Dead Souls
Page 4
“Mr Sellar, what can I do for you today, Sir?”
Patrick Sellar’s mouth tightened into a grimacing smile. “Mr MacKay. I have heard that the North Sea has not been your friend of late.” His thin lips stretched whiter. “Perhaps that explains why my officers are yet to take receipt of your rent?”
Donald pulled on a cloak and stepped outside. His fury was too quick and he fought to drown it down beneath the surface. A weasel Sellar might have been, but he was a weasel with the ear of both the Countess and the Duke; a weasel who had turned out thousands from their highland homes — burning them out when all else failed — and stealing a large portion of the parishes of Farr and Kildonan into his own hands while he was about it. Sellar could be his ruin before either the North Sea or his cursed family.
“Ye and yer masters will have my rent soon enough, Sellar.”
“Soon enough is not soon enough, fisherman,” Sellar grinned, eyeing the banned colours under Donald’s cloak. “What else can you barter?”
Donald drew the cloak tighter over his tartan. “None.”
“Young Murray has much praised the talents of your youngest daughter, MacKay.” He threw a glance towards the sniggers of his men behind. “An eager servant is always welcomed in the House of Stafford.”
Donald heard his wife move into the doorway in the instant before he lunged for the factor. Her shriek found him faster than Sellar’s own or the angered shouts of his men. “Ye’ll not have her, ye rank son of a Lowland bastard.”
Only after Donald found himself pinned fast against his own house by more than half a dozen grim-faced sub-factors did Sellar move to grasp him tight around his throat. Donald could vaguely hear the protestations of his roused neighbours.
“Then give me the other, MacKay. I’ve heard she’s bonny enough.”
Donald’s relief was predictably short lived. Isobel’s cry was too loud and carping. When he nodded once, Sellar’s men let him go, and Donald turned back for the entrance of his home in unsteady steps. Isobel had cleaned her face he saw, but ugly swellings already claimed much of her cheekbones and jaw. Her eyes had become wide and grasping once more.
“Bring her out, Isobel.”
The desperation that commonly found her pleading for his sympathy upon every recent return from the sea now sought him out in a low moan and easy tears. “No, Donald. Please, no.”
“Bring her out, Isobel.”
She flew at him then, her fingers clawed and bloody, her curses more wicked. He pushed her back into the gloom of their home. “Isobel! I’ve not the money tae pay the bastard. Do you want the Black Watch tae come for us in our beds?”
“Not Moira, Donald.” Isobel dropped to her knees, letting go her hold upon the crusted blood on her skirts. “Please, Donald, not Moira. She has suffered en—”
Despite the jeers outside, Donald sunk also to his knees. He cupped his wife’s face in calloused hands and kissed her swollen mouth. “If evil is truly in this house, Bel, be grateful that Moira can be spared from it. If ever ye loved me, bring her out.”
He kissed her again, but this time she flinched from it and he met only dry matted hair. He choked down a sob. “Bring her out.”
****
Donald could still hear his child’s screams many hours after the day had gone and the vocal batter of night called him back to the shore. He pulled the short net over his shoulder and picked up his creel, eyeing his clumsy repair of the turf wall with something close to disgust.
Isobel crouched close to the now roaring fire. She had not looked his way for all of the day. Not even when he had sent Donnie to the pit had she so obviously punished him.
When he opened the door, an icy gale swept away their silence. “Keep the door barred, Isobel. Let none in until I return.”
Her laughter was too harsh. “Aye, husband. I’ll let none in. Much good that will do.”
A pervasive pain that Donald could not place found him stumbling over the threshold and into the stormy night beyond. “Don’t mither me, woman! Always I have done only my best to protect—”
Isobel’s shadow reached across their floor of moor-rushes and damp earth. “The Reverend Murray is tae visit us after ye have gone. He will—”
Donald again felt the keen point of incrimination at his throat. “The Reverend Father sits at the Countess’ table, Isobel! The Reverend bloody Murray numbers among those who extort frae us our meagre lands and monies, while celebrating the vengeance of Heaven and eternal damnation upon any of us who dare to resist!”
“The Reverend bloody Murray will bless our house and drive out its demon!” Isobel shrieked. “I care none for land auctions and the Highlanders’ persecution. While my nights are still plagued by shadowed rape and torture, I hardly even care that the Sutherland Clearances and Herring Busses have thus far cost me both a son and a daughter!”
Isobel’s curses followed him onto the rain-logged road. When he looked back, her hair flew about and above her face as if she were an old Lunan witch. “And a husband!”
He ran until she had disappeared from sight and until only the smoke from the hearth was visible above the muddy slopes. Her ragged whisper still found him beyond the headland, where many feet below, his crew loaded their repaired nets onto his skaffie in silence. He could go back; he had done it time enough before. He could send out the boys, while he went back home. He dismissed his resumed tears to the North Sea wind, and climbed down to the shoreline.
As soon as they had cleared the lee of the harbour, he gave himself up to the lure of the sea completely. He was too tired. Too tired of it all.
****
When they returned just before another dawn, the coast was a fiery red haze beneath the jagged shadows of the Dornoch Moor and Brora Links. Donald made himself look northeast towards the recently built Helmsdale and Gower. There, all manner of ousted Highland farmer sought to eek out an ignorant existence, sucking dry the coastal lands and their resources where Cheviots and Blackface Lintons had usurped their own.
Donald hated them. Hated them more than greedy lairds and their corrupt factors; perhaps even more than the rank black shadow that ever plagued his own home, his children, his wife. If he was truly cursed, then impotence and the shared company of despair was no comfort at all. He had never seen the monster that blighted his house; he had only witnessed the bloody mess and ruined walls that it left behind in its sated wake.
Many months before, when their son had only just received his summons to the pit and had not yet answered it, Isobel had found Donald crouched by the stuttering hearth in the death of night. Then her face had borne only the beginnings of the persecution that was soon to find her; only the long and drawn worry of every east coast mother and wife. Yet It had been between them even then. She had long cried of It in dreams and in muttered distraction. It had grown far bolder since.
“There is an evil in this house, Donald. I feel It in the walls and in my dreams. I feel It even in the children. It is waiting. Just waiting.”
Donald had perhaps rolled his eyes; certainly he had given little quarter to her wifely histrionics.
“The evil in this house is not born of noblemen or driven-out clansmen,” she had whispered angrily as he had bowed closer to the fire.
Then he had been too consumed by fear, too overwhelmed by the sheer numbers that were fleeing to the coast from the highlands of Sutherland, to think upon anything else. “Ye say that only because ye were once a bloody MacKenzie before I made you my wife.”
There had been no sobbing then either; no stiff red blood upon his wife’s skirts.
“The crofters talk of fired villages and the illegal dispossession of the swain, Bell. Those that come down frae the hills are naught but our enemy. They are parasites that seek to steal our lives and drown us the quicker.”
Isobel had reached out a hand to his face that first night, had reached out a hand to stroke his cheek and press a finger to his lips. Her eyes had not been wild or wide, but the tears in them had brimm
ed and almost fell. “The evil in this house is not born of nobleman or highlander,” she had again whispered. “Ye bring it back frae the water, Donald. It finds ye in the drift and it follows ye home. And I live in fear that one day it will choose never to leave.”
****
After dispatching his complaining crew once more towards the curing yard beyond the Strath, Donald climbed the bluff from the harbour and headed for home. Again the rising sun winked over the Clynelish in the east, throwing the old bell tower into long shadow. Donald did not stop at the old Pictish cairn, did not even glance at it. Before he reached his home, he threw his empty creel back toward the shore with a cry. The dark shadow still squatted above his home regardless. And Donald prayed to none. Not anymore.
This time he heard the wailing before he stepped over the threshold. This time it found and revived the bird in his chest far quicker than the dark emptiness of the but and its stone cold hearth.
“Nancy?” He raced towards the ben upon feet that had forgotten their weariness. Only when his daughter flew at him from the shadows did he falter, buckling as she threw herself upon him, her sobs almost drowning out that dreadful keening howl beyond the curtain.
“The bairn, Daddy! They took the bairn!”
Donald fought for a decent hold upon her, dragging her down to the reed floor and pulling her close until he could feel Nancy’s own bird kicking out at his own. His voice was too weak. “The bairn?”
“They took him!” she shrieked again. “The Black Watch took him, and the factor threw him into the Brua-a Marsh.”
For the first time since her birth, Donald pushed Nancy from him with a scream. He crawled towards the curtain in wretched sobs. The heather thatch over his head dropped lower its malignant shadow. All the time, Donald whispered his promises, his empty retribution to the hills and moorland high above their home.
When his wife drew back the curtain, he tried and failed to regain his feet. She had tied her hair back from her face and had changed both her gown and her apron. Where there had before been bloody cuts and swollen welts, there remained only yellowing bruises. Her smile was too serene.
“Isobel?”
She looked down at him as the north wind whistled through his ill-repaired breaches. Her smile exposed too many missing teeth. “The evil is in the water, Donald. It finds ye in the drift and ever it follows ye home.”
The bird died fast in Donald’s chest even as he still struggled to rise. “God I am tired, Bell. I am tired of it all.”
His wife’s beatific smile implied that she hardly cared. She pressed a fisted hand to her breast. “I need to feed the wean.”
In the instant that she turned her back again upon him, she drew the knife across her throat, so that her sin might not touch either him or Nancy. Instead it sprayed dark crimson across the curtain and what little was yet exposed of the ben. Nancy’s shrieks drowned out his own. But only for a moment.
****
The sunrise was too brilliant a witness to his and Nancy’s lumbering progress down to the shore. Lazy arcs of wisplike clouds, stretched so thin across the sky that they were almost transparent, drew the eye stubbornly away to the east: heralding the autumn yellow sun as it rose above the horizon. Hues of angry purple, mauve and indigo spread across those skies like bruises, framed by spans of golden light that undulated slowly, shiftless and resolute in their evasion of both cloud and cliff.
They set Isobel down upon the shale close to the harbour, and Donald left Nancy by her lifeless mother only for the time it took to release the skaffie from its mooring post. Before he turned back, he glanced once towards the misty moorland above the cliffs. The shadow still hung there, low above the headland and the home that they had left.
Another shadow suddenly moved out of the first, reaching towards them on mournful and crooked wings. Its feathers were hoar frost and wild thistle, its wingspan greater than ten feet across. As it soared towards the breakwater, the sea eagle’s black throat caught the rising sun and glowed like shot-silk. Donald hid another sob as he returned to the shore and helped Nancy carry her mother to the boat.
When they were at least a mile out to sea, the silent raptor returned, following their progress as the sun rose above the Clynelish. Donald tried to smile for Nancy, and she tried to smile back. This morning there was no rain, no hail, no battering crosswind to drive them back toward the shore.
Once Brora had become little more than an ill-defined shape to portside, Donald dipped the sail and swallowed two fingers of scotch. Nancy looked to him and not to her dead mother as they both heaved Isobel over the curved stem and dropped her into the sea. Its eager waves lapped her scarred and still battered face before cold shadows drew her down into their depths. While Nancy sobbed, Donald watched his wife’s white, wide eyes as they left him and dwindled into only memory.
The sun had climbed high above the horizon, and Donald had taken another few fingers of scotch before he found his courage again. Bent close to the stem, Nancy still sobbed, and Donald twisted around her bony shoulders, pulling her onto his lap as he had done so many times when she had been a child. The sea eagle gave only one mournful cry before heading out into the open ocean.
“There’s no hiding frae them, Nancy,” he whispered to her hair, while his shoulder grew damp with her tears. “They’ve had it all frae me. All of it.” He drew back from the embrace, his gaze taking in the tarred hull and warped timbers of his boat before returning to his daughter. “This is all that I have left tae me.”
Her fine fair hair slapped at his face and when he cupped her face in his hands, her cheeks were feverishly hot. He saw that she didn’t understand even then. And was glad.
“I’ll not give them ye, Nancy. Never ye.”
He had already closed his hands around her throat and begun squeezing before she realised. Even then, it was still a few seconds more before she began to fight. Donald closed his eyes as she kicked and struggled against his will. His salvation. He thought of the thousands of herring that had ever swum into his nets; of how long and hard their bodies quivered and fought against the mesh trapped under their gills. Suffering should never have to be so relentlessly borne — not if the battle was always lost. With more strength than he had possessed in many, many years, Donald snapped his daughter’s neck in two.
****
It was only many hours later, when he had finally determined to throw Nancy overboard to join her mother that Donald began to feel doubt creep in. He tried not to look at his daughter at all as he hefted her onto the roll and balanced her there: too afraid to let her go and too afraid to hold her with him.
When finally he dropped her down, Nancy sunk like a stone. Donald’s sobs were now more for himself than for her. Only when a shadow moved suddenly beneath the water, did Donald abandon his grief and remember his doubt.
His dead wife came for him in a vengeful rush: her hair wild and fanned around her bloated face like kelp, her fingers wrinkled and clawed as if in spasm. She drew ever closer, reaching out of those vertiginous depths, her mouth wide and whispering too close to his ear.
“The evil does not come from the water, Donald.”
Donald’s horror found another home. “Ye told me It did!”
From her watery grave, Isobel smiled wide and long. The gaps between her teeth became blurred caverns as she turned her head back and forth. “It is in you, Donald. Always you brought it back from the water. But it was only ever in you.”
“Ye told me it did!” Donald screamed, stumbling back from the edge as Isobel, not this time looking like an old Lunan witch, but like the demon Tuatha Himself, swam up towards him — for him — her fury an ugly mask of wet earth and spent blood. Donald fell backward against the skaffie and hunkered down in its hull. He looked down at his old and calloused hands. “Ye told me it did,” he whispered.
****
Donald’s hands had grown steadier as he turned the yard and tacked the lugsail. He pulled on the halyard and gathered his nets. As the sun
winked behind darker coastal clouds, the sea eagle returned, its wings catching the same wind as Donald’s old skaffie, a fat mackerel clasped between its claws.
Upon the distant horizon, the vast convoy of Herring Busses lumbered into view, heading finally for home. High above the grey swathe of Brora village, the bell-pit sounded its mournful call. The new villages of Gower and Helmsdale were no more than distant squat shadows in the northeast. Donald cast his nets and buoys, and tied the warp to his stern.
And waited for the drift.
****
dry places
Tom English
When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man,
it walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none.
Matthew 12:43
With the ferocity of a wounded animal when it is cornered, he rushed from the desecrated tomb, shaking his gnarled fists and screaming obscenities at the small group of men. He was completely naked except for the broken chains hanging from his bleeding wrists and ankles. His emaciated frame was lacerated with numerous wounds that had become infected by the dried gore and excrement encrusting his body. Here in the country of the Gerasenes, east of the Sea of Galilee, this madman had become infamous for terrorising the townspeople. Oftentimes his violence made it impossible for travellers to pass along the road leading into the city. At other times he had been observed tearing clumps of hair from his scalp or ripping open his flesh with jagged stones. Several attempts had been made to restrain the man, but as attested to by his broken chains, all of them had failed.