Part 11 (1/2)

For a long moment, Helen looked at her without comprehension. ”What are you saying?”

Now that she had told her daughter the secret she had kept hidden from everybody for those twenty years, Mary looked completely drained. In an flat voice she repeated: ”He is your half-brother. He is my son.”

The ground was slipping away from under Helen. Everything around her began to spin. She stumbled and tried to hold herself up against the wall. And then she wailed plaintively: ”Mother, tell me it's not true. Mother, please! Tell me that this is all a bad dream! Mother!”

Helen's heart-rendering distress released the tears blurring Mary's eyes. She took her into her arms, rocking her gently from side to side, like a little child. Helen just sank into her mother's arms, weeping, whispering time and again: ”I love him.”

After a while she fell silent, listening to Mary's confession: ”When I lived at the castle in Inveraray, I fancied Lord Archibald, the brother of the duke. Stupid, gullible girl I was, I believed him when he said that he loved me. But he just saw me as his plaything. He had no intention of marrying me. I got pregnant. His mother kept me secluded in the castle until after the birth of the boy, and then sent me home. n.o.body ever knew about it. That was twenty years ago. Much later I learned that the boy had been named Andrew. Helen, he is your brother... And now you have to promise me that you will never reveal to anybody what I just told you. You're the only living soul who knows it besides Lord Archibald.”

Helen disengaged herself and leaned against the wall, hunched over.

”Helen, look at me!” Her mother was pleading. ”You understand now why you cannot see him again.”

Helen nodded slowly. It was a major effort. Then she murmured: ”I've to tell him. I owe it to him.”

”No, you'll never see or speak to him again. I'll tell him myself... Where do you meet?”

”At the lochan... He'll come down to the goat hut when you call.” Helen's voice was completely resigned. There was almost no sound to it.

”When will he be there again?”

”In two days ... In the early morning.”

As Helen had told Mary, Andrew came down from the boulders and rocks at the back of the glen when she called him. His face betrayed his apprehension of seeing her, rather than Helen. In turn, Mary's face was stern, but her eyes were fearful.

”Master Andrew, I want to thank you for all the food you gave Helen.”

He only nodded in acknowledgment.

”But this isn't the reason I came to see you.” Her voice faltered.

”Did Helen tell you that I want to marry her? ... I love your daughter, Mrs. MacGregor.” It was said firmly, with utter conviction.

Mary did not answer his question. ”You must never see her again, master Andrew... Never again.”

Andrew's stubborn expression revealed his defiance. ”I want to marry her... We will marry. You can't prevent us.”

”You must not... You cannot... She is your sister... You are my son.” She painfully wrenched each sentence from her throat with rising vehemence.

Andrew stared at her in disbelief. ”You're my mother,” he whispered hoa.r.s.ely, and then he croaked: ”No, no!”

Suddenly he turned and ran to his mare at the back of the glen. He jumped on her on the run, instantly slamming his boots hard into her sides. The horse reared frightened and then shot off. He galloped toward the crest and then sharply tore the steed around, heading straight back to her. She saw him coming, saw the cold hatred in his eyes, braced herself to be run over. But he didn't. He reined the mare brutally in front of her that she reared again, screaming in terror.

”I curse you, woman. You abandoned me. I never had your love, and now you take away the only love I have! You brought me nought but misery!” he cried, his words echoing back from the crag above, and then he galloped off.

Each word cut deeper into her. How she had mourned for her baby son herself! And now that son was cursing her. His harsh words kept ringing in her ears. Her legs trembled from the delayed fright of seeing the horse aim straight for her. She sank to the ground, weeping bitterly. Finally, the tears dried up. Her pride of a MacGregor, her resolve to protect her family at all costs, returned. She got up and washed her face in the water, feeling suddenly years older. She would never tell her daughter of Andrew's curse.

Helen did not see Andrew again. Deep in her heart, she hoped that he would come by and see her once more, dreading it at the same time. She searched her heart. Did knowing that he was her brother change her love for him, make her love him like a brother? But she knew, it didn't.

Her heart constantly ached for him. She craved for the gentle touch of his soft palms, his loving green eyes in whose depth she had lost herself so many times. She found solace in daydreams, only to become even more morose when the present rea.s.serted itself again. Many a night she cried herself to sleep silently, often holding on to Betty, desperately. The first time, her sister asked: ”Has mother found out about master Andrew?”

Helen nodded.

”Did she forbid you to see him again?”

Again, Helen just nodded. She didn't trust her voice. Betty stroked her back.

Almost overnight, she lost her color. The sparkle in her eyes was gone. Often she did not hear when somebody spoke to her, and when she did, she seemed to be coming from far away. She showed no interest in anything, not even reading.

Mary watched her, worrying. Several times she spoke to her, tried to talk sense into her, but the girl always closed up, unwilling to listen, her eyes, red from crying, an accusing reminder of her deep hurt. One time, she lost her patience and shouted at her. Without uttering a word, Helen ostensibly took the tool for making fir candles and left the cottage.

Helen's spirits sank deeper and deeper. Added to her loss was her remorse of having given in to Andrew, of having sinned with her own brother. She prayed for G.o.d's forgiveness, but it did not help. She felt betrayed even by G.o.d.

Some weeks later, she learnt that Andrew had left the castle and that the earl had appointed a new factor in place of the bedridden Dougan Graham. For a while, she clung to the hope that Andrew would write to her. After all he was her brother. But no letter ever came, no message, nothing. At first, she became resentful even toward him. If he did love her so much, why didn't he give her a sign that he still thought of her? But then she understood that for him the discovery that they were born from the same womb had been twice the blow. She finally gave up hope of ever hearing from him again.

And then came the news from Glengyle that her father's brother, his wife and her oldest daughter-Helen's favorite cousin-and several other distant relatives had been slain in a skirmish with Argyle cavalry. They had been lured into a trap and when the MacGregor men refused to lay down their arms, the cavalrymen charged them, killing all those who could not get into the safety of the forest-men, women, and children. Her contempt of the Campbells, held in abeyance and suppressed by her love for Andrew, burst out with even greater vehemence, turning into hatred. At times it even included him. She asked herself whether her love for him had been doomed in the first place, even if he were not her brother. It brought her MacGregor pride and fighting spirit to the fore again, and as autumn gave way to winter, and the world coc.o.o.ned itself into a mantle of snow for the long sleep to a new spring, she shook off her depression. With renewed fervor, she began to read. It took her mind away from the ever more confused love that could not be. She even braved the heavy snow and went into Killin to borrow books from the minister of the church. Often, she and Betty read together and talked about it. Her reading ventured into anything she could lay her hands on-history, politics, and travel in foreign countries. Yet at times she yearned to discuss things with Andrew and a dull hurt rea.s.serted itself.

Her relations.h.i.+p with her mother never regained the warmth it had felt before she met Andrew. Where there had been filial love, there was sad bitterness, and it made her feel guilty.

When they moved up to the s.h.i.+elings the following June, the memories of their short summer of bliss. .h.i.t her with renewed hurt, but tinged now with the MacGregor blood spilled by the Campbells, and she felt empty for days, until she willed herself to lock them away, never to be opened again.

9.

Early June 1750, Andrew dismounted from his horse at the Bear in Killin after almost four years of restless traveling. First, he had been simply running away from himself, paying scant heed to where he went and what he did-the more dangerous, the better. He was playing a game with death. It started with smuggling French brandy from small Scottish ports into England, cheating the excise tax collectors. On his last run they were jumped by English customs guards. The leader of their gang got shot in the fray, and Andrew made off with his purse-over four hundred pound sterling in gold coins.

With money to burn, he went to London, then Paris. At that point he was not running away from himself any longer, but trying to forget Helen. Young, good-looking, an attentive listener, women in the Paris salons flocked around the soft-spoken Scott who spoke French fluently with a quaint accent. There was something mysteriously sad about him that attracted the more mature ones, particularly those married to older husbands, women in their late twenties and thirties. He went from lady to lady, always coming away dissatisfied, empty, but at the same time hungry for more.

Restlessness finally drove him out of Paris. He traveled on horseback through the Swiss Alps into northern Italy, on to Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, and finally Greece, only to go back to Paris in the end. But after a few months there, an empty boredom caught hold of him again, and he had outstayed his welcome in the Paris salons. He ended up as the go-between for a group of French brandy smugglers. Working out of St. Malo, they dumped their wares on the Cornwall and Devon coast. It offered a welcome diversion, something with an occasional taste of danger and a quickening of the pulse.

Finally, older and more cynical, he spent the last Winter in Devon in the manor of the old Baronet Coville. He was hired as the tutor for the seven-year-old heir by the baronet's young wife. He quickly discovered that Lady Coville had other designs on him. Within two weeks, they were lovers. At the end of six months she tried to snare him into a plot to speed up her partially infirm husband's death, so they could get married and live from her inheritance. At that point, he thought it wise to disappear.

He had started to care for life again. The idea of emigrating to North America, Boston or Philadelphia, began to take slowly form in his mind. Having largely lived off other people, mainly women, he had acc.u.mulated a sizable purse of close to one thousand pounds, most of which was invested with a reputable London merchant firm on which he could draw, should he need cash. It would be enough to give him a solid start in the new world.

So this trip to Scotland was to say farewell, probably forever, while he waited for the Spring storms on the Atlantic to blow themselves out. The first two weeks he spent in Edinburgh, most of it reminiscing of his student days at the university. Then he went north to Perth, through the mountains to Inverness-he had never been there-and down the Great Glen to Fort Williams and on to Argyle. He wanted to know if he still felt bitter about his childhood days and discovered he didn't.

The Highlands were full of reminders of the ravages following the rebellion-numerous burned-out clachans, untended fields going to waste, but life in the villages and cities seemed to be teeming. It was so strange to find practically no Highlanders wearing a plaid, and all of them unarmed, except in remote mountain regions. He discovered that this useful, healthy, and highly adaptable form of clothing had almost completely disappeared with the 1747 disarming act that also prohibited the wearing of Tartans and Highland garb.

Inveraray had not changed much. It didn't awake any feeling of coming home, and he realized that it had never really been home for him. He felt completely detached and looked at the castle only from the outside. Searching his heart for any feelings toward the man-his father-who ruled there, he found nothing, not even resentment, just emptiness. He had no desire to say h.e.l.lo to anybody. In fact, with his neatly trimmed black beard and the foreign clothes, speaking English, n.o.body even seemed to recognize him, except for that old woman at the inn he stayed overnight.

She was sitting on a bench next to the hearth, stooped forward toward the embers, and as he walked past her after dinner she grabbed hold of his hand and murmured: ”It's master Andrew, isn't it?”

When he bent down to see her gnarled face, his hand still in hers, she said: ”Don't you recognize aunt Lorna anymore? ... Come, sit by me for a while, as you did so often in the castle kitchen when you were but a wee boy.”