Coronach, page 70
“I would have a word with you, on a matter that concerns you.”
They had not spoken since before Ewen’s death, when briefly, at James’s insistence, Coll MacGregor had assisted Ewen’s valet. He had found intolerable their intrusion into the privacy of the ordeal he shared with Ewen, and had never forgiven the indignities suffered by Ewen in their care. Between them, also, remained a complex, hereditary hatred, unjustified and irremediable.
“Well?
“Talk is running high against you, Scott.”
“And what talk do you hear, boot-boy, living under your master’s bed?”
“Men talk to whores, and over the heads of other men they perceive as eunuchs. Men talk by their fires, to their brothers and cousins. Riot is upon you, Scott. Affray is upon you. There are those who would have your life.”
“What do you want for these prophecies? Money?”
“You always had a gift for insult. I tell you for your wife’s sake. She was kind to me, when she was always in the bosom of her friend, my lady who is gone. I would wish no sorrow on her.”
“Who talks, MacGregor?”
“Young men. Men who would marry, if the factor permitted the marriage. Men who would work their fathers’ land, did the factor not forbid subdivision. Men whose virility has been mocked, here and at the doors of their homes. I think you know these men.”
“Coinneach Cameron?”
“Among others.”
“Who does he run with?”
“Young men of his kidney.”
“Torcall Gunn?”
“And his brother Raonull. Ruiseart and Uilleam their cousins, Gilchrist MacGregor, my cousin. Caillean and Daniel, his brothers. And others. They take your sheep, and talk of sodomy among your shepherds. They say you condone it.”
“If these are lies—”
“There is no word of a lie in this. I tell you for your wife’s sake only. You are nothing to me.”
Silence: the soundless onslaught of the snow. The hazel eyes narrowed at it, lost briefly in reverie.
He said, “When you’ve wiped your master’s arse this morning you can send him to me. I have something for him to read,” and the eyes returned to him with an intense, bewildered affront; then the cruelty was accepted as a matter of course, as a language understood by both.
James sat buffing his nails. The snow had stopped, and the sky was suffused with sunset.
You ineffectual prick, he thought. Your cattle are dying, your people are dying, riot threatens you. Would you buff your nails at the seat of judgment?
James looked up, startling him, as though he had spoken aloud.
“I don’t see what this has to do with me.”
He turned from the window, where his breath had clouded the glass, obscuring the painful clarity of mountains and the illusion of beauty in the land.
“I am not yet capable of forging your signature on documents of import. If I were, you would not hear from me from one end of the year to the other.”
“Are these measures necessary?”
“They are necessary. Perhaps you would care to read it again.”
“I require three days to consider it. It will cause great lamentation among the people.”
“Are you deaf, man? Your people have been crying for months. What matter a few more tears?”
“My responsibility—”
“Your responsibility died at Culloden. How many years can you sustain failure? How many years can you live like this, asking for blood from stones?”
The buffer disappeared.
“And you propose to pay each one of these five pounds upon removal? Where is the economy in that, or do you consider this an investment in the future?”
“If the bounty is from my purse and not yours, I fail to see that it concerns you.”
James said, “You know what people will call this. I call it a vendetta.”
“I applaud your imagination.”
“Malcolm, if my father knew—”
He said, “There is a sickness in your land, and it is not of my making. And it is not peculiar to Glen Sian. Seventy men left Glenmoriston last year to go to America. Five hundred went from Islay, and three hundred went from Skye. Glenmoriston never sees above four hundred pounds a year for all his lands, and you have less than that. Your daughter is your hope of the future, man. What will you leave her? Your accounts are two years in arrears, your roof leaks, your cellar is empty, and your people are idle and consumptive. They dream of America— they feast on dreams. Let them go, and be damned with the rest of the agitators.”
He turned again to the piercing clarity of light, the sky stained by torn clouds.
James said, “How is Margaret?”
“Margaret is with child, and unwell in body and spirit.”
He was aware of James’s shock, and then an honest attempt at kindness.
“My dear fellow, I had no idea.”
“That will be your epitaph.”
“Is there anything I can do for her?”
“Care for her in my absence. I must be in Inverness before April eighth to apply to the sheriff for the writs.”
“It is not a foregone conclusion. I told you I require time.”
“Bankruptcy limits your options. Sooner or later you will have no choice.”
James came stiffly to his feet.
“I will read your papers, and give them careful consideration. In the meantime— I offer my congratulations.”
He said, “Save them. They are not wanted.”
He was alone, in the dead silence of the room. The sheaf of closely written pages had been taken and the table was bare except for the brick he kept on it, which had excited no comment from James, the pistols neatly arranged, the sheathed sabre lying lengthwise as though at a court-martial. The iron taste of sickness filled his mouth. He had not eaten for some twenty-three hours.
In the lingering twilight, the first thrush of the year was singing. He laid his forehead against the cold glass and closed his eyes, and yielded to an anguished yearning for death’s peace, and freedom; and its beauty broke his heart.
XVII
I was asked, years later, if I had known the nature of his business in Inverness, and why I could not have exerted my influence to dissuade him from it. If he had thought it advisable or necessary to tell me, he would have done so: if he had required my opinion he would have asked for it. If I had pressed him, he would have lied with facility to keep his purpose secret. He was not a man one questioned. He did not order my life or interfere with the running of my household or the disposition of my time or my money, and I did not presume to judge him in matters relating to Glen Sian. I believed his judgment sounder than mine, untempered though it was by humanity. And so, rationally, I did not know; but in my heart, I suspected.
He left me at the least hospitable time, apart from the dead of winter, that could have been chosen for travel in the Highlands. Continuous rain had melted the heavy snows and the rivers were in spate, the Sian itself was swollen and turbulent, upon the point of flooding: by Wade’s road on a fresh horse Inverness could be reached in three days. But Wade’s road had not been repaired for twenty years, and my gelding, which Malcolm took instead of his ailing stallion, was jaded and ill-fed. The journey might take five days or a week: the date of his return was uncertain. I remained alone, with Malcolm’s stallion my responsibility and Malcolm’s angry spirit my companion in a shadowed, whispering house.
Jesus, is it so much to ask that you do as I say?
Is that what you want me to do? Sit at James’s table like a specimen and be examined by that misogynistic butcher? Perhaps you’d like him to attend me at the birth. That would soon rid you of me, wouldn’t it?
I had not fully understood the state of his mind until then, until I saw the expression on his face: until I realized that what I had said, out of the bitterness of my soul, must remain unspeakable. I had not fully understood how savagely I could hurt him, how he blamed himself for my pregnancy and feared the possibility of my death.
And here, in this dark room, in the rainy shadow of an April afternoon, here too was pain, the memory of frustration, the taint of ignorance and fear poisoning our last attempt at lovemaking. I needed his comfort; I hungered for it; it seemed our only meeting place was here. I felt no desire for him, only a terrible hopelessness and solitude, a bereavement. My only salvation was this, the assertion of life in his sex. I initiated it and he came to me as though from a great distance, his spirit deadened and weary: he entered me and his erection failed. I knew then that pregnancy repulsed him; he resented the unseen presence of the child in this most intimate communion, or he feared that he would injure me. Articulate though he was, and however explicit the language of our lovemaking, he withdrew from me into silence; too ignorant myself to reassure him, I lay in the darkness, abandoned. In the morning he left me: superstitiously, he would not allow me to watch his departure. The rain took him from me, and now spoke to me endlessly with his voice, and the whispers of other voices. I drifted through the days, and every sound I made was an affront to the silence of the house. I sat in his chair and wore his coat over my clothing and drank the claret he had left for me, I physicked his vicious, restless stallion; I slept at night with candles burning and a pistol on the bed beside me.
Nothing happened. James did not write to me or visit me or send any one from Ardsian with game for me, although later I learned that this had been requested, along with a groom for the stallion. Mairi let herself into the house one morning and left a hare propped in a basin draining blood, and reappeared in the evening to cook it, pointing a carving knife at me and saying in a sharp, high voice and, startlingly, in English, “You... eat....” and then bringing a plate to the table and sitting down opposite me. She devoured her portion in utter silence, punctuated only once by a singularly sweet smile, which haunted me more than the presence or absence of any other thing in those days.
And then they came. I did not sleep unclothed when I was alone— I wore Malcolm’s coat over the shirt and waistcoat and the riding skirt with the placket that would not fasten; and when I heard the stallion screaming I was on my feet with the gun in my hand as though I were running in a dream.
Memory fails, and the order of things shifts. I wore no shoes, but I was conscious of nothing, not the icy rain in my eyes, not the mud dragging at my ankles. My hands and my brain worked mechanically: I reloaded in the rain, in the darkness, with shaking hands, cursing myself; I pulled the trigger and the charge lit and fired. I heard some one shout, “Christ and Mary, is the bastard at home?” and then another voice, “It is the bitch. I saw him go.”
And there was time to remember, to hear the voice in my mind, his voice, which spoke to me always: aim for the groin if you want the stomach, aim at the stomach for the heart.
And now, no time. All gone, thrown away, falling into the night, no time to lay his cherished guns carefully out of the rain, no time to find them in the firelight. The perpetrators were gone, their work done. The stables Malcolm had built of stone: the roof was slate. Nothing would burn but the rafters and battens, and the grain and the straw stored there, and the horse, screaming in terror, secured with a halter in his loose box so that I would have a measure of control over him, although Malcolm had never restrained him.
I threw his coat into the water at my feet and soaked it and wrenched at the door. The iron burned my hands: in another minute it would not have opened. There did not seem to be smoke, only an intense, airless heat intolerable to my eyes. My very lashes seemed scorched; I thought my hair would burst into flames. I threw the coat over my face and went in. My skirt was smouldering: fed by the inrush of air, fire bloomed above and around me. I felt the bolt on the wood and hit it with something, perhaps my hand, perhaps some implement I had carried in with me. The stallion had torn his halter from the ring, the leather was dangling, and even in extremity he could not relinquish his jealousy of me; he threw his quarters against me, slamming me into the wall, an old malevolent trick. I remember only beating him with the flat of my hands, screaming, “Get out, get out, get out,” and then, in all that ghastly light, the pale spark of his shoe against the stone as he threw up his head and plunged forward into the night.
Rain fell all the hours of darkness that remained. It was raining at dawn, when the roof collapsed and the obscenity of destruction was laid bare. I was sitting in the kitchen, with my burned hands bound in soaking cloths and a constriction like death in my lungs: the rain, carrying the ash, was running in a black river on the eastern window. The smoke must have been visible for miles.
The pain had begun with the coming of day: it seemed inevitable that I should labour alone who had carried this child in isolation and loneliness. I propped myself on the stairs but I could not climb, and wrapped still in Malcolm’s damp coat I gave myself to him. I called him again and again, until my voice broke and the jealous silence of the house smothered me, and the spirits of the cold dead rooms flickered out of the shadows and claimed me— things real and imagined, terror made flesh, until the afternoon. Then there was movement in the shadows, living sound in the endless drumming of the rain: a scarred, cadaverous face, a trembling man without the strength to lift me. And then, as though in my anguish I had summoned her, a limping phantom who crooned to me; and together they carried me to bed.
At some hour of the afternoon or evening, this unequal struggle ended. I lived. My child died.
My house was full of people, voices that would not be identified, fragments of conversation in a language that would not be understood.
I drifted, bodiless, on the ebbing river of my thoughts. Hours, days, darkness passing, blood and time draining away.
I had given it no name, no identity, no welcome, no love, no hope of existence, and the child of my flesh was gone. I had never held it, never heard it cry, never been told of its death. It had died unbaptised. Malcolm and I had no religion... I had lost mine because it would not serve me, his only gods were himself and me. But in the dark world of his spirit, the hidden soul that was Celtic, there was a superstitious devotion, a consciousness of gods. What provision was made in that other world for the souls of unbaptised children?
I wanted to ask him. I wanted to know by what name we should have called it, I wanted to reach for him, but I had no strength. He came and went, one of the shadows that crossed my mind, and when he came to stay he sat in the chair by the bed and stared at the wall, unseeing. I watched the shadow of the rain on his face, and when he turned to look at me his eyes were dark, expressionless. It was a face I did not recognize, a man I did not know. I had not lain with him in passion in this bed or conceived this child, which I had not loved as I had loved him.
I did not know him, and because I could not embrace him or speak to him I lost him there in that darkness. I wept, endlessly, effortlessly, the tears the only warmth in that cold room, and he leaned forward and dried them with his handkerchief, gently but in an oddly detached manner, as if we were unacquainted. We did not speak: we did not seem to exist in the same world. I felt that if it were possible to lift my hand and touch him, my fingers would encounter nothingness. So we did not discuss our lost child, not then, not, with one exception, ever again. It went to its grave without a name, and no one ever told me where it was buried.
And when they came to him and told him that his only legitimate issue had been a son, he covered his face with his hands and cried. And in his soundless, inconsolable grief and my inability to comfort him, the lost soul found its resting place, and dwelled forever between us.
He was there: he had come from outdoors, there was a cleanliness about him, the scent of April. Was there spring in this dying place?
His hands were cold: roughened hands stroking the hair from my cheek. Our son would have had his eyes, green eyes, and his bristling black lashes, and his mouth, and his beautiful hands, bringing coolness to a burning face, and tenderness to one unloved.
“Well, a luaidh, how are you this morning?”
“Better, I think.”
“I’ve brought you something.” Their fragrance was already filling the room.
“Oh... violets....” Wet with dew or rain: indescribable sweetness, an ecstasy. They grew at Ardsian in profusion, in the orchard and the wood. “Are they from James?”
A stillness came into his manner, and I knew that this was yet my gift, to be the only living being who could injure him.
He said, “No, they are from me.”
As violets fade, these folded quickly and were removed. They were not replaced.
.... In the evening, the mist pressed against the leaded panes. In the night the rain began again, beating against the glass like hands, like running steps, like whispers.
What did you do with my child? Did you bury it? Did you give it a name? By what name did you call it?
What did you do with my son?
.... Another evening. He was punctilious in his visits. He had brought me the heavy silk shawl to wear, as he knew I was fond of it.
I said, “I want to be well again.”
“You will be well,” he said.
“I want to be out in the air. I want to be in my garden.”
“It’s cold today. You would not want to be out there now.”
“If I die, will you marry again?”
“You are not going to die. I would never allow it.”
Malcolm— do you love me— do you love me—
From the kitchen there was a smell of cooking: my aunt, who had stayed, preparing supper. He would bring something to me on a tray: I would eat very little: he would go. The evening was not yet night; the afterlight lingered in the sky.
“When you were away... there was a great unhappiness in this house. You may call it fanciful, but I was conscious of ghosts.”
