Torr Eil

CHAPTER ONE

I only saw my mother cry once. At the time, I thought she was crying because of me, but I was wrong. It took me almost twenty years to discover the real reason.

On the day she wept, I was perhaps four years old and prone to ignoring instructions if the temptation was great enough. That day, the temptation was a field of barley, the grain golden and waving in the breeze.I’d been told to stay out of the barley,but I ran through the field, anyway. The stalks tickled my arms, the wind blew through my hair, and I laughed with the bright, foolish joy of childhood.

Until I saw him. Da stood before me, tall as a tree, broad as a wall, his shadow falling over the barley. He said nothing. He only slapped me hard enough to knock me down.

I lay in the dirt with my cheek burning and my mouth full of dust. I knew better than to cry. Crying earned another slap and the command to shut up, so I swallowed the hurt and got to my feet.

I trudged toward the house, brushing the dirt from my dress. As I went up the steps to the porch, my older brother Donald was just coming out. He saw me, grinned, and pushed me off the step. I didn’t fall, not that time.

“Donald!” Mum had come to the door. “You mustn’t be cruel to your sister!”

Donald gave her the same look of contempt she would have gotten from Da and trotted back toward the barley field. Mum held the door open for me. As I went in, I looked back toward the field and saw Da rumpling Donald’s hair, the two of them smiling.

Mum touched the red handprint on my cheek. “Oh, Skye, I’m so sorry.” She knelt down and held me tightly, stroking my hair. “I’m sorry. It’s not right; good men don’t behave that way.” Her voice broke. “I should have waited.”

I raised my face and saw her tears. “If only I’d waited. If only.”

I never returned to the barley field, and I learned to make myself as invisible as possible when Da was in the house.

Arran Ballantine, my father, never let anyone forget that he owned his land. Da answered to no laird, paid no rent and reminded us of that almost daily.

Our fields stretched farther than most: barley in one direction, pasture in the other. A dozen Aberdeen cows, two horses, and a flock of sheep besides. Like every landowner, my father had wanted sons, several of them, to share the work and help him expand his holdings.

Instead, God gave him only one son. And me.

Donald, my brother, was five years older than I and everything Da valued: male, strong, loud, and trained from boyhood to swing a blade. According to Da, Donald was fearless. I secretly doubted this, but one did not contradict my father.

Mum had nearly died bringing me into the world. Something had gone wrong, and there would be no more children after me. Da never forgave either of us for it, though Mum bore the heavier share of his disappointment.

By the time I was ten, I began to wonder just how my lovely mother had married my surly father. Surely there was a time when he’d smiled and been pleasant, though I couldn’t imagine it. I never saw him raise his hand to my mother, but he had an acid tongue and would belittle her at every chance.

An educated woman was an oddity in Carn de Marbh, and Faith Ballantine was educated. Mum could read, do sums, and speak in French. Her back was always straight, never touching the back of her chair as she sewed or ate her dinner. She always smoothed her skirt before sitting down and braided her hair before breakfast.

Mum wanted to pass her knowledge to her children, but Donald had no interest, and Da sided with him. I wanted to learn, so Mum taught me to read using the Bible and a book of poetry by Robert Herrick. Odd choices, but those were the books we had. By the time I was eight, I’d realized that the two books held very different views. One promised me hell if I indulged in the pleasures of the flesh; the other promised me heaven. I asked Mum about it.

Her reply was as mysterious as the words. “They’re both right. Wait and see.”

Mum didn’t limit my education to reading. She taught me sums with peas on the table and told stories of ancient kingdoms while we weeded the garden. The garden was for food, of course, but Mum always saved a little corner for flowers—dianthus and coralroot, stubborn bright things pushing up among the edible plants,

“Beauty matters too,” she told me once, pressing soil around a coralroot stem. “Not as much as bread, maybe, but more than your father thinks.”

I believed her. I learned to sew, then to spin and weave, and like Mum, I tried to make every piece pretty as well as useful.

Mum owned a small looking glass, and I liked to study my face in it when no one watched. I looked like her: dark hair, dark blue eyes, the coloring of the Celt. Da and Donald were red-haired men with pale eyes and ruddy skin, so I was glad I favored Mum. On our rare trips into town, I knew I had the prettiest mother in the village.

She was prettiest when she laughed. That didn’t happen often, but I remember once when we laughed together, laughed until we cried.

We had no water in the house. No one did. There was a well outside the back door, and even in the summer months, the water that came out of it was as cold as January. One spring, Mum and I were feeding chickens in the yard while Da repaired the fence along the back of the garden. We heard him cursing and turned to look.

The dark, ominous cloud that buzzed out of the ground told us he’d stepped on a wasp nest. He was dancing with an enthusiasm no fiddle had ever inspired, slapping at his face, his head and other less-visible parts. He ran past us.

“Woman! Help me!” he yelled.

I noticed the smile that turned up the corners of Mum’s mouth, but it immediately vanished.

“I’m coming, Arran!”

Mum picked up the freshly drawn bucket of well water, and hurried toward Da. With all her strength, she dashed the entire bucket of icy water onto Da’s face and chest. The shock of the cold water left him speechless. He stood gasping, his hair plastered to his head, a few red welts rising on his face. The chickens and I stood watching to see what came next.

“There now,” Mum said with satisfaction. “You should put on dry clothes before you catch a chill.”

Da said not a word. He walked toward the house, his arms at his sides, his head down, his dignity dripping away along with the cold water. Mum turned away and went toward the barn. I followed.

She was leaning against the wall, laughing. “Did you see the way he was flapping about?” She performed a good imitation of Da’s frenetic dance.

I started to laugh, too. “Did you see his face?” I widened my eyes and stared at Mum with my mouth hanging open. “Like he’d been poleaxed!”

Before we stopped, we were sitting in the dirt, wiping tears from our eyes. Mum had never been prettier than she was that day.

Drawing water from the well wasn’t easy, but I did it every morning. Like everyone else, we had an outhouse set far back from the main house. Getting to it in the dark was a problem, so at night we used chamber pots. The chore I hated most was carrying them out in the morning, emptying them, rinsing them, and bringing them back clean for the next night. In winter my fingers froze. In the rain, I was soaked through before breakfast.

It was raining the morning my childhood ended.

I was twelve, almost thirteen, and I woke to the sound of water ticking against the roof. I sighed before I even sat up, already thinking of the pots, the cold mud, the wet hem of my dress. I relieved myself into my jar and turned to seal the lid so it would not splash going down the ladder, which was not anchored and tended to move.

Then I noticed there was blood in the jar.

For one suspended breath, I stood there. Then terror rose in me so fast I nearly dropped the thing. I knew Mum bled sometimes. I had seen the stained rags in the wash. But I did not know why it happened, nor had I been warned that the same affliction might befall me.

I left the jar where it was and scrambled down the ladder.

Mum was at the hearth making breakfast, her hair braided down her back and flour on one hand. She was in no mood to be disturbed, but blood from inside seemed to me an urgent matter.

“Mum! Mum, I need help!”

“What is it, Skye? Did you spill one of the pots again?”

“No, ma’am. I’m bleeding! From inside.”

She paused, then her face changed. Not fear, which I had expected, but a weary amusement mixed with regret.

“Ah,” she said. “I am a little late with my talk, then. Don’t worry. It’s a natural thing. Wait there.”

She went into her room and returned with clean rags, though some bore old rust-colored stains that washing had not taken out.

“Tuck one between your legs. After your Da and Donald are out of the house, I’ll show you how to fix it in place.”

I hurried back up the ladder, mortified to see I had dripped blood into the hallway. I meant to clean it before Da noticed, but he and Donald came in just as I started down again.

“Faith,” Da said, looking at the floor. “Did you cut yourself?”

“No,” Mum answered. “It’s Skye. The flux.”

Donald made a sound of disgust.

“A bit young for that, is she not?” Da asked.

“She’ll be thirteen in May. About the age I was. Perhaps we should start thinking about a dowry.”

Da grunted. “She’ll have to spin for her husband. I can’t afford to give away livestock, let alone coin. You’re always bragging about what a help she is. Let her stay and help.”

I would not have gone to the table just then if my life had depended on it. I snatched up my jar, Donald’s, and the one from my parents’ room and went out into the rain to finish my first chore of the day. When I returned, the blood in the hall was gone, and so were Da and Donald.

Mum showed me how to tie a girdle, then sat me at the table and explained the way of it between a man and a woman while I ate barley porridge gone nearly cold. I knew babies came from women’s bodies. I had seen women with swollen bellies in the village. But the means by which babies got there was a revolting revelation. I decided I would be perfectly happy to wait years and years before becoming a wife, but my traitorous body prepared me for it anyway.

My breasts, already tender and embarrassing, grew larger. My arms and legs changed from skinny sticks to softer limbs. I developed a waist, and my hips filled out. By fourteen, I was no longer a child, though not quite a woman, either.

One afternoon not long after my fifteenth birthday, Mum and I were in the yard hanging washed clothes when we heard a man shouting.

Mum’s hands clutched at a wet shirt. Her eyes widened and her jaw tightened.

“That sounds like Donald.”

She dropped the shirt and ran around the house. I followed.

Donald was staggering toward us from the road, white-faced and wild-eyed. Our neighbor Ian Rutledge heard him, too, and abandoned his plow to run over.

“Dragoons! They were taking the cows, and Da tried to stop them. They were hacking him to pieces!”

Then he dropped to his knees and vomited.

The English soldiers had come from Fort William; they commandeered—stole—livestock and supplies with regularity. There’d be no justice for my father’s death unless we exacted punishment ourselves.

Ian’s face hardened. He did not offer comfort, though he had been the closest thing my father had to a friend for twenty-five years.

“I’ll round up the men.”

Within half an hour, twenty armed men were making their way up the brae. Mum pretended to go about her work. I climbed to my loft and watched the road through my small dormer windows. Three hours later, the men returned. They brought back what was left of my father wrapped in burlap bags.

They also brought the news that the redcoats had taken half the cows. It was a hard blow, but not so hard as the loss of Da.

Mum had not shed a tear. When she saw the men riding toward the house, she turned to me.

“Go inside, Skye. Stay there.”

“But—”

“Some things you should not see. You will never forget them if you do. Go on in, and for once, do not sneak back out.”

I went into the kitchen and sat at the table my father had built. I could hear the low voices of men, the dull thud of tools against earth. My father had never been warm, but he had fed us and protected us as best he could. If there was grief in my heart, it was grief that Da had never loved me, but fear was overriding.

What would happen to us without him?

Mum called for me hours later. Her face looked older than it had that morning.

“It’s over,” she said. “We’ve buried what was left. Now we find a way to keep going.”

Donald was the new way.