Anne McCaffrey
The Mark of Merlin
CHAPTER ONE
I was aware that I should be more grateful. The train was after all headed in the right direction. Track was laid from Boston to the end of Cape Cod and eventually this train, too, would arrive at its destination. Maybe not on the day of embarkation, March 18, 1945, but sometime. Such vague reassurance didn’t make the journey from Boston to East Orleans in a frigid baggage car any less cold and dreary.
Not that this was the first trip I had made in a baggage car. Merlin and I had traveled that way all over the United States, including the territory of Alaska. But this time the ignominy of forcing a gentleman like Merlin among common crates, bales, and boxes, and having to have him muzzled and chained, was one more insult to the injuries of spirit I had already sustained. My rebellion was complete. The only living thing it did not touch was Merlin. He was, all totaled, the one being who cared for me, Carlysle Murdock. I should say, James Carlysle Murdock, driving that particular thorn deeper into my side.
Merlin sensed my rising inner turmoil and whined sympathetically, his tongue cramped up against the confines of that indecent muzzle. At Merlin’s remark, the imbecilic baggageman cast a nervous look in our direction. I ignored him. As I had ignored his attempt to bully me into confining Merlin in a cage.
I knew how useless it was to explain that Merlin had had the benefit of schooling under the leading canine trainers in the world. That he had far better manners than three-fourths the travelers today, including service personnel.
Merlin’s size and his breed predisposed people immediately against him. It is difficult, I agree, to reassure the timid that one hundred and twenty pounds of silver-black German shepherd was in actual fact a driveling coward. I could show his K-9 papers discharging him on the ground of “insufficiently aggressive behavior” and I would find people ready to discredit the word of the undersecretary of war.
Oh, I could have caged him and sat forward in comfort and warmth with the human passengers but some perverse streak in me reveled in the martyrdom of this segregation. I knew I was acting childishly, that I was not adhering to the strict “chin-up” code in which I had been raised, but that was another facet of this whole humiliating, terrible journey.
Tears, never far from my eyes these days, dribbled down my cheeks. Rather than let the baggageman misconstrue my weakness, I buried my head in Merlin’s ruff, choking back the lump in my throat. Merlin’s soft whine was more understanding than all the sympathy of the dean and the hospital staff at college, or the commiseration of my boardinghouse colleagues. None of these people had ever met my father so how did they know how much I was going to miss him? How could they understand this crushing loneliness that overwhelmed me?
Here I was, sick with grief and not yet recovered from the strep throat infection that had stricken me at midterms, advised by the dean to take the rest of the spring term off “to get my bearings,” on my way to meet a guardian whom I earnestly wished to hell.
And he had perpetrated the final indignity. He had not even had the grace to come get me, though he had certainly known from the dean’s letter how sick I had been. I refused to allow him the one benefit of doubt to which I knew, in my heart, he was entitled. He did, after all, believe me to be a boy. Who wouldn’t? With a name like James Carlysle Murdock? Was he in for a surprise! And, damn my dear father anyway, not only for inflicting such a name on me in the first place, but for not explaining to the friend he had happily conned into “guardianing” me that his beloved Carlysle - Dad had never called me “Carla” as my friends did - was actually a girl and not a boy. Major Regan Laird was in for a mighty big surprise at the station at Orleans. That is, if he condescended to come meet me there!
Remember, my better half reminded me, he’s just been invalided home himself. He might not be able to drive, assuming first, he has a car and second, he is able to wheedle gas out of the local ration board.
I was not to be mollified so easily. I was bound and determined to be as miserable, disagreeable, and awful as I could. That would repay the much decorated Major Regan Laird for his ridiculous letters, urging me to join the service and finish my college later.
“Apply for O.C.S. and be a credit to your father!” Indeed. What did the service ever do for Dad but kill him?
“Enlistees have tangible advantages over draftees.” Sure, Major, but I’d love to see your face signing a WAC application form as my guardian. I smiled to myself, smugly sure of startling the hell out of the patronizing, insufferable, egocentric major-my-guardian.
What had my father been thinking of? Couldn’t he have appointed someone I knew? Captain Erskine, for instance: He was in Fort Jay. For a year I could even put up with simpering Alice Erskine. But this unknown major? That rankled!
Now, said myself to me, your father has been mentioning this Major Laird ever since he wangled Laird’s transfer to his own regiment. Laird has been praised, appreciated, blessed by Dad for two years. Two soulmates, that’s what my father and the major had been. Two minds but with a single preoccupation - infantry: the proper disposition and use thereof in battle.
If it did nothing else for me, this line of thought kept me so agitated I did not feel the damp, raw sea-cold that seeped through the ill-closed baggage door as the train bucked and squealed slowly over the icy tracks. I heard the conductor calling “Yannis” at the next station. Not bad. A mere three hours late to Hyannis. Chatham would be next and finally, at long overdue last, Orleans. This endless journey to the long-delayed meeting with my unknown guardian was drawing to its conclusion.
I leaned into Merlin’s warm body as the baggagemaster swung open the door to the icy March evening. No appreciable effort had been made here to clear the depot or the street visible just beyond. Drifts were piled high around the baggage entrance; a narrow aisle, shovel-width, led to the passenger side of the station. Two Railway Express trucks were backed into four-foot drifts and a green mail truck was revving its motor noisily, gusts of its exhaust mingling carbon monoxide odors with the smell of overheated oily steam drifting back from the hardworking engine. My stomach churned spasmodically.
Immersed in this slough of self-pity, I envisioned myself trudging drearily, freezing cold, down the deserted, snow-heaped streets of Orleans, trying to find my way to Major Laird’s house, Merlin, his silvery coat white with snow, pacing wolflike behind me.
“Gawd, what is it? A wolf?” a masculine voice demanded in a broad down-east twang as the door creaked wide.
“Nar, the gul’s dawg,” the baggageman said, giving me a dirtier look than usual. He had been questioned at every stop and was as irritated by now as I.
“Should be caged. Reg’lations.”
Before the baggageman could open his mouth with another of his simpleton remarks, I answered.
“They don’t build cages that big.”
“Bulieve it. Better keep that’un chained down heyah, miss. Someone’d shoot’m fer a wuff. Would indeed.”
“He never leaves my side,” I replied coldly, looping one arm loyally around Merlin’s neck. He had watched the exchange, cocking his head right and left, ears pricking forward. He looked soulfully up at me and tried to lick his lips through the muzzle. Frustrated, he stretched his front paws out and eased his huge barrel down, resting his insultingly packaged head on his front legs.
There was the usual endless routine of waybills and did Mrs. Parsons’ package make this train and when did they expect the shipment for Brown’s and so on and on. I supposed acidly to myself that without the summer visitors to gossip about they had to make do with such banal topics. But it was driving me nuts. I didn’t want to get to Orleans and yet I couldn’t wait to confound Major Laird. I was supremely tired of train riding. I was thoroughly bored with baggage cars and I was exhausted, very cold and very hungry. Since we’d left South Station in Boston at eleven this morning I had had one single cup of lousy coffee and nothing else. The moron of a baggageman wouldn’t let me leave Merlin long enough to get so much as a sandwich.