Jennie About to Be (16 page)

“One more, one more!” he insisted. For mischief Jennie struck up “The De'il's awa' wi' the Exciseman,” and Archie laughed till he had to pull out his handkerchief and dry his eyes. Jennie then stood up, took Nigel's arm, and walked back to the fireplace.

Christabel, lifting the teapot, said composedly, “I do not care to hear that man's doggerel in my drawing room. He was nothing but a womanizer and a drunkard.”

Nigel looked amused but not apologetic. Jennie said nothing. Archie exclaimed, “Och, but to quote the bard himself, ‘a man's a man for a' that'!” Christabel gave him the look of a tyrannical nanny who sees her charge getting above himself and is about to whisk him off to bed without supper.

She handed Jennie her cup and said, “Eugenia, my dear, you must devise a different name for the factor's house. At present it has a quite unintelligible pagan one.”

“But I like it,” Jennie protested.

Archie spoke the name with a sliding, almost whispering intonation, quite different from his ordinary one.

Christabel's cheeks darkened under the powder. “It's a barbaric tongue,” she said, “and those who cling to it are barbarians.”

“Nigel told me that the name means ‘House of the Springs' because there are so many near, and even one under the house,” Jennie said mildly. “But when you said it was pagan, I was hoping it really meant ‘House of the Witches' or ‘Here dwells Asmodeus, King of Devils.'”

“And you'd be the one who'd be trying to raise him,” said Nigel.

“And she'd be the one who could turn him into an angel!” said Archie. Christabel's cheeks were purplish now. Jennie could endure no more of her tonight. She set her cup back on the tea table and arose.

“I beg you will excuse us. We have been traveling many days, and I am tired.”

“Of course you are!” cried Archie. “We must keep the roses in those cheeks and the sparkle in those eyes, mustn't we? After all, we'll have many such happy hours together, eh?” He rang for the butler and ordered the dogcart brought around. “We must have a dance! Clear
this
out of the way”—he waved at the precious clutter as if it were so much brushwood—“take up those carpets, have some musicians in for the waltzes and polkas, and a piper for the reels—you know Murdo Gilchrist, Nigel. Good company, good music! It'll be a grand way to introduce you to the countryside.”

“We shall see.” Christabel was glacial, but the cold couldn't numb Archie. After they had given their thanks and good-nights and were dismissed from the Presence, Archie waved away the servants in the hall and held Jennie's shawl for her, managing to give her shoulders a little squeeze. He came outdoors with them, still talking about his dance and how his wind was as good as it ever was.

They had to wait a few minutes for the dogcart, and Archie said, indulgently, “Sheena will be hard to put between the shafts. She thinks her day's work is done.”

“And so it should be,” said Jennie. “We could go on foot if I had my shoes.” She longed to be walking away with Nigel into the silent twilight, disappearing from Archie and Christabel's world and emerging into their own as if into a new universe, which existed out there where the red afterglow still burned in the western sky.

M
ORAG AND AILI
waited in the candlelit hall; they were bidden goodnight and waved off to their beds. Up in the master bedroom a small fire burned, cozy as a purring cat. Nigel and Jennie undressed each other with trembling hands, silently hilarious, drunker than any amount of wine could have made them, and tumbled naked into the herb-scented sheets.

Afterward they lay entwined and talked in a luxurious intimacy. This was one of the pleasures of marriage that Sylvia hadn't mentioned.

“Christabel seems to hate it here,” Jennie said. “What does she do all year?”

“Waits for an invitation to the castle.” Nigel's amusement vibrated in his chest under Jennie's ear. She was fascinated by this phenomenon.

“Do they have people often? Archie spoke of a dance.”

“Archie loves dancing. He's a maniac in a Highland reel, and then Christabel pretends she's never met the man. So they don't have many dances, but some of their English friends come up for the fishing and the birds, and hoping to get a stag. The wives make good company for Christabel while the men are out all day, and they play cards at night and lower the tide in Archie's wine cellar.”

He yawned, then felt with his lips past her cheekbone to her mouth. She met him avidly; one could never grow tired of kissing. After this pleasurably greedy interlude she said, “She's starved for London. Why can't they spend the winters there?”

“She must keep old Archie in line. A winter of dancing, drinking, and gambling, and he'd be more of a living skeleton than the Earl is.”

“Poor Archie,” she said, and meaning it. “He seems a very good-hearted man, and he wants so much to have a merry life. But I suppose he loves her, so that makes up for a great deal.”

“She is also rich, and that makes up for everything.”

“Poor Nigel then, with no rich wife.” She ran her hand over his chest. “Tell me the truth: do they approve of your marrying a penniless girl?”

“Christabel doesn't, but she'll never tell me to my face. Archie can no more resist a pretty girl than he can a dram. If he had any doubts, they were forgotten when he lifted you down tonight.”

“He told me he wished he could have been at the wedding. He sounded wistful.”

“I think they'd have come, if only for a fortnight,” Nigel said, “to get a look at you and your connections. But it's a long way to travel from home when you can't trust your factor.”

“What was the trouble with him? Christabel said he wanted to emigrate, but I know it's not that simple. ” She didn't tell him she'd tried to find out from Morag. He hugged her and muffled her mouth against his chest.

“Whatever it was, it's over and done with. I'm the factor now, so forget Grant.”

She got her head free. “I can't! He asked the servants to stay on for my sake. That was a great kindness. I gather that if he'd said the word they'd have vanished like some of your Highland fairies. I would like to thank him.”

“He is a good distance off, waiting for a ship, if he hasn't already gone to America. Now will you be quiet and let me make love to you?”

“
Again
? Why, Capting!”

When she first woke in the morning, there was the blackbird again, her familiar. A cuckoo's call followed when the blackbird stopped for a moment; the sound was muted and hollow as if it had come from far away, but she knew the bird could be very close. There was a mélange of other bird voices, and to hear this as she had heard it at Pippin Grange was almost as enchanting as to wake up curled against Nigel's back. She kissed his neck, and when that didn't work, she leaned over him and flicked her tongue along the rim of his ear.

At once he looked up at her with one blue eye and said, “Who is this woman in my bed? Dear God in heaven, I am compromised for life!”

It was a gray morning, and the dining room was dim with the trees and shrubs growing so close to the windows. It was frustrating to know that the ridge was up there but she could not see it. Never mind, she was going out as soon as she had eaten; she had come downstairs dressed for it in a geranium red nankeen walking dress and wearing her half boots.

Morag served a large Scottish breakfast, assisted by a hard-breathing Aili. Speechless and blushing as usual, she went well out around Nigel like a kitten around a mastiff that could devour it in one bite. Jennie finally caught her glance and smiled at her, and Aili responded by rolling her eyes upward and blowing her red fringe up from her damp forehead. Morag was at ease; in the dark-paneled room she had the bloom of the apple blossoms at Pippin Grange, those whose petals were stained with rose.

“When will you be wanting to go through the house, Mistress?” she asked Jennie when they were finishing their coffee.

“Later this morning. Now I'm very anxious to be out of doors. Will you tell Mrs. MacIver that the breakfast was delicious?”

The girls curtsied and left. Aili's departure was an escape.

“If there's any sorrow in me at this moment,” Jennie said, “it's for Tamsin.”

“You're too young to keep grieving for what might have been,” said Nigel, sounding fifty-eight instead of twenty-six. He pushed back from the table and picked up her shawl and gypsy straw. “Come along, we'll have our walk. I won't stop for a pipe now.”

She took the straw bonnet out of his hand and scaled it across the room. “I've decided I'm not wearing
that
. We're not going for a walk in Kensington Gardens; we're home.”

“That we are,” he agreed. He left his own hat behind. With his fair hair and ruddy complexion he was the idealized version of the country gentleman. None of the authentic country gentlemen she'd known at home had looked in the least like this one. It was impossible that he would ever grow stout, bald, or florid in the cheek and purple about the nose, that a gouty foot could slow those legs, or that jowls could ever be a difficulty to arrange over a cravat.

They went along a passage between the dining room and the combined study and office, and went out a door on the northern end of the house. The cool, still air was scented with green growth and water. There to the west was the ridge like a high rampart built from north to south for a barrier between two worlds. Some crows were flapping and calling around the heads of the old pines, whose motionless silhouettes had a misshapen grandeur. They imposed themselves against the pearly sky as if for centuries they had been holding it back from crashing down on the house below.

In comparison to the noisy activity up above, the silence and emptiness around the clustering outbuildings at the base of the ridge were extreme. A glimpse of Fergus would have helped, but there was not even an open stable door.

They halted their stroll at the paddock gate, and Nigel said, “The horses will be here today. I haven't seen them, but I trust Archie's choice.”

From the house there was an outbreak of laughter. They looked around and saw the two girls filling a basket with peats from the stack just outside the back door. Something was amusing them very much.

“Us, do you suppose?” said Nigel.

“I don't know, but I love to hear them,” Jennie said. “And, Nigel, we must have cats and dogs here. I know now that's what I missed at Linnmore House last night.”

“There's probably a cat or two around the stables; there always were. Archie doesn't care for dogs, but our father had deerhounds.”

“They're in the painting. They look wonderful.”

“Those two were Monty and Rob,” said Nigel. “I never knew them, of course, but the men told me about them. One of them bit Archie badly once, and our father refused to have the dog put down. He swore Archie had done something to make Monty turn on him.”

“Had he, do you know?”

He shrugged. “They swore so to me. They said he was jealous of the dogs because they didn't have to be sent off to school.”

“No, they could stay home with his father, when he was exiled. Poor Archie,” Jennie said. “How awful for him, his father preferring a dog to him. He must hate that portrait facing him every day of his life.”

“Wouldn't do to shut the Old Laird away in the gallery. This way Christabel can exhibit a handsome father-in-law, if not a titled one.”

He pulled her arm through his. “Come along now, I have a meeting later this morning. You can have a puppy or two if you want. There's always a litter at one of the farms. Spaniels, terriers . . . we might get a deerhound from Roseholm if you like. I'll find out if the Roses still keep them.”

“How about a spaniel, a terrier,
and
a deerhound?”

“Anything!” he said exuberantly. He bent his head and kissed her. They walked beside the paddock out to a well-traveled track at its northern end. This ran east to join the drive from Tigh nam Fuaran to Linnmore House, and west the short distance to the foot of the ridge, where the ascent began in a coppice of birch and hazel. Beside the path there was a little fern-ringed pool dimpling constantly with the motion from the springs that filled it. Primroses spilled gold and ivory down its banks.

They climbed above the coppice along a diagonal track among thistles and wild rose tangles, blackberry canes, heather just coming to life, new bracken rising in green fountains from its flattened dead, and bristling dark thickets of gorse starred with blooms like tiny yellow roses. Water sometimes ran across the track and trickled over exposed rock faces; small birds were surprised bathing under miniature falls. There were streamlets following narrow courses whose mossy banks were jeweled with tiny plants. When Jennie stopped to look down at the house, she could hear the water like the voices of countless Undines.

The sun broke through the layers of pearl and gave a pigeon-breast luster to the roofs of Tigh nam Fuaran. The girls ran out from the house, Morag lithe as a deer, to spread towels on the drying green. Heat struck through Jennie's shawl, and she dropped it off her shoulders; a moist, aromatic warmth rose from the earth around her.

Nigel reached down a hand and pulled her up to the crest. The crows exploded from the pines with shouts of alarm or derision and went sailing out into space on wings turned iridescent by the sun.

A dead pine lying where it had crashed long ago showed that the pines were not immortal. But old enough, she thought. Nigel sat down on the fallen hero.

“Cheeky black devils,” he said fondly, watching the crows. “Well, here you are, my darling. And there's the loch where I covered myself with glory.”

The loch was all she saw at first, as if the treeless moor and the outer encircling rim of mountains existed merely to form the basin which held it: a sheet of white water suddenly filigreed with silver where a breeze touched it, turning milky blue when the nacreous cloud layers thinned.