Jennie About to Be (28 page)

She sat on the bank, hugging them to her, and they clung to her because she was an adult. Through their soaked scanty garments their bodies vibrated with shock. She didn't want to leave them, but she must, so she found them a warm hollow and tried to make it clear that they should cuddle there and wait. They knew a few words of English, and one of them understood her and mutely nodded.

Holding up the wet skirt that dragged down on her, she crossed by the stepping-stones and went on. A bedridden person was being carried out on a mattress, and now, closer to the scene, she realized that Nigel was holding his watch in his hand, timing another removal. If he had happened to look in her direction, he would have seen her for an instant before a swirl of smoke hid them from each other.

She wished he
had
seen her watching him.

Another roof went up, and there was a long scream as if a woman were dying in the fire. People kept trying to move their househould goods out of reach of the blowing flames, and sparks. A dog yelped as if kicked, the crying of children mingled with the bleating of goats and sheep, and Jennie wished to be struck deaf. Hidden from Nigel's sight by a newly roofless cottage whose interior was smoldering, she saw Aili kneeling beside the old woman on the mattress; they didn't see Jennie.

She looked around for Morag. Over beyond Aili and the old woman, a safe distance from the smoke and sparks, Morag's wee cow seemed to have collected the goats, the dwarfish sheep, and the other cows about her, and in a hollow of the moor below them there was a little knot of women. Jennie recognized Morag's curly black head; that cow must have followed her.

Jennie walked timidly toward the hollow. She saw that the women were clustered protectively around another one, whose head Morag's mother held against her breast.

Jennie hadn't the courage to go farther. She was Nigel's wife, and if they spat in her face, as Morag had done to Nigel, she wouldn't be surprised. But Morag, lifting her head to look around toward the burning cottages, saw her. She jumped up and ran to her. To order her away? Jennie quivered but stood her ground.

“Mistress!” Through the anguish and the soot, the sweetness came. “You shouldn't be here! And look at you! Your clothes—”

“Morag, I didn't
know
—”

“I know that, Mistress.” One side of her face was red from the blow. “Now go away, please. This is no place for you.”

“There are two little children up there by the brook. They were running away in blind terror. They'd have drowned if I hadn't been there to drag them out. Someone should go to them.”

Morag seized her hands and squeezed them. “It'll be Kirsty's boys! She's been frantic for thinking they were caught inside. She was fearing wee Colin ran in for his father's bonnet.”

“Where is the father?”

“He died in the winter.” She ran back to the others and bent over the woman on the ground, who struggled to sit up. Her face had been ugly in grief but was now transformed. Jennie had seen she was the older of the two pregnant women, and it was a wonder she hadn't gone into labor there on the ground.

In a little pause in the hubbub, Nigel's voice rang out clearly; the gamekeeper's shout answered, and then some command was relayed in Gaelic. Unexpectedly Jennie became very calm. Now she understood; she was to have been taken out of the way.

“Whatever happens now is on your head,” Christabel had said with that peculiar smile. She must be ecstatic now on her drive to Rowanlea, imagining what was going on behind her.

Morag turned to her, and they hurried to the brook. “I will not be going back to Tigh nam Fuaran, Mistress,” Morag said.

“I know.”

“I spat in his face.”

“I know that, too. Did he hurt you badly?”

“Och, I was too furious to feel anything!” She laughed proudly.

“How long was I gone before it happened?”

“A half hour perhaps. Then the Captain told us the writs of eviction were being served all over the estate, and there would be one hour and then the torching would begin. He told us we could go home to help our families. But no one would believe it till the sheriff's men came. Donald John went at them with his fists and had his face laid open, and they arrested him and took him away.” She said it as if she had no emotions left. “My father walked all the way to Linnmore House, but the Laird wouldn't see him. Then the hour was almost gone, and those others came on their horses—
he
came, and he stood with his watch in his hand and gave each ten minutes—”

Jennie couldn't bear to hear this. “Where was Alick Gilchrist?”

“He didn't come.”

“Surely he knew what was going on, he could see across the loch—”

“And the smoke going up everywhere,” Morag agreed. She turned and pointed north and west, and Jennie saw smoke rising from distant folds in the land.

“They are even burning the roof timbers,” Morag said, “so we have nothing to start new with, if we found a place. They should have let us save the timbers.”

Off to the far right of Alick Gilchrist's untouched cottage, smoke eddied from a hollow. “Lachy's hut.” Morag's voice was dull. Lachy's hut, where they used to take the trout and fry them in oatmeal, Nigel and the sons and brothers of those he was driving out.

Jenny cried savagely, “Why isn't Alick Gilchrist over here risking his neck to help you? He had enough to
say
!”

“I don't know,” said Morag softly. They crossed the stepping-stones and went along the bank to the children. Jennie was the alien now as Morag comforted and cajoled in the hushed, musical Gaelic. At last she could start back, holding a boy by each hand.

“I told them their mother was weeping for them,” she explained.

“What about
her
? Is she going into labor? She'll need things—”

“We will take care of her, Mistress. And no one blames you.” She went on with the children across the stepping-stones, and walked with her head up toward the smoking desolation. She didn't look back. For the first time in all this, Jennie's eyes filled with tears. Then she turned and blindly ran, stumbled, fell to her hands and knees, got up again, sobbing with a pain that wasn't physical. When she reached the top of the ridge, she looked back for Nigel. She didn't want to see him, but she couldn't keep from trying. Once before in her life, when her father had been carried home dead, she had insisted to herself that it was a dream and if only she could find a way to wake up, Papa would still be alive. Now she wished sickly for some fantasy to be truth; for that to be an evil, crazed, identical twin to Nigel, imprisoned until now, when he had escaped while her Nigel lay hidden from her, a bound, helpless prisoner. But while she was wishing it, she knew she was sane and wide-awake.

It had happened. Nothing could change it.

All the roofs had boen fired now, and Nigel's people were walking away toward their horses. She leaned against one of the pines and watched the miniature figures in the distance. None of them looked back at what they had done. They reached the road and mounted; Nigel and two of them headed eastward toward the break in the ridge, and the others rode toward the west.

She went down to the coppice, skidding in her wet boots on damp places, snagging her skirt on bushes. But she was in control enough to be careful. To take a bad fall now would make her helpless among her enemies. She saw things around her with the obsessive attention to detail that accompanies such moments. When she passed the ferny spring, she noticed that the violets were drooped and faded; she heard the blackbird from one of the chimneys.

Dora and Fergus still waited by the paddook; the mare was grazing, and Fergus sat on the ground with his back against the wall. When Jennie came upon them, he got clumsily to his feet.

“You knew what they were doing, didn't you?” she said. After a long moment he nodded. His black eyes seemed bemused by her damp, disheveled clothing and scratched face.

“Where is your family, Fergus?” She tried to speak evenly. He answered something she couldn't understand, lifted his hands, and shrugged.

“No family?”

He nodded.

“Is there a short way from the top of the ridge”—she pointed— “across to the road? A way that will be safe for the mare? I must ride to Alick Gilchrist's house.”

He took the reins and started off. Dora went agreeably along the track and through the coppice, but when the path turned steep, she was nervous. Skillfully he coaxed her along, repeating little sounds which Dora knew; sometimes she contributed a few of her own as if she and Fergus were holding a conversation. Again Jennie felt like an alien. She was needed by no one, not even her husband. With his brother and sister-in-law he had made her less than nothing.

It was Christabel who had proposed the visit to the Lamonts, not the other way around. When had they arranged it? The day when Nigel was supposed to reassure the tenants? When he'd claimed that his con' science had been too much for him? Of course! Christabel would suggest the visit to the Lamonts when they came the next day. How sympathetic they'd be about the problem with this delicate, sentimental girl Nigel had foolishly married. They'd be happy to help.

The Lamonts hadn't come because of the emergency at Rowanlea, and Davie Grant had appeared unexpectedly. But the note suggesting the visit must have gone back with the messenger who brought the Lamonts' regrets. Such a nuisance, having Jennie meet Grant! It put Nigel to the inconvenience of quieting his wife's hysterical fears. But he'd be able to talk her around, and he had done so, with consummate art.

Then Lily forgot to pack the sapphires, and Jennie had a word with lain Innes.

D
OWN BELOW
, the people sat in stunned silence or moved slowly about, aimlessly shifting their belongings among the ruined gardens and the roofless double walls of fieldstone. Smoke curled up here and there. Jennie kept her eyes on the mare's rump and tail. They went diagonally southward toward the road along a track as clear to Fergus as if he were a rabbit or a fox, but Jennie could not make it out for herself in the heather.

When they reached the road, Fergus made a step of his hands to help her mount, then waited for her to settle herself in the saddle. She accomplished a weak smile with her thanks. He nodded and started back at a shambling trot the way they had come.

Dora flung her head about, and Jennie murmured, “Gently, gently,” stroking the arched neck. Then she let the mare out, and they fled westward along the road. They passed the drying rows of peat and the head of the loch, where the osprey was fishing as if nothing had happened. Alick Gilchrist's cottage appeared and disappeared; light flashed off windows and was quenched by a brackened hillock. A gable showed, now a whole roof, and a chimney. Then it all vanished behind a green fold.

She knew that Grant had given him money to help in the trouble to come. Why wasn't he with them now? They needed him; someone had to take charge. He could natter on like one of the three witches in ‘
Macbeth
' about approaching disaster, but he had taken the man's money and gone where he wouldn't have to see the dirty work done.

She was walking the mare now, looking for a clear track leading off to her right, and found it, beaten hard with use. It wound up and down around boulders and through heather and whin. She dismounted and led Dora, who was disinclined to be adventurous when she couldn't see what was beyond the next bend. Two crows suddenly erupted noisily from the heather and went sailing over their heads, and the mare almost ripped the reins from Jennie's hand. When the cottage appeared, more crows launched from the roof, all alarms and imprecations that had Dora in a ferment until she heard an equine signal of assurance; the brown garron trotted from behind the walled garden at the southern end of the cottage.

Except for the sociable pony, the crows flapping off across the loch toward the destruction on the other side, and the osprey suspended on beating wings above them all, there were no signs of life. Jennie fastened Dora to the garden gate and went in.

The cottage was stone like the others, and it had a thatched roof held down with weighted heather ropes. But it had windows and a central chimney, and there was no clutter about. The vegetables grew in well-weeded rows within the shelter of the wall. Clumps of daffodils bordered the flagged walk to the door; their self-confident gaiety was incongruous to her in the context of this place and the day's events, until she remembered that two women had lived here for their adult lifetimes, the one who had borne a son to Nigel's grandfather and the one who married that son. They would have also planted the unpruned rose bushes that sprawled in a healthy green tangle against the warm stone of the gable end.

The byre was attached to the northern end of the cottage, and its door stood open; a few chickens wandered in and out. Back at the gate Dora and the pony were nosing each other in friendly curiosity.

So the man had gone on foot somewhere and would be back tonight when it was all accomplished. “We'll have a reckoning, Mr. Alick Gilchrist,” she promised him. “What did they pay you to be absent today? A share in what they'll make from leasing Linnmore to the sheep owners? If Archie didn't think of that, Christabel did; if they can't get rid of the agitator, they'll buy him.”

The sound of her voice intensified the silence. She leaned against the cottage wall, all at once tired enough to die, or at least to cry, neither of which could accomplish anything for herself or those she wanted to help. She could not bear to ride back around the loch without doing
something
. She didn't want go back at all because sooner or later she would have to face Nigel, and the prospect sent shudders over her body in paroxysms, and her teeth chattered uncontrollably.

She rushed at the door and pounded on it with both fists, shouting, “Alick Gilchrist!
Alexander Gilchrist
! Open up!” Senseless, but it was a relief to shriek, except that it startled the animals and scared the hens, and she thought angrily that you couldn't even have the luxury of a good hard scream without having to consider someone or something.