BOOK TWO. CHAPTER THREE

I could not have told when it was that I became aware in the schoolroom at Barnfingal of looks that met and glances that quickly fell, of sentences half begun and words that were never spoken. No longer was Julia troubled whether or not she should go to the schoolhouse, but set out joyfully with me each Tuesday and Friday to be greeted by him at the door with brightening eyes.

One Tuesday in late autumn she was not able to accompany me as usual, for Mr Urquhart’s brother Charles was home from abroad and had come to visit us. Julia primed me to tell the dominie that friends had called but told me not to mention whom they were. He, however, had evidently been watching me coming down the brae alone, for he greeted me with the words, spoken with some excitement:

‘Your sister has not been able to come. Would it trouble you to wait after your lesson while I wrote her a letter? You remember, she once told us she wanted to see the place where the Romans are said to have camped? I wondered if she would like me to show her it on Friday after your lesson.’

I sat beside him whilst he wrote the letter and after he handed it to me I bade him a hurried good-bye for fear he would ask for it back. Rain stung my face but I felt my cheeks glow as I ran most of the way to the manse where, in the dark garden, autumn leaves were sucking amongst the shiny holly bushes. Hiding the letter under my jacket, I started to look for Julia and found her alone in our bedroom. She looked round as I entered.

‘You’re never back already?’ she exclaimed. ‘What is that you’re hiding below your jacket?’

I had meant to tease her a little but something in her manner forbade it, so I only said gladly:

‘A letter from him.’

She told me not to be foolish and to give her it at once. After she had read it, she did not mention what it said, but asked me if he had looked disappointed when he saw she was not with me; and if he had, how disappointed; and what had I said to him.

A rough wind blew on Friday, chasing the clouds across a blue sky and blustering through the topmost branches of the creaking trees. On the road to Barnfingal Julia told me the dominie wanted to show us the Roman encampment that afternoon, but I answered I would go home after my lesson.

‘No, no,’ she said in alarm, ‘they would wonder at home where I was if you returned without me.’

‘I’ll go so far with you then,’ I arranged, ‘and wait for you until you return.’

She did not reply and after my lesson the three of us set out, leaving the road when we came to the ferryman’s cottage and striking towards the hills. I felt curiously glad and light-hearted that afternoon. Nothing could ever account for those feelings of well-being which filled me with a sense of powerful exhilaration. I felt at one with the gangrel winds, the desultory sunshine and the ground that had once stirred with the roots of trees. It was as though I had once been very happy on a day such as this and now, decades later, when I struggled through the dying bracken which stained the hillsides a bright rust brown, I was warmed by the memory of that long ago, forgotten happiness.

Our footsteps disturbed two grouse which rose, with screaming protests, from the ground at our feet and, on whirring wings, beat themselves into the air. The dominie called them ‘heather hens’ and told us they always seemed to him to cry out, ‘Go back! Go back!’ At the foot of a green hill we came to the Barnfingal graveyard where I said I would wait for Julia and be sheltered by the dyke.

I sat for some time on the western side of the dyke, looking over the moor, and stared at the bare ground so long that I saw it veined with deep dark colours, wine red, ruby and prune, drawn to the surface by the sun. Amongst the peat hags were little raised islands with tufts of long grasses sprouting from them, which made me think of fantastic hedgehogs. Grasses, purple when in a mass, bent whispering and sighing before the wind, but I was so protected where I sat that it scarcely fanned my face.

I rose at last and, undoing the piece of frayed rope that tied the gates together, went into the graveyard to look for the place where lay ‘the charitable remains’ of the Lady of Fingal. The cemetery was raised so that in some parts it over-topped the low dyke and it was built round that Cloutie, who only frequents corners, could not enter. Suicides were interred on the side belonging to the ‘black north’. The oldest tombs were horizontal slabs raised on stout, short pillars that had now sunk so far into the earth the slabs were half-buried, while a bright green moss had prettily filled the lettering on the upstanding stones, making them hard to read. Some had skulls and crossbones carved on them, others heads of angels, like the crude drawings of children, some winged hour-glasses, and others fists holding opened books.

My skirts swished in the long grasses, which wetted their hems as I moved from stone to stone over the eardmeal that covered molesmen and elders, shepherds and farmers, their spouses, relicts and children who had ‘departed this life’. I loved that expression; there was something gentle and acquiescent about it, as though they had at last found the door they had been seeking all their days.

‘… And also his spouse Florah Malcolm …’ I read and gave a little start, for even now voices were lowered when they spoke of Florah, who had been credited with having the Evil Eye. Strange tales they told of her. When crofters, taking their cow home from grazing, had met her, they had been wont to say in passing, ‘Good evening, Mistress Malcolm. God bless me and God bless my cow.’ But the story that haunted me was the story of the Pedlar Woman and her child.

There were some still living who remembered the day the Pedlar Woman came to Barnfingal. She left her little boy at the mill to play while she went with her wares of bootlaces and gaudy beads to the clachan of Moccoth, higher up the hill. When dusk was thickening into night, old Mrs Stewart, the miller’s mother, heard the sound of a child’s crying and, going to the door of her cottage, she saw a little boy who said that his mother had never returned.

Late though it was a consultation was held among the crofters that night, for the Pedlar Woman had been seen early in the afternoon on the path to Florah’s and there were ugly rumours afloat about the cottage on the old drove road to Balmader. It was said that at different times travellers, walking over the hills and going in to the croft to ask the way or for a drink of milk, were never seen again.

Lots were drawn among the crofters and he who pulled the fated number went to make inquiries at the cottage. It was Florah’s daughter who came to the door and, yes, they had seen a pedlar woman that very day but she had gone away, they thought, on the road over the hills; they had not known she had a child, he was not with her when they saw her. The little boy was sent to Perth but the Pedlar Woman was never heard to have reached either Perth or Balmader and was never seen in the district again.

Sometimes people, passing through the long, lush grass warmed by the sun beside the mill, have paused and fancied they heard through the creeping darkness the frightened crying of a child when he finds himself alone.

The fear of her Evil Eye guarded Florah while she was alive. Now her croft was in ruins, and although the unpruned apple trees in her garth still bore fruit, no one ever plucked them. The cottage was built high on the banks of the burn and it was said that the ground between the ruins and the bank could not settle. Each year it slipped a little farther, until in so many years it was supposed to crumble away altogether below the croft and reveal its ghastly secret. There was something malevolent even in her tomb, with its rusted iron railings closing it round, which made me wonder if she too could not settle.

I found the Lady of Fingal’s stone and read with ease what was written there, for the gravedigger never allowed it to become obscured with moss or rank grass like the other tombs:

If ever virtue gain’d sincere esteem

Or shed a lustre o’er life’s fleeting dream

That happy lot was thine in worth approved

Bless’d by the poor by all who knew belov’d

Unstain’d thy life in ev’ry view display’d

Calm reason’s power when by Religion sway’d

And now tho’ here thy Mortal parts assigned

With spirits bless’d above thy soul is join’d.

The former gravedigger used to tell, I believe, of how, returning one wild autumn evening to the cemetery for a forgotten spade, he was startled at seeing something white gleam palely through the darkness. Going forward, he discovered that the rowan tree growing on the Lady of Fingal’s grave bloomed with creamy blossom that neither shook nor rustled in the high wind tearing round it.

‘Life how short, Eternity how long,’ bemoaned one stone. ‘Whomsoever read the other side,’ warned another, ‘beware of death for it happened quickly to me on a market day in Dormay.’ ‘Ian Campbell, Piper to the Marquis of Mhoreneck, died in his twenty-first year,’ yet another ran. Then very contentedly I read of one who ‘died at Leith but now is buried in this churchyard in peace and with friends and neighbours.’

I liked the rhyming epitaphs best and with my finger picked out the grey lichen and green moss furring some of the stones that I might read their dim, chipped legends. And as I read, it was as though the ghost of him who lay underneath rose from his grave to speak with me. There was something amiable and friendly about Homish MacLean whose confiding epitaph ran:

This little spot is all my lot

And all that kings acquire;

My home’s above, a gift of love,

Ο reader, there aspire.

Catherine MacDiarmid’s read sadly when I pulled aside the tangle of weeds covering her grave to trace out the words:

Troubles sore oft times I bore,

Physicians were in vain;

Till God above, in His great love,

Relieved me of my pain.

But I did not care for the one next it, which belonged to a Duncan Ross who exhorted me almost spitefully to:

Remember, Man, as you pafs by,

As you are now so once was I,

As I am now, so must you be,

Remember, Man, that you must die.

I thought of Nannie who was wont to say death and the tax-gatherer were the only two things of which we could be certain in this uncertain world.

In a less over-crowded part of the graveyard I came upon a small cross that looked as though it were flying as it stood on a little hump. Kneeling beside it, I read its story which plained:

The/Fairest Flower/that/Decks the sod/

must/Close their eyes/To meet/Their/God.

Suddenly I became aware of the hollow-toned wind, like the united voice of those who lay buried there, moaning round the graveyard. I had forgotten to tie up the gate again with the piece of rope and every now and then it was blown to by the wind with a dull clang. I looked up to find myself surrounded by grey crosses and stones pinnacled with draped urns. The rustlings at my feet sounded unaccountable. The gate, at the other side of the cemetery, looked disproportionately far away.

I began to walk towards it slowly, to show I know not whom that I was not afraid. But once I stepped outside, I banged it behind me as though I had reached it only in the nick of time, and tied it up as quickly as my chilled fingers fumblingly allowed.

I did not look within again, between the railings, in case I would see them, a silent, ghostly company—all whose ‘soul sheaths’ had been buried there in the graveyard on the hill, Malcolms, Stewarts, MacLeans: the erst-time piper to the Marquis of Mhoreneck, the dew of youth upon his spectral brow; he to whom death had come swiftly that market day in Dormay; Florah with her Evil Eye burning fierily in the middle of her forehead; and, growing from a flowering rowan tree, the Lady of Fingal.