Rorie, hat in hand and shy as a sinner at the gates of heaven, clears his throat and looks at the ground. “She says she’s the happiest woman in the world.”
That does it. She can’t hold it any longer. Suddenly Ailie loses control, laughing out loud, beginning with a barely suppressed titter and building to a series of breastbone-pounding whoops. Nodding and grinning, the old housewife takes a pinch of snuff and laughs along with her, hysterical, high and keening, a laugh like knives grating against a whetstone. “Happiest. .” Ailie gasps, holding her sides, unable to complete the phrase.
And then the old woman is jabbering away again, her voice rasping and harsh, the strange musical language like something inexpressibly ancient and exotic, some Ur language, something you’d expect to find in Mesopotamia or Luxor or in the crumbling leaves of a faded parchment. When she falls silent, Ailie turns to Macphoon with an anticipatory grin: “Well? What did she say this time — more words of wisdom?”
Rorie goes through the same routine again — the foot shuffling, tugging at his trousers, turning the hat over in his hands — and then looks Ailie dead in the eye. “She says she’s got her husband right here by her side, and that’s all a woman could ever want.”
The words drive home like separate blows from a mallet, a stake sinking into her heart. The old man is nodding his head and smiling — an obscene, wet-lipped parody of a smile that shows his yellowed teeth and the dead white tip of his tongue. And his wife, the old hag, is cackling like an overworked clock and struggling to get up out of the chair. Ailie feels as if she’s caught in a dream, feels as if someone’s played a bad joke on her, feels the bad breath of the universe whistling in her face and is frightened. The smile is gone.
Georgie, sensing that something has gone wrong, takes her arm and leads her to the door, nodding to the old man and pressing another coin into his hand. Alarmed, Thomas clings to his mother as if someone were trying to snatch him away, and Rorie, flushing, concentrates on his shoes. Shaken, angry, bewildered, Ailie steps out into the rinsed gray air and takes a deep breath, wondering just what is going on and why she’s let an old crone’s banter upset her so.
All at once there’s a tug at her elbow. She turns. The old woman, bent over her crutch like an errant question mark, is looking up at her out of a sharp sly raptor’s face. The dull light is blinding. Something wrong with the hag’s lip, scarred, as if… as if had once been pierced through, like Seedy’s. Ailie draws back instinctively, and the woman’s hand snakes out to pat Thomas’ head, pinch his cheeks, the cracked grating voice having its final say.
Ailie’s face is burning. She looks at Rorie framed in the doorway, the white bulb of the old man’s head at his shoulder.
The bailiff wets his fingertips, smooths the cap across his crown. “She had a boy like him once, she says. Run off on her.” There are no trees, no bushes, the sky gone dark, the invisible loch in the deep glen roaring with a thousand voices. The old woman is rocking on her crutch, leering, rubbing the white bristle of her chin. “She says you ought to keep a watch on him.”
For a long while, wending their way through the darkening forest, saddles creaking, the silent mist tugging at their elbows and knees, they can hear the knife edge of the old woman’s laugh, cutting the night in two.
♦ ♦ ♦
The final day of their sojourn at Avis House dawns like an intimation of July, bright and cloudless, the air gravid with a slow penetrating warmth, as if somehow the seasons had advanced, the earth pitched forward on its axis, the sun flared up like a bundle of twigs set atop a mound of glowing coals. Ailie is up at first light, intoxicated by the texture of the air, by the odor of daffodils and the sound of honeybees. Standing at her window and looking out over the loch, she can’t help feeling a tug of regret, a resistance to the idea of leaving, of going back to the humdrum and the quotidian. Certainly she misses the children, and her father, and even in a way the staid domesticity of day-to-day life in Selkirk — but she’s not ready to go back yet. This is adventure, this is living, this is what she’s been looking for all her life. At home she has only her duty to husband, children, father, and her role as the constant wife of the absent saint and martyr.
There are sparrows and starlings on the lawn. Out over the loch a golden eagle coasts in the high thin air, luminous in the morning sun. She wants to go, she wants to stay. Wants to look into her children’s faces, and at the same time she wants to travel farther, to the Hebrides, the Arctic, up over Russia and down to Tibet. At that moment she comes closer to understanding her husband than she ever wilclass="underline" the adventure, the surprise, the frisson of chasing down the permutations of possibility, the purity of doing and experiencing — how could looking on the same bit of yard, the same black mare, the same four walls even touch it? It is the sixth of April. Mungo has been gone a year and a half. Today is hers and hers alone.
At breakfast, Fiona throws open the windows to birdsong, golden Light, an eariy hatch of mayflies. Tim Dinsdale is there, Donald MacDonald, half a dozen repentant Ramsays, Ewan Murchison, Sir Adolphus Beattie, Miss Mary Ogilvie, Betty and her preacher, Mrs. Quaggus, Fiona and Georgie. Everyone — even Reelaiah Ramsay — seems to be smiling, feeling chipper, talking about a ride or a walk around the grounds, a picnic or a match of croquet. The only topic of general concern is the weather. “Oh, it’s a real pippin of a day,” Mrs. Quaggus says, buttering her bannocks. “Wally,” offers Sir Adolphus, looking up from his eggs and rashers, “really first-rate.” Tim Dinsdale says he hasn’t seen it this warm in April since ‘81, the year it snowed in July. “It’s a blessing, is what it is,” Fiona sighs. Ailie couldn’t agree more.
Afterward, Georgie takes a seat beside her on the porch. In his simple brown suit, silk shirt and riding boots he almost looks elegant, uncoiling his long frame, throwing back his head and crossing his legs with an easy, self-confident air, proprietary and unassuming at the same time. His ears still stick out, his wrists insist on protruding from the jacket sleeves, his nose is like something you’d carry into battle — but does it matter anymore? Aren’t those the things that a child would notice?
Georgie shifts in his chair. “Well, Ailie,” he says after a moment, “it’s your last day. Would you like to take a turn on the loch?”
“Rowing?”
He nods.
Fiona and Thomas are marching around the parlor, beating on kitchen pots and singing Haytin foam, foam eri at the top of their lungs, Betty and her preacher are strolling through the garden arm in arm, and Mrs. Quaggus, surrounded by Ramsays, is eulogizing her late husband over her sixth cup of tea.
Georgie is studying the side of Ailie’s face. She turns to look him in the eye. “There’s nothing I’d rather do.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Beached at the mouth of Divach Burn, oars poised in the locks, the rowboat could be the remains of some fantastic form of life, a colossal insect washed ashore or the hollow exoskeleton of a prehistoric crab — but for the fact that Fiona has painted it cherry red — for visibility— and whimsically christened it The Kelpie. The boat lies there in the undergrowth, an advertisement for civilization, while birds flit in and out of the reeds and midges hover over the water. Georgie hops from one leg to the other to remove his boots, drags the boat into the whisky-stained water and gallantly hands Ailie into the stern. Then he lifts in the picnic hamper (three bottles of wine, smoked salmon, sliced tongue, cheese, bread, radishes and linen napkins), gives the boat a reasonably athletic shove and they’re off.