Jennie About to Be (12 page)

He blew out the guttering candle, then lay down and pulled her against him so that they slept spoonfashion for the rest of the night.

They were awake at dawn; Nigel had ordered an early breakfast, and the hot water would arrive before that. Her nightgown had been left under her, sparing the sheets, and she bundled it deep into the bottom of her bag. She would wash it herself when they got home.

She might be tender in spots, but it had been worth a week of seasickness. If she was a wanton, she was proud of it; she could meet Nigel's speculative eye without a blush, and then they had a fit of laughter.

“Sylvia never said anything about fun,” she remarked over the finnan haddock.

He raised an eyebrow. “Apropos of what?”

“I was thinking aloud. Do you really like marmalade on your roll with
fish
?”

“Have to have it. It's Scotland, so marmalade at breakfast. It's like the wine of the country. . . . Regarding last night, my love. The popular conception is that only a man's mistress should behave like that.”

“Do you disapprove?”

“When I can have a wife and mistress in one body? And how does the body fare this morning?”

“I'm glad I needn't ride astride to Linnmore.”

“No riding a cockhorse to Banbury Cross, what?” He laughed uproariously, throwing himself back in his chair, then jumped up and came around the table and took her face in his hands. “Oh, my sweet Jennie, you don't know how happy you make me. I knew the minute I laid eyes on you that day that I had to have you.”

“I knew, too,” she said. “I went home with my head spinning.” She pressed his shoulders through the stuff of his shirt as if to be sure he was really there. “Nigel, it took so long from that day, but now it all seems like the twinkling of an eye.”

A
WAGON
from Linnmore was waiting at Inverness to carry their gear, and the Linnmore chaise took Nigel and Jennie and their necessary personal luggage, since the wagon would not reach the estate for several more days.

They were two days driving north, stopping frequently to rest the four horses. They rode through old stone towns and along empty roads where ruined castles watched with dead eyes from barren hilltops. Occasionally there was a living one, with the master's flag whipping in the wind from a tower showing above surrounding trees. There was not much woodland except around these great houses or in young plantations set out on otherwise bleak land by forward-looking proprietors. Occasional fishing villages huddled on the shores like clusters of winkle shells on kelp.

Nigel kept Jennie entertained by telling her everything he knew about the places through which they passed. In Strathpeffer there were chalybeate springs which the local people claimed could cure anything but death itself. In the Ferrindonald region the whisky smuggling had the excisemen half-mad with frustration. The chaise stopped to allow a funeral procession to pass them: dour, slow-pacing men carrying and following a coffin. Nigel, the coachman, and the lad riding postilion stood on the roadside with their hats held reverently against their breasts.

“That coffin's as likely to be as full of whisky as a corpse,” Nigel said, keeping a long face.

“Aye,” the coachman answered mournfully. “Did you see the minister with his white bands and all? If he's a clergyman, I'm John Knox himself.”

His name was lain Innes. He was only up to Nigel's shoulder, bandy-legged, gray-headed; his brown face full of creases, but he had the eye and the step of a boy. He seemed to be enjoying the wedding journey as much as the bride and groom did. The postilion was his son, Dougal, a freckled redhead without much to say, but an incandescent grin. He sang or whistled while he rode.

Gorse blossoms captured the sunshine on open slopes; cattle grazed on rich pastures. Everything was lustrous with early May; even the showers sweeping down from the mountains were over in a quick gemmy sparkle.

Jennie was charmed with the Highland people so far, the easy voices and lilting accent, the good manners she met wherever they stopped to rest themselves and the horses. They spent the night in an ancient seacoast town dominated by a Celtic saint of whom she had never heard. They wanted to make love, after brushing arms and holding hands all day, but they felt crowded and public in the small inn. They could hear too plainly the voices of the two men in the next room, drunkenly arguing the long-dead Jacobite cause. One of them suggested that if Napoleon conquered England, he might return a Stuart to the throne. The other burst into tears about all the braw laddies away in yon papist country fighting English wars for a German Geordie.

“Someday,” he prophesied between hiccups, “the Sassenachs will come crying for Hielan soldiers for another war, but there'll be none left. What has not been killed already will be emigrated and never come home again.” He stopped, evidently struggling with his emotions; then words broke free. “It's not the ‘Forty-five that's our doom; it's the sheep!”

At the first of the discussion Nigel and Jennie, lying in bed, had been stifling their laughter against each other's flesh, turning it into tormenting kisses. But at the end of it they lay still, raked by the man's harsh sobs. His friend didn't speak for a time, then he said with rough tenderness, “Och, Calum, the Hielans will never die as long as you and me is in it.”

“And you and me,” Jennie whispered against Nigel's throat.

In the afternoon of the next day they turned away from the sea and drove inland. In the clear white light the hills continually changed shape and position, waves of cobalt and indigo washing up against the wall of mountains. These were still capped with snow and streaked with the tangled white threads of waterfalls. Bright-edged clouds reared up behind them and slowly moved across the sky.

The travelers met no one else on this road, not even a solitary walker. They drove through a landscape of bog, moor, and patches of water catching the sky like shards of mirror. Sometimes there was a thatched stone cottage half-hidden in a fold of land, with a few goats about it. Once two children stood staring at the chaise, and Jennie waved, but one couldn't be sure if they were really children or dwarfs, or even flesh and blood under their dingy wrappings. They were like small stone images. She turned to call Nigel's attention, but his head was tipped back, and he seemed to be peacefully drowsing. Up on the box lain Innes was whistling a tune in time with his son and the horses' gait. She wished she were up there with him, asking him questions; he'd have likely put a surname to the odd little beings and turned them back into human waifs. His common observations would have changed this setting into something ordinary. But supposing it was not ordinary to him but a haunted place, and he was whistling for courage up there?

I am tired
, she thought,
and when I am tired, I am full of dread signs and premonitions
. She was foolishly relieved to see signs of peat cutting off to her left, laughed silently at herself, and shut her eyes to rest them.

Iain and Dougal Innes went on whistling. She slipped into a half doze. The journey had reached the point where it seemed to exist for itself alone. The purported destination now seemed more remote than when she had left England. She knew the name, but nothing more except that she would live in a tall stone house. In her uneasy half dream she saw the house like a jail, standing alone in a harsh volcanic landscape. Oh, yes, somewhere there was a deep pool, a black tarn on which no birds rested, in which nothing reflected and nothing lived.

She was being whirled helplessly along like a leaf on the wind by a robber bridegroom; no, a demon bridegroom. She was almost afraid to look at him through her lashes, for fear the transformation had begun, or had already happened.

She struggled to wake herself, welcoming the niggling irritation of common things, like ribbons scratching under her chin, and had she really needed the wool underwear? Whoever had said it wouldn't itch under stays lied.

She untied the ribbons and pulled off the hat.
I hope I haven't conceived this soon
, she thought in panic.
Not yet, please God. Let me have a year first. Well, six months anyway
. Why was she asking God?
He
had nothing to do with it.

She started to unbutton her pelerine, wishing she could get out and walk. Nigel's voice said, “Keep on undressing. I love it.”

She forgot premonitions and panics when he took her in his arms as if they'd been separated by at least one large ocean, if not the whole world.

“What have you been worrying about?” He kissed her throat. “I've been watching you.”

“That was very dishonorable of you, Capting. And I haven't been worrying. I'm tired of traveling, that's all.”

“It won't be long now.” He cuddled her against his chest. The chaise climbed a rise and began the descent on the other side. Nigel said exultantly, “We're on Gilchrist land now, by God!”

She sat up to see. They crossed a packhorse bridge over a roaring brown current just as a quick, hard shower blew down on them; when they drove through the village of Linnmore, the few people caught out in the wet were running for cover and paid little attention to the chaise rattling along the one street. As they passed through the small market square, with its tall stone Celtic cross, a stoutish man walking away from a shop stopped and ceremoniously raised his hat; rain pelted his white head, and he and Nigel bowed to each other.

“The Reverend Doctor Fitzroy Macleod.” Nigel sat back, and the chaise went on. “You won't catch
him
running. God sent the rain, so take it and be joyful. No matter if there's a month of it.”

At the other end of the village, set apart from the rest of the houses, the manse had for Jennie a Calvinist gloom. The square tower of the church was almost hidden behind massive old yews black in the rain.

They left the basin that held the village, and the horses' pace picked up. The sun came out, and the earth gently steamed; they traveled into a land of forested hillsides and high ridges, where great old pines stood black against luminous mists. Flooded burns came hurling down in white cataracts over glittering boulders, throwing rainbows of spray. Silvery pale birches climbed slopes where last year's bracken lay bronze and gold in death. Trembling with suspense, almost oblivious of Nigel's arm around her and his breath warm on her ear and cheek as he too looked out, she watched buzzards drifting on the wind against a broken blue and white sky and the black flight of a pair of ravens. Small birds flew up from roadside puddles as the horses passed.

The chaise rolled over another stone bridge above a stream deep in a ravine which would be a jungle of green in a few weeks; only the ubiquitous gorse, yellow as butter, was blooming now. It seemed to Jennie that she could hear the thunder of that unseen water through the noise of the carriage wheels and the horses' hooves on the stone. She felt a sharp regret at leaving it so quickly behind her; then, as Nigel kissed her earlobe, she remembered that the stream was on Gilchrist land and she was Mrs. Gilchrist. When she had her own horse, she could come back to this place and stand on the bridge and look down to that mysterious flood.

The road began a gradual winding descent into a broad valley. The forest ended and pastures began, and plowed fields, divided by dry-stone dykes. The encircling wall of hills dwarfed the stone houses and barns of the farms which they sheltered. Cattle grazed ankle-deep in the thick grass. Three big shire horses saluted the carriage horses as they went by, and were answered in kind by one of the four.

“What crops will be growing there?” Jennie asked about the tilled fields.

“I'm no farmer, my love. I suppose it will be barley, rye, and oats, of course! I know
that
much! Where would a Scot be without his oats?” He grinned and gave her a squeeze. “I'll have to learn, won't I? But I can already tell a cow from a horse, though. And
those
are sheep.” He pointed to a small flock scattered across a broad field and halfway up a hillside. “Cheviots. The Great Sheep that'll put an end to the scrawny Highland beasts forever. They're tough, they're hardy, and they can make a man a fortune in meat and wool.”

“I know about sheep,” said Jennie. “Don't forget where I grew up. I hope Mr. Gilchrist isn't counting on that small flock to make his fortune.”

“Those are only the beginning,” he said. “The farmer back there is from the Borders, and he brought these with him. Look at those lambs!” he exclaimed. “Sturdy little beggars.”

A farm servant trudging along the road touched his cap, and Nigel returned the salute with negligent courtesy, as if to the manner born. The prospect of all this, starting at the village, belonging to Nigel and their children, caused an upheaval in her stomach.

She had nothing of her own, but her children would have. She saw the lambs through a mist of homesickness and envy. The tiredness and apprehension she had felt earlier came over her like the enervating forerunner of illness; she felt as if she had expended herself so lavishly for so long, beginning with the first shattering sight of Nigel, that now she had no reserves left with which to experience anything but a leaden melancholy.

She couldn't let Nigel know. She lay back in his arms, shutting her eyes. “I can hardly wait till we're there,” she murmured. “Just to know we're at journey's end.”

He was kissing her face all over, gentle little kisses like a bird drinking. Did some men know these things naturally? She must ask him when she had recovered from this awful feeling.

H
E STRAIGHTENED
and made a gesture, and she sat up and looked out past him. A long L-shaped farmhouse, much like those at home, sat at right angles to the road, and the farm wife and a girl were in the angle, surrounded by assorted poultry and several dogs. A kitten rode the woman's thick shoulder. She had a broad, very red, smiling face. The girl curtsied, but the woman waved, and Jennie waved back.