Jennie About to Be (36 page)

“I am a hanged man,” he said. He stood up carefully and walked away down the slope toward the burn. She could not believe that Nigel was dead, but she could no longer look into his face. A bee lit on his nose and walked the length of it, between his fair eyebrows, across his forehead to his hair. Her held breath erupted in a harsh gasp; she sprang up and stumbled down to where Alick was. The water purled along at their feet, making its own sound.

Alick was shaking violently as if with chills. She spoke fast. “I will swear for you. You have the marks on your face and your throat. Surely the sheriff will see them if you go to him before they fade. I will go with you.”

Gazing down at the bubbling brown water, he said tonelessly, “The sheriff is the landlords' man. I will go into jail to wait for the trial, and the marks will be gone by then. But there will be plenty to swear to the marks on
him
.”

He turned to her. “Your husband came upon us in adultery, and I killed him. That is what they will be saying.”

“Archie will believe me!” she cried.

“Archie is an amadan, a fool, and
she
will pay people to lie about what they have seen between us. We will both be gotten rid of. You in disgrace, and me to the gallows.” He couldn't stop shaking. “My neck is already in the noose.”

“
No!
”

He said with soft courtesy, “It is not your fault.”

“It is, it
is
!”

The larks upwinging were birds singing in hell. She was half-wild with terror for them both, ready to sink down where she stood and will herself to a swift death.

Alick said suddenly, “Ride back. Say you found him like this, alone. Can you lie?”

“Yes.” She was surprised by the strength of her voice. “To save a life.”
If I can keep from feeling the truth is written on my forehead
, she thought. “I'll be distraught, beside myself. I'll need soothing drafts, laudanum to make me sleep. They can't keep at me then. And he could have been thrown! If I am to lie, I could say I saw it happen.”

“No. You will be playing into their hands, you see.” His painful throat made his voice husky. “There will be bruises on him from my knee and my fist, and they will think as they please, but you will not be a part of it if you say you
found
him like this. By the time they come for him with a cart I will be lost in the mountains.” He felt inside his jacket and brought out his purse. “Here is your money, and Davie's. Iain will know how to get it to Hamish.” They were walking toward the horses. “You must lead his horse back. The beast shouldn't be left alone out here.”

In the dark entrance to the Pict's House, something moved. Alick leaped forward, Jennie's legs gave out this time, and she collapsed to the turf, wishing that the earlier blackness would return and shelter her.

A sibilant spate of Gaelic flowed down the rise. She lifted her head from her arms and saw Alick coming with a bent, frail, elderly man who hobbled along with the help of a staff.

“This is Parlan, from Coire na Broc,” Alick said. “He says he will live like a rabbit on the moor rather than leave it, and I tell him it is like a rabbit they will snare him.... He was sleeping, and the loud voices woke him.”

Parlan took off his bonnet. “Good day, Mistress,” he said as if they had merely met upon the road. “The Captain looks as if his neck is broken. How could that be, with only one blow?”

“He saw it all!” Jennie exclaimed. “He can be our witness!”

“He is worse than no witness at all. He will be torn to pieces in the High Court like a hare by dogs.” The picture, one of the horrors of her childhood, sickened her, but Parlan listened with bright interest, his bald head cocked, his watery blue eyes moving from one face to the other.

“On his own moor he is one man. Carry him away from here, and he will be old and confused and very frightened. They will be twisting his confusion to make the story they want.
He
has already told us what that will be.” He jerked his head backward toward Nigel.

“What can we do then? Can you swear him never to tell anyone that he was here at all? If he could just erase it from his mind, hide it as if it were a whisky still. You would be safe in the mountains, and I—” The impetus ran out. How intolerable would it be to live in suspense, waking each morning to wonder if this was the day when Parlan rambled in his wits and forgot his oath? Among his own folk the story of the factor's death, and her presence at it, should be safe enough. But who could know what rumors might reach what ears?

She saw herself summoned to appear before the High Court to assist in an inquiry into the death of Nigel Gilchrist, questioned without mercy by clever men who had already condemned her as an adulteress and accessory to her husband's murder.
She
would be the animal thrown to the hounds: the exhausted fox, the hare paralyzed by terror.

Her chest constricted so she could hardly breathe; she gasped for air. An arm went strongly around her and kept her from falling. Life coursed powerfully through her, a rage that innocence should be violated.

“I'm not going to swoon,” she said proudly. Alick released her. “Tell me this. You need not name names, but you have a place in mind, have you not? You are not simply going to live out the rest of your life as a fugitive in a mountain cave.”

“I have a place, yes.” He was wary. “I know where I am going.”

“Could I reach England from there?”

“In time, yes.”

“Then I am going with you. I have no other choice.” A crowded rectory in Northumberland looked like very heaven. “I have a family who will believe me, no matter what Christabel says. Then I can go to the Continent and find employment and be safely out of reach of Linnmore House.”

She watched the dark gray eyes change from wariness to obstinate refusal, then shift away from her, absently contemplating space, then return in dour acceptance. He had no more choice than she had.

He spoke to Parlan, whose answers came quickly back. She watched the expression on first one face and then the other, tried to guess what each intonation meant, vaguely understood gestures, nods, a fist softly thumped into a palm, and then the interlocked grip of four hands, tears standing in the old man's eyes as he spoke what was clearly an oath.

She felt as if she had been standing in this hot bright hollow for at least half her lifetime, and to look anywhere else but at the two men would mean seeing Nigel, and she couldn't do that. He dominated them all as it was, just by lying there dead.

Finally Alick came back to her. “He will do better with one simple lie than attempting to tell them a truth which they will not accept. And he will hold fast to this lie as if it is his life.” Parlan nodded vehemently.

“The lie is that he has seen nobody. He has been walking across the moor from Coire na Broc since the evictions, lying up by day and traveling by night, to shelter in the Pict's House until he is driven out. He came upon the two horses and the garron, and the Captain lying so. He rides the garron to Linnmore House, leading the horses, and tells what he has found. A cart will be sent; men will search. I have gone; you do not come home. We will be deep in the mountains by then because Parlan will not go to them until the sun drops behind Ben Cheathaich. Are you still sure?”

She said with a bitter smile, “Yes.”

“Then, if ever we are caught, remember I took you captive by force. You are my hostage.”

“This is no time for chivalry. If ever we are caught, I will defend you. This is all my fault, and I'll crawl to my uncle if I must, to hire the finest lawyers, and I will sign over my inheritance to him to pay for them.”

“If you don't say that you were taken, you will be damned for running away with me,” he warned.

“I will say I was afraid you would be tried and hanged before you could be properly defended, and that I would be unjustly accused if I spoke for you. We were on our way to find someone who would believe the truth.
Someone
has to believe the truth!” she cried passionately at the two faces, and burst into tears.

She sat on the ground and wept into her hands. No one came near her. In the streaming red-shot darkness she saw Nigel lying dead a little way from her, she saw her whole life lying dead, and it had all happened so fast.
How could it have happened like that
? she cried piteously inside her head.

After a time she lifted her face and looked around her with bleary eyes. She expected to find herself alone except for the two horses and Nigel; the Highlanders would have taken the chance to slip away.

But they were up by the Piet's House. Alick was hanging a leather satchel over his shoulder by a strap. She went down to the burn and washed her face and drank. Alick came to her there.

“Parlan has given us what stores he has. He can take what he needs from my house, and he has the money to put in the hands of Iain Innes. He will do it; he swore to it.” He hesitated. “I kept out something. I will need it for what I intend to do.”

“Give it all to him, Alick. Remember, I still have money, and they need all they can get.” He nodded and went back to Parlan.

It was a relief to feel completely free of any emotion now. She knew that she was doing the only thing possible for her. When she got up from her knees, she felt surprisingly strong. She walked over to the horses and took Dora's head in her arms and kissed her nose; she reached out a hand and stroked Adam's neck. Alick whistled to the garron, who trotted to him.

“Why don't you take him?” she asked.

“Because I will not take him away from his home. It's enough that I have to go. Parlan will leave him with the Elliots. They grow a few kind hearts in Ayrshire.”

When he held the pony's head between his hands, she looked away toward the mountains in the south. By sunset how deep would they be in the foothills? How far still from those mountains whose transitions from one pastel tint to another, as clouds passed over the sun, belied their brutality? She wanted only to be there, no matter what lay within those folds; anything to be away from the hollow.

“Are you still sure?” Alick asked behind her.

“Yes.” Parlan was with him, and she surprised an expression of loving sadness on his toothless old face. She put out her hand, and he closed his gnarled fingers over it.

“Thank you, Parlan.”

“It's a safe journey I wish you, Mistress, and peace at the end of it. You have a true heart. You could be one of ours.” He put out his other hand to Alick. With wet eyes he spoke in Gaelic; then he and Alick embraced, and it was over.

Jennie and Alick crossed the brook and went up to the opposite rim of the hollow; the way south lay before them. Alick walked ahead of her through the whin and bracken, with a swift but easy stride, and she kept up without difficulty. She'd have gladly run if it had been possible.

They went out around a stony mound, and some distance before them a deep, forested crease appeared between two hills. She guessed that they were heading for it. Instinctively she looked back. Already a mile or so of uneven terrain had hidden the general location of the hollow, but now the loch had disappeared, though she thought she could still see the osprey hanging over it. Far away across the billows of moor that brightened and darkened under sun and cloud, there was the line of the great old pines against the sky.

She filled her eyes with them to imprint them for always on her memory. Then she turned and hurried to catch up with Alick.

S
HE WALKED
behind Alick in a trancelike state. When a grouse exploded out of the heather, she was brutally startled and cried out as if in pain; the cry echoed weirdly in the emptiness. The man didn't look around or hesitate, and she fell back into the mindless rhythm of their walking. She was impelled to turn her head often, only to see how the land flowed down behind them to wipe out what she had seen in the last five minutes. The sun-filled hollow might have been a hallucination; in fact, her whole life since she met Nigel was compressed into one massive hallucination of a man lying dead with a bee walking over his hair. By concentrating on the bee, she could ignore Nigel's face. She saw the bee with a pure and fiery clarity. It was a jeweled bee, a Cellini bee. It was the sort of vision that might haunt, or entertain, a madman.

Reality was the man walking ahead of her in coarse coat and breeches and scuffed boots. She had been watching those boots for years, it sometimes seemed; the dark pattern of the plaid folded over his shoulder had a ghastly familiarity, and the way the hair grew down his neck. The way the leather bag bounced softly on his hip.

She had no fear of him. It did not occur to her to wonder just with whom or what she was tramping off into the wilderness. She did not wonder where they were going. What mattered was the distance they put behind them before the sun dropped beyond Ben Cheathaich.

Not speaking, avoiding direct glances, they drank from streams that bubbled across their path or beside it. There were scurries in the bracken as small animals were taken by surprise. An auburn flash on a rise meant deer. Once, when she looked up, two golden eagles were circling the zenith. They could see everything, she thought dully: the fugitives here, the dead man there; the grazing horses and pony; the old man waiting, drowsing, for the sun to go down. But when would it set? The world seemed to hang motionless in space, no longer turning, their side of it condemned to eternal day.

In a small wood Alick cut two ash sticks and handed one to her. She was desperate to make some human contact, and her words gushed out on a shallow breath. “Thank you, it will be easier on the steep places. . . . How is your throat? Is it much bruised?”

He put his hand up to it. Above the inflamed marks of the crop his eyes conveyed nothing. She thought he hated her because she had brought this doom upon him.