Scenes From the Second Storey
Page 4
Donald turned back to the harbour, watching his battered skaffie where she sat low in the lee of the sea wall beyond Brora Bridge. He claimed perhaps a dozen of the fattest herring for his own, fishing them out of the barrels while ignoring his crew and their mutinous scowls.
"Get the rest tae the curing yard by sun-up. I don't want tae be hearing about them spoiling because ye were too busy sousing yourselves in the Bannockburn."
Off they went, west along the shoreline, just as another gust of icy wet wind pushed them backwards against their not so heavy loads. The gust carried with it weightier evidence of their discontent: muttered forecasts that they would doubtless be finished in the yard long before sun-up, and braver threats of defection to the vast Herring Busses and their favoured tonnage bounties. Donald was not overly concerned; even should a few of them fall foul of the fishery officers and find themselves signing on a dotted line, they would be back again soon enough. If not one of them could stomach a single night of inshore drifting, a couple of weeks at sea would likely finish them completely.
"And get back here when ye're done! Those nets won't fix theirselves."
Once they had disappeared beyond the harbour wall, Donald climbed up from the quayside on too weary legs. The late September wind coming off the North Sea still slapped against his face, lifting the hair from his scalp and filling his lungs with the briny taste of ocean. He struggled around the headland, looking to the empty sand beach below with a heavy heart; hearing the far off call to the bell-pit north of the river, its winches and water-powered pumps stretching wide above the grey swathe of village like a hungry raven.
He supposed that he was no more entitled to indulge his ill will towards the coal mine than he was to the vast salt pans that now stretched as far south as Easter Ross and Cromarty: from Kintradwell Broch to the mouth of the Dornoch Firth. His son had worked at the mine for nigh on two months now, and had survived no less than two cave-ins and three floodings; while Donald's own dwindling livelihood relied upon both the salt recovered from the ocean and the distilleries fuelled by Uaran's rich seams.
They were not the source of his malaise; his wretched decline in fortune. Nor was the culprit to be found in his sullen crew, battered boat, the bloody Fishery Board or the North Sea's temper. It was people — always people. Great, swelling, lumbering masses expelled from the low peaks, high moorland and small lochans of the Flow Country, and spewed onto the coast like herring worm and fish guts.
As he climbed the last few steps towards the narrow row of white-painted cottages that ran close to the shoreline, he fought as hard against an early assault of smurry as he did the hopeless fury that was ever now his constant companion. His too-empty creel banged hard against his thigh. The sun winked over the Clynelish in the east, where brown moor cambered inland away from grassy cliff. Before them, Brora's bell tower stood against the grey-gold skyline like a mournful sentinel.
He dropped to his knees just shy of the old Pictish cairn of the Caledonii, setting his creel upon the stone. "May Manannán of the Sea bless my catch and humble burden," he whispered close to the ground, though there was likely no-one else around to witness his heresy; most of the newcomers imagined themselves to be still in the hills and rarely rose before dawn. "May He have pity upon my fortune and send the Tuatha against all those who seek my ruin."
There was a familiar gloom above the thatched roof of his cottage, he could see it now: a rank, dark shadow that neither his prayer nor the miserable dawn looked ready to banish. Before he even opened the door, he knew that the cottage was still in darkness. He knew that the hearth would not be lit and his breakfast would not be cooked. It had happened again, and he had not the strength this time to stomach it.
Once inside, he wrenched open the shutters like a man possessed. He tossed his meagre catch into one of the salt barrels, and wasted too much flint in getting the peat alight in its damp recess. The air was frigid and stale with old smoke. The thickly cut turf had come away from a corner of the sea-facing wall, as if something had sought to burrow out in the night, exposing a leavening of rough stones through which more of that late September wind screamed.
On the other side of the curtain, he could hear stuttering crying that could too easily lapse into the keening wail that kept him awake most nights. Even when he was out at sea. Putting down his fury a second time was too difficult.
"Isobel! Get out here, woman. Where is yer husband's bloody breakfast? Where is his fire?"
She took too long to obey; worse than that, she then no more than loitered by the soiled curtain, twisting it between her fingers and offering no amends.
"Get out here, woman!"
Her hair was a tangled shroud that hid her face. Behind her, the sobs grew higher and uglier in pitch.
"It came again, Donald."
Donald was still better disposed towards anger than fear. "Aye? I spent a night close tae being battered against the Laoghal Rocks, and was rewarded by less than ten barrels of herring and the cliping of my crew. Yet yer troubles were the harder tae endure? Yer troubles see me starving and cold in my own hame?"
She came out from behind the curtain then, but still she did not venture near to him. Picking up an oil lamp, she kneeled down by the revived fire, leaning too close. Donald could smell the singeing of her hair over the low stench of peat before she stood again. Still she faced the fire, and Donald found that he was too glad.
"Do you want me tae warm some stew?"
"Aye, I want ye tae warm some bloody stew, woman! And I don't want tae hear another word about—"
The sobs beyond the curtain began their wail in the instant that his wife turned around, the lamplight exposing the wide white of her eyes framed by old crusts of blood. Deep scores ran from her temples to chin, and her frightened grimace exposed another new gap in her teeth. When he glanced down at the fresher blood on her skirts, she gathered the stiff material in her fists and clamped shut her mouth. There were raised and blistering welts at her wrists and blooming stabs of purple inside her elbows and forearms. Still, she wouldn't look at him.
"Jesus, Isobel!" His gaze suddenly found the curtain again as a bird started battering wings against his ribcage. "Nancy? Is Nancy—"
For one moment there might have flashed some anger in those wide, red-framed eyes. "Nancy is fine, Donald. She slept through again. Though Moira—"
He had already stumbled past the curtain and into the ben beyond before hearing his wife reassurances. Nancy — his Nancy — was curled up on her side, close to the still sleeping bairn. He recognised the unhurried rise and fall of her slumbering breath. And finally released his own. The bird inside his chest calmed through more pleasant swoops and flutters.
Moira he remembered as an afterthought. She was not in the bed. Close to the piles of broken net and new hemp on the far side of the small room, his older daughter shivered and still bayed, her bony knees drawn up to her chest, blood pooling around her feet.
"Haud yer wheesht, Moira! Isobel! Get this child cleaned up." He stumbled in his haste to retreat, winning another barely-disguised glare from his wife in the process. As he caught her eye, the smell of his warming stew made him feel queasier still. "Shut her up, Isobel. We will not talk of this. Not again."
Isobel set down her lamp. "Aye we will, Donald. This time we will."
*****
Donald was in the end spared that ordeal by another that was far more insistent. Awoken from an ill-easy slumber by a battering at his door, he stumbled towards the threshold, his weary mind no match for his ever present caution. Nothing good had knocked at his door in more than two years.
The Countess' factor stood just shy of the muddy dip ahead of the entrance. He wore a non-descript plaid, belted and held at the shoulder by the Sunderland brooch. His face was as grim as the weather that beat down upon his bonnet-less head. Donald's heart sank even before he glimpsed the men that loitered close to the bluff's summit.
"Mr Sellar, what can I do for you today, Sir?"
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, Bel. 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 brimmed 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 w
ill 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.