“KEEP HER HERE,” she said, and ran. When she reached the crest of the ridge, she could not believe what she was seeing, yet it was there before her, as hideous as one of the story paintings that had haunted her as a child, like “The Massacre of the Innocents.” The wind carried not only the fresh gusts of smoke from flaming thatch but the indescribable din of terrified animals and children, men shouting, a woman screaming.
She saw one man trying to keep another from putting the torch to his roof; he was knocked out of the way, and as he went sprawling backward, a woman sprang at the arm of the torchbearer, and she too was swept aside. She scrambled to her hands and knees and then onto her feet, and ran into the cottage. The man with the torch kept shouting in at her, and when she didn’t come, he set the fire anyway, and the thatch went up in a roar of black smoke and dirty flame. The woman came out, huddled over and holding herself together in a way that made Jennie’s stomach crawl.
She heard herself shouting crazily, “Stop this! Stop!” She looked around wildly for someone, anyone, to go and help them. Then she saw the cluster of horses and ponies kept from harm’s way over on the road near the peat. One of them, standing out among the others because of his height and color, was Adam.
So Nigel was down there somewhere. “He’s trying to stop it,” she said aloud. “Archie went ahead with it, but Nigel’s trying to stop it.” She went down the hill, trying to watch her footing but still see the scene below, and as her perspective shifted, she saw Nigel standing like a rock in the midst of chaos. He was looking at something in his hand. Near him Morag’s father and mother were dragging a chest from their cottage, and Morag hurried out behind them with her arms full.
Surely Nigel would help them; that was why he was there. So why did he keep staring at what he held in his hands? All at once he lifted his other hand high, and brought it down fast, and a man darted into view with a torch and fired the thatch before Morag was ten feet away from it. Jennie could hear the roar.
Morag’s mother stood as if turned to stone by the sight, and Harnish sagged over the chest. Morag ran to Nigel and spat in his face; the gesture was clear to Jennie. He swung his arm, and the backhanded blow nearly knocked the girl off her feet.
Jennie began to run, lost her balance, and tumbled down into the little valley. As she struggled up, she saw two small children running from the fires toward the brook, one dragging the other by the hand. They were nowhere near the stepping-stones when they plunged into the stream. Their heads strained above the deep fast flow, mouths wide in cries drowned out by the noise of the water. Clutching hands appeared and disappeared. Jennie threw herself headlong, fell into the brook, and regained her footing by a miracle. She waded waist-high in the rushing current and grabbed for the children with an insane strength, getting one by the shoulder and the other by the hair. She hauled them ashore before their frantic hands could drag her down with them.
She sat on the bank, hugging them to her, and they clung to her because she was an adult. Through their soaked scanty garments their bodies vibrated with shock. She didn’t want to leave them, but she must, so she found them a warm hollow and tried to make it clear that they should cuddle there and wait. They knew a few words of English, and one of them understood her and mutely nodded.
Holding up the wet skirt that dragged down on her, she crossed by the stepping-stones and went on. A bedridden person was being carried out on a mattress, and now, closer to the scene, she realized that Nigel was holding his watch in his hand, timing another removal. If he had happened to look in her direction, he would have seen her for an instant before a swirl of smoke hid them from each other.
She wished he had seen her watching him.
Another roof went up, and there was a long scream as if a woman were dying in the fire. People kept trying to move their househould goods out of reach of the blowing flames, and sparks. A dog yelped as if kicked, the crying of children mingled with the bleating of goats and sheep, and Jennie wished to be struck deaf. Hidden from Nigel’s sight by a newly roofless cottage whose interior was smoldering, she saw Aili kneeling beside the old woman on the mattress; they didn’t see Jennie.
She looked around for Morag. Over beyond Aili and the old woman, a safe distance from the smoke and sparks, Morag’s wee cow seemed to have collected the goats, the dwarfish sheep, and the other cows about her, and in a hollow of the moor below them there was a little knot of women. Jennie recognized Morag’s curly black head; that cow must have followed her.
Jennie walked timidly toward the hollow. She saw that the women were clustered protectively around another one, whose head Morag’s mother held against her breast.
Jennie hadn’t the courage to go farther. She was Nigel’s wife, and if they spat in her face, as Morag had done to Nigel, she wouldn’t be surprised. But Morag, lifting her head to look around toward the burning cottages, saw her. She jumped up and ran to her. To order her away? Jennie quivered but stood her ground.
“Mistress!” Through the anguish and the soot, the sweetness came. “You shouldn’t be here! And look at you! Your clothes—”
“Morag, I didn’t know—”
“I know that, Mistress.” One side of her face was red from the blow. “Now go away, please. This is no place for you.”
“There are two little children up there by the brook. They were running away in blind terror. They’d have drowned if I hadn’t been there to drag them out. Someone should go to them.”
Morag seized her hands and squeezed them. “It’ll be Kirsty’s boys! She’s been frantic for thinking they were caught inside. She was fearing wee Colin ran in for his father’s bonnet.”
“Where is the father?”
“He died in the winter.” She ran back to the others and bent over the woman on the ground, who struggled to sit up. Her face had been ugly in grief but was now transformed. Jennie had seen she was the older of the two pregnant women, and it was a wonder she hadn’t gone into labor there on the ground.
In a little pause in the hubbub, Nigel’s voice rang out clearly; the gamekeeper’s shout answered, and then some command was relayed in Gaelic. Unexpectedly Jennie became very calm. Now she understood; she was to have been taken out of the way.
“Whatever happens now is on your head,” Christabel had said with that peculiar smile. She must be ecstatic now on her drive to Rowanlea, imagining what was going on behind her.
Morag turned to her, and they hurried to the brook. “I will not be going back to Tigh nam Fuaran, Mistress,” Morag said.
“I know.”
“I spat in his face.”
“I know that, too. Did he hurt you badly?”
“Och, I was too furious to feel anything!” She laughed proudly.
“How long was I gone before it happened?”
“A half hour perhaps. Then the Captain told us the writs of eviction were being served all over the estate, and there would be one hour and then the torching would begin. He told us we could go home to help our families. But no one would believe it till the sheriff’s men came. Donald John went at them with his fists and had his face laid open, and they arrested him and took him away.” She said it as if she had no emotions left. “My father walked all the way to Linnmore House, but the Laird wouldn’t see him. Then the hour was almost gone, and those others came on their horses—he came, and he stood with his watch in his hand and gave each ten minutes—”
Jennie couldn’t bear to hear this. “Where was Alick Gilchrist?”
“He didn’t come.”
“Surely he knew what was going on, he could see across the loch—”
“And the smoke going up everywhere,” Morag agreed. She turned and pointed north and west, and Jennie saw smoke rising from distant folds in the land.
“They are even burning the roof timbers,” Morag said, “so we have nothing to start new with, if we found a place. They should have let us save the timbers.”
Off to the far right of Alick Gilchrist’s untouched cottage, smoke eddied from a hollow. “Lachy’s hut.” Morag’s voice was dull. Lachy’s hut, where they used to take the trout and fry them in oatmeal, Nigel and the sons and brothers of those he was driving out.
Jenny cried savagely, “Why isn’t Alick Gilchrist over here risking his neck to help you? He had enough to say!”
“I don’t know,” said Morag softly. They crossed the stepping-stones and went along the bank to the children. Jennie was the alien now as Morag comforted and cajoled in the hushed, musical Gaelic. At last she could start back, holding a boy by each hand.
“I told them their mother was weeping for them,” she explained.
“What about her? Is she going into labor? She’ll need things—”
“We will take care of her, Mistress. And no one blames you.” She went on with the children across the stepping-stones, and walked with her head up toward the smoking desolation. She didn’t look back. For the first time in all this, Jennie’s eyes filled with tears. Then she turned and blindly ran, stumbled, fell to her hands and knees, got up again, sobbing with a pain that wasn’t physical. When she reached the top of the ridge, she looked back for Nigel. She didn’t want to see him, but she couldn’t keep from trying. Once before in her life, when her father had been carried home dead, she had insisted to herself that it was a dream and if only she could find a way to wake up, Papa would still be alive. Now she wished sickly for some fantasy to be truth; for that to be an evil, crazed, identical twin to Nigel, imprisoned until now, when he had escaped while her Nigel lay hidden from her, a bound, helpless prisoner. But while she was wishing it, she knew she was sane and wide-awake.
It had happened. Nothing could change it.
All the roofs had boen fired now, and Nigel’s people were walking away toward their horses. She leaned against one of the pines and watched the miniature figures in the distance. None of them looked back at what they had done. They reached the road and mounted; Nigel and two of them headed eastward toward the break in the ridge, and the others rode toward the west.
She went down to the coppice, skidding in her wet boots on damp places, snagging her skirt on bushes. But she was in control enough to be careful. To take a bad fall now would make her helpless among her enemies. She saw things around her with the obsessive attention to detail that accompanies such moments. When she passed the ferny spring, she noticed that the violets were drooped and faded; she heard the blackbird from one of the chimneys.
Dora and Fergus still waited by the paddook; the mare was grazing, and Fergus sat on the ground with his back against the wall. When Jennie came upon them, he got clumsily to his feet.
“You knew what they were doing, didn’t you?” she said. After a long moment he nodded. His black eyes seemed bemused by her damp, disheveled clothing and scratched face.
“Where is your family, Fergus?” She tried to speak evenly. He answered something she couldn’t understand, lifted his hands, and shrugged.
“No family?”
He nodded.
“Is there a short way from the top of the ridge”—she pointed— “across to the road? A way that will be safe for the mare? I must ride to Alick Gilchrist’s house.”
He took the reins and started off. Dora went agreeably along the track and through the coppice, but when the path turned steep, she was nervous. Skillfully he coaxed her along, repeating little sounds which Dora knew; sometimes she contributed a few of her own as if she and Fergus were holding a conversation. Again Jennie felt like an alien. She was needed by no one, not even her husband. With his brother and sister-in-law he had made her less than nothing.
It was Christabel who had proposed the visit to the Lamonts, not the other way around. When had they arranged it? The day when Nigel was supposed to reassure the tenants? When he’d claimed that his con’ science had been too much for him? Of course! Christabel would suggest the visit to the Lamonts when they came the next day. How sympathetic they’d be about the problem with this delicate, sentimental girl Nigel had foolishly married. They’d be happy to help.
The Lamonts hadn’t come because of the emergency at Rowanlea, and Davie Grant had appeared unexpectedly. But the note suggesting the visit must have gone back with the messenger who brought the Lamonts’ regrets. Such a nuisance, having Jennie meet Grant! It put Nigel to the inconvenience of quieting his wife’s hysterical fears. But he’d be able to talk her around, and he had done so, with consummate art.
Then Lily forgot to pack the sapphires, and Jennie had a word with lain Innes.