The Fanatic Page 17

  As she shauchled round, she sang a few notes to herself. Maybe it was a psalm, maybe it was a pagan song. She didn’t care. And with her stick she chapped the walls; the stonework around the lum, the wooden skifting at floor-level, the floorboards themselves. Chap! There a mystery,’ she said. Chap! ‘There anither.’ Chap! ‘There a secret, Thomas Weir.’ Chap! ‘There a wee thing tae keep tae yersel.’

  When she’d been right round the room she threw her stick in the fire. A poor, sulky thing the fire was, the wind must be in the wrong airt. She turned about suddenly, as if she had heard someone at the door, but there was no one. Then she sat down, in his chair, and watched as the fire, slowly at first, then greedily and with a pleasing cracking sound, consumed the branch.

  Over her shoulder, over the back of the chair, came the voice again. ‘Jean, Jean!’ And now she knew it wasn’t her own, for the voice was quite clearly coming from behind her. She gripped the arms of the chair and pretended not to hear it. If she sat there long enough, it might go away.

  When you’d no mirror you learnt to see yourself elsewhere. She’d always been good at seeing pictures in the flames. She knew she looked like the crooked stick now, because when she put her hand to her face she felt the wrinkles, the hard knots of bone beneath the broken skin. When she got into bed at night, although she never undressed completely, not now, for it was too painful to see her nakedness, she saw enough of it to know that she was crumbling and brittle.

  Had she ever been different? It was hard to think on now, but she believed she had. Not bonnie perhaps, but young and strong. Oh aye, she’d been those. At Wicketshaw, the house of her youth. In those days, she had gone naked. That had been a joy. To strip in the woods at Carluke, to lie in the long grass in meadows, to feel the good earth and the sharp blades of twigs and leaves pricking and tickling your soft flesh. It was a joy, not a sin. Even now she was sure of it. It was he who had made it a sin, he who had made their love impure after promising her it was purity itself. As pure as God. As free from censure as God.

  The byre, the bedrooms, the hidden corners of the house. She minded these places and the times he had forced himself on her and she hated them all now. But the times they had had out of doors, they were special. She minded Thomas like a white hind in the trees, coming towards her. His thing like a mushroom on a huge stalk, straining towards her. Later she realised how like some witch rite it had been, those frantic, joyous couplings under the green canopy of birdsong. Like how a witch’s coven was supposed to be. A man with the head of a beast. A woman dancing wildly. At the time, though, it had been nothing to do with witches. It had been to do with saints.

  ‘Jean, Jean, come awa noo!’ The voice was soft, but mocking. It mocked her memories. To do with saints! What was she thinking of? She frowned. In the fire the last of the branch twisted and kinked. She unfrowned, and the branch broke and was lost among the rest of the embers.

  She often wondered about things like that. Did she really have power? Did the branch obey her frown? She’d heard so many stories of women who could make spells, who could talk to the invisible world. And she knew which herbs to pick from the forest to make a cure for a child’s sickness, her mother had taught her. But were these things power, and if so what kind of power?

  Sometimes when she was alone in the woods she’d think of the naked days of her youth again, and she’d seem to picture more than just herself. Other women – witches – dancing in a clearing, and a muckle black man. If she could think these things, if she had that kind of knowledge, and if she had done what she had done with her brother, ah well then, maybe she could be a witch.

  After they came from Carluke to Edinburgh and she kept the school at Dalkeith, had she maybe been a witch by then? She lived alone and that was enough in some folk’s eyes. They tried to trick her. They sent a wee wifie, who pretended she came from the fairy world. ‘Touch yer heid and taes, Jean, gie him awthin inbetween; hae whit iver thing ye list, iver mair ye shall be his!’ She saw what their game was. She sent the wifie packing. The Dalkeith folk were jealous of her. Her neat wee schoolhouse. Her skill at spinning. Her fine, upstanding brother, the Major, that could speak so English like and was so favoured by the kirk, the army and the city. Now that was a different kind of power, was it not?

  But the wifie came again, and each time she came Jean’s spirit weakened. For she knew her brother false by then, long before anybody else suspected. Before he suspected himself, even. Because he had turned away from her. She could tell that she repulsed him. Yet he would still come to her, when he could not get what he desired elsewhere.

  ‘Whit is it ye want?’ she said suddenly, out loud. Her voice was shrill in the empty house. It was proof that she had not spoken before. But now the spell was broken. As soon as she spoke the other voice vanished. If it had ever been there.

  Thomas would be home soon. The day was darkening and he would be expecting food. Work to be done and she hadn’t even started. There were some scraps of food: a bit of an old sheepshank, some carrots and kail. She could boil it all up with some barley for a broth. He would hate it, greasy and grey with the carrots floating like corpses. If he wanted to eat he’d not have any choice.

  It might make him raise his hand to her. He had done it in the past and hurt her. He had had many ways to hurt her but this was the last and weakest. She liked to see him try it these days because now when the arm came up it always fell away again. Feeble, dwindling in strength. She understood why this was. He was drowning in doubt, and the doubt was becoming certainty.

  She went to the window and looked out onto the roofs and walls. Their recesses and angles were fading into the gathering dark. She rubbed at the pane and saw herself distorted in its whorl, an old stick being souked down into blackness.

  Into blackness, and never come back. She wished that of him. Never come back, Thomas Weir. May ye drap deid in the street. God strike ye doon. Oh she wished it, she wished it. She’d go to Hell for wishing it, if it would just give her a few months, a few weeks even, to be here alone, shut in from the world.

  If she had a charm against him she would use it. But she’d none. For a witch she was fushionless. She could not keep him from coming home. But she had seen the fear in his eyes. Doubting Thomas. He was crumbling too. She had all his secrets numbered in her heart and he could not deny them. That was power of a sort.

  ‘Jean, Jean!’ She held her breath, listened. But now when she wanted the woman’s voice, wanted whatever unknown promises the wee wifie might have for her, her hopes sank. For it was a man’s voice. He was coming up the stair. There was the sound of his heavy tread outside the door, and the dull thump of his staff against it, demanding entry.

  Edinburgh, April 1997

  Jackie Halkit had a huge room in an enormous flat in Great King Street, in the New Town. It was the kind of place which she could never afford to own, but just to live in it was a pleasure. She shared it with two other women and a man, splitting the exorbitant rent and the astonishingly large heating bills four ways to make the costs just about bearable. Sharing itself was not much of a burden: the flat was too big to feel crowded or oppressive. If she ever got bored of her own room (about twelve feet by ten of bedroom tastefully melting into the same amount of sitting-room, complete with open fireplace) there was the vast and comforting kitchen, the bathroom with its acres of stripped floorboards between bath, sink and toilet, and the long elegant hallway to enjoy. There was a serenity about the flat that normally never failed to relax her.

  But tonight was different. She lay on her bed and the room seemed too big and empty. She was thinking of Andrew Carlin. She’d been bothered all week by thoughts of him and it was driving her mad with frustration. He kept creeping up on her … No, that wasn’t it, that was what she expected him to do, whereas what happened was he just kept being there. In her head. She’d be working on a manuscript and find she’d drifted away from the text in front of her and was seeing him instead. She’d be walking home and he’d be beside h
er. She’d wake up in the morning and he was there, in her mind.

  It wasn’t sinister or scary. It was like – well, the only thing she could think of made her even more angry with herself – it was like when she’d had a crush on a boy at school. That constant turning over of chance meetings and imaginary conversations. And yet this wasn’t a crush. He wasn’t attractive to her. If she fancied anyone lately it was Hugh Hardie, an uncomplicated lightweight with a bit of money and no hang-ups. Maybe, just maybe, she fancied Hardie. But Carlin, no, definitely not.

  She tried yet again to remember when she’d last seen him, before he walked into Dawson’s. There’d been that time in Sandy Bell’s, six or seven years ago, when he’d walked her and the other girls from the class across the Meadows. He’d left them and headed off westwards. They’d all sighed and giggled relief and gone for a coffee in one of the others’ flats. Then, the next term, had he come back? He must have dropped out around then, she decided.

  She didn’t fancy him, she wasn’t afraid of him, not any more. On the tour, she’d been impressed by his performance. It wasn’t like he was acting well, he seemed disdainful of the act. More that he couldn’t help himself. Or he became himself.

  He’d dodged out of the end of the tour. She knew that’s what he must have done. No reason why he should have. He must know the route inside out.

  He’s lost, Jackie thought. That’s it. That’s what’s on his face. It looks spooky to people because they’re on this tour through all these wynds and closes and they see this figure that’s supposed to scare them and it does scare them because it looks like he’s been wandering around there for centuries trying to find a way out. A dead man in a labyrinth without a skein of thread.

  Carlin is lost. Or he’s afraid of being lost.

  She sat up on the bed. She thought, I’m going to have to phone Hugh. I’m going to have to do his bloody tour again. I’m going to have to find out where Carlin goes when he gets lost.

  Bass Rock, April 1677/Kippen, November 1673

  Tammas’s bulk filled the doorway of the cell, blocking out what little light might have got in.

  ‘Ye hae a visitor,’ he whispered. ‘I’m shuttin yese in till jist afore the boat leaves. They think she’s ower wi a servant o Maister Fraser’s.’

  Mitchel sat up, confused. He thought Tammas was talking about the boat. But a smaller figure came in past the soldier, who shut and locked the door. The figure moved through the mirk towards him. There was a familiarity about its shape.

  ‘Ah, James, James,’ it said, ‘whit sair place is this tae find ye in.’

  ‘Sweet Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘Elizabeth.’

  She came into his arms. He breathed in the smell of her, so fresh when all he had breathed for months was salt and smoke and the staleness of his body. Their faces were wet with each other’s tears. They hushed each other’s sobs like bairns fearful of being discovered.

  ‘The sodger wi the poxed face, he is an angel,’ Elizabeth said breathlessly. ‘I had peyed the minister’s man tae let me come ower wi him, tae say I was his sister, but I hadna thocht how I would get tae ye yince we landed. I had decided tae beg the captain’s mercy tae let me see ye, since the boat winna return for us till the forenicht, but I was feart he wouldna like ma deceit. And when I saw the horror o the place, I kent I would hae nae mercy frae ony man that could rule here, and I jist sclimmed up the steps, thinkin somehow I would find ye. But the sodger speired did I no ken where I was gaun, and I thocht I would hae mair chance wi him, and sae I said I didna ken, but I was lookin for ma husband, and he speired wha was that, and I tellt him James Mitchel, and he looked aboot himsel and pushed me on afore him and said, dinna say that name again, he has nae freens, and syne he led me tae ye. I hae mair siller, James, and ye must gie some tae him, for it’s through him we are brocht thegither.’

  She had a basket, in which she had packed bread and cheese, some salted meat, tobacco and brandy. And there was a small amount of money, which she had gathered over the months since he had been brought there. The last time she had seen him had been nearly a year and a half ago, not long before he had been put to the boots.

  While he tore at the bread and bit off chunks of cheese, Elizabeth removed his stocking to look at the injury. She was not hungry; she had eaten that morning at North Berwick. She did not say that she had been two days in the fishing port, waiting; not for calm weather, but for the moment when she herself was ready for crossing.

  She stared in horror at his leg. There was nothing to be done for it. It was, at least, not infected, but it was wrecked. The shinbone had been splintered and had reset itself crooked; the muscles were torn and mashed beyond repair. She touched it with her fingers, which were calloused and yellow from working in the stall. As he ate, he watched her hand stroking the patchy, discoloured leg, and a different kind of pain rolled through him.

  ‘I am sorry, Lizzie Sommervile,’ he heard himself say. ‘I am sorry that God’s work is sae sair on us.’

  They had met in 1673, at a conventicle in a house in Edinburgh, and had been married later that year by the outed minister John Welsh, in a ceremony that was illegal in the eyes of the state. Four months later Mitchel had been seized and incarcerated in the Tolbooth. In the last three years he had seen Elizabeth no more than half a dozen times. Even at Edinburgh access had frequently been denied her, and, since December 1675, when he had made an abortive attempt to escape by breaking through the roof, all visits had been refused.

  ‘His will be done,’ she said. He had never spoken to her about the shooting of Sharp, and she understood that he never would. She knew he had done it. It was a long time ago. She hoped that it was a buried thing now, that he, even if he could never admit it, was as glad as she was that he had missed.

  ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘his will be done.’ The Bass was a world beyond the world. It was agony for him even to think on the possibilities of her life on the mainland. She was kissing the leg now, laying her cheek against it, her breath hot over the blotched skin. It was unbearable to him to receive that tenderness.

  ‘Lizzie,’ he said, ‘hae ye been faithfu tae me?’

  She stopped. Her eyes filled. ‘Dinna speir that unworthy question, James,’ she said. ‘Aw that I sell on the streets, I sell for you. Aw that I hae saved in the world, is saved for you. Dinna question ma faith.’

  He was mortified. She had come to him here, at great risk. If she had taken herself off and he had never seen her again, he could not have blamed her. But the fear was still there.

  ‘Lie wi me,’ he said. ‘Let me ken ye again, here in the darkness.’

  She hesitated. It was the moment she had prepared herself for, the reason she had waited the extra day at North Berwick, but it had come sooner than she had expected. But then, what had she expected? His question had hurt her, but shamed her too. She had come here not for him, but for herself.

  She knew her own body and its monthly changes so well that ordinarily she hardly had to think about them. But she’d been thinking hard over the last year, as it grew upon her that James might never be released. They were husband and wife, but she felt in some way she was about to betray him.

  ‘Lizzie,’ he said again. ‘D’ye mind thon time at Kippen?’

  He untied his breeks, feeling himself swell the way he did in dreams. She stretched out on the hard bed beside him, fumbling against him as she gathered her skirts towards her waist.

  ‘Thon time,’ she said. ‘Mair than three year syne, James. There’s been little else tae mind on atween us.’

  After their marriage, at the suggestion of Mr Welsh, they had journeyed together north to Stirling, and from there to the west, to Cardross House by the village of Kippen. ‘Come and share in the spirit of Christ’s people,’ Welsh told them, ‘in the very heart of God’s covenanted nation.’ Lord Cardross was a fervent Presbyterian, who had been supporting and attending illegal gatherings in the vicinity for years. The country that lay between the Fintry hills and the Trossachs,
and between Strathblane and Stirling, was a hive of conventicling, where large crowds would come to out of the way places in the hills and among the bogs for the preaching.

  Lizzie had never been more than a few miles from Edinburgh. To travel so far when the winter was closing in, was a revelation in itself. As far as Stirling the going was relatively easy and the towns and villages, though new to her, were not frightening for one who had grown up on the streets of the capital. But once they left Stirling behind, and she saw the great desolate mountains of the north ahead of her, and the long bleak shoulder of the Gargunnock hills closing on her left, she began to shrink and cling to Mitchel. It was not new land to him, yet even now he found something momentous about the mountains. He saw why John Welsh had encouraged them to come, why he called it the heart of Scotland, out of which both Highlands and Lowlands flowed. In such a place, where the land gathered like solid waves about them, a man and a woman would understand their place in the cosmos.

  When they arrived at Kippen, news of Welsh’s arrival was carried from house to house, and from farm to village. The meeting was to be held up beyond Flanders Moss, in rough wet country below the Menteith hills where the dragoons, if they appeared, could not easily ride, and from where folk could scatter and hide if necessary. It was November, and the weather was threatening rain and hail. Early on Sunday morning, before dawn, groups of men and women began to appear in the wastes, drawing together as the light slowly filled the sky. James and Elizabeth walked together along the wet paths, hand in hand, and Lizzie was smiling and James Mitchel was delirious with happiness. It was seven years since Pentland and the hanging of Hew McKail; five since he had shot at James Sharp; now he was being reborn again, with a wife to care for, a covenant to renew, and perhaps, when they returned to Edinburgh, a chance properly to fulfil the purpose God had set for him.

  The people were quiet and serious but friendly. Some of the men, like James, carried swords and other weapons, but the atmosphere was peaceful. They had come from miles around. They came out from Kippen itself, from Arnprior and Balfron and Buchlyvie and Gargunnock. They came north across the hills from as far as Lennoxtown, east from Aberfoyle, south and west from Drummond and Thornhill. The country was filled with the folk of Boquhan, Kipdarroch, Cauldhame, Poldar, Arngomery Menteith, Tamavoid, Brucehill, Ruskie, Cassafuir, Ladylands, Carden, Gartrenich, Arnfechlach, Knockinshannock, Gartentruach, Ballabeg, Gartbawn, Gartinstarry, Jennywoodston, Arngibbon, Blaircessnock, Arnbeg, Inch, Dub, Drum, Myme, Pendicles of Collymoon, Nether Easter Offerance, Claylands, Borland, Dykehead, Merkland, Shirgarton, Kepdowrie, Gartmore, Gartfarran, Offrins of Gartur. The names of their places filled the air like the numbering of Israel.