Little Bird Flies

by Karen McCombie

  From what little I have so far heard and seen, I would suppose Miss Tulliver is not held in particularly high regard by the Palmer-Reeveses, but it is quite a shock to hear Mr Samuel talk so bold on the matter. In fact, I am so startled at Mr Samuel’s disclosure that it overshadows the sharp stab of disappointment at his mention of staying but a short while on Tornish.

  “They do not treat her at all kindly?” I ask, watching as Miss Tulliver tilts her head back and laughs at something foolish and pleasing that my silly William has said to her.

  Perhaps this is why Miss Tulliver said she envied me yesterday. She saw that despite our small home and careless state of dress, me and my family are hearty and happy, while she plainly is not…

  “The family and their staff treat the little dog with more regard than Miss Tulliver,” says Mr Samuel. “And they do not treat it with much regard at all. But now come; I wish to draw you again, Little Bird. Can you sit, perhaps, on that rock there?”

  I do not move. “What do you mean, draw me ‘again’?” I challenge him.

  Smiling, Mr Samuel flicks to an earlier page in his book … and there I am, and there are my sisters, just a few flicks and gestures but clearly us. The figure crouched by the fire with a kettle is Ishbel, while Effie and I, hair loose and long, stand sentinel either side of the fireplace, as if we are mimicking the china dogs on the mantle. Mr Samuel must have drawn us unnoticed as he sat on the settle yesterday afternoon!

  “Do you like it?” he asks.

  “Of course!” I tell him, and before another second passes, the page is neatly ripped from the book and passed to me.

  “A gift,” Mr Samuel says simply. “Now, please do me this favour, Little Bird, and sit over there so I can capture you while that pleasing cluster of clouds is in my eye-line.”

  Oh, my … I am to be drawn, I have been drawn, by an artist!

  I do hope the darting breeze cools the pools of red I feel burning on my cheeks as I slip atop the boulder. Pulling my feet up beside me, I place one hand on the hard surface to support me, while my weaker left hand lays in my lap, resting on the large pocket of my apron wherein lies the gift of the picture I have just been given.

  “Will this do?” I ask shyly, wishing I had tied my hair neat this morning, so that it would not dance and slap around my face and shoulders.

  “It will indeed,” Mr Samuel says. “A little bird with nothing but an empty horizon behind…”

  “But, sir, it is not empty,” I reply. “If I had wings to take me, I would fly in that direction, all the way west and not stop till I was at the shore of America!”

  “America?” says Miss Tulliver, hearing our conversation and turning to see that I – a scrawny, ordinary girl – am now muse to Mr Samuel. “Oh, I too wish I could see that country! They have a song there that describes it as ‘the land of the free’. What a thought, eh?”

  I suddenly, desperately wish it was possible to look Miss Tulliver full in the face, for in this instant I feel a unity between us. Our paths in life are quite different, but I think we both have a burning desire for a freedom that girls and women – rich or poor – can never have.

  “But why would anyone want to live anywhere but this glorious island?” Will bursts in, laughing at the very idea of another sort of place or another sort of life.

  His lust and laughter is infectious, and we all laugh too. Till a harsh, chill gust of wind rushes at us from the Atlantic. It slaps hard against my back, makes the pages of Mr Samuel’s book flap and crackle and near tear, and causes Miss Tulliver to cry out sharply – for the gust has lifted her carefully pinned veil clean off her head and sent it flying into the air.

  Miss Tulliver is turned half away from us, watching her panel of lace tumble in the breeze and Lachlan jumping in a failed bid to catch it. In that fleeting moment, I see her hair is the colour of dark honey, and pulled back to a tight bun at the nape of her neck. And the age she must be … twenty-one or two or three, I guess. Around the same as Mr Samuel, perhaps?

  But that is not all I see. In the next moment she turns to Will, Mr Samuel and myself with a look of sheer terror in her new-seen eyes; large, blinking eyes in a heart-shaped face that is on one side as milky-pale as you would expect for skin hidden each and every day from the sun. But the other side of her face is a very different hue; a vivid pink, like that of the skin on her wrist. And like her wrist, the skin is puckered and pulled into the odd wrinkles caused by burning.

  “Oh!” whimpers Miss Tulliver, slapping her hands across the damaged side. She seems to stumble a little, as if the wind is too strong for her, or as if she might faint at the shock of being so forcefully unveiled before us.

  Will – standing at her side – quickly puts an arm around Miss Tulliver’s waist and guides her to the boulder I sit on, lest her legs give out beneath her. Of course, I shuffle over to make space.

  “Miss Tulliver! Caroline!” Mr Samuel calls out, hastily shoving his book in his pocket. He bounds over to us, and kneels in front of the trembling lady beside me. “Please, please … do not fret so. You are with friends.”

  He reaches his hand to Miss Tulliver’s, and gently peels her fingers away from the side of her face that she is covering.

  “No, no … I am so ugly!” she protests, though she does not wrestle her shaking fingers from Mr Samuel’s grasp.

  “Not at all!” says Mr Samuel earnestly.

  For a second my mind whirls with the notion that Miss Tulliver must have burns all down her right side; the puckered wrinkles are on her neck too, and no doubt travel their meandering way down her arm to her wrist.

  And then the wind quietens as quick as it came, and my thoughts clear. We have something else in common, Miss Tulliver and I.

  “Miss, you look fine indeed,” I say to her. “You just have a few marks, that is all. Just as I am like every other girl, but lack a little strength here and there.”

  Miss Tulliver turns to look at me as I wave my weak hand and point the toes of my twisted foot, her eyes brimming with tears while a small smile falters and flickers on her lips.

  “I hardly think people would look upon me and call these ‘just a few marks’…” she says.

  “And should people describe them aloud in any other terms,” Will says stoutly, “then they would be rude fools!”

  “Indeed!” Mr Samuel agrees earnestly. “Our friends Little Bird and Will are very wise, Caroline!”

  I feel my cheeks colour – what a strange and pleasant thing it is to be called a friend to these fine and good people!

  “Yes, yes they are,” says Miss Tulliver, looking particularly upon me.

  And now I think I understand why she said she envied me yesterday. She feels – or has been made to feel – that her burns are something shameful. And she has come to see that I feel no shame at all in my small differences to others.

  “Well, I think you are very pretty!” says Lachlan, who has quickly gathered a little beauty for Miss Tulliver; he drops puffs of yellow blossom from the jagged gorse on to the black wool lap of her skirts.

  Miss Tulliver – or may I now think of her in more warm terms, as Miss Caroline? – begins to say a pleased and surprised thank you, when a new voice utters her name.

  “Miss Tulliver? Miss Tulliver?”

  We all turn to see someone who has not come to the top of the Glas Crags for the last three years, for Effie set aside any playfulness and wonder when Mother died.

  But most peculiarly, my sister has chosen to climb its heights now, with her skirts clutched in bunches in her hand.

  “Effie!” Lachlan calls out, rushing over to her. “Why are you here?”

  Effie pauses a minute to fill her panting lungs with air and – I can tell – quiet her surprise at seeing Miss Caroline without her mask of veil and with her face marked with her history.

  “If you please,” she says directly to Miss Tulliver, “I have been sent to fetch you by the Laird. He came riding by and saw your maid. He bids you come down from the Crags
immediately, lest you fall and hurt yourself, or worse. You are told to return home straightaway.”

  With the skirl of the wind, Miss Tulliver’s soft-spoken words are almost lost … but I can make them out.

  “I think that my uncle might prefer it, if it were ‘worse’…”

  With those muttered words, she gets to her feet, letting the blossom of gorse tumble to the ground.

  All happiness and hope seem drained from her now dulled eyes, I see.

  While behind her, in the blue distance, the gusting wind speeds off westwards with her dancing lace veil.

  CHAPTER 10

  Victoria, sovereign Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, is the most important woman in the land – one of the most important women in the whole of the world, I am told.

  But she is tiny, Mr Samuel says. Small as a child. Small as me, he supposes, having once seen her in Edinburgh, when she visited. I too have seen the Queen, but only in drawings and photographs printed in the newspapers that Father has brought back with him on the ferry from the mainland.

  Can you believe it? I hardly can, but tomorrow I will see for myself if this is true, for a steamship is to arrive here on Tornish with Her Majesty, her German husband Prince Albert, their family and whatever retinue might travel with a royal party! The royals are headed to their Scottish summer home – Balmoral Castle, it is called – but have chosen to visit some of the islands of the west coast beforehand.

  “Are you managing there, Bridie?” Fergus Matheson calls down to me and Lachlan from the loaded cart he is driving past us on the lane from the harbour. Beside him is his brother Donal, who gives us a smile and a nod.

  “Aye, we are fine,” I tell him, as together my own brother and I push a heavy barrow-load of wrapped hams and such that have been loaded off the ferry just now. Will has already gone ahead, helping his brother George take a creel of lobsters to the kitchens of the Laird’s house. And I fancy that though Donal and Fergus despise Mr Palmer-Reeves, they will be pleased enough to deliver the stuff he has ordered, so that they may catch a glimpse of Ishbel at her work…

  “So will we have a race now to the Big House?” Fergus jokes, pitting his hardy horse and cart against Lachlan and I, barefoot and only just managing a barrow handle each.

  “Tell you what, we will give you a head start,” I joke back, nodding for them to be on their way with the Laird’s stuff.

  Both the young men laugh good-naturedly at my cheek, then trundle off ahead of us.

  “Bridie, will the Queen wear her crown and jewels?” asks Lachlan, as the dust kicked up by the cartwheels drifts in sunlit flurries ahead of us. Behind us, I hear the high-pitched voices of some of our neighbour’s children, giggling and carrying goods as we are doing.

  It is lucky for the Laird – if not for the education of the island’s children – that the school is still shut; it means there are many hands available to help shift ashore such a vast amount of things that appear to be necessary for such a small Queen’s visit…

  “No, I think Queen Victoria will be dressed quite modestly, in country clothes,” I tell Lachlan, since Mr Samuel has told me this himself. When relaxing in the Highlands, Her Majesty likes to set aside the finery she must wear as her duty, Mr Samuel said yesterday, while he sketched Lachlan running, his skinny chest bare, back and forth beneath the waterfall that lies at the most southerly point of Tornish. (The drawing is a marvel, and even better than the one he did the day before, of Will and I by the ancient Standing Stones on the moor.)

  “Oh,” says Lachlan, sounding a little disappointed and then perking up again as a new notion comes to him. “It must be very nice for her children, to have a mother who is so special.”

  I notice that as my brother talks, he does not see that we are passing the churchyard where our own mother lies. It is difficult for Lachlan; he feels her loss because Mother died when he was little enough to be held and hugged by her in a way that my sisters had outgrown. And then it is easier for him in a way too; the past has a hazy quality to it for younger children, does it not? As if events were just a story; as if Mother may have been just a character in a tale Lachlan once heard.

  “Indeed, the lives of the royal children must be very pleasant,” I agree, as I steer the barrow here and there so that we do not fall into the ruts that criss-cross the lane. “But remember, not all of the children are young, Lachlan. Some are nearly grown men and women now!”

  “Oh, yes…” he says, sounding disappointed. I think he imagines children always staying children. But Queen Victoria has not only ruled her country for almost a quarter of a century but had nine sons and daughters spanning that time too.

  As we steer our load towards the left fork that leads to the approach to the Big House, Lachlan once again brightens up. He chatters and chirps, wondering what Prince Leopold will look like (since he is the closest to Lachlan’s age), whether we might see the Queen out and about the island, whether she might stop to take tea at our cottage, do I know how very low he must bow to her…?

  I manage an answer here and there, but really, I am lost in my own thoughts. Lately, everything has been such a queer mix: truly the best of times and the worst.

  One of the best? Well, I am so very glad and grateful to have had the keen pleasure of knowing such a kind, interesting gentleman as Mr Samuel. I swear the last few days where we have taken him around the island have been some of my happiest. He has spoken of artists he admires, and described to me their paintings, so that I can almost picture them in my mind’s eye. He has told me of the majestic cathedral and university buildings of Glasgow, and the strange-sounding graveyard there that is big as a village, with its residents all at their rest in the ground! But the worst of it is the reason for Mr Samuel’s presence; he would not be here if Mr Palmer-Reeves had not become the new Laird. And having Mr Palmer-Reeves among us is akin to having a storm-cloud settle over Tornish; a storm-cloud that darkens with every day that goes by.

  And of course I am glad and grateful for the hateful schoolmaster Mr Simpson taking his leave, so that Will and I and Lachlan have been able to spend our days showing Mr Samuel the best of the island. But then it seems the Laird has as much interest in finding a new teacher for the children of his tenants as he has to furnish their cattle with pretty bonnets – and this lack of care and thought does not endear him to the islanders.

  Also, I am glad and grateful for catching a glimpse of the young woman behind the guise of the Black Crow. But for four days now I have not set eyes on Miss Tulliver. Since the morning she scaled the Glas Crags, she has been ordered to stay home, and not to leave the grounds of the Big House unless she is in the company of the Laird or the Mistress. This news comes direct from Mr Samuel, who has contrived to speak with her often while she circles the gardens like a restless caged animal, with a new, heavier, plainer veil that has been made for her.

  And now the Queen … how wonderful will it be to stand at the harbour tomorrow and see this famed, all-powerful woman come to our quiet corner of the Highlands! Tomorrow truly will be the best of times. And I do not want to seem like Effie with her superstitions, but should I expect the worst of times to come hand in hand?

  “Quick,” I say to Lachlan, as we go through the huge iron entrance gates. “We should not be seen by the family…”

  And so we make haste, following the path around the side of the building that will bring us to the courtyard at the back. For once, I wish that the old Laird had done as other Big Houses do and have a gated entrance there just for the servants, so that we would not feel this pressure to be invisible to those who might stare out of the curtained windows at the front of the house.

  But as we trundle and steer our way towards the yard, a streak of fur rushes towards us.

  “It is the little dog! Patch!” Lachlan cries out in delight – till Patch neatly snatches a leg of ham that is practically the same size as him. It bounces along the ground as he runs off with it towards the front of the house.

  Thumping his
side of the barrow down, Lachlan goes in chase – and I am uncertain what to do. Go in chase as well? But I would be better to struggle and push the barrow round to the kitchens than leave it here unattended.

  So with a deep breath, I try to lift both handles; but the weight of it is too much for my weak hand and it clatters down with a sharp crack of wood. Luckily, the sound is heard by someone who can help; Donal Matheson sticks his head around the corner of the building and, seeing me in need, comes towards me. He must have been chatting to Ishbel, for she quickly hurries after him.

  And now someone else shows interest in my plight; a window very close is flung open, the room Ishbel has told me is the library … and after a moment of alarm, I see with relief that it is Mr Samuel.

  “You look like a street trader, Little Bird!” he says with his usual easy smile. “I could well imagine you on the wide roads of Glasgow, selling your wares!”

  My chest swells at the thought of that. What a job to have! To watch the hustle and bustle of coaches and horses passing by, of talking to more customers in an hour than I talk to all week here on Tornish!

  But then my eyes suddenly alight on something directly behind Mr Samuel, and I move closer to the windowsill to view it. It is the Laird’s portrait.

  “Oh, would you like to see how it is coming along?” asks Mr Samuel, and he steps back inside the book-filled room, so he can turn the easel a little and give me a better view of the painting.

  I am surprised. Not by the figure I see, but by what he stands in front of.

  “What made you choose the woods?” I ask in surprise, as I frown at the image of the tweed-suited, twirl-moustached Mr Palmer-Reeves, with a dense, dark forest behind him. Did Will and I and Lachlan not take Mr Samuel to see the very best scenery the island had to offer, any of which he might have chosen to paint in the background?