THE WATTER LOLLED AT HER FEET. She had loved that as a child; the initial thrill of the cold and then the gentle massaging, sometimes with a strand of seaweed tickling back and forth. The feet were swollen, hard and contorted now, but the sensation was as ever she remembered it.
She rested now against a black rock that stood alone on the shore as it had done since she had been a wee girl. She remembered it as a test of childhood, when successfully clambering to the top of it marked the coming of a certain age. ‘The Beast’ they had called it. Sometimes smaller rocks and pebbles clustered around it, at other times it rose clean from a bed of sand. It all depended on the tidal shifts of the Atlantic. In the decades since she had last seen it she had thought that its form might have altered in some way, worn by the batterings of the storms. But no, it was just as it always was. It must have been the same when The Skipper had played on it as a child almost two centuries before, and a thousand years before that the Vikings would have cast their eyes upon it.
She had the eyes of those Vikings, she’d been told. Rheumy with age they were now, but still unmistakably blue. She gazed out to the horizon and back again in time. Eighty-five years she had lived, but her life had blossomed and choked in that one year so long ago. Its shadow had hung over her ever since. The cliffs rising black and broken before her were like some monument to her life, a life that she now sensed was drawing to a close. She was old of course, but more than that she felt her body was slowly closing down. That was what had drawn her to the shore, to see it one last time, while she was still able. She had stayed away for so long because she had feared what she would have to confront within herself.
She had looked upon her son for only a few moments. The pain of her pregnancy had dulled and she had but the vaguest recollections of holding him. She still saw, though, in a muzzy slow motion, the pathetic bundle falling to the sea. But his face she saw in the face of every baby she had looked at in the years that followed. The life that he might have led, she saw lived out by the children who grew around her in the village. Some of them, too, had been taken by a war, and seeing the anguish of loved ones bereft had vividly brought her back to her own grief. Some were alive even yet and she had watched their faces change through the years. Her own child’s never had and she remembered and regretted it every day of her life.
There had been no other children because she had never loved again. The man who had been taken from her so long before had been the love of her life, her only love. There could be no other. She had existed for more than sixty years, nothing more than existed, with that love for her Murdo her emotional sustenance. Younger folk might have wondered how this withered old woman could ever have loved. But she had loved, and how breathtaking it had been. It had not evolved over a lifetime into companionship and shared memories. She felt her love for Murdo as vital as it had been on those summer evenings so long before. Even now she talked to him, told him her troubles and reached for him in her loneliness. How remarkable it was, the love of an old, dry woman for a youth, forever fresh and young.
She had never received a telegram. Their bond was not written down for officialdom and she was not his kin. But she had received a letter. When she first saw it, the pencil on lined paper had reminded her so much of Murdo’s own that she for a magical moment she thought he was alive and coming back to her. How hard she fell. All hope was crushed by the simple words of a comrade-in-arms.
Dear Miss MacLeod,
It is with deep regret that I write to you. I had a pact with Murdo that if one of us should come off the road the other would write to loved ones. That is why I write. He spoke of you often and of his plans for you both and you were in his thoughts until the last. Murdo was killed on Sunday the 9th. He fell during our advance and died instantly. He would not have known what had happened and he did not suffer. He was a hero and you can be proud of him. Please accept my deepest sympathy in your sore bereavement. I shall write to you again.
Yours sincerely,
Malcolm MacKay
The soldier had never written again. He must have fallen too, although she never knew for sure. It would have meant so much to have been able to speak to him face to face, to know more of how Murdo had been killed and whether he truly knew nothing. She believed that would have made it easier for her to accept his death, but she never did learn of his final moments. Throughout her life she was tormented by the thought of him lying wounded, calling her name and crying for lost dreams. When she learned that the attack on Aubers Ridge had been in vain it was almost too much to bear.
His belongings had been returned to his mother. She asked for Kirsty to come to her one evening in the summer, almost a year after Murdo had first kissed her. Until then, there had been little communication between them, each lost in her own grief. The message was delivered by the brother who had brought her the news those months before. Kirsty gasped when Mam had answered the door to him. ‘Can you come to the house?’ was all he had said before fleeing, chased away by his own terrible memories.
Kirsty had never been to Murdo’s home. Since that morning on the cliffs, she had never even left her own home. It was Mam who forced her to go.
‘You can’t go hiding away. You must get out.’
Kirsty pulled a shawl tightly around her head and hesitated at the door.
‘I’ll come with you if you want,’ Mam said, ‘but I think this is something you should do on your own. It’ll be about Murdo.’
That was the impetus to make her step outside, the air so jolting fresh on her face. She couldn’t face going through the village, to have people looking at her, talking to her. This would be an ordeal enough. So she walked up the croft and made her way to the house across the moor. Some distance behind her was Annie, ready to crouch behind a peat bank or a rock should Kirsty turn round. Mam had instructed her to follow. Kirsty was watched constantly, even at night. Mam blamed herself for Kirsty’s condition and feared what she might do. Annie was relieved when her sister did not take the tracks to the cliffs, but still she followed her closely. She would track her all the way to Murdo’s house and back again.
Kirsty came down off the moor onto the road, close to the house. Murdo’s house. It was set back from the road and Kirsty hesitated at the stony path. She had passed it before, but then it was just another house in the village. Now she saw the fence posts that Murdo had fixed in place, the thatch that he’d spread and the blue wooden door he had painted. He was everywhere around it. It was only when the door opened and Murdo’s mother beckoned to her that she made herself walk towards it.
‘Come in, Kirsty, come in,’ his mother had said quietly, leading Kirsty into the living room. The fire was out and the house seemed so cold.
‘The army,’ began Mrs Morrison, ‘they sent me Murdo’s things.’
A sob suddenly caught in her throat and she fled through to the bedroom. Kirsty remained standing at the table, unsure what to do.
A few moments later she returned holding a parcel in front of her with both hands. Her hands shook as she pulled open the loosely tied knot of string and peeled back the brown wrapping paper. Murdo’s few belongings from the Front lay before them. His wristwatch, the glass cracked and the hands stopped. His cap badge with dry mud in the crevices of the mould. Frayed edges of paper poked from his stained, leather wallet. There was the small Bible his mother had prayed would protect him. And there were two small bundles of letters, tied with a bootlace. Kirsty took in every detail.
His mother sat down, her arm resting on the table, supporting her head.
‘Some of these letters are yours,’ she said wearily. ‘Do you want them back?’
Kirsty made an involuntary sound that was neither a word nor a sob, but did not move. Murdo had carried these letters with him when he died. It was their last link. Mrs Morrison picked up one of the packages of letters and handed it across the table to Kirsty. Neither woman could speak. Kirsty wanted to touch his other things, just to feel them in her hands, but this was not her place.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Mrs Morrison asked eventually.
‘No, thank you.’ Kirsty didn’t want to stay. ‘Thank you for the letters.’
‘They were yours to have, dear.’
The two fell to silence again and Kirsty just wanted to leave.
‘I think I’ll go now.’
Murdo’s mother nodded absently.
‘Thank you,’ said Kirsty again and then left.
She didn’t feel so close to Murdo in his home. It was not a place they had shared. In the few years that followed before Murdo’s mother’s passing they never became close. There was a warmth, but it was tempered by Murdo’s mother’s uncertainty over Kirsty’s place in her son’s life, and Kirsty’s faint, but uncomfortable resentment that his mother stood between her and Murdo.
Annie had watched her leave the house, return to the moor and walk in the direction of the cliffs. Her alarm was quelled when Kirsty sat at the rock that had been the special place for her and Murdo and read over the letters she had sent to him.
Murdo’s siblings had grown and carried on with their own lives, but only Alasdair really understood what feelings she had had for his brother. He had tried to be close to her, but emigration had taken him away. Now Murdo’s great-grand-nephews and nieces were growing up in the district, maybe seeing him only as a face in a sepia photograph, but never knowing who he was or his love for the quiet old woman who lived further in the road.
She had heard the saying of having outlived one’s time and she felt that now, living in a world that even here had changed beyond recognition. But then her time, she mused, had lasted barely nine months. It was a phrase she remembered The Skipper using, and she thought of him fondly. It was he who later told Mam so graphically of the row between the policeman and doctor from town as they had left the house.
‘The doctor fellow with the beard came stomping out,’ The Skipper had said. ‘He went up to the Inspector and asked if he was satisfied. He said MacLean had been right all along and he’d been dragged over from town for nothing. He even told him to go and examine her himself if he wasn’t happy. Well, the Inspector said nothing, not a word. He got into that gig and the four of them went back to the police house and not a word was said all the way back. They were saying in the road that the doctor fellow got into yon motor thing and was away over to town straight away.’
Grant had not given up. He had stayed on at the police house with MacRae. Houses were visited and questions asked, but no one had told them anything because no one knew anything to tell. The Inspector had prowled along the cliffs, looking for anything that may have been missed, making minor variations to his route each time.
Mam often saw him near the house. He’d even spoken to her once as she came back from the well. He’d asked how Kirsty was. He said he was sorry that she had been forced through the indignity of being examined twice. He was sorry, but hoped she understood why it had been done. The mother of the baby they’d found, he said, would need help. And he had been so anxious that she got that help that perhaps he had made mistakes. He hoped she was not offended, but he had thought he was doing the right thing by her. If only he could find the girl he could get her the help she must need. Mam had acknowledged what he said and responded in monosyllables. Whatever assurances Dr MacLean might have given her, the presence of the Inspector was a worry.
It had been a relief when her husband and son returned from the fishing. She was no longer alone. They had heard all about the boys lost and the discovery of the dead baby when they unloaded their catch at the pier. The two men returned to a house suffocated in sorrow. Kirsty’s father was helpless to comfort his daughter, but he knew how to protect her. When he learned of the police interest, he made straight for the police house. Kirsty had been scared when she saw him leaving, grim-faced. He never spoke of the confrontation, but the Inspector did not come back.
The investigation just seemed to peter out. Nothing new emerged, no evidence, no testimony, nothing. John MacRae later confided in his wife that the Inspector had believed the case had been solved on that first day. Grant had convinced himself that the answer to the tragedy lay in the house of the three women, but he was never able to prove it. He had discussed his suspicions at length with MacRae.
‘They might think it’ll all be forgotten,’ he’d said over a late whisky the night before he left. ‘But they’ll be wrong. That was a human being who died. Maybe I can’t make them pay for it, but you can’t ever forget killing someone like that. That’ll live with them and that damned doctor.’
The next day he was gone. Dr MacLean called down at Kirsty’s house in a jubilant mood.
‘He’s gone and he won’t be back. It’s all over for you now,’ he’d crowed.
The investigatin saw the legend of Mary Horseshoe’s daughter supplanted. The death of the child had become public knowledge and the culprit a matter of fervid speculation.
‘The police thought that Kirsty did it, but they never did know for sure,’ Old Peggy had told a gaggle of listeners. ‘And do you know why? Because she had nothing to do with the poor child. Two doctors called at that house and that could only be to check that no baby was born there. They checked Kirsty all right from what I hear, but did they check the other one, the quiet one? They did not. For if they had they might have found something.’
‘Did you tell the policeman that Peggy?’
‘I did not. It’s none of my business.’
There were those who came to be convinced that the baby and his killer had indeed come from the house of the twin sister, and that while the police had thought it to be Kirsty, they should have paid more attention to the girl who silently cowered from them.
As she thought back, Kirsty felt the extra burden of guilt that dear Annie had been subjected to, the whispers and the gossip for what was left of her life. She had been taken by the worldwide flu epidemic that had followed the First World War, succumbing to the frothing and the coughing from her lungs. Not for Annie the simple home life that had been her only wish, with a local lad and children of her own in her own village. Instead, this sweet girl’s life had ended prematurely in pain and with a stained name. Old Peggy had opined that the Lord could not allow her to escape her awful deed. It was so unfair and cruel.
It had been Dr MacLean’s idea that Annie pretend to be Kirsty. He’d come back into the house on that first day when the baby had been found. The policemen were on the cliffs, he’d said, but the Inspector would want to come back with another doctor the next day. Dr MacLean had said that if Annie was willing to impersonate Kirsty, he would see to it that the second doctor would never know. Kirsty had been through enough, he’d said. If they thought she had killed her baby they would not try to understand, they would just send her away. Annie could help her. Her ever-loyal sister had said she would, of course. Dr MacLean had told her that it might not be easy, but he would be there too.
Kirsty had done what she was told by Mam. She had sat by the fire and remembered watching the two men come in and leave again. Mam had immediately gone to see Annie. Her sister never ever spoke of what had happened to her, but Kirsty could still hear her crying, even now. It was one of the many guilts that burdened Kirsty through her days.
In a place where tragedy was part of the landscape, it had been a time of heightened torment. There had been the lads lost at the war, even more after Murdo. Iain Ban had been one of them. The remains of the house that had been his pride still stood. It was a little way down the croft, out of sight of the road. It never was lived in. One gable end remained, standing tall to its apex, the intricate jigsaw of stones withstanding the years of winds and storms. Through the hole that would have been the window, you could see the grass thick and strong. Over the years sheep and cattle had sheltered here and generations of children had played their games, their laughter lifted by the wind. None of them, though, carried the blood of Iain Ban.
A dreadful time. When the war had passed and there was a future again, then, then came the cruel scything of those that remained by the Spanish Flu. And in the village there had been the burning of the doctor’s house. Everything but the stone walls had been consumed in an inferno that could not be contained. Futile efforts were made to extinguish the flames as they burst through the windows and beams of the house. No one emerged from the blaze. His charred remains were found in what had been the living room. ‘The poor man fell asleep in his chair and a lump of peat rolled off the fire,’ was the story that spread round the village. His wife, it transpired, had been away in Glasgow and he had been in the house alone.
Mam was shocked when she heard and brooded over how to break it to Kirsty. Her daughter had been getting better. It had taken years, but when Annie took ill, she nursed her constantly. It was as if Kirsty knew it was her turn to be strong for Annie. What would the news of the doctor do to her? She was outside when Mam came to her.
‘There has been a terrible thing happened. I don’t know how to tell you, but I have to. Dr MacLean. He’s dead. He died in a fire at his house.’
Kirsty remained impassive.
‘Oh, what a terrible thing,’ Mam sobbed. ‘The poor doctor. He was such a kind man. And he was so good to us.’
Kirsty turned and began to move away.
‘Where are you going?’ Mam asked nervously.
‘Don’t worry, Mam. I’ll be fine. I’ve work to do.’
Mam watched after her as she walked up the croft.
Kirsty felt frozen inside. She thought back to the morning after the Road Dance when she had lain in the same room as Dr MacLean and saw him asleep by his fireside. She had known him to be a deeply unhappy man and she wondered how much of an accident it might have been. He was a tortured man, a man who struggled to overcome inner demons. Sometimes the drink let them run riot in his head. He had the capacity for tenderness. She knew this to be so; she knew him as her saviour. And she knew him to be her rapist.
In the months that followed the death of her baby he had been so attentive to her and protective of her. He called almost daily, talking to her, leading her from the deep, deep darkness into which she had descended. He made it possible for her to continue her life and tried to convince her that she had been a victim of circumstance. She had chosen to do only one bad thing, he told her, and she had been in no state to make that choice. He was always there for her, to speak to her. He was so kind. But when he had breathed on her the day the police had come, she had known with awful certainty that it was he who had violated her and drawn her to her terrible deed. When he’d spoken to her conspiratorially, she recognised an edge in his voice that she had heard before. The betrayal petrified her. How could he be one and the same man? If he saw the change in her, he gave no indication, but she took care never to be alone with him. He only saw her at the house and her father and brother were near at hand. Over time she feared him less. But the hatred festered.
It had erupted as the flu epidemic began to ebb away. Kirsty was stronger now and the death of Annie was still sore. He had called on one of his visits and they sat on chairs at the end of the house.
‘When will it ever end?’ he’d asked wearily without expecting an answer.
‘It never will,’ she’d said. ‘We reap what we sow.’
‘Kirsty, this has nothing to do with us. What has happened is beyond our influence. And even if it was, you have done nothing. What you did, you did because you were sick. Sickness is not always physical. It can be in the mind too. And like the body, the mind can be healed. You were sick and that is nothing to be guilty about. I thought you understood that now.’
‘And what about you?’ she asked, her hands clasped tightly on her lap. ‘Have you anything to be guilty about?’
‘I’m sure I have,’ he said half-smiling, but mystified. ‘There’s none of us perfect.’
‘But you’re not certain are you?’
‘I’ve done things wrong Kirsty and I’ve done things I wish I hadn’t. I’m no different from anyone else in that.’
‘Aren’t you? Is every sin the same? Are they all equal?’
‘No, of course not. But don’t confuse sin and mistakes. I’m just saying that you learn from what you do wrong. You can’t torture yourself.’
‘What if others are ruined by what you’ve done?’
‘You have to move on, Kirsty. You can’t dwell on things.’
‘How can you not dwell on things? It’s all around us. There are reminders everywhere. Tell me doctor,’ Kirsty spat, ‘how do you ignore all of that?’
MacLean stared hard at her.
‘All these people. My baby. Me. Annie. All destroyed. But we don’t dwell on it. We just move on. You just move on.’ The bitterness spewed from Kirsty.
Slowly the doctor bowed his head.
‘I know it was you. You hurt me. You killed my baby.’
Kirsty had sprung from her seat, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at him. MacLean sat for a minute in silence, his shoulders sagging, twisting his hands.
‘I am sick, Kirsty,’ he said in an undertone. ‘The drink. It’s an illness for me. There are times when I don’t know what I’ve done. That night. I don’t remember. I don’t even know why I was there. The drink got the better of me. I am so sorry.’
She stood with her back to him, saying nothing.
‘It was when they brought you to me that I realised what I’d done. I don’t know what I can say. I’ve tried to make it up to you. I’ve tried to put it right, tried to help you recover. Your health, the police, everything. I’ve tried to make it right.’
‘How in God’s name could you make it right?’ she hissed bitterly. ‘What sort of a man would think he could make it better? You’ve ruined me as a woman. I killed my baby. How could you make that better?’
They both heard the outside door opening. Kirsty stood over the pathetic figure of the doctor.
‘You saved me to save yourself and I hate you for it.’
MacLean lurched away from her, unable to bear what she was saying, stumbled past her father in the doorway and out. She never saw him again. The following morning he was dead.
A piece of wood had been floating in the water. Kirsty’s failing eyes only noticed when a wave threw it beside her on the shore, leaving it stranded. The wood was part of a packing case that must have fallen from one of the many ships ploughing through the ocean. There were figures burnt on to it, and she stooped to make them out. Above the smaller numbers three initials stood out, N.Y.C. She caught her breath. New York City. On a summer night a lifetime before, she had believed that place would become her home.
She drifted again to that night on the moor as she and Murdo had looked to the glowing sunset in the west and dreamed their dreams. At least she’d had those moments. It was why she had never left. Sometimes, in the late evening, she could see the rise and fall of the knolls on the moor and she could remember with vivid clarity. She felt closer to Murdo, surrounded by the landscape they had known and near to the places that had been special to them. But she could never return to them in person. To do so would be to take her within sight of the cliffs on the other side of the bay and be confronted once again by the unspeakable images they represented.
As the time was slipping away from her, so she found that there was no fear now, only deep regret. A sorrow that she would never know Murdo again. In all those years she had felt his presence with her, looking over her, but she knew that when her time came there would be no celestial reunion.
It was a comfort of the faith that those who were parted would be together again in the afterlife. Kirsty believed there would be no such peace for her. How could God pardon her when she couldn’t forgive herself? She had not even asked in prayer. She had been doomed since that stormy morning when she had cast her child to the waves.
The horizon was obscured now. A grey curtain of rapidly approaching rain sweeping in to envelope all before it. As the first of the raindrops slipped down her cheeks, another wave rolled in, lifted the fragment of wood away from her, and swept it back into the sea.