Shadow in Hawthorn Bay (22 page)

The letter was from her father. He told her that in the year that she had been gone, Uncle Davie and Aunt Jean and the boys had arrived home safely. He also said that her sister Jeannie
and Johnny Fraser had married, but that the baby that had been going to come soon after had been lost, and that Jeannie could have no more.

“I will have no descendants unless they be yours,” he wrote. “If you do not marry, you must do with the brooch what you feel is best.” He closed by telling her that both he and her mother were well. The letter was not long nor was it obviously a loving letter. It was not James Urquhart’s way to write such a letter. His gift and his few spare words told Mary poignantly that he loved her and that he wanted either for her to have children to leave the brooch to, or for her to sell it and come home. She sat for another long night by the fire, dozing only now and again, moving to stir the fire and, once, to make herself tea.

She was not grieving. She was thinking—and remembering; remembering home, the fragrance of the golden whin and broom, the roses and the purple heather. She was remembering that she had once told Duncan when they were children, “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.” And Duncan had said, “And I will be there, too.” And she had agreed, for they were not to be parted.

“But you lie here,” she murmured, “beside the dark forest, and though the black shade of you called me, I would not go that far with you.
Your shade is at rest now, too. I can go home, if I wish.” The picture of Luke came to mind, his eyes dark with fear. “Someone I was supposed to be with,” he had said.

She went to bed, her head full of thoughts of Luke, and when she woke in the morning she knew what she was going to do. She bathed herself in the creek, scolding her shivering body—“I could all but drown myself in the icy water without a groan or a sigh—now I surely can bathe in it.” She put on her clean shift, her good red-and-blue-checked skirt, her clean white linen blouse, her stockings, and her shoes. She combed her hair down smooth and straight, put her warm plaid around her shoulders, pinned the cairngorm at her shoulder, and took from the cupboard shelf the neatly folded length of creamy white cloth she had woven as the first instalment on her passage home.

Journeying through the woods was a great deal faster than by the road. Mary reached the Anderson homestead in less than an hour. The day was warmer than days had been for weeks and Luke, his father, and Henry were out planting pumpkins in a last effort to battle the wintry summer. Mary stood at the edge of the field watching them make neat rows with their hoes until Henry looked up and saw her. He started to smile, then an expression of shame and self-consciousness crossed his face. He looked away.

“Henry,” Mary called, “Henry, you cannot for ever not speak to me because you have been foolish. Come you here.”

Henry stood up, and slowly, as though each step were painful, crossed the small field. Mary knelt down so that she could talk to him at his own level.

“Well then,” she said, “if I were to touch you, would you disappear, do you think?”

Henry was looking at his feet. “No,” he whispered.

“What then do you think might happen to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you afraid to look at me?”

“Yes.”

“Henry, I am afraid about something I mean to do. If I have the courage to do this thing I fear, will you look at me then?”

Henry raised his eyes in surprise. “Not yet, laddie, for I have not done it yet.” She stood up. She drew a deep breath.

“Luke,” she called. “Luke Anderson. I have come courting and I have brought you a gift.” She held out the folded length of cloth.

Luke gaped at her from the other side of the field. He did not move.

Mary was trembling. Her hands had broken out in a sweat. She took a few steps.

“It is in my mind,” she said, “that it would
make a fine wedding shirt. It is not perfect but I have woven it myself. If you refuse my courting, Luke, I can do no less than you and tell you the gift is yours, all the same.”

Still Luke stood motionless on his side of the field. Mary stood on hers, fearing that her knees would fail her. Then Luke let out a whoop, bounded across the field, and swept her into a hug that lifted her right off her feet.

“This ain’t no wrestling match, son,” shouted his father, laughing, and Patty, standing in the doorway, teased, “Luke, you’ll ruin the beautiful cloth!”

“But what’s the thing you’re afraid of?” demanded Henry.

“It was not really a thing.” Mary moved a small space away from Luke. “It was Luke. Will you look at me, now?”

“You’re afeard of Luke?” Henry was incredulous.

“Sometimes I am afraid of you.”

“Of me? I’m not afraid of you … oh.” Henry’s face reddened.

Later when they were walking hand in hand back through the woods, Mary told Luke about seeing Duncan in the water and about her time in the forest. “Then you came,” she said.

“Were you really afraid of me?” asked Luke.

“I was. It was my pride, Luke.” She sighed ruefully. “I think now I should not have been. I have remembered Mrs. Grant’s prophecy.”

“Mary, see here—”

Firmly Mary reached up and put her hand over his mouth. “It is time for you to see here. Listen. ‘Twice will you refuse your destiny, twice will you seek it before you embrace it as your own.’ Mrs. Grant, who has the two sights, told me that the night I left home. I thought she meant that it was my destiny to be a seer and a healer and that I had refused it twice—once when I did not tell you about seeing you carrying Henry before he fell and once when I did not warn of the Pritchetts’ fire the day I hid in the privy. Then, when I was coming through the woods for you, I knew
you
were the destiny she meant. But when I saw you in the field, you looked so far away and so stern all I could think was that you had said, more than once, you would not marry me after all—and I was afraid.”

“But I am going to marry you.” Luke’s eyes were shining. “Mary, I been thinking. You told me to watch out for Ma in the snow—and I got to tell you I did try—just in case you wasn’t as loony as I figured. And it did give me a turn that you ran all the way from the Collivers’ in time to save Henry from drowning. Now you tell me how it was you near drowned yourself—” His hand tightened on hers. “And how you seen
Duncan in the water. I seen for myself how peaceful it was there afterwards when you went home from being in the woods. Well, I’ve been thinking there must be something to what you say about all that. We just ain’t raised to think that way. I see the birds and the trees and the lake—and the land to be cleared and ploughed. I guess you see all sorts of things I don’t. Mebbe I wish I could, too, but I don’t think so. I wonder if sometimes you ain’t just so caught up in looking for your ghosts and fairies and strange critters that you miss some of what I see.”

Mary looked solemnly at his open face. “It is no easy thing to understand. But I do understand this. I came to this place when Duncan called and now I know you were the one here waiting for me. I cannot go home without you.

“And there is something else. Here where I have been so afraid and so sure I did not belong—teaching, working with Julia Colliver, living with Henry, being with you—I am more a part of your neighbourhood than I ever was of my own in my own hills. My heart can never truly leave those hills, Luke. I know I must live with that sadness but I know that I do not have to live as though burdened by a heavy cloak soaked in rain. I can wear the burden lightly because I chose both the sadness and the joy.”

Shyly, self-consciously, Mary and Luke put their arms around each other and kissed in the privacy of the deep woods.

They agreed to be married in August, with John and Patty and four other couples, when the preacher came again to the district. They decided to live at Hawthorn Bay. Henry was going to live with them. Sarah Pritchett gave them the house, the lot, and twenty acres across the road for a wedding present. “Part of the land Dan owns is mine as my Loyalist grant from the King, and I want you to have this piece of it. I think you’re a brave young woman, Mary Urquhart, to hold strong with your own ways when all were against you.” She twisted the sash of her dress until it was like a spring as she talked, but she persevered, and when she had finished she handed Mary the deed to the property. Mary and Luke thanked her together and promised to “hold strong” with both their ways.

Owena brought Mary a handsome deerskin dress. “It is for walking among the trees,” she said. She had a pair of moccasins for Luke.

Word had come from pedlars from New York and New England that there was no summer anywhere that year—“eighteen-hundred-and-freeze-to-death”, they were calling it back in Vermont. Whichever of Mary’s neighbours had harboured the notion that she might have caused the bad weather sheepishly relinquished it.

Few people mentioned that Mary had predicted the weather. And it was suddenly remembered that Simeon Anderson had always been a “wild one, too fond of his whisky, too loose with his words”.

Dan gave a small parcel of land for a school, and the community elders—Dan, Sam Colliver, Jim Morrissay, Hiram Openshaw, and Liam Hennessy—asked Mary to teach the children. Gravely she accepted.

The wedding was to be by the creek near the mill. The wedding feast was to be at the Collivers’. Mrs. Colliver would listen to no refusals. “Luke brung you here in the first place for me to take care of, and seeing you safely married’s my job.” Luke gave Mrs. Colliver his mother’s rose-coloured silk wedding dress to be made over for Mary. He and his father bought cloth from the pedlar and made a special trip to Soames, to Micah Lambert, the tailor. Luke took with him Mary’s hand-weaving for his shirt.

Mary insisted on spending the night before the wedding in her own house, making the room clean and bright, finding a few hardy leaves and a bit of blue chicory to put on her table, smooring the fire so that it would be set to come home to, and saying the words in Gaelic for good fortune in marriage. When all was done, before she put on the rose silk dress to wait for Luke to come for her in the horse
and cart, she went across the road to Duncan’s grave. She put a bouquet of dried rowan berries on it and said a small prayer. Then she knelt down to talk to him.

“It is well, Duncan,” she said. “And it will be well, for it is meant to be. It is not the same here for me as it was at home—as it was not the same for you. The burns that rush so swiftly down our hillsides are not the creeks that wander through these deep woods. The high hills are not these low lands and the spirits of our rocks and hills and burns, the old ones who dwell in the unseen world, are not here.

“But we are not to grieve. The old ones came to our hills in the ancient times. It began somewhere. It began there long ago as it begins here now. We are the old ones here.”

Mary fell silent. She stood up. Then she said again, very softly, “It is so, we are the old ones here.” She went back to her house to dress for her wedding.

The Root Cellar
WINNER OF THE CLA CHILDREN’S
BOOK OF THE YEAR

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t looked like an ordinary root cellar, the kind of place where you’d store canned goods, and winter vegetables. If twelve-year-old Rose hadn’t been so unhappy in her new home, she probably never would have fled down the stairs to the dark cellar. And if she hadn’t, she never would have climbed up into another century, the world of the 1860s, and the chaos of the American Civil War. There she makes her first friends—and they desperately need her help!

SEAL BOOKS / ISBN: 0-7704-2885-1

The Hollow Tree
WINNER OF THE GOVERNOR GENERAL’S AWARD
FOR CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
and
THE CANADIAN CHILDREN’S BOOK CENTRE CHOICE

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t is 1775 and Phoebe Olcott is plunged into the horrors of war when her cousin Gideon is hanged for being a British spy. When she finds the secret message he left behind, Phoebe knows she must deliver it. On a dangerous journey that brings her face to face with rebel guns and wild animals, she is befriended first by a cat and a bear cub, and then by Jem Morrissay, a young Loyalist escaping to British Canada. Although Phoebe and Jem discover their growing attraction for one another, Phoebe’s mission cannot be ignored. She must go on, alone.

SEAL BOOKS / ISBN: 0-7704-2887-8