The Runaway's Gold (4 page)

“Are you sure?” I pleaded, Daa's eyes boring into me, an icy-cold silence willing me on.

I glanced quickly at John—surely he, always the guide amid me Daa's violent storms, would tell me to stop. But as our eyes met, he winced. And then he looked away.

And so I grabbed her snout once more, clamping me shaking fingers around her moist nostrils and delicate, bony jaw as Daa's powerful hands held her body and struggling legs in place. Again she thrashed and twisted, fighting to push her head free, but this time I tightened me grip.

At first I squeezed softly, and then harder and harder, me pink palm just wide enough to seal off her air and clamp her jaw closed. Her nose was wet, fast, desperate—and as she struggled against me, thrashing left and then right, her haunting brown eyes searched mine. Then, finally, her chest lay eerily still.

I released me hand and stood, me entire body trembling, the imprint of me palm still pressed into the cloth covering her
snout. And then I slowly backed away, so stunned by what I had just done it was all I could do to take another breath.

Beside me Daa sprang to his feet, dragging the dense, lifeless body into the back room and hoisting her with his powerful, booming arms into the box bed Catherine shared with Vic. Then he covered her with their quilt, wiped his hands on his breeks, and rolled down the sleeves of his gansey.

“Peterson, is that you I hear?” he called in a slippery voice as he reached for the door. “What brings you by in this God-awful gale?”

Culswick Broch

t wasn't the death of the ewe that seemed strange that night. Like all Shetland lads, I had slaughtered sheep, swine, fowl, and even whales stranded helpless on the shore. But those killings had been with a purpose, kept at arm's length by the quick stroke of a sharp blade. Fast, direct, deliberate.

I looked first to Gutcher, then Aunt Alice, and finally John, but none would meet me eyes. Gutcher settled in by the fire, fishing line gathered in his lap. Aunt Alice stood staring at the floor for a moment, her long, bluish fingers still covering her mouth. Then she let out a faint gasp, reached for her knitting from the basket in the corner, and sat down.

That was when I saw John snatch the remaining piece of cod from the table and slip out the door to the byre.

When Peter Peterson burst across the threshold, a rush of wind came with him, blowing out the lamps and causing a change in air pressure that sucked another blast of wind down the vent in the roof and across the fire.

“Aye!” he cried, slamming his forehead on one of the rafters as he made his way through the cloud of ash. As the debris settled, his hunched frame towered over Daa's. “Where is she?” he growled, searching the room with his eyes.

Daa scratched his head and shrugged. “If you're meanin' yer lass Ann, who's always moonin' over young Christopher here, we haven't seen her yet today.”

Mr. Peterson's face turned a deep purple as he raised his fist in the air. “It's the ewe I'm after, you fool, not me Ann!” he roared, spit flying as he spoke.

Daa told me to
, I reasoned, the warmth of the ewe's breath still in me palm.
He couldn't do it himself
. A rush of bile rose in me throat as I backed slowly into the shadows of the far wall. Snuffed her out, I had. All for him.

Quietly as I could, I kicked open the door to the byre and disappeared inside. It being March, there were at least two feet of straw bound with peat mold and muck on the floor, making headroom scarce, even for a boy me size. By locking the cows inside for the winter, we collected the muck we needed to mix with seaweed and spread on the fields come
spring. It was wet and heavy, with a stench so powerful it made me eyes water.

Grabbing the box lantern hanging from the rafters, I made out Catherine and Victoria. They were hovering in the corner, the now orphaned lambs weak in their arms. The harnesses for the ponies we no longer had swayed in the wind from the hook by the door. They banged against the wall near the shadows of the three emaciated cows leaning against the driftwood slats that divided their stalls. Their fodder had run out weeks before, and the bones of their once grand frames pierced sharply through their coats. They had survived near starvation before, but this time I had me doubts. When they could no longer stand, we would hoist them by ropes to keep them up—a gruesome sight I had already witnessed three other winters of me short life.

“I hear Mr. Peterson's voice,” Catherine whispered, cradling the wet ram lamb in her arms. “Come to collect his ewe, has he?”

“Aye,” I said, spitting on the floor.

“What did Daa do?”

“Hid her—in the ben.”

“Lor'—she must be frantic looking for her lambs. Seems strange we're not hearin' her through the wall.”

I thought of her limp body lying in me sisters' bed. “Resting, she is,” I said. “All worn out, I expect.”

“What will we do if Mr. Peterson comes in the byre?” Victoria asked. “There's no place to hide.”

I shrugged, looking quickly about me. “Where's John? He'll know.”

“Slipped out the back door,” Catherine said. “Throwing another linksten over the thatch, I suspect. We'll be lucky if any of the roof survives this storm.”

I remember the wind being so strong, and I so thin, that it was all I could do to push the back door open with the lantern in me hand. I pushed wildly through the blinding sheets of sea spray lifted from the waves and dragged ashore, calling for me brother. Pools of water had formed around our croft house, and before I knew it me rivlins, the sealskin shoes we Shetlanders laced below our ankles, were soaked clear through.

Snuff her out!
Daa's words turned over and over in me head. I paused by the wall of stones we called a planticrub, built to protect me late Midder's cabbages from the unforgiving summer wind. It was there, as I thought of her kind, warm hands I'd never touch again, that me tears began to mix with the rain dripping down me forehead. Then I retched on the mud. She, the one person who protected us from Daa's rages. Who, with but a light touch of her fingers to our cheeks, let us know we would survive another day.

I thought of her grave, a common mound next to William's behind the Kirk—our family, like most, too poor to pay for a proper gravestone.

“Midder, what have I done?” I cried into the storm.

I was hungry—so hungry. We all were. And now Daa had
gotten us into another one of his messes. In this of all years, when we hadn't even the smuggling to rely on.

Ah, yes. The smuggling. In the eyes of the Crown, Wallace Marwick was a merchant of the highest stature, known for his trade in dried fish, timber, and coal. But he hadn't become the wealthiest man in Shetland by following all the rules. With the high duties charged by Her Majesty on imported items such as gin and tobacco, he found ways to hide them in his trading ships. Then, after officially registering the legitimate goods with the Customs House in Lerwick, he'd cruise to our end of the island to bring ashore the rest. In fact, there wasn't a crofter—man, woman, child—who hadn't hauled at least a cask or two of smuggled Dutch gin in the dead of night from a Marwick packet, and me family was no exception. Even Reverend Sill, the annoyingly pious leader of the Kirk and Daa's greatest enemy, was known to chide his parishioners not for gulping a dram of smuggled gin, but rather for not blessing it before it was swallowed.

Trouble was, last September, while barrels were being unloaded in the middle of the night, one of Marwick's packets was seized by Her Majesty's Revenue Men—the officers whose job it is to see that the Crown's import duties are paid. And when the Revenue Men found the barrels loaded with tobacco, Marwick's captain was arrested and sent to Lerwick Prison.

“There'll be a dry spell ahead,” Daa had warned, “while mighty Marwick defends his good name.” And how right Daa
had been. Already it had been months since any of us had caught sight of a Marwick packet hovering in the distance, the much-welcomed lights flashing twice from her bow at nightfall letting us know a shipment was coming ashore.

I dropped me face in me hands, knowing what was ahead. From May through September, John, Daa, and the other men of the parish were bound to Marwick, fishing cod with horsehair lines and baited hooks in the deep seas west of the island. Day in and day out, recording their catch by slicing barbels from the end of each fish's chin and collecting them in a tin box, knowing all the while that half the catch was Marwick's as rent for our croft, and the rest sold to and cured by Marwick at the price of his choosing. The cod banks having failed three out of the last five years, any hope of paying down even part of our debt had long since disappeared.

“Thief, he is,” John muttered each spring when Daa signed for the lines, hooks, and other provisions before heading to sea. “Makes enough to line his own pockets while bleedin' the rest of us dry! Marwick's store, Marwick's prices, even if you can find better in Scalloway.”

It had been generations since any crofter on Marwick land had seen cash for his pay, but Wallace Marwick wasn't the only reason for John's hate of the sea. Our brother William was also to blame. Two years before, there had been talk of a growing herring market. “They sell it cheap in the West Indies—feed it to the slaves,” John had told me, his freckled face beaming one day after returning from Skeld. “Last year the demand was so
high they couldn't keep up, so Lerwick merchants are taking on new men. They say after a year you can earn enough to outfit your share of a sloop!”

But you had to be fourteen to sign on, and John was two months too young. So it was William who found a spot on a half-decker out of Lerwick, and the family rejoiced. Then the early fishing failed, and in September, there was the Great Gale. All hands were lost on more than twenty boats, and none of us speaks of the herring anymore.

From that day on, John's fear of the deep waters was like no other.

It was a crack of thunder that startled me back to the present, and when I looked up, a streak of lightning slashed the sky, showing a strip of thatch on our roof blowing like the flag atop a mast. Then I turned to the scattald and scanned the blackness until another flash caught what I thought could be the outline of John racing in the direction of Culswick Broch.

Culswick Broch—our broch—was a tumbled fortress from ancient times perched on the hill above our croft. There are loads like it in Shetland, built by a mysterious civilization that had long since disappeared. Once as tall as eight men standing one atop the other, it was a massive structure of pinkish-red stone with views for miles in every direction: Straight ahead, the looming rock island that is Foula. To the north, the neighboring parishes of Walls, Aithsting, and Sandness. To the southwest, far across the North Sea waters, the faint outline of Fair Isle.

For thousands of years Culswick Broch had towered atop our hill, its roof finally collapsing when Gutcher was but a lad. What was left was a crumbling, five-foot-high, circular wall I couldn't see over and an enormous triangular lintel stone still in place above its only entrance.

Through sheets of rain and sea spray I sprinted. I scaled the hill dike around the grazing land startling clusters of sheep hovering in the storm, then continued up the rough, drenched path I had traveled so many times I could have done so blind. At the broch's wee entrance I shoved the lantern ahead of me and scrambled on hands and knees through an icy puddle of scree.

There, just inside the wall and illuminated through the driving rain by the weak light of me lantern, stood John, pulling something from a crack between two of the stones.

He snapped his head around at the light and slipped a hand quickly behind him.

“Chris!” he said, his eyes darting left and then right. He was still breathing heavily from his sprint up the hill. “Are you alone?”

I laughed when I saw him, his head just inches from the mysterious carving of the tree on one of the stones of the wall, remembering a time not long before when I had surprised him in that very spot, his lips pressed flat against Maggie Moncrieff's.