Jennie About to Be (47 page)

“My things must be nearly dry by now,” she murmured, and went outside, holding the plaid around her shoulders. Everything was still a little damp, but she was much too warn in the plaid. Her clothes could finish drying while she wore them. But she didn't put on the stockings.

He broiled the trout on a hot flat stone, and they had two apiece. He was so pleased with himself that he was talkative and described how he had cut the slender ash sapling for a pole, cut a bit of rag from his shirttail for a lure, and raveled threads from the same place, tying them together to make a line.

“And we'llnot need to save for tonight,” he said. “I'll be catching more.”

“May I go down to the loch with you?” she asked meekly. “Or will I spoil your luck?” The instant she said it she thought:
I've already spoiled his luck. His life
.

But he didn't hesitate. “You are welcome to go. It is quite pretty down there.”

“Will your knife cut hair?”

This time he was surprised. “Why?”

“Look at mine! It's worse than ten birds' nests. I've no comb, and even if I could unsnarl it, I've lost my pins. If you could cut it off here”—she touched the nape of her neck—“the worst tangles will be gone, and I can comb the rest of it with my fingers.”

“I will try,” he said soberly, “but it will be more sawing it off than cutting.”

“I don't care, as long as I'm rid of it. It will only get worse and worse until it's impossible to clear.”

“Come out here then.”

She sat on a rock with her head tilted forward, and gazed at her clasped hands in her lap while he lifted the heavy mass off her nape. He was surprisingly delicate about it; his knuckles brushed her neck only once.

“Don't be moving now,” he warned her. “I will be pulling a little.”

“I shan't move.”

“It's curling around my hand like a live thing. It's not wishing to die. Is it sure you are?”

“Yes, I am sure. Please, Alick.”

Holding the thick swatch tautly away from her with one hand, he cut across it in small, cautious motions. She felt one release after another, until her nape was completely out to the air. He blew on it and brushed away some short loose hairs. “There,” he said. “After this I can be setting up as a lady's maid.”

“You have a better touch than most of them,” she said. She ran her hands over her head. “Thank you! My head hasn't been this comfortable since the first day they made me put it up. What can I do for you? Can I wash your shirt in the loch this afternoon?”

He laughed. “I have nothing to wear in its place. And if I am needing to make a new line, clean threads might frighten the fish.”

S
HE SAT
on the warm sand, burrowing her bare toes in it, sifting it through her fingers. She was watching Alick dress the trout he'd caught from the outer end of a long natural jetty of rock that projected a good way into the loch. While he was fishing, she had woven a small mat of coarse grasses, on which he laid each cleaned and washed trout.

Unconsciously she traced her name in the sand, suddenly saw it, and inspiration sprang up full-blown. She didn't give herself time to think twice.

“Alick, there's something I can do that will help you in America.”

“What would that be?” he asked skeptically. He straightened up and carried the handfuls of entrails up to the edge of the trees and laid them on the turf beside a log. “A wildcat and her kittens were sunning there this morning,” he said. “She will be back to see what we were doing here.” He returned to the water and knelt down to wash his hands.

“I wish I could see her,” she said enviously. “Do you think she robbed your snares?”

He shrugged. “Herself or a fox. They are welcome, as long as I can be fishing.” He folded an end of the mat over the trout and set it in the shade of the rocks. Then he sat down to clean his knife.

“This is what I was thinking I could do for you,” she said. “I could teach you to read and write. In a few days you could learn a good deal. You already have the words, you told me so yourself.”

He began scouring his knife clean with sand, as intent on it as if he were all alone. She pushed on. “You will be able to sign your name and not make just a mark. And once you know the letters and their sounds, you can read almost anything.”

“I will not be Alick Gilchrist in Fort William,” he said bluntly, keeping at his work.

“If you have to write a name there, you can write anything you choose. But we'll start with Alick Gilchrist.” She smoothed a place, and wrote his name. She thought he was obstinately refusing to watch until she glanced up quickly and caught him looking from the corner of his eye. She grinned.

“Come along, Alick. You do it now.”

There was a suspenseful interval when she was afraid she'd gone too far, a woman condescending to his ignorance; irreversible blow to his male, and Highland, pride. Then he wiped the knife on his breeches and returned it to the sheath on his belt. He knelt by his name and drew out the letter A below the one she'd made. “That is
A
,” he said with dignity. “I am knowing that much.”

“Then we're off to a flying start,” she said briskly. She named each letter as he drew it. They repeated the process three times, until he spoke every letter without prompting and was writing his name with some ease. She commenced on the rest of the alphabet, and by the end of an hour he was almost letter-perfect; she began putting words together, and then simple sentences. He was so quick that she ventured into the inconsistencies of the English language. This could not be memorized in one session, even if she could think of everything at once. But the moment of triumph for them both came at the end of the engrossing afternoon when he wrote, “I have caught five trouts,” and signed his name.

He stood back to gaze at it, his head cocked, and then looked at her, not quite smiling but with a fresh lustre in his eyes. She was immensely proud that she had been able to get through to him. Wisely she didn't say anything about what they would do tomorrow.

They had stopped at the spring on the way down; it gurgled out of the earth above the hardwoods and fed a little brook that ran down through the grove to the loch. They left the pannikin there, and on the way back Jennie filled it, and Alick gathered a bonnetful of young nettle plants to boil as greens for their supper. After they had eaten their trout and drunk the last of the water in which the nettles had been cooked, Jennie took the pot back to the spring to rinse it out and refill it. She washed her face and cleaned her teeth with a twig of bog myrtle.

Walking back up to the cave, she felt a rare peace. She had a stomach full of good hot food; yesterday she'd had a bath even if by accident; she wore no stays; her skirts were comfortably short, her bare feet delightfully free in brogues, and her head delightfully free to the breeze. She ran her fingers through her hair again and again, enjoying the looseness and lightness. It was curling around her neck and ears, and she remembered what Alick had said about the rest of it curling around his hand like a living thing that did not want to die.

What had he done with the hair? she wondered. Thrown it deep into the cave, perhaps, where it might be discovered by some later traveler and mystify him till the end of his days. And where would she be by then? And Alick?

The evanescent peace had been purely physical. Nothing could quiet the mind but the narcotic of exhausted sleep, and then one sometimes dreamed.

They sat outside the cave in the long late sunset and afterglow. The moon appeared, and the sun went down red behind the mountains, which he named aloud; the recitation sounded like a litany or a prayer. The loch was, appropriately, the Loch of the Speckled Trout.

“A man knows he will always be eating here if he can fish.”

“I take it this isn't the territory of the dead exciseman.”

“Not for anyone who is not knowing about him. I think myself he does not travel here. It is too far from where he was murdered.”

“How long will he walk, do you think?” she asked. “Until he is avenged?”

He shrugged. “I have heard it said that such souls are not knowing they are dead until someone makes it clear to them, but who will be doing that?”

“In the”—she was going to say “English”—“in my church they have rites of exorcism. ” She didn't add that her father had told her it was all foolishness. “How long will it take us to reach Fort William from here?” she asked.

“We will be walking for a day, sleep one more night, and go into Fort William the next day. We are staying here two more days, over the Sabbath. On the Sabbath no one stirs. On Market Day, the crowds will help hide us.”

“I can't believe that we're almost there.” She was tight with dread, and England seemed farther away than ever. Alick's lips were thinned and pale in his beard, and his eyes were fixed on space, unseeing, she was sure.

“Yes, we are almost there,” he said. “And then it is over. However it will be going with me, you will be on your way to your sisters.”

“No! I
told
you that if they take you, I speak for you. If I don't, they will think you murdered me on the way.”

“And how will you be explaining that you ran away with me if you don't tell them that I stole you?”

“That,” she said haughtily, “is a story for the costly advocates to invent.” It was a brave but senseless flourish, and she knew it, and he smiled at her statement as if at a child, as if he had gone beyond fear. But when—
if
—they walked him white and alone to the gallows, how would it be then? Only a saint could go up those steps in his chains as if he had already passed into another world. Even Jesus had cried out on the cross.

It was one thing to play the fiddle on the gallows like the legendary MacPherson, quite another to be resigned to death when you were innocent, because you believed there was no justice for you.

No. No! I won't have it! Nigel is dead, Archie is cowering in Linnmore House, wallowing in wine and self-pity, and Christabel is rejoicing at having got rid of three of us at one blow. She's seen Nigel into his grave, and she'll make a pilgrimage to see the hanging so she can he sure Alick's well and truly gone. If she can't see me dead as well, she can be sure I'll never come back over the border
.

Jennie's belly caved in when she thought of those contemptuous hands laid on her books, her family keepsakes, her few jewels, the miniatures, the old robe and slippers—darling Ebony—how that woman would sneer.

Alick said urgently, “You are not to be afraid.”

“I'm not afraid; I'm furious. I wonder if Christabel has already gone through my belongings. She would leap at the chance to pry.”

“I am sorry.”

“Why? It's not your fault!”

“You will be sending for them surely.”

“Who is to force her to have them packed and sent?”

“Are you grieving for
things
when your life is safe?”

It was a gentle reproof, and she was furiously ashamed. But the outburst of hatred for Christabel had been like a cold sea wind blowing away a plague-carrying miasma. She said strongly, “There will be a ship for you, I know it.”

“It is almost midnight. I am ready to sleep.”

The next two days moved slowly on one plane and sped on another level. They were two more days without traveling, and with plenty to eat, but at the end Alick and Jennie would set out to keep a tryst from which there could be no turning back.

They lived on fish, greens, meat, and Alick's herb teas. The snares yielded a cock grouse and a hare before the wildcat could get them, or the fox that Jennie heard barking at dawn; the high sharp sound rang with echoes from slope to slope. They saw eagles, one of which could have been the bird that rode the wind past them in the flooded corrie; a pair of ospreys appeared to fish the loch. They were like familiar spirits to Jennie, and she tried to see them as an omen of good luck. Deer drifted across the pastel slopes beyond the loch.

One could see the fair weather as another omen. It meant that they could stay out of the cave all day, and they spent hours at the loch, writing in the sand. She showed him the difference between script and print, small letters and capitals.

“Now I will be able to read my name on the advertisements in Fort William,” he said.

“Would they be printed and posted so soon?” She tried to sound hardheaded. “Especially if they look first at Mallaig? Besides, you are not going to be Alick Gilchrist in Fort William, you told me. You had better be thinking of a new name.

“Tomorrow,” he said, unwilling to part with himself yet.

When he was not fishing or working at his lessons, they gathered all the broken wood they could find and carried it up to the cave, both for their own use and to leave for the next corner, Alick cut new ash sticks for them.

They talked in the evenings, or rather she did; he asked her questions about her growing up and her sisters, and she suspected he was keeping her going so she wouldn't question him. He was free to be sunk in his own thinking while she diverted herself with spoken memories. But often he surprised her by an observation, or even laughter, which showed that he had been listening after all. It was no hardship for her to run on about Pippin Grange. It lessened the distance between her and her family and kept her from dwelling on the interim perils.

She expected to sleep badly on the last night, but she had got used to the comfort and safety of the cave, and during the evening she had told him how she would like to go to Switzerland, where Ianthe was. “So you will be thinking of me there when I am thinking of you in America,” she said, defying him. She
had
to be right about a ship for him; she went to sleep convinced of it, and never knew if Alick lay awake or not. As usual he was gone when she woke up, and the plaid was tucked around her.