That’s it. That’s what this thing is all about, that’s why old Quaggus and simpering Fiona are knocking themselves out to be so gracious. They’ve buried Mungo already, and they’re softening her up — like a piece of meat — for Georgie. For a moment she just sits there, staring down at the shoe in her lap, humiliated, frightened, resentful of the scheming old biddies, resentful of Georgie. But then she leaps up off the bed and flings the shoe at the wall, as sore and hurt and angry as she’s ever been. It’s not Georgie’s fault — he’s been a saint, a savior — nor Mrs. Quaggus’s or Fiona’s. It’s Mungo — Mungo’s the one to blame. Would she be up here at the loch if he hadn’t deserted her? Would she so much as look at another man if he hadn’t broken his marital vows? No. Dead or alive, he’s made her a widow, condemned her to solitary confinement. Well, he’s asked for it. He has. And she’ll be damned if she’ll sit at home and wait for him till her hair’s turned gray.
Ten minutes later she’s sitting over a cup of tea, laughing till her sides hurt over some little joke Georgie’s made. Her son, barely able to see over the edge of the table, glances up at her with Mungo’s startled eyes and the laugh catches in her throat. There is a moment of silence, awkward, Betty and her preacher, Fiona and an assortment of Macdonalds and Ramsays staring down at their cups, until Mrs. Quaggus shoots out a hand to tickle the boy, and he subsides in giggles.
Fiona is tapping the edge of her saucer with a spoon, grinning broadly. “Ahem,” clearing her throat, fluffing her hair. “If I can get a word in amidst all this hilarity, I thought perhaps you and Georgie might want to take a ride out to one o’ my tenants, Ailie — see some o’ the quaint side o’ Highland life. Very picturesque, I assure you.”
“Yes, let’s.” Georgie meets her eyes, then looks away.
“We’d be more than happy to look after the young gentleman,” Mrs. Quaggus adds.
“To be sure.” Fiona is still smiling, lips drawn back to show her teeth.
♦ ♦ ♦
Outside, the sky presses down on them like a weight. Clouds obliterate the hilltops, mist creeps up the glens. Where before there were early flowers, ferns, leafing bushes, there is now only a low band of fog billowing upward to join earth and sky. Ailie and Gleg lead the way, mounted on a matched pair of chestnuts, while Thomas — he threw a tantrum until Ailie relented and agreed to take him along — brings up the rear on a pony led by Rorie Macphoon, Cousin Fiona’s bailiff. They pause at the top of a rise to watch a lone collie work his flock down the slope, white paws blurred as he dashes in and out of a bank of mist after strays. A big broad-faced ewe, just in front of them, glances over her shoulder like a nervous grandmother, hurriedly tearing up great streaming mouthfuls of heather and grass before the dog can discover her. Georgie, in rare form, quotes from Macbeth: “By the pricking of my thumbs, / Something wicked this way comes,” and old Rorie laughs as if his head would split.
The sky has darkened perceptibly and a light drizzle begun to thicken the air by the time they reach the little cottage on the hillside. Quaint, Ailie thinks, oh yes indeed, and then calls to Thomas to hurry and come have a look. The boy wears a rapt expression, awestruck by the romance of the scene, something out of the pages of a storybook. The hut is of turf, with a crude, blistered wooden door and a square cut out of the front wall to serve as a window. A stream courses through the yard with a sound of gargling fish and mermen, the naked black trunks of pines reach up into the smoking atmosphere like great solid beanstalks, there is a delicious frightening cackle of voices mingled with the smoke rising from the chimney. Georgie, riding crop in hand, raps at the door.
After a moment the door swings back and a bewildered-looking old man pokes his head out. He gapes at Georgie as if he’d just dropped down from another planet, inclining his cross-hatched face to one side and squinting an eye shut to get a better look at him. Georgie is holding out his hand, hearty and condescending at the same time. “Gleg,” he says. “Georgie Gleg. We’ve stopped by to pay you a visit.”
If the words register they have no visible effect, except that the old fellow tilts his head to the opposite side, as if he were contemplating a listing ship or chinning an invisible violin. His lips are compressed, his eyes shuttered windows. Slowly, hesitantly, like a man who’s answered a knock only to find no one there, he begins to pull the door closed. To this point, Rorie Macphoon has remained in the background, holding the pony’s bridle; when he steps forward, the old cottager’s face undergoes a transformation: where before he’d looked puzzled or merely obtuse, now a whole range of human emotions plays across his features. Ailie watches his initial look of enlightenment realign itself into something harder, an expression of anger and resentment, which is in turn succeeded by a sly glimmer of avarice and finally a sort of hangdog look of obsequious resignation. Georgie Gleg, the Edinburgh physician, presses half a crown into the old man’s palm, and they enter the cottage.
Inside, an enormous brindled cat gazes up at them from the hearth, its eyes the color of cheddar cheese. Beside the animal, so still she could be made of wax, an old woman dozes in a chair carved from a treestump. A slab of oak balanced on two piles of paving stones serves as a bench, and a bedframe, set on the floor and heaped with heather, sags against the far wall. There is no other furniture in the room. In the glimmer from the hearth and the bleak gray light of the window Ailie can make out the shabby accouterments of the place: a crutch and a rusted hoe in the corner, sheaves of barley stacked on the floor, a mound of peat, string of onions, wooden washbasin. A wicker curtain cordons off the low cavelike back room, from which emanates a caustic stench of urine and the occasional unsteady caprine bleat. Sad, Ailie thinks. Pitiful. Better call it sordid than quaint. She shifts uneasily from foot to foot, listening to the goats make water and wondering why in God’s name Fiona sent them to this hole.
“So,” Georgie booms, warming his hands over the peat fire and turning to the old man, “you live here, do you?”
Startled, the cottager dips his head and steps back a pace. The turkey flesh under his neck has begun to quiver and Rorie is attempting some sort of explanation beginning with the phrase “Mr. Gleg” repeated three or four times and interspersed with “ums” and “ahs” and a good deal of foot shuffling and trouser tugging, when suddenly a discordant stream of language is washing over them from down below. The old woman, hunched and crippled, one eye dead, has come to life, treating them to a disquisition in Erse, the native tongue of the Highlands. And disquisition it is — she goes on and on, wound up like a mechanical gargoyle, her good eye leaping about its socket, delivering a regular lecture, every last word of which is entirely unintelligible. Finally, after what seems like a good five minutes, she ends with a wild stinging laugh like wind in the gutter, and then subsides in a spasm of coughing.
“What was that?” Georgie asks, turning to Macphoon.
Thomas, intimidated by the whole scene — the dimness, the stink, the unspoken threat — clings to his mother’s skirts, while Ailie bites her lip to keep from laughing. The idea of it: Fiona thinks this quaint?