Shadow in Hawthorn Bay

by Janet Lunn

  Copyright © 1986 by Janet Lunn

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Seal Books and colophon are trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

  SHADOW IN HAWTHORN BAY

  First published in Canada by

  Lester & Orpen Dennys Limited, 1986

  Seal Books edition published August 2001

  Map by Jonathan Gladstone, j.b. geographics

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36748-8

  Seal Books are published by

  Random House of Canada Limited.

  “Seal Books” and the portrayal of a seal are the property of Random House of Canada Limited.

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website:

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  This book is for Jean,

  with love

  The author wishes to acknowledge: The Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council for financial assistance; Mollie Hunter and Michael McIlwraith, Invernesshire, for their generous hospitality and advice; Dorothy Davies, Trenton Ontario Memorial Library, for her helpful assistance; Edith Fowke, for kindly opening her music library; Jessica Latshaw, Joyce Barkhouse, and my family for having faith in this story over a long period of time; Edward Lukeman for Davie Cameron’s map; Louise Dennys, my editor, for her clear good sense, endless patience, and encouragement.

  Glossary of Gaelic terms

  an dà shelladh — the second sight

  beannachd Dhé leat — may the blessing of God attend you

  bodach — brownie, hobgoblin

  coire na cailleach — hag’s cave

  Dia — God

  dubh — black

  feasd, am feasd — never

  glaistig — female fairy, ghost

  iùilas — spells

  mo gràdach — my dear one

  och-on — alas

  sitheachean — fairies

  slan leat — greetings

  taibhes — a vision of the second sight

  tigh na shuidh — the house on the resting-place

  tornashee (literally tor-na-sitheachean) — the fairies’ hill

  uan — lamb

  Sources: The New English-Gaelic Dictionary compiled by Derick Thomson (Gairm Publications, Glasgow, 1981); Gaelic Dictionary compiled by Malcolm Mackinnon (ACAIR and Aberdeen University Press, first pub. 1925, reprinted 1984).

  Cover

  Map

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Glossary of Gaelic Terms

  Chapter 1 Come, Mairi!

  Chapter 2 The Cairngorm Brooch

  Chapter 3 The Andrew MacBride

  Chapter 4 The Dark Forest

  Chapter 5 I Am Alone Here

  Chapter 6 Baby

  Chapter 7 Fire

  Chapter 8 Meadow on the Bay

  Chapter 9 The House at Hawthorn Bay

  Chapter 10 The Old Ones Are Looking After Me

  Chapter 11 Henry

  Chapter 12 A Swift Magic

  Chapter 13 “So Cold”

  Chapter 14 There Is No Summer

  Chapter 15 Duncan

  Chapter 16 Luke

  Other Books by This Author

  Come, Mairi!

  “Come, Mairi! Come you here!”

  “Duncan, I cannot! Here is the lamb making sore trouble getting itself into the world. Come you to me!”

  Mary went back to her work. Swiftly she turned and tugged the struggling lamb, crooning softly all the while, until, with a cry of triumph, she held it firmly in her two hands.

  “There now, Sally, there is your wee uan,” she murmured. She laid the lamb beside its mother. It began at once to suckle. Gently stroking the ewe’s still heaving sides, Mary sat back on her heels, tossed her thick black hair from her sweaty face, and watched with satisfaction as the ewe began to clean her baby. Only then did she realize that Duncan had not called from the other side of the hill. He was three thousand miles away in Upper Canada. Yet he had called! Sudden tears prickled her eyes. In four years it was the first time she had heard his voice. He had sworn so often they could never be parted in life or death but he had gone away. And barely a word since.

  “While you are gone,” she had said, “we will still be together, Duncan. Our thoughts will travel the miles. And you will be soon home.” Mary had never doubted that. She and Duncan had always been like one person, two halves of a whole. Cousins, they might as well have been twins, they had been so inseparable—until Uncle Davie and Aunt Jean had decided to leave the Highlands. Over the plaintive cry of the lapwings, the chirping of the thrushes, and the ewe and her baby bleating softly at one another, she heard Duncan’s voice again, “Come, Mairi!” In it there was a note of such pain, such urgency, she could feel the sharpness of it in her own breast.

  “How can I?” she cried aloud. “How can I?”

  “Was you wanting help with the ewe, Mairi?” Annie Morrison called from across the field.

  “I was not.”

  “Come away then, it is dinner time.”

  “In a minute.” Mary rested on her heels, pulling her plaid around her against the chill April wind and fine rain. She looked down the green slope over the valley and the hills beyond, remembering the day Duncan had left the glen. Everyone in the township had gone down to the wide path by Loch Ness to see them off. The sun was shining on their six dark heads—Uncle Davie, Aunt Jean, Callum, the baby, Iain, and Duncan. Standing beside the cart that held the few Cameron possessions they would take with them, tears large in his black eyes, Duncan had promised, “I will come home, Mairi. Next year I will be twelve, I will be soon grown, and I will earn the money to come home.”

  But it had been four years and the only word he had ever sent was a brief letter in English, not in the Gaelic they all spoke, a letter enclosed in one of Uncle Davie’s a year after they had gone away.

  Upper Canada

  near the settlement of

  Collivers’ Corners

  10th day of July, 1812

  Dear Mary,

  Here the land is low and dark with forest. We are expected to make crofts of it.

  Respectfully,

  your cousin,

  Duncan Cameron

  Mary hated it. And she had every word memorized. There was nothing in it of the Duncan she knew, of what he was feeling—beyond those mournful words “dark with forest”—and there was nothing in it of plans to come home. There had been letters from Uncle Davie and Aunt Jean to Mary’s mother and father, letters to say that life was hard but good in Upper Canada, letters urging them to emigrate. But although she had written and written to him, there had never been another letter from Duncan, nor any sign at all.

  “Four years,” Mary thought bitterly. “Four years and the two of us fifteen years old already. Is it not old enough to be earning the passage home? And now you call me to come to you. Och, Duncan, you know I cannot do that.”

  Returning to the present, Mary gave the ewe a final loving pat and rose to her feet. Absently she crossed the field to eat her bannock and her bit of cheese with the other young herders who had gathered in the lee of the hill.

  The talk was all of May Morning, the big spring festival only a week away.

  “And Mairi, you will have your rowan wreath and your May Morning fire made, and your bannock rolled down the hill, and you be halfway up Clachan Mountain before the rest of us are out from our beds,” laughed Jenny Macintyre.

  “And I wonder do you ever go to bed at all before
May Morning?” sighed Callum Grant.

  “I would be a bent old woman did I wait for you to rise, Callum Grant,” retorted Mary.

  The others laughed, full of the joy of summer coming. The first of May was Beltane, the ancient festival with its ritual fires on every hilltop, its bannock rolling, and the herding of cows and sheep and goats up into fresh pastures in the high hills. There the women and young people would stay in their shielings, the little rough mountain huts, all summer while the men farmed in the lower hills. In the autumn they would trek home again, people and animals fat and happy.

  The chatter went on but Duncan’s call and the terrible need in it were so powerful that Mary got suddenly to her feet and, without a word, left the group. The others took little notice. They were used to Mary’s abrupt ways.

  All that afternoon, the echo of Duncan’s voice was strong in her head. Over and over she relived their childhood together.

  Born in the same week, they had understood one another from the first with hardly a word having to be spoken. Almost as soon as they could walk, the two had gone racing over the hills together until the rocks, the deep corries, and the swift-flowing burns had become more home to them than the hearth in either of their houses. They were so in tune that Mary’s mother called them reflections of one another. “And who is to say which is the child and which the shade?” Aunt Jean would ask—and there seemed to be no answer.

  They were both small, black-haired, and dark-eyed, but Duncan’s eyes were large and black as sloes and people called him beautiful with his hair curling around his ruddy complexion, and his straight nose and full mouth. Mary’s eyes were bright as a blackbird’s, and she was plain and sharp-nosed, with skin as pale as yarrow and a mouth that turned up noticeably at one corner when she was amused. They shared an intensity and a streak of wild joy that, in Mary, though she was a solemn child, sometimes erupted in a song that was clearer than a bird’s. Duncan’s way was to laugh and dance, and sometimes he fluted on a whistle he made from a willow twig.

  Mary had, too, both a sweetness and a “tongue sharp as a thorn”, said her sister Jeannie. It showed itself in quick, sometimes unkind words. In Duncan it was a slower burning anger, a sulking that lasted and lasted and gave him the name Duncan dubh, Duncan the black, for his dark moods. They were different in other ways, too. Mary was as unmovable as a mountain when she had made up her mind to something, Duncan as changeable as the shadows on a Highland loch. He would start off up the hill to hunt for the fox’s lair, then, when Mary had followed into the bracken or the berry thicket, he would change his mind and race off towards the stream to find a salmon. The only thing about Duncan that was steadfast was his desire to be where Mary was. He was a terrible boy for teasing and playing tricks, but when his tormenting turned Mary from him in anger or hurt, he would retreat into misery and, although it often seemed unfair, Mary would have to comfort him. But he took care of Mary in one important way. For there was something else about Mary that was not so of Duncan, or any of the other children in the glen. She had the an dà shelladh, the gift of the two sights. There were times she could see into the past, into the future, into the distance, and even into the hearts of others. People said Mary could see the wind.

  She did not think it a gift. She hated it—the headaches, the rush of blackness, the frenzied need to warn those about whom she had the premonitions. She hated the strangeness of seeing a thing happen as though it were as real as the cotton grass on the hill, then having it happen exactly the same, days, weeks, or even years later. She hated being set apart in this way. Duncan hated it too. He did not tease her about the an dà shelladh, and because he didn’t Mary felt he was her anchor, her protection from the glances and whispers of the other children, the hasty gestures some adults made to save themselves in case she put spells on them.

  Once, in school, Annie Morrison had stumbled over her reading lesson and sworn to the dominie that “Mairi Urquhart has ill-wished me.” Mr. Fraser had strapped Annie’s hand until it was red and sore but she had tearfully stuck to her story and some of the children had talked afterwards about Mary being unchancy.

  As a small child Mary had more than once begged her mother to take away the gift. “Gift! Gift!” she would storm, her eyes heavy with misery. “It is no gift. It is my misfortune.”

  “Mairi, Mairi, it is a sore thing, surely, but it is what you are and must be.” Her mother’s dark eyes would be sympathetic and she would give Mary a bit of honey on her oat bannock and rock her for comfort. Mary would not be comforted.

  Old Mrs. Grant told her much the same thing. Mrs. Grant was the only person in the township who understood how Mary felt. She lived alone in her cottage under the brow of Drum Eildean across the burn, not far from the waterfall. Her husband was long since dead and her only son had gone to America before Mary was born. She too had the gift of second sight. It was to her the people of the glen went for spells against bad luck and ill wishes, and for the taibhes, the glimpses into the future she could sometimes give them. And although all the women in the glen were versed in herbal cures and knew the charms against ill, it was often felt that Mrs. Grant’s gift and her healing hands gave the remedies special power.

  The minister, Mr. Graeme, at St. Kilda’s parish church, preached that it was sinful to believe in spells and the like and that those who did would burn for ever in hell. All the same, the people came to the spae wife for their needs, as people in the glen had always done.

  Mary went often to the cottage where the rowan grew tallest, and the spicy-scented roses and the creamy-white yarrow grew thickest. She cared almost as much for this tall, stern, quiet old woman as she did for Duncan. And Mrs. Grant, who was so reserved with most people, talked to Mary of the pain of her own childhood as a seer, of her happy marriage, and of Donald, her son. She shared his letters from New England with Mary and told her that he was sending money so that she could go, some day, to live with him.

  Over the years Mary learned the uses of the camomile, savoury, thyme, and lovage that grew in Mrs. Grant’s garden and of the hawthorn, burdock, flag, gentian, and mint that grew wild on the hills and beside the streams, just by being with the old woman. She learned too some of the simple charms and spells for healing, the charms against ill-wishing and the evil eye, but when it came to studying seriously Mary refused, stubbornly. “I will not be set apart so,” she would cry.

  “Mairi, Mairi, you have the gifts. You have the an dà shelladh. You have the knowledge in your heart to turn away evil. You have the healing in your hands. And what gifts the good God gives us, those gifts must we cherish and nurture. Remember you well the story our own dear Lord tells of the talents.”

  “I will not. Mother Grant, do not weigh me with such needs of folk. Is it not enough to have to see their ills before they do, themselves? Jenny Blackburn pained so in her back for the witch doll Mairi Carmichael set in the burn, sotted old Angus Morrison choking to death on his dram—what need have I of this?”

  “What a body is given to do, a body must do—one way or another, Mairi.” There was a tinge of sadness in Mrs. Grant’s voice. She sighed and gave Mary an unaccustomed kiss on the top of her head.

  Duncan would not go with Mary on those visits. He did not like her friendship with Mrs. Grant.

  “Mairi,” he had told her after her first long visit with the old woman. “It was the royal stag himself I saw on Carroch Hill and I could have followed him but I would not without you.”

  Mary had been bitterly disappointed. Then she had realized that there had been no deer, that it was only Duncan’s way of telling her she was not to leave him. And every time she did there was a wondrous something Duncan had seen—a glimpse of the rare wildcat, a vixen that might have let them play with her kits, a shadow that was sure to have been the urisk over by the Corran Craig—that great shaggy grey half-man, half-goat everyone knew lived up by the rocky pool beyond the waterfall, though no one had ever seen it.

  “Duncan dubh, you are not to mind so much
.” Contrite, Mary would not visit Mrs. Grant for a week or two.

  All this Mary was remembering as she tramped around the meadow, whistling the lambs from the high crevices in the rocks where they loved to climb, checking now and then to see that the ewe and her new baby were all right. “Och, Duncan dubh, how could you have gone away at all!” she whispered furiously. “I would have hidden myself away in the coire na cailleach and never gone. Never. Never.”

  Ignoring the calls of the others as they herded their animals towards home, Mary stood on the slope of the pasture looking down over the hills. It had stopped raining. In that sudden brilliance of the sky that comes in unexpected moments in the Highlands, the pasture blazed with the gold of the whin and broom in flower, the honey-sweet perfume of them rich in the air. The little loch just below the slope was ringed with aspen and rowan and birch softly green with early leaf. Above its dark water, small black terns and the great curlews wheeled in uneven circles against the wind, the sharp keek-keek-keek of the terns punctuating the curlews’ wild cries. High on Carroch Hill to the west, Donald Cameron’s cows grazing on the ridge were silhouetted against the deep, gentian-blue sky. Far below, Loch Ness shone white as a white swan’s wing and, away on the other side, the fields were green with spring. Beyond them the hills, smudged with the darkened purple of last autumn’s heather, rose and fell and rose again like massive earthworks left by the giants who were once the sole inhabitants of the north country.

  Mary loved the land fiercely. She felt as though she had been born out of its earth, that she was kin to the whin and broom and heather that grew so profusely over the hillsides, that there were tiny unseen roots growing along her body, reaching out for the land, drawing nourishment from it. Once she had told Duncan, “When I am old, I will lie myself down on the hill and my roots will push themselves into the earth and I will sleep. The grass will come to cover me then, and I will be part of the hill for ever.”

  “And I will be there, too!”