At the Water's Edge (20 page)

W
hen Anna finally returned, five days after learning of Hugh's death, she accepted my condolences and otherwise simply carried on, although there was a heaviness in her step that hadn't been there before. She let me resume doing the rooms, for which I was very grateful, because I'd been losing my mind trying to stay out of Rhona's way and had no idea what I'd say to Angus if I found myself alone with him.

The crone apparently shared Anna's view about picking up after others, because Ellis's dirty socks and underpants lay exactly where he'd stepped out of them three nights before, and his pajamas lay in a crumpled heap in the corner. Hank had at least tossed his clothes onto the chair.

Of the hundred pills I'd initially found in Ellis's room, only thirty-six were left.

Hank and Ellis returned that night. When they came through the door, I took a deep breath, steeling myself.

“Darling!” said Ellis. He swooped over and kissed my cheek before sitting next to me on the couch. He stank of paraffin oil, but not liquor.

“Did you miss me?” he asked.

“Of course,” I said, trying to read his face.

Hank plopped down on one of the chairs opposite. “You'll never guess where we've been.”

“She doesn't care about that,” said Ellis, rubbing his hands together. “Quick—get her prezzie!”

Hank dug around in one of the duffel bags and handed Ellis a thin gift-wrapped box, which he solemnly presented on the palms of both hands.

I pulled off the satin bow and lifted the lid. A pair of red kid gloves lay inside, on tissue paper flecked with gold.

The blood drained from my face.

“What do you think? Do you like them?” he asked.

“They're beautiful,” I said.

“More importantly, what color are they?”

“They're red,” I said in a near-whisper.

“Good,” said Ellis, smiling broadly. “That's what Hank said, too, but I never know with you two jokers.” He held a hand over his head and snapped his fingers. “Bartender! Two whiskeys. Actually, just bring the bottle.”

Angus glared, but pulled out two glasses. Meg picked them up and tucked a bottle under her arm, her expression conveying every word that didn't come out of her mouth.

The gloves were a message, obviously, but what did they mean? Had I managed to convince Ellis that I still believed he was color-blind? Or had he interpreted my desperate soliloquy as a promise to keep his secret? Or was he actually color-blind?

Over the course of the evening, Ellis drank almost a whole bottle of whiskey, but he remained—at least outwardly—jovial.

He kept a proprietorial hand on my shoulder or leg the entire time, and it was a constant struggle to keep from shrinking away. I stole occasional glances at Angus, whose face was unreadable.

I'd been back to the graveyard twice since seeing his scars, and had myself mostly convinced that he was the Angus on the stone, the one who'd lost everything in the space of six weeks.

I thought often of our embrace by the fire, and wondered if he did, too.

They never told me where they'd been, and I didn't ask. Despite Hank's promise to straighten Ellis out, they fell right back into their old pattern of returning to the inn plastered and then continuing to drink until they were both in a stupor. Judging from his fast-diminishing stash, Ellis was also gobbling pills. By my estimation, he was taking anywhere from eight to ten a day.

On the night I knew he'd run out, he knocked on my door and asked if he could have one. After popping one into his mouth, he shook more into his hand and slid them into his pocket. From what remained, I figured he'd taken about fifty, enough to last him five or six days.

We achieved a tenuous kind of normal. Ellis seemed to have completely forgotten about the glove incident, and while he was consistently drunk, he never tipped into a rage.

Every day he looked for a letter from his mother, and every day it didn't come. He began to say he didn't need her anyway—he was more certain than ever that when he found the monster, he would clear both his and his father's names, and that the Colonel would welcome him back with open arms and checkbook.

Finding the monster in Loch Ness was all he cared about. He remained as ignorant as ever about the monster facing the rest of the world.

I began to iron the newspaper, in the hope that he—or Hank—might start to read it. They did not.

Although there was no question that it was selfish and cowardly to blinker themselves against the chaos and horror, there were times I almost understood.

At the end of January, the Red Army had liberated a network of death camps in Auschwitz, Poland, and the details that trickled out over the days and weeks were so excruciating I fought a very real urge to remain ignorant myself.

Hundreds of thousands of people—perhaps many, many more, because the reports were often contradictory—had been interned and killed, most of them simply for being Jewish. They'd been rounded up and transported in cattle cars, and assigned to either death or hard labor as soon as they climbed out. Death was by gas chamber, and the chambers and crematoriums ran night and day. Many of those spared immediate death died anyway, from illness, starvation, torture, and exhaustion. There were rumors of a mad doctor and unthinkable experiments.

When the SS realized the Red Army was closing in, they tried to destroy the evidence. They blew up the gas chambers and crematoriums and set fire to other buildings before retreating on foot, forcing tens of thousands of starving inmates—every last person who was capable of walking—to march further into Nazi territory toward other death camps. The only people they left behind were those they were certain were dying. They shot people randomly as they retreated.

Even the hardened soldiers of the Russian army were unprepared for what they found: 648 corpses that lay where they'd fallen, and more than seven thousand survivors in such terrible condition they continued to die despite immediate rescue efforts.

They discovered that the SS had burned the infirmary with everyone inside it, 239 souls in all. One of the six storage buildings the SS
had not had time to destroy was filled with tons—literally tons—of women's hair, along with human teeth, the fillings extracted, and tens of thousands of children's outfits.

I despaired of humanity. Although the Allies were making progress, I thought maybe it was too late, that evil had already prevailed.

W
ith Anna weighed down by fresh grief and my own days as available as ever, I took it upon myself to expand my household duties, although I kept to the upstairs so I wouldn't get caught.

I began sweeping the bedroom carpets with the witchlike broom, which turned out to be made of dried heather, and then, since I was sweeping anyway, did the hallway to the top of the stairs. Less than a week after Anna's return, I was doing the entire upstairs on my own, polishing the doorknobs, trimming and filling the lamps, gathering laundry, changing the sheets—even scouring the sink, tub, and toilet with Vim powder. Meg repaired my manicure as necessary, so while my nails were shorter, they were as flashy as ever, and Ellis remained none the wiser.

I grew bolder, and one day decided to sweep all the way down the stairs, since that was where the carpet ended. Too late, I heard the clicking of Conall's toenails and a moment later was face-to-face with Angus. I was on the bottom step, in an apron, clutching the broom. I froze like a deer in the middle of the road.

A sudden widening of his eyes betrayed his surprise.

“Good afternoon,” I said, after a few beats of silence, trying to act as though we found ourselves in this situation all the time.

He frowned. “And how long has this been going on?”

“A while,” I said, feeling the heat rise to my cheeks. “Please don't blame Anna—it was entirely my idea. I just wanted to help.”

The corners of his mouth twitched and a twinkle crept into his eyes. He laughed before continuing on his way, shaking his head and followed by a visibly confused Conall.

I sank down on the stair, light-headed with relief.

I had been restricting my efforts to the upstairs only for fear of getting caught, but since Angus apparently didn't mind, I began to help in the kitchen as well. I always brought my coat, gloves, and gas mask with me, so that if Ellis and Hank returned early, I could slip out the back and return by the front, pretending I'd been on a walk. This was Meg's idea, and Anna objected vehemently. She was adamant that it was bad luck for a person to enter and leave a house by different doors.

Although I was close to useless to begin with, I was a willing student and they were patient with me. I soon learned how to scrape, not peel, carrots and potatoes, and how to cube turnips. After my first brackish mishap, I learned how to properly salt water for boiling, and not just how to slice bread, but how to do it to wartime standards—vendors weren't allowed to sell bread of any kind, even National Loaf, until it was stale enough to be sliced thinly. Anna confessed her suspicion that National Loaf was not made of flour at all but rather ground-up animal feed, and I thought she was probably right. It would explain a lot about the dense, mealy bread that was commonly referred to as “Hitler's Secret Weapon.” It was rumored to be an aphrodisiac—a rumor many suspected had been started by the government itself to get people to eat it.

I learned that all tea was loose leaf and steeped more than once, and also that the strength of a guest's tea was directly related to Anna's
feelings about the person. At that point, Hank and Ellis were drinking hot water with a splash of milk.

I discovered that in addition to Anna's many personal beliefs—she couldn't see a crow through the window without running outside to see how many there were and then analyzing what the number meant—there were all kinds of universally accepted sources of bad luck. One of them explained why I hadn't been able to find any meat the day Anna thought I'd seen the Caonaig and run off before starting dinner. It was considered unlucky to store it inside, and so it was kept in a ventilated meat safe out back. I also discovered that Angus was responsible for the contents of many a meat safe.

In the hill just beyond the Anderson shelter was a tall, drafty dugout, which he kept stocked with venison, grouse, pheasant, and other game, hanging it until it was tender. Anna and Meg took what was necessary for the inn and wrapped the remainder in newspaper, which Angus then left on the doorsteps of families in need, delivering the packets at night so no one would feel beholden.

I'd already figured out that Angus was poaching—how else to explain the visit from Bob the Bobby, or the ample supply of game?—but I wasn't shocked, as I once might have been. My education at the hands of Anna and Meg included enough history that I understood the policeman's reluctance to enforce the law, and also that it reflected the prevailing attitude.

It started the day I asked Anna what made a croft a croft instead of just a farm, and got an unexpected earful:

“It
is
a farm,” she said indignantly, “only not quite big enough to support a family.
That's
the definition of a croft.”

Meg shot me a glance that said,
Well, now you've done it
, and she was right.

Although the events Anna spoke of had taken place nearly two hundred years before, she railed on with as much outrage as if they'd occurred the previous week.

She said that in 1746, following the Battle of Culloden—the final, brutal confrontation in the Jacobite Rising—the Loyalists forced an end to the clan system so the Jacobites could never rise again. They
seized their traditional lands and dispersed clan members, banishing individual families onto tiny tracts and expecting them to become farmers overnight. The former communal hunting grounds were turned into sheep farms and sporting estates, and anyone caught hunting on them was subject to severe penalties. The aristocratic shooting party's right to an undepleted stock was held to be more important than feeding the starving.

But it didn't end there. Beyond the physical displacement and the abrupt, forced end of the clan system was a methodical attempt to wipe out the culture. Speaking Gaelic became a crime, and the first sons of clan chiefs were forced to attend British public schools, returning with the same upper-class accent my father-in-law had affected during the heady days of his celebrity.

I imagined the Colonel strutting around in his estate tweeds with his smug sense of superiority on full display, and realized that the loathing Rhona and Old Donnie felt for him—and all of us by association—ran far deeper than anything he'd done personally.

“And
that's
why the taking of a deer is a righteous theft,” Anna said, wrapping up with a decisive nod. She had unknowingly repeated Meg's words from the day she showed me the Anderson shelter, and I finally understood.

The taking of a deer was a righteous theft because it was taken from land that was stolen.

Because of their overlapping shifts, I spent the first part of each day with just Anna and the latter part with just Meg, and during these times, our chitchat sometimes turned to confidences.

From Meg, I learned that Anna's brother Hugh had stepped on a mine and what could be found of his remains had been buried in Holland. The other brother she'd lost, twenty-one-year-old Hector, had been hit in the chest by a mortar bomb during the D-Day landings. His body was never recovered, although a fellow soldier had paused long enough to grab his identification tags.

From Anna, I learned that Meg had lost her entire family—both
parents and two younger sisters—four years earlier in the Clydebank Blitz. Five hundred and twenty-eight people were killed, 617 injured, and 35,000 left homeless during two nights of relentless air raids that left a mere seven out of twelve thousand houses intact. Meg had been spared only because she'd already joined the Forestry Corps and was in Drumnadrochit.

I kept hoping one of them would offer some information about Angus's background, enough to confirm or refute my theory about the gravestone, but they didn't, and I couldn't ask for fear of giving myself away. I was fully aware that my desire to know wasn't based on curiosity alone.