LIFE ON THIS ISLAND was a constant struggle against the raw power of nature. It lay on the very western edge of Europe and was first to bear the brunt of the uninterrupted Atlantic storms and last to feel the warmth of the continental air streams from the south. It was the outpost of the continent, and it had about it the wildness and harshness of the frontier.
Boils of rock betrayed the thinness of the soil; like eruptions on a pale face, they were evidence that this was not a healthy land. The people survived the poor earth and stood against the driving rain and constant wind. With the yield from their crofts, their beasts and the sea, the people survived, and they thanked God for His goodness and sang His praise. The seeds of faith sown in a foreign land in a different millennium had no deeper, stronger root than here, here where the soil was thin but the soul was fertile.
For six days of the week they toiled in the harshness of the land He bequeathed them, and on the seventh day they thanked Him for it. Eternal peace and salvation brought joy to those who believed, although their faces when in church to hear His word showed little exaltation.
This was the only world Kirsty MacLeod knew, but she dreamed of more. There had always been restlessness within her; it was the very essence of her. She read in her Bible of peoples and of lands so different from anything she knew. Her father would enthral her with his tales from the ports he docked at down the west coast and further over to the east. For a girl who’d never left her own district, there was an excitement about all that was beyond her.
Ten years before, a ship had arrived on the sea loch. It had come to take some émigrés away to the Americas. The sight of the ship thrilled her.
‘Did God make that, Father?’ she had asked in wonder.
‘No, my darling, that was made by men.’
‘How could men make something so big, Father?’
‘It takes hundreds of men to build big ships like that. And they go all over the world. They bring tea back from India, silk from China, tobacco from America. And they take things from here back to these countries. Sadly they take our people away too.’
‘A boat like that has been to America, Father?’
‘Many times. A boat like that will have crossed the ocean many’s a time. That boat you see there has probably been to places like New York and more.’
‘But no one ever comes back from New York, Father. Mam told me so.’
Her father chuckled.
‘Your Mam might well be right, m’dear. No person might come back from New York, but the ships,’ he said with admiration, ‘ships like that can come and go to New York as often as the wind.’
‘But why do the people not come back?’
‘Oh there are many reasons. Money more than anything. It is a lack of money that makes them go and the same that stops them coming back. And a lot of them don’t ever want to come back. It’s a grand life some of them have over there, better than they could ever have here. There is nothing for them to come back to.’
‘But this is home.’
‘It comes to us all. We all leave home sometime, it’s just that some travel further than others. Home is where you make it. And in America, from what I hear, it’s a better place to have a home.’
‘Would you like to have your home in America Father?’
Her father was silent for a moment as he looked to the ship before he stooped and swept her up in his strong arms.
‘How could I have my home in America while I have my own big girl right here on the island? You’re here, your Mam is here and Neil and Annie. This is my home.’
Years on she remembered the bubbling emotions of that day. Young men struggling to contain their tears as their mothers, faces crushed in sorrow, hugged them for the last time. The bewilderment of children too young to understand what was happening, the only certainty amidst the rabble being the instruction they had to hold tight to their tiny bit of luggage. One boy, maybe three years younger than herself, sat on top of a trunk with both hands wound round the handle of a black kettle. She had felt strangely envious of him, knowing the adventure that lay ahead of him. It had been the source of much guilt for her. How did Annie, her twin, love being at home so much, helping her mother, while Kirsty dreamt of being far away? Perhaps she loved her mother and father less, though she knew she loved them plenty.
Rowing boats had taken the travellers from the pier to the boat, and Kirsty had stayed for much of the afternoon watching the embarkation while her father had helped row the boats out. Some would sit waving repeatedly at those they had just left until they climbed onto the ship. Even then, they quickly returned to the decks to look back at the world they were leaving and would continue to do so until it fell away behind the horizon.
There were others, though, having said their goodbyes, who were now looking ahead to their future. Kirsty was captivated by one young woman who had climbed onto her father’s boat with only a trunk and a bag. She was travelling alone and no one had come to say farewell. Kirsty had fantasised about who she might be and why she was alone. The woman had sat quietly in the rowing boat and had not looked back once. She had graciously accepted assistance to get onto the ship and then she was gone from view.
Kirsty was only a young girl, but the images and feelings of that day had never left her. Even now she wanted to be like that mysterious woman. She knew that so many who had been forced to sail away longed to return. The songs of the émigrés yearned for home. They may be prosperous in the New World, but home was the island they knew they would never see again, and how they wept for it. Kirsty could not understand why they cried. They may have had to leave to find work, to make a life for themselves, but that they had surely done. Not for them the back-wrenching labour of cutting the peat, lifting the potatoes, scything the hay and gutting the herring; the constant work, from the setting of the fire and milking the cow in the morning to the covering of the embers late at night. Those gone wrote of factories, huge buildings where hundreds, even thousands worked. And when the day was done they were free. She wanted to join the generations who had gone before, to go to the big cities where the letters said the buildings scraped the sky, and jobs and land were to be had by all. It sounded like the land of dreams, a New World for a new life. And whenever she looked to the west Kirsty so longed for that.
She lived near the end of the village road, a few hundred yards from the shore. Like most others in the settlement, the house was a Black House; a single-level dwelling which seemed almost to cling to the earth from which it had been torn. Solid chunks of stone arranged closely, with a thatched roof. It was so perfectly suited to its environment that it looked almost as natural as the moorland itself. In a place where the wind never rested it found the house of rocks a doughty barrier, with the moist earth between the wall cavities forming a final line of defence. Cattle were sheltered at one end of the house and the family lived in the other, separated by a small entrance lobby. Five of them shared two rooms: Kirsty’s parents slept in the living area, Kirsty, her twin sister Annie and brother Neil in the only bedroom. The house smelled of peat smoke and strong tea.
Kirsty was a handsome girl and she knew it. She knew that her shy smiles and cheerful laughs kept the boys looking at her for that second longer. Sometimes, when she passed, a group of them would share a confidence, a laugh and a snigger. There was something of the beast about them at times. They would tease her and banter with her. They would boast of the bull they had calmed, the storm they had endured at sea or the haul of fish they had landed. She would listen and she would laugh, but she would never believe.
Her mother told her how lovely she was, how bright her eyes were; ‘You have such beautiful red hair,’ she would say, as she brushed it at night. Ordinarily it was tied up close to her head beneath a scarf, but at the dances it would shake free and tumble around her shoulders bringing warmth, light and colour to her face, like the sun setting over the sea. And she would laugh and the boys would whoop as they spun her ever faster. And Kirsty would always be spinning and reeling, be it during the winter ceilidhs in the village hall, or in the road dances during the midsummer when darkness barely cast its cloak. And when the boys danced with her, they would hold her as close as they dared in their rough way, and as they sent her spinning onto her next partner their fingers would slip down her arm relishing the touch of her for as long as they could. And although their fingers may leave her, their eyes never did.
Old Peggy thought Kirsty a little too flighty for her own good. Something about the way she carried herself and the way she giggled. But then Old Peggy thought anyone who didn’t clad themselves in joyless colours was frivolous. Old Peggy would tell anyone who listened, and because she was an elderly widow and the village matriarch, people did listen. She would even tell Kirsty herself. ‘You watch yourself, girl,’ she would say.
Kirsty knew what the old harridan meant – closeness to the boys led to trouble. She’d heard the story of a girl in the village who had had a child. It had happened many years before, but the story was still told and retold. Like the flowers of the machair, it flourished in the right conditions. Like as not that would be a wet and wild night with a gathering at a house. The songs would have been sung and the poems and legends spun. The village gossip would be passed around like a communal quaich, often light-hearted, sometimes with a hint of scandal. Then there might be an oblique reference, a question of detail, and the legend of Mary Horseshoe’s daughter would blossom in all its tragedy.
Although most had heard it, few were capable of telling it. Those who could had refined their narrative over many years and recitals; each pause had its place, every look and glance laden with meaning, each sigh drawing out the drama. And as the years passed, the storytellers capable of reliving the events of nearly four decades before had diminished in number. Old Peggy remembered. Old Peggy had been there and Old Peggy would never forget, nor let succeeding generations forget.
Kirsty had never known the girl, although her mother lived in a house below the road as it curled back on itself round a rocky outcrop. The Horseshoe, it was called, and the old lady was known as Mary Horseshoe. Kirsty knew her as a quiet, timid woman who would avoid your gaze even as she spoke to you, for all the speaking that she ever did. She was stooped and frail and the story had it that she had been stooped ever since the night her daughter’s screams had heralded the birth of a child, a child that no one expected. The girl herself had barely understood what was happening, they said. Only as the months passed had the awful realisation dawned on her as she saw her stomach swell and felt the flutterings inside, and even then she did not know for sure, but guessed from what she had seen of other women. The long tweed skirts and woollen cardigans and shawls had kept her secret until it could be kept no more. She could not even seek help from her mother and the other older women of the village because they did not know and they could not know. It was only when the waters broke and the blood seeped and the pain pushed the girl to hysteria that anyone knew.
In time-honoured tradition, older women from the village came to help. There were no medical textbooks to follow, but there was the experience of generations of women who had nothing to support them but the sisterhood of other women who knew what needed to be done because they had been through the same themselves so often before.
The community helped bring the child into the world, was a part of it as it passed through its life, and stood over it as it was laid to rest in the burial ground.
It had been so different for this child, a boy with a thatch of black hair and lungs that had forced the sound of his cry along the village road. By the following evening there was no more crying to shatter the night. The bastard child was gone, huddled away to the other side of the island. No one knew where he had gone from there, but Old Peggy said he had been taken to the mainland. Instead of watching a child grow to manhood the village saw a legend mature.
As for the girl who had mothered the child, she too disappeared. There were stories of her moving to a family on another island, of her following the child to the mainland, but those who nursed her that night recalled that she had never returned from the wild frenzy of her childbirth. She had been taken away in a cart, huddled in a shawl with her mother’s protective arm around her. She had been trembling like a puppy. Her father had not even been able to wave farewell, his love for his daughter soured by disgust. Her disgrace was his shame. He had failed in his guidance of her.
Mary Horseshoe returned the following day, walking up the road from the bridge, her shawl pulled tight around her head to keep out the wind and the questions. She never again spoke of her daughter in public. And even at night in the privacy of the darkness and her home, her husband never asked. Now the only one who really knew where she had gone was Mary Horseshoe and she never said and she never travelled.
No one knew who the father of the child had been. There were stories of the girl’s friendships with this boy or that. The pier on the sea loch was a landing place for fishermen from other parts of the country, sometimes even from different countries. And some of the girls would have gathered to work with the fish and sometimes just to watch these exotic strangers with their strange accents and unusual ways. There were those who said that she misunderstood the rituals and had been drawn too far by one of those men from far away. Even darker allegations were hinted at, never uttered, but insinuated by a look or a mumbled mutter. Wasn’t her brother a strange one? Whoever he was, wherever he was, the father of her baby was away from her now, abandoning her to her fate.
At the church the minister softly asked for compassion for the girl and prayed for health for the child and said that in time God would reveal why He had allowed such pain. It was not for man to know such things, but to accept that the Lord worked in mysterious ways. For a few moments he had rested his hands on the pulpit, his head sunk below his shoulders as if he was weighed down by the sorrow of it all.
And then he condemned; this was a lesson to all the young, that looking away from the Lord was to look towards Hell itself. And although everlasting torment was the certain end for those who did not believe, there could be a living Hell for those on earth, when acts not worthy of the Lord could lead to heartbreak and suffering. Face away from the Lord and you face blackness even in sunlight. The shame brought upon a household in the village was the work of evil, and the Devil would stop at nothing to ensnare you. Every impure thought, every moment your mind strayed from His Glory, every temptation was Satan grasping to you, drawing you to him, enslaving you. The Lord worked in wondrous ways, but the Devil was never far behind.
For an hour and more he blistered the congregation before him, his eyes scorching from face to face, his chest heaving like bellows to the flame. The flushed red of his neck and face stark against the white dog collar told everyone that this was a Man of God. His voice rose and fell like the stormy sea. The people before him were at his mercy, tossed from peak to trough by the power of his rage against sin. And in their midst sat Mary Horseshoe, pressed against the pew by the force before her.
When he was done and had entreated that the grace and peace of the Lord be with them all now and forever more, they filed out, still trembling. The memory of it burned through the decades. Mary Horseshoe had walked home that Sabbath as so many before, but despite the people walking with her, she walked alone.
In the years that followed many a girl heard the story of Mary Horseshoe’s daughter. And if, like Kirsty, the girl was popular with the boys, the story carried a warning. Kirsty understood the message and it left its mark on her as it did the others. Paul had written to the Ephesians of the mystery of man and wife becoming one flesh. The intimacy between man and woman was for marriage alone and for now, for Kirsty, that must wait. She knew she could have her pick of the men, but she wanted none of them. That would bind her to the island.
Iain Ban told her, she couldn’t remember how often, of the croft he was to take over from his ailing father, his plans to build one of the new style of houses which were appearing on the island. White Houses they were called, two storeys high with slate roofs and a kitchen with a stove. Iain had his plans alright: more sheep, more cattle and a new loom for the weaving. Iain wanted to have money in his pocket. He made it clear he wanted to have Kirsty too. And Iain Ban was a real catch, a tall powerful man who had the look of the Vikings from whom he was descended. Iain Ban, they called him, White Iain. He was the prime of his generation in the district and the district thought that whoever Iain chose, Iain would have. Who could not wish to be his wife? He would speak to Kirsty after church, he would walk her home from the village store, all the while telling her of what he was doing to his land and the prospects for his beasts. The time would come soon when he would need someone to be there with him and what a life they would have. He didn’t say that it would be Kirsty, but his implication was clear; when the time was right he would come for her and the white flags would be out to celebrate their marriage.
Yet he never saw that not once did he make her heart surge. Kirsty knew there would be no marriage to Iain Ban. He was a good man, but he saw life before him stretching no further than the end of his croft. Kirsty’s dreams soared like the moorland eagle beyond that, swooping down beyond the croft and over the ocean.
She despaired of the future others saw for her. She was eighteen and it was a surprise to some that she was not already wed. Marriage, though, meant living with in-laws in an already over-crowded house until another home could be built. It meant having children, many children – some women had given birth to ten and more. Not all would survive and many’s the time she had seen a woman grieve over the death of a child. To have something so precious growing within you, to feel it move and come alive and then have it denied to you. It could only be like a part of yourself dying, having it torn from you. How did they go on? How could they begin again? And yet they did.
Infant mortality had become less common in the new century, but always there was the unasked question when a child was born, would it survive its infant years? And women died giving birth. Died in agony trying to give birth to a child that couldn’t be released from their body. Kirsty could not help but think that they did not live for themselves, that their life was not their own.
Kirsty wanted so much more, believed that there was more to be made of her life. She devoured letters home from family overseas and she knew that was where she wanted to be.
And now, unexpectedly, there was Murdo. Murdo Book, he was known as. Books were his passion. This was a man who would often walk the twenty miles and more across the moor to town to get books from the public library. Murdo Book would read and read. His was a mind that craved to learn and though his formal education had ended long before, he wanted to know more. His dream of being a teacher had died with his father’s passing, but he could still learn. To what end he didn’t know, but there did not need to be a purpose to it. The acquisition of knowledge was a pleasure in itself.
Something set him apart from the other boys of the village. Not his looks, though he was handsome enough, but an air. It wasn’t sophistication exactly, more a sense of being a part of them but not one of them, something of a loner. He played the shinty, but he was not so inclined to gather at the bridge to yarn and joke the evening away or sup with them in the bothies. Instead he sought older company, talking with the bodachs of the district – the old men, many of them, even in their eighth or ninth decade, still with keen minds and hoards of deep experience of life and the world. They were the pages of his books brought to life; soldiers, sailors, adventurers, men who had seen the best and worst of mankind and the grandeur of God’s earth. And he would learn from them.
Kirsty had known Murdo Book all her life, but it took a chance conversation on a late summer’s evening for her to see him in a new light, to learn more of this rather distant man. She had been at the potatoes at an old lazybed her father had found on the moor near the cliff edges. She had lost herself as her eyes gazed at the sea and her mind sailed across it. People from the village, from the island, from the Highlands as a whole, had been crossing that ocean to the Americas for two centuries and more. It had been for adventure at first, young men following the sunset to find adventure and riches. Too soon, though, it had become necessity as clan chiefs, once paternal kin, had been seduced by the good living of the south. Blood, kinship and loyalty paled against a lifestyle of fine wine, good food and status in genteel society. In Edinburgh and London the ancient bonds of ancestry and loyalty were as nothing compared to the cosmopolitan sophistication of the lords and ladies. The chiefs had turned away from their people, without whom they would be nothing. And after turning away from them, they turned upon them. High living came at a price and land could provide a better return than people, particularly if that land was filled with sheep. Sheep could be sold, humans could not. The clan chiefs became landowners whose right to possess the land was lost somewhere in the mists of genealogy. The people were burned from their homes and cleared from the land. Thousands were forced across the ocean out of sight and out of conscience. Kirsty knew of these people, and of the bitterness that endured three and four generations on.
Even now the clearances continued, but in a different way; now it was an economic imperative. With limits on the good land available, younger sons saw emigration as their only chance of prosperity. Men who might have anticipated a life of working with the plough and the scythe and the fishing smack, crossed the Atlantic and became familiar with the drill and the grinder and the production line as they worked in the factories of Detroit and Chicago producing the new motor cars.
Murdo Book had seen the solitary figure looking out to sea. When he came closer to her he said her name.
‘Kirsty.’
She was so lost in her fantasy she didn’t hear him. He came within a few feet of her.
‘Kirsty. Hello.’
She whirled around in surprise.
‘Oh Murdo!’ she exclaimed.
He moved towards her, his right hand held out in apology.
‘I’m sorry if I made you jump.’
Her head bowed and she rubbed her hands distractedly down the sides of her legs, agitated that he had come upon her when she was dreaming her dreams. She had been so absorbed that she did not know how long she had been there. How long had he been watching her? Had she perhaps spoken aloud in her trance? She felt distressingly vulnerable and exposed.
Throngs of her hair hung heavily over her flushed face. He thought her the most beautiful vision he had ever seen, so alive, so vivid. He had always thought of her so. She brought colour and life to everything around her. But he had understood that she was beyond him and although his heart could still jump when they met, his pulsing arteries remained concealed.
He could not understand the intensity of her reaction. Why was she so overwhelmed? She had only been looking out to sea.
‘Were you digging for pirate’s treasure?’ he smiled, trying to put her at her ease.
‘No, I was…’ she paused in total confusion. ‘The potatoes.’
Murdo looked to the horizon.
‘It’s a lovely night, is it not?’
‘It is. It’s beautiful,’ she said, regaining her composure.
‘There’s not a cloud in the sky. You could believe there’s not a cloud between here and America.’
Below them the sun blazed a golden road westward across the sea, shimmering to bronze and copper before the light was lost to the shadows of the brooding rocks. The sea was settling in before nightfall glided over it with darkness and unknown fears.
‘It can take weeks to sail that ocean,’ Murdo said quietly, ‘and when you reach America there is much the same distance of land until the Pacific. They’ve got too much land and not enough people to fill it.’
Kirsty lifted her eyes to the horizon. The two of them stood with their backs to the old world, the world they both knew so well. Behind them were the blackhouses and the crofts, the peat stacks and the church at the end of the road. As they stood together the sea breeze that brushed past them seemed to carry with it new life from beyond the horizon. They both shared the same dream and they sensed that they were with a kindred spirit. The final glow of the ebbing sun seemed to forge a bond between them as it gently lowered the island into dusk and proffered dawn to the land of promise.
‘I’m going to go there,’ Murdo said. ‘There is nothing for me here. Whatever I do I will always be Murdo, son of Calum, son of Murdo. I have the same name as my grandfather and I live in the same village as my grandfather and his father before him. In their lives the world barely changed. They had as much here as they would have had anywhere else. But the world is changing, it’s exploding, and it will never be the same again. This is all happening now, but it is happening somewhere else.’
Murdo spoke of his plans to go to America, but not as others had, simply aspiring to work for someone else. In America Murdo was going to be his own man, in control of his own destiny in a way that would never be possible at home.
He became more intense, staring from the sea to her eyes. And she was drawn into his excitement, swept along in his vision.
‘On this island I will always be who I am and I will always do what I do. If I move to the mainland or down to the cities I will always be a man from the islands and they will judge me by that. But in America it doesn’t matter who I am or where I’m from, it’s what I can do that counts. And if I can do it for myself then all the better.’
Kirsty was entranced. It was as if he had been reading her mind. She had known Murdo all her life, but as a distant, peripheral figure. But his words made her heart pound with exhilaration. His mind so quick, so keen and his eyes so dark and intense. For all the dreams Kirsty had of a new life, there had always been the doubt that for a woman it may not come to pass. She’d considered two possibilities of passage. Some women had travelled over to become the wives of men they had never met, men who had emigrated before their future wife had even been born and who now sought a partner. A partnership was what it would be: such a man would have spent his early years building up a farm, and his woman would be there to provide a home and a family to take it on. The other possibility was to answer one of the occasional advertisements in the post office offering emigration for women who would work as maids to wealthy families. Neither choice appealed to Kirsty’s independent spirit. She reasoned that if she was to work in service she would be as well working for a husband with whom she might have no affinity but who could at least provide security. But if that was the best choice, then it was no choice at all.
Now Murdo Book seemed to be offering a different way, though perhaps he didn’t even realise it himself, but she sensed it in the way he was opening up to her.
She wanted to tell him of her own dreams, but he was gushing like a burn in spate and there was no stopping him. He had an uncle in New York who was something of a hero to him. He was the brother of Murdo’s mother and he had sailed away before the century had ended, before Murdo had been born. Uncle Alasdair had gone first to Toronto in Canada and then to the motor factories in Detroit. Now he was in New York City working as a joiner. He was married, but had no children and regarded his sister’s family as his own.
He only knew him through his letters home, but Murdo had always been able to sense him, feel his presence, hear his voice. From before he could read, Murdo remembered when the regular letter from his uncle arrived. Even the knowledge that the thin, pale blue envelope with its large stamps and address written in bold, sweeping strokes had come from so far away was a thrill in itself. His mother would not open it until the family was gathered together. Then, with no little ceremony, she would carefully slit it open and start to read, slowly and hesitantly, sometimes having difficulty making out a word. It would be written mostly in Gaelic, but his language of common use was English, so he would skip between the two.
Murdo, more than any of his siblings, was hungry for the news from overseas. If his mother paused while she tried to make out a word, the interruption in the flow was almost too much for him to bear. And if his mother would read under her breath something she wanted withheld from the children, his irritation was absolute. As he learned to read for himself, Murdo would be allowed to read the letter. This he would do, over and over again. Uncle Alasdair would ask about the people and the life at home. He still felt a part of it even though he was so far away. He would write of his regret when he heard of someone passing away. He would know when the cows were to be taken out to the moorland pastures over the summer. But Murdo would become really immersed when Uncle Alasdair wrote of what he was doing himself. He spoke of dollars, of streets and avenues that had numbers not names, of automobiles and apartments. Murdo knew that in Glasgow there were houses that were four storeys high. Uncle Alasdair wrote of buildings that had fifty levels and more. And when at the end of his letters Uncle Alasdair asked after the children, Murdo would be thrilled to see his own name written there by this man who had seen and done so much.
Murdo told Kirsty that he would live in New York City. Uncle Alasdair had written telling him to come and stay, telling him that he too could be a part of the American Dream.
‘Too many folk who come here can’t even speak English,’ Uncle Alasdair had written. ‘You can’t fail. They want bright lads like you. You can stay with me until you find what you want to do. I could even fix something up for you.’ Murdo so wanted to go, but he was the eldest in a family without a father and he felt the burden of responsibility. His mother understood his dilemma. Her own brother had gone before and made a good life for himself. Murdo’s father may be dead, but she had told him that she would not stand in his way.
The sun had long disappeared below the horizon by the time Murdo’s cascade subsided. In its place were myriad stars, millions of them and more. Every detail of the night sky was clear to the naked eye. A rock just a footstep ahead was lost in the gloom and yet the gleam from a star light years away was as bright as rock crystal. In the darkness Kirsty too began to voice her dreams.
‘I have fancied that someday I too would go there. I hear of women who work over there, not on crofts or in houses, but in banks, in shops and in businesses. I could never do that here. But in America I surely could.’
Murdo was enthralled by her quiet determination. No woman had ever before confided in him like this, and it thrilled him.
‘You say you have your grandfather’s name,’ she continued, ‘but one day it’ll be your own name. And your children and their children will be known by your name. Me? I will never be me. I was born my father’s daughter and even now that is what I am. Should I ever wed I will become the wife of Peter, Kenny, Iain or whoever and even when they die before me that is all I will ever be: a daughter, a wife, a mother and a widow. Even when I die I will be buried with my father’s name above me. I will never be me. That is my past, my present and my future. But I want more and maybe I will only ever find it if I leave behind all that I know and all that knows me.’
The first chill of the night made her shiver. Murdo slipped off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. This was the first physical contact there had been between them. But they had talked with a vitality as intense as any first kiss.
They began to make their way off the moor down to the shore, carefully navigating their way across the rocks. Kirsty giggled gently when Murdo stumbled. Further on he turned to help her climb down from a steep rock and though she had done so often herself, she did not reject his attentions.
They came onto the village road. Although they could barely see ahead of them, they did not stumble. This was a road both had known since birth.
‘How would you go?’ he asked her. ‘Where would you go?’
‘It is a dream for now,’ she sighed. ‘The real world just spoils the dream. But maybe my chance will come some day.’
Too soon they reached Kirsty’s house. She shrugged off his jacket and held it out to him. He tugged it on and hesitated, biting his lip.
‘Kirsty. You could come with me if you wanted,’ he said haltingly. ‘We could go together.’
Her heart leapt. She had wanted him to say just that.
‘Oh Murdo! But how can I?’
Murdo gently grasped her arm and she felt the softness of his lips on her cheek and the warmth of his breath on her face. She turned to face him and saw the whites of his eyes stark in the gloom. The glint on his iris could have been a flash from the stars. He brought both hands up to her face and cupped her head in them. Gently and deliberately he kissed her lips. She couldn’t close her eyes and nor did he. His gaze held her as he caressed her.
He whispered, ‘We’ll do this together.’
And then he was gone, his boots scrunching on the stones of the road. And yet it felt to Kirsty as if his hands were still on her. The damp of her lips caught the cool of the wind. She became aware of the sound of her heart thudding and that her fists were clenched and her arms bent almost as if to protect her. With a sudden sigh she relaxed, glanced about her, and hurried down the path to the house.
What had happened? She had been digging the earth with a cromman to gather potatoes in a bucket. There was the prospect of tea and a blether with the family about the day’s events. Tomorrow she would have expected another day much the same. Yet now she felt herself alive as she had never been before. She knew she was in love, her senses tingling with the anticipation of something unknown. She saw her future clear before her, dazzling her and thrilling her.
And how she missed Murdo, though he was scarcely gone from her. This man whom she had always known and yet never really known until now. He had been a figure in the village, a boy she’d known all her life, a man she’d danced with, and that was all she had ever thought of him as being. Now she was helplessly in love with him because he had shown her what could be. And he had kissed her, not some childlike kiss with tightly closed mouth against a half-turned cheek, but a real kiss that lingered on her lips and left her weak. She longed to chase after him, to be with him, to walk into the night with him. Kirsty felt as if she’d been reborn.
As he walked further away, Murdo could barely believe what he had done. He had strode away quickly, stunned by his own impulse, fearing her reaction. His neck was tense with apprehension. Hadn’t this girl just been telling him how she wanted to make a life of her own, free from constrictions and expectations? And what had he done? He had grabbed her, kissed her and told her they could do it together. But desire for her had swept over him. This girl stirred something in every male and he had been no different. He’d watched the way men looked at her at the dances, even at the church, but he was Murdo Book and she would never be interested in him. And yet tonight, she had revealed something of her soul. Her words had seemed to beckon him. It had been too much to resist. However, as he walked on and the fear that he had misjudged everything receded, Murdo began to allow himself to relive his enjoyment of this night. The memories he would always have. Tomorrow was another day.
The creak of the door heralded Kirsty’s arrival home. The scene was one that had been part of her life for as long as she could remember: the peat fire glowing, Mam and Annie knitting, father sitting peacefully sucking his pipe in his corner, with his Bible lying on a small shelf by his hand. He was waiting for the whole family to gather together for the Books. Now that Neil had returned from repairing fishing nets and Kirsty had come back from the lazy beds, they sat together taking turns to read from His Word and bowing together in muttered prayer. Tonight it meant more to Kirsty than ever it had, because she knew now that it would not be a part of her life for much longer.
Mam asked what had kept her so long, and she heard herself saying she had wanted to watch the sun set. Her mind was wondering where Murdo was now. When Mam had asked had she seen anyone coming in the road, she could only think of what he might be saying as he arrived home himself. And when asked where the pail of potatoes was, Kirsty just didn’t hear.
She lay in bed beside her sister that magical night and thought of Murdo, and the future that lay before them. Some in the village had the second sight, a foreboding of what was to come. It was a sweet blessing that Kirsty did not, for she would have seen that before the year was out Murdo would have left the island to fight in the bloody, muddy fields of France and she would have a baby growing within.