Veil of Time (11 page)

It’s a captivating story, Scottish history, now that we know it. In the Great Hall below, we watch a demonstration with swords by a couple of bearded men in Elizabethan dress, and so the chatter comes back and a few jokes about codpieces and men in tights.

On our way out of the castle, we merely glance at the burning spot; in the car words fail me. I can’t dispel the image of that horse-drawn cart carrying the swaying, shackled witch, and often bands of witches, or druids, bumping over the cobbles, upwards towards the castle barricade, the clawing mobs after it. Sometimes the witches were garroted first; often they went live to the flame.

Maybe it’s that that releases a tear when I have to say good-bye to Graeme. Perhaps it’s the feeling of failure. He puts his arms around me like the man he isn’t yet.

“I’ll be all right,” he says. “You know I will.”

I shake my head. “No, I don’t.”

He hands me a hankie, like a man would. It’s ironed and starched, in a way I would never have made it.

He says “Do you still think you might move to Edinburgh once you’ve had the operation?”

I hand him back his hankie. “I suppose I could if I got a job here.”

“But even if you didn’t,” he says, “you could come here and use the university library.”

I look into those grey eyes that used to be clearer, with fewer questions in them. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

He nods, tries to laugh, and makes me smile. “It’s a bit lonely here all by myself.”

I hold this little son of mine, desperate to make it all right for him. This is the first time since Ellie died that he has admitted any need.

He waves to me as I drive out of the parking lot, looking small and lost all of a sudden, so that it’s all I can do to switch on the blinker and make the right-hand turn out onto the main road. I put on the radio and get an Edinburgh DJ. But the fast talk jars with the choking in my throat, and I have to turn it off.

Before I leave Edinburgh and head back to the west coast, I have one more stop. Oliver would say I want to wallow in the gloom, but I do feel the need to visit the university library’s Scottish Studies section to locate some names and try to put faces to the bodies in the fire. Somehow I feel as if I owe it to them.

University libraries are stuffy places, not so much
because of the air but because of the faces people have, tortured student faces over the tomes they must devour or arrogant faces because of what has been achieved. I keep looking up at people as they pass my carrel, my finger on the lists of witches, the Bessies and the Isobels and the Joans, people with a network of family and friends, and enemies, too, apparently. It was often the nervous neighbors who would turn them in, churches that would try them, traveling courts that would sentence them. Pyres both recorded and unrecorded that would burn them. Whatever year it turns out I’m visiting in my dreams, it seems the church was making only squeaking noises in Scotland then, preparing in the wings for its great roar down the corridor of history.

As a child, I went to mass. I colored in the pictures of Jesus of Nazareth with his pierced hands turned towards the poor and helpless. For a time, I even wanted to die young so that I could sit on the lap of Jesus like the children in the coloring book. I suppose part of my interest in witches is just to understand how we went from Jesus meek and mild to this hell pocket in the history of the world.

It’s hard to leave those women behind in Edinburgh, though history long since moved on. The last witch to be burned in Scotland was Janet Horne in 1727, a demented old biddy who didn’t understand the pyre was
meant for her and thought she was being taken for a picnic.

God, I want to throttle someone, as I wind this modern contraption over mountain passes to the coast upon which Dunadd sits. Surely I would have been a victim of the witch hunts; the nuns or the neighbors would have turned me in for my affliction. I wonder how many women were burned just for having epilepsy.

All the lights are out at Dunadd as I chug along the long lonely path, over the cobbled bridge to the small glow of the night-light in my cottage kitchen.

After I have banged the car door shut, the fields and the river seem very still. No sound, just the smell of soil and river. I lean back against the car, the hill fort towering over me asleep, like all good things at this hour. I wait for Winnie to make an appearance, but the only animals I can make out in the dark are the shadows of sheep in their field across the river where the village once stood.

But I am tired, and not only of driving. There’s Ellie and the divorce; there’s the son I have failed; there’s the sheer brutality of the witch hunt. I look around for Winnie, but I expect she is still couried down among the bales, warm, back to her natural state.

The next morning, I’m still brooding on my Edinburgh trip, walking out into the farm’s courtyard behind the cottage in my dressing gown, my hands around a hot mug. I call for the cat but hear nothing back. Then in
among the bales, I see her curled black back, unmoving, something not quite right.

“There you are, Winnie.”

I set my cup on the concrete floor, waiting for her to notice me, but the curled back does not unfurl. When I reach down and touch her, she is cold. I put my cheek next to her belly and feel her chest rising against my skin. But her eyes are dull and will not look at me.

I’m rushing for the car when Jim Galvin walks around the corner.

“The cat,” I say, still running, “what’s the matter with her?”

“Skitters,” he shouts, as I open the car door and jump in.

I’m forced to let Jim climb in beside me, because I don’t know where the vet is. I lift Winnie onto his lap, and he knows by my look that there will be no objection.

I have always been respectful of speed along the lanes out of Dunadd, as though keeping time with its ancient standing, but I am in third gear approaching the bridge this time and close to fifty miles an hour on the road out to the main road.

“If you knew she was sick, why didn’t you take her in out of the cold?”

“Did you want shite all over the house?” he asks. “Don’t worry. She’ll be fine.”

I turn hard into the traffic. “She doesn’t look fine, does she?”

We drive in silence except for the directions I must accept. I am weak down to the foot that must depress the pedal and the hand that slots the gear stick into fourth. The vet is eight miles away. I glance at Winnie’s half-slit eyes, and I’m not sure we’ll make it. I slept all last night with her dying outside in the barn in the cold. I shudder with the familiar guilt of not being there.

“It’s just a cat,” Jim is saying.

Just a cat, but another life I was responsible for.

“Shut up.”

We drive in silence except for “Turn here” and then “Pull up behind the green car.”

I dash into the surgery in my dressing gown with my black bundle of fur and try to explain but cannot rightly answer the details. I wasn’t there. I have known this before. I have known this before.

They make me wait in a chair with her on my lap, and then it’s, “The vet will see you now.”

They shake their heads, make me wait, shoot her full of fluid with a dash of electrolytes. I object to nothing, ask no questions. They give me antibiotics, probiotics. I do not object. I hang on to the possibility that it could all have some effect, and I drive home with Winnie eerily quiet in the backseat.

I fill the syringe and hold her tight to get the medicine down her throat. But she doesn’t have much struggle.

I lay her back down, flat out on the table. She won’t purr.

By the evening, she raises her head as I walk into the kitchen. Her eyes seem more awake. But she can’t get up to take the water I offer. I use the syringe to get more fluid into her.

Jim Galvin taps at the window and mouths, “How is she?”

I shrug. He comes in, though I still have not forgiven him.

He starts to make tea, while I sit watching the feeble life of a stray cat that I need to survive suddenly more than my own life.

Someone has to be held accountable. “How could you leave her out in the cold? She nearly died.”

“Aye, well.” He drops a tea bag into each cup. “We all die.”

I sigh. He’s right. It seems we spend so much of living trying not to die. But then death happens anyway. Time is such a useless measure of anything. The most you can say is that we are born and that we die. What comes in between is a short pause. In the great expanse of the universe, the pause is nothing more than a few breaths. We try to make it mean something by adding it up in years, but it doesn’t add up. We’re here; we’re gone. Something else takes our place.

I get up from the table and lean on the kitchen counter. Jim slides the cup of tea towards my hands, then leaves.

The next day, Winnie manages to pull herself up and
walk to her bowl of water. My heart jumps, and I’m smiling when Jim comes through the door.

He says, “I said she’d be fine.”

“No thanks to you.”

I pass him a bowl and a box of cornflakes. “You want your milk heated up for that, too?”

“If it’s not too much trouble.”

It is too much trouble. Life is too much trouble, but we can’t help but shuffle it along. I crunch my cereal across the table from him.

He says, “Are you still in a bad mood?”

I sigh. “I’m not going to grace that with an answer.”

Oliver couldn’t stand my moods, either, but then, when I was having them, I couldn’t stand him. They were often the precursor of a seizure, which gave him more reason to hate them. I wonder what Jim Galvin would do if I started one right here in front of him, and I am beginning to feel that heat in the soles of my feet, so it behooves me to get rid of him before I find out.

I take his bowl of cornflakes from him. “I have a terrible headache. Do you mind?”

He’s saying he doesn’t mind in the least and quite understands, but I am only seeing the part of him that speaks, the lips and teeth; all else has swum out into vague light, and he’s only just out of the door before I feel my way to the bedroom and drop against the pillows.

8

I
lla was gone when Fergus awoke from the Samhain celebration in the commoner’s house, his head in the lap of the older daughter of the house. The thighs of a woman formed a soft-enough pillow, and he was still fatigued from the journey from the Britons, still a bit queasy from the
fraoch
he had swallowed in abundance. He closed his eyes again and feigned sleep, for there was no harm here in the lap of a girl, keeping warm in her woman smell beside the fire.

The mother of the house came through the door and set a pot of water over the fire, singing a song of supplication to the sun to rise each morning, and for Cailleach the goddess to stay close through the long winter nights. She sang in the strange minor tones of
Pictish, but this woman with her dark hair and sallow skin was no Pict.

The song brought with it thoughts of Saraid, and he remembered with a clutch in the region of his heart that he had not tried to contact her last night. His thoughts had become tangled and slipped from Saraid to the woman in men’s clothes up on the hill with Sula. Perhaps it was happening, what his mother had said, the fading that came eventually after death.

He sat up and stretched, drawing to him the eyes of the peasant women. The mother handed him a bowl of brose, oats uncooked in milk, which he took but didn’t know if he could stomach. He preferred the milk to be heated, but he nodded in thanks, belched a little, and felt better; after all, this was the food of his childhood. It gave him comfort, as it was designed to do, though what he required of his body this morning was getting back up on the fort to locate the whereabouts of the Roman slave, one of a few he had brought with Murdoch a few years ago from a battle with the Northumbrians. If some of the words he had heard the woman speak were from the Roman tongue, then the slave would be able to find out where she had come from and what her business at Dunadd was. She might well be a druidess sent by the colonies of druids that had been moved off the sacred isle of Iona.

First he went to make sure Illa was with his mother.
Fergus knew he should be more grateful to his mother, though he resented her meddling and had, at the time of his father’s death, wished it were her instead. Still, she was the reason they were living high on Dunadd, the reason Murdoch was now king. She was as much of a mother as Illa had now, and that wasn’t much.

He found Brighde, an unhappy bundle of shawls by her fire this morning, sipping her custard. Illa jumped to her feet when she saw her father come through the door.

“Go and find some meat for your father,” Brighde said.

Illa’s eyes met Fergus’s in a moment of protest, but he nodded for her to leave.

Fergus went to the fire, stretching his hands out to the warmth. “Must you always send her off? We have slaves for that.”

“Not on this morning after Samhain,” Brighde said. “They are all like you, slumbering where they should find no slumber. Will you take another commoner for a wife?”

Fergus poked the fire. He sighed. “Sleep was all I was doing by a commoner. And Saraid was no commoner, as well you know.”