Shadow in Hawthorn Bay (2 page)

“Four years,” Mary thought bitterly. “Four years and the two of us fifteen years old already. Is it not old enough to be earning the passage home? And now you call me to come to you. Och, Duncan, you know I cannot do that.”

Returning to the present, Mary gave the ewe a final loving pat and rose to her feet. Absently she crossed the field to eat her bannock and her bit of cheese with the other young herders who had gathered in the lee of the hill.

The talk was all of May Morning, the big spring festival only a week away.

“And Mairi, you will have your rowan wreath and your May Morning fire made, and your bannock rolled down the hill, and you be halfway up Clachan Mountain before the rest of us are out from our beds,” laughed Jenny Macintyre.

“And I wonder do you ever go to bed at all before May Morning?” sighed Callum Grant.

“I would be a bent old woman did I wait for you to rise, Callum Grant,” retorted Mary.

The others laughed, full of the joy of summer coming. The first of May was Beltane, the ancient festival with its ritual fires on every hilltop, its bannock rolling, and the herding of cows and sheep and goats up into fresh pastures in the high hills. There the women and young people would stay in their shielings, the little rough mountain huts, all summer while the men farmed in the lower hills. In the autumn they would trek home again, people and animals fat and happy.

The chatter went on but Duncan’s call and the terrible need in it were so powerful that Mary got suddenly to her feet and, without a word, left the group. The others took little notice. They were used to Mary’s abrupt ways.

All that afternoon, the echo of Duncan’s voice was strong in her head. Over and over she relived their childhood together.

Born in the same week, they had understood one another from the first with hardly a word having to be spoken. Almost as soon as they could walk, the two had gone racing over the hills together until the rocks, the deep corries, and the swift-flowing burns had become more home to them than the hearth in either of their houses. They were so in tune that Mary’s mother called them reflections of one another. “And who is to say which is the child and which the shade?” Aunt Jean would ask—and there seemed to be no answer.

They were both small, black-haired, and dark-eyed, but Duncan’s eyes were large and black as sloes and people called him beautiful with his hair curling around his ruddy complexion, and his straight nose and full mouth. Mary’s eyes were bright as a blackbird’s, and she was plain and sharp-nosed, with skin as pale as yarrow and a mouth that turned up noticeably at one corner when she was amused. They shared an intensity and a streak of wild joy that, in Mary, though she was a solemn child, sometimes erupted in a song that was clearer than a bird’s. Duncan’s way was to laugh and dance, and sometimes he fluted on a whistle he made from a willow twig.

Mary had, too, both a sweetness and a “tongue sharp as a thorn”, said her sister Jeannie. It showed itself in quick, sometimes unkind words. In Duncan it was a slower burning anger, a sulking that lasted and lasted and gave him the name Duncan
dubh
, Duncan the black, for his dark moods. They were different in other ways, too. Mary was as unmovable as a mountain when she had made up her mind to something, Duncan as changeable as the shadows on a Highland loch. He would start off up the hill to hunt for the fox’s lair, then, when Mary had followed into the bracken or the berry thicket, he would change his mind and race off towards the stream to find a salmon. The only
thing about Duncan that was steadfast was his desire to be where Mary was. He was a terrible boy for teasing and playing tricks, but when his tormenting turned Mary from him in anger or hurt, he would retreat into misery and, although it often seemed unfair, Mary would have to comfort him. But he took care of Mary in one important way. For there was something else about Mary that was not so of Duncan, or any of the other children in the glen. She had the
an dà shelladh
, the gift of the two sights. There were times she could see into the past, into the future, into the distance, and even into the hearts of others. People said Mary could see the wind.

She did not think it a gift. She hated it—the headaches, the rush of blackness, the frenzied need to warn those about whom she had the premonitions. She hated the strangeness of seeing a thing happen as though it were as real as the cotton grass on the hill, then having it happen exactly the same, days, weeks, or even years later. She hated being set apart in this way. Duncan hated it too. He did not tease her about the
an dà shelladh
, and because he didn’t Mary felt he was her anchor, her protection from the glances and whispers of the other children, the hasty gestures some adults made to save themselves in case she put spells on them.

Once, in school, Annie Morrison had stumbled over her reading lesson and sworn to the
dominie that “Mairi Urquhart has ill-wished me.” Mr. Fraser had strapped Annie’s hand until it was red and sore but she had tearfully stuck to her story and some of the children had talked afterwards about Mary being unchancy.

As a small child Mary had more than once begged her mother to take away the gift. “Gift! Gift!” she would storm, her eyes heavy with misery. “It is no gift. It is my misfortune.”

“Mairi, Mairi, it is a sore thing, surely, but it is what you are and must be.” Her mother’s dark eyes would be sympathetic and she would give Mary a bit of honey on her oat bannock and rock her for comfort. Mary would not be comforted.

Old Mrs. Grant told her much the same thing. Mrs. Grant was the only person in the township who understood how Mary felt. She lived alone in her cottage under the brow of Drum Eildean across the burn, not far from the waterfall. Her husband was long since dead and her only son had gone to America before Mary was born. She too had the gift of second sight. It was to her the people of the glen went for spells against bad luck and ill wishes, and for the
taibhes
, the glimpses into the future she could sometimes give them. And although all the women in the glen were versed in herbal cures and knew the charms against ill, it was often felt that Mrs. Grant’s gift and her healing hands gave the remedies special power.

The minister, Mr. Graeme, at St. Kilda’s parish church, preached that it was sinful to believe in spells and the like and that those who did would burn for ever in hell. All the same, the people came to the spae wife for their needs, as people in the glen had always done.

Mary went often to the cottage where the rowan grew tallest, and the spicy-scented roses and the creamy-white yarrow grew thickest. She cared almost as much for this tall, stern, quiet old woman as she did for Duncan. And Mrs. Grant, who was so reserved with most people, talked to Mary of the pain of her own childhood as a seer, of her happy marriage, and of Donald, her son. She shared his letters from New England with Mary and told her that he was sending money so that she could go, some day, to live with him.

Over the years Mary learned the uses of the camomile, savoury, thyme, and lovage that grew in Mrs. Grant’s garden and of the hawthorn, burdock, flag, gentian, and mint that grew wild on the hills and beside the streams, just by being with the old woman. She learned too some of the simple charms and spells for healing, the charms against ill-wishing and the evil eye, but when it came to studying seriously Mary refused, stubbornly. “I will not be set apart so,” she would cry.

“Mairi, Mairi, you have the gifts. You have
the
an dà shelladh
. You have the knowledge in your heart to turn away evil. You have the healing in your hands. And what gifts the good God gives us, those gifts must we cherish and nurture. Remember you well the story our own dear Lord tells of the talents.”

“I will not. Mother Grant, do not weigh me with such needs of folk. Is it not enough to have to see their ills before they do, themselves? Jenny Blackburn pained so in her back for the witch doll Mairi Carmichael set in the burn, sotted old Angus Morrison choking to death on his dram—what need have I of this?”

“What a body is given to do, a body must do—one way or another, Mairi.” There was a tinge of sadness in Mrs. Grant’s voice. She sighed and gave Mary an unaccustomed kiss on the top of her head.

Duncan would not go with Mary on those visits. He did not like her friendship with Mrs. Grant.

“Mairi,” he had told her after her first long visit with the old woman. “It was the royal stag himself I saw on Carroch Hill and I could have followed him but I would not without you.”

Mary had been bitterly disappointed. Then she had realized that there had been no deer, that it was only Duncan’s way of telling her she was not to leave him. And every time she did there was a wondrous something Duncan had
seen—a glimpse of the rare wildcat, a vixen that might have let them play with her kits, a shadow that was sure to have been the urisk over by the Corran Craig—that great shaggy grey half-man, half-goat everyone knew lived up by the rocky pool beyond the waterfall, though no one had ever seen it.

“Duncan
dubh
, you are not to mind so much.” Contrite, Mary would not visit Mrs. Grant for a week or two.

All this Mary was remembering as she tramped around the meadow, whistling the lambs from the high crevices in the rocks where they loved to climb, checking now and then to see that the ewe and her new baby were all right. “Och, Duncan
dubh
, how could you have gone away at all!” she whispered furiously. “I would have hidden myself away in the
coire na cailleach
and never gone. Never. Never.”

Ignoring the calls of the others as they herded their animals towards home, Mary stood on the slope of the pasture looking down over the hills. It had stopped raining. In that sudden brilliance of the sky that comes in unexpected moments in the Highlands, the pasture blazed with the gold of the whin and broom in flower, the honey-sweet perfume of them rich in the air. The little loch just below the slope was ringed with aspen and rowan and birch softly green with early leaf. Above its dark water,
small black terns and the great curlews wheeled in uneven circles against the wind, the sharp keek-keek-keek of the terns punctuating the curlews’ wild cries. High on Carroch Hill to the west, Donald Cameron’s cows grazing on the ridge were silhouetted against the deep, gentian-blue sky. Far below, Loch Ness shone white as a white swan’s wing and, away on the other side, the fields were green with spring. Beyond them the hills, smudged with the darkened purple of last autumn’s heather, rose and fell and rose again like massive earthworks left by the giants who were once the sole inhabitants of the north country.

Mary loved the land fiercely. She felt as though she had been born out of its earth, that she was kin to the whin and broom and heather that grew so profusely over the hillsides, that there were tiny unseen roots growing along her body, reaching out for the land, drawing nourishment from it. Once she had told Duncan, “When I am old, I will lie myself down on the hill and my roots will push themselves into the earth and I will sleep. The grass will come to cover me then, and I will be part of the hill for ever.”

“And I will be there, too!”

“You will, for we are not to be parted. And maybe, Duncan, there will be a rowan tree grow out of us and bring good fortune to all who dance around it.”

For two thousand years and more, Mary’s people had lived on this beautiful, harsh, unyielding soil. And, like all Highlanders, Mary knew where almost every one of her ancestors had lived, died, and been buried—and where and when their ghosts walked among the living. She knew too, as all her people did, where the ancient giants, gods, and heroes of the old religions walked, which were the places sacred to them and which belonged to the fairies.

The fairies, the
sitheachean
, once gods and heroes, the sole dwellers in the land, were now the kings and queens of the unseen world, emerging into this world to bring good luck to those they favoured, trouble to those they did not. People called them the good neighbours, the people of peace, hoping the flattering names would keep away the trouble. Some simply called them the old ones. Mary and Duncan called them that and, because once they had been lost far from home and led to safety by a strange light, they had been sure that they were favoured and that one day they would find the old ones and perhaps meet a fairy cavalcade shining in the sun. They knew they would never fear the fairies.

But Duncan had gone away. At first the loneliness had seemed so unbearable that Mary had choked back her pride and asked Mrs. Grant for a charm to bring him home.

“It is not for this a seer has the healing gifts,” Mrs. Grant had reproved her. And Mary had settled down, finally, to await Duncan’s return. In time she had grown from a child to a young girl. Now, at fifteen, she was hardly taller than she had been at twelve and no more beautiful. But her hair was thick and long and shiny and she had a spark in her eyes and a quirk of humour that came and went from the corner of her wide mouth, and there was still an underlying sweetness to her nature that softened her sharp tongue and brought more than one boy, refusing to be afraid of her two sights, to come courting at her door. Astonished there would be any who imagined she would not wait for Duncan, she unceremoniously sent them all away.

Mary looked across the Great Glen through sudden tears. “I cannot come where you are, Duncan,” she cried. The wind tore the words from her lips and carried them down into the valley but Duncan’s voice in Mary’s head, “Come, Mairi,” in such pain, was still strong. Abruptly she gathered up her skirt, clutched her plaid at her neck, and headed up the slope.

With the rose and green check of the shawl making a bright sail behind her, her hair rippling in black waves above it, she ran across the fields, her bare feet scarcely touching the ground. She scrambled over the low stone dikes, leapt across the rushing streams, and at
last clambered up the side of the high, round hill that overlooked the waterfall where the kelpie, the water horse, was said to rule.

All her life, in times of joy or trouble, Mary had come to this hill—the
tornashee
, the fairies’ hill. Below it, near the burn, was the rowan tree where the children came to dance on May Morning, to tell their wishes and receive their luck. On the slopes of the hill the magic pearl-wort, the safeguard against evil spells, and the velvet heart’s-ease grew in greatest abundance. It was on that round summit that Mary and Duncan had been sure they would find the old ones one day.