Jennie About to Be (30 page)

“What are you doing here?” he whispered.

“Should Dr. Macleod preach next Sunday on the whited sepulchre?” she asked in a brittle voice she hardly recognized. “Or wouldn't he dare? Or course he should be an authority on whited sepulchres; he's one himself, along with most of his congregation.”

“What on earth are you talking abeut?” He half laughed, like someone who suspects the joke is on him and doesn't want to be caught out. “Why aren't you with Christabel?” He came toward her. “Was there a carriage accident? Are you all right? My God, you are so
lovely
! I could go down on my knees to you. What a vision to greet and haunt a tired man!”

She snatched up her wrapper and put it on. “Modest before me?” he teased. “Or are you inviting me to take it off?”

“I saw you in action this morning,” she said. “Captain Gilchrist leading his troops in a gallant attack on savage hordes of lame men, old men, pregnant women, young girls, and children. I missed the business of Lachy, but I'm sure your men were magnificent. What I
did
see was soul-stirring. I'll never forget it.” This wasn't at all the trembling confrontation she imagined; she was beth astounded and exhilarated by it, knowing anything was better than crumpling abjectly in tears.

Nigel was white. “There
was
an accident, wasn't there? Did you strike your head? Sit down, my darling, I'll ring for—”

“There's no one here to ring for, Nigel. And the accident was that I could not be gotten safely out of the way as you three had arranged it.”

“I don't understand!” He reached out for her, and she backed away from him.

“Don't touch me, please.”

“What went wrong?” he pleaded. She knew—oh, how clearly she could see it—that he was keeping up this pretense to give him time to think.

“There was so much wrong around this morning,” she said, “that a dog would have been howling with the feel of it. But I walked out of here like a simpleminded child. However, I said good-bye to Lady Macbeth at the Elliots' and I walked back to Tigh nam Fuaran a little less innocent than before, but I still didn't believe—” She was going to break down, and if it happened, she was lost. So she would not. “Until I went up on the ridge and saw you with your watch in your hand and the men with their torches. I went down there, Nigel, but you never saw me. I was
there
!”

He collapsed into an armchair, putting his head in his hands as he had done when she first asked him about the clearance. “Dear Jesus,” he said to the carpet, “it would have been all out of the way before you came back on Monday.”

“And I would have taken it meekly as a
fait accompli
? Never asked questions, never made a protest, because out of sight means out of my empty little mind?”

He lifted a haggard face. “Jennie, Archie wouldn't listen to me! I could do nothing with him. She'd worked her damned evil spell before she left the house. So for us—for you—I had to do as I was told, don't you see?”

“You couldn't have argued with him for long. I was back within the hour. When was the time set for the clearing to begin? As soon as I had agreed to go away with Christabel?”

“I swear to you, it was none of my doing! I never wanted it!”

“Then why didn't you walk away from it, like Mr. Grant?”

“I—I—” He was scarlet now, trying to laugh. “What an inquisitor! You should be a barrister, my sweet! I simply did my duty, for you and for our children.” He came to her again, and this time she was stopped by the wall; she stood passive while he tried to embrace her, kissed her blank face, attempted to draw her head against his breast. “In a little while you'll feel better,” he murmured, “when everything is tidied up and the sheep come.”

“You mean every
one
, don't you? It's too bad they all can't be buried decently out of sight, like Lachy.”

“That's the second time you've mentioned his name!” He stood off from her. “What about him?”

“He's lying dead outside what was once his door.”

“
Damn
!” He smashed his fist down on her bureau. “I'll have some-body's hide for that! I gave orders that nothing, nobody was to be harmed! Believe me, I wanted no brutality—”

“Brutality!” She laughed. “You killed Lachy when you allowed him to be evicted. Old Lachy, who let you fry trout over his fire at midnight. And what about Hamish, who taught you how to catch those trout?
Brutality
? Oh, Nigel you're both a knave and a fool if you believe what you're saying!” He backed away from her as if she'd attacked him physically. “What is it but brutality to turn people out of their homes at an hour's notice and even burn the timbers they'd need to start a new shelter if they ever find a place where they'll be allowed to stay? Bring on Napoleon! What worse could
he
do than you've done to your own?”

“Jennie—”

“Will you please go now so I can dress in privacy?”

“I have a right to be here,” he said doggedly. “I am your husband and your lover. I can't believe this is happening, to us.” His voice dropped to the secretive, amorous pitch she'd loved. “Nothing outside this house should affect us in this room.” When she still kept her face turned away, he seized her by the shoulders. “You
shall
listen, and you
shall
understand. What's done is done. It's for us, and our children. The Cheviot is the Great Sheep, and it's our future. We'll make our fortune from the Cheviot, not from a pack of lazy peasants who'd rather poach deer and smuggle whisky than do an honest day's work. All the men are fit for, if you can catch them young enough, is cannon fodder, as you call it.”

“You seem to have turned a few of them into efficient traitors and bullies.”

“They had their work to do, and they did it. Call them what you will, our future depends more on men who can carry out orders than on the rabble we've just evicted.”

“And transported?” she asked sardonically.

“I'll have Donald John released after he cools his heels overnight.” He went out, slamming the door behind him and swearing. She wondered when he would realize the servants were gone, and then she was swamped in misery. She sank down on the bed, huddling herself together, knees almost to her chin. Nigel, saying cheerfully that he would do whatever a factor does, had known from the start why Mr. Grant had left and what the factor's work was to be. And she with her prattle about a school—no wonder the minister had been confused; he knew what was about to happen. Perhaps for a few minutes he'd believed otherwise and might even have been relieved; she'd give him that much credit. But she doubted that he'd ever argued with Christabel. The manse was too comfortable a nest for him to leave at his age.

No wonder the cottage people had been so happy; she and Nigel had come to them like angels of deliverance, and she had reinforced their hopes with her promises. She was a well-meaning little fool of the sort whose innocence is the most deadly.

She had curled up like this on her bed when her father died and Pippin Grange was no longer to be home. Almost everything gone from her in one great brain-splitting blast of thunder, but still there were her sisters sharing her grief.

Now it had happened again. Nigel had become her world, but he had been blasted away like the other one, and her sisters, even if they had been within reach, couldn't have shared this; they could not have reached her where she wandered alone, blinded and deafened, in the void.

And what about those others? She tried to think of them, but the meeting with Nigel had been too disastrous to allow for anything else.

She pulled the covers over her head and shivered until she fell asleep, though it was more like drowning; on the edge of it she saw her first image of Linn Mor as a black tarn, and it was waiting for her to sink into it without a splash.

When she awoke, the sun had clouded over, and the trees made the room dark. She felt drugged at first, and if she didn't move a finger or toe, hardly breathed, perhaps the pain wouldn't start up. But in a few moments her mind was achingly awake. Poor
Jennie Hawthorne
, she thought.
You fell in love with a glittering vision in the park, a marzipan soldier, and now, like many a woman—-and you swore you'd never be one of those—your duties are to keep your mouth shut and your brain asleep, and bear children to a man you can never respect again, even if you ever stop despising him
.

“There are bears and wolves in the Highlands,” Sophie had quavered, and Jennie promised her a Highland gentlman.
Darling Sophie
, she thought,
I'd rather take my chances with the bears and wolves than with any of the Highland gentlemen I've met at Linnmore
.

S
HE DIDN'T HEAR
Nigel on the stairs this time. He came in quietly and stood by the bed, very tall, his hair pale in the gloom.

“Jennie?” he whispered. She could have stuffed the edge of the sheet into her mouth and howled at the anguish of hearing that whisper and knowing what she had lost. Or had never possessed. He leaned over her and saw that her eyes were open. He stroked the tangled damp hair back from her face.

“Have you had a good sleep? You needed it.” He sat on the edge of the bed. “Put on a pretty frock, and we'll have dinner with Archie. He wants the company of a pretty woman tonight, the old dog. We can stay at Linnmore House until we have servants again. Your trunk has come from the farm, so you needn't even pack. . . . It needn't be long. Christabel's a dab hand at acquiring reliable servants.”

“Christabel,” she said from a scrapy throat, “is a dab hand at a number of things. But she is not staffing my house.” Was he actually stupid? Or did he think
she
was, and that a nap had restored her good nature?

“Whatever you say, darling,” he murmured, trailing his warm fingers down her throat in a way that, until this morning, had always bewitched her. When they wandered toward her breasts, she turned away from him, hunching up a shoulder as a barrier. His hand then capped the shoulder, the fingers gently kneading.

“It's time we picked out a puppy or two for you,” he said. “Would you like that, sweet? Yes, you would.”

She wrenched herself out from under his hand and sat up on the far side of the bed, pulling the covers tightly about her. “Nigel, I'm not a child who's had a little temper tantrum and can be bribed into smiling again. I'm a woman who's seen something dreadful done, and it's still going on. It's only the beginning of the torment for those people out there.”

“Archie's giving them all the time they need—”

“And I suppose he's congratulating himself on his generosity! I couldn't sit at the table with him tonight without wanting to hurl my plate into his face.”

“Jennie, Jennie.” He came around the bed and tried to take her into his arms, and she fought against him with elbows and fists. Laughing at first, he had to let her go. “What a spitfire! I never dreamed it!”

“Don't you understand, Nigel?” She was resolved to speak reasonably and give him no chance to turn her emotions against her. “You were—you
are
a part of the awfulness. I saw you doing those things, and there was no pity in you. You and your men were like soldiers sacking a captured village. Perhaps you didn't rape the women and kill the men, but it was a sort of rape and murder as far as they're concerned. And, Nigel, this happened all over the estate! Even if you were not actually at each spot with your watch in your hand, you were represented there. Do you think a few hours' sleep, or a month of sleep, will erase that from my mind?”

“They'll survive,” he said sulkily. “They'll roost somewhere.”

“If someone like Sir Hector Rose lets them. Or if they try to stay on some marshy bit that isn't even fit pasturage, or huddle on the coast somewhere, living on dulse and whelks. If they had the money to emigrate, some of them might survive that way.” The epitaph at Elgin appeared before her mind's eye.

“Who's been poisoning your mind with all this? Davie Grant? Alick Gilchrist? The bitch Morag?”

She ignored that. “They're pulled up by the roots and thrown away. They're dispossessed, and so am I.”

He looked wildly at her. “This is your home.”

“You were my home, my whole universe, and then I found out how you've been lying to me almost since we met, and you've looked down on me for a silly, sentimental doll; you've discussed my silly, sentimental notions with Christabel.” The name almost gagged her. “You've talked me over with her. How dare you?
How dare you
?”

His face contorted. “Be quiet!” he shouted at her. “I've had enough!” He seized her upper arms and savagely shook her. She made no resistance, she was as limp in his grasp as a dead hare, her head bobbing loosely as if her neck were broken. Suddenly he threw her back against the pillows and slammed out of the room.