“I–I—uh. .”
“Come,” she says, locking arms with him, “I haff some odder guests you maybe would like to meet. Gentlemen, you’ll excuse us pleese?”
♦ ♦ ♦
A few hours later the explorer is three sheets to the wind and leading the Baroness through a vigorous and semispastic reel while the other dancers clear the floor and the violin strains away at the upper end of the fingerboard. Chandeliers flash by overhead, plants, statues, paintings and astonished faces melding in a vertiginous blur, the Baroness looming and receding like a vision in a dream. She kicks up her heels, spins like a dervish, hair falling down her back in loops, bosoms jogging, petticoats aflutter. Inspired, the explorer attempts a sort of grand jeté, springing across the room like an antelope, leaping a writing desk and spinning toward his partner in a series of widening spirals. He feels so good he could shout for joy, roar like a lion, beat his chest and howl like some elemental force of nature. Unfortunately, he loses his balance at the last moment and pitches headlong into the Baroness, driving her back against a Pembroke table and blasting it to splinters. She lies there a moment, pinned beneath him, forty years old and feeling twenty. “You’re quite a dancer, Mr. Park,” she murmurs finally, her long-fingered hands spread across his back.
A moment later the two terpsichoreans are back on their feet, grinning, a knot of anxious guests crowding round to survey the damage. “More champagne!” calls the Baroness. “Strike up the orchestra!”
Dutifully, the musicians launch another tune, and a few couples edge timidly out onto the floor. Someone is telling a joke in the corner, the wave of chatter swells again, the incident already forgotten. The Baroness smooths her bodice, plumps her bosoms and adjusts the ruffles of her skirt, while the explorer brushes at his frock coat, momentarily at a loss for words. “Mein Gott, dat was fun,” she says finally. And then: “May I offer you anodder glass of champagne, Mr. Park?”
“Yes — yes, of course. And please: call me Mungo.”
While the servant refills their glasses, she looks up at him in a wide-eyed, cattish sort of way. “Iss dere anyting else at all you might want of me — Mungo?”
The explorer stands there, swaying back on his heels, grinning like an idiot, lost in contemplative admiration of the front of her dress.
“Maybe you would be interested to see the rest of the house — the sitting room, library. . my bedchambers?”
He watches her sip at her wine, the tip of her tongue like a bud, rich and pink and moist “And uh,” he stammers, fighting for nonchalance, “the Baron. . uh, I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure yet—”
“Ach!” she says, taking his arm. “Didn’t I tell you? The poor man succumbed t’ree years ago.”
♦ DOWN AND UP AND DOWN AGAIN ♦
It’s been a shattering month. A month of trial and vindication, doubt giving way to certainty, crisis to resolution. And then this sudden deflation, the rush of joy and affirmation superseded by a new and malignant sense of incomprehension and hurt, lingering, persistent, dull. Like having a tooth pulled, the same tooth, twenty-four hours a day, thirty days running.
Mungo’s letter reached Selkirk on the twenty-ninth of December. Ailie was not there to receive it. She was in Kelso, in a brick house just outside of town, sitting before the fire and scrutinizing her emotions as closely as she’d ever scrutinized hydra or Paramecium beneath the ground and polished lens of her microscope. The brick house belonged to Dr. Dinwoodie. She could think of no one else to turn to. Her father, the relations, Katlin — even Zander was against her in this. Dinwoodie was bald, semi-invalid, sixty-three years old. His hobby was taxidermy. I dunna understand it, he said when he answered the door, ye’re a wild and wicked gull. But of course ye can stay with me. Of course ye can. Glad for the company.
On Christmas night she sent a message to her father via Dugald Struthers, who was riding into Selkirk to be with his mother for the holidays. Dear father, she wrote, don’t worry yourself. I’m at Dr. Dinwoodie’s, sorting things out. I just couldn’t go through with it, I hope you’ll understand. Won’t you?
The following morning, 6:00 a.m., the old man was beating at Dinwoodie’s door. With his shoe. A frozen rain was falling, gray as a dead lake, starlings stirred in the hedge, the world was sunk in glass. “Dinwoodie!” the old man thundered. “Open this door, be gad, open it this minute or I’ll put me shoulder to it!”
Ailie was upstairs in the guest room. She’d spent a sleepless night, racked with guilt and uncertainty. Staring up at the rafters, listening to the drum of the ice pellets on the roof as the snow turned to sleet, sick at heart over the absence of Mungo and the unforgivable thing she’d done to Georgie Gleg and her family. One minute she would think that she’d run back and marry him despite herself, the next she would know it was impossible. And at dawn, just before she dozed off, she knew, in a sudden flash of intuition, that waiting for Mungo was equally impossible. He was lost. She would never see him again.
The sound of her father’s voice startled her. She sat up in bed and listened to him storming around downstairs. “Where is she, the jezebel?” he shouted. “Be gad I’ll drag her back by the nape of her neck, spank her disrespectful bottom till it blisters, horsewhip her if need be!” And then the calm soothing tones of Dr. Dinwoodie, offering a cup of tea with a bit of brandy, going on about things psychological, the effect that Mungo’s loss has had on her, the need for time to heal the wounds. “Surely you don’t want to force the gull into marriage, Jamie.”
“Force her? She give her word. Give her word, Donald. It gars me greet to think on it. An Anderson, and she broke her solemn vow. Ye should hear the gossip—”
Then Dinwoodie, mumbling something about the new generation.
“New generation, my arse!” Her father’s voice shot back like a rally in a tennis match. “She’s twenty-three years of age. A growed woman. And she maun get married. Get her down here, the hussy — get her down here before I lose me self-control and thrash her out of bed before me oldest friend’s eyes.”
“Jamie, get a hold on yourself—“
“The devil with gettin’ a hold on — this is a time for action:”
There was the sound of a scuffle, crockery shattering, Dinwoodie’s voice, louder now, angrier, but with an edge of resignation to it: “All right, all right, keep your sark on — I’ll fetch her.” And then the scrape of the old doctor’s footsteps on the stairs.
Ten minutes later she was standing before the fire in the parlor, wincing down at the cup of tea Dinwoodie had brewed her, weathering her father’s tirade. Behind her on the mantel was one of the old doctor’s taxidermic triumphs: a badger and two stoats, erect, dressed in kilt and tarn o’shanter, playing at viol and fife. She transferred her gaze to the grinning badger as her father raged and spat round the room. The old man had a magnificent pair of lungs, but eventually he had to pause for breath.
“Are you done?” she asked, and before he could start up again she cut him off. “Because whether you are or not it’s time I had my say. Georgie Gleg is odious to me. He always has been. For all his good heart he’s a coof and a simp. There’s no magic between us, and I’ll not have him now nor ever.”
Her father’s mouth dropped. “Not have him—? But ye give your word, gull.”
“You’ll see me in the nunnery first.”
“All right!” the old man bellowed. “All right then — suit yourself,” slapping his hand down on the table. “I’ll bring the cart round and drag ye to the Abbey meself.” He fumbled angrily into his coat and slammed out the door, muttering “no daughter of mine,” over and over, as if he were rehearsing it.