at eight hundred feet there was nothing, only the bitter gnawed ground called with ironic significance An Reithe, the Ram. Here he would burn in April, to force tender new growth from the heather: here, among the fallen stones of crofts long unoccupied, sheep would graze, and force from this uninhabitable country the profit no other method of husbandry had ever provided.
He flung off his coat and sat sweating in the bitter air, eyes narrowed against the glare of sun on the snow of the closest peaks. Eight hundred, nine hundred, a thousand feet high, their Gaelic names evoked with understated clarity a country’s resistance to man. The cold hill, the bare hill, the little hill of struggle, the place of the sharp dry stones, the hill of no shelter, the ridge of the mist, where the scree fell away into eternity. It was not a country made for men: it was not to be subdued by men. It was not meant to be farmed; it was not meant to be cultivated. It was primitive; and until men ceased to farm it like some verdant upland, attempting to wrest an easy livelihood from it, it would break them... it would break their hearts and their spirits and their fortunes, and sometimes, indifferently, it would kill them, until they acknowledged its grandeur and its brutality and left it alone in its solitude.
He believed it utterly. He believed the land uninhabitable, and unfit for cultivation. But he could not abandon his attempts to subdue it. He knew he would not lose his life to it; and he would wrest profit from its barren stones.
The sweat dried on his body, and the fingers frost-bitten in his childhood bleached to insensibility, and still he did not move, staring across the ground. Indigo shadows, black rock, drifting snow hardened and sculpted by the wind. As sterile as rock, as clean as rain: no frost-blackened fields, no rotting bere, no bloated carcasses, no human voices crying.... There was nothing between himself and infinity but the wind, and a pair of eagles in the sun. Spiralling, tumbling, diving at one another in their ritual courtship flight, the shadow of their great wings crossed his face, and mocked him with their freedom.
VII
When time has dulled the memory of pain, these pages resurrect it: my book of dreary hours, of commonplaces, of proprieties and drudgeries that hedged my screaming soul.
7 o’clock. Rise. Air bed. Window frozen. Dress. Bring water to kitchen, sweep, clean fireirons, make up fire. 8 o’clock. We break our fast. 9 o’clock. Wash breakfast things. Half nine. Cows, hens, stable. 11 o’clock. All rooms swept, dusted and arranged, water cans full, brush my father’s boots (not to his satisfaction). One o’clock. Dinner, boiled potatoes and tea. Half one. I make black pudding with my aunt of yesterday’s dead sheep. Singe head and trotters for soup, clean heart and lungs. Salt and hang meat. 5 o’clock. Lay table. Half five. We eat supper, a hard fried liver.
7 o’clock. Bed.
By night I wrote, to preserve my sanity. The blowing snow scraped like sand against the glass and collected on the sill, and lay on the page of a shabby book cracked with much reading.
I am Duchess of Malfi still....
The draught blew my candleflame, and in the silence of the sleeping house a board creaked beyond the door: MacNeil, emanating disapproval and whisky fumes; but even he did not dare to disturb me.
Return, fair soul, from darkness, and lead mine/ Out of this sensible hell....
I had lived in this place for five years and five months. I was twenty-two years old.
On a day in late winter, the date of which I could never remember, I stood in Ewen’s glasshouse, where neither I nor any one else had come in the two years since his death.
It was full of desiccated plants, cracked panes of glass overhead, a litter of twigs and leaves and moss on the roof. Beneath one of the benches a few bulbs had bloomed and shrivelled unnoticed. Among the empty pots I found a label in Ewen’s handwriting: the sight of it, unexpectedly, could still bring tears to my eyes. Then I closed the door and went into the house, where I thought I might be welcome for an hour, and coming out of the servants’ warren into the cold hall I heard James’s voice.
They say listeners never hear well of themselves. Certainly ever afterwards I recalled my sense of outrage and betrayal.
“... as you intend to display her to your relatives, perhaps it would not be too much to ask that you have a word with her concerning her appearance.”
She said only, “Och, James,” as though the entire subject were an unnecessary interruption in a trying day, then he said, “Well, I don’t know how I should tolerate it. Some one who claims to meet me with equity, to look like such a guy— one feels one should toss her a penny for a new shoe. Cannot you give her something of yours? You seem to throw enough of them out.”
And my shabby coat hangs on the peg, and my cracked boots, patched and soled by Glen Mor’s tanner, sit on the floor beneath it; and my clothing smells of neglect and smoke, and in my chests the silk gowns rot, and against my skin the greyish linen of a boned jump fitted to the breasts of a sixteen year old girl frays and strains; and the cuff of my shirt and my stockings are greyed, and the snow falls outside the window as it fell on me that morning coming out of James’s house, whispering to this poor tatterdemalion ghost, this diminished heiress, A penny for the guy, a penny for the guy.
And I write, and I write into the night.
O death, rock me asleep....
I came in one evening and found a stranger sitting in the kitchen. It was my only indication that our contact with the world had once more been established.
He was a lank, ill-made man, badly dressed, with hair of a nondescript brown tied back with a snuff-coloured ribbon: where the firelight touched his cheek the skin was pitted with smallpox scars. He was not a man of consequence, otherwise he would have been entertained in the parlour instead of lounging at the table with a coatless MacNeil, who sat in slovenly disarray nearest the fire in his stockinged feet. But his manners were impeccable: he rose when I appeared and MacNeil broke off in mid-discourse and said, “My daughter.”
He spoke in Gaelic, and his guest bowed and addressed me in that language. His voice was pleasant, but the general atmosphere of dissipation and MacNeil’s air of sly expectancy, as though he had conjured this little scenario for his own amusement, disgusted me; so I turned to that eager, pitted face and said, “Go back to your boozing-glass, sir. I do not understand you.”
And I left them in the smoky kitchen, amid the smell of feet and whisky and drying laundry. I neither knew nor cared for my father’s response, and in fact he made none. Perhaps it had added an unexpected savour to the drama, or perhaps I had genuinely shocked him. But nothing he did or said signified any longer to me: nothing any one did or said would now govern my behaviour, save myself.
Such was George Cameron’s first experience of me.
He took up lodgings in the derelict school, which it was MacNeil’s intention that he should reopen, and where George himself had been educated before the rebellion.
His father, in the final days of a dying feudalism, had called himself a bard. In truth he had been a failed farmer who had followed MacNeil into revolt and died a fugitive. George had inherited his father’s fine tenor voice, his rusting broadsword, and a starving patch of kale on the hill: when his mother died he was passed like an unwanted parcel to various hungry relations, and lodged in the end with cousins. When he was fourteen he had fed long enough on his uncle’s contempt and announced he was leaving Glen Mor. MacNeil, lifting his head briefly from his miasma of drink and self-pity, had subjected him to a thorough course of study and sent him to Edinburgh, where for some years he had laboured and attended the university, which he had left abruptly and without his degree.
He told me all this one day at the school, to which I had been dispatched with rags and buckets and broom to render it habitable.
We were sitting two or three rows apart on the hard, scarred benches in the dusty cold, breathing in the odour of mildew: we were permitted to be alone because my father sanctioned this acquaintance, and all the doors were open.
The conversation was conducted in English. He never again attempted to speak to me in Gaelic.
After some hours we ate together: cold mutton and bannock and cheese brought by my aunt, who stayed only long enough to inspect my efforts and the walls, which he was washing with lime. When she left she shut the door behind her... more complicity, I thought.
He said, “It was my intention to serve the Kirk.”
“What prevented you?”
“I fell into evil ways.” And he said it so drolly that I laughed.
“You are a strange man, Mr. Cameron.”
“I would be honoured if you would call me George.” He was painfully ugly, but his ugliness was relieved by a wistful charm, as though he apologized for it.
“What an unfortunate Christian name for a Scot to bear.”
“Alas,” and he gave me that ironic smile, “we do not choose our names, any more than we choose our relations.” I laughed again, more than I had for months— or years— and found myself liking him.
“Were you christened George?”
“No. But I prefer the English version.”
“How odd.”
“No odder than you: a Scot with a Saxon tongue.”
“I believe there is a proverb to the effect that although a man be born in a barn, it does not make him a horse.”
“Are you not a horse then, nor even a Scot?”
He said it whimsically, as if he knew the depth of the wounds; and maybe he did, maybe MacNeil had presented some bent version of the truth. But I told him nothing― why should I tell him?― and he changed the subject.
“So Jamie Stirling succeeds the old man.”
“ ‘The old man’ was dear to me.”
He flushed, which intensified the pitted scars.
“You must forgive me, Miss MacNeil. I stumble at every step.”
He said it with great sincerity, and even offered his hand as schoolboys ask for Pax. His fingers were as bony and as pale as his face: they clasped mine across the gritty floor and the greyish scum of the water.
“I have prayed for the friendship of some one like you.”
Does God hear your prayers? Or do you cry in the wilderness, like me?
But I did not say it. I did not say anything, only sat in a permissive silence while his fingers ventured upon that first intimacy; and he called me Margaret, without my consent.
Malcolm sat in the estate office at seven in the evening: he had risen fourteen hours earlier, and ridden and walked thirty-two miles in the course of the day conducting his census: he had no lieutenants and he trusted no one else to do this accurately and impartially, uninfluenced by family pressures or pleas for favour.
When they were registered they signed or made their marks, taking responsibility for the mentally deficient or infants housed among them. Some refused, having heard the rumour that to mark his paper was to sign away their tenancies. These he brusquely recorded with a cross and bracketed illiterate. At one croft which supported fifteen adults and children, some from other impoverished townships, he had given members of the extended family notice to quit, in accordance with the policy of non-subdivision. They had stared at him with no show of resistance, while beneath the dense fug of smoke an old woman, clearly senile, huddled and moaned, hugging herself and shuddering whenever one of them spoke his name.
Eighteen families, seven of which had never previously paid rent. How many more? Three hundred, four hundred? How many hours, how many miles, how much profit?
He closed his eyes. Heavy rains had delayed the burning and clearing of heather; the fields were a sea of muck; the Sian which meandered through James’s garden had burst its banks, and flooded the orchard with a foot or so of fast-flowing water. And solutions must be found to every such act of God, and must originate here, must proceed from behind this table, from behind his aching eyes.
There was movement, and he raised his head. James drifted toward him through the dusk.
“How fortuitous to find you here. Your little exercise continues, I trust?”
He tossed the sheaf of papers across the table, and felt for his tobacco while James squinted at them in the gloom.
“Very progressive. I congratulate you.”
Still light in the sky, and the cawing of rooks. He waited for James to speak further or go, and allow him to do the same, but James merely studied his silken legs and settled deeper into the chair. Irritated, he pulled the papers toward him and closed them into their marbled covers; then James said, “I hope this business proves as profitable as you say. Because come the autumn I shall have a son to inherit.”
“Or a daughter to dower.”
“I thought I might have your felicitations.”
“You have them, if you need them.”
The light was dying now. How rapidly the air became cold... the season was early yet.
He became aware of the hostility with which James was watching him.
“I might have expected that from you, as you sow your bastards so freely. The bloom is rather brushed off the experience for you.”
“Have you anything else to say?” and James stood up jerkily like a beautiful puppet.
“Yes, and it may prove of passing interest. You are no doubt aware that our mutual friend George Cameron has returned from his travels.”
“Seoras Cameron is no friend of mine.”
James’s hands came within the periphery of the candlelight. On the smallest finger of the left, he wore Ewen’s long unused signet.
“Well, it comes to my attention that your other little friend, the one you had in common with my father, is seen about a good deal in his company.”
He put the quill down and looked over the candleflame. The light seemed to burn his eyes.
“I am not Miss MacNeil’s guardian, any more than I am yours.”
James said diffidently, “Oh, well, in that case, perhaps I should not have said.” There was no response, only the burning, inexpressive eyes, and he felt as though nothing he had been saying had been heard since he had entered this room, and nothing after he left would be recalled but the insignificance of his interruption. “You do take a certain proprietary interest in her, I collect?” The quill was moving again, trailing its stream of ink, indecipherable hieroglyphics upon which his future relied: as it had yesterday, and the year before, and all the years before that, as it would like the line of Banquo’s progeny stretch out to the crack of doom. And nothing changed, and its claustrophobic sameness and futility smothered him, and made him want to scream.
“I never thought you would come to this. Everything you were, and everything you wanted to be, now reduced to the margins of a ledger. I never thought to ever see you pushing a quill on my behalf.”
This, he thought, this is mere shadow play. I make this with my fingers against the wall.
He replaced the quill, the papers, the ledger, in a red haze of fatigue. Even James seemed to waver in the heat rippling from the flame, and when he stood James retreated slightly, as though his movements held some inexplicable menace.
“I am everything I was, and everything I wanted to be, and what I am is not this, and is not here. Only a fool would think so.”
He went out, leaving the candle burning. James said after him, “I concern myself only with your welfare, Malcolm, and your happiness.”
When there was no answer he flicked open a page of the ledger, but the columns and calculations bored him and he let it fall shut, and conscientiously snuffed the candle, remembering the cost.
The moon was late in rising. By three in the morning it was at its zenith, casting the cold, greyish light by which the woman saw him.
There was no conversation, only a moment’s cursory groping: he came at once, in silence. When he had gone she picked up the coin and returned to the croft where her husband slept; she had heard the recurrent whine of his snoring even in the midst of intercourse.
She turned away with contempt and slipped her fingers into the wetness, the unsatisfied mouth he had filled so brusquely: then she fell into a heavy sleep, as if she had been disturbed only by some violent, passing dream.
