Wild Talent
WILD TALENT
A Novel of the Supernatural
WILD TALENT
A Novel of the Supernatural
EILEEN KERNAGHAN
© Eileen Kernaghan, 2008
All rights reserved
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Thistledown Press Ltd.
410 2nd Avenue North
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7K 2C3
www.thistledownpress.com
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Kernaghan, Eileen
Wild talent : a novel of the supernatural / Eileen Kernaghan.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-897235-40-9 (pbk.).âISBN 978-1-77187-038-2 (html).â
ISBN 978-1-77187-039-9(pdf)
I. Title.
PS8571.E695W55 2008Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â C813'.54Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â C2008-904518-1
Publisher Cataloging-in-Publication Data (U.S.)
(Library of Congress Standards)
Kernaghan, Eileen.
Wild talent : a novel of the supernatural / Eileen Kernaghan.
[264] p. : cm.
Summary: The strange tale of a sixteen-year-old Scottish farm worker whose fear of being sentenced as a witch propels her to flee her home to London and the late 19th century world of spiritualists and theosophists, artists and esoteric cults.
ISBN: 978-1-897235-40-9 (pbk.)
1. Supernatural â Fiction. 2. Occult fiction. I. Title.
[Fic] dc22 PZ7.K45785Wil 2009
Cover photograph: Woman in Yellow, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti @Tate, London, 2008
Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie
Printed and bound in Canada
Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing program.
A version of Chapter Six appeared as a short story, “Dinner with HPB”, in
Crime Through Time III
(Berkley, 2000).
Many thanks to my indispensable first readers: my daughter Sue, my husband Pat, my friends Casey Wolf and Mary Choo, and members of the Helix speculative writing workshop; and very special thanks to Seán Virgo for his immensely helpful and perceptive editing.
For Edward Leander
I can't accept the reality of anything, in such an
indeterminate existence as ours.
â Charles Fort,
Wild Talents
CONTENTS
. . . lost and helpless youngsters, under hard
task-masters, in strange surroundings . . .
âCharles Fort,
Wild Talents
March 2nd, 1888
M
y mother has sent me a gift of this journal, with roses and pansies on the cover, and a great many blank pages to be filled. And so tonight, now that my little cousins are asleep and I have an hour to myself, I mean to begin recording the story of my life. I will do my best to make it (as Miss Charlotte Brontë said of
Jane Eyre
) “a plain tale with few pretensions”.
When I was younger and still in school I saw my life writ clear before me. A fine life it would be, with an oak desk in a big sunny room, windows looking out on a garden, bookshelves all round, and one long shelf of books that would have my own name, Jean Guthrie, in gold letters on their spines. I would not entertain visitors, for my time would be taken up by my work, but now and again I might take the train to Edinburgh where the university is, to attend a lecture. Or if I wished to meet with my publishers, as the Misses Brontë did, I might travel all the way to London, and there would be parties in my honour. I would order a Paris gown for such occasions â sober in colour, of dignified cut but very elegant.
It was my father taught me to love words, showed me the way they can be made to sing, to make patterns and images that linger in the mind long after the page is turned. If my father were here with me now, instead of in the kirkyard, it would break his heart, to see what has become of all his hopes for me. As it broke my heart to see him laid in the cold ground.
But I must begin at the beginning, for that is what Miss Brontë does. He was a scholar, my father, and meant for greater things than a village schoolmaster's post. That was the lot God gave him, and he accepted it with good grace, but for me he wanted the respect of learned folk that had never been accorded him. He would not spare himself, in work or in study, and it seemed to me, in the last year of his life, that all his frail strength was consumed by that restless mind.
Be that as it may, he left my mother with two bairns to care for, one still at the breast, and me, who was the oldest, the only one in our household fit for work.
Today I was up at 5:30, with cold mist curling over the fields, to be at the stables by first light. The steward set me to work sorting tatties for the spring planting: six in the morning till six at night stooped over the pit in a grey drizzle, up to my boot-tops in mud, my hands half-frozen in my gloves. And on this day â though it has passed as drearily as the ones before and the ones to follow âI am sixteen years old.
When I opened this journal, I found a letter tucked between the pages, in my mother's careful hand. “I think of you every day, dearest Jeannie. If only you did not have to live so many miles away! Still, what a blessing in disguise that your Uncle James had no daughter to hire out with him, and took you on instead. The life of a kitchen servant would never suit you â better far to be outdoors in the fresh air.”
Well, she is right enough in that. I had no fondness for scrubbing pots and sweeping floors, and little aptitude for either one, as my mother has often enough observed. I thought that outdoor work would suit me better, and maybe it will if it stops raining and the north wind stops blowing, and summer ever comes. And if another steward of a more forgiving nature should be hired. And if my cousin George should fall into a ditch and drown. (That is a wicked thing to write, and I should scratch it out. But in this book, which none will ever read save myself, I mean to speak honestly and from the heart.)
That raw February morning when I went with my Uncle James to the hiring fair, I guessed well enough what my life was to become. I was not yet fourteen, shivering with cold and nerves in my thin jacket, while the farmers came by to ask my uncle, “Are ye to hire? And do you have a woman or girl with you?” Other women were laughing and chattering, in a holiday mood, for they'd not have a free day again before New Year's. And there was I, near dying of shame while the farmers looked me up and down, and my uncle swearing I was a braw strong girl, with back and arms meant for stooking sheaves and cleaning byres. No Paris gowns it was to be, for Jeannie Guthrie, but an apron and drugget skirt. No feathered chapeau, but a bondager's kerchief and wide straw hat ruched with red and black; no stockings of silk, but rough tweed leggings and tackety lace-up boots.
So then. Here I am, and here I must bide. And it is past time to blow the candle out.
Sunday, May 13
H
ow could I let so many weeks slip by, and write nothing in my journal? Hell, as my father used to say (and Samuel Johnson before him) is paved with good intentions. But after these long days of planting and sowing and thistle-chopping, I fall into bed with scarce the energy to wash my face. And there is no rest on the wet days for then we must bide inside and sew the grain sacks. But now the real spring has come, the evenings grow longer, and I must use this precious hour of a Sunday dusk to say what has happened these weeks past.
But first I will write of what we did last night, Nellie Douglas and Edith Graham and I. It was a glorious spring evening, and we all went together to the dance in the village hall. I set out in a blithe enough frame of mind, excited to be away from the farm for a few hours, but my heart sank when I looked into the hall and saw that George was there. I remembered too many awkward encounters in byre and turnip shed, and when we met as we must in the eightsome reel, the look in his eye and the touch of his hands made my skin creep. The other girls think him handsome, even if they do not like him much. But Sally from the north, who is a sharp-tongued lass never caring what she says, told me once, “He's a randy wee man, your cousin George. I willna stand on a ladder near him, for fear he will look up my skirts.” Rough spoken she may be, but Sally has the right of it. Though we are warned to keep clear of Irish harvesters, they are all talk and I can see no real harm in them. It is my cousin George I avoid whenever I can.
