A Leaf on the Wind of All Hallows: An Outlander Novella (4 page)

How long …? A jolt of alarm brought him up onto his knees, but a bright yellow stab of pain behind his eyes sat him down again, moaning and cursing breathlessly.

Once more. He waited ’til his breath was coming steady, then risked cracking one eye open.

Well, it was certainly still Northumbria, the northern part, where England’s billowing fields crash onto the inhospitable rocks of Scotland. He recognised the rolling hills, covered with sere grass and punctuated by towering rocks that shot straight up into sudden toothy crags. He
swallowed, and rubbed both hands hard over his head and face, assuring himself he was still real. He didn’t feel real. Even after he’d taken a careful count of fingers, toes, and private bits—counting the last twice, just in case—he still felt that something important had been misplaced, torn off somehow, and left behind.

His ears still rang, rather like they did after an especially active trip. Why, though? What had he heard?

He found that he could move a little more easily now, and managed to look all round the sky, sector by sector. Nothing up there. No memory of anything up there. And yet the inside of his head buzzed and jangled, and the flesh on his body rippled with agitation. He chafed his arms, hard, to make it go.

Horripilation
. That’s the proper word for gooseflesh; Dolly’d told him that. She kept a little notebook and wrote down words she came across in her reading; she was a great one for the reading. She’d already got wee Roger sitting in her lap to be read to after tea, round-eyed as Bonzo at the coloured pictures in his rag book.

Thought of his family got him up onto his feet, swaying, but all right now, better, yes, definitely better, though he still felt as though his skin didn’t quite fit. The plane, where was that?

He looked round him. No plane was visible. Anywhere. Then it came back to him, with a lurch of the stomach. Real, it was real. He’d been sure in the night that he was dreaming or hallucinating, had lain down to recover himself, and must have fallen asleep. But he was awake now, no mistake; there was a bug of some kind down his back, and he slapped viciously to try to squash it.

His heart was pounding unpleasantly and his palms were sweating. He wiped them on his trousers and scanned the landscape. It wasn’t flat, but neither did it offer much concealment. No trees, no bosky dells. There was a small lake off in the distance—he caught the shine of water—but if he’d ditched in water, surely to God he’d be wet?

Maybe he’d been unconscious long enough to dry out, he thought. Maybe he’d imagined that he’d seen the plane near the stones. Surely he couldn’t have walked this far from the lake and forgotten it? He’d started walking toward the lake, out of sheer inability to think of anything more useful to do. Clearly time had passed; the sky had cleared like magic. Well, they’d have little trouble finding him, at least; they knew he was near the wall. A truck should be along soon; he couldn’t be more than two hours from the airfield.

‘And a good thing, too,’ he muttered. He’d picked an especially godforsaken spot to crash—there wasn’t a farmhouse or a paddock anywhere in sight, not so much as a sniff of chimney smoke.

His head was becoming clearer now. He’d circle the lake—just in case—then head for the
road. Might meet the support crew coming in.

‘And tell them I’ve lost the bloody plane?’ he asked himself aloud. ‘Aye, right. Come on, ye wee idjit, think! Now, where did ye see it last?’

* * *

He walked for a long time. Slowly, because of the knee, but that began to feel easier after a while. His mind was not feeling easier. There was something wrong with the countryside. Granted, Northumbria was a ragged sort of place, but not
this
ragged. He’d found a road—but it wasn’t the B road he’d seen from the air. It was a dirt track, pocked with stones and showing signs of being much travelled by hooved animals with a heavily fibrous diet.

Wished he hadn’t thought of diet. His wame was flapping against his backbone. Thinking about breakfast was better than thinking about other things, though, and for a time, he amused himself by envisioning the powdered eggs and soggy toast he’d have got in the mess, then going on to the lavish breakfasts of his youth in the Highlands: huge bowls of steaming parritch, slices of black pudding fried in lard, bannocks with marmalade, gallons of hot, strong tea …

An hour later, he found Hadrian’s Wall. Hard to miss, even grown over with grass and all-sorts like it was. It marched stolidly along, just like the Roman legions who’d built it, stubbornly workmanlike, a grey seam stitching its way up hill and down dale, dividing the peaceful fields to the south from those marauding buggers up north. He grinned at the thought and sat down on the wall—it was less than a yard high, just here—to massage his knee.

He hadn’t found the plane, or anything else, and was beginning to doubt his own sense of reality. He’d seen a fox, any number of rabbits, and a pheasant that’d nearly given him heart failure by bursting out from right under his feet. No people at all, though, and that was giving him a queer feeling in his water.

Aye, there was a war on, right enough, and many of the menfolk were gone, but the farmhouses hadn’t been sacrificed to the war effort, had they? The women were running the farms, feeding the nation, all that—he’d heard the PM on the radio praising them for it only last week. So where the bloody hell was everybody?

The sun was getting low in the sky when at last he saw a house. It was flush against the wall, and struck him as somehow familiar, though he knew he’d never seen it before. Stone-built and squat, but quite large, with a ratty-looking thatch. There was smoke coming from the chimney, though, and he limped toward it as fast as he could go.

There was a person outside—a woman in a ratty long dress and an apron, feeding chickens. He shouted, and she looked up, her mouth falling open at the sight of him.

‘Hey,’ he said, breathless from hurry. ‘I’ve had a crash. I need help. Are ye on the phone, maybe?’

She didn’t answer. She dropped the basket of chicken feed and ran right away, round the corner of the house. He sighed in exasperation. Well, maybe she’d gone to fetch her husband. He didn’t see any sign of a vehicle, not so much as a tractor, but maybe the man was—

The man was tall, stringy, bearded, and snaggletoothed. He was also dressed in a dirty shirt and baggy short pants that showed his hairy legs and bare feet—and accompanied by two other men in similar comic attire. Jerry instantly interpreted the looks on their faces, and didn’t stay to laugh.

‘Hey, nay problem, mate,’ he said, backing up, hands out. ‘I’m off, right?’

They kept coming, slowly, spreading out to surround him. He hadn’t liked the looks of them to start with, and was liking them less by the second. Hungry, they looked, with a speculative glitter in their eyes.

One of them said something to him, a question of some kind, but the Northumbrian accent was too thick for him to catch more than a word. ‘Who’ was the word, and he hastily pulled his dog tags from the neck of his blouson, waving the red and green disks at them. One of the men smiled, but not in a nice way.

‘Look,’ he said, still backing up. ‘I didna mean to—’

The man in the lead reached out a horny hand and took hold of Jerry’s forearm. He jerked back, but the man, instead of letting go, punched him in the belly.

He could feel his mouth opening and shutting like a fish’s, but no air came in. He flailed wildly, but they all were on him then. They were calling out to each other, and he didn’t understand a word, but the intent was plain as the nose he managed to butt with his head.

It was the only blow he landed. Within two minutes, he’d been efficiently beaten into pudding, had his pockets rifled, been stripped of his jacket and dog tags, been frog-marched down the road and heaved bodily down a steep, rocky slope.

He rolled, bouncing from one outcrop to the next, until he managed to fling out an arm and grab on to a scrubby thornbush. He came to a scraping halt and lay with his face in a clump of heather, panting and thinking incongruously of taking Dolly to the pictures, just before he’d joined up. They’d seen
The Wizard of Oz
, and he was beginning to feel creepily like the lass in that film—maybe it was the resemblance of the Northumbrians to scarecrows and lions.

‘At least the fucking lion spoke English,’ he muttered, sitting up. ‘Jesus, now what?’

It occurred to him that it might be a good time to stop cursing and start praying.

She’d been home from her work no more than five minutes. Just time to meet Roger’s mad charge across the floor, shrieking ‘MUMMY!,’ she pretending to be staggered by his impact—not so much a pretence; he was getting big. Just time to call out to her own mum, hear the muffled reply from the kitchen, sniff hopefully for the comforting smell of tea, and catch a tantalising whiff of tinned sardines that made her mouth water—a rare treat.

Just time to sit down for what seemed the first time in days, and take off her high-heeled shoes, relief washing over her feet like seawater when the tide comes in. She noticed with dismay the hole in the heel of her stocking, though. Her last pair, too. She was just undoing her garter, thinking that she’d have to start using leg-tan like Maisie, drawing a careful seam up the back of each leg with an eyebrow pencil, when there came a knock at the door.

‘Mrs MacKenzie?’ The man who stood at the door of her mother’s flat was tall, a dark silhouette in the dimness of the hall, but she knew at once he was a soldier.

‘Yes?’ She couldn’t help the leap of her heart, the clench of her stomach. She tried frantically to damp it down, deny it, the hope that had sprung up like a struck match. A mistake. There’d been a mistake. He hadn’t been killed, he’d been lost somehow, maybe captured, and now they’d found hi—Then she saw the small box in the soldier’s hand and her legs gave way under her.

Her vision sparkled at the edges, and the stranger’s face swam above her, blurred with concern. She could hear, though—hear her mum rush through from the kitchen, slippers slapping in her haste, voice raised in agitation. Heard the man’s name, Captain Randall, Frank Randall. Hear Roger’s small, husky voice warm in her ear, saying ‘Mummy? Mummy?’ in confusion.

Then she was on the swaybacked davenport, holding a cup of hot water that smelt of tea—they could change the tea leaves only once a week, and this was Friday, she thought irrelevantly. He should have come on Sunday, her mum was saying, they could have given him a decent cuppa. But perhaps he didn’t work on Sundays?

Her mum had put Captain Randall in the best chair, near the electric fire, and had switched on two bars as a sign of hospitality. Her mother was chatting with the Captain, holding Roger in her lap. Her son was more interested in the little box sitting on the tiny piecrust table; he kept reaching for it, but his grandmother wouldn’t let him have it. Marjorie recognised the intent look on his face. He wouldn’t throw a fit—he hardly ever did—but he wouldn’t give up, either.

He didn’t look a lot like his father, save when he wanted something badly. She pulled herself up a bit, shaking her head to clear the dizziness, and Roger looked up at her, distracted by her movement. For an instant, she saw Jerry look out of his eyes, and the world swam afresh. She closed her own, though, and gulped her tea, scalding as it was.

Mum and Captain Randall had been talking politely, giving her time to recover herself.
Did he have children of his own? Mum asked.

‘No,’ he said, with what might have been a wistful look at wee Roger. ‘Not yet. I haven’t seen my wife in two years.’

‘Better late than never,’ said a sharp voice, and she was surprised to discover that it was hers. She put down the cup, pulled up the loose stocking that had puddled round her ankle, and fixed Captain Randall with a look. ‘What have you brought me?’ she said, trying for a tone of calm dignity. Didn’t work; she sounded brittle as broken glass, even to her own ears.

Captain Randall eyed her cautiously, but took up the little box and held it out to her.

‘It’s Lieutenant MacKenzie’s,’ he said. ‘An MID oakleaf cluster. Awarded posthumously for—’

With an effort, she pushed herself away, back into the cushions, shaking her head.

‘I don’t want it.’

‘Really, Marjorie!’ Her mother was shocked.

‘And I don’t like that word. Pos— posth— don’t say it.’

She couldn’t overcome the notion that Jerry was somehow inside the box—a notion that seemed dreadful at one moment, comforting the next. Captain Randall set it down, very slowly, as though it might blow up.

‘I won’t say it,’ he said gently. ‘May I say, though … I knew him. Your husband. Very briefly, but I did know him. I came myself, because I wanted to say to you how very brave he was.’

‘Brave.’ The word was like a pebble in her mouth. She wished she could spit it at him.

‘Of course he was,’ her mother said firmly. ‘Hear that, Roger? Your dad was a good man, and he was a brave one. You won’t forget that.’

Roger was paying no attention, struggling to get down. His gran set him reluctantly on the floor and he lurched over to Captain Randall, taking a firm grip on the Captain’s freshly creased trousers with both hands—hands greasy, she saw, with sardine oil and toast crumbs. The Captain’s lips twitched, but he didn’t try to detach Roger, just patted his head.

‘Who’s a good boy, then?’ he asked.

‘Fith,’ Roger said firmly. ‘Fith!’

Marjorie felt an incongruous impulse to laugh at the Captain’s puzzled expression, though it didn’t touch the stone in her heart.

‘It’s his new word,’ she said. ‘ “Fish.” He can’t say “sardine.” ’

‘Thar … DEEM!’ Roger said, glaring at her. ‘Fitttthhhhh!’

The Captain laughed out loud, and pulling out a handkerchief, carefully wiped the spittle off Roger’s face, casually going on to wipe the grubby little paws as well.

‘Of course it’s a fish,’ he assured Roger. ‘You’re a clever lad. And a big help to your
mummy, I’m sure. Here, I’ve brought you something for your tea.’ He groped in the pocket of his coat and pulled out a small pot of jam. Strawberry jam. Marjorie’s salivary glands contracted painfully. With the sugar rationing, she hadn’t tasted jam in …