Shadow in Hawthorn Bay (5 page)

Every morning she walked the four and a half miles into town to make sure the
Andrew MacBride
was not sailing without her, then she trudged back to her cave. Once she asked for a bit of oat bannock from the weaver who lived at the edge of town, but when he demanded a kiss in return she told him he might grow toads in his beard if he were not more careful where he asked his kisses. Swiftly he crossed himself and threw the bannock after her. She would not give him the satisfaction of seeing her pick it up; she left it lying where it fell.

Only once did she dip into her supply—greedily she ate a handful of oats. The rest of the time her will power held and she subsisted on the wild plants. “Och, Duncan
dubh,”
she said ruefully on a day when there was only one small fern to be found, “it may be I will starve, then all you will have for your comfort will be the shade of me.”

Sometimes her headache was so intense and her need to reach Duncan so great she was sure she would explode and could not even think of eating.

The ship sailed at last on an evening when the tide was high. It was the first clear night since Mary had returned to Fort William and the dark outline of Ben Nevis stood out against the stars as the ship moved out of the harbour. A piper who was going to the new land played “This Is My Departing Time” for those who were leaving their homeland for ever. They lined the ship’s railing, holding each other for comfort, weeping.

Mary felt only relief that her ocean journey was beginning at last. “Soon, Duncan, I will be with you soon,” she whispered as she watched the big, round mountain disappear from sight.

The Dark Forest

Q
uarters in the hold of the
Andrew MacBride
were a nightmare. Mary’s berth was the top one of three, set in a row only two feet from other rows, in a space no crofter would stall three dozen cows and sheep in. It was to house two hundred people. What air there was was soon dark and fetid with the odours of the two hundred unwashed bodies, their breath, their excrement, and their cooking. It was dark and it was cold—cold for being so airless, as the Highland wind and rain had never been cold.

Out on deck the sea terrified her. It rose to the heights of the highest hills, it fell to the depths of the deepest glens, in a constant motion that seemed to threaten, with each new swell, to engulf the ship that rode it so precariously.

Although she was violently sick to her stomach from the pitching and rolling, Mary was so
glad the voyage had actually begun that, almost, she did not mind. In the bunks below hers were Kirsty and Iain Mackay, their new baby, and Kirsty’s mother, Elizabeth Finlay. When she first met her Mary saw the grey mist of death around Kirsty’s pale hair but she could not bear to say so. The family were so good to her, so genuinely eager to share their provisions, that soon she was cooking her porridge and potatoes with them, helping to care for the baby and commiserating with them over their sorrows.

They had come from a glen to the north and west of Mary’s, they told her one evening after supper. “And had our houses burned out behind us so we could not go home”—there were tears in Kirsty’s blue eyes, there was bewilderment in her soft voice as well as bitterness—“so our chiefs could have our land for the sheep. Our own chiefs whose fathers were our fathers, whose mothers were our mothers.”

Iain said nothing, but the set of his red head bent over the rattle he was whittling for the baby bespoke not only bitterness but resignation.

“It is a new land we go to.” Elizabeth’s bonnet strings bobbed with her firm nod. “A good land, we will be well there.” Elizabeth’s husband was already in Upper Canada awaiting them.

“A good land.” They were the words Uncle Davie had written. It was what he had said when he had first talked of leaving the glen.
Thoughts of leaving the Highlands had been in the air for three generations, to be sniffed out of corners and tasted on the wind. They had begun after the Scottish followers of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Bonnie Prince, had lost to the English at the bloody battle of Culloden Moor, sixty-nine years earlier, in 1746. Many of the Highland men who had survived the battle had been exiled. Later, others had chosen to leave with their families. The settlers in America and the Canadas had written home to say that it was fine to have no landlords. Shipping companies had posted bills in all the market towns saying that land across the sea could be had for only a few shillings. Preachers, influenced by wealthy landowners or honestly feeling it would be better for the people, preached that it was a gift from God. Mr. Graeme at St. Kilda’s told his congregation, “He has given you a chance to repent you of your sins and begin life anew.” And Uncle Davie Cameron had sat afterwards by the Urquhart hearth and called emigration wisdom.

“Wisdom is it, Davie Cameron?” James Urquhart had raised one red eyebrow scornfully. “We have been in this glen from time immemorial, Urquharts and Camerons alike.” But Uncle Davie had sold up and gone with Aunt Jean and Duncan and Callum and wee Iain. The family had settled in the backwoods
of Lake Ontario country, among refugees from the revolution in America.

Uncle Davie had written again and again to beg James and Margaret to join him in Upper Canada. War had broken out anew in 1812 between the British colonies in Canada and the thirteen old colonies, now called the United States, but “we are not much troubled here on our island at our end of the loch,” he had said and had drawn them a map to show how to find him. Mary had pored over it, learning it by heart, trying in her mind to fill it with hills and streams and crofts, trying to see Duncan’s dark forests, aching to see him in his new world. But the second sight did not come to her at will, it came and went unbidden. Duncan and his dark forest had remained stubbornly beyond her view.

“And here am I, now,” she thought, looking around her at the sorry gathering of exiles, “with these poor souls who have no homes left to go back to.”

The exiles did their best to be cheerful. Hector Macmillan, the piper, played dance tunes and melodies they all knew how to sing, and there were story-tellers. But the sailors sometimes played cruel jokes on the passengers in the hold and stole their provisions—the Mackay family lost their dried berries, their bit of salt fish, and a bag of oats. After four weeks
the drinking water was stale and scarce and a lot of the food had spoiled. Many people had sickened of dysentery and malnutrition. Peggy Gordon grew hysterical from homesickness, Jamie Mathieson swore he would jump overboard before he would pick one more rat from his oats. Kirsty Mackay weakened day by day from the poor food and, one stormy night, she died in her sleep. Her thin body was rolled in her plaid and Colin Macleod, who had been the dominie back in Kirsty’s glen, read psalms from the Bible, and her body was cast into the sea.

For one horrible instant, as Mary watched the plaid sink, she felt an almost overpowering urge to jump after it. It was as though she were the one sinking and had to leap in to save herself. Forcing back the sensation of black, suffocating water, she clung to the ship’s rail until her knuckles went white and her breath came in sharp gasps. Afterwards she wept until there were no more tears in her. She crouched on the deck and wearily rested her head against the railing, her hair whipping about her in wet swirls. The frenzy that had been driving her for so long had abated, the headache was gone. In their place she was filled with a sadness that drained her of all other feeling.

She did not want to sleep again in the hold. She ate her oats raw, on deck; she wrapped herself in her plaid and tried to sleep with her head
on her sack, braving the waves that passed over her, the winds that threatened to hurl her overboard. But the waves were too powerful and in the end the wind caused her to flee in terror to her berth below. Hugging herself, saying charms over and over, she kept the fears at bay.

The day after Kirsty Mackay died, when the emigrants had come together on deck around the piper, Mary took the baby from its grieving father and stood at the edge of the gathering. After the piper had played “The Flowers of the Forest” she sang a lullaby for the baby and for Kirsty. All the days afterwards she took the baby to walk with her around and around the deck.

Three weeks later the ship sailed into the gulf of the St. Lawrence and began its journey up the great river towards Montreal. At first the fog was too thick for anyone to be able to see anything. When it finally lifted Mary could not believe they were on a river, it was so wide. As the days passed it gradually narrowed and the shores became visible, faintly at first, then more and more clearly—low and rolling to the south, high and rising towards the Laurentian Mountains away to the north.

Along both shores were farms and villages with neat little white houses and tall shiny church spires. The distant mountains brought a joy to Mary’s heart. “The forests are so far from
where the people must be,” she thought. “Why do you mind them so, Duncan? Are the hills so different from our own?”

Slowly they made their way up the river, past settled islands, the mouths of smaller rivers, and more and more villages—everywhere the signs of settled countryside. High on its promontory, the city of Quebec guarded the river. Mary thought that, but for there being no castle, it must be as fine, even, as Edinburgh itself—the fort, the stone houses both down along the shore and up above the cliff.

They finally docked in Montreal on a morning in mid-July. The day was already hot and damp and the air was full of bugs. The quay gave off an odour of dead fish, of cargoes and people emerging from ships from all over the world. Mary felt overwhelmed by the noise of hundreds of people all shrieking and shouting at each other in different languages. It was not what she had expected of a city in Duncan’s “dark forest”.

She determined not to stay in this hot, stinking, crowded place a single moment. She would have struck out for the spot on Uncle Davie’s map called Collivers’ Corners in Upper Canada with no delay but Elizabeth Finlay invited her to travel with her party. Elizabeth Finlay and Iain Mackay, and a few others who were headed west, were travelling on that day
by coach. “And there’s room for you,” Elizabeth told Mary, “room going begging.” Carefully not looking at Mary’s bare feet, her now faded and threadbare blue skirt and worn blouse, she insisted, “Mairi, in these long, sad weeks, you have become very dear to us—to Iain and to me and to the wee bairnie. Why do you not come with us all the way?”

Mary, looking from Elizabeth’s kind, worn face to Iain’s weary one, read in their eyes—without the need of second sight—the hope that she would marry Iain and be mother to the baby.

“I will come with you, and many thanks, as far as Cornwall on the river, but I must go on to Loch Ontario.”

They did not have to stay the night in Montreal since the stage-coach in which Iain had booked passage left immediately for Upper Canada. It wasn’t long before the road grew narrow and the forests grew thick. There was little light. Mary began to understand why Duncan had written “dark with forest”. In some places the trees were the familiar birch and aspen. In other places all she could see was cedar and tamarack swamp. But along most of the route were giant pines rising a hundred feet and more into the air, their trunks over six feet across, their branches starting only thirty or forty feet from the ground and meeting high above the rough road. Before the coach had
driven very far into the forest Mary had to restrain herself from pushing open the door, jumping out, and running back to the river, back to the city, to where those gigantic trees would not close in on her so relentlessly. Firmly she said to herself a charm against danger.

With each passing mile from Montreal, the smaller, rougher, and farther apart were the settlements—squares and notches cut out of the wilderness. Many of them were only one or two rude shacks, with blankets for doors, surrounded by a few feet of raw tree stumps with the cut-down trees in high piles at the edge of the clearing. “Bush country,” a fellow traveller called the woods they rode through. His voice was loud and nasal and his English flat and harsh to Mary’s ears used to the soft sibilant sounds of Gaelic.

The coach lurched and bumped along the deeply rutted road, now and again all but capsizing on a protruding root, a stump, or a larger boulder. Occasionally there was relief from the endless trees when the road ran alongside the St. Lawrence River, past rapids or through more settled villages where there were a few stone or
frame houses with flowers and vegetables growing around them. The journey took two days with two overnight stops at dirty little inns that stood at crossroads along the way.

At last they reached Cornwall, a sizeable town on the river with several inns, mills, and blacksmith shops. There Mary parted from her friends, they to travel north, she to follow the map she had memorized so carefully.

“I know it is many miles yet to Loch Ontario and farther still to the island where Uncle Davie lives but I will be well.” She drew the map for them on the back of the paper packet that still held Mrs. Grant’s letter and they asked the innkeeper about the distance. “Yep,” he said, “looks to be up past Kingston way—be about a hundred miles.”