The Touch (2 page)

That marriage would be her lot had never occurred to her, though she was just beginning to be old enough to wonder about its pleasures and perils, to look at her older siblings’ unions with fascinated interest. Alastair and Mary, so different, always arguing, yet, she sensed, enjoying some deeper communion; Robert and Bella, perfectly matched in parsimony; Angus and his twittery Ophelia, who seemed determined to destroy each other; Catherine and her Robert, who lived in Kirkaldy because he was a fisherman; Mary and her James, Anne and her Angus, Margaret and William…. And Jean, the oldest daughter, the family beauty, who at eighteen had married a Montgomery—an enviable catch for a girl of good enough blood but absolutely no dowry. Her husband had removed her to a mansion in Princes Street, Edinburgh, and that was the last time the Drummonds in Kinross ever saw Jean.

“Ashamed of us,” said James with contempt.

“Very canny,” said Alastair, who had loved her and was loyal.

“Very selfish,” said Mary, sneering.

Very lonely, thought Elizabeth, who remembered Jean only vaguely. But if Jean’s loneliness became too much to bear, her family was a mere fifty miles away. Whereas I will never be able to come home, and home is all I know.

It had been decided after Margaret married that Elizabeth, the last of James’s brood who lived, was to remain a spinster at least until her father died, which family superstition believed would not be for many years to come; he was as tough as old boots and as hard as the rock of Ben Lomond. Now all of it had changed, thanks to Alexander Kinross and a thousand pounds. Alastair, James’s pride and joy after the death of his namesake, would override Mary and move her and his seven children into his father’s house. It would go to him anyway in the fullness of time, for he had cemented his place in James’s affections by succeeding his father as loom master at the mill. But Mary—poor Mary, how she would suffer! Father deemed her a shocking spendthrift, between buying her children shoes to wear on Sundays and putting jam on the table for breakfast as well as for supper. Once she moved in with James, her children would wear boots and jam would appear only for Sunday supper.

The wind began to bluster; Elizabeth shivered, more from fear than the sudden chill. What had Father said of Alexander Kinross? “A shiftless boilermaker’s apprentice living in the Glasgow stews.” What did he mean by shiftless? That Alexander Kinross stuck to nothing? If he was shiftless, would he even be there to meet her at journey’s end?

“Elizabeth, come inside!” James was shouting.

Obedient, Elizabeth ran.

AS THE DAYS flew by they conspired to give Elizabeth little time for reflection; try as she did to stay awake in her bed and think about her fate, the moment she lay down, sleep claimed her. Every day saw quarrels between James and Mary; Alastair, away to the mill at dawn and not returning until after dark, was fortunate. All of Mary’s own furniture had to be moved to her new residence, and took precedence over James’s chipped, battered pieces. If Elizabeth wasn’t running up and down the stairs with armloads of linens or clothing (including shoes) or on one end of the piano, the bureau, the chiffer-robe, she was outside with one of Mary’s rugs spread over the clothesline, beating it within an inch of its life. Mary was a cousin on the Murray side, and had come to her marriage with a certain amount of property, a small allowance from her farmer father, and more independence of mind than Elizabeth had credited any woman could possess. None of which had impinged on her in the way it did after Mary came to live with Father. Who didn’t always win the battles, she was amazed to discover. The jam stayed on the breakfast table every morning and was there again every night. The children’s shoes went on their feet before service at Dr. Murray’s kirk on Sundays. And Mary flirted her shapely ankles in a pair of exquisite blue kid slippers with heels high enough to turn her walk into a mince. James spent much of his time in towering rages and soon had his grandchildren in healthy fear of his stick, but Alastair, he was learning, had become putty in Mary’s hands.

Elizabeth’s only chance to avoid this domestic turmoil were visits to Miss MacTavish’s establishment in Kinross’s main square. It was a small house whose front parlor, opening straight on to the pavement, bore a big glass window in which stood a sexless dummy clad in a very full-skirted pink taffeta dress—it would never do to offend the kirk by showing a dummy with breasts.

Everyone who didn’t make her own clothing went to see Miss MacTavish, an attenuated spinster lady in her late forties, who, upon inheriting a hundred pounds, had given up employment as a seamstress and opened her own business as a modiste. It and she had prospered, for Kinross contained women able to afford her services, and she was clever enough to produce magazines of ladies’ fashions that she insisted were sent to her from London.

Five of Elizabeth’s twenty pounds had gone on tartan wools from the mill, where Alastair’s position allowed her a small but welcome discount. These and four house dresses in coarse brown linen she would craft herself, together with her unbleached calico drawers, nightgowns, chemises and petticoats. When the expenditure was totted up, she found that she had sixteen pounds left to spend with Miss MacTavish.

“Two morning gowns, two afternoon gowns, two evening gowns and your wedding dress,” said Miss MacTavish, enchanted with this commission. She wouldn’t make much of a profit on the exercise, but it wasn’t every day that a young and very pretty girl—oh, such a figure!—was thrust into Miss MacTavish’s hands without a mother or an aunt to spoil her fun.

“As well,” the modiste chattered as she wielded her tape measure, “that I am here, Elizabeth. Were you to go to Kirkaldy or Dumfermline, you’d pay twice as much for half as much. And I have some lovely materials in stock, just right for your coloring. Dark beauties never go out of fashion, they don’t fade into their surroundings. Though I hear that your sister Jean—now there was a fair beauty!—is still the toast of Edinburgh.”

Staring at herself in Miss MacTavish’s mirror, Elizabeth heard only the last part of this. James wouldn’t brook a mirror in his house and had won that particular encounter with Mary, who, when James produced Dr. Murray as reinforcements, was obliged to keep her mirror in her own bedroom. Beauty, Elizabeth sensed, was a word that tripped easily off Miss MacTavish’s tongue, and served as a balm to soothe a customer’s misgivings. Certainly she saw no sign of beauty in her reflection, though “dark” was accurate enough. Very dark hair, thick dark brows and lashes, dark eyes, an ordinary sort of face.

“Och, your skin!” Miss MacTavish was crooning. “So white, and quite flawless! But do not let anybody plaster you with rouge, it would ruin your style. A neck like a swan!”

The measuring done, Elizabeth was led into the room wherein Miss MacTavish’s bolts of fabrics were arranged on shelves—the finest muslins, cambrics, silks, taffetas, laces, velvets, satins. Spools of ribbon in every color. Feathers, silk flowers.

Elizabeth sped straight to a bolt of brilliant red, face alight. “This one, Miss MacTavish!” she cried. “This one!”

The seamstress-turned-modiste went as red as the cloth. “Och, dear me, no,” she said, voice constricted.

“But it’s so beautiful!”

“Scarlet,” said Miss MacTavish, shoving the offending bolt to the back of its shelf, “is not the done thing at all, my dear Elizabeth. I keep it for a certain element in my clientele whose—er—virtue is not what it should be. Naturally they come to me at a prearranged hour to spare embarrassment. You know your scripture, child—the ‘scarlet woman’?”

“Ohhhh!”

So the closest to scarlet that Elizabeth came was a rust-red taffeta. Irreproachable.

“I don’t think,” she said to Miss MacTavish over a cup of tea after the choices had been made, “that Father will approve of any of these dresses. I won’t look my station.”

“Your station,” said Miss MacTavish strongly, “is about to change with a vengeance, Elizabeth. You can’t go as the bride of a man rich enough to send you a thousand pounds wearing naught but tartan from the mill and plain brown linen. There will be parties, balls, I imagine, carriage rides, calls to pay on the wives of other rich men. Your father ought not to have kept so much of what, I am sure, is your money, not his.”

That said (for it had burned to be said—what a miserable old skinflint James Drummond was!), Miss MacTavish poured more tea and pressed a cake on Elizabeth. Such a beautiful girl, and so wasted in Kinross!

“I really don’t want to go to New South Wales and marry Mr. Kinross,” Elizabeth said unhappily.

“Nonsense! Think of it as an adventure, my dear. There’s not a young woman in Kinross who doesn’t envy you, believe me. Think about it. Here, you will not enjoy a husband at all, you will spend your best years looking after your father.” Her pale blue eyes moistened. “I know, believe me. I had to look after my mother until she died, and by then my hopes of marriage were gone.” Suddenly she sighed, beamed. “Alexander Drummond! Well do I remember him! Barely fifteen when he ran away, but there wasn’t a female in Kinross hadn’t noticed him.”

Stiffening, Elizabeth realized that at last she had found someone who could tell her a little about her husband-to-be. Unlike James, Duncan Drummond had had but two children, a girl, Winifred, and Alexander. Winifred had married a minister and gone to live near Inverness before Elizabeth had been born, so that was her best chance gone. Quizzing those of her own family old enough to remember Alexander had produced curiously little; as if, for some reason, the subject of Alexander was forbidden. Father, she realized. Father didn’t want to give back his windfall, and was taking no chances. He also believed that ignorance was bliss when it came to marriage.

“Was he handsome?” she asked eagerly.

“Handsome?” Miss MacTavish screwed up her face, shut her eyes. “No, I wouldn’t have called him handsome. It was the way he walked—a swagger. He was always black-and-blue from Duncan’s stick, so sometimes it must have been hard to walk as if he owned the world, but he did. And his smile! One just went—weak.”

“He ran away?”

“On his fifteen birthday,” said Miss MacTavish, and proceeded to give her version of the story. “Dr. MacGregor—he was the outgoing minister—was quite heartbroken. Alexander, he used to say, was so terribly clever. He had Latin and Greek, and Dr. MacGregor hoped to send him to university. But Duncan wouldn’t have that. There was a job for him in the mill here in Kinross, and with Winifred away, Duncan wanted Alexander here. A hard man, was Duncan Drummond! He’d offered for me, you know, but there was Mother to care for, so I wasn’t sorry to refuse his offer. And now you’re to marry Alexander! It’s like a dream, Elizabeth, it’s just like a dream!”

That last remark was true. In what corners of her mind the constant hard work permitted her, Elizabeth thought about her future much as clouds passed across the high, wide Scottish sky; sometimes in airy, lighthearted wisps, sometimes sad and grey, sometimes stormily black. An unknown severance with unknown consequences, and the limited ken in which she had spent her barely sixteen years could offer her neither comfort nor information. A tiny thrill of excitement would be followed by a bout of tears, a spurt of joy by a dizzying descent into despond. Even after intense perusal of Dr. Murray’s gazetteer and Britannica, poor Elizabeth had no yardstick whereby to measure this complete and drastic upheaval.

THE DRESSES got made, including her wedding dress, every item folded between sheets of tissue paper and packed in her two trunks. Alastair presented her with the trunks, Mary with a veil of white French lace to wear at her wedding, Miss MacTavish with a pair of white satin slippers; all the members of the family save James managed to find something to give her, be it Cologne water, a scrimshaw brooch, a pin cushion or a box of bonbons.

James’s respectable Presbyterian married couple answered one of his advertisements from Peebles, and after several letters had traveled back and forth between Kinross and Peebles, said that, for fifty pounds, they would be pleased to take custody of the bride.

Alastair and Mary were deputed to take Elizabeth on the coach to Kirkaldy, where they boarded a steam packet for the journey across the Firth of Forth to Leith. From there several horse-drawn trams took them into Edinburgh and to Princes Street Station, where Mr. and Mrs. Richard Watson would be waiting.

Had she not been felled by the choppy ferry crossing, Elizabeth would have been agog; in all her life she had never been as far afield as Kirkaldy, so the huge city of Edinburgh ought to have transfixed her, if her delight at seeing Kirkaldy was anything to go by. Catherine and Robert lived there and had put them up, shown Elizabeth the sights. But she could summon up no enthusiasm for Edinburgh’s bustle, its wintry beauty, wooded hills and ravines. When the last of the trams deposited them at the North British Railway station, she let Alastair guide her, install her in the tiny, boxlike second-class compartment she was to share with the Watsons all the way to London, and left him to search the jam-packed platform for her tardy chaperones.

“This is quite tolerable,” said Mary, gazing about. “The seats are well padded, and you’ve your rug for warmth.”

“It’s the third-class passengers I don’t envy,” Alastair said, pushing two cardboard chits into Elizabeth’s left glove. “Don’t lose them, they’re for your trunks, safely in the luggage compartment.” Then he slipped five gold coins down inside her other glove. “From Father,” he said with a grin. “I managed to convince him that you can’t go all the way to New South Wales with an empty purse, but I’m to tell you not to waste a farthing.”

The Watsons finally arrived, breathless. They were a tall and angular couple in shabby clothes that suggested Elizabeth’s fifty pounds had promoted them from the horrors of third-class to the relative comfort of second-class. They seemed pleasant, though Alastair’s nose wrinkled at the liquor on Mr. Watson’s breath.

Whistles blew, people hung out of the carriage windows to exchange screams, tears, frantic clutches and final waves with those on the platform; amid huffs and explosions, clouds of steam, jerks and clangs, the London night train began to move.