Jennie About to Be (48 page)

It was a cold and foggy dawnbreak, and she was hard put to maintain her convictions. Oh, why couldn't it have been an exquisite dawn, full of diamonds and birdsong?

“There will be a ship,” she chanted, bundled in the plaid, arms crossed over her midriff, icy hands squeezing her lean flesh above her elbows. “
There will be a ship
.”

She wished there were a God of whom one could ask favors, or a pantheon separate from the impersonal indifferent Creator. She wished she were a Roman Catholic and could pray to a particular saint. The belief that you were heard by some dear soul sitting on a footstool by God's throne, who then passed on your message, must have been as comforting as a hot bath or a cup of steaming chocolate.

Both of which awaited her, and many more comforts, material and otherwise.
There will be a ship
. She got up and found her stockings.

A
FTER THE BREAKFAST
of cold broiled trout and potentilla tea, Jennie had a clawing in her belly that hurried her off into the bushes. “
Oh, no!
” she groaned. “What a way to start out! If this is an omen, it's a frightful one.”

She didn't feel nauseated or light-headed; it had to be caused by a bad state of nerves, and why not? There was enough to have nerves about.

There was a mute farewell to the cave, and they set off into the fog. They had been on their way about a half hour when the clawing began again and would not be ignored.

“I have to drop back,” she called to Alick.

“Are you ailing? Should we be waiting another day?”

“It's only from too much food, I'm sure. I don't feel ill.”

The path had been going gradually downward, and they had come to a giant thrusting fist of rock, knuckles and all. “I will be just beyond this,” he said. “Be careful. Use your stick.”

She crouched in the bracken and cleaned herself up afterward with handfuls of the wet green fronds, and washed her hands with more of it. Going back to the track, she had no fear of not finding Alick; he had had too many opportunities to leave her. Still, when she approached the great gneissian fist, the sense of complete solitude was strong enough to make her scalp prickle.

The fog lay in opaque layers around her. She leaned in against the lower part of the fist to pass it, feeling as if a step off the wrong side of the track would be a step off the world into infinite space.

She didn't see Alick, but to her right something enormous moved on the slope, towering in the fog. It walked in air or, more horribly, on a fall of rock too sheer even for a goat. She couldn't hear its footsteps, but she was sure she felt them shaking the ground.

There's nothing, but I'm seeing it
, she thought.
I'm losing my mind. This is ^how it happens
.

With all her strength she forced a sound from her throat. It was like trying to cry out in dreams when only a strangled croak comes. But it was heard. Alick came out of the fog and took her hands and rubbed them hard between his.

“What is it then? What's at you?” She couldn't speak, and he shook her. “Jennie, answer me!”

“I'm losing my mind,” she wheezed. “I saw a spectre.” She couldn't take her eyes away from the spot. “Up there. Huge. Hulking. Like the fog shaping into a monster to devour us.”

“There's nothing there but fog now, and it's thinning. No monsters.” He pulled her down into the shelter of the fist.

“I
saw
it, Alick.” She kept wriggling around to see. “If I didn't, I'm going mad!”

“Och, it's only Am Fear Liath Mor, the Great Gray Man of Ben Tee. There's many a Great Gray Man in the Highlands.”

“He was
there
? He
exists
?” She shook, and he hugged her against his chest.

“It comes with the fog. Who knows what it is? It always has been, and it always will be, long after we are gone.” He even tried to make her smile. “You might have been seeing a
wee
man and he would be leading you into a fairy hill like the lass Kilmeny. And you would never be seeing Fort William, and I would be missing that ship you are so sure about, because I would be growing old searching for you.”

He stood her up and put her stick into her hand. “Then there would be another Great Gray Man out here then to be putting terror on wanderers.” She was weak-kneed, but his efforts deserved something from her.

“Alick, if I should be lured off to fairyland, I forbid you to look for me. After all we've been through, it would be a crime for you to lose your ship because I ran off with a wee man in a green suit.”

He gave her shoulder a rough little shake. They went on, stopping after a few hours for a strupach of cold trout and a drink of water. Evidently the Great Gray Man had cured her of the disorder in her belly. The fog was going fast, but there was no sunshine; it was a quiet world of white sky and white water, subtle grays, dark smoky blues, vaporous greens, sooty black.

“Where will we be sleeping tonight?” she asked him in late afternoon.

“On this side of Mile Dorcha.”

“What does that mean? What is it?”

“It is the Dark Mile.”

“I hate the sound of that,” she exclaimed. “It's like some long avenue of terror one must travel, full of fire pits and dragons, and at the end there's no safety, only more terrors.”

“It is only a bit of forest between Loch Loohy and Looh Arkaig. It would not be surprising to be feeling terrors there; the earth has been soaked with too much blood. But that was all long ago. It is not phantoms I fear now.”

They slept, if you could call it sleeping, in a hollow scooped out by nature from the side of an almost vertical rise. They reached it by using their hands as much as their feet. To lose your grip and footing simultaneously could mean a fast, bouncing, bruising roll down the steep and the chance of a fall into the boiling river at the bottom.

They built no fire, and their water came from a trickle running over a rock; it took nearly an hour for the pannikin balanced beneath the drip to catch enough for each of them to drink. Jennie thirsted greedily for Alick's pungent brews as she had earlier lusted after large bowls of steaming coffee or pots of scalding hot tea.

There were only a few hours of darkness, and that wasn't really dark but a long gloaming. Ironically, now that they were so close to Fort William, she felt a homesickness for the cave where they had spent the last three nights. She didn't love the stars now; they told her how quickly the earth was turning inexorably toward day, and she was still getting no more sleep than quick catnaps, from which she'd be suddenly aroused either by a bird or animal sound or by herself. And there were times when the noise of the water inexplicably increased.

Alick lay motionless as a log, too quiet. She knew he wasn't sleeping, and she wished she could speak to him. There was a great deal she wanted to say; perhaps she'd be able to tell him a little of it before they separated for good. A few fumbling, inadequate phrases weren't going to make up for what he was losing, but half her soverigns would ensure that he didn't arrive a pauper in America. If he would accept them, she'd give them all to him, except for what she needed to carry her from Fort William to Sylvia and William.

Apart from this, what could she say? That she wished she could know how he did in America? It was as unthinkable that, after the enforced intimacy of the last week, they should never know anything more about each other, as it was that her lover was lying under a stone behind the yews in Linnmore churchyard.

Alick was up and out of the hollow when the half-light was coldly whitening. When he came back, she went. She had to perch precariously in the heather behind a wind-worn thorny little shrub, and wondered at the instinct for privacy that could dictate behavior out here where the only other living soul was out of sight.

There was no dew-wet bracken handy for washing her face and hands. There was no morning fire. But she shivered less from the raw damp chill than from anticipation. Alick, without speaking, insisted on her wrapping up in the plaid while they ate the last of the cold meat. She'd have liked the relief of mentioning her state of nerves, but considering the probable state of his own he wouldn't appreciate hearing about it.

Silently they began the downhill walk, braking themselves with their sticks. At the foot they turned left and followed the stream southward until they came to the Dark Mile.

The wood lived up to its name in the hours before sunrise. The two moved in a twilight as bitingly and deadly cold as if the sun had never reached through the branches since the forest's birth. They walked in a hush where the dripping of heavy dew and their own soft footsteps and heartbeats were the only sounds.

Yet she knew that it was really only a wood, and on a hot noon it would be a place of pleasant coolness and shade. But she was relieved when they began to hear birds, and once, looking down, she saw hare droppings. Then Alick, who had been ominously wordless since they started out, cleared his throat and said, “We will be coming soon to Loch Lochy.”

“You mean we're all the way through Mile Dorcha?” Already she was warmer and lighter, down to her soaked brogues. He didn't answer, but in a short time the southern end of Loch Lochy lay below them to their left, silvery past the trees. The day was warming rapidly as the sun diffused its heat through an opaline film of cloud.

The river Lochy ran from the loch of that name to Fort William, to Loch Eil and the great arm of the sea, Loch Linnhe, down which the immigrant ships sailed to the ocean. Alick and Jennie crossed the river by an old stone bridge below the falls, and here they began to meet other people on their way to Fort William, either for the market or to board a vessel.

Jennie had put the guilechan over her head and fastened it under her chin with a pin Alick had made from the fishhook when they needed it no longer. The other women either glanced at her without interest, being too involved in their own worries, or nodded and gave her a soft “Madainn mhath.” She was afraid to return the “Good morning” for fear her poor Gaelic would give her away, but she smiled and put two fingers to her lips as if to sign that she was mute. For that she received looks of sympathy, and she felt not a bit guilty of deception, but rather pleased with herself.

More traffic filled the road, human and animal. Little black cows, some with calves, a few black-faced sheep and lambs, goats and kids— all were going to market. Hens clucked in baskets; children rode on shaggy ponies carrying loaded panniers. Those people without four-footed goods or poultry to barter carried their merchandise—or their belongings—on their backs, done up in their plaids.

Alick fell into conversation with two men, one young and one a bearded elder, walking beside a cart in which three excited small children perched on two substantial chests among sacks and bundles. The younger man led the pony; the older sometimes gently cautioned the children about their noise. The young man talked freely with Alick, often smiling; Jennie didn't have to understand Gaelic to know that this group was emigrating and that one of them, at least, was eager to go.

Two women and a young girl followed the cart; one woman carried an infant wrapped in a plaid, and kept glancing down into the little face and then licking her dry lips. Drying from fear, Jennie knew. The older woman gazed straight ahead from a mask of anguish carved in stone. The girl, about thirteen, with a creel on her back, was quietly weeping, wiping her eyes with a comer of her shawl; then they would fill and run over again.

Jennie turned away; it was not decent to look at them. A month from now would the baby still be alive? Or those little ones who were now so ecstatic in their innocent excitement?

Fort William was dwarfed into a toy village by its surroundings; Ben Nevis, off to its southeast, was the highest mountain in Scotland. The procession went along the road past a collection of thatched stone hovels and desultory onlookers, and streamed into the one crude street of the town.

S
HE WAS UNPREPARED
for the relentless volume of the noise that surged down the narrow street. She had gone to town on market days at home; she had been on the streets of London at their busiest. But after the primordial silence of the wilderness, when the loudest sounds besides their own voices were those of water, wind, and birds, the uproar here assaulted her ears like an artillery barrage.

She was no longer afraid of any human predator's pouncing on them; she feared only being swamped and drowned. She hung onto Alick's arm, and he charged unswervingly on, his bonnet pulled low over his eyes. She felt like a mere appendage as he swung her around groups or through them; no offense was taken at this, it was considered a part of the good-humored jostling. Once she crashed into a sergeant's iron-hard midriff, and he steadied her with a grip on her elbow and a few jovial words in a broad Devon accent. Alick never looked around, but his arm cramped her hand hard against his side, and she was dragged on.

It was a mild day of light wind, with the sun burning through a low ceiling of cloud that pressed down and held in the stench as well as the noise. She felt manure squash under her brogues, and once she looked down just in time to avoid splashing through a puddle of urine where some cattle had just gone by. An insidious pungence of rotting fish united all the other stenches into a stirring, nose-prickling authoritative alliance. Jennie needed a deep breath but hated to draw one. She supposed that Alick was heading directly for the shipping, and she hungered and thirsted for a clean air off the water.

Suddenly he stopped short, and the opposing streams divided around him and Jennie. He was watching a lad posting advertisements on the walls of a building. The youth had an untidy head of thick straw-yellow hair and wore a long apron over his shirt and breeches. His stockings slid in folds halfway to his heels. When he finished his chore, he looked around, saw them watching him, and gave them a friendly grin. When he went back inside, the scent of roasting meat and potatoes came out past him.