Jennie About to Be (29 page)

A heavy, rhythmic thudding started up in her ears. Could she have a stroke? she wondered in alarm. Drop dead as Papa did? Trying not to give in to terror, she felt her pulse in her wrist and forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply.

Then she knew that her heartbeat hadn't gone wild. The sound came from inside the house. She lifted the heavy iron latch with no resistance, so the door wasn't barred on the inside. It swung open into a small hall dominated by a large press cupboard. On her right a door stood open to a sparsely furnished bedroom. Behind the closed door on her left the slow, laborious thumping went on, each blow accompanied by a loud clattering.

It didn't occur to her to be afraid. She opened the door and walked into a kitchen, where Alick Gilchrist lay on the floor by the cold fireplace. He was gagged, his hands tied behind him, his ankles bound. Lying on his side, he was driving his feet against the leg of a heavy oak table. At each impact the earthenware dishes on the table jiggled noisily.

“Oh, my God!” Jennie said. His wet and bloodshot eyes recognized her with utter disbelief; he shut them and sagged back to the floor and was so still she thought he had just died. His face was smeared with blood and sweat run together. When she saw that he was still breathing, she stepped around him and knelt behind him and began working at the hard knots of the gag, a man's handkerchief.

Be calm, Jennie
, she admonished herself.
Easy does it
. ... Strength flowed back into her fingers. Finally she got the gag untied, and when she lifted it away from his mouth, she saw it was bloody and threw it in disgust across the room. Then she put her arms around his sweat-drenched body and dragged him up and around to a sitting position and propped him against the side of the fireplace. He kept moving his jaw and trying to moisten his lips. They were bloody, and his nose had been bleeding, too. He couldn't speak.

“I'll get you a drink before I start on your wrists,” she told him, using an impersonal businesslike manner to save his pride and control her own agitation. She stood up and looked around; there was a wooden bucket on a dresser under the western window. She took a cup from the table and dipped out cold peat-tinted water and held it to his mouth.

He drank in deep gulps, and said on an outgoing breath, “Thank you, Mrs. Gilchrist.”

“You're welcome,” she answered. “I'll do your wrists now.” He hitched around sidewise, and she struggled with the rope, which was so tight that his hands were darkly swollen. The sight of them made her wince.

“You'd better get a knife from the cupboard,” he said.

That was across the room against the south wall; dishes arranged on the shelves as the women must have kept them, drawers and doors below. “The wee drawer on your left,” he directed her. She chose a knife from a jumble of cutlery, one that looked sharp enough to cut but small enough for her to manage without damaging him further.

Kneeling again, she sawed away at the rope between his wrists, afraid to use too much force for fear of slashing him. Suddenly the binding fell apart. He held his hands up to let the blood run back from them, pressing his bruised lips tightly together to stifle gasps of pain. Then he tried to use the knife to cut the ankle ropes, but he had no strength in his hands. In silence, she took the knife back and went to work.

When that was done, she moved away and sat on a stool across the hearth from him, beyond a basket of peats. The boots had kept the ropes from biting deeply into the flesh, but he had no feeling in his feet, and his hands were still too weak for him to help himself up. She gave him some privacy by looking around the room. For the first time she became aware of the loud ticking of the wag-on-the-wall clock above the chim-neypiece. The place was barren of the things with which a woman would ornament it, except for those bright-flowered plates on the cupboard shelves; there was some masculine clutter, but it was clean.

She was resting involuntarily from the exertions and the emotional stress of the past hour; she was very tired, and her thoughts wandered. Hazily she wondered if Alick's grandfather had ever come to the cottage to see his son and if the baby's mother had been a contented woman or a bitter one.

Alick pulled himself up by the table, leaning over it, shifting from one foot to the other. Holding on, he hobbled painfully all around the table, grimacing at first. By the third time he was stepping faster and harder, and he walked away from the table to the window looking over the loch.

He stood there without moving or speaking for a few moments. At last he said in a low voice, “So. It is done.”

“Yes, and I didn't
know
,” she said vehemently. “I was supposed to go away on a visit with Christabel, but lain said something—well, I stopped at the Elliots' and walked home. It had begun almost as soon as I left the house.”

“They came here at first light to put me out of the way,” Alick said, still looking out over the loch. “The gamekeeper's creatures. If you hadn't come, and the others thought I was away from home, and they were all driven away, leaving the place deserted, I'd have died. And a long, hard death it would be.” He gave her a bright harsh stare. “Why
did
you come?”

“I wondered where you were, after the things you said.” She was ashamed to say she'd thought he'd been bribed. “Why should they do this to you? What could you, one man, do to stop them?”

“I asked that, and they bloodied my nose for an answer. I
exist
, that is my crime. Was anyone hurt over there?”

“A man named Donald John was arrested and taken away.”

He swore. It was Gaelic, but she knew. “They'll have him tried and transported before the week is out!” He went to the dresser and ladled water into a basin and splashed it over his head and face, washing away the blood and sweat. She took a towel off the back of the chair and handed it to him when he straightened up, groping. “Thank you,” he said formally through the folds. He balled up the towel and hurled it away from him. “I must see about Donald John.”

He went out into the hall and picked up a saddle from the floor beside the press cupboard. She followed him outdoors. By now she felt like a piece of fine porcelain that has been cracked but is still holding together. A tap, and it could shiver into fragments.

He stopped so suddenly on the walk that she almost ran into him. His head up like an animal's, he was looking northward to where a thread of smoke wavered skyward from the heather. He spoke under his breath, and dropped the saddle, and ran to the gate. He pushed by the animals and set off toward the tremulous filament of smoke. Jennie was behind him, half running to keep up.

Though the sun was warm, and heat beat up from the ground, drying her boots and tights and the skirt of her habit, she was cold. Miniature flowers, yellow and white, twinkled on the turf. It was as if she were seeing them for the first time in her existence, or anyone's, as if they had just now sprung up to celebrate the end of her world.

The roof of the little hut in the hollow had burned fast and fiercely. An old man lay dead before the doorway. His eyes were open in a wrinkled brown face framed with white whiskers. Alick knelt beside him and closed his eyes.

“How did he die?” she whispered.

“They killed him.” He didn't look away from the dead face.

“I see no wound.”

“It's bloodless. Straight into the heart. When you are eighry-nine year old, and you are dragged out of the place where you have lived out your life, and your forefathers before you, then the wound is clean and deadly. Look!” He touched the dirk in the old man's hand. “How did they miss that, I wonder? Och, they couldn't get it free of the dead hand, and they'd be afraid to, with him lying there looking at them. It's flattered Lachy would be, to think he frightened anybody. It would be the first time in his life.” He stood up. “But he died fighting. There's a bit of blood on the blade ... I will bury him later.”

“I wish there were something to cover him with,” Jennie said.

“He won't care.” Without touching her, he steered her out of the hollow. The pony had followed them, and Dora, forsaken, whinnied back at the gate. “I am going to Linnmore House to give my cousin my opinion of this day's work. He will promise that no charges will be made against Donald John. And they will have all the time they need to collect themselves and their creatures and the use of farm wagons wherever those can be taken on the estate.”

“Were will they go?”

“Onto the roads, that is all I can tell you.”

She remembered the dispossessed on the road between Banff and Inverness, and the shame she felt. She could taste it now like the beginning of sickness, as if in another moment she must retch to get free of it.

“How can you be sure of seeing Archie?” she asked. “Of his seeing
you
?”

“
She
is gone, and his man won't be keeping me from him. Linnmore will hear me if I have to take him by the throat and knock his head against the wall to make him listen.”

“But he will only gobble and go white and send you to the factor.” The word
factor
was just that, a noun, not a person she knew.

“I know how to be dealing with
that
man,” he said with a cold smile. “If it is needed.”

At the cottage she thirstily drank a mug of the peaty water while he saddled the garron. He led the way out, and Dora trustingly followed her new friend. When they were back on the road and riding side by side, Alick told Jennie that the tenants from the northern part of the estate would doubtless trickle away through those hills out to the coast, but many of those to the west and southwest would go through the Roseholm lands.

“They will rest there before they move on. A few will stay. Roseholm will never drive them.”

“Is this what caused the bad feeling between the two houses?”

“Yes. The last time Sir Hector and his lady came here to dine, Madam Christabel announced the great decision. Roseholm was arguing with Linnmore that it should not be, but
she
was the greater talker. There has been nothing between the two houses since.”

“It seems that the London servants do talk,” Jennie said.

“It came straight from the kitchen,” he said with a wry grin.

“Then everyone has known and worried for a long time.”

“Aye, but Davie Grant was holding back the Red Sea until Christabel wore Archie out, and he discharged Davie.”

“He gave you money—”

The response sprang at her. “Did you think I'd not give it to them?”

“
No
!” she lied. “
I
want to give you some to use for them.”

They trotted along in silence for a few minutes. At least the mare and the pony were serene in their companionship. Then he said very quietly, “I beg your pardon. You can give the money to Fergus to bring to me. He can be trusted. I will be away from home much of the time now, but he will know when to find me.”

“Agreed,” she said.

When they came by the peat cutting to a clear view of the devastation, Alick said, “I am stopping here before I go on. Good-bye, Mrs. Gilchrist. Thank you for what you have done today.”

“I am going down there with you,” she insisted. “There might be something I could do, some needs I could fill from the house.”

“It is better if you don't.” He was adamant without raising his voice. “Now is no time for them to have to think of manners.”

He was right, of course. “But the girls have wages due them. Will you tell them I won't forget that?”

“Yes. Are you riding up across the moor or home by the long road?”

“Fergus led me along a shortcut from the ridge. I think I can find it,” she said.

He nodded and turned the pony off down the slope. Jennie rode on, aching in her whole body, parched in spite of the long drink at the cottage. She was grateful for such physical sensations which were too strong to be ignored. But she knew that when she was out of these clothes, bathed, and physically rested, she would have no refuge left from the truth.

A
LL THE WAY
up to the ridge she kept her eyes averted as if from the sight of a mutilated body. When she'd gone over the crest and was leading Dora down the other side, she returned to that static, unreal world, a scene in a tapestry. The difference was that now she knew what existed over the ridge.

Fergus came out to take Dora. As usual he said nothing, but through the fog of exhaustion she thought that she perceived a change in him. She went in at the side door, recollecting how she had walked through the rooms a few hours ago, touching and admiring her possessions. In the hall she called Mrs. MacIver's name, but there was no answer, and the house felt empty. The woman must have already gone when Jennie first came back.

“I should have met her,” she mumbled. “Why didn't I meet her?” Then she knew that Mrs. MacIver must have gone down with the girls, to help; she could have been one of those women vaguely seen through breaks in the smoke. She could have returned to Tigh nam Fuaran while Jennie was looking for Alick, packed her things, and left for the village.

“Well, she warned me,” Jennie said loudly. “She was honest.”

She went up to her room and stripped off all her clothes and flung them in a heap, boots and all. She would order them burned; she never wanted to see that bronze-colored riding habit again. It belonged not only to today but to the first time she had ridden with Nigel in the park, hardly believing in her own happiness. Today there were no such doubts of her rage and bereavement.

Standing in the tin bath in his dressing room, she poured tepid water over her hair and her body and soaped and rinsed twice, but she still felt soiled. With her hair done up on a towel, and drying herself with another, she walked back into the bedroom.

Nigel was running up the stairs. Before she could move, not knowing where she would go, he came into the room. He went perfectly still with shock, and she too was motionless, stunned by his beauty as if she were seeing it for the first time but not in adoration.
How art thou fallen from heaven
,
O Lucifer, son of the morning
!