The Betrayal of Maggie Blair (40 page)

"So, Maggie," he said at last. "You'll do us the favor, I hope, of reading to us tonight's passage from the Good Book before we go to our beds."

He took a large Bible down from the shelf in the alcove by the fire, opened it, and laid it front of me. It was gently done, but I could tell that he was setting me a test, and my pulse quickened. I hadn't read a word since leaving Kilmacolm all those months ago.

It was fortunate that the story he chose was the Good Samaritan, a favorite one that I had read many times before.

"
A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves,'
" I began.

I read on faultlessly, and when I had finished the chapter, I looked up to check if he wanted me to carry on. As I did so, I surprised the Robertsons exchanging a look. He was mouthing a question to her. She was nodding with enthusiastic consent.

"That was well done," he said, taking the Bible and replacing it on the shelf.

He sat down again at the table and cleared his throat.

"I have an idea for you, Maggie," he began, nodding solemnly. "It's a kind of—a proposition."

"Oh, do tell her, John!" interrupted Mrs. Robertson, her shoulders heaving with her customary laughter.

"We're trying to set up a school here," Mr. Robertson said, suppressing her with a look. "The teacher has been found, but he can't start until after this coming winter. I believe you could stand in for him and teach the little ones their letters. There's a cottage for the teacher, you know, and a kail yard. You would earn some pennies, enough to live on in a simple sort of way."

His words seemed to buzz in my ears. The idea was too absurd. Impossible.

"I couldn't do that," I said. "I wouldn't know how to do that."

"Say yes, dear! You'd be perfect!" said Mrs. Robertson, clapping her chubby hands.

What do you know about it?
I thought, with a little spurt of irritation.
The last child I saw in Bute was calling out to me, "Witch girl, witch hag!
"

"I don't know." I shook my head.

"You must have time to think it over," said Mr. Robertson. "Let us sleep on the matter prayerfully, and in the morning, God willing, wiser councils will prevail."

"Amen." His wife giggled.

***

I fell into a deep sleep as soon as I had lain down on the small truckle bed they set out for me by the kitchen fire, but I woke very early in the morning. It was still dark, but the faintest glimmer of early dawn was creeping through the cracks in the wooden window shutter.

I had been dreaming uncomfortably of a kind of prison, a vault with a small window, from which a cliff fell away to the sea raging on rocks below. The vault was full of children tugging at me, pulling at me, calling me names as I shouted out the letters of the alphabet.

The Robertsons' strange proposition came back to me with full force.

Me! A teacher! Right here, in Kingarth! How Granny would have laughed. How bitter her laughter would have been and how triumphant.

You show them, girl,
I seemed to hear her say.
You're better than the lot of them.

But the dream of prison was still upon me, and the air in the little kitchen was close and stuffy. I got up and crept to the door, lifted the latch, and stepped outside.

There is no air like the soft air of Bute, crisp with the tang of the sea, laden with the richness of the earth and the fullness of grass and trees. I breathed it in, long and deep, remembering the stench of Edinburgh, the foulness of Dunnottar, and the lighter air of the moors and mosses of Kilmacolm.

Almost of my own accord, my feet began to move, and I was walking and then I was running up the hill from Kingarth and down the long, long lane to Scalpsie Bay.

The sun had risen by the time I had rounded the last bend. I stopped, the familiarity of the place clutching at me. Every twig on every tree was known to me. Every stone in every ditch. Every pebble on the sweep of the beach.

The tide was out. The bones of the whale still lay on the sand, clean and whitened to a stark frame. Beyond the water rose the mass of Arran, touched with pink in the morning light.

And there was the cottage. Our cottage.

Smoke was rising through the thatch. I watched it for a moment, without understanding, then a howl of rage tore out of me, and I raced down the last stretch of lane.

I reached the gap in the hedge. Robbie Macbean was squatting in the dirt by the kail yard, his breeks around his ankles.

"Get out! What are you doing here? Get out of my house!" I shrieked at him.

He looked up at me, his mouth open, terror in his eyes. He tried to stand but tripped on his breeks and fell on his face in the mud, letting out a wail of anguish.

Someone appeared at the cottage door. It was Jeanie Macbean.

She saw me and flinched, putting out both hands as if to protect herself.

"You've come at last," she said. "I knew you would."

I'd been so hot with rage a moment earlier that I might have rushed at her and attacked her with my fists, but the distress of little Robbie distracted me. I couldn't help myself. I went over to him, picked him up, and set him on his feet.

"Stop that noise, you silly wee man. I'm not going to hurt you."

He ran to his mother, clutching at his breeks, and clung to her skirts, staring at me wide-eyed.

The sight of Mrs. Macbean standing in my own doorway, where I'd seen Granny stand so many, many times, made my fury rise again, but it was cold rage now.

"You took it, then, our cottage, like you always wanted," I said bitterly. "I hope Mr. Macbean's pleased with himself. I hope he's happy now."

To my surprise, Mrs. Macbean let out a shriek of laughter that was wild to the point of madness.

"Happy? In Hell?
Happy?
"

Before I could say anything, the laughter left her, and she seemed to shrink within herself. She put a weary hand up to her head.

"You'll be wanting to put us out. I won't make a fuss. Give me a day, Maggie, that's all I ask, to find another place."

"What do you mean, another place?" I couldn't understand. "Go home, to your nice big farm, up there on the hill."

She stared at me.

"You don't know, then? You have not heard?"

"Heard what?"

She turned away, as if she was ashamed.

"Come inside for a minute. I'll tell you. You'll be happy enough to hear it, I don't doubt."

I went into my old home with odd reluctance.

The vile toad,
Granny had said.
The cold snail.

And there was something vile and cold in that familiar room, where the floor was unswept, and Jeanie Macbean's little girls looked at me from thin, pinched faces, their eyes wide with fear. There was a chill of misery, a despair that not even Granny had spread around her.

"He hanged himself," Mrs. Macbean said baldly. "From the old ash tree out by our barn."

"
What?
"

I had to put a hand down on the old table to steady myself.

"After you—after the trial and all that, it came out. About him and Annie, and the child, and the lies he'd told. The lies! They stripped him of being an Elder, of course. He was up before the Kirk Session. He had to sit for four Sundays on the stool of repentance, in the same gown of sackcloth, no doubt, that you wore. They said he'd lied at your trial. That he'd perjured himself. That he was practically guilty of murder. No one would speak a word to him or to me. They all turned their backs."

Her voice, thin with anguish, was making the hairs stand up on my arms and legs.

"He'd never been a drinking man, Maggie. You know that. But he started on the whiskey then. He stopped working on the farm. He drank every night on his own. He'd get violent and hit the children. And me."

She stopped. I didn't know what to say. I just waited for her to finish.

"He had the drink badly on him one night, and he hit Robbie so hard that he knocked him right out. John thought he'd killed him. His own son. He did love his children, you know. He really did." For a moment her voice had lightened, and there was a spark of warmth in her eyes. "I don't think he could bear the thought that he might have murdered his own child. I found him in the morning, hanging from the tree."

"Oh," was all I could say. "Mrs. Macbean, I—"

"His brother came and took over the farm. It was his right, I suppose. He said we could live here, in your old place. He's a mean man, but he lets us have a sack of oatmeal from time to time."

She licked her lips.

"I found the letter, about the money John owed your father. I'd give it to you if I had it, Maggie, honestly I would. But you can see how it is with us."

She stood up, picked up a cloth that lay crumpled in a corner, and began to fold it.

"I'll just put our things together," she said. "Please, Maggie. Just today. Give us today. I don't know who'll take us in now."

I stood in silence, unable to speak. Known things from the past were shattering to pieces, and the fragments were falling about me. New patterns were being made that I could only dimly see.

Mrs. Macbean bent down to collect her pots that surrounded the unswept hearth.

"Stop," I said. "You don't need to do that." I took a deep breath. "Never mind the money. You can't pay it, anyway. And you can stay here. You can have this place. I don't want it anymore. I couldn't live here alone."

She sank down onto Granny's old stool. A pewter plate fell from her hand and rolled across the floor. I wasn't sure, though, if she had heard what I'd said.

"The house is cursed," she said. "She cursed it. Nothing good will happen to anyone who lives here."

The memory of that dreadful morning when they had come to the cottage with soldiers and weapons, their faces alight with cruel glee, was on us both. I seemed to see Granny, kneeling by the hearthstone, her eyes darting with malice, her voice cracking with hatred.

And if anyone takes this place from me and my granddaugh
ter, he will be cursed,
she'd said.
And his cattle will die and his children.

I sat down on the other stool. My old stool.

"Listen, Mrs. Macbean." I wanted to touch her hand but was afraid she would recoil from me. "You must believe what I'm telling you. My grandmother wasn't a witch. She wasn't. She didn't kill your baby Ebenezer. She saw he was sickly at his birth. She knew he wouldn't live long, by her knowledge of these things. She was angry and lonely and cruel, but she had no dealings with the Devil."

Mrs. Macbean shook her head.

"Maybe so, Maggie, but I told you, this place is cursed. I know it is. Can't you feel it yourself?"

Was it cursed? Maybe it was: cursed by hatred, anger and misery. I felt something soften and loosen inside me, as if old bonds were breaking. I heard myself say, "Then I'll lift the curse, Jeanie Macbean. I'll bring a blessing here instead."

I knelt on the hearthstone, where I'd cried myself to sleep so many nights as a cold, lonely little girl, and words came to me from some old corner of my memory.

"
God bless this house
From beam to wall
From end to end
From floor to roof.
Floor to roof.
"

I paused. It wasn't quite enough.

"I lift the curse from this dwelling place. Go, vile toad. Flee, cold snail."

I knew it had happened. A kind of warmth, a kind of peace, had stolen into that tumbledown cottage, like the first rays of a summer's sun. Jeanie Macbean had dropped her head down onto her arms, resting on the table, and her shoulders were shaking with sobs.

"Don't cry, Jeanie. Don't," I said. "I'm telling you, there's no curse now. You have no more to fear from my granny or from me. And the cottage is yours to keep."

And I stepped out from that old doorway and ran down the path I'd followed a thousand times before, till I was standing on the beach at the water's edge. Under the clear sky, the sea lay flat and calm. There were no black and silver clouds to break open, as there had been on that day so long ago, when the whale had come up there to die. There was only a haze, soft and blue, that seemed to lift the distant Isle of Arran, making it hover above the water as if it was floating gently down from the sky. A white shell, perfectly grooved, lay on a rock near my feet. I picked it up.

What shall I do?
I thought.
Where shall I go?

Would it be the schoolroom in Kingarth? Would I seek work elsewhere? Would I go roving again, to places I'd yet to see? Would Ritchie Blair come for me one day? And if he did, would I welcome him?

"Where's the answer?" I called out. "Who's going to tell me?"

I lifted my arm and hurled the shell away from me, across the water. Ripples spread out from the place where it had sunk, then merged with a wave that broke in foam around my feet, as if the sea had flung my questions back to me.

I had known the answers all the time. I had no need to shout them out. They were there in my head and my heart.

I'll go where I choose, and I'll be who I am, and I'll rise up to meet whatever comes my way.

Scotland was a rough and violent place in the seventeenth century. In the north, the Highland clans were at each other's throats. In the southern Lowlands, fiery Protestants had swept away the old Catholic religion and created their own Presbyterian Church.

These Presbyterians were filled with enthusiasm and a sense of their own rightness. They didn't want anyone else to appoint their ministers and interpret the Bible for them. They wanted to pray and run their Church in their own way.

Four hundred miles away, down in London, King Charles II and his government felt threatened. They saw the Presbyterians' spirit of independence as a rebellion. The King decided to choose bishops to rule the Church in Scotland so that he could control the turbulent Scots through them.

The Presbyterians were infuriated. The King had no right, they said, to interfere with their religion. The most determined of them banded together and signed documents called Covenants, in which they promised to remain true to their Church and resist the King. These men and women were called Covenanters.