Jennie About to Be (17 page)

The breeze that spangled the loch left it dulled again and reached the ridge. It was cold on Jennie's face, lifting the loose tendrils around her forehead and ears. The pine boughs stirred and sighed. Two buzzards came drifting over, mewing and whistling to each other.

Jennie now saw details that had been lost to her at first. Across the loch a flash of windows reflected one of those sudden appearances of the sun; when the flare died out, by shading her eyes she could distinguish the shape of a solitary cottage there in a crease of the land. Down on the loch a man stood up in a small boat, casting, and she could have sworn he hadn't been there a few minutes ago. Another cool puff of breeze brought her the bite of peat smoke and the bleat of a goat.

It came from below her, on this side of the loch. How could she have missed the spatter of thatched cottages, the grazing goats, the few little black cows and undersized sheep? It was as if the loch had mesmerized her like a great mirror.

“Look down there!” she exclaimed, but if Nigel answered, she didn't know it. The place was swarming with life. Several men were digging in the long strips of garden that must have been made with great labor out of the tough moorland. Two kids played King of the Mountain on a stack of peats. A group of women were just approaching the hamlet from the south, carrying creels on their backs, and children frisked around them like puppies.

“What are they carrying in those creels?” she asked.

“What? Oh, peats.” He sounded preoccupied. “You can see the peat bed there on the slope at the southern end of the loch. That's one thing the men'll work hard at, cutting their peats. Have to keep warm and cook their grub, you know. But the women always bring the dried peats home on their backs, like ponies.”

“It's too bad they don't have some ponies.” She kept seeing something more. A man limped over uneven ground toward one of the garden strips, using two sticks to help him along. A woman with a baby in her arms walked to meet the peat carriers. Voices, both human and animal, were lifted and carried on the wind like the smoke from the holes in the thatched roofs.

“What do you call that?” she asked.

“Loch na Mada Dubh,” Nigel said. “Didn't I tell you? The Loch of the Black Wolf. Or Dog. You can take your choice.”

“No, I mean that little settlement down there.”

He rose and stood beside her, his arm around her. “Oh, I believe they have some name for it among themselves,” he said indifferently. “There are more of these anthills scattered over the estate. Look over there, my darling, above the peat. Can you make out the road? It begins at the back of the farms, follows a pass through this ridge, and travels west across the moor.”

She looked obediently where he pointed, but she could hardly bear to look away from the scene below, as if it would vanish while her eyes were off it. She could see the line of the road cutting across the slant of the land among humps of rock like strange beasts sleeping in the heather.

“Yes, where does it lead?” she asked dutifully.

“It's the best way to reach the far western parts of the estate. At least you have a decent road for part of the way before you must take to the old tracks over the moor and in and out of the glens. But it ends properly at Roseholm. In my father's time there was a good deal of coming and going between there and Linnmore.”

“But not now?”

He laughed and squeezed her. “If the Roses are the way they used to be, Christabel would find them devilish rough. Dogs underfoot, a piper parading the courtyard while they eat, and the last I heard they were still drinking toasts to the King over the Water.”

“They sound entrancing. At least I'd know I was in Scotland. At Linnmore House one might as well be in England.”

“We'll drive there one day, I promise you. I haven't forgotten the deerhound puppy.” He held her tightly to him and put his lips against her temple.

A rooster's crow came up to them, small, shrill, but perfectly clear. She could even see him, standing on the peat stack where the kids had played.

“Oh, Nigel, let's go down there! I'd love to see the children and the kids.”

“You'll not find it so charming at close range, sweetest. Now look over to the north; there's another way out through the hills, but it's hardly more than a pony track.”

“To another part of the estate?”

“Yes, and those are superb hills for deer stalking. There will likely be a big house party then. They'll come for the sport, if not for Christabel's
beaux yeux
.”

She hoped she wouldn't be expected to admire newly dead stags; the mounted heads were bad enough. “As factor you have something to do with these cottages, do you not?”

“I have everything to do with them, you might say.”

“Then tell me about the people. Who are they, and what do they do? You can hardly call it farming; they have so little garden space and so few animals.”

“They exist,” he said dryly. “And their reason for existing is that their ancestors lived there. Many of them are named Gilchrist.”

“They're clansmen then.”

He said with amusement, “I see you haven't forgotten what Sinclair said. But remember what else he had to say: those days are gone forever, and no great loss, what?” His hands urged her back toward the way they had come. “Shall we go and see if the horses have arrived?”

“Oh, yes!” But she kept looking around. A movement out on the loch caught her eye, and she exclaimed, “I think he's caught something! I wish we had a telescope. Is he one of the people from the cottages?”

“No, he's a different sort of tenant. He lives in that fairly decent place across the loch; he has special privileges.” Nigel was offhand about it; he was anxious to see the horses. She went with him, but she was not done asking questions.

“But may they fish the loch, too?”

“No. Any trout they take from the loch would be at night, with a lookout posted to warn of the gamekeeper or one of his men . . . watch your footing there.”

“But supposing a poacher was caught, would he be put in prison? Even
transported
?”

He laughed. “
Archie
do anything like that? Christabel would have the law on the poor devil at once”—he snapped his fingers—“and mourn because poachers can no longer be hanged. But not Archie.”

“Then you wouldn't do it either.” She stopped on the path and turned to face him.

“Send a man to prison or Australia because he took a fish or a bird? Good God! My, what big eyes you have, little grandmother.” He kissed her, and she responded eagerly, with an amused recollection of those first hungry kisses behind the sooty laurels in a London garden. Here they were in each other's arms on a breakneck path, still behaving as if they couldn't stop but knowing they needn't.

The crows returned victoriously to the pines and shattered the poetry of the moment. “What was it about horses?” Nigel muttered in her neck. “I'd rather go to bed.”

“So would I, but think of the servants. They'd be so shocked, except for Morag. She has a twinkling eye.”

“That she has,” Nigel agreed. A horse nickered from down below. “They're here!” he said happily. He went ahead so that if she slipped where the path was damp he'd break her fall.

“Nigel, have you found out what your other duties are, besides admonishing poachers? Can't Archie accept the rents from his own people? Papa always made quite an occasion of it; everybody took a dram.”

“It's not difficult to deal with the farmers or the folk in the village,” he said. “It's those out there on the moor.”

She stopped and looked indignantly at his back. “You mean they pay rent to live on those miles and miles of empty land?
Clan
land?”

“My sweeting,” he said with humorous resignation, turning back to her, “forget the word
clan
and all its romantic associations. Archie is the landlord here, and one day I shall be.” He took her hand to draw her on. “And they are tenants.”

“But what can they do to earn the money to pay? They must scarcely see a coin from one year's end to the other.”

“The making and smuggling of whisky pay a good many rents in the Highlands. In the far reaches of the estate there's many a secret still, and perhaps even nearer to Linnmore House than you'd believe. My father knew, and pretended he didn't, but he always had whisky in the house in a time when it was not a gentlemen's tipple. And Grant took care not to know a thing.”

“But suppose someone isn't in the smuggling? How do they pay their rents? What can they do, with most of the hale young men gone far away? It must be difficult or impossible for them to be always sending money home, if they have it to spare.”

“My love, you needn't worry. They're here, aren't they? They have obviously survived for generations.” He put his hands on either side of her waist and squeezed. “Bonnie wee thing,” he said in Archie's accent.

“But
how
?” she persisted.

He sighed loudly. “The women weave cloth for the clothes, the men make all the brogues, and they have a little extra to sell in the town on market days. They all sell goats and kids too, a few eggs, turnips and cabbages in season. The men work on our roads or reforesting, and they can earn a few extra shillings when the sporting parties are here. If they don't owe rent, they can take their pay in meal if they choose; the estate has its own gristmill. It's for me to get them to work; Grant was more than a bit soft with them.”

She gave him a great smacking, trollopy kiss on the mouth. “Ah, Capting, but you're the 'andsome one, and no mistake. So you're going to be the grand tyrant! You'll go for them and their few pence with savage dogs and a horsewhip, is that it?”

They heard the horses again. “Come along, my girl,” said Nigel. “On your own two feet, or I'll toss you over my shoulder like a prize of war and carry you off to have my wicked way with you.”

“I can hardly wait,” said Jennie.

At the spring-fed pool she made him stop and lean over it with her, to see their faces framed by the curling fronds of fern and fragmented by the action of the water. “Pyramus and Thisbe,” she said dreamily.

“Nip and Tuck,” suggested Nigel.

“Supposing you're no more successful than Mr. Grant was,” she said to the broken reflections.

“You're not a girl; you're a terrier digging out a rabbit.”

“If I'm to be Mistress of Linnmore one day, I have to know all, don't I?”

“The terrier has such melting eyes. Very well. Grant wasn't Archie's heir, but I am. So I must be successful, and you're part of the reason, as you have just told me. There's more to it than rents with that lot and the others out there. Archie has great plans for their welfare, but they're stubborn and ignorant, and Grant humored them in it.”

Holding hands, they walked through the birch and hazel coppice. “They could have better gardens, better beasts. They could have decent cottages with separate byres, but they don't want to give up the old ways of taking animals in under the same roof with them. They'd have proper fireplaces instead of a peat fire in the middle of the room, with the smoke supposed to go out a hole in the roof but kippering the inmates instead. It's no wonder some of them have coughs that sound as if their lungs were exploding out of their chests. I know whereof I speak. I was in and out of those hovels enough as a lad, drinking goat's milk from a sooty bowl and eating bannock cooked over a smoky fire.”

She'd seen him as an officer of the Royal Horse Guards; she'd seen him dancing, singing, joking; she'd seen him giving Christabel his wicked caricature of a London buck; she'd known him as her lover. But here spoke a man with a social conscience and heavy sense of responsibility. If she had wished before that her father could know him, she prayed for it now.
Oh, Papa, if only it's true that you do know all. William says so, but I never could understand how it could be. Now I wish I believed it beyond a doubt, the way I believe in Nigel
.

“And besides drinking the milk and eating the bannock,” she said, “you knew about taking trout in the night, with someone watching for the gamekeeper.”

“Ah, those were the sweetest trout I ever ate! We'd go up to Old Lachy's to fry them in oatmeal. He lived away from the rest, so nobody could be fluttering and fretting about what we'd done. And if a keeper should walk in on us, how could he prove that Young Master Gilchrist hadn't provided some perfectly honest God- and Laird-fearing fish for his ill-chosen friends?”

Her mouth watered for the sweetness of the stolen trout in its crisp coating, eaten around a peat fire with the boys and Old Lachy, whoever he was.

“Is Archie a great fisherman?” she asked.

“He always was, but he seems to have gone off it lately.”

“Isn't there plenty for everyone, not just that very special tenant out there all by himself?”

“Archie, good-hearted as he is, is a great upholder of tradition. He reserves his position as the Laird, and so he should. The landlord who forgets his authority is inviting anarchy. In any case,” he added with a grin, “they're not dying of desire to fish the loch at night. I told you about the water horse. It was safe enough for the lads with me; they thought I had a charm against evil.”

“Did you?”

“I let them think so. But there were times when the heart threatened to leap out of my breast when something
big
broke water out there, and I was convinced it was swimming straight for us. I was more afraid of the Black Wolf than anything else. You see, as long as you didn't
touch
the water horse, you were safe.”

“Wouldn't it be wonderful if such monsters did exist? Awful, but wonderful.”

A
DAM WAS
a big young gray with a calm eye. “Well, he's certainly not elegant,” Nigel said, “but I believe he has a sense of humor.” Adam gave his shoulder a sociable nudge. Dora, the mare, was a slender chestnut beauty, skittish, but responsive to Fergus's stroking and crooning.