The Sea House: A Novel (28 page)

But for all the crashing of the great surf on the beach and the thrumming of the wind from the Atlantic across my ears, I stood there alone on that shore. I stood bitter with the knowledge that no one would be coming to put right all the wrongs done to my people. No one on this earth would ever come and restore to me all that I had lost.

At night I was still sleeping on the settle bench in the manse – some foolish notion that I should be there lest the Reverend return unexpected. Being so alone in that house got my thoughts wandering bitter and lonely, back along the thick carpets of the corridors of Avenbuidhe Castle, waiting behind the drapes for him to come out from his bathroom with the green-glazed crocodile tiles, waiting silently with the knife in my hand raised and ready. But still I did not go. I waited on, hoping for the Reverend’s return.

Finally, the letter came one morning. The Reverend was due back in a week. I set to around the manse, opening windows, beating rugs, baking bread and getting Maggie to help me move the furniture so we could clean proper.

The date of his arrival came and went. He did not appear. No further letter to explain his delay, though the days kept coming and going till it was some two weeks after he was due.

I knew then that what the doctor had said was the truth. My Alexander would not be returning to the island; he would go back to his old life in Edinburgh and not think of us again – of me.

The next day, I was more than surprised to have a knock on the door again and get a letter with my name writ large. The postman did say it was from Canada and with great joy I saw that it was from my cousin.

But the news inside was heartbreaking. Poor Annie’s husband had had a letter scribed to say that they had to throw their three children in the sea when they died from the smallpox on the boat. He did not think that Annie would ever be right again. I sat and wept for those bairns then, and I decided that if the Reverend was not come home by the end of the week, then I would do it. I would set out for Avenbuidhe Castle and justly settle my accounts.

*   *   *

It was a couple of nights before I was to set out. Though I had got used to my hard bed, it was close to midnight before I slept, my thoughts so anxious and distracted. And as soon as I was asleep, something woke me. Straight out of a deep sleep, I was sat up wide awake and listening. I knew in my bones that something was very wrong, though I could say not what.

I listened hard, and though it does not concern me much that we do live next to a graveyard, that night I was afraid to get up and look about.

Then I heard it, the thing that had woken me, a noise outside like the sound of a horse’s hoof on stone, and I laughed, because I thought, it is the Reverend. He has come back to his house.

But I hesitated still to go to the door, for all was silent again; no noise of bridle or of horse stirrups as someone dismounts. So I went quietly to the side window, nervous now, and looked out. A moon was up over the hills, and when the moon is clear in these parts then it is clear as day, everything the colour of a steel knife. Big black streaks of cloud were climbing up to the moon, making the dark go thick.

I went then to the back door and opened it. The dark and the wind made me very wary, since I was now sure something was out there, and I could not say what. The byre was black against the sky, the clouds sliding by fast, a sheet of white cloud with a red stain passing fast over the moon. And then I saw something white move, over near the byre, and it almost stopped my heart – for it was the gliding, white shape of a person.

I was froze there with fear, trying not to see what I could plainly see, a faint white shape floating above the grass. Then it called out, ‘Moira, please help me,’ and I knew from that voice that this was no ghost.

I went out to her in the wind, and there she was, standing in nothing but the thinnest white nightgown all stuck to her with the wet of the night chill.

That is when I saw what her trouble was, for Miss Marstone, all wild and half naked as she was, was as round in the belly as I have ever seen such a thing, and I saw that the Miss was with child.

‘You’d better come in, Miss,’ I told her, though I had to pull at her arm to get her to follow me, since she seemed of a mind to just stand there in the dark and the cold, till all the world could see her in the plain light of day. My Lord, she was cold. She was icy to touch. I got her into the kitchen and wrapped her in the blanket from my settle. I lit the lamp and saw her lips were a strange blue and her eyes had gone sunk in with inky shadows all round them. And her hair, her lovely fair hair, was matted like weed and I know not when it had last been washed or combed.

But while I tried to get her to drink something warm, I had one thought filling up my mind, and then my chest, till I felt I might burst open with tears. I thought, It is that day. It is because of that day when I saw them in the dunes and left them.

I would have hated her very much then, but there was surely nothing much left to hate but her troubles, and she was greatly in pains and crying out, so I lay her down on the bench and found her feet all cut up. I sat by and held her hand, as she did not want me to leave her but kept telling me to make sure the candle was still burning.

‘But Miss,’ I said, ‘shall I get word to the castle for them to come and get you?’

This got her very agitated and shouting at me not to tell them where she was. I said, ‘But they will surely come looking for you.’

Then she was more in pain and it began to dawn on me from the calves I have helped watch into birth that the Miss’s time was very near. So I told her to keep looking hard at the candle and I would get help.

I came back with Maggie Kintail, who has watched half the island into this world, and she did not seem so very surprised when she saw the Miss there in the Reverend’s kitchen in all her trouble and pain.

Maggie said then that we should take her to the bed in the cottage, but I said no, we shall take her upstairs.

Maggie looked shocked. ‘What if the Reverend comes back? What shall we say then?’

‘We shall tell him it is his Christian duty to help this poor girl,’ I said, though I was more sure of his not returning that night, or any night, than I was of how I would explain my reasons as to where the Miss should birth her baby.

Half of me was hoping that he would come back, and see what he had done.

When we helped the Miss upstairs to the small bedroom, the moon was on the rise over the back hills. That moon would be sinking down into the sea in front of the house before the Miss had stopped screaming all night; for once a girl has a child within her, then it must come out or they must both perish. There is no way out of such a long night.

Her nightdress that she came in was wet as a sheet on the line and so Maggie found a nightshirt that was the Reverend’s from out of his own chest, and would not listen when I said that was surely wrong. So we peeled off the Miss’s wet things, and she was all bones like an old lady, knock-kneed, and her hips all sharp as stones, but with a stomach bigger than I had ever thought to see, hard and dark and round as the globe of the world that sits in the Reverend’s study, veined over with blue lines and silvery rivers where the skin had stretched apart. She held out her broomstick arms, covered as they was in fine rabbit’s down, and as we pulled the clean nightshirt over her bony little face and thin scrapes of fair hair, then I felt my feet wet and saw her waters had broke down her legs.

I knew my world was ending that night as we waited for the Reverend’s child, but I had to put that thought aside, as it must surely be easier to die than to go through the travails the Miss went through. Waiting all night while a child is being born is much like waiting through a night vigil as a soul leaves this world in agonies.

With a last great groan to tear the world apart, the babe was delivered and Maggie had a tiny scrap of a child in her arms. As we heard its thin cry, I looked up and was surprised to see that the morning had come in at the windows.

Maggie told me to take the babe, all covered in mess as it was, for there was work still to be done. As I know from helping my own mother with my sister, you must deliver all that is left or the mother will bleed to death.

But Maggie said, ‘For the love of God,’ and the Miss began to groan again like a creature possessed of the Devil. A few minutes later, Maggie delivered to the world a second babe, which I also took from her as she then turned to finish the last of the birthings.

I had washed the first little girl, wrapped her in a cloth, and set her in a drawer padded out with a blanket. I took this second child in a dry cloth to wash it in the warm water that we had got ready, but I almost dropped it as I carried it across the room. Its tiny face was as round as a soft little mushroom, and its long, swollen eyes were closed, but the poor wee thing had no legs where the legs should be. Instead, it had a long, tapering body, like a seal or a fish, with two bony flippers that twitched as it mewed.

I washed that poor babe. I took some linen from the pile, a damask hand cloth with lace around it. I wrapped up the child, and laid it next to its sister. The second child had its eyes closed in the way of a new kitten. And then I saw this smaller child had become very still and the child did not move any more, though I picked it up and rocked it.

The Miss was asking for her babies, so Maggie carried over the little girl that was alive, and she laid it in the crook of the Miss’s arm and told her how to give suck, which she did well.

And then the Miss said, but you must bring me her sister, when she is awake.

So I told the Miss that I did not think the child would ever wake up again. And the Miss bowed her head and cried, and told me I must let her hold the babe.

So I took it over, and the Miss unwrapped the child, and saw how it was, and she was happy in her tears. She said that it was a blessing for a girl child to be a mermaid.

And I was crying too, and I said, ‘Miss, I will never forgive the Reverend for all that has happened to you.’

And she looked up at me puzzled. Then she said, ‘Moira, you are very mistaken. Alexander is not their father.’

‘Then who is their father, Miss?’ I blurted out.

‘Marstone,’ she said.

‘No, Lord Marstone is
your
father, Miss.’

‘That man was never my father.’

And I looked up at Maggie, because I could not understand what the Miss was saying. Maggie looked like she had seen a sight that was horrible, and shocked out of her wits.

So I tried again to get the Miss to talk sense. ‘I think you are mishearing me, Your Ladyship. Who is the father of your bairns, Miss, that he should come help you now?’

‘I told you this, Moira. Marstone only brought me back here to want me dead. He is the father.’

Maggie pulled on my arm and she shook her head at me to ask no more. Then she turned to gathering up the bloody linen, her face grim and set.

The awfulness of what the Miss was saying worked slowly into my mind, though I resisted it hard, and I could not think that I had worked it out right.

The Miss was getting sleepy now. The babe had finished its feed and was sleeping already, so Maggie took it to lay it down.

‘But who shall we ask to help you, Miss? Where shall you go?’ Maggie asked her.

‘I may sleep here now,’ she answered. ‘No one shall hurt me now. I have killed him, Maggie.’

‘Killed who, Miss?’

‘Killed him as he slept, with the knife he used for the stags. It is over,’ she told us calmly, and she moved slowly down her pillows and turned her face into a sleep.

*   *   *

We cleaned up the bed as best we could while she slept and I carried the bloody linen down to soak. Then we made tea with sugar and we sat and drank something hot at last, waiting in her room lest she wake or the baby stir. We sat a long time, with faces wide eyed and stunned, and sometimes I thought, Surely it was me who was there who killed Marstone, so long had I seen myself doing just such a thing. But no, it was she that had done it, who lay sleeping in front of us, grey hued and blue lipped.

Maggie said, ‘They will come for her, Moira. The poor girl will hang for this.’

‘But we shall not let them have her,’ I said.

And it was then that we heard what I had been longing for, for so many nights – that could not have come at a worse time – the sound of a horse’s hooves in the yard outside. We looked around at the room; so many, many things wrong in that room, and who was to explain what we were doing there? Maggie was white as a sheet, the Miss hardly stirring in her sleep.

‘But the Reverend will tell them,’ she said. ‘After all, he is a man of justice and right.’

I looked around madly as if I was looking for somewhere to hide the Miss, but saw there was nothing to do but that I must go down the stairs and say things to the Reverend that ought never be said. I heard the front door open and the stamp of his boots on the mat. I looked at Maggie and she nodded, so I got up and went downstairs.

I had longed and longed for the sound of the Reverend coming home. Now as I walked down the stairs I saw that I was beyond all feelings. I looked down at my arms and saw there were many new freckles, but they were not freckles, but spots of dried blood, and the front of my dress was bloody and stained.

I spoke with the Reverend, who was looking in horror at the state of me as he listened, and then he followed quickly upstairs. He stood in the room and looked around. The Miss was sleeping, the child by her side, the mermaid baby wrapped up and at peace.

Maggie took the Reverend aside; she told him those things that should not be. He shook his head and then he must get up and walk about the room.

‘I should have seen. I should have understood,’ he was saying. ‘But who should we tell?’ he said. ‘There are laws…’

‘If you tell them, then they will take her away and she will hang,’ Maggie said.

I thought he would fall over, he looked so spun around and desperate. He stood with his eyes closed for a long time.

‘No, no. The Church preaches the forgiveness of the cross. I have preached it often, but I see now, I see, it was for this moment. Don’t you see, Maggie, we can’t let them take her, because she is forgiven by the blood of the Lamb.’