Turn of the Tide Page 19

  And that was how Robbie found her, sent to cry her in for dinner. Stomach warred with pride and won, but, greatly daring, she ignored the partition and slung her leg over to drop onto the stool, which Robbie obligingly held steady. At the door of the stable, she halted, her childish treble fierce with unshed tears.

  ‘He promised me a lesson.’

  Robbie, awkward, looked up at the sky, ‘It’s gey like rain, he wouldn’t have let you out in the wet.’

  Her look shrivelled him into silence, a reply the more cutting for its lack of words, so that he offered, ‘You looked fine and easy, with a good seat.’

  An older child would have laughed at the pedantry of it. Anna, taking it at face value, was mollified. She jutted out her chin. ‘It won’t be a Sheltie I’ll be having, you’ll see.’

  Unfortunate that Maggie, nursing her victory over the ribbon, had wheedled Agnes into plaiting it through her hair. Doubly unfortunate that Kate, occupied with her own thoughts, on Archie and Sybilla and how they fared at Kilmaurs and what fettle Munro might be in on his return, failed to notice, so that Anna, fixing on it, boiled afresh. And, most unfortunate of all, the arrival of a knife-sharpener; so that Kate, who had intended to ride out to visit Mary and had ordered Midnight to be saddled to that effect; was occupied for a good hour or more.

  Robbie, after a whispered debate with Anna, in which she stubbornly refused to give up his fishing line until he made her a promise, took himself off to the loch and settled to practising his cast. Anna waited until the stable lad disappeared towards the kitchens with some of the more blunt of the outdoor implements, then unlatched the stable door and, tugging Midnight against the partition, clambered onto his back. She would be back long before Kate was free and none the wiser. The horse needed little encouragement, walking on at Anna’s command, with only the merest prick of his ears and a quick sideways shuffle to indicate his awareness of a new and less confident rider.

  Once through the gate, Anna, unsure on the rough ground, turned to follow the line of gorse that stretched across the hillside, climbing crabwise towards the brow of the hill. At the top she paused, pulling too hard on Midnight’s mouth, so that he began to toss against the bit. A kind of instinct led her to relax her hold, though not enough to stop his backwards lurch. Fearing to slide, she dug in her heels, and misinterpreting the signal he sprang away, moving swiftly to a trot. Unable to find the rhythm, she was jolted with every stride, up when she should have been down, down when she should have been up, the saddle bouncing firm and unyielding against her buttocks, so that she bit her lip with the pain of it. He moved from a trot into a canter and she found temporary respite in the smoother flow, but only for a moment before he lengthened his stride to a full gallop. With the increased speed, she lost her hold on the reins and lunging forward was forced to grab a fistful of mane.

  She lay along Midnight’s neck, pressing herself into him, bone and muscle etched along her length, so that on the following day, a mottle of bruises showed blue-black through her skin. Her breath came in gasps and sobs, the scent of horsehair laced with salt and sweat lying in her mouth and nose, half-choking her. She had no thought but to hang on, no sense of where she headed, no idea of how to stop. Her hair was plastered to her face, a pulse pounding in her head. Had she been older, or unloved, she might have recognized the sensation as fear. As it was, she knew only that she thought her head might burst.

  They reached a long incline stretching towards a ring of trees and their pace decreased, the gallop become a canter, the canter a trot, the trot a walk, until, finally, Midnight stopped. For what seemed a long time Anna didn’t move, pressed down by the weight of her head, powerless to unfurl her fingers from the tangle of mane, fighting the urge to be sick. When she did open her eyes, it was to see that lather striped Midnight’s neck and lay in flecks along his nose, white against black.

  Contrite, she whispered, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to stop.’ She smoothed Midnight’s glossy coat with her trembling hand, trying to reassure herself as much as the horse. ‘You shall have all the grooming you want when we are home.’ Then, raising her head a fraction, noting the unfamiliar ground, questioned, ‘Do you know the way home?’ Her voice wobbled to a sob, ‘For I’m not sure that I do.’

  For a few minutes more she lay motionless, resting her cheek against Midnight’s neck, feeling the slowing of his breathing; aching for her mother. It was, though she didn’t know it, the best thing she could have done in the circumstance, for herself and for the horse. Finally, cautiously, she sat up. She had no idea how far she had come, and nothing around her provided any clue to her whereabouts. She shut her eyes against a renewed impulse to be sick, allied now to a need to relieve herself and forced herself to concentrate on teasing out strands of mane with her fingers, until the twin urges subsided. A whisper in her head, told her that if she did get down she wouldn’t be able to get up again. Then as she looked towards the far away ground, she realised that she couldn’t even get down. She was close to tears and knew it, knew too that tears wouldn’t take her home. And so she sat up straighter in the saddle and focused fiercely on thoughts of the horse that she wanted, the promise she had extracted from her father, her boast to Robbie. She chided herself – that she wouldn’t get anything at all if she couldn’t get Midnight back safe . . . and how Robbie would crow. Deep inside herself, she knew that to be unjust, but some instinct made her nurse the thought, while she took a second, more careful sweep of the surroundings.

  Failing a second time to find any familiar landmarks, her mind turned to rehearsing what she could remember of their flight through the heather. Which was almost nothing and of no use at all. Her right hand, lying on Midnight’s mane, turned warm. Surprised, she saw that the sun had sailed from behind a cloud, and again tears pricked her. But this time ‘good’ tears, for Anna knew the sun and where it shone at Broomelaw and hence the direction she should take.

  Had she been on the ground, she would have danced a jig. As it was, she gathered the reins and careful not to tug at his mouth, turned Midnight and clicked softly to him. Under her breath she repeated the mantra, ‘Sun to the right, shadow to the left’ and feeling the heat on her right shoulder, began to relax. Midnight began to move more confidently, his head up and eager, but submissive to the direction of her choosing.

  In the end it was a small thing.

  They were within a mile of Broomelaw, on the top of the rise, the familiar sea of gorse stretching up to meet them. Anna had regained a measure of confidence and, no longer having to concentrate so hard on keeping her touch light, had begun to think instead, and with apprehension, of the reception she would receive on her return. The sun was behind her now, their joint shadow almost twice their length, so that she knew with certainty that not only had she failed to return in time for her mother’s excursion but had probably missed supper as well. But reckoning that an extra half-hour was unlikely to increase her punishment, while returning with Midnight in poor shape likely would, she was careful not to push him, so that they jogged along comfortably, the gable of Broomelaw’s garret firmly in her sights.

  The grouse burst from the heather under Midnight’s hooves and flew straight up at him, calling her protest. Munro would have known to a nicety the degree of pressure to exert with hand and knee to steady the horse; Anna, jolted out of her thoughts, reacted to the lifting of Midnight’s front hooves with a sharp pull that jerked his head up and back. A small thing, but the worst possible. The horse was vertical, flipping backwards, casting her over the rump, his tail flailing her face. She landed on the flat of her back, the mass of horse above her toppling, blocking out the sun.

  They had been searching for three hours when they found her, laid out on the heather, limp and crooked. And when they lifted her, her head flopped, her hair swinging behind her like a rope, her eyes wide open and staring as if caught by surprise, much like the raggedy doll that Kate had made for Maggie out of scraps. Kate, who had refused to remain indoors, was right on th
e heels of the lad who caught first sight of her and so it was Kate who, dropping to her knees, placed her fingers on Anna’s forehead and drawing them downwards, shut her eyes for the last time.

  She too, moving ahead of the small procession that wound down the path to the tower, gathered Robbie and Maggie close and, hugging them fiercely, told them that Anna wouldn’t be learning to ride a pony at Broomelaw after all; that she had gone away, that they would miss her, and here she choked, but that they must try not to be too sad, for she had gone to heaven and heaven was a beautiful place. And when Maggie, tugging at the ribbon in her hair, asked,

  ‘Will she have a pony?’ Kate crushed her against her chest and kissed the top of her head and said, with a swift prayer that God would forgive the fiction, ‘The best.’

  Maggie, curious, said, ‘What like will it be?’

  And Kate, choking afresh, found an answer. ‘Snow-white and fine, with a mane of silver and hooves of gold. Handsome and . . .’ Her voice cracked, ‘. . . sweet-natured and kind.’

  But afterwards, the children finally asleep and the servants dismissed, she went to the stable and savaged Midnight’s saddle cloth with the newly-sharpened scissors until it was barely fit for stuffing. And when that wasn’t enough, tossed it, sodden with tears, onto the midden.

  It was the remnants of the saddle cloth that caught Munro’s eye as he returned home, so that he slid from Sweet Briar’s back and left her standing, reins trailing while he went to investigate – dear God . . . sensing something was amiss.

  Kate met him at the foot of the stair and keeping him at arms length, told him, in a voice devoid of emotion, that Anna was dead. That they had found her, her neck broken, bruises blossoming along her length, Midnight cropping at the grass nearby. That if the tinker hadn’t come; if Midnight hadn’t been saddled; if she hadn’t sent for the axe and scythe . . .

  He cut through her babble in a voice that far surpassed the grimness of hers. ‘If I hadn’t been obsessed with William. If I hadn’t gone to Kilmaurs. . .’ The realization, surfacing from deep in the recesses of his memory, was sharp as a stab wound. ‘If I hadn’t bided away. I promised . . . dear God, Kate, . . . I promised her a riding lesson.’ He plunged back down the stairwell and out onto the hill to fling himself prostrate in the Anna-shaped hollow of crushed grass; and railed in anger, at himself and at William and at the God that he was now almost sure couldn’t exist, or if he did was the God of the Old Testament only and not of the New.

  As dusk fell he shut himself in the tack room, his head resting on the saddle that Anna had polished so vigorously, the smell of it stripping his nostrils as if it were acid she used and not goose grease. He found the rag wad and buried it inside his doublet, so that it pressed against his rib, a constant irritation reminding him of what was lost.

  In the days and weeks that followed he found he could not bear to look at the horse, whose fault it was not, nor himself, whose fault it was, nor Kate, whose every movement seemed an accusation, nor the bairns, who sought attention that he couldn’t give. Nor could he go away, which was his inclination. Instead he marked out an area of ground in the valley below the tower, and refusing all offers of help, began to clear it of stones. With the stones he made a wall, and it was as if he built it as a defence, not to protect the sheep whose new lambing pen it was to be, but as a barrier around himself, that no-one could breach.

  Part Three

  January 1590 – April 1591

  This above all: to thine own self be true . . .

  Hamlet: Act 1 scene 3

  Chapter One

  Winter passed.

  Little word came from Kilmaurs to give them either quiet or dismay, their unease over Archie and Sybilla displaced by more personal ills. Kate kept herself occupied with the children: nursing Ellie, braiding Maggie’s hair and playing endless games of marbles and Nine Men’s Morris with Robbie. A clear attempt to bring a forced gaiety to the long evenings; so that Munro, unable to speak of it, ached for her, for the children and most of all for the Anna-shaped chasm that yawned everywhere you looked. Robbie had lost his competitive edge and despite that it had often been a trial, Munro missed his quick flare of temper when things went awry. Maggie, though still with a ready smile, seemed also to have lost her bounce. Even Ellie, for all that she was but months old, grizzled at odd moments as if she too felt the lack.

  He was taken by surprise that the usual concerns of winter: the timely servicing of the ewes and the cattle, the repairing of walls and byres, the worry that the straw wouldn’t last out, that the food laid by would be insufficient to see them through to the spring, that the animals confined to the byres might ail, were just as they had been every winter for as long as he could remember. Daily, the thought weighed on him: only we have changed. And all my blame. His mother failed each time they saw her and he dreaded another funeral, the pain of Anna’s still with the power to fell him like a blow.

  March came in wet and wild, an unusually fierce storm lifting the foot-square roofing slabs on one side of the tower and scattering them across the rough slopes below. Although some were recoverable, most were not, and Munro was forced to plunder their small savings to pay for the new stone and the mason to replace them. There were few jobs he wouldn’t tackle himself, but the roofing of the main tower one of them.

  Paradoxically, the setback seemed to ignite a spark of the old Kate. She placed a hand on his arm as the mason left, two-thirds of their hard saved cash clinking in his saddlebag. ‘There is always a blessing. No-one is hurt and the job is well done and should see us right for years to come.’

  ‘I know, only . . .’ he had been about to say that he had a mind to take Kate away for a bit: abroad even, to Holland or France. But little point in speaking of what they could no longer do.

  ‘Only what? We have a wee pickle still aside if we need it, though with spring just around the corner, I can’t think for what.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  It was the first normal conversation in months and both of them aware of it, both equally afraid to continue lest they strayed into dangerous territory.

  At the beginning of April with lambing newly on him, Munro received a summons from his mother. She received him in her bedchamber, the first time he’d been at her bedside since a child, and though she pulled herself up against the pillows, it was clear that even that effort was much for her.

  He touched her shoulder, the bones fine as a bird’s under his fingers. ‘I should have been here sooner.’

  ‘For why? To carry worry the longer?’ Her skin was parchment-thin and heavily lined, a map of veins like clogged tributaries through which her blood battled to pass. ‘When it is time I will know.’

  ‘Come back with me.’

  ‘I wish to die at my own hearth.’ She gripped his hand, but there was little power in her fingers. ‘I am well looked after here. And death isn’t for the young. . . .’ Her eyes signalled her distress, the silence between them a weight crushing his chest. ‘Let the bairns mind me as I was.’ She closed her eyes and he thought that she had slipped into sleep and wondered if he should leave. But whatever else had caused her to call for him, it wasn’t that he could sit by her side a while and begin to grieve, though her not dead. And so he waited, perched on the edge of the bed, her hand lying in his, almost weightless. The silence deepened and, for a moment, he thought her wish fulfilled, that she had known and so had cried him. He had time to begin to be glad of the call before he heard the fresh in-gasp of breath.

  She spoke as if the conversation between them had never been interrupted. ‘Wabbit I can stand, wandered I couldn’t. If you wish to make a prayer on my behalf, let it be that I go before my wits desert me.’ Again a silence, her gaze sliding past Munro to settle on the hanging behind him. He pictured the embroidered initials – AM and MC, the colour of the silks faded to a dull brown, and guessed, wrongly, that she minded his father.

  ‘What of Archie? Have you word?’

  He was startled back t
o attention. ‘None since I was last here. He was aye a poor correspondent.’

  ‘And the Boyds? Have they had anything?’

  ‘No idea.’ He turned the conversation. ‘You should see Ellie now. Red-headed for sure, and already starting to curl for all it’s no length.’

  ‘And a temper to match?’

  ‘Oh, aye. She may be but a wee mite yet, but there’s nothing wrong with her lungs, and when she’s cross, she clenches her fists and hammers her heels that hard that if she forgot what angered her in the first place, she’d still be howling from the pain of it.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a blessing I won’t be around to see the fallings-out between her and Maggie then.’

  It was his turn to look past her, to the cross-stitch that Kate had given her last Yuletide but one: of the bairns in the barmkin. Anna, riding the wooden horse across her knees, Robbie whittling at a stick and Maggie, kneeling on the cobbles, a kitten sleeping at her feet. He admired the spirit in his mother that made a joke of imminent death but found himself unable to reply in kind.

  She touched his face so that he was obliged to look at her. ‘I have had my share of this world and am ready for the next. Only . . .’

  He waited.

  ‘. . . I would wish to see Archie settled. The last time . . .’ She began to worry again at the embroidered coverlet. ‘Last time he was here he seemed over hard for his own good.’