Coronach, p.39
Coronach, page 39
She gave birth kneeling, her back arched against him, a squalling rush of blood and mucous.
“ ʼS e caileag a thʼ innte,” he said.
A girl. Born alive out of the privations of winter, kicking now in protest at the cold breath of the dawn.
She remained kneeling, and he held the child he would never touch again until she passed the afterbirth, then she lay back and closed her eyes, taking the slight weight on her breast. The lamp still burned, and the fire, pale in the growing light.
“I will get up later,” she said, and lay breathing the damp, piercingly sweet air. “I will get up, a chiall.”
She continued to murmur to him although she knew that he had gone, until drifting on the tide of exhaustion she slept, drowning in the cold, bright sea.
By ten o’clock the brightness of the dawn had given way to rain. He sat in the estate office listening to its rhythm against the opened windows. The last snow melting, the rivers now in spate, the furrows turned to mud beneath the plough: the long continued drenching rain of winter.
The room was unheated, and consequently damp: it was also small, concentrating the mind upon the minutiae of management, and cluttered with the debris and impedimenta of generations, the shelves lined with ledgers in green and brown leather or bound in marbled covers, the paper spotted with mildew, the table littered with candle stubs, goosefeather quills, a tinderbox, and a flask of the local whisky, recently confiscated from one of half a hundred nearby stills.
He sat in the darkness of the spring morning, the pages closely written in his own hand lying on the table before him.
Farm 7th. Glenkill. This Farm is occupied at present by 3 Tenants and extends to the No of 62 Acres, 30 of which is arable and the remaining 32 Acres of very fine pasture interspersed with a great deal of shabby wood which tho it takes up some of the ground, yet affords much shelter, and natural Grass that at an average its value may be taken in with the ploughed land. These 3 Tenants sow yearly 12 Bolls grain and hold 6 horses, 12 Milch Cows, 12 Yell do./ and 2 Score sheep for which they pay of yearly Rents £8.4.3 d. Sterling.
Farm 8th. Monnymore. This Farm is occupied at present by 6 Tenants and Extends to the no of 265 Acres....
He drank deeply from the flask. He had drunk this particular water of life since his childhood, for sustenance, for warmth, for oblivion, and its fiery assault on an empty stomach was welcome after the night. The rain swept the courtyard below, and the wind stirred the papers slightly. He turned the pages. Backwards or forwards, it made no difference. This tune was always the same.
15thAugust, Falkirk tryst. Small cattle, no money offered and many left unsold.
30th September, Falkirk tryst. Lean cattle very stiff to sell. Prices offered very low and as such would not remunerate the rearers of stock.
19th October, Falkirk tryst. High prices for sheep. The numbers of cattle from the north unusually short. The losses sustained by north country dealers are immense…some sales are effected but at considerably lower profits than previous markets.
The litany of disaster continued like a melancholy chant.
1763, December (cont.) Mortality in the Parish unnaturally great.
1764, January. Sickness and mortality esp. among the old, much beyond the common average.
February. Two deaths reported of absolute starvation. Much sickness prevailing.
March. Disease, the result of insufficient and bad food, is committing great ravages. Deaths frequent among the old, bloody stools always present.
April. Purpura present. They are attacked with languour, pain of the arms, then ulcers, generally on the legs and body – There is also pain in the mouth and throat, swelling of the limbs with discolouration. Number of deaths averaged 40 in a population of 1,650 (est.)
The people are in very poor circumstance.
There were steps in the corridor, and a flickering light: Ewen with a candle.
“It is as dark as the Apocalypse. I do not know how you see what you are doing.”
“I don’t need to see it. I have it all by heart.”
Their conversations now were almost invariably in English. Ewen’s enthusiasm for Gaelic had waned with his relinquishment of responsibility, and French remained a language of intimacy and pain.
They sat in silence: Ewen studied him. Unkempt, unshaven, eyes bloodshot: whisky on the table. As if sensing his disapproval, Malcolm slopped some of it into a dirty horn cup and drank it.
“You begin early.”
He said nothing, feeling in his pocket and pulling out a roll of tobacco tied with tarred twine. The sgian was in his boot: he drew it and cut off a lump and began to shave it into shreds with the razor-sharp blade.
“What do you want?”
“Only to see you. I do not see you often, Malcolm. I merely wondered how you were.”
He rose, leaving the journal open on the table.
“You’d better look at this, since you’ve come.”
He stood by the window, the greyish light across his face. His writing was almost illegible, perhaps deliberately so.
“What are these figures?”
“Mortality among your cattle. Deaths in the townships. Births. One this morning, female. Illegitimate.”
“Yours?” He smoked and watched the rain, reminding Ewen of the intractable silences of his youth. “I understand these liaisons are necessary to you. I find them deeply sordid nonetheless.”
“This is the only prick of mine the world sees. What I do with the other is my own business.”
He returned the roll of tobacco to his pocket and continued to stare at the rain.
“Do you not consider marriage? I do not mean at this level of society.”
“Who would have me, for Christ’s sake?”
Ewen’s pity deepened, and his sense of futility. The morning was stale with it.
He laid his hand on the journal. Like the room, it smelled of mildew.
“What am I to do about this?”
“I will tell you, when I know.”
And he heard himself say humbly, “Thank you.”
I had had the dream again, as I had dreamed it at irregular intervals since coming to Scotland. It was always the same house, neither Evesham nor Ardsian, and they were always the same darkened, secret rooms in some hidden upper region. Sometimes I was alone, searching in the shadows for revelations, diaries, a lover’s explicit letters, which would cause me unbearable pain when I found them: sometimes the dream was deeply sexual. It was sexual now. He was leading me up a darkened staircase, with a hand of cold, raw strength... and I knew him, although he never turned his head or spoke. We climbed in shadow, and came not to those shrouded rooms but into a painful intensity of light, and he pulled me against him, although a bright mist obscured his face. And I fought him and woke, crying, in the first glimmer of the dawn.
It was the fourteenth of May, almost Whitsun: two years had passed since he had quit Evesham. And I knew with an utter conviction that he was dead, and in the guise of this dream had come to me one last time and, rejected, had finally left me.
I rode to Ardsian: it was a little after ten. I walked into the house uninvited and unannounced, up the stairs, along the gallery. Knocked, opened a door. The sunlight blinded me. The room, the library, was long and luminous, with windows from highly polished floor to ceiling... Ewen was there, seated, with papers on a table and the radiance of the morning behind him, and he was not alone. There was a man with him who seemed all darkness, dark clothing, dark hair, whose face I could not see and did not need to see. I knew who he was.
I stood with my hair clubbed untidily back from my face, in my shabby, stained riding clothes, gaunt and graceless and as taut as a wire about to snap, and Ewen said gently, “Come in, my dear. You do not know my factor.”
I said, “How do you do.” I could not offer my hand, because Ewen held it, and the man to whom he had introduced me made no attempt to approach me, or to offer his.
He said, “We have met.”
His eyes were some light colour, green or grey, I could not determine which; nor had I been able to distinguish it in that drifting, glittering snow, that hallucinatory twilight.
I said, “I think not.”
An interminable time passed: it seemed we stood in crystal, in that bloodied, drifting snow; then Ewen said, “My dear, if you will do me the kindness of waiting in the garden, we will take coffee presently. Please excuse me.”
He was gone, leaving me with that still, silent shadow against the light, who was watching me with eyes I could not see while motes of dust, instead of snow, drifted in the broad bars of sun between us, and somewhere a thrush was singing in yet leafless branches.
He said, “I see you have recovered your wits, from which you seemed briefly parted on the occasion of our last meeting.”
I stared into the light for a moment, then I walked out and closed the door behind me. Ewen was not yet in the garden. I sat, shaken, on the stone bench by the fountain, and eventually he came, wearing his coat and his shabby boots.
“This is an unexpected honour.”
“Thank you for receiving me with such grace. For not making me appear a fool before your man.”
Something in my turn of phrase seemed to amuse him. “I should not want you to feel that you must be invited. I would prefer you to use the house as if it were your own.” Then, “What is troubling you, Margaret? What has brought you here?”
And I wept: I wept so easily now. Perhaps he recognized in it and in me something that alarmed him.
“He is dead―”
“Who is dead?”
“Achill. I dreamed of it.”
“You have never said his name,” and I thought it had brought something to his mind, some fragment he would share with me.
“You remember him?”
“What I remember I have told you.”
The thrush was still singing, and at the bottom of the garden a wild cherry, white with blossom, dropped its petals on the barren ground.
“Will you tell me something, Margaret?”
“Yes. Whatever you wish.”
“Why did he leave his house, and why did you leave it, for this?”
“He loved me.”
“Who could not love you, Margaret?”
“I could not... love him. I was frightened. He had―”
Whatever he saw in my eyes confirmed what his instinct had told him, and he said nothing for a while, because everything was understood.
Then he said, “Is it possible that what you feared was not him, but yourself?”
“No. That is not possible.”
He sat for some moments, deeply reflective.
“I cannot judge him. I can only pity, and attempt to understand.” A long pause, as if he considered what had been or should be said. “From time to time, in desperation... I have taken lovers. One was half my age. I imagined it was possible that she could love me, that she would not find me ridiculous... or disgusting... and for a time I believed I loved her. And there was some light in hell― and I was in hell then― I had been in hell many years. And I thought... if his life has been like mine, and you were that only light... you would understand, and forgive us both.”
Then he rested his hand gently on my sleeve, so that it should not be intrusive: I could ignore it if I wished.
“Can you forgive him?”
“No.”
“One day you will.”
“I cannot. He blighted everything... and by what right?”
“You have not loved, so you cannot understand his suffering.” The wind moved among the cherry branches, scattering the petals like snow. “Where is he now?”
“I told you. He is dead.”
“He is not dead. This is mere fancy, mere distress. Do you know where he has gone?”
“No.... The Havana. I don’t know.”
“You know the regimental agent?”
“Yes. Mure, Son, and Atkinson, in London―”
“Why do you not write to him? I will have it carried for you to Edinburgh, for the post.”
“I cannot.”
“So,” he said. “C’est finis. Malheureux comme les pierres.”
And I never knew which one of us he meant.
In the evening Ewen sat staring at the lucid sky, and phrasing in his mind the elegant courtesies of the letter he believed time had granted him the wisdom to send. After several attempts he finished it, signing himself Ewen Hilaire Gunn Stirling, of Glen Sian, and folded it; and wrote on the cover, To the Garrison Commander, the Havana, in the care of Mure, Son and Atkinson, London.
He drank brandy and water and watched the sun set, and the sealing wax harden on the letter. Then he tore it neatly in half and burned it, and wrote instead to his son, informing him that his season of dalliance in Edinburgh was at an end, and summoning him home.
And so he came, James Gordon Gunn Stirling, twenty-three years old, a fair-haired chameleon of charm and immense insecurity, with an accent that drifted from French to Scots as he himself had drifted, belonging nowhere. Born in Nice but possessing no European sensibility, and reared in the Highlands, where he had acquired no sensitivity to Gaeldom, he had passed the years from nine to eighteen in France and emerged neither corrupt nor innocent. He had travelled on the Continent for two years thereafter, funded by a dying vicomtesse as a gift of love to his father, knowing that Ewen could not afford this, the accepted apex of a young man’s education. With the Peace of Paris he had kept his deferred promise to his father to return to Scotland, and had glided without distinction through two years in Edinburgh in the blue and maroon gown of a student. Fifteen pounds a session, board, lodging and tuition, from November to April: he left eagerly, with no interest in law, halfway to his degree. He had accomplished what he had intended in Edinburgh, and he planned to return as soon as the opportunity presented itself to claim his prize: the hand of an Episcopalian heiress three years his senior whom he had cheerfully seduced after ascertaining the extent of her dowry. He had neglected to tell her of his family’s chequered history of Jacobitism, and he had renounced Catholicism out of boredom― he saw these as minor considerations, so minor that he did not find it necessary to inform his father, and when he did perceive the necessity, he found he had not the courage.
And so, for a time, chameleon-like, he altered himself to blend with his surroundings, playing the part his father wished: the adoring son, rapt with delight at his homecoming and eager to learn the affairs of Glen Sian. And he played another part, almost to perfection, when gossip and judicious enquiries had afforded him all he wanted to discover of my past, and my own inheritance.
“Are you the beauteous Margaret, of whom my father has told me so much?”
“Your father exaggerates, if indeed he said it.”
“I like a rose with thorns,” he remarked with a little, knowing smile.
So he began his campaign.
It was a silly, shallow interlude, and ultimately wearying. As his pursuit of me intensified, so his father withdrew and observed it and us, as it were from a distance, with a cynicism I had not seen in him before. His coolness hurt me, and I saw him very seldom throughout the summer. I saw only James.
I rode with him; I walked with him; I fished the peat-stained, icy waters with him. I played the spinet, out of tune and out of practise, and he played the flute in the white summer evenings. Once, in a secluded corner of the garden, he attempted to make love to me, but I found him curiously asexual, and after a few desultory kisses he seemed to concede that I was equally unappealing, so our relationship became casually filial. His fumbling, boyish ardour had neither frightened nor disgusted me, and evoked no memory... I merely found it, and increasingly him, an encumbrance of which it was suddenly imperative that I be freed.
I lived in a miasma of disapproval. My father’s eyes burned me like acid, burned the perfume from my skin and the pearls from my ears, burned what was feminine and renascent in me and left me scarred by his contempt. My aunt, enigmatic as a stone, commented neither upon his behaviour nor my own, but she watched the emergence of the woman from the gaunt and slovenly chrysalis of the girl, and assessed her strength. Even James, for a strange, brooding interval, left me alone: our marriage had become, from a matter of crude speculation in Glen Sian, almost a foregone conclusion, and perhaps even he was aghast.
In the last week of September I wrote to Ewen: such formality had descended upon our relationship that I felt I must speak to him. I received no answer, and chilled by his silence I rode uninvited up to Ardsian. There was fog on the road, and a clinging quietness that persisted throughout the house. I went to the library, where James was sometimes to be found lounging, and pushed open the door: at the end of that lightless room, where the sun had streamed through glass on a May morning, the casements stood open. The air was intensely cold.
He was sitting at the table, coatless and smoking: the scent of the tobacco in the damp, cold air was curiously sweet. Behind him, as in a milky sea, the world lay shrouded and indistinct.
“Whichever one you want, he is not here.”
He was writing, a difficult script that might have been any language, even some private shorthand: the sound of the quill seemed unnaturally loud. Eventually he paused, consulted one of the piled sheets, wrote again and looked up.
“Unless your business is with me?”
His eyes, which had watched me through that glittering, drifting snow and the glare of spring sunlight in this room, were a stark, clear, disconcerting green. They could not be mistaken for any other colour; nor could their expression be misconstrued.
