“Surely,” he exclaims, his voice rich with piety and exaltation, the good word melting on his tongue like a thick pat of butter, “surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. .”
Ailie looks up, as if the promise were meant for her alone, as if it were a blessing for the road, a sign that she’s made the right choice. The sermon is over, the parishioners rustling in their seats. She can’t help smiling. Amen, she thinks. Amen.
♦ ♦ ♦
Georgie’s diligence carries them as far as Leith, where they take ship for Kinghorn and pick up the post chaise. From there they work their way up the east coast, through Cupar, St. Andrews, Ellen, Fochabers and Cawdor, stopping at inns and country houses for refreshment, taking time out to reflect on such curiosities as Dunbuy Rock and Gordon’s Castle. Ailie presses her face to the window, rapt, gazing on the windswept coast with its stunted spruce and fir and heaps of rounded boulders. Thomas, child of the century, is almost six. He clings to his mother’s sleeve and whines, uneasy with the pitch and yaw of the coach, or interrupts Georgie’s delirious monologue with aboriginal screams and resounding raspberries. He looks, absolutely, precisely, and in every detail, the image of his father. Mrs. Quaggus, in widow’s weeds (“Poor Tyrone: his heart failed him as he was tossin’ off a sillabub with Archbishop Oughten one night — it was a sort of contest, a wager, you know — and Tyrone he woulda won it hands down because the Archbishop dinna have the stomach for more than six or seven and my dear departed was already into his twelfth — his twelfth—when the good Lord called him to his reward. .” [a sigh] “I guess he shoulda knowed better than to bait an Archbishop.”), sits against the far window, erect as a hatrack. From time to time she bathes her son in a smoldering look of maternal regard, as if he were nothing short of Molière for wit and a veritable Hippocrates for skill and accomplishment. Betty, in her late twenties now, still unmarried and with a nose like a garden implement, tries her best to be gracious and to respond to Georgie’s nonstop barrage of words, while Georgie, for his part, is so exhilarated by the very fact of Ailie’s presence that he is unable to shut his mouth, even when it’s stuffed full of onion and oatcake, all the long way from Selkirk to Drumnadrochit.
At Inverness, like Boswell and Johnson before them, they put up at Mackenzie’s Inn, and Ailie is in such a state of anticipation she hardly notices the rough-hewn furniture and the desiccated flies in the corners, or that the haggis tastes like stewed leather. All she knows is that the loch, the glorious loch, is no more than three miles off. She tucks her son in, then throws open the windows and looks out on the darkening treetrunks, the raw wet smell of the loch in her nostrils. There is the distant cry of an embergoose, and then the moon slips up out of the grasp of the trees. Pocked and scoured, it is the very same moon that squats over Selkirk, but here it looks different somehow, as if it were newly created, as if it were something magical, a sign in the sky. She sleeps like a drugged princess.
In the morning they take the road for Drumnadrochit, winding through stands of birch and scotch pine, the loch stretched out below them like a great glittering arm of the sea. Ailie feasts her eyes, a strange sense of fulfillment, of rightness, coming over her. Finally she’s making her own expedition, doing a bit of exploring for herself. She laughs out loud at the thought of it — the explorer’s wife exploring — and Mrs. Quaggus lifts her eyebrows, as if she too would like to be let in on the joke. Ailie can’t remember a happier moment.
At Avis House they are greeted by an ebullient and talk-starved Fiona Gleg, a red-haired woman in a bulky wool cardigan who sweeps past her servants to embrace them, one by one, on the front steps. They’ve barely had time to catch their breath before she knots them up in a concatenation of questions, opinions, observations and suppositions, touching on everything from Uncle Silas’ eczema to the egregious food at Mackenzie’s, from the stonework at Cawdor Castle — shoddy, isn’t it? — to the disappointing size of Dunbuy Rock and the odd color of little Thomas’ eyes. In the wainscoted vestibule, servants scuttling to and fro with trunks and bags and hatboxes, Cousin Fiona turns to Ailie with a wide wet motherly smile. “Mrs. Park,” she says (it sounds as if she’s saying Mrs. Paddock), “I’ve heard so much about you — it seems the young physician here can talk of nothing else — and I’d like to say it’s a pleasure, it is, and that ye’re unco welcome at Avis House.”
The red-haired woman has taken her hand. Georgie Gleg, distinguished professor and doctor of medicine, is shuffling his feet and looking down at his shoes. “And of course,” Fiona adds, “I’ve enjoyed your husband’s book.”
♦ ♦ ♦
During the next few days, Avis House hums, roars and squeaks with activity, as if someone had loaded it on a colossal wagon and set the wheels rolling. The doors are wide open, the groaning board groaning, and every ambulatory, morally unobjectionable, semi-rational soul up and down both sides of the loch has been invited to pay a visit. Kilted men and women in tartan shawls show up for tea, for dinner, for cards or quoits. The Reverend this, the Doctor that, the Honorable Mister and odd Sir. Ailie can hardly keep track of the faces. There are Macdonalds in the parlor and Dinsdales on the lawn, beaming Camerons come for a look at the Edinburgh physician and the wife of the renowned explorer, soberfaced Ramsays eager to discuss Cave’s Lives of the Fathers and Ogden’s Sermons. Evenings are consecrated with vast bowls of punch and cider and bottles of port wine, nourished with mutton, herrings, fricasseed moorhens, beef collops, frothed milk, tongue and bread pudding, and consummated with conversation and tobacco, music, dancing and parlor games. It could be Christmas, Michaelmas, the harvest feast. The whole county seems to have gone on holiday.
Ailie can’t get enough of it. She feels like a girl of sixteen, light on her feet, witty, attractive, appreciated. For the first time in years she’s the center of attention, whether jigging round the parlor with a young buck in kilt and argyles or talking fashion with the ladies or horses and dogs with a cross-eyed country doctor. Despite the odd position she’s been placed in — wife to Mungo, jilter of Georgie — she couldn’t feel more relaxed — or more welcome. She’d thought at first that Fiona’s reference to Mungo was a subtle dig at her — and God knows Georgie’s cousin and mother and all the rest of his clan had a right to resent her — but now she’s certain the remark was innocent, a way of making conversation and nothing more. If anything, in fact, Fiona and Mrs. Quaggus have gone out of their way to foster a relationship between her and Georgie. They’ve taken Thomas off her hands, occupying him with Erse songs and tales of taibhs and goblins and the beastie that lives in the loch, stuffing him with cake, running him round the meadows. And Betty too. Less than an hour after their arrival a young, smooth-faced clergyman sat down to tea with them and hasn’t left her side since. The whole thing is very strange. It’s almost as if the two older women were matchmaking, as if Ailie were truly sixteen, free and unattached, the chosen mate for an exemplary son and sterling cousin. Either that. . or a widow.
A widow. The thought comes to her, cold and insidious, as she’s dressing for tea one afternoon, and it stops her dead for a moment. Do they really think—? No. She’s a married woman, mother of four. . her husband’s gone away for a bit. On business. Like a traveling solicitor or a circuit judge. And then suddenly, as if a wet sheet had been thrown over her, the truth of the matter strikes her. Mungo is out there somewhere, suffering, injured maybe, racked with disease, beleaguered by hideous grinning black faces and howling beasts, and here she is running around as if he didn’t exist, like a schoolgirl or something, like a widow. Widow. The two evil syllables box round her head, insupportable, unacceptable: Ailie Anderson Park, Widow of the Late Great Explorer.