Jennie About to Be (38 page)

“I'd hate that. Well, I won't have to see it, will I?”

He didn't answer but began packing the food and the pan. Again she had that sense of a door slammed shut between them and bolted, not ever to be opened again. Yesterday in the space of ten minutes he had become not only an exile but a fugitive, while she had been at Linnmore only a few weeks and would be returning to her own people and her own country.

She was ashamed of her flippant comment. How could he bring himself to be even civil to her? She stiffened her jaw to underline her determination to be as self-reliant and undependent as possible; he would never be able to say that she had held him back. If her boot soles wore through, he would never know. If her heels blistered, she would lean that much harder on her stick but never moan. And by an absolutely inhuman effort of will she might be able to stop having noisy nightmares.

Tramping behind him, she moved in the prison circle of her thought as he must be moving in his. The sunny hollow was always waiting like a punishment cell, and Nigel was still in it, even though he must have been taken away by now, and a letter would be on its way to his mother.

She searched for something immediate to obsess her, and found it, as one always could. There was nothing, she reflected grimly, like worrying about the body's inner workings to take one's mind off the larger issues.
They
became the larger issues. Her menses, for instance. How would she deal with something which up to now had been only a nuisance (she thought nature had evolved an abominable system for females) but never a serious problem, if it happened before she reached Fort William? She couldn't sort out dates in her mind; everything jumbled together.

She'd have to tear up her lawn chemise and borrow Alick's knife to cut up her scarf. In the meantime she hoped that short rations and nerves would keep the flow back.

The sun rose in a sky made of fire opals, and the earth steamed as the mists burned away. The trail went over the hillsides above the trees for the most of the morning. They surprised a ptarmigan, which thrashed around in the heather to divert them from her nest. A blue-gray mountain hare ran before them for a while and then plunged off the track and disappeared in the undergrowth. She envied him; in spite of winged and four-footed predators, the hare was at home.

The wind came up with the sun. They had to lean into it sometimes, and she felt as if she were pushing her head and shoulders with all her might against an invisible but overpowering force. But she kept her lips tightly shut so she couldn't gasp. The cold tore through her clothes, while the sun burned on her head.

They went down over a broad slope of scree, slipping and sliding, using their sticks to brake themselves. Once she almost went headlong and Alick thrust out his arm and it held her like an iron bar on a gate.

“Stay behind me,” he commanded. It was the first thing he'd said since they started out at dawn.

On level ground at the foot, a stream ran among stones, and they ate and drank here, still with no conversation. Around them the mountains formed a threatening circle, as if they were biding their time in a monstrous cats-and-mice game.

She bathed her windburned face. Her nose and cheekbones felt afire, and on Alick the crop marks were almost masked by his burn. If her lips were sore, his must have been more so, after having been split by a blow and bruised by a gag.

But she was more concerned with the diminishing loaf and cheese. How long could they keep this up on so little? Already her clothes were feeling looser on her, and Alick's cheekbones were sharp enough already. The growing dark beard made his face look even thinner. If he were alone now, the food would last him twice as long.

Stop that!
She rebuked herself.
No more ifs. All you can do is pretend you're not very hungry. A person can survive a long time on a few crusts if there's plenty of water to drink, and this land is overflowing
.

The afternoon walk was easier as they followed the shallow stream through a long valley. The wind was gentler down here, the sun's strength weakened by gauzy clouds. There were grassy stretches that were heavenly soft underfoot. The sound of the brooks and the calls of wheatears and plovers, all familiar to her, were company of a sort.

Yesterday's sense of continuing nightmare was gone, replaced by desolation. They seemed to be going deeper and deeper, farther and farther away
from
everything rather than
to
something. Yet the man knew where he was going; he certainly didn't intend to walk out his life in the wilderness; it was not wilderness to him.

How quickly one accepted, after the first frightening disbelief and rejection; one began to accommodate to the disaster, to try to live with it, sealing it off as oysters sealed off the intrusions into their shells. Except, of course, that there was no way of making a pearl out of what had happened yesterday.

She wished she could speak to Alick, but if he answered at all, it would have made her more lonely than before.
Someday I will be remembering all this in a different place, a safe place
, she comforted herself,
a long time from now, and I will be trying to recall details. I should pin my mind on them now to keep me from going mad
.

Melodramatic. Worthy of a Gothic heroine lost in one of Mrs. Radcliffe's castles. Jennie Hawthorne would not go mad. Beneath her grief, her guilt, and the still-smoldering outrage at being conspired against and lied to, she never doubted her instinct and capacity for survival.

So she looked around her as an act of faith, forcing herself to take in sounds, scents, colors. Almost instantly a stone rolled under her foot and she went down. Alick was well ahead and didn't notice, or was purposely ignoring her. She broke into a sweat, sure she had sprained her ankle; salt water ran in her mouth. But she'd only turned it, and after a few limping steps it was all right again. She watched where she stepped and used her stick more.

Hills were now closing the way ahead. The stream divided murmurously around boulders and rippled over pebbly bars and eventually flowed into a small loch in a deep, narrow glen. The loch lay like a shard of wet glass, streaked in dark and bright greens with the reflections from either side. Late sunshine stabbed into it, illuminating a group of deer drinking on the far side. Alick didn't go in their direction, but off to the left and up to rising ground. A pair of ospreys swept the sky in searching circles, sunlit birds whose calls took her back to that other loch.

Using their sticks, they climbed a track across an almost vertical grade. Their destination was another cave; this one was deeper, a natural chamber in the hillside, opening off a sort of terrace. The path went past the entrance and out around a jut of rock higher on the hill.

They pulled up masses of heather and bracken for their beds, hers well back in the cave and his near the entrance. He built a small fire of dry twigs just outside the mouth; Parlan had given him his tinderbox as well as his food. He broiled slices of ham in the pan, and they wiped up the fat with bread. No hot food had ever tasted so good before, and Jennie had a hard time remembering she'd intended to have a delicate appetite. Afterward he fetched their drinking water from one of the inevitable springs. This one bubbled out of the ground on the other side of the path, just below the lip of the terrace.

They sat for a little while on either side of the dying fire, cherishing it while any sparks of life remained. They were still silent with each other, but relaxed with the food and the prospects of a night's rest. At least Jennie was, and she hoped he was. Sitting only these few feet from her, he was as distant as those southern mountains that now glowed carnelian in the last sunlight as if they were burning from within. If
he
was burning within, his self-control was as inhuman as the mountains. Sooner or later he must flame out against her, and she wished it would happen and be over with.

The peaks dulled to a dead russet and retreated into the oncoming dusk. “Do we go that way?” she asked diffidently.

“We do.”

“From here they look completely impassable.”

“They are not.”

She took a sip of water. “Have you walked to Fort William by this route many times before?” She felt an idiotic desire to laugh at herself.
And do you visit London often, Mrs. Gilchrist?

He surprised her by answering freely. “Aye, and to other spots in between. You could go to Fort Augustus if you wanted, and there is a road even to Mallaig. That is hard to find, but it is there.”

“But you said no one uses this trail now. Why is that?”

“There are other ways, better ones. It was an old way for the whisky smugglers. They gave it up when the excisemen discovered it.”

“So it's known,” she said, with a prickle of alarm. “Mightn't someone think of you using it?”

“No, they would not,” he said, “and if they did, still no one would come after us.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. She knew he was being evasive, and she would not pry, but she had no intention of letting him escape into silence again as long as there was a chance of getting words out of him, any words.

“Aren't you afraid they might expect you to go to Fort William?”

He moved uneasily. “I think they will be looking for me at Mallaig. My mother came from there, and I have people on Skye.”

But they could still be watching at Fort William. She locked her cold fingers together.

Alick said unexpectedly, “My grandmother forbade her son to marry on the estate, for fear it might be his own sister. My grandfather was a man of great appetites, you see, so they could never be quite sure.”

“How did your parents meet then? Mallaig is a long way from Linnmore.”

“They met at Fort William.” No details.

Her next question surprised even her. “Alick, were you ever married? Or are you leaving anyone behind?” He was mute and motionless in the near dark. She was appalled by herself, then thought defiantly:
If it angers him enough so he'll break out against me, so much the better
.

“Whar has that to do with anything?” he asked flatly.

“Nothing, and it's no business of mine. It was inexcusable of me to ask. I apologize.” She went outside and walked a short distance along the upward path. She was still squeezing her chilly hands together. So she had separated him from more than his home; like a great natural disaster or an enemy ravaging the countryside, she had blown his world to bits. Never mind what had happened to
her
; she had merely repeated the crime, innocently or not.

She wanted to run back to the cave and accuse herself to him before he could say anything, even if so doing she'd go to pieces and thoroughly disgrace herself. But at least there would be no more concealment between them.

Or course one couldn't do it. If only for good manners alone, one would carry on as Alick chose. He wanted to get to Fort William and free himself as quickly as possible, with no frenzied scenes on the way; she was burden enough as she was.

She forced herself to breathe deeply and concentrate on externals. The scents of the hillside as it dampened with dew, the call of night birds, and over all a silence so entire that she could hear fish jump in the invisible loch below.

When she had control of herself, she returned to the cave. He was not there. In the half-dark that passed for night in the Highland summer she saw that he had dropped his plaid across her bed of heather and bracken. She put it on his. When he came back, she was curled up with her back to him. She heard him sigh as he lay down.

She awoke to footsteps. At first she thought Alick was outside and just coming back to the cave, but then she realized she was hearing hooves as well, the muffled leisurely tread of an animal on the path. Coming up. Coming nearer, with a faint creak of leather, a jingling; a horse blew softly.

She sat up, hugging herself together; she wanted to whisper to Alick but couldn't unglue her lips. She forced her hands loose and crawled over to him, for the shelter of his granite composure.

Before she reached him, she knew he was shaking in long, convulsive crescendos like a man with the ague. She felt the vibrations and heard the fast, shallow breathing through his nose, as if his mouth were clamped shut to keep his teeth from chattering, and he couldn't get enough air. Then and there she knew herself to be disintegrating, teetering dizzily on the brink of the abyss. Involuntarily she resisted the lethal impulse to go over.

She pressed herself against Alick's back, her cheek against the rough wool, the scent of it and him in her nostrils. She put her arm around him, not knowing whether it was for himself or for her, only that she was terrified and if
he
was, they could only huddle together and wait.

The tremors that shook his thin, hard body were so strong that they shook her also, and she hung on all the tighter. She heard muted footsteps now; the man must be leading his horse up the incline. Either he was an innocent traveler, or he was someone who knew where Alick must be and was coming straight to him like a bee to the hive. And Alick was afraid; he was seeing the gallows, and the noose hanging, and himself being dragged to it.

The steps came nearer. The horse blew again; the creak and jingle were louder. There was the faint scrape of a boot sole on rock.

The steps slowed as they approached the cave mouth and stopped. She saw nothing against the night sky, but she heard the animal shake its head the way Dora did.

Alick had stopped breathing, under her hand she felt his rib cage swell with the held breath. She held her own.

Shadows passed the opening, filled it up, blotted out the stars; she smelled horse, and tobacco scent exuded from wool clothing. Then the stars returned a few at a time as the shadows moved on. The footsteps died away on the upper path.

She released her breath and her arm at the same time. She was still afraid; if the man had come for Alick, he would not chance entering the cave in the dark, but could be waiting somewhere around the side of the hill to ambush them by day.