That was on the twenty-sixth. Three days later he was back, vaulting the picket fence on his winded mare, plowing through evergreens and dormant flowerbeds, galloping right on up to the doorstep, and all the while sputtering through a bugle like some kind of madman. Ailie had heard the sound of the horn in the far distance and had come to the window, puzzled. Dinwoodie was in the midst of stuffing a pair of hedgehogs, which he’d dressed to resemble the parson and his wife, when he heard the commotion and thought for one wild moment that they were under attack. The confusion was short-lived. The next instant Ailie’s father was careening through the door, no time to knock, bellowing at the top of his lungs. “He’s alive, lassie,” the old man was shouting as he bounded up the stairs. It took a moment for his words to sink in — was it possible? — then she was up and out the door, rushing down the hallway to meet him. He swooped her up in his arms, whiskery and red-faced, rabid with the news, a letter flapping loose in his hand. “He’s done it lass. He’s back. Your mon’s come home!”
After that it was easy. The years of waiting, the trouble about the wedding, breaking her vow: it was all forgiven her. People began to talk about premonition, clairvoyance, a sign that had come to her at the last minute. How had she known? They came from miles around to congratulate her, to look at her, touch her, hear the sound of her voice. It’s a miracle, is what it is, they said. A love made in heaven. Ailie was vindicated. She felt as if she’d just won the lottery, restored Bonnie Prince Charlie to the throne, taken her seat at the right hand of God.
But now, back in Selkirk, the walls have come tumbling down again. A month passes, and no further word from Mungo. He’s alive, thank God, she’ll always have that — and yet where is he? The coach takes four days from London, five ownin’ for bad weather, her father says. Where is he then? Where is this boy that’s so hot to see his betrothed, eh? Where is he? Talk starts up again. He’s back, all right, but he’s deserted her — just as she had deserted Gleg. Serves her right. It goes on like this, worse each day, until finally, on the day after the anniversary of their engagement, the second letter comes.
The George & Blue Boar, Holborn
29 January, 1798
My Dearest Ailie:
I am unavoidably delayed in London over the issue of preparing a shortened account of my travels for dissemination to members and subscribers of the African Association. With the aid of Mr. Bryan Edwards, Secretary of the Association, I expect Ishould have it completed in a few months’ time — after which I shall fly to your arms. Think of it, my dearest friend and wife-to-be: once this minor impediment is out of the way, we shall be together always. At least while I’m at Fowlshiels working on the manuscript of my book, to be called “Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, 1795-97.” Isn’t that exciting? Too, too much? I’m to be a literary man!
But of course, I languish till I feel your touch.
Yrs., Et Cetera,
Mungo
A few months’ time? She’s waited an eternity already. Badgered and beleaguered, fighting off the wide world for faith in him. And now he’s too busy to see her? Too involved with his book to come up to Selkirk for a week and tell her he’s missed her as she has so painfully and vitally missed him? She crumples the letter in disgust, suddenly filled with remorse for what she’s done to Georgie Gleg. It hits her like an epiphany: poor Georgie, he must feel as hurt and bewildered as I do now.
But that’s another story.
♦ GLEG’S STORY
(BORN UNDER A BAD SIGN) ♦
Georgie Gleg was born at Galashiels, second son of the local laird. As the moment of parturition approached, a golden eagle coasted down out of the haze, flapped its great dark wings a time or two, and settled lightly on the weathervane atop the Gleg house. The locals were astonished. People came running from shops and fields to stand in the courtyard and gawk at it.
“It’s a sign,” someone said.
“Aye,” said another, “but is it auspicious or no?”
A debate started up, right there beneath the windows of <“he laird’s house, Georgie’s mother crying out in pain, the eagle preening its wings as calmly as if it were perched high in its aerie.
“It’s the devil’s own hand laid on, I tell you,” insisted a man in an oversized hat.
“You’re a blatherin’ fool,” countered another. “It’s a benediction out of the heavens is what it is.”
Almost immediately a fistfight erupted. Women screamed, horses whinnied, someone broke out a bottle of whisky. Factions were already forming, and there were indications that the controversy could develop into a full-scale brawl, when suddenly Davie Linlithgow put an end to it. He raised his musket and took the bird’s head off in a blast of fire and smoke. Spastic, the big-feathered torso pitched forward and slathered the tiles with blood.
The crowd fell silent, the combatants held their punches. Upstairs, thin and harsh as a penny whistle, the voice of Georgie Gleg was heard for the first time on earth.
♦ ♦ ♦
If there were any doubts as to the meaning of the events surrounding Gleg’s birth, they were unequivocally dispelled as he grew into boyhood. Without question the appearance of the great bird had been ominous, its slaying a disaster: misfortune settled on the boy’s shoulders like a winged apparition. When he was six his father was killed in a hunting accident, and his sister Effie — the darling of the family — was kidnapped by gypsies and nailed to a tree in the wood beyond the north pasture. Anthrax decimated the flocks that year and three of five milch cows went dry. Inexplicably, the hens began laying yolkless eggs. There was a fire in the barn. Hailstones the size of goiters wiped out the wheat crop, and Georgie’s elder brother was struck by lightning. Poor Simon. They found him laid out in the heather as limp as some soft boneless thing washed up out of the sea.
Two years later Georgie’s mother remarried. Tyrone Quaggus, the new man of the house, was a gambling fool. Skeet shooting, tea drinking, a stroll in the garden — any human activity was occasion for a wager. I’ll bet you can’t put away twenty cups of tea in half an hour, vicar, he would say. Ten pund says I can make it around the garden in two minutes flat. See that jay out in the hedge? Five’ll get you ten he raps on this windowpane before noon. By the time Gleg was twelve, Quaggus had squandered the boy’s patrimony and three quarters of the estate as well. The family was in deep trouble.
But as if that weren’t enough, the blight touched Georgie in a far more subtle and insidious way: it made him a pariah. People shied away from him as if he were a leper, dogs snarled at him, his coevals kept him at a distance with sticks and stones. He was a toad, a worm, a freit — not fit for human company. And what made matters worse is that Gleg so clearly looked the part. He grew thin and ribby, with narrow shoulders and a breast like a plucked chicken. His feet were huge, his hands chapped. Talk had it that the high arched beak of his nose was the mark of the bird on him. His eyes too — they were tiny and close-set, flecked with yellow and red, pushed far back in his head and rimmed with flesh the color of liver. Bird’s eyes.
At school he was the object of taunts, epithets, practical jokes, inhuman pranks, outright mockery and patent disdain. He was ten years old, homely as a horse, and the best Latin scholar in the Selkirk grammar school. This last was the kiss of death as far as his classmates were concerned. If they could forgive him his strangeness, his flapping ears and lack of coordination, they could never forgive the way the declensions rolled off his tongue, effortlessly, while they sat agonizing over the ratlike scrawlings in their battered copybooks. The older boys were particularly incensed. They’d been at it, day and night, for four years — only to be shown up by a sniveling little wimp of a bejan. They decided to get even.