Shadow in Hawthorn Bay (6 page)

“Mairi, you will get lost in this strange place. You are unprotected. Come with us for now and we will get word to your uncle. He will surely come for you.”

“I cannot.” Mary smiled. She took Elizabeth’s hand. “I will not be lost. I have my map. The sound of the river will be always beside me. And—and I have money. I will be well.” Mary hugged them all. “Fare you well.” She kissed the baby once more. “Remember me.”

But she did not have money and, alone, she did not feel as brave or cheerful as she let on. She, who had never been afraid of much of
anything in either the seen or the unseen world, was afraid of this strange land, of strange people—Indians, about whom she had heard so many frightening stories, and others who spoke English so loudly in such flat accents; and even more, so much more, she was afraid of the forest that seemed to come at her from a depth of darkness too black to fathom, too powerful to escape.

Humming “The Battle Song of Harlaw” to keep up her courage, she set out with a will and walked steadily until nightfall. The road was very rough even on feet toughened by fifteen years of treading on rocks and sharp, cropped Highland grass. Her two shawls began to seem a real burden. There was no wind, the heat lay heavy and damp and thick, and the bugs were an unbelievable torment. In the Highlands the black clouds of whining, itching mosquitoes were unknown. Overhead where the trees almost met there were crows and jays and waxwings, birds she knew, and enormous pigeons of a kind she did not. They seemed to her friendly and, with their coo-roo-coo-roo, a bit of comfort in this strange place.

She passed half a dozen homesteads and several travellers on horseback, in carts, and once in a coach. She stopped at a log shack to ask for a cup of milk. A small, grey-looking man was sitting on a stump in the dooryard.
“This ain’t no inn and we don’t feed beggars,” he growled.

Before Mary could respond, a woman appeared from the interior of the cabin, equally grey-looking.

“Git along!” she spat. “Git along outta here.”

Mary stared at her in horror.

“Scat,” hissed the woman.

Mary left, dazed. She could never have imagined a human being talking to a stranger, a traveller, like that, “as though I were a dangerous beast,” she muttered to herself.

Maybe because she was so shaken by the experience, maybe because she was bone-weary, Mary made a mistake. She had been running, walking, and running again along the ever-narrowing road for some time when she stopped. She was hungry and she was bitten from head to foot by mosquitoes, and while she had been running the tree-dim world had turned to night. She listened.

“I cannot hear the river.” She was frozen with fright. She realized that it had been some time since she had seen either a dwelling or another traveller. She looked down and saw, by the bit of daylight that remained, that the road was no longer much more than a foot path. She began to hear the sounds of the woods at night as though she had just wakened from a sleep—wolves howling nearby, owls hooting, frogs croaking, other
unfamiliar cries and calls, and all around her rustlings and gruntings in the underbrush.

“Duncan!” she whispered. “Duncan, I am lost.” She hugged her two plaids as though they were her only comfort in the world.

Through the dark and the trees she saw a flicker of light. She ran towards it—off the path and into swamp water up to her hips. She screamed. She grabbed at a low branch of a cedar tree. She pulled herself up—and came face to face with a dark man looking down at her. She gasped, let the branch go, and would have fallen back into the swamp if the man hadn’t grasped her by the arm and shoulder and pulled her back onto firm ground.

“Please,” she pleaded in Gaelic, “please, let me go.” She could not understand his reply. It was not English. She could see now that he was naked from the waist up. An Indian! A savage! She wrenched her arm free and ran. She fell, picked herself up, stumbled and ran again, gasping and sobbing, until she fell over a root.

She lay there, gulping in air, trying to calm herself, listening for the sound of feet coming after her. She could hear no feet. She heard the animals, she heard the owls—and then she heard the river.

“The river!” She sat up and looked around. She could make out nothing but the shape of evergreen trees.

“I do hear it,” she whispered. “I will not leave this place until morning comes. Och, Duncan, what a terrible country this is. How will I find my way out of this wilderness? Is there no one to rescue me? My poor white bones will be found, years from this day, all picked over. My luck has surely left me.” In a panic she felt into the pocket under her petticoat for the spindle whorl and for Mrs. Grant’s letter. Safe. In spite of herself, she leaned against the trunk of a tree and dozed fitfully, like a cat, starting to wakefulness at every new sound.

At first light she saw that the wider road was only a few feet from where she sat. “What a foolish lass I am,” she reproved herself. If she hadn’t been so tired and so wet and dirty, she might have laughed. As it was, grimly she straightened her blouse and her skirt now stained with brown swamp water and pulled her fingers through her tangled hair. She picked up her shawls—Mrs. Grant’s wrapped carefully inside her own—held her shoulders back, and started west along the road. She was too afraid of getting lost again to go down to the river to wash or drink.

Rescue did come and in an unexpected form. Mary hadn’t been walking for more than half an hour when a coach rattled by. It stopped just up the road.

A woman’s head in a fashionable bonnet poked out of the window. “Dear, dear,” she
fluttered, “what can you be doing on this desolate stretch of road at such an hour, child? It’s only just gone seven.”

Mary wanted to say, “What is it you think I am doing? I am making a fine meal of meat and drink on this white linen cloth you see spread out before your eyes.” What she did say was, “I am on my way to Collivers’ Corners, ma’am—on Loch Ontario.”

“Why, that’s a blessing. We’re on our way to Amherst. That’s on Lake Ontario.”

“Mama, Josie’s wet herself.” A tousle-headed boy put his head out of the window beside his mother’s.

“Just a minute, Charles, just a minute. Oh dear, oh dear! We’ve lost our nanny. It’s so sad. Maggie died on board ship and I don’t know what we shall do. I … you … we … you wouldn’t be able to help with the children, would you? You do seem small.” The woman looked doubtfully at Mary’s ragged, grubby state. “They’re very sweet,” she added.

By this time the three children had crowded their mother out of the window and Mary could see, at once, that they were not sweet.

“I can see that they are,” she agreed, “and I will be happy to help you care for them.” Before the woman could change her mind, Mary hopped up onto the step and was in the coach.

The mother, an English woman named Sophie Babbington, had no rein on her children, and they, delighted to have a fresh victim, climbed all over Mary, shrieked in her ear, pummelled her viciously, pulled her hair, and fought with each other across and on top of her. Mary didn’t care. Mrs. Babbington had a wicker hamper full of cold chicken and white bread, and cold tea and fruit, food Mary had never eaten in her life, and the coach was steadily moving westward towards the dot on Uncle Davie’s map that was labelled Collivers’ Corners.

At Prescott, where the rapids ended, Mrs. Babbington, without a word, bought Mary a ticket on the ship that would take them up the river to Kingston on Lake Ontario and, from there, to Soames for Mary, and on to Amherst for herself and her children. She took a room in an inn at Prescott, saw to it that Mary had a bath, and gave her a skirt, a petticoat, a blouse, and a pair of shoes that had been the nanny’s. Maggie had been only a little larger than Mary and the clothes did very well. They were clean but every bit as heavy as Mary’s own in the heat. With a sigh, Mary bundled up her own rags to salvage as best she could another day. After a night’s sleep in a real bed, even though none too clean and shared with all three children, she felt considerably brighter and well able to tackle the rest of her journey.

By the time their ship neared the island the children were Mary’s devoted slaves. She had told them stories from Cornwall to Prescott, from Prescott to Kingston, from Kingston to Soames, each story more terrifying than the last. She had told them she was a witch and taught them nonsense rhymes in Gaelic that she said were evil spells. When the time came for her to leave them at Soames they all cried and Mrs. Babbington begged her to stay with them.

“I declare, the children have never behaved themselves so well. I don’t know how you manage them!” Mrs. Babbington had slept in the coach from the moment she had picked Mary up, and as soon as they boarded the ship she had left the children completely to her.

Mary was as grateful to Mrs. Babbington and her children as they to her. They had kept her so busy she had had no chance to think of anything else.
“Beannachd Dhé leat
, may the blessing of God attend you,” she said as she left them on the wharf at Soames. “I will not forget your kindness.”

Soames was a prosperous village with five docks, short streets running from them to a main street where there were three inns, a couple of blacksmith shops, a livery stable and two mills. At one of the blacksmith shops Mary was told, “It ain’t more’n eight miles to Collivers’ Corners. Like as not you can get a lift if you wait.”

She did not wait. Eight miles was nothing to walk. But the trees, once she had left the village, seemed taller and if possible even more formidable than the ones near Cornwall. And there was a steady wind here that moved the enormous treetops so that they seemed to be singing a constant, low, keening song. The road was much like the one out of Montreal and Cornwall. “Government road,” the blacksmith had told her proudly, “wider than most. Goes all the way to the town of York, more than one hundred miles west of here.”

As she tramped along in the half-light, Mary concentrated on the familiar sounds of pigeons and doves cooing. She started at the sight of strange animals and she tried not to acknowledge the terror that rose in her throat when she glanced into the dark trees hemming her in. She did not hear the horse and cart approach. She jumped and whirled around at the sound of a drawn-out “Whoa!”

“Didn’t mean to scare you.” The tall boy driving the cart looked concerned. “It ain’t exactly that these here wagons is quiet or sneaky. Hop aboard if you like.”

He was a tall, brown-haired boy perhaps three or four years older than she, with a broad, open face. Without a word she climbed up beside him.

“I’m Luke Anderson.” He eyed her curiously.
Mary told him her name and where she was headed. As she sat beside Luke, Mary’s head reached only to his shoulder, and her feet did not quite touch the floor. She wished, for once, that she were not so small. With her feet dangling down like that she felt foolish. Once or twice Luke offered conversation but, when Mary did not respond, fell silent. He remarked about a bird in sudden flight and a deer that bounded across the road. Once they had to stop when a strange, ungainly, dark-furred animal lumbered across the road. “Raccoon,” Luke replied to Mary’s astonished question. Otherwise they rode for almost two hours in silence. The only sounds were the dull thud-thud of the horses hoofs on the dirt road and the chatter and whistle of the birds at the edge of the forest.

They came in sight of the village at last—a blacksmith shop, a general store, a scattering of log cabins and frame houses and, across a small stream, a dark red house beside a tall stone mill.

“That’s the Corners,” said the boy. Only then did Mary tell him, “I am wanting to find Davie Cameron and his family.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. That’s really too bad. They took off from here not two weeks ago.”

“Took off?” Mary stared blankly at Luke.

“They gave up. Took off. Went home to where they come from. After—”

“Went home?” echoed Mary.

“It was after—” Luke began again.

Mary put out her hand as if to stop the words she knew were coming next, words she had known she would have to hear from the day Kirsty Mackay had died, the day her headache had stopped. Then, because she could not bear to hear this stranger speak them, she said them herself.

“It was after Duncan died,” she said.

I Am Alone Here

L
uke Anderson took Mary to the house next to the mill. “Julia Colliver will take care of you,” he assured her. Mary sat unmoving in the cart, not feeling the heat, the sweat pouring down her face, the gnats swarming around her, the flies and mosquitoes settling on her. When a large, middle-aged woman came out of the house and put out her hand for her, Mary obediently stepped down.

“Come along, child, we’ll have a nice cup of the tea Luke’s brought us off the boat at Soames.”

Mary sat by the table in the kitchen of the Collivers’ house with the cup and saucer in front of her.

“They never give a thought to leaving their place, neither Davie nor Jean, when the baby—little Iain—took sick of the dysentery. But after Duncan.…” Mrs. Colliver sighed and shook her head. “Well, the heart just sort of went out of
them. There wasn’t nothing anybody could say would make them change their minds. They left without a stick of furniture, only her spinning wheel. The four of ’em looked so beat down when they took off from here it was enough to make your own heart bleed. They was good folks, though they wasn’t just the same as us, and we’ll miss them sorely.” Mrs. Colliver talked on and on but Mary didn’t hear any more. Nor did she notice when the cup of cold tea was taken away.