Summer of Love (20 page)

    
"When will he be there again?"

    
"In two days … In the early morning."

 * * *

As Helen had told Mary, Andrew came down from the boulders and rocks
at the back of the glen when she called him. His face betrayed his apprehension of seeing her, rather than Helen. In turn, Mary’s face was stern, but her
eyes were fearful.

    
"Master Andrew, I want to thank you for all the food you gave Helen."

    
He only nodded in acknowledgment.

    
"But this isn’t the reason I came to see you." Her voice faltered.

    
"Did Helen tell you that I want to marry her? … I love your daughter, Mrs.
MacGregor." It was said firmly, with utter conviction.

    
Mary did not answer his question. "You must never see her again, master
Andrew… Never again."

    
Andrew’s stubborn expression revealed his defiance. "I want to marry
her… We will marry. You can’t prevent us."

    
"You must not… You cannot… She is your sister… You are my son."
She painfully wrenched each sentence from her throat with rising vehemence.

    
Andrew stared at her in disbelief. "You’re my mother," he whispered
hoarsely, and then he croaked: "No, no!"

    
Suddenly he turned and ran to his mare at the back of the glen. He jumped
on her on the run, instantly slamming his boots hard into her sides. The horse
reared frightened and then shot off. He galloped toward the crest and then
sharply tore the steed around, heading straight back to her. She saw him
coming, saw the cold hatred in his eyes, braced herself to be run over. But he
didn’t. He reined the mare brutally in front of her that she reared again,
screaming in terror.

    
"I curse you, woman. You abandoned me. I never had your love, and now
you take away the only love I have! You brought me nought but misery!" he
cried, his words echoing back from the crag above, and then he galloped off.

    
Each word cut deeper into her. How she had mourned for her baby son
herself! And now that son was cursing her. His harsh words kept ringing in
her ears. Her legs trembled from the delayed fright of seeing the horse aim
straight for her. She sank to the ground, weeping bitterly. Finally, the tears
dried up. Her pride of a MacGregor, her resolve to protect her family at all
costs, returned. She got up and washed her face in the water, feeling
suddenly years older. She would never tell her daughter of Andrew’s curse.

 * * *

Helen did not see Andrew again. Deep in her heart, she hoped that he would
come by and see her once more, dreading it at the same time. She searched
her heart. Did knowing that he was her brother change her love for him,
make her love him like a brother? But she knew, it didn’t.

    
Her heart constantly ached for him. She craved for the gentle touch of his
soft palms, his loving green eyes in whose depth she had lost herself so many
times. She found solace in daydreams, only to become even more morose
when the present reasserted itself again. Many a night she cried herself to
sleep silently, often holding on to Betty, desperately. The first time, her sister
asked: "Has mother found out about master Andrew?"

    
Helen nodded.

    
"Did she forbid you to see him again?"

    
Again, Helen just nodded. She didn’t trust her voice. Betty stroked her
back.

    
Almost overnight, she lost her color. The sparkle in her eyes was gone.
Often she did not hear when somebody spoke to her, and when she did, she
seemed to be coming from far away. She showed no interest in anything, not
even reading.

    
Mary watched her, worrying. Several times she spoke to her, tried to talk
sense into her, but the girl always closed up, unwilling to listen, her eyes, red
from crying, an accusing reminder of her deep hurt. One time, she lost her
patience and shouted at her. Without uttering a word, Helen ostensibly took
the tool for making fir candles and left the cottage.

    
Helen’s spirits sank deeper and deeper. Added to her loss was her remorse
of having given in to Andrew, of having sinned with her own brother. She
prayed for God’s forgiveness, but it did not help. She felt betrayed even by
God.

    
Some weeks later, she learnt that Andrew had left the castle and that the
earl had appointed a new factor in place of the bedridden Dougan Graham.
For a while, she clung to the hope that Andrew would write to her. After all
he was her brother. But no letter ever came, no message, nothing. At first,
she became resentful even toward him. If he did love her so much, why
didn’t he give her a sign that he still thought of her? But then she understood
that for him the discovery that they were born from the same womb had been
twice the blow. She finally gave up hope of ever hearing from him again.

    
And then came the news from Glengyle that her father’s brother, his wife
and her oldest daughter—Helen’s favorite cousin—and several other distant
relatives had been slain in a skirmish with Argyle cavalry. They had been
lured into a trap and when the MacGregor men refused to lay down their
arms, the cavalrymen charged them, killing all those who could not get into
the safety of the forest—men, women, and children. Her contempt of the
Campbells, held in abeyance and suppressed by her love for Andrew, burst
out with even greater vehemence, turning into hatred. At times it even
included him. She asked herself whether her love for him had been doomed
in the first place, even if he were not her brother. It brought her MacGregor
pride and fighting spirit to the fore again, and as autumn gave way to winter,
and the world cocooned itself into a mantle of snow for the long sleep to a
new spring, she shook off her depression. With renewed fervor, she began
to read. It took her mind away from the ever more confused love that could
not be. She even braved the heavy snow and went into Killin to borrow
books from the minister of the church. Often, she and Betty read together and
talked about it. Her reading ventured into anything she could lay her hands
on—history, politics, and travel in foreign countries. Yet at times she
yearned to discuss things with Andrew and a dull hurt reasserted itself.

    
Her relationship with her mother never regained the warmth it had felt
before she met Andrew. Where there had been filial love, there was sad
bitterness, and it made her feel guilty.

    
When they moved up to the shielings the following June, the memories
of their short summer of bliss hit her with renewed hurt, but tinged now with
the MacGregor blood spilled by the Campbells, and she felt empty for days,
until she willed herself to lock them away, never to be opened again.

9

Early June 1750, Andrew dismounted from his horse at the Bear in Killin
after almost four years of restless traveling. First, he had been simply running
away from himself, paying scant heed to where he went and what he
did—the more dangerous, the better. He was playing a game with death. It
started with smuggling French brandy from small Scottish ports into
England, cheating the excise tax collectors. On his last run they were jumped
by English customs guards. The leader of their gang got shot in the fray, and
Andrew made off with his purse—over four hundred pound sterling in gold
coins.

    
With money to burn, he went to London, then Paris. At that point he was
not running away from himself any longer, but trying to forget Helen.
Young, good-looking, an attentive listener, women in the Paris salons
flocked around the soft-spoken Scott who spoke French fluently with a
quaint accent. There was something mysteriously sad about him that
attracted the more mature ones, particularly those married to older husbands,
women in their late twenties and thirties. He went from lady to lady, always
coming away dissatisfied, empty, but at the same time hungry for more.

    
Restlessness finally drove him out of Paris. He traveled on horseback
through the Swiss Alps into northern Italy, on to Venice, Florence, Rome,
Naples, and finally Greece, only to go back to Paris in the end. But after a
few months there, an empty boredom caught hold of him again, and he had
outstayed his welcome in the Paris salons. He ended up as the go-between
for a group of French brandy smugglers. Working out of St. Malo, they
dumped their wares on the Cornwall and Devon coast. It offered a welcome
diversion, something with an occasional taste of danger and a quickening of
the pulse.

    
Finally, older and more cynical, he spent the last Winter in Devon in the
manor of the old Baronet Coville. He was hired as the tutor for the seven-year-old heir by the baronet’s young wife. He quickly discovered that Lady
Coville had other designs on him. Within two weeks, they were lovers. At
the end of six months she tried to snare him into a plot to speed up her
partially infirm husband’s death, so they could get married and live from her
inheritance. At that point, he thought it wise to disappear.

    
He had started to care for life again. The idea of emigrating to North America, Boston or Philadelphia, began to take slowly form in his mind. Having
largely lived off other people, mainly women, he had accumulated a sizable
purse of close to one thousand pounds, most of which was invested with a
reputable London merchant firm on which he could draw, should he need
cash. It would be enough to give him a solid start in the new world.

    
So this trip to Scotland was to say farewell, probably forever, while he
waited for the Spring storms on the Atlantic to blow themselves out. The
first two weeks he spent in Edinburgh, most of it reminiscing of his student
days at the university. Then he went north to Perth, through the mountains
to Inverness—he had never been there—and down the Great Glen to Fort
Williams and on to Argyle. He wanted to know if he still felt bitter about his
childhood days and discovered he didn’t.

    
The Highlands were full of reminders of the ravages following the
rebellion—numerous burned-out clachans, untended fields going to waste,
but life in the villages and cities seemed to be teeming. It was so strange to
find practically no Highlanders wearing a plaid, and all of them unarmed,
except in remote mountain regions. He discovered that this useful, healthy,
and highly adaptable form of clothing had almost completely disappeared
with the 1747 disarming act that also prohibited the wearing of Tartans and
Highland garb.

    
Inveraray had not changed much. It didn’t awake any feeling of coming
home, and he realized that it had never really been home for him. He felt
completely detached and looked at the castle only from the outside.
Searching his heart for any feelings toward the man—his father—who ruled
there, he found nothing, not even resentment, just emptiness. He had no
desire to say hello to anybody. In fact, with his neatly trimmed black beard
and the foreign clothes, speaking English, nobody even seemed to recognize
him, except for that old woman at the inn he stayed overnight.

    
She was sitting on a bench next to the hearth, stooped forward toward the
embers, and as he walked past her after dinner she grabbed hold of his hand
and murmured: "It’s master Andrew, isn’t it?"

    
When he bent down to see her gnarled face, his hand still in hers, she said:
"Don’t you recognize aunt Lorna anymore? … Come, sit by me for a while,
as you did so often in the castle kitchen when you were but a wee boy."

    
"Aunt Lorna," he whispered. "What an unexpected surprise!"

    
"You thought me long gone. They all do," she chuckled hoarsely, coughed
briefly, and spit into the embers. "So you went to see the world." She
touched his velvet jacket. "I always knew you would … and now you have
come back?"

    
"Only passing through. I’m going to America."

    
"That is a long way to go. Tell me."

    
They talked for a while about his travels, his plans. Then he got up,
holding her hand, and said: "It was good to talk to you, aunt Lorna. Keep
well. Are they looking properly after you?"

    
"I’m fine. Don’t need much anymore, you know. But you have grown into
a fine young man and from your looks, you seem to be doing well. God bless
you!"