Coronach, page 98
She said, “I saw you. I wanted— I thought— that we should talk.”
He did not slacken his pace for her, or turn his head.
“You must see that I regret nothing. And I should not want you to think that I blamed you.”
He said, “Don’t walk on that side of me. My left eye is blind,” and the step hesitated, and once more followed him.
“Why? Why is it blind?”
“Ask your father. I was about his business.”
She had moved closer, on the right, not that radiant, provocative presence but something young, altogether younger, reflective and subdued. He thrust his maimed fingers into his pocket and continued to walk and to ignore her. Eventually he felt her clasp his right hand. It was a strange, affecting little gesture, less a lover’s than a child’s, and briefly he allowed it, and then withdrew his hand.
“It will not happen again.”
“I wanted it. I was very unhappy. I thought you were unhappy, too. I told you, I do not regret it.”
“Nor do I. But it will not be allowed to happen again.”
They halted by some unspoken accord. She did not turn her head, and her profile was thin and sickeningly youthful: it was not a woman’s face but that of a girl of fifteen.
“Don’t you understand? I want it to happen again. I want it.”
He had never been moved by tears and was not now, nor by the immature beauty of that face, nor the unfulfilled promise of the body.
“I want it as it must be between men and women— not as it was. I know it must be— more beautiful. I want to lie with you in your bed— and let you teach me— and love you. I want you to love me.”
“I have nothing to teach you, and nothing to give you.”
She lifted drenched eyes to his, eyes, in the twilight, which at last were recognized, and he knew whom she resembled.
She said, “I cherish— a great warmth of feeling for you.”
He did not touch her hair or her face: on such gestures, such hopes, she would live, and there was no hope.
“Give it to another. I am not for you.”
Her face was very still and closed, as it had been in childhood.
She said, “They are right to call you dangerous,” and walked away.
He met Eleanor Stirling near the house, perhaps intent on some agenda of her own, perhaps merely looking for her stepdaughter. It was not yet dark enough to avoid an encounter, and she called piercingly to him from the terrace, using his surname, to which he did not answer. Annoyed by this, she snapped her fingers.
“Scott! Scott, I say!”
He paused, with one foot on the stone step. She was a silhouette in his vision, obscured by the candlelight of the house.
He said, “Madam, if you want a dog, buy one,” and withdrew his foot, and walked on.
II
In death the legends were magnified, and imbued with immortality.
On the morning of January thirtieth, 1788, in Rome, that architect of tragedy Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, died, having suffered a paralyzing stroke. A lecher and an alcoholic depressive, with whom conversation on the subject of his failed rebellion was forbidden because it threw him into such depths of melancholy, he had never returned to the country to which he had brought such disaster and misery. On the fifth of March, 1790, in Skye, Flora Macdonald died, as potent an icon of that dream-riddled epoch although she had passed part of the American revolution in Carolina, where her husband had raised a regiment of Macdonalds loyal not to blood or memory but to the Hanoverian king. She had never been reunited with the fugitive prince in whose escape she had played a part, but she joined him in Jacobite hagiology, yet another symptom of the land’s lingering sickness of sorrow and nostalgia.
In France, the disease was a cancer of absolute power and corruption, endured for centuries by a restless, aggrieved, disaffected, unrepresented people, disadvantaged by treaties, and the importation of expensive foreign goods by a nation whose deficit stood at two hundred and fifty million livres, by unemployment, by the sullen geography of the land they attempted to farm, and by the natural and political cataclysms of 1788. James, at the Château Saint-Arnaud, wrote of the hailstorm of July thirteenth, which devastated the country from the Île-de-France as far south as Languedoc, destroying vines in the Loire, Alsace and Burgundy, ripping branches from elms and chestnuts, smashing windows, and killing birds and livestock in the fields. The harvest, of wheat in the Orléanais and the Beauce, fruit south of Paris and oranges and olives in the Midi, already severely damaged, could not survive a succession of thunderstorms and the weeks of drought that followed. Bread, from eight sous for a four-pound loaf in the summer of 1787, rose to twelve in the barren autumn of 1788, and to fifteen in February of 1789, when the Seine and the Loire were impassable with ice, and ice floes choked Le Havre, and snow fell from the Haut-Garonne to Provence. What little, inferior grain could be imported could not be distributed by river, or ground by mills frozen into immobility. The abrupt thaws of January brought not deliverance but flooding. The unemployed, the desperate and the lawless rioted in Paris, Rouen, Reims, Poitiers, Dijon and Versailles itself, and attacked bakeries and granaries from Picardy to Brittany: rioting became the endemic disease of Paris.
The recurrent violence, the spiralling unemployment, the price and the shortage of bread, the example of egalitarian America, and the pressure for constitutional reform by those enlightened liberals who had fought in that war of independence and claimed they had “brought back the seeds of liberty”... if a nation could be conceived of less visceral desires, what greater potential had this hunger and anger to spark revolution.
On Sunday July the twelfth, 1789, the Genevese director-general of finance, Jacques Necker, regarded by many reformers in France as the only potential saviour of the country and its people, was dismissed by Louis XVI and sent into exile. By Tuesday the fourteenth the rumour, if not the fact, of Necker’s dismissal was known in Paris, and was used by fanatical agitators to ignite the inflammable. Rioting throughout the city became an organized quest for gunpowder, and led a mob estimated at fifty thousand strong to storm the fourteenth-century fortress and prison in the Rue Saint-Antoine. What had begun as deliberate insurrection, with the waxen models of the heads of popular commanders carried on poles for inspiration, ended with the severed heads of the governor of the Bastille, the intendant of Paris, and the minister held responsible for a famine perceived as a plot against the citizens of France paraded on pikes through the streets, the mouth of the last, Foullon, crammed with grass and excrement to signify his crime. On the twenty-second of July Bertier de Sauvigny, Foullon’s son-in-law, was also decapitated, and his heart torn from the palpitating corpse and offered as a deputation to the Marquis de Lafayette, commander of the National Guard and the people’s darling, but nonetheless powerless to prevent this or any other execution of the mob’s vengeance. At that time, the hero of America was in the process of drafting his declaration of the rights of man with the collaboration of the American ambassador, Thomas Jefferson. The spectacle of human hearts and heads carried through the streets of Paris confirmed Jefferson’s suspicion that here was not the democratic revolution of his experience, but the birth of bloody anarchy.
And then came la peur, a collective, obsessive fear, of roving armies of brigands, of conspiracy, of sabotage, of invasion by enemies, Britain, Austria or Spain, of the impending massacre of innocents or nobility, all unfounded rumours in a nation reeling under its own iconoclasm.
And there was still no bread. Drought had dried the rivers, and the mills were unable to produce flour for the volatile Paris market.
More significantly, attacks on châteaux began, in Picardy, Burgundy and Alsace. The Loire was restive, but remained quiet. The fear was ubiquitous.
Gifts to la patrie were solicited, as demonstration of patriotic fervour and the abnegation of the material: courtesans’ jewellery, ancestral paintings, silver shoe buckles, objets d’art. All fed the bloody newborn entity, the France of Liberty.
They sat in the estate office, with torn copies of Élysée Loustallot’s Révolutions de Paris and Marat’s L’ami du Peuple between them, and a tricolour cockade, incongrously vivid, in a bar of September light on the table where James had placed it.
“Un souvenir de Paris, or should I say, the latest fashion. Even the King accepted one, and has been seen to wear it,” and then, tentatively, “Can you read that?”
He was conscious of the burning clarity of the green eyes, raised from the Loustallot paper.
“Yes.”
Tyrants, shudder and see how you and yours will be treated....
It closed along deep creases, as though it had been read repeatedly.
“Well, well. Hearts torn out, heads on pikes: blood and liberty.”
James coughed.
“I didn’t think the children should be witness to such things.”
Malcolm said, “No. They would never see them here,” and thought the irony was not lost on James.
“Do you think there will be war?”
“I should think war is inevitable. However, we shall profit by it.”
There was silence.
“Do you think... they may accomplish what they intend, without shedding innocent blood?”
What blood is innocent? Was mine?
He looked up.
“No.”
The fair, aging face was more introspective than he had ever known, as though the turmoil in France had opened before James vistas and possibilities and culpabilities he had never contemplated.
“Do you think this is the end of the world, as we have known it? That there will be a great overturning of social order— even here— and that everything we hold dear will be taken from us?”
Everything I hold dear has been taken from me. What remains is nothing, only life.
“It is insurrection in France, James, not the apocalypse.”
James’s restive, haunted eyes lifted briefly.
“Perhaps it means nothing to you. You have nothing to lose.”
He said, “That is true. I have nothing left to lose.”
There was no sound in the house, only the wind, southwesterly, bringing salt rain from the Atlantic on a dark spring night. He was alone in contemplation of his ghosts, and of truths which had become manifest, and revelations which held no fear.
The darkness of the spirit tonight was physical: he no longer sat with candles but like this, without light, listening to the wind’s turbulence, the variations in direction and velocity. The intonation of the wind, after fifty-four years, was as familiar as the voice of a lover, the texture of the wind and the land and the sky, in darkness and in light, the texture of desolation, like the despised contours of his own flesh. There was no mystery, no enigma, neither in himself nor in the land, nor in this succession of storms and seasons: no mystery, only recognition, only knowledge.
He did not fear blindness, although he recognized its advent in a slow accrual of symptoms. Neither the body’s fallibility nor its pain disquieted him. The conclusion of this life was known.
What remained unfinished would be finished; what was offered he would take. There was no motive, no subtle vengeance, no quietus sought in young flesh naïvely tendered. There was only the dead loneliness of the spirit, and the wind in the wastes of the night.
She lay on his bed, trembling a little: the room was cold, shadowed with afternoon. She had undressed herself with nervous, impatient fingers, unaccustomed, without assistance, to the intricacies of tapes and laces. Her skin was veined, translucent, scented with some perfume of iris and citrus, her hair, which he did not touch, already dishevelled on the pillow: skin and hair and ribboned underclothing were virginally clean.
The nakedness of the eyes, the fear, the desire, the innocence, was more compelling than the body.
“Are you going to hurt me?”
“No,” he said.
“Kiss me.”
He ignored her: small acts of tenderness and intimacy had not been known between them. These caresses were without desire, as though the lips and breasts and parted thighs were merely unfamiliar sculpture. He did not speak, nor she, although the skin and the spirit responded to him, learning sensuality.
He paused. The dark eyes were opened, drugged, languid... innocence despoiled.
She said, “Undress,” and then, “Touch me. Kiss me.”
The kiss remained ungiven, the perfume stronger, less innocent, the fair hair less a fallen angel’s; the vagina was a hidden calyx, now liquid, now desiring. He withdrew his fingers and caressed her lips.
“Taste yourself.”
The drugged, soft rose of the lips opened and sucked his fingertip, and then he withdrew it and resumed his slow violation of her, the ghost and the flesh and the innocence, until she was an instrument, neither mind nor spirit, and cried out, consumed by orgasm.
She slept then, briefly, with an abandoned sweetness in his arms. The heavy hair lay against his mouth and he removed and caressed a strand, only once, with the fingers of his right hand, and tasted the perfume of sex, the essence of an unfamiliar cunt: so many women, so many ghosts, so many anonymous acts. In this was one last act of love, was reparation to Margaret.
At Whitsun, the ten families who retained a precarious foothold on the grassy floor of the Sian valley were issued with writs of removal and evicted. It was his intention to dismantle the ruins, and allow the ùrlar to be used as low wintering for sheep. In this he fulfilled a prophecy of Glen Sian’s obliteration, and dealt its last inhabitants the final, killing blow for which they had waited in fearful anticipation for nearly twenty years.
The dispossessed offered no resistance, and had no destination. They did not expect and were not given the customary compensation, nor was their embarkation planned or their passage paid to Pictou, unlike others who had preceded them: he had tired of gratuitous charity, and so they simply congregated, wraithlike and uncomplaining, twenty-three children and thirty-nine adults, where they were offered shelter in the churchyard at Glen Mor, from which the militant, alcoholic MacNeil refused to evict them. And there, in the sullen rain of June and the unseasonable cold, they remained, an intolerable burden on the resources of the village, a typhus epidemic in embryo.
He rode down in the rain one afternoon, partly to observe them and harass them with his presence, partly to provoke a confrontation with MacNeil, whose attacks upon him from the pulpit had become vitriolic. He dismounted near the manse, aware of the eyes regarding him from the churchyard, the calm, patient, insensate eyes of animals. Without spirit, without passion: like those who had preceded them, they could not resist the iron genius, progress.
O, brave Highland men.
Furtive movements, a fold of canvas falling across a face, a turning of backs, the withdrawal of a child into the shelter of a dripping tarpaulin; the only voices the whisper of the rain in the tangled grass on the graves.
He opened the gate and walked toward the kirk: the path was rank with weeds. The door opened easily: this, too, was habitation for the evicted, all women, who fell silent upon seeing him. He walked around the perimeter of the stone floor in the dimness. Here, too, rumour was not unfounded. They had scratched their names and histories on the small, flawed panes of glass, and the dates, May 24, 1790, June 4th, 1790, strange, pathetic little footnotes, not in a Gaelic which would pass with them but in English, as though with MacNeil’s guidance.
Glen Sean peeple was here...the last pilgrims... wasteland... we are damned... God speed us faint of heart... honour to God above.
Even here, on the rain-speckled glass and in the silence of women, was condemnation.
He left it and walked out into the rain to the manse. The curtain was drawn briefly and fell again, and he saw or imagined MacNeil, although he did not come down in answer to the knock.
He stood for a minute or two with the rain running on his face, gazing up at the house, then the premonition passed, and the certainty that their long antagonism had ended. MacNeil suffered a fatal stroke the following day.
He did not attend the funeral, and it was only after repeated assurances that the refugees in the churchyard were not Jacobins in waiting that James was persuaded to appear. Whether out of respect or superstition or a final desolation of spirit, after MacNeil’s burial among them Glen Sian’s last inhabitants dispersed, leaving only trampled muck and litter, and ineradicable engravings of despair.
He came across Saobhaidh from the southwest in the whiteness of the summer night in late June, cutting close to Glen Mor, perhaps intentionally seeking this encounter which circumstances had made difficult for him to force. He knew Deirdre walked here by the wall and what ghosts summoned her, and she was sitting now in that place where, as a child, he had sometimes seen her. He approached and sat on the wall, his blind side deliberately toward her: she did not acknowledge him. The cold deepened, and the stillness, the lights of the village lay in a white scarf in the twilight, the narrow gorge of the river obscured by fog.
She said, after a time, “So the devil walks abroad.” He said nothing. “This must be a triumph for you. Voice after voice in Glen Sian falls silent, until none will speak against you. And when you have silence where Glen Sian once spoke, what will you do then?”
“I will be deaf by then, old woman, and six feet under. Like you.”
There was a silence, neither hostile nor companionable, then he said, “What will you do?”
“I will serve the appointee. I will not leave this place.”
“The living is not in my gift, but in Glen Sian’s. He may desire you to leave.”
“Then you may use me as you use the others, and evict me. My dead are here. I will not go.”
