by Fiona Monroe
Without another word, he squeezed her hand, leaned in, and placed a gentle kiss on her mouth.
The villagers erupted into cheers once more, and Bridie turned her head aside in confusion.
As she did so, her gaze fell suddenly upon the one person who was, out of all the gathered villagers, not cheering. It was a young girl, a slight, hunched figure, who wore no shawl over her cloud of fire-red hair. Her face was pretty, in a broad-boned, freckled way, but it was distorted by an expression of sullenness. But it was her eyes which startled Bridie. From below red, swollen lids, they bored straight into her, twin beams of hatred.
Chapter FIFTEEN
"Who - is the girl with the red hair?"
She asked the question tentatively, almost as something to diffuse the embarrassment of their being alone together at last in the pitch-dark, stinking interior of the blackhouse. Something to defer what she knew must come next.
There were still voices outside, though they were low and distant. Some of the older men had stayed out, gathered around the bonfire they had lit when the light at last began to fade, intent on talking late into the night. But the music and the dancing, which had gone on for hours after everyone had eaten their fill, was over at last.
Bridie did not know the dances, which were elaborate and energetic. She had never learned to dance at all, her father not having considered such an accomplishment to be of any use to a farrier's daughter. Here, the smallest children seemed to know the complicated reels and sets, danced to the sole accompaniment of an indefatigable fiddler. He was an ancient man with a face that might have been carved of peat, and Bridie could not imagine that he could ever have taken a lesson from a music-master in his life, but he wielded a surprisingly good-quality fiddle as if it were part of his own body, and brought forth from it an unending stream of lively melody.
Angus had tried to encourage her to dance, but she had no idea what she was doing and she was sure the other girls were laughing at her. She felt awkward and shy and foolish, whether she was stumbling around tripping over everyone's feet, or whether she was sitting by not being part of it. She hoped that Angus might notice her discomfort and put an early end to the dancing, but he had not. The fiddler seemed tireless, and so did the villagers. The red-haired girl flung herself about with the rest of them, hair streaming like flame behind her, skirts flying up to reveal stout, sturdy bare legs and shapely feet. Bridie took to watching her, and although the girl took part in every dance, her face expressed no enjoyment. She scowled, and danced relentlessly with pressed lips and a scowl. At least she did not look again in Bridie's direction.
Inevitably there had been jocularity and, she supposed, ribald comments when eventually Angus had declared that he, for one, was retiring for the night. She did not fully understand two or three of the remarks called out, though Angus cut short the hilarity with a single sharp gesture. He took Bridie by the hand and led her away from the fire, up the grassy slope towards the great mound of stone and straw that was his home. The sky was a delicate lavender-blue now and the moon shone, though she could still see no stars. Though she had no watch, and perhaps time meant nothing here, she thought it must be past midnight.
She followed him under the flap of hide into the smoky, cattle-smelling darkness. Only the very embers of the peat fire still glowed in the crude central hearth. With a practised jab of some kind of iron poker, and a huff or two, he quickly reawakened the flames.
Only then did he answer her question. "Oighrig Ruadh," he said. "Her father is Feargaidh am Fìdhlear. Why do you ask about her in particular?"
"She... " Bridie had been about to tell him how venomously the girl had looked at her, but she stopped herself. In truth, having to pause and gather the words to express this, gave her a moment to think about whether it was a good idea to say it at all. She would have to live alongside all these people, she supposed, and it would hardly be wise to begin by saying something uncharitable about one of them. And perhaps, Red Oighrig's ill temper had not been directed at her at all. Indeed, how could it be? They did not know each other, Bridie could have done nothing to offend the girl.
"She has very striking hair," she concluded, lamely.
He laughed, shortly, still prodding the fire to life. "She's named Oighrig Ruadh for a reason."
"Shall I do that?" Bridie said anxiously, stumbling forward in the gloom. "I should..."
"Aye." He stopped, and looked thoughtfully at the poker in his hand. "This fire is yours now, a bhean. I'm too used to fending for myself. "
He handed her the iron, as if he were handing her the keys to the household closets. Perhaps it was the Highland equivalent, for there were no locks here. Bridie knelt down and prodded gingerly at the peat, which shifted and disintegrated at the touch. She had never tended a peat fire before.
"Shall I make you some tea? Where is the kettle?"
"Bridie... a Bhrìghde Bhòidheach..." He put his hands over hers, gently stopping her ineffectual efforts at peat-stoking, and raised her to her feet.
In the low orange glow of the fire beneath them, his face was cast all in dark shadows.
"I drank my fill at the feast. I don't need tea. Bridie..."
She could not look up into his face, now that the moment had come.
"Our Lord says when they marry, man and woman are no long two people, but become one flesh. I'll guess that you know the verse."
Bridie whispered, in English - for she had never studied Scripture in any other language - "Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, for this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?"
"But when he said that, it was in the context of an argument with some Pharisees, who were trying to trick him into contradicting existing sacred laws about divorce. Our Lord did not mean that a man and woman have to 'cleave' before they want to, married or no."
Startled, she did look up. "Are you... don't you want to?"
He was silent for a moment, a moment so long that she felt her heart began to sink through her body. It was as she had half-feared since the moment they had set eyes on each other two days before; he did not like her, not well enough to want to consummate the morning's ceremony and make their marriage real. She looked away, mortified.
Then she felt his hands on her arms, gentle but firm.
"More than anything," he said. "But I thought you might like to wait until we know each other."
He seemed to be waiting for an answer. Bridie was in a whirl of confusion. It had not occurred to her for a moment that her wedding day would not end in her wedding night, with all that this implied; and she had been, under every other sensation, in a state of tension between terror and excitement.
"I married you," she said, slowly. "I chose to do that. I meant what I said when I made my vows this morning." She wished she could express herself more fully, but she was still struggling with her limited command of the language. Pride forbade her to lapse into English. "St Paul said - I'm sorry, I know the verses only in English - 'the wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife'."
"Have you," he said in a low amused murmur, "every single word of the Good Book stored in that beautiful head?"
"I... have never had anything else to do on the Sabbath. My... memory... is fair."
"Your memory," he repeated, affirming that the word was correct, "is extraordinary. I will kiss you, a bhean, and see if you like that, for now."
She closed her eyes and tried as hard as she could to shut out thoughts of someone else as Angus covered her mouth with his. This was no fleeting peck, as he had bestowed upon her in front of the villagers. After one soft, yet lingering kiss while they still stood apart, he drew her up against him. His mouth was hot and suddenly fierce.
He tasted, he felt, very different. She was enveloped in strength, gathered up in it, held so firmly in arms that were like
tree-trunks. He smelled, not of spice and tobacco and liquor, but of peat-smoke and hot skin. Just for that moment, she was thinking of Lord John as she noted that difference in her mind. But in the next moment, she was lost in the sensation of urgent desire, surrendering to it and him with an astonished realisation that she could, that she was allowed to.
"Aye," he said, releasing her eventually and gazing closely into her face. "You like it."
#
She awoke, thinking it was still night. All around was warm and comfortable darkness, and she let herself become slowly aware of the extraordinary feeling of skin against her skin. Angus was lying full against her, his arm still over her breasts. They had both, in the end, taken off all of their clothes, and discarded them she knew not where.
She shifted. She felt sore, tender, not only where her maidenhead had torn but also along the inner parts of her thighs and even her stomach muscles. It was a good feeling, curiously.
"Madainn mhath, a bhean."
She hadn't realised he was awake. She smiled shyly, though she supposed he couldn't see it, and then her smile was captured by his mouth as he rolled over onto her again.
"It's not morning," she said.
He reached across and pushed at one of the wooden folding doors which enclosed what he called the leabaidh-dhuinte, 'closed bed'. She saw that the small bedroom beyond, though windowless, was suffused with light that must be coming from the main part of the house. Shut in the leabaidh-dhuinte, they had been in their own private world.
She had seen nothing the night before. It had been all sensation, in the smoky darkness. Now, in the half-life, she could see the thick curls of hair across his chest, and the ropes of muscles bulging in his arms as he leaned over her. And his eyes, full of warmth and desire.
She had never even yet laid eyes upon a manhood, though his had filled her up until she had felt she might burst open with the strangeness and sweetness of it. And she felt it pressing again against her thigh, hard as hot stone, as he eased the cover away to expose her breasts and took one nipple into his mouth.
The feeling of that was so delicious that she gasped out loud.
Then she squealed and snatched the quilt back. With no warning, a face had appeared round the leather curtain that separated the bedroom from the main room.
It was the red-haired girl whose baleful looks had troubled her the night before.
She had tied her startling hair into pleats against her head, and changed into a dark woollen garment, so that she looked more sober and subdued than she had the night before. Her expression, however, was still as intense.
"Good morning, Aonghais," she said, coming into the room. "Your breakfast is nearly ready."
She spoke using the plural pronoun, and Bridie was not sure whether this was to show respect towards Angus, or to suggest that breakfast was meant for them both. From the way that she was fixing Angus with her stare, and completely ignoring Bridie, she suspected the former.
Angus began an exclamation that he choked off, then said, "In the name of all that's holy, Oighrig. What are you doing here?"
"Making your breakfast." It was definitely Angus alone that she was addressing. "It's my morning."
"I have a wife now. She can make my breakfast, when we're ready for it."
"You don't want me to see to you anymore?" Oighrig stood in the middle of the floor, some kind of toasting-iron still in her hand, her lower lip protruding.
He grunted in what seemed to Bridie like exasperation. "We'll talk about it later. Go and finish whatever you're doing and leave us be."
The girl stared for a long moment more, then turned on her heel and stalked out.
Angus might have asked for privacy, but he did not resume his kisses. Bridie felt horribly self-conscious now, and they both lay in silence listening to the clatterings-about going on a few feet away beyond the leather curtain.
When Oighrig started singing a melancholy air in a loud, slightly husky but rather sweet voice, Angus sighed and climbed out of the bed.
For a moment, Bridie was able to see him all, in his magnificent entirety; though dimly, as hardly any morning sunlight penetrated the windowless room. Then with a practised swing he swathed himself in the same length of plaid he had dropped to the rush floor the night before, secured it with his fine-buckled belt, and ducked through the partition without even glancing back at her.
She divined that he was displeased, and it was difficult not to worry on a visceral level that it was she who had offended him somehow. Perhaps she ought to have got up earlier and started breakfast herself. It was what her father had always expected of her. But she had no timepiece of her own and she had seen nothing in the way of a clock here, so it was impossible to know when she should rise. Indeed, enclosed in the leabaidh-dhuinte in a windowless room, she did not even have the light of dawn to rouse her.
She climbed out of the box-bed, wrapping the top quilt around herself to hide her modesty should anyone else barge in, and picked up her white muslin gown from the day before. She was dismayed to realise that it had lain all night on the rush floor, which she could not help feeling could hardly be clean. It was impossible in the gloom to ascertain whether it had suffered any damage, so she draped it carefully over the handsome wooden chest in the corner and found her own trunk, which was a poor cheap old thing in comparison. In this battered box she had packed all the clothes she owned, which were not many, and at the bottom hidden the three books from Dr Menzies. She unfolded her house dress, the one she wore in the morning for housework, and her apron.
The top of the box-bed did not reach to the high pointed roof of the blackhouse, so there was a clear gap above it through which smoke from the peat fire, and voices, carried from the main room. As Bridie dressed herself as hastily as she could, without mirror or basin or any other convenience, she could hear every word being spoken.
"I've made porridge, and bannocks, and grilled some salmon from last night if you want it," Oighrig was saying cheerfully. "I've been up to the field and milked Beasag already. Here you are."
"Oighrig, Bridie will do these things from now on."
"Well she hasn't done them this morning, has she? Where would your breakfast be if you'd left it to her? I've been up for an hour at least. I went up to the field to milk the cow when the dew was still thick on the grass. See how wet my skirt is. If you'd left it to your wife, you wouldn't even have milk to eat your porridge with. You wouldn't likely even have porridge. The fire had gone out!"
"Thank you for making breakfast, Oighrig, and for fetching the milk. Now leave us in peace."
By the time Bridie hurried through, more or less dressed, Oighrig was just departing through the outside door. The girl turned to give her a baleful, scornful look, and distinctly tossed her head.
Angus was scowling as he settled himself down, as if this was quite the thing to do, on the floor by the fire. There was a rough woollen blanket laid over the rushes, that looked as if it might have been woven by one of the villagers and was, she supposed, put there for the purpose.
Bridie surveyed the arrangements. Oighrig had left a pot of bubbling, spitting porridge hanging over the fire, and a round, sooty loaf of the unleavened oat bread they had eaten at the feast, warm and freshly baked on a platter next to it. There was also, as promised, a plate of salmon and a pitcher of milk. Oighrig had also laid out a bowl, a plate, a knife, and a curious wide spoon-like implement made of carved horn; only one of each, as if Angus were to be breakfasting alone.
She did not want him to think that she was any less competent than his servant, or whatever Oighrig was, but she had little idea how to handle this primitive cooking apparatus. The porridge looked ready, and would surely burn if it were left over the heat for much longer, but how was she to remove it? She glanced uncertainly at Angus, who was still frowning with downcast gaze, and made one attempt to lift the pot by its hanging chain.
She yelped and dropped it immediately. The chain had conducted the heat of the fire all the
way up, and was burning hot.
Her cry roused Angus, who turned his glowering look on her and, taking a rag cloth from the dresser, expertly swung the pot away from the fire and deposited it on an area of bare earth next to it.
Bridie rubbed her hand on her skirt, trying to hide the tears of pain and chagrin that had sprung into her eyes. She ladled out some porridge into the single bowl and handed it to him. He had sat down again on the rug, and took the pitcher of milk and poured some over the top of the porridge. Bridie wondered if she ought to have done that for him. He started to eat with the horn spoon.
After a few mouthfuls he looked up, as if surprised to see her standing there. "Aren't you hungry?"
"There's no... There wasn't a bowl for me. I thought perhaps you eat first, and I eat later. I thought it might be your custom."
With another sigh of what sounded very like exasperation, Angus put aside his porridge and stood up again to go to the dresser. He opened one of the cupboards below the shelves to reveal a stock of crockery plainer than the fine china on display above, and took out a bowl and a plate.
She felt foolish as he handed them to her. It would have taken very little wit to deduce that the household tableware was probably kept in that cupboard, but she had not known what she was supposed to do.
"We have no custom that says a wife must watch her husband eat, and starve in silence," he said. He still sounded disgruntled. "Sit, a bhean. Have some porridge."
She glanced at the wooden settle, and at the armchair which was clearly his, then knelt on the rug near him, folding her skirts under her legs. She did not want him to think that she was in any way above crouching on the floor to eat, though it seemed so strange. They might have been savages in a jungle hut.
The excitement she had felt upon waking in his arms was quite gone. He seemed remote now, brooding, wrapped in thought. He finished the porridge in silence, a silence which she did not have the confidence to break, then said, "I'm going down to look over the rigs this morning. I've been away for a few days, the weeds have probably grown. Bring me some lunch at midday."