Lightly Poached (11 page)

‘That was a lucky one,' I murmured.

‘Lucky?' echoed Morag. ‘Indeed if Fergus hadn't made the man get steam up it's likely the ship an' all their lives would have been lost.'

‘What did the owner have to say?' asked Behag. ‘You'd have expected him to give Fergus a good pound for that.'

‘Indeed the owner wouldn't believe it at first when Fergus woke him to tell him but he believed it all right afterwards when he saw it for himself. They got some divers down to inspect the moorings an' they found somethin' wrong with them that had caused them to part. Fergus said the owner took the firm who'd made them to the law over it an' won his case.'

‘Did he ever ask Fergus why he'd made sure they had steam up?' I asked.

‘He did,' declared Morag. ‘An' when Fergus told him he shakes hands with him. “Fergus,” says he, “I've always laughed at your premunitions before but I never will again.” He never did an' that's the truth. He never forgot that night, either, an' when he died he left Fergus a pension for the rest of his life.'

‘It's nice to hear of that,' I remarked.

‘Aye, mere's some of these rich folk that do right by people,' admitted Morag grudgingly.

‘I wouldn't care to see the future,' said Behag with a slight shudder.

‘Well, Fergus could without a doubt,' Morag told her. ‘An' that's what folks will best remember him for when they're speakin' of him. Aye,' she repeated, ‘they'll remember his premunitions.'

I did not divulge then it was in no supersensory way that I should best remember Fergus. I had been living with Morag for some time before starting to look around for a house and croft of my own and hearing of one which had been empty for years and might possibly be bought I set out one day to find it. I knew roughly where it was situated but I knew also that if I kept to the road it was going to be a long trek and as it was winter with short hours of daylight I took what I thought to be a short cut. Morag has assured me there was such a path but her instructions, always more colourful than correct, had led me into a deep, boggy valley. At that early stage of my initiation bogs terrified me and in mounting panic, visualising myself being sucked rapidly into miry mud with darkness coming on and no one to see my plight, I tried repeatedly to find a path back to firm ground but drew back each time as I went ankle deep in treacly mire. Common sense told me my panic was foolish. The day was mild for the time of year; the sun indicated it was around midday and except for one or two historic and easily identifiable bogs none was reputed to be dangerous except to cows and horses with their small feet and heavy bodies. All the same I was immensely relieved to see Fergus coming over the hill in my direction carrying a creel of peats. I hailed him and, still with the heavy creel on his back, he came towards me, testing the ground at every few steps. He guided me back to the path and asked me where I was making for. I told him and begged for directions.

‘You've lost yourself, have you?' he said with mockery in his voice.

I grinned and acknowledged I was a little lost.

‘Aye, aye, I thought that must be the way of it.' With a hand that was as hard as a cricket bat on my shoulder he turned me in the direction I was to go. He raised his right arm. ‘Now look along the length of that,' he instructed. Obediently I looked along the length of his arm. ‘Now you'll see that,' he went on, holding up a sturdy thumb that was as dark and wrinkled as oak bark. I assured him I could see it. ‘Now, Miss Peckwitt,' he told me, wedging each word into the sentence as carefully as a mason wedging stones into a wall, ‘you'll just take a line from the black of my thumbnail,' he commanded. Heedfully I had done so.

The three of us were now approaching the croft land as distinct from the moor and the ever-elusive corncrakes were croaking in the unscythed grass down towards the bum.

‘I mind my father always used to say those birds made him think of the angels,' observed Morag as I stopped to listen.

I looked at her. The rasping of the corncrake might be music to the ear of an ornithologist but it was hardly what one would expect to hear from angels.

‘Aye, he'd say they're all around you an' yet you scarcely ever saw one,' she explained.

When we were within a few paces of Fergus's cottage two women emerged wearing suitably staid expressions.

‘How is she?' asked Morag.

‘Ach, she's no' bad. No' bad at all,' replied one of the women.

‘She's frettin' more about gettin' her cow to the bull before her season's over,' added the other. ‘She's wonderin' if Angy will get here in time or will one of the men come an' do it for her.'

Angy, being Fergus's nephew, was now Ina's closest relative and was confidently expected to come from the mainland and take over both his great aunt and the small croft.

‘He'll surely be here for the funeral,' Morag asserted. ‘They'll need him for the carryin'.'

‘The more the better,' agreed one of the women.

‘I'm thinkin' the men will be awful dry if the weather stays as hot as this,' commented Behag.

The sombre expressions on the faces of the women were wiped off as easily as dust from a mirror as we all turned to assess a setting sun so fiery that one expected the sea's rim to hiss and bubble as they touched. The hills were clear except for a crumpled bunch of cloud behind their peak which looked as if it might have been a coverlet hastily thrown aside.

‘I believe this weather will stay with us for a whiley yet,' predicted Morag with satisfaction. ‘Surely carryin' Fergus is goin' to make the men sweat worse than carryin' a load of hay.' A gloating smile creased her face. ‘Mind you,' she went on, ‘I believe they'd as soon he died now as wait till they're busy at the hay.'

The murmurs of agreement from the two women were cut short by a croaking voice calling from inside the cottage.

‘She's hearin' us,' whispered Morag. ‘You two had best away an' we'll go in to her.'

Despite the warm perfection of the evening Old Ina, Fergus's widow, was sitting in a chair drawn close to the hearth, cherishing the fire as if, now that Fergus had gone, it was destined to become her mate. Behag and I settled ourselves on the bench and mumbled trite commiserations while Morag, going immediately to the old woman, laid a hand on her shoulder and crooned comfortingly in the infinitely more expressive Gaelic. Ina shook her head or nodded, making whispered denials and acquiescence and after a few minutes Morag came and sat on the bench beside us. Her voice became more matter-of-fact.

‘Would you say he had a premunition about it?' she asked.

‘Indeed, I'm sure now that was the way of it,' replied Ina. We leaned forward avidly. ‘Aye, an' I should have known it,' continued the widow, ‘for when he came in that evening for his potatoes he ate three sooyan along with them before he pushed his plate at me for more. “That's a meal enough for a ploughman you've taken already,” says I. “Right enough,” says he, “but I don't wish to go my way hungry.” “Go?” I asks him. “Go which way?” But he doesn't say a word an' just goes through to the room an' lies on the bed an' that's the last speech I had with him till I went to tell him it was time to go to the milkin' an' found him gone.' Her voice faltered and she struck her forehead with the back of her hand.

‘It's sad, mo ghaoil,' Morag sympathised when the widow had recovered herself. ‘An' him such a strong healthy man all his life.'

‘Indeed he was so,' agreed Ina, wiping the sleeve of her cardigan across her eyes.

‘An' always so good to eat,' prompted Morag.

‘Good to eat an' good to sleep,' the widow confirmed.

‘An' never seein' a doctor.'

‘He saw a doctor only once in these twenty years past,' Ina replied, ‘an' that was only to see how he was wearin'.'

‘Aye, aye,' commented Morag. ‘An' nothin' artificial about him,' she added.

‘Nothin' but his teeths,' corrected Ina.

‘Did he have his teeths?' Morag's voice was sharp with surprise. ‘I never saw them, then.'

‘Indeed they never came out of that little box you see there on the chimney shelf,' confided the widow. ‘Never once but when he took them out to polish them.' I glanced up at the exquisite little lacquered box which sat between what I had discovered on a previous visit to Ina to be a Georgian silver salt-cellar and pepper-shaker.

‘He polished them?' asked Morag with a touch of scepticism.

‘He did so. The same time as he polished the other ornaments there with some stuff he got from the van. There should be a tin of it there now.' She indicated a tin of a well-known brand of metal polish which stood tied in a duster at the end of the mantelpiece. ‘He liked to see things shine,' she explained. ‘I daresay it was the boat in him still.'

Ina picked up a pair of tongs roughly fashioned out of fencing wire and added a couple of peats to the fire.

‘You'll take a cup of tea,' she stated with shaky-voiced emphasis and shifted the kettle from the hob to the hook above the fire. While the kettle boiled and the other three women talked pious trivialities I studied Ina's kitchen with its wood walls tanned by peat smoke; its bare wood floor dark as lichen with age and wear. Apart from the long wooden bench on which we sat there were two roughly made upright chairs, a table obviously knocked up from driftwood and a varnished dresser which occupied almost the whole of the wall opposite the window. The lower shelves of the dresser were loaded with plain earthenware basins of uniform size; brown glazed jugs of varying sizes, and an assortment of stone jam jars, while on the top shelf sat three fat brown teapots interspersed with such oddments as a pewter tankard, sporting an engraved coat of arms; a silver sauce-boat, and one of a pair of elegant silver candlesticks. The last time I had been in Ina's house both candlesticks had been on display, as had also a pair of silver meat-dish covers which had hung on the wall on either side of the dresser.

‘Useless things!' Ina had said when I had admired them.

I glanced about me, trying to locate the missing items, and soon found the candlestick which was propping open the tiny window to allow the slight evening breeze to drift into the over-warm room. The meat-dish covers I could see nowhere and I sighed for Ina's indifference to her treasures, wondering if Morag's ‘anticsman' had paid her a visit or if some travelling tinker had cast a covetous eye on them and had exchanged them for a couple of milk pails or even tin water dippers. It was so unusual to see such treasures in a crofter's kitchen that I had once asked Morag how the old woman had come by them, imagining that perhaps Ina was descended from some once wealthy family and these were the remaining heirlooms or perhaps that at some time in her youth she had acquired a taste for fine things and had saved up her money and bought them on rare visits to the mainland. Admittedly neither theory fitted Ina's present attitude towards her valuables but that could always be put down to age or the bludgeoning effect of a harsh crofting life.

‘An' hasn't she a box full of other things under her bed in the room?' demanded Morag. ‘Dishes an' spoons an' little ornaments, all wrapped in pieces of blanket. She showed them to me one time.'

‘It seems so odd,' I began, but Morag cut me short.

‘Ach, Ina doesn't know they're valuable,' she said. ‘Nobody's told her an' it's best if no one does.'

‘Why ever not?' I asked, puzzled.

‘Well, you see, mo ghaoil, when Ina's daughter was alive she used to travel about the country takin' jobs as a servant in these big houses. She never seemed to stay in any place for long but she was always sendin' her mother home some little keepsake or other. Ina thought she was buyin' them an' sendin' them for her to keep till the girl got married.'

‘Oh,' I said expressively.

‘Aye,' agreed Morag. ‘So there they are an' where they rightly belong the dear only knows but it's certain it's not in Ina's kitchen or under her bed.'

The tea was brewed, the girdle scones handed round. Ina was not eating and Morag began questioning the old woman as to what food she had taken that day.

Ina shook her head. ‘I have no hunger,' she said.

‘That's no way to be,' Morag told her severely. ‘Wait you now while I just switch you up an egg in a bitty milk an' supposin' you take nothin' else till the mornin' you'll not starve.' Bending down she extracted a pan from under the dresser and poured in some milk from the pail. She peered in various basins.

‘Where do you keep your eggs?' She turned to Ina.

‘Indeed if there's none in the basin there's none in the house,' replied Ina. ‘I mind now I didn't gather them yet today,' she added plaintively.

‘Did you feed your hens?' enquired Morag.

‘Kirsty did that for me while she was here,' admitted Ina.

I volunteered to go to the hen-house to look for eggs.

‘You'll take this an' see an' just lift the clocky hens while you're at it.' said Ina, showing signs of animation. From beside the fireplace she picked up a bowl of meal in which reposed a long-handled serving ladle. ‘You'll just lift up the hens an' throw them into the air,' she instructed me. ‘They've been sittin' that tight the last four or five days an' they're needin' to come off or they'll get stuck.'

I assured her I knew how to deal with broody hens and, picking up the basin and ladle, went out towards the henhouse, casually inspecting the ladle on my way. It was heavy and dull but as I had expected the hall marks on the handle were plainly visible.

There was a cluster of hens outside the hen-house all obviously questioning and counselling one another as to whether it was time to go and roost. I shooed them aside and bending down entered the tiny, strong-smelling shed where the two clocky hens sat, screened by pieces of sacking, one at either side in nests only slightly raised from the floor. The first hen tried to peck me as I lifted her out and when I threw her into the air she came down with such a squalling and shrieking that the rest of the hens scattered in panic. The second clocky reacted similarly and I watched until they had muted which was what was required of them and then threw down ladles of food, fending off the other hens until the clockies had eaten their fill. Only then did I go back into the hen-house and after collecting the eggs from half a dozen laying boxes I crouched down to check that there were no broken hatching eggs in the two snug hay-lined nests near the floor. The neat shape of the nests intrigued me and pulling aside a little of the hay to inspect them I found my fingernail was scratching on metal. I lifted a little more hay, then sat back on my heels, shaken with a mixture of disbelief and laughter. I had found the two silver meat-dish covers. They were tarnished and speckled with excreta but undoubtedly they made excellent nests for the two clocky hens and their expected progeny.