Fiona, p.1
Fiona, page 1
Fiona
Catherine Gaskin
Copyright © The Estate of Catherine Gaskin 2018
This edition first published 2018 by Wyndham Books
(Wyndham Media Ltd)
27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX
First published 1970
www.wyndhambooks.com/catherine-gaskin
Publisher’s note: As this novel was written many decades ago, and takes place many centuries ago, occasionally terms of the times are used that would not be used today.
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Cover images from Shutterstock © Boiko Olha/Eva Bidiuk
Cover design © Wyndham Media Ltd
Titles from Wyndham Books by Catherine Gaskin
The Property of a Gentleman
Sara Dane
The Lynmara Legacy
The Summer of the Spanish Woman
A Falcon for a Queen
Promises
The Edge of Glass
Blake’s Reach
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This book is for Sol,
who gave me the place for it
Contents
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Preview: The Property of A Gentleman by Catherine Gaskin
Preview: Sara Dane by Catherine Gaskin
Preview: The Lynmara Legacy by Catherine Gaskin
Preview: The Summer of the Spanish Woman by Catherine Gaskin
Preview: A Falcon for a Queen by Catherine Gaskin
Preview: The Edge of Glass by Catherine Gaskin
Preview: The Wine Widow by Tessa Barclay
Preview: Lily’s Daughter by Diana Raymond
Preview: Wonder Cruise by Ursula Bloom
Prologue
The Scots call it ‘the sight’; some think of it as a curse, to others it seems a kind of gift of grace. I have it, and in my own heart I hold it a curse ‒ undeserved, perhaps, but there, like a birthmark, or a twisted body.
From the time I first knew of it, when I was nineteen, until now, at twenty-three, it has cost me my peace of mind, and three positions as a governess ‒ positions hard to come by for the daughter of an impoverished Scottish clergyman. So that was why I tramped the hills above my father’s little parish of Silkirk, on the Ayrshire coast in the late spring of 1833, unemployed, impelled by a restless energy, wondering what was to become of me, and what other crisis this unwanted gift of fate would bring to me.
I thought about it often now as I sat among the heather to rest on these long walks, watching the grey sea that swept down the North Channel from the Atlantic, past the top of Ireland and the Mull of Kintyre, watching the ebb of the tide and the shining miles of strand exposed, and then its slow return to the inlet of Silkirk. I kept telling myself that there would be a return from the ebb for me also. This could not be the end, here at Silkirk, with the journey hardly begun.
From the first two positions I had left with excellent references and there had been no problem about a new position ‒ just a matter of answering advertisements and waiting. That was because the ability to see into the future was an uncertain thing, not to be called up at will, not to be conjured up for one’s own good or gain ‒ it was just a flash of a coming event, and a warning, with no reason behind it. It had not then brought me into trouble.
I had been governess to a small boy when the first sight had come ‒ and it could, charitably, have been dismissed as sharp hearing, or a kind of animal instinct of things not being right. But it had saved a coach with my employers and their son, as well as myself, from plunging into a river from which the bridge had already been swept away by the rushing flood-waters of a cloudburst. The coachman had been pushing his team against the slashing rain, one lamp extinguished by water, racing to get home to a warm kitchen and his supper. Suddenly I had screamed for him to stop, had pounded like a madwoman against the carriage roof, striving to make him hear, and finally lowering the window and letting the rain pour in upon us all to reach around and somehow grasp his coat. We stopped in time; but the bridge had been at the other side of a sharp bend, and no one could have seen in that blackness that it was gone. They didn’t believe, either, although to make it seem right, they said they did, that anyone could have heard the changed sound of the water as it crashed over the debris of the bridge. My employers were grateful to me, but they didn’t talk about it, and I knew that from then on a sense of unease rested on them about me; but the coachman talked, and in the village the locals turned to look at me. There was something not quite right. I was an excellent teacher, my reference said, and good with children. But they sent their son to a preparatory school sooner than they had planned, and I think they knew a kind of relief when I was gone from their roof.
The next pupil had been a girl, Charlotte, a spoiled and pampered darling, saved by a sense of humour and a sweetness that no one, least of all myself, could resist. I was with her two years, mostly in the big house in Edinburgh, with summers spent at the family’s lonely retreat among the hills and hidden lochs and islands of the far Highlands. Many of the family came to that distant summer house, cousins, in-laws, grandmothers. It was a young cousin, seventeen, called Bruce, who had got out the boat for the sail he made on their own private loch whenever the weather would permit. This day, I remember, seemed made in heaven ‒ golden, calm, with soft clouds drifting before a barely perceptible breeze. Charlotte had waited impatiently, skipping from one foot to another, as Bruce readied that small craft moored at the dock. That was how I saw them from the windows of the drawing-room. Charlotte’s mother sat sewing and gossiping with Bruce’s mother, her sister. I remember I suddenly cried out, ‘No ‒ no, they mustn’t go! Something is going to happen! There’s going to be …’ I stopped. I didn’t know. I had the sight, but I saw imperfectly.
I remember also the sharpness of the tone that answered me. ‘Nonsense, Miss McIntyre! What can possibly happen? Bruce has been sailing all his life and on a day like this … They are quite safe. Calm yourself!’
But I didn’t. I remember running from the room, and the slam of the front door behind me, and the rush down the slope of the path slippery with pine needles. I remember, too, with awful clarity, the raising of the sail, and the way the playful breeze took it, and the gaily painted little craft standing out from the jetty. I remember my cries and shouts, and the breeze blowing them back at me, and Charlotte’s saucy wave, and the sun on her golden hair. The little waves lapped the shores and the pines sighed above me, and it was a happy, lazy, gentle day for sailing.
It stayed that way for an hour, and stubbornly I sat on the jetty and waited until the little boat should round the bend of the island, set secret and mysterious, in the middle of the loch. I was there on the jetty when the squall came, as it does so often in the Highlands, rough rain and wind sweeping in suddenly. They found the capsized boat quite soon, but it was a week before the bodies of Charlotte and Bruce were found at distant parts along the shore.
Charlotte’s mother wrote my reference, again an excellent one, but her face was turned away from me, as if she strove, in charity, not to let me see that in some way she held me responsible ‒ as if my vision of tragedy had somehow caused it to happen. Her hands and voice were cold in parting as she said goodbye, and made herself wish me good fortune. I had brought, she seemed to say, no good fortune to that house.
From the third position I was dismissed without a reference, and, I suppose, in justice, I deserved none. I had done no wrong to the family, but I had behaved in a way that no respectable young woman ever should. But I had been compelled by that same force that had occurred on the other occasions ‒ something so strong that I had had to act upon it.
Something I could not explain, and which could not be proved. So I was back home in Silkirk, answering advertisements for GOVERNESS WANTED, but getting no replies because that vital reference from my last employer could not be supplied. I walked, and waited, and fretted, and wondered why I had had the bad luck to be born as I was, with those terrifying flashes of the future, which threatened to destroy those they concerned, and perhaps me.
Three times I had looked into the face of the future, and I hated the power of this awesome gift.
One
Suddenly the rain was not the fine drifting mist that had veiled the hillside all afternoon, blotting out th
It took a time too, even after my knock, for her to come, although I knew she must have watched me from the single tiny window. Finally the door opened grudgingly.
‘Will you let me take shelter for a moment? I’ve a mile or two to walk before I’m home, and I’ve no thought to take a drenching.’ I said it confidently enough, because the tradition of hospitality among these people was as deep as their poverty. And she and I were not strangers to each other. On finer days when the cottage door had stood open and she had sat by it at her spinning, we had exchanged nods as I passed. Or rather she had returned my greeting with a long, vaguely hostile stare.
She said nothing now in return, just jerked her head to a stool before the smoky peat fire. But when I seated myself, and tried to shake a little of the wet off my cloak without spreading it about the room, she came to the fire herself and swung the black pot on its hook over the embers. Then she went back to her spinning-wheel close to the window, and bent about her task again in the wan afternoon light. The rest of the room was dark, and it was cold, despite the fire. There was nothing much in it ‒ a single table and a few stools, a row of blackened pots on the mantel, a pallet of straw on the hard-trodden earth floor, with a bundle of rags as bedcovers. I remembered that a few years ago, when I had sometimes walked this way, there had been a boy, her son, I supposed, who had tended the few sheep which provided the wool the woman spun and wove. There had been a barley patch and a few potatoes. The remains of a poor garden were still there, but there was no man about the place ‒ it had the look of it. The boy would be grown and gone, gone to Glasgow probably in hope of work and wages, exchanging one poverty for another. The woman looked old, but she may not have been so old; need and hardship lay in every line of her face.
It was an embarrassment, then, to see her take down from the mantel a pewter caddy, and measure with careful hand, the tea into the earthenware pot. For her, tea would be an almost unthought-of luxury, something she permitted herself a few times a year.
I made a gesture of protest. ‘No … please, no …’
She made a clicking sound with her tongue, slightingly, as if to remind me that she knew the ways of those better off than herself. ‘Dinna ye be the minister’s daughter?’
I nodded, shamed to think of the poverty that seemed to us to sit on the manse so heavily, and yet it was only the poverty of lacking new dresses and bonnets, and my father wanting books he could not buy. This woman seemed to put me in my place; I took the black brew in a tankard from her meekly. ‘Thank you, mistress.’
She took no tea herself but retreated again to the wheel, bent over it, her face turned away from me. For a time I felt uncomfortable sitting there while the silence grew thick between us. Even through the thatch I could hear the rain, and there was no excuse for going; I sipped the tea, not enjoying it, but knowing I had to drink it to the end. Hospitality had been offered, and must now be endured, no matter the cost. I only wished that her hostility had seemed less personal ‒ more against the world than against me. But in her few glances in my direction it was me she saw, not merely someone from a more fortunate world. I waited, but still the rain came down, and there was no decent escape.
After a while though, I retreated to my own thoughts, those useless and wearisome companions of these last months; I seemed imprisoned in the black hopelessness of them, and was tired of their repetition. The questioning never yielded an answer. My father just said: ‘Wait ‒ something will come.’ I hadn’t his patience, and his belief. For me, waiting was hard.
There was a reason, more subtle and never spoken of, other than the need to unburden my father of my support, for having to leave the manse at Silkirk. I was now, at twenty-three, already regarded by some as an old maid, and I had three pretty young stepsisters coming along, the eldest, Mary, being courted by an eligible young man from Ayr. For some reason, since I had come home, the courtship hadn’t been progressing very well. It wasn’t to be believed, of course, that he found me more attractive than that Dresden doll, Mary. I wasn’t the kind of woman that eligible young men paid much attention to ‒ hair too red, and apt to be wild, as was my tongue at times. It was true I had had, until last autumn, a suitor of sorts, a rather solemn professor at Edinburgh University who wrote scholarly letters, but hadn’t seemed able to make up his mind whether or not I would be a suitable wife for him. I know I was said by some to be too large, and certainly I towered over my stepmother and sisters. But my father said I had my mother’s eyes, the tilt of her chin and head; that seemed for him to make up for any other deficiency. But it still was no reason for a young man like James Killian to listen to me with more attention than he gave Mary; and to suggest that everyone should go walking on Saturdays when I said I was going alone. So now, on Saturdays when he was expected, I left the house before he arrived, and came back when he could be reckoned safely to have left. I was growing tired of my lonely meal of sandwiches eaten on the mountainside while my stepmother invented tales of my gay social life that took me elsewhere. I don’t think James Killian believed those tales. Each time he asked about me, and each time more searchingly, as Flora, our all-purpose maid eagerly related to me from what she overheard. All of us knew it would be better if I could leave Silkirk, and leave James Killian to Mary.
I thought now longingly of that last position, governess to the three rough-and-tumble little sons of a Glasgow merchant. I had enjoyed it while it lasted, and the family had been good to me. It was cruel it had had to end, by my own doing, that day last autumn in Kelvingrove Gardens.
It had been such a fair day, a day suddenly given back from summer, a Sunday afternoon with the sun warm, and still there was the scent of damp, rotting leaves. The sun had brought out thousands to stroll in the gardens, for the most part a fashionable crowd, with the light striking the velvet bonnets and the tall silk hats. The man who had set up his little rough-hewn platform at the junction of several promenades didn’t belong to the well-dressed crowd; his clothes were shabby and careless, his accent was working-class with the overlay of some learning upon it. I don’t know how long he had been speaking to the crowd that had gathered about him when I came ‒ there was no policeman in sight, but I supposed it was against the by-laws to hold meetings like this one in the park. But he was the kind who would never pay attention to by-laws. And what he had to say wasn’t for the ears of the Glasgow tenement dwellers either, from whom he was probably sprung, and who could do nothing about his cause even if they had wanted to try, which was doubtful. His audience was here, among the prosperous who did the trading and the moneymaking, who built the ships and made the contracts. As I remember every detail of that afternoon, I remember that man’s face ‒ pale and thin, and burning fire-like with his passion.
‘And will you not, my brothers, set them free? Will you not end this traffic in human misery ‒ end this shame set upon a great nation like a running sore? Who can expect the blessing of serenity when men and women are still born into a lifetime of slavery, still branded and sold from one man to another like cattle …’
A speaker in a park can never expect to have it all his own way; inevitably there are the hecklers, and he knew to expect them. Men who build ships, who deal in trade of any kind, go pale at the thought of anything interfering with that trade; I think there were some there who simply cried out in anger because one of this kind had come to disturb their comfortable, well-fed Sunday afternoon.
