A Kind of Grief Read online

  She almost said, me too. “Maybe you are a real writer.”

  “One day.” They were smiling at each other now, comfortable.

  “Listen,” he said, “there’s a wee tea shop I go to—full of old ladies, usually—but it should be quiet now. Not that you’re an old lady . . .”

  “Lead on, Mr. Mackenzie.”

  “After you, Miss Ross.”

  “Joanne. We’re colleagues, after all.”

  That did it. Calum Mackenzie became devoted to Joanne Ross. He remained so for years, long after what he later thought of as “the old days,” when the so-called witch’s trial was consigned to distant memory. And history.

  Over a pot of tea and cheese scones, then a second pot of tea, Calum told Joanne of the trial before the sheriff of Miss Alice Ramsay.

  His account was confusing. He started in the middle part of the trial, reliving the most memorable moments of a witness the likes of whom Calum had never before encountered.

  “Calling in thon art expert did Miss Ramsay no good at all. Many of the locals, the police, the procurator fiscal, and aye, the sheriff included, were none too pleased at being shown up for teuchters. Only Mrs. Ogilvie, the district nurse, enjoyed the professor’s testimony.”

  He saw Joanne’s bewilderment and said, “Sorry, got it back to front, haven’t I?” He had, but his mother’s constant indignation at the not guilty verdict and her implication that Miss Ramsay had tricked the court were most fresh in his mind.

  “You know how I wrote that Miss Ramsay was accused of giving thon poor woman”—his mother’s words again—“the herb tea that made her lose her baby?”

  Joanne nodded, not interrupting but with encouraging nods and the occasional “aye.” Letting people tell the tale in their own way, listening to what they said rather than waiting for a pause to put in her opinion, was a talent Joanne had, a talent that made her a good journalist.

  Calum continued, “Most of the case was about what the police found when they came to interview her at her house up the glen: skulls and animal skeletons, birds’ eggs—some still in their wee nests—loads of flowers and leaves hanging from the clothes pulley above the kitchen stove. For teas and herbal remedies, she told the court. And it was a tea—raspberry leaf, she said—that got her into trouble. It is an abort—”

  Joanne saw him struggle with the word. Whether from embarrassment or because he did not know the correct pronunciation was not clear. “Abortifacient,” she said. After having read the word earlier, she’d looked it up in the dictionary.

  “Aye, that. But Nurse Ogilvie testified the woman had previously lost two babies.”

  “Poor soul.”

  “Then the art expert, he told the court about thon painter mannie Leonardo and some ancient called Culpepper or something like that. He brought art books to prove it. Aye, the professor really got up the noses of the folk there. I only caught a glimpse of Miss Ramsay’s drawings and pictures that they showed in court. I’ve seen a painting of hers, a nice big one, she donated to the local Old People’s Home. Right professional her work looks. Even the sheriff thought so.”

  The town clock struck one. Calum knew his mother would have had his dinner on the table at twelve thirty, and it would take days to placate her, his being this late.

  “Sorry, I have to go, but it’s all here in my report.”

  “One final thing—a map to Miss Ramsay’s farm?”

  “Not that she’ll see you,” he said as he tore a sheet from his reporter’s notebook. “And not that it’s really a farm anymore. Most of the land was sold to the Forestry Commission when her family gave up the big estate and the castle. Here. It’s easy. But the track has seen better days, so watch out for your sump.”

  “I will, and thanks.”

  “If you end up needing a tow, my father has the local garage. Here’s his number. Not that Miss Ramsay has a telephone, but there’s a phone box at the turnoff.” He stood, saying, “Tea’s on me—expenses.”

  She knew he was trying to impress her, and accepted. “Thank you.”

  Saying “Good luck with Miss Ramsay” and “Nice meeting you” and “Be in touch,” he almost ran out the door of the tea shop, taking a shortcut through the cathedral graveyard, knowing his mother would harp on about his lateness for the rest of the week. I was about to call the police was one of her catchphrases whenever her son was more than five minutes late for anything.

  Joanne sat in the car studying Calum’s map, then drove to the main road and the few miles to the turnoff for Alice Ramsay’s home in the high glen. “I’m dying to meet this mysterious artist,” she said to herself, “even if she’s not a real witch.”

  CHAPTER 2

  From the kitchen window, Alice looks out over the copse of birch trees, studying how the topmost leaves, shivering in the early-morning chill, change color as the first of the sun catches their undersides before moving down, gilding the bark of the silver limbs and trunk. She’d drawn birch leaves before, and the veins, the texture, the scent, the fragile skeletons of them delight her.

  The high sides of the glen, and the lower slopes of the narrow fissure that begin a scant mile from the shoreline of the North Sea continuing deep into a landscape formed in the Ice Age, begin to lighten.

  The trickster of a sun extends its arc to the heather and bracken, reaching down to the boulders and rocks and stones of the river, touching the garden wall, sending out an impression of warmth, of summer extended, tempting her out into the day.

  She despairs of ever capturing that light in her work. And doubts her ability to capture variegations of shades too subtle for a camera, too violent for a painting.

  Staring, seeing-not-seeing, in a state of suspended remembering, in that waking dreaming the Scots called a dwam, she feels it, that early-morning chill on the cheeks, a scent of clean, the sound of quiet.

  The sky feels vast in this far northern glen. As a child coming up here for holidays, she’d played under the same sky, in the same air, in the same quiet—a quiet that is not silence, that presses in on the ears so you can feel your breath, hear your heart beating, breaking. That too she first experienced in this glen.

  Alice turns to lift the boiling kettle and start the morning tea ritual.

  Then, teacup in hand, she sits on the bench by the kitchen door. The sun vanishes. Clouds are racing, dancing, forming and re-forming a skyscape of grey. Rain might fall. Soon. Or not. A faint sound fills the air.

  That was it, she remembered. That was what made me stay; that lark’s rising song made my heart glad. She is transported back to spring, over two years ago, to the five-mile drive up the glen, a one-and-a-half mile drive along a rutted track with high vegetation growing on the middle ridge, making her fear for the exhaust pipe; it had been every bit as bad as the estate agent told her it would be.

  The big gate was in such disrepair she’d been afraid to open it. So she’d abandoned her car, worrying how she would turn it around. Walking the final half mile to the house, she’d apologized to a constellation of curlews crying out at the intrusion into their territory. “I’m only visiting,” she’d called back.

  She remembers the old Scots name for skylark: laverock. Then and now, as it reaches for the heavens, that tiny bird with the giant voice inspires hope. She also remembers that first day and the fatal shaft of sunlight highlighting the once-white-lime-washed walls, the once-gleaming slate roof glistening with dew, multiple greens of bracken and heather and birch and rowan to rival any of the forty shades of Ireland. She remembers how it caught her in the throat, capturing her heart. And soul.

  She knew then. And she knows now. She absolutely, without doubt, and without reason, knows that this is her place. For ever and ever. Amen.

  “Amen.” She bobs a mock bow in the direction of the distant song. “Thank you, Mr. Skylark.”

  The hens start clucking. The rooster cries again. And again. She shakes herself out of her dwam.

  “Good morning, girls,” she calls out to the six
hens and that bossy-boots cock-o’-the-glen cockerel. She liberates them. Feeds them. Collects four warm brown eggs. Then starts her day.

  The weather holds.

  Hours later, Alice is working the fork deep into the earth, carefully lifting the potato sets, making sure she misses none of the pale yellow tubers. There were enough to keep a family fed in a long snowbound winter. “Planted too many,” she says, grunting, “and enough cabbages to feed a flock of sheep.” As she digs, she again contemplates the practicality of keeping a cow. Milk was one of the few reasons for her to visit the garage shop where Mrs. Mackenzie would peck at her like a carrion crow.

  A cow is a good companion but too much bother, she tells herself, and too much milk for one person. A Guernsey milking cow with long-lashed eyes is a fine animal, a beast of beauty. There had been one on the estate where she grew up. With family and servants and estate workers, one cow had been just right to provide milk and cream and butter.

  “Better a dumb beast than those gossips in the town,” she mutters.

  She ignores the noise of a distant vehicle, knowing the gate to her track was locked, knowing the Forestry Commission people worked intermittently up the glen, inspecting and planning and planting what she named an Abomination. The plantations of rigid rows of spruce lining the hillsides were no shelter for the deer, or the foxes, or the hares, or the birds, never mind the flora of the Highlands.

  A curlew cries. A peewit weeps. All familiar sounds of these glens, so the other noises don’t register.

  She pulls a sack of potatoes to the shed. She cleans and stores the fork. Stepping into shadow, the damp around the waistband of her trousers cold now the sun is spent, she turns towards the kitchen. Something, someone, steps into the cobbled farmyard from the side of the house.

  The fright was as sharp and as painful as a knife thrust.

  “What are you doing here?” It came out as a shout. “Who are you?”

  The question was angry or anguished; Joanne wasn’t certain. “Sorry. Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare . . . to startle you.” She was stumbling over the words, in half a mind to run back down the mile and a half of track, jump into her car, and drive the three and a half hours home. Later, she could not decide who had been more frightened, herself or Alice Ramsay. But the dog was completely unperturbed.

  Alice’s innate good manners returned. “Who are you?” She straightened her back from her habitual slouch, a posture developed from years of leaning over a drawing board.

  Joanne saw a tall woman, perhaps in her late forties, and thin from what she guessed were hiking and climbing and working on the land. Her hair, brown with streaks of gold and grey, was escaping from the handkerchief holding it back from her face. And her skin, browned by weather, reminded Joanne of a polished hazelnut. But it was her eyes that made Joanne feel intimidated. They were sizing up her visitor, an aloof stare, an appraisal from an artist searching for the soul of a subject she might try to capture in oils or inks or with a few strokes of charcoal or pencil.

  “Miss Ramsay? I’m Joanne Ross. Actually, I’m Mrs. McAllister, I’m newly married, and . . .” She knew she was blethering, still recovering from the harsh reaction to her appearance in Miss Ramsay’s territory. “Ross is my professional name.” At the hardening of Alice Ramsay’s face, Joanne knew that had been the wrong thing to say.

  “I’m here—”

  “Out of nosiness.” Alice finished the sentence. “Sorry, Mrs. McAllister or Ross or whoever you are, I’m not interested.”

  Joanne lost her smile, though she kept her eyes on Alice, noticing they shared the same shade—that green with a hint of blue, depending on the weather, not uncommon in Highlanders.

  A few splatters of rain plopped loudly on the empty wheelbarrow. The wind swirled. The cold nibbled. Alice asked, “How did you get up here?”

  “I drove. Then climbed the gate.”

  “Climbed over the sign saying keep out.”

  Joanne flashed a smile. “Of course.”

  That did it. Alice looked again with her artist’s eye at her visitor’s face; she was a pushover for people with intelligent foreheads. She could see the woman was weary. And something else. Wounded, she decided. Her face betrayed her reluctance. Alice did not want a wounded soul to disrupt her life, be it a bird with broken wing, an orphan lamb, or a person with a history. But she acknowledged a hint of her younger self in Joanne and relented.

  “You may as well come in and have a cup of tea before you go. But whatever it is you want, I’m not interested.”

  The Skye terrier, who had accompanied Joanne up from the five-bar gate, made a few circles around the rag rug on the floor in front of the Aga, then settled down to sleep.

  “Sit,” Alice said, and pointed to a chair at the table.

  For a moment Joanne wasn’t certain if Miss Ramsay was addressing her or her dog.

  Then, saying nothing more, Alice filled the kettle, opened the stove lid, and began the ritual of coaxing the fire back to high. Satisfied the logs would catch, she washed her hands, attacking her nails with a brush, cleaning out the soil and the ash and a long day’s labor. All the while she still said nothing, only emitting small grunts as she rolled her shoulders, stretched her back, loosening the knots from much digging, much lifting, much bending.

  Joanne was not uncomfortable. The quiet between them felt right, a settling-down time, an observing time, two strangers interested yet wary of each other. She unwound her scarf and took off her beret, wishing she could also take off her shoes, which were decidedly damp. Then she looked around.

  The table was covered in red gingham oilcloth with paint splatters adding to the cheery color. The room smelled of wood, yeast, and drying vegetation.

  There were paintings on every wall, a mix of watercolors, oil paintings, drawings, with one large oil still life in a speckled gold frame. Another cluster of paintings, which looked modern but not too modern as to be scoffed at by the hoi polloi, were propped above the stove on a timber beam nearly a foot thick and about nine feet long.

  What caught her fancy most was an ink drawing of a bird skeleton—brown ink, faded ink, light-dirty-faded brown paper. The tiny bones, in profile, took up half the composition, details of the skull the other. Calum had said something about skeleton drawings being exhibited in court, and Joanne had to look away, lest she be caught staring.

  Faded rugs, some rag, some woven, and some threadbare Oriental, were scattered on the slate slab kitchen floor. The covers on a sofa, set under a window looking down the glen, Joanne recognized as a William Morris print, a design she had seen in a book and always hankered after. She loved the tapestry cushions and wondered if Miss Ramsay had stitched them herself. And the paisley shawl—perhaps it was a treasure from some relative in the British Colonial Service. She felt she was in an Oriental bazaar in a story from One Thousand and One Nights. Entranced by the room and everything in it, Joanne did not disguise her delight. Never before had she been in a place where she coveted so many of the objects.

  Alice enjoyed her visitor’s obvious pleasure at her creations. As she busied herself stoking up the fire and searching for the tin of biscuits she had misplaced, she was remembering the numerous trips up the farm track, when every visit to the town, every hour outside the safety of her territory, was one trip too many.

  She could picture her Land Rover, the rear area, the backseat, and the passenger seat filled with the spoils of the furniture and bric-a-brac auctions held weekly to coincide with the livestock marts.

  Nails, screws, tools, cement, curtain rods, curtain fabric, flour, poultry feed, barley, oatmeal rough and flakes, tea—lots and lots of tea—sugar brown and white and castor, soap, washing soda, scrubbing brushes, sweeping brushes (outdoor, indoor, a broomstick made from twigs), bed linen, pillows, cushions, knitting yarn, knitting needles (secondhand from a church bazaar), thread, needles, sewing-machine needles, scissors large and small and pinking shears, antiseptic cream, sticking plasters, bandages, surgical spirits, a
nd other spirits—whisky, gin, and cooking sherry (for she was not fond of sweet sherry, but that was all that was available hereabouts)—everything in the house and the outhouses and the garden she had carted up the road, through the gate, up the track, and into her life. The fencing posts and barbed wire and building materials, the hammer, screwdrivers, a set of spanners, and a bow saw—all these she had carried and used. Frequently.

  Joanne cut into Alice’s reverie. “Miss Ramsay, I wrote to your post office box. Is that not the correct address?”

  “I haven’t had time to collect mail.”

  Joanne knew the mail would only have been there two days at most and didn’t take the offense that was intended.

  Alice put down a tray with the teapot hidden in a pale pink quilted satin cozy, the edges of which were stained a peat color from spilt tea. “Milk?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Alice sighed. She may have to venture out after all, as this was the last of her last pint of milk, with not even enough for that first early-morning cup of tea. For the remainder of the day, black tea or herbal was fine. But to start the day, milk was essential.

  Joanne mistook the sigh. “I’m not your enemy. I came to talk, to ask you about the trial, yes, but never to publish without your permission. Most of all, I’m interested in your art.”

  No answer.

  “I know how it feels to be persecuted for being different.” Joanne’s voice dropped, her gaze concentrating on the drawing of the bird skeleton; even the bare bones held within them the knowledge of flight.

  Alice noticed how her visitor faded into herself when she spoke. How her eyes would widen, soften, as she asked a question. How her head angled imperceptibly as she waited for an answer. A good interrogator, was Alice’s summation. “Ah. The trial. So you understand. I can see you have spirit. And intelligence. Not a good idea for a woman to show intelligence hereabouts.” She smiled.

  And when Alice Ramsay smiled, a different woman appeared—as different as the shadows of light and sun in the shire of Sutherland, the place where she had hoped to remain, anonymous, unremarked upon. Until the gossip and accusations and exposure in newspapers threatened everything she had dreamed of, worked for, and almost achieved. What was worse for Alice, fear had returned.