Highland Portrait (32 page)

Merry closed the space between her and her daughter, walking slowly, absorbing the sight of the young woman in front of her.  In spite of her tears and disheveled appearance she was the most beautiful thing that Merry had ever seen.  She knew she would be.  Merry encircled Stella in her arms and held her tightly, rocking her gently, remembering the feel of her little girl, the sweetness of little Ailean, now grown and returned to her.  Stella, eyes closed and sealed with tears, could only sob and wish her body to meld with her mother’s, that in that union they might relive, if only at the cellular level, the years that were missing.   She wrapped her arms around her mother’s waist and her body became an arc of electricity that gives light only when it returns to its source.

“Mama,” Stella felt glorified and whole, the part that she had so mournfully missed now made flesh before her.  Merry moved and putting her arm around Stella’s waist she urged her forward. “Come dear, let’s go inside.  Albert, dear, take care of the horses and then find something to do.  I’ll call for you when we need you again.”

Albert, still sitting on the ground, his tear stained face pock marked with guilt and sorrow, watched his daughter and wife, move up the path toward Merry’s croft.  Pleasure at this reunion pushed to find purchase in his heart, but the anguish and guilt of how his desires for his daughters future had over ridden her need for a mother, kept the full impact of joy at a distance.                Wiping at his tears he stood and gathering the reins of the two horses he walked slowly and miserably to the small barn he had built for Merry.

Stella and Merry spent the better part of the afternoon crying together, learning of each other and establishing an intimate closeness that only women can find in the company of each other.  It was an intimacy of finding love, not fault, eschewing fear and loving each other in spite of their misfortune of distance. Merry examined Stella’s hands, so like her own, and was happy to see they were hands that worked, hands that created, hands that did not shirk.  She combed and brushed Stella’s hair, a ritual she had missed, taking measure of the texture of her daughter’s hair, smelling the lilac’s in it.  She looked in her daughter’s eyes, so like Albert’s and she felt a rush of love and joy that only mother’s feel when reunited with their lost children. She quizzed Stella on the rites and milestones of her life – the loss of her baby teeth, her illnesses, the moment her womanly courses began.

Stella, for her part, wanted to know everything about her mother, her lineage, her thoughts, her heartaches, her love affair with Albert.  She wanted to know what she ate, how she cooked, where she had learned her healing craft.  Who had she healed.

“Do you know the herbs, daughter?  Can you make simples?” Merry smiled at Stella, her question hopeful.  Stella furrowed her brow knowing that she was about to disappoint her mother.

“Herbs?  Well, I can make pesto.” She replied weakly.  Her mother looked at her puzzled.  ‘And what does pesto cure, my dear?”

“A hankering for Italian.”

Merry, sitting at the wooden slab table on a bench across from Stella, looked at her, lips pursed and said, “Italian?”

“I am not a healer, mother.  My gift is my art.  It brought me here.  It’s connected us my whole life – even though I didn’t know it – my art is my gift.”

Merry smiled and was of a sudden excited.  “Oh, daughter, yes!  I have something to show ye!”  She turned and went to a corner of the croft, opening up a large flat trunk.  She pulled a large stack of papers from it and laid them on the table in front of Stella.

“Look, my sweet.  Yer father brought them to me in his travels.  Ye were ne’er far from me, Stella.”   Stella touched the paper and was surprised to see her drawings.  Merry had accumulated a good many of them, some from her childhood, others more recent.  Stella wasn’t surprised.  She left drawings all over her studio and house and it would have been easy for her father to pick them up and take them.  She understood now where some of her best work had disappeared to.  She thought she had thrown them out or misplaced them, but here they were in her mother’s possession.  Stella smiled as she leafed through the pictures, wishing she had known – but that was an issue to take up with her father and right now she was not going to think of him.  She was only going to think of her mother.

“Mama, why didn’t you come to be with me?” Stella did not want to lose this special closeness that was developing, but so many years of yearning cried out for an answer.  Merry’s eyes teared up again and there was such a look of sorrow on her face that Stella almost regretted the question.

“My sweet child, I was so afraid of star traveling.  At the time your father could not always control it and he would end up in the wrong country or wrong century.  I was afraid of being lost and that we would never see each other again.

“I am so sorry, Ailean, I let you down because of my great fear of never seeing you or your father again.  I would send you gifts as often as I could.  I left them at the stones because I knew that you would get them.  I am so sorry that I could not send more.”

Stella reached across the plank table and held her mother’s hand.  With the understanding of woman’s heart she let her tears seal her testimony of forgiveness.

Albert had cleaned the barn, curried the horses, chopped wood for Merry, and tended to her garden.  He had milked both of Merry’s goats and set the bucket in the croft window, gathered several eggs, leaving those in a small wooden box by the milk. After resting against the large oak where Merry hung her bird houses he pulled more weeds.  Merry had not called him in and to tell the truth he was afraid of Stella’s wrath.  He knew that she would be basking in the love and reunion with her mother right now, but at some point he had to man-up and deal with the questions and understandable accusations she would throw at him.  He was trying to steel himself for it, but felt a shiver of cowardliness inside.

Pulling flat stones from the ground he began to pile them so that he might build Merry a cobbled walkway from her door to the garden.  It would be arduous work and would tire him, keeping him from dwelling on the disservice he had dealt his daughter.

It had taken Albert several years to build this croft for Merry on this piece of land that abutted both the MacDougall and Stewart clans.  It had been given to her by the Stewart Laird after the ‘death’ of her Stewart husband and she had been happy here, hidden from all but her close family.  The healer’s art was her craft and she had spent her time preparing simples and potions, keeping a small kitchen garden, and learning to read at Albert’s bequest.  Albert was with her often enough, sometimes as much as once or twice a month so she was happy.

Straightening up and arching his back that was beginning to ache from pulling stones from the ground, Albert cocked his head to the sound of barking. Turning to the path he squinted his eyes and tried to decipher movement on the path and smiled when he recognized Ferghus, tail held straight out, tongue hanging from the side of his mouth, running toward him.

“Well, I suppose Robbie is not far behind then,” he mused. Holding the stone in his hand he watched as Robbie did, indeed, ride up not far behind Ferghus.  The dog reached Albert first, jumping at him, happy to have found him.  He sniffed at the stone, and finding it of no food value, left off and went about the croft yard sniffing and exploring.

Robbie knew this place, it was the healer’s croft.  He had come here on just one occasion when his aunt had been gravely ill and the MacDougall, fearful that he might lose her had sent Robbie to fetch Merry.  She had brought her basket of potions and over several days, staying close at the side of Elinor, she had brought color back into her cheeks, life back into her body.  The MacDougall had been so grateful he made sure that Merry received venison throughout the year and had plenty of wood for the winter.

Robbie looked at Albert and saw a man he did not recognize.  He was holding a stone in his hands as if unsure what to do with it, but what concerned Robbie more was the odd look on his face.  He had never seen such strain on Albert’s face, such misery.  Dismounting he looked at Albert and he panicked.

“Albert!  Stella, where is she?”  Albert sighed and shook his head.

“She is fine, Robbie, she is safe.”  He nodded toward the croft. “She’s in there with her mother.”  Albert was not in the habit of dropping bombs of information on people, preferring to keep hard secrets to himself, but now that the lid was raised his Pandora’s box was spilling over.

“Och, Albert.  Did I hear ye say, ‘her mother’?”  Robbie’s look of astonishment would have been funny if Albert wasn’t so heavy laden with anguish.

“Here,” Albert handed the stone to Robbie and, turning from him, moved buckets of weeds from two large tree stumps near the house.  He brushed one off and indicated that Robbie should sit.  Robbie looked at the stone, then the stump and seated himself, after a glance at the croft hoping to see Stella, but it was not to be.

“Why am I holding this stone, Albert?”  Albert sat on the other stump and looked at the stone. “And what do you mean by ‘her mother?”  Robbie was beginning to be nervous about Albert’s strange faraway look.  This just wasn’t the professor he knew so well.  Gone was the self assured and jaunty air of the pedagogue, and in its place was the haggard face and broken shoulders of an old man, bent with penitence.

“I’ve been shut out of the croft, so I was building Merry a stone path to the garden.”

“Tell me, Albert. What is happening?”  Robbie, still holding the stone, looked with caution at the croft again and then gave his undivided attention to Albert.

Albert mentally rehearsed his words, planning how he would unroll his tale without involving Robbie in the core of his secret – the time travel.  He knew Robbie to be an astute fellow, open to scientific evidence and thought, but even Robbie was not ready to hear about moving through time.  So moving cautiously through the tale Albert told him of he and Merry, how they had met on one of his visits and had hand fasted and soon thereafter welcoming the birth of Stella.  He told him of his coercing of Merry and how he pled for his daughter that she might be given greater opportunities than she would ever receive here in Scotland. How he had taken their daughter away, when just three years old, to Texas where she received an education and was brought up to be an independent thinker and to rely on her strength of spirit and intelligence.  How Merry was fearful and would not travel to Texas so he kept Stella from knowing her true birthplace and her mother.

Robbie had often wondered about Albert’s family and now that the story was unfolding it was nothing even remotely close to what he might have expected. Now he understood, or thought he did, why Stella looked so familiar.  She was very much a reflection of the healer.

“Albert why did ye not tell her o’ her mam?” Robbie’s question was at the heart of the problem.

“I could not travel from here to Texas with a child, back and forth, it would be difficult and she would cry to see her mother and so I told her that her mother had died.  It was wrong because I denied her what she needed, but she had me, Robbie and I thought that was enough.  I was wrong and I have hurt them both.”

Robbie placed the stone on his knee and held it there contemplating what Albert had told him, wondering how this would affect his relationship with Stella.  He was dumbfounded to hear that she was more a part of him then what he expected.  She belonged here because she wasn’t really from Texas she was from here, not a day’s ride from his home.  Now that she knew her mother then surely she would not leave, would not want to be parted from her mother again, not after twenty years apart.  As much as this was a blow and heartache to Albert, Robbie could see that this would work to his benefit.

“Is Stella, happy, Albert?  Happy to be w’ her mam, again?” Robbie asked hopefully.

“Well, I believe she is, Rob, but she was very angry with me when I told her.  Fierce anger, Rob, my daughter can cause the sky to blacken, the winds to blow when she is angry.  Or at least is seems like that.” Albert, head down, was so miserable Robbie wanted to say something to lighten the mood of his very good friend.

“Aye, I have seen it.  Did the lass throw you over her shoulder into the weeds?” asked Robbie, shaking his head and smiling thinking about Stella’s temper.

“Not yet, but I fully expect it when she comes out.  She can be a terror when she’s mad, Rob.  Just a caution, my friend.”  Albert eyes grew wide thinking of the few times he had seen Stella completely lose her temper.  He’d thought that it was like watching a tornado – fascinating, but deadly.  He weakly smiled at Robbie, feeling some slight measure of relief knowing that secrets that had been heavy to bear were now no longer his to carry alone.                “Well, then, while we wait for a summons from the lassies let me help ye build a wee walk fer Merry.” 

Laboring side by side as the sun went down, the two friends, whose normal activity would have been to sit with a whiskey by the fire and take up intellectual pursuits, rolled up shirt sleeves and built a path, laying the rocks in such a meticulously precise design that Robbie briefly thought that even the king himself did not have such beautiful workmanship at his disposal.

When it was too dark to lay stones Robbie suggested that they build a small fire and he would find them a hare, his stomach was growling and he could smell bread coming from the croft, but he had been cautioned by Albert that it was best to let the ladies decide when they should approach.  Albert agreed to build the fire and Robbie, in just a short while produced two hares for their dinner.  Ferghus, after eating the entrails padded up to the croft to scratch and whine at the door.