Jennie About to Be (18 page)

“What are you saying to her, Fergus?” Jennie asked.

He stared at her with dead-black eyes under the thick, low brows, and after a moment he said something guttural and unintelligible. Then he steadied the mare's head between his hands and made the same sounds again.

“She was bought for Christabel,” Nigel said, “but Christabel doesn't care to ride here. No Hyde Park.”

“And she must watch her complexion,” said Jennie. “I'm turning to boot leather before your eyes, you poor man.” At this moment four men came riding around from the front of the house, one on horseback and three on garrons. They stopped at the paddock gate.

Nigel went at once to meet them. “
Good
morning, Patrick! Come here, Jennie, will you?”

Patrick MacSween was the head keeper, a square-set, ruddy man, black-haired, roughly handsome. He had a very soft voice. He held his bonnet in his hand while he talked with her. “And how are you liking your new home, Mistress Gilchrist?”

“I love it already. There is so much to see and do, but I want everything at once.”

“Och, it will be even more interesting by and by, when the—”

“We must get to our business, my dear,” said Nigel like a middleaged merchant of a husband.

She smiled and nodded at the other three men, who civilly touched their bonnets. “Will you be wanting a dram?” she asked Nigel, in character as the merchant's wife.

“Don't hurry in; I'll speak to Morag,” he answered.

The visitors' horse and ponies watched over the gate while she tried to make friends with Dora. She thought she'd do better without Fergus; the mare seemed to have eyes only for him, and the way he observed everything, as unblinking as a cat, made Jennie self-conscious. But she didn't like to ask him to go away. She put him out of mind and held the halter with one hand, stroked the mare's face with her other hand, murmured love words of her own, and persevered until she felt the change come.

When she let go, the mare stayed instead of tossing up her head and wheeling around to run. She made small sounds in her throat, and Jennie kissed her between the eyes.

“Well, Fergus!” she couldn't resist saying smugly, and surprised what might have been a rudimentary smile.

“I'll bring you something next time,” she promised Dora. Adam nudged her. “You, too. You're a pair of poppets.”

Nigel and the men were talking in the office-study. So Nigel was actually at work as his brother's factor, the man of business. Serious matters were being discussed; she found herself tiptoeing reverently past the closed door and laughed at herself.

The tour of the house started in the kitchen and pantry. They were immaculate. The flagged floor was scrubbed, and the wooden work surfaces were scoured nearly white. The stoves were well blacked, and a peat fire burned in a clean grate. The blue and white delftware in a hutch cabinet reminded Jennie of home.

“Mr. Grant left if for you,” said Mrs. MacIver. “It was a wedding present to him and Mistress Grant from the Old Laird. You will be wanting your wedding china kept in the dining room.”

“I would rather eat from the delft. It suits the house.”

“Oh, but you'll have lovely china surely,” Morag coaxed, “to use when you have guests! Will that wagon
never
come? Och, that Coinneach has stopped too many times altogether.” Aili was bouncing up and down like a fat little water bird in anticipation of the wagon's treasures.

Mrs. MacIver took Jennie down to a clean, light cellar where the food was kept cold in a whitewashed buttery. A boy from the home farm fetched fresh milk and cream daily; cheese, butter, and eggs were brought as they were needed. All meats and vegetables came from the farms; game and fish were taken on the estate. They sent to Inverness for fruits, nuts, sugar and treacle, white flour, coffee, tea, and chocolate, and any other delicacies available.

Archie had laid down a selection of wines for a wedding gift. “A very fine start for your cellar,” Mrs. MacIver said, and Jennie nodded as if she knew all about wines.

“Mrs. MacIver, I would like you to choose the meals for the time being,” she said. “I'm most anxious to try everything Scottish. I have a good appetite, and so has the Captain, so you needn't be worrying about having food sent back from the table.”

Mrs. MacIver nodded austerely. Feeling more and more like the lady of the manor, Jennie visited the rest of the house, attended by the maids. The drawing room had only a few heavy oak pieces and a dismal painting, of a snowbound moor and mountains, over the fireplace.

“Your things will be making it so beautiful!” Morag promised.

There were three other rooms on the next floor, sparsely furnished. There was a bed in only one of them, a majestic construction. “That looks old enough for Mary, Queen of Scots, to have slept in,” Jennie remarked.

Morag giggled and then said reproachfully, “Och, the poor lady. Mistress Grant told me all about her.”

The servants' rooms were upstairs under the roof. Respecting the oocupants' privacy, Jennie merely glanced in and saw that the rooms were neat, made personal by a few little possessions, and were reassuringly airy. For summer weather, windows could be opened throughout. Mrs. MacIver's room was the largest, as befitted her position; Jennie saw a Bible beside the candlestick on the night table.

When the inspection was over, Jennie was ready to drop the lady-of-the-manor role. She was frantic to get out again. She would thankfully eat anything Mrs. MacIver chose to prepare; she didn't care if the girls kept their rooms tidy or not, as long as they themselves were tidy. She wanted only to be outside again under Scottish skies, hearing her black-bird and a Scottish skylark. She was going to climb the ridge again, sit on the fallen tree, and contemplate the moor again, the loch, and the hive of vitality below the crest.

The study door stood open, and the men were all gone, Nigel with them. She went to the kitchen to get a sugar lump for the mare, but before she could deliver it, the wagon had arrived.

Fergus was called to help the two men; the girls carried everything they could, and Mrs. MacIver appeared without being asked. Jennie would have gladly left everything heaped in the drawing room for the time being, but she found herself in the center of a cyclone; not a very fast cyclone, as nobody seemed to hurry, but a subtle, relentless one, accompanied by compliments and assurances in English and a great deal of Gaelic conversation spangled with laughter. Once she saw Mrs. MacIver smile.

Coinneach of the wagon, he who had stopped too many times altogether and gave off the fumes of it, was a tall man, and Mrs. MacIver had him standing on a kitchen chair to put up curtains and hang the mirrors and pictures. The carpets went down next. Then the Wedgwood and the tea sets were arranged on the dining-room shelves by Aili. She rubbed up the pieces of plate with a flannel before she set them out on the sideboard.

The drawing room blossomed, and the two girls flitted through it, humming with the ecstatic industry of bees in a rose garden. Everything left over was taken upstairs to one of the empty bedrooms; Jennie asserted herself about this. “I shall see to those things
later
,” she said.

She told Mrs. MacIver to give the men a good dram each, and she and the girls were to sit down to a good cup of tea. Jennie would have tea herself.

“In the drawing room, Mistress?” Aili said hopefully.

She'd have liked to have it brought outside the front door, but the girls would have been devastated, they were so anxious to have her in the drawing room. She let them settle her there with the tea tray and then told them to go and have theirs and take their time. She poured a cup of tea and took it and a piece of shortbread out to the parapet and hoisted herself up onto it. The worst was over, and she was glad of it. She swung her feet, ate and drank, and was happy except for wondering how she could tip the men. She wished that somewhere along the way she'd been able to change one of her sovereigns.

Luckily Nigel came riding home while she was still sitting on the parapet with her second cup of tea, and he went back to the kitchen to tip and thank them. “Give Fergus something, too!” she called after him.

She had known exquisite intervals as a child and even more intense moments as an adolescent. But after her father's death and the breaking up of the family and the loss of Pippin Grange, she had believed she was no longer capable of those spontaneous skylark flights toward the zenith. Those were symptoms of youth, like the flower texture of a baby's skin, a new chick's down, a puppy's soft fur. For her to experience them now, as a married woman, first astonished her, and then they were reverently accepted.

“Surprised by joy,” Wordsworth had begun a sonnet, and he knew whereof he spoke.

That first week she and Nigel covered much of the estate that lay east of the ridge. They rode on bridle paths through the woods from one section to another. Sometimes Archie joined them when he wanted Jennie to see a particular view, and he would display it as if he'd created it. At these times they'd be expected to stop at Linnmore House on the way home for a glass of wine, and Christabel always behaved as if she'd been dragged away from some great work of mercy or philosophical research. Aunt Higham had had a second habit made for Jennie when she realized how much she would be riding; it was dark blue kerseymere, very slim-fitting, with blue velvet collar and cuffs and a small blue velvet hat. The first time Christabel saw this she looked at it sidewise, as if Jennie were out in gossamer muslin with no underwear, and then said that they all smelled so strongly of horse it make her feel faint.

At night Jennie and Nigel played chess or cribbage before the fire in their room, or she read aloud to him, now that she had her books. He was always agreeable, no matter who the author was. He either fell asleep or pretended to, then suddenly rose up, removed the book, blew out the candle, and took her into his arms. She wondered if their child had begun yet. Surely when this miracle occurred in her body, she'd know it; she wished she'd asked Sylvia about this.

One afternoon they rode through the woods south of Tigh nam Fuaran along a rising trail to the mill. It was built astride the stream which, lower down, flowed so placidly through the pastures. Up here it furnished the power to grind all the meal used on the estate and most of the flour, except for the fine white stuff Christabel ordered from Inverness.

The miller spoke of that with subtle sarcasm. “They're saying the scent of yon bread fairly makes your teeths water. But you'll be knowing that already, Captain and Mistress Gilchrist. You're fresh from London, where all the grand things are.”

“There could be nothing grander than the porridge here,” Jennie told him. “Did you grind the oats for that?”

“Aye, Mistress.” He tried to look grimly modest, but he couldn't help a sparkle which suggested that when he used to be thin and nimble and young, he'd been quite a lad.

From the mill they climbed diagonally up the forest ridge and reached the carriage road that led west across the moors. The hills and the mountains were preternaturally clear in the bright easterly atmosphere. All blurring moisture and haze had been sucked up to return as rain, but one should be willing to pay for such a day as this.

Only an osprey fished the loch today, hovering on beating wings high above the broad reflecting glass. Then suddenly it shot downward and hit the water like a cannonball. It rose with a fish in its talons and headed off to the north.

Jennie applauded. “Poacher,” said Nigel, and laughed.

“Let's ride out on the moor,” she coaxed. “It's too beautiful to turn back. It may rain for a week after this.” She had seen the women loading their creels with peats, and she wanted to speak to them.

“We'll go a little way,” Nigel said. “But at five I am having a meeting with Archie.”

“About the new cottages? I won't let you be late for that.”

Birds flew up from the heather on either side of the road, and one sang loud defiance from a dwarf shrub. As they approached the women and children loading peats, close enough to hear their voices, Jennie slowed Dora, but Nigel speeded Adam to a trot.

“I want to stop!” she protested. “I want to meet them!”

“We haven't the time today, love. And we shouldn't be interrupting their work. The midges must be driving them mad.”

“There's not a midge out—”

“Not up where we are, but down there, close to the ground. Believe me, I
know
.” He put a hand over hers and gently shook it. “It'll be no kindness to stop them. They want to be loaded and out of there.”

“They're
loking
,” she whispered. “They expect us to stop. Nigel, they might be mothers or sisters or wives of your old friends.”

“I will see them later, Jennie dear.” He saluted with his crop as he rode by. Jennie held Dora back and made a point of waving, so they wouldn't think the Captain's wife had not wanted to acknowledge them.

When she caught up with Nigel, she said, “You could have called out to them instead of going by like Wellesley reviewing the troops and disapproving of them.”

He grinned. “If I was a bit stuffy, I'll make up for it later. I don't want to talk to any of them until we're ready to begin the improvements and I can tell them everything at once. Now they're bound to ask questions, and I don't want to give them time to discuss it. There's always one among them—I don't mean just among those women, but the lot—who'll convince the rest that the Laird has evil schemes in mind.”

His reasoning satisfied her. “I may be able to help when the time comes,” she said. “Talking to the women, you know. Morag can help with the language. I'm sure
they'd
like everything new for once in their lives.”

“If anyone can convince them, you can, my darling.”

Beyond the loch, the road ran in a pale stripe up a wave of land and disappeared over the top. To their right a track went off among the crags and wild growth; it dipped out of sight, but beyond it she saw, halfhidden by a rounded shoulder of gray rock, the gable and chimney of the cottage that stood alone over here.