Jennie About to Be (34 page)

She was on her knees, scooping up the sovereigns, dropping them into the velvet bag. “What—what is it?” She tried to sound dazed, just wakened from deep sleep. She slipped the cord over her neck and thrust the bag into her bosom, where it nestled warm and heavy between her breasts.

“I'm sorry if I woke you, but I must talk to you before that damned woman gets here. I'm glad you could sleep,” he said sarcastically. “I couldn't.”

“I'm not ready to talk yet.” She yawned on the last word. “I must have time to wake up and wash and dress.”

“Why can't I come in now?” Soft and seductive words against the panels.

She didn't answer.

“Very well! I'll see you downstairs in fifteen minutes.” In a few moments she heard him striding toward the stairs. She tied a narrow scarf of fine red and white checked wool around her neck with a loose bow that would droop and hid any hint of the bag under the snug-fitting jacket. She left the hat but took her gloves. Then she went out into the hall. A breeze blew up the stairs; he had gone out the front door, and she could see him standing at the head of the stone steps. She went along the passage to the back stairs.

I cannot listen to him now
, she thought.
I have nothing to say to him that I haven't already said
.

She had to wrestle a bit with the heavy bar holding the outside door and began to sweat inside the wool riding tights. But finally the bolt slid back, and she escaped out into the cold shadow of the house and the morning chill.

She was uneasy about Fergus. Five sovereigns would represent a fortune to the boy, if he knew what money was. And even if he had never seen a gold coin before this, the gold in itself was beautiful, warm to both the touch and the sight.

“Fergus is to be trusted,” she could hear Alick Gilchrist saying.

She opened the small side door into the stable, and the sun came in with her, heating her back while she called for Fergus. Motes danced in the sunbeams; emptiness answered her voice. Out in the paddock one of the horses whickered in response. She went across to the loose-box in which Fergus slept on a pallet of straw. He'd kept his belongings in a small, crudely made wooden chest. So few things to furnish his life, but such a vacancy when they and he were gone.

She took Dora's saddle out to the paddock. It was heavy, but she'd carried Bertie's saddle when she was a small girl, and then Nelson's. Bertie had stood like a rook when one child or another slung the saddle over his back, climbing up onto a wall to do it. He'd endured any amount of fixing and fussing, buckling and unbuckling, all the getting on and off to make inexpert adjustments. He would roll his eyes at them and sigh, but stood. Nelson was a different case, and Dora was as full of notions as he was.

Jennie heaved the saddle up onto the paddock wall and summoned the mare, who came willingly; after all, Jennie was the source of sugar lumps and turnip slices, and allowed herself to be nuzzled and blown upon during the search for delicacies. But Jennie had no strupach for her this morning, and Jennie had never saddled her. The menacing shape upon the wall could be a crouching beast whose one aim in life was to leap at the throat of an innooent mare.

Attracted by the small furor, the gray joined the group. He was not alarmed by the saddle on the wall, but he was intrigued by Dora's sidewise dancing. Jennie tried to croon like Fergus, gave up in favor of a few crisp commands, and when those didn't work, she decided she would have to walk, praying the whole time that Alick would be home to receive the money.

Nigel said from beyond the gate, “I'll saddle her for you. Hold her head.” He came over the gate like a gymnast. His eyes were a hard, expressionless blue. “We were going to talk.”

“There's nothing to talk about. It's all been said.” Her voice trembled. How could she be speaking like this to her Nigel? (If he had ever been hers.) “If we're to go on, there must be no more trying to defend something that's indefensible. It's happened. We can't undo it. For now, I need time and space.”

He didn't answer but set about saddling the mare, who stood cooperatively still. Jennie waited. The trembling had left her voice for her body. Nigel came around the mare's rump, his face flushed, and said, “I'll ride with you.”

“I prefer to go alone.”

“You're not going out there!”

“No,” she said, meaning she was not going down to the ruins. “I have no wish to visit open graves.”

His head jerked back as if she'd lashed him across the face but had infuriated rather than wounded him.

“Where are you going then?”

“ ‘Goosey, goosey gander, / Whither shall I wander?' Help me mount please.”

He made a step for her and gave her a lift up. “I'm just going to ride, Nigel,” she said calmly. “Why don't you use the time to write to your mother and tell her what's been happening here? I'm sure she'll be glad to know just how well you are doing.”

He was more than flushed; he was scarlet to the temples and the rims of his ears. “She's another romantic idealist! And as for you, by God, if you hadn't been allowed to run free here, we'd still be happy.”

“Because I'd be ignorant? You reason like a child, Nigel. Well, you are still a boy after all, aren't you? Don't you think I'd have heard of the evictions, even if I hadn't seen them carried out? You insisted that I visit Christabel, and that's where I met Mr. Grant.”

“He had no right to say whatever he did to you!”

“Nigel, I'm a woman, not a toy! Even without Grant, don't you think I could have put all the puzzling things into a whole? The girls and Mrs. MacIver would not have left this house without telling my why.”

“I should never have had those sluts under my roof!”

He held Jennie's foot in the stirrup and rested his forehead against her thigh. Out of habit her hand moved toward the yellow hair, then arrested itself.

“My God, Jennie,” he groaned. “What's happened to us?”

“Something we can't ever talk about again,” she said, “if we're going to get through the years ahead of us.” The words clogged her mouth like the thick dust of the desert in which her youth was to be used up.

He released her and stood back. “I've sent word to the sheriff there'll be no charges against Donald John. He should be free by now.”

“Thank you. Let's hope he can find his family.”

Biting his lower lip, Nigel opened the gate for her like a groom; she nodded to him and rode out around the house and across the driveway, to the woods where the bridle path began which led to the start of the road over the moor.

F
OLLOWING
the wagon road down from the woods above the mill, she kept her head turned away from the sight of the dead hamlet in the hollow, her face toward the rock-studded hillocks that rose southward to the beginnings of the mountains. They were crowned with light while their sides were still blue or smoke-purple or black-forested in morning's deep shadows. In the clear air they and the heights to the west looked so unnaturally near it seemed as if she could ride to them in a half hour and vanish into their precipitous folds to realms as mysterious as the spaces among the stars or the bottom of the deepest ocean.

How silent the moor was, now that no one was there. The only sounds were the mare's hooves on the road, and the birds. When she was passing the loch, she thought it was safe to look down, and the water was lustrous as satin. Above its far shore the windows of Alick Gilchrist's cottage winked reflected sunlight. She couldn't see any smoke from the chimney, and it should be rising in this still air, unless he was sleeping late after some wearying days. But when she turned off the road onto the track among the rocks and the gorse, she had an emptiness in her stomach that wasn't all hunger; she wasn't surprised to find no one there, and the garron gone.

She didn't want to go back without leaving the money, and there was no reason why she couldn't leave it; who was there to steal it in this place? The door was unlocked, and she went into the kitchen. There were some oatcakes on the table, and a slice of cold bacon. Her mouth watered, and she ate one of the oatcakes, chewing each mouthful carefully and washing it down with water. She had a struggle to keep from taking another, and the bacon too.

She reached inside her jacket for the velvet bag, but she couldn't make up her mind to leave the money and go. There were things she had to know: where Morag was, and if the new baby had survived, and how the children were whom she'd pulled from the brook. She had no one at Tigh nam Fuaran to talk to, and she was in no hurry to ride back there to begin the rest of her life.

If she waited a little while, he might come; she left the sovereigns in the purse and rode back to the road, and continued westward around the curve, looking for the Pict's House. She traveled up a rise and passed between two high outcroppings of nearly bald gray rock, then descended into a sheltered bowl of moist heat rising from the dew-sequined heather, and a dry, strong heat falling from the sun. The road went through it, bisected by a brown brook bubbling along a pebbly bed. To her right, halfway up a shallow mound, there was a dark little doorway framed in stone.

The first sight of that black oblong amid the sunlit bracken stopped her like a threat. Dora was offended by the sudden restraint and tossed her head instantly. “It's all right, my darling,” Jennie said. Now she saw that there was more than a doorway, but with the centuries the small hut of stones seemed to have been swallowed by the earth around it. And if that shadowy portal weren't the way into a fairy hill, it should be.

She would have been enchanted by it under happier circumstances. Now, absurdly, she felt like crying because she had been cheated of this simple joy.

Dora drank from the brook, and Jennie gazed up at the Piet's House, trying to imagine the builder and what his life had been. She was hot, and loosened the scarf, and opened her jacket at the throat.

Dora's head came up, and her ears pricked forward. She stared expectantly up at the road ahead where it disappeared behind the Piet's mound. Presently the big brown pony came into view. Alick was slumped in the saddle, his head drooping, his bonnet tilted forward over his eyes. He wore a folded plaid of a dark tartan over his left shoulder. He seemed to be asleep, letting the garron take him home. The garron seemed halfasleep himself, until he saw those in the hollow, and sped up.

Alick straightened in the saddle and rubbed a hand over his face.

“I'm sorry if we woke you,” Jennie said.

“Good morning, Mrs. Gilchrist,” he said with no great enthusiasm. He took off his bonnet but drew his dark brows down as if his eyes were bothered by the light. He hadn't shaved, and the shadow of beard made him look very dark.

“I've brought the money myself,” she said diffidently. “Fergus has disappeared.”

“I'm not surprised.”

“
I
am. We talked yesterday, as much as I could talk with him, and he seemed friendly and willing. But perhaps he didn't like the new servant. He wouldn't feel at home with someone who doesn't speak like a Highlander.”

“Perhaps,” he said absently. “Will you be stepping down?”

“Yes, I have questions to ask.”

He dismounted, but she had slid off the mare's back before he could help her. The two animals moved off together, starting to graze. She pointed up at the stone doorway. “So that's the Pict's House.”

“So ithas always been called.” They stood silent in the warm, buzzing hush as if neither could think of anything else to say. When he spoke again, she started.

“I buried Lachy that night, and I built a cairn over his grave. The only prayer I made was that he would be undisturbed until the call comes to rise. He believed in that.”

“Do you?”

“If God is still on the side of the landlords when the call comes, who wants to rise up from the grave to have the whole bloody business begin again?”

“My view is that God isn't on anyone's side. He is as magnificently indifferent as those mountains.”

“That is worth considering.” Alick's voice dragged. “I have not been home since that night. I've slept wherever I happened to be when I couldn't hold my head up for a few hours. Last night it was in a barn at Roseholm.” He knelt by the brook and scooped up water to drink and dashed some into his eyes.

She sat down on a small boulder. “I won't keep you if you'll let me ask my questions first.”

“Ask,” he said. He dried his face on a fold of the plaid and sat down in the heather with his knees drawn up and his arms folded across them.

“Where is Morag?” she asked. “Where did they go?”

“The minister was shamed into allowing them to shelter in a fir wood behind the manse. Out of sight of the kirk, you understand,” he said softly, “so the ladies and gentlemen might not be offended when they go to worship.”

“Where will they go from there?”

“They don't know yet whether it will be south or north or to the coast. It will be wherever they are allowed, and what difference does it make? They will be vagrants now. With the money from Davie Grant and you and myself, they can be buying meal to keep from starving for a while. They will have to sell their beasts because they have no way of keeping them, and they will be robbed in that business.”

“What about the new baby?”

“She came too soon. She was buried yesterday morning in a corner of the churchyard.”

Suddenly Tamsin was with her in the person of the dead baby, and she pressed her palms over her eyes and wished she could go on retreating into the darkness she made for herself.

He didn't move. She could hear the mare and the pony cropping grass, and the sound of the brook. She lifted her head and blinked her eyes to clear them. Alick was watching something high overhead. Her own eyes were too blurred and dazzled to make it out. “Were there any more deaths?” she asked.