Entry Island (28 page)

Sime glared at him with anger and dislike. ‘Fuck you,’ he said quietly. ‘Fuck you all.’ And he turned and strode off into the dark.

The harbour was dominated at its south side by a large rock that towered over the quays. A wooden staircase zigzagged its way up to a viewpoint at the top. Sime stood there, fully exposed to the wind, having made the long slow climb with leaden legs. He had walked aimlessly in an almost trancelike state during all the hours of the night, before pitching up at the harbour. There he had stood at the water’s edge staring out across the bay towards Entry Island. Somehow he always seemed drawn back to it. Only a handful of lights twinkled faintly in the distance to betray its presence in darkness.

Now he stood clutching the wooden rail on the viewpoint, braced against the wind that powered out of the south-west. He saw the lights of the islands spread out below him, stretching away to north and south. He knew that sunrise was not far away, and for the first time fully understood the saying that the darkest hour comes just before the dawn.

While walking blindly through the night he had forced himself to think about nothing, entering a nearly zen-like
state in which he had allowed none of the events of the last few days to impinge on his consciousness. Only now, overtaken by total exhaustion, did his resolve crumble, permitting those thoughts to flood his brain.

He replayed his life of the last few months in an endless loop, picking up for the first time on all the little details he had missed. The tell-tale signs he had ignored, consciously or otherwise. It seemed to him, looking back, that Marie-Ange and Crozes must have been having an affair for well over a year. She had converted her guilt into an anger that allowed her to blame him. Her infidelity had become his fault. If she had been forced into the arms of a lover, Sime was to blame. It explained so much. How affection had turned to contempt, intimacy to impatience and then anger.

And somehow he understood, for the first time since she had left, what it was he felt. Grief. For the lover he had lost. Almost as if she had died. Except that the body was still there. Walking, talking, taunting, tormenting him.

He clutched the rail, holding himself steady, his body rigid with tension, and he was caught almost unawares by the trickle of hot tears that ran down his cheeks.

*

It was still dark when he got back to the hotel. The long, low, two-storey building lay silently beneath the yellow glow of the streetlights. There was no hint of the drama which had played itself out there just a few hours before. Sime wondered how many of the team were asleep, what whispered
words had passed between them in rooms and corridors. But found that he didn’t really care any more. The acute sense of humiliation had passed, leaving him empty of emotion, and indifferent to the opinions of others.

The night porter gazed at him from behind the reception desk with a surreptitious curiosity. In his room, the tele-shopping channel was selling an exercise machine to provide a whole-body workout. Sime locked all the doors and turned the TV off. He kicked away his shoes and slipped between the sheets still fully dressed. It was just after 5.30 a.m., and he lay shivering until gradually he started to recover some heat. A slow-burn warmth began to seep through his limbs, permeating his thoughts. He felt his body go limp, the red glow of the digital display on the clock fading to black as lids like lead closed on aching eyes …

The notices of eviction arrived just days after my father’s funeral, but none of us has any intention of leaving.

I feel the wind in my face, cooling my sweat as I toil over this stubborn ground. It is not cold, but the summer sky is laden with rain, and the stiffening of the breeze tells me it won’t be long in releasing it. I have a spade in my hands, digging stones out from beneath my feet, trying to make something arable out of this wilderness. The soil here is thin and sandy and full of stones. But if we are to survive this cursed famine then we need to grow more food.

I look up from my labours and catch sight of Ciorstaidh running down the hill towards me. She is pink-faced and breathless, and I am pleased to see her until she gets close and I catch the look on her face.

When she reaches me she takes several moments to recover her breath. ‘They’re coming,’ she gasps.

‘Who?’

She is still having troubling finding her voice. ‘The Sheriff-Depute and about thirty constables. And a band of men from
the estate led by George. They’ve all been drinking ale at the castle to fortify themselves.’

I close my eyes and in the darkness can feel the end of everything I have known just a breath away.

‘You have to persuade the villagers to leave.’

I open my eyes and shake my head slowly. ‘They won’t.’

‘They must!’

‘This is their home, Ciorstaidh. They won’t leave it. To a man, woman and child, we were born here. Our parents and their parents, and theirs before them. Our ancestors are buried here. There can be no question of leaving.’

‘Simon, please.’ Her voice is pleading. ‘There’s no way you’ll win. The constables are armed with batons and carrying irons. And whether it’s right or wrong, they have the law on their side.’

‘Damn the law!’ I shout.

She flinches, and I see the hurt in her eyes and regret raising my voice.

She finds control from somewhere and drops her own voice to a whisper. ‘The sailing ship
Heather
dropped anchor this morning in Loch Glas. No matter what kind of resistance you put up, they mean to clear Baile Mhanais and put everyone aboard her.’ She pauses. ‘Please, Simon. At least try and persuade your family to leave before they get here.’

I shake my head, full of foreboding. ‘My mother’s more stubborn than any of them. And if she won’t go, then I won’t either.’

She stares at me as if trying to formulate words that will make me change my mind. Before suddenly, quite unexpectedly, she bursts into tears. I am torn between my confusion, and an urge to protect her. I step up the slope to take her in my arms. The sobs that rack her body vibrate through mine. ‘It’s all my fault,’ she says.

I slide my fingers through her hair and feel the smallness of her skull in the palm of my hand. ‘Don’t be silly. None of this is your fault. You can’t be held responsible for the actions of your father.’

She pulls back and stares at me with tear-stained eyes. ‘Yes I can. He wouldn’t be doing any of this if it wasn’t for me.’

I shake my head. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘George saw us together. That day up on the hill, when I gave you that first hamper.’ She paused, almost as if she were afraid to go on. ‘The bastard told our father.’

I am shocked to hear her use such a word.

‘He was furious, Simon. He flew into such a rage I really thought he was going to kill me. He told me he would rather see me dead than be with a common crofter’s boy. That’s when he ordered the evictions. Baile Mhanais was only spared before because you saved my life. Now he wants to be certain there is no way I can ever see you again. That you’ll be on a boat to Canada and lost to me for ever.’ There are fresh tears and her voice quivers on the brink of breaking. ‘You’ve got to come with me. You and your mother and your sisters.’

I stare at her in disbelief. ‘With you?’ I shake my head again. ‘How? Where?’

Her breath trembles in her throat. ‘I have been locked up in my room for days, Simon. No better than a prisoner in my own house. Until this morning.’ She brushes away her tears with the backs of her hands, focused on the telling of her story. ‘I persuaded one of the maids to let me out, and while my father was downstairs with the Sheriff-Depute and the factor I went into his study. I’ve always known he kept cash in there, and I knew I needed money to get away.’

In my mind I picture her feverishly searching her father’s study, shaking with fear, and all the time listening for a footfall on the stair.

‘I found his money box in the bottom drawer of his desk. But it was locked, and I had to force it open with a ceremonial dirk that he uses as a letter opener.’ She closes her eyes momentarily, reliving the moment. ‘As soon as I did it I knew there was no going back.’ Her eyes flicker open to hold me again in their frightened gaze. ‘There was two hundred pounds in it, Simon!’

Two hundred pounds! I can barely imagine so much money, never mind holding it in my hands.

‘We can get a long way away from here with money like that. All of us. You, me, and your family.’ She implores me with her eyes, and I find it almost impossible to resist. She takes my hand in hers, and I feel how cold it is. ‘There is no way I can go home again. I have defied my father. I have
stolen his money.’ She squeezes my hand until it very nearly hurts. ‘I can get a horse and trap from the stables at the castle once everyone has left. I’ll meet you at the foot of the waterfall near the old Sgargarstaigh crossroads. We can head south and get a crossing to the mainland.’

*

It is suffocating in the blackhouse. Fresh peat on the fire sends smoke billowing up into the roof of the fire room, stinging the eyes and burning the lungs. But it is my mother’s voice that fills the room. A voice full of sound and fury and close to hysteria while Annag and Murdag stand behind her, pale faces blanched by fear.

‘You’ve brought this on us, Sime! You and that foolish girl. God knows, her father is right. There is no place in this world for the two of you together. You belong in different parts of it. Her in hers, and you in yours. How could you have thought for one minute that you would ever be accepted into hers? Or that she would stoop to be a part of ours.’

I have never been close to my mother. Always my father’s boy. And since his death she has been strident and whining and always finding fault with me, almost as if she blames me for what happened to him. But I am patient, forever mindful of the responsibility that my father bequeathed me.

‘You were happy enough to take the food she’s been bringing us these last two weeks.’

But that only sends her spinning off into another tantrum ‘If I’d known it had come from the hands of that girl I’d never have taken it!’

And I get angry for the first time. ‘Where did you think it came from? God? What did you think it was, manna from Heaven?’ I glare at her. ‘You’re as bad as the laird. He thinks that he and his kind are better than us. And you think that we are better than them. But you know what, we’re none of us better than anyone else. We’re all God’s children, equal under Heaven, and no accident of birth can change that.’

‘Don’t you bring the name of the Lord our God into this! I’ll not have you blaspheming in this house.’

‘It’s not blasphemy. Read your Bible, you stupid woman!’ It’s out before I can stop myself, and she hits me across the side of my face with the flat of her hand, nearly knocking me from my feet.

But I stand my ground, glaring at her. My face stinging. ‘We’re leaving,’ I say. And I turn to my sisters. ‘Get your things, there’s not much time.’

My mother’s voice cuts through the smoke. ‘Don’t you move!’ Though she has never taken her eyes off me the girls know that it is them she addresses, and they freeze. ‘No son of mine is going to tell me what to do. I was born in this house, as were every one of you. And we’re not leaving it.’

Annag speaks up for the first time. But her voice is brittle and uncertain. ‘Maybe he’s right,
mamaidh
. If there’s forty or more of them coming to put us out we’ll not stand a chance. Maybe we should go with the laird’s girl.’

My mother swings her head around slowly, and the look she gives Annag could have turned her to stone. ‘We’re staying,’
she says, with such finality that not one of us is left in any doubt that there will be no arguing with her. ‘Now go and start collecting stones, girls. Good, fist-sized stones that’ll crack a constable’s skull.’ She turns back to me. ‘You’re a Mackenzie, boy. And Mackenzies don’t give up without a fight.’

I wonder what my father would have done.

*

The wind has dropped, so has the temperature, and the rain has come at last. A fine, wetting rain that drifts like mist over the mountains. When the constables arrive, they seem like wraiths lined up along the top of the hill, grey figures against a grey sky.

The villagers, and all the crofters and their families from the township, are gathered among the houses and along the shore. Nearly two hundred of us. We are a pathetic bunch, diminished by the famine and ill-equipped to stand up to a gang of sturdy, well-fed constables and estate workers. But we are fired up with righteous indignation. These are our homes, and this is our land. Our ancestors have lived here since before anyone can remember, and long before any laird thought that his wealth could buy and sell our souls.

I am resigned to the fight. My heart breaks for Ciorstaidh, but I won’t leave my family. Even though I know this is hopeless. I know, too, that before the day is out I will either be dead or on a ship bound for the New World. But I am not afraid anymore. Just determined.

I feel fear moving like a stranger among the others as our enemies gather on the hill, formidable in their dark anonymity, threatening in their silence. And it is the strangest quiet that has fallen over Baile Mhanais. Without the wind the sea is hushed as if it holds its breath. Not even the plaintive cry of the gulls breaches the still of the late morning.

Two figures detach themselves from the group on the hill and walk down the path towards us. It is not until they are close that I recognise one of them as the factor. The laird’s lackey. His estate manager, Dougal Macaulay. A man universally despised. Because he was once one of us and now does the laird’s bidding. No doubt he thinks that rubbing shoulders with the gentry makes him better than his peers. And you can hear it in his tone as the two men stop no more than a few feet away from the crowd. Me, my mother and my sisters are up there at the front.

He casts a speculative eye over the assembled villagers before he says in Gaelic, ‘This is Mr Jamieson, the Sheriff-Depute.’

Mr Jamieson is a man of average height and build, maybe forty-five or fifty years old. He wears leather boots and a long coat that glistens with myriad tiny droplets of rain. His hat is pulled down low over his brow so that we can barely see his eyes. His voice is strong and carries the confidence of the ruling class, and his breath billows like mist around his head as he speaks in English, a language that 90 per cent or more of the people of the township will not understand.