At the Water's Edge, Page 23

  Angus was hauled to safety by members of the French Resistance, but nobody knew for a long time--his ID tags had been torn off and lay somewhere among the rotting bodies that littered the cobblestone streets. The fighting was so fierce the corpses could not be recovered for more than a week, rendering them grossly bloated and unrecognizable.

  He had remained on the brink of death for weeks. It was a miracle he survived at all, but five months later, against all odds, he made his way back to British territory.

  "My God," I said, when Anna paused. "And then he found out his wife and child had both died."

  "Aye," said Anna. "There was nothing anyone could have done about the child, but he blames himself to this day for what happened to Mairi."

  "That wasn't his fault," I said.

  "I know that, but he feels responsible anyway, like he should have been able to find a way to get word back, even though he was lying right gralloched somewhere in a French cellar. He hasn't touched the waters of the loch since. He'll only fish in the rivers. In fact, he won't set foot through the Water Gate."

  "Other than that, has he recovered? I mean, physically?"

  "He's strong as an ox--I've seen the man haul a deer down the hill on his shoulders, Harris-style. The only reason he's not back at the Front is because they need him at the battle school. Only a commando can train a commando, so that's what he does, up at the Big House, most of the time. The rest of the time he's keeping us all fed."

  "Do you think he'll go back to being the gamekeeper? I mean, after the war?"

  Anna shook her head. "No. The old laird died, you know. Only a few months ago, but it was a long time coming. He never recovered from the loss of his son, the poor man."

  I remembered Bob the Bobby's warning with a sinking feeling. There were no hunting parties at the estate--for obvious reasons--so no rich person was being robbed of a trophy head, and Angus was supplementing the diet of every last family in the village. It was a true case of righteous theft, and I hoped the new laird would have a change of heart. After everything else Angus had been through, it seemed beyond cruel not to let him go back to being the gamekeeper after the war. It was clear he knew and loved the land.

  "Well," Anna said wearily, "now that I've blathered your ear completely off, I should probably get going. I'll fetch you a cup of tea first."

  "Anna?" I said, as she got to her feet.

  "Aye?"

  "Thank you for filling me in," I said. "Even if it isn't any of my business."

  "Oh, I don't know. I'm starting to think of you as one of us now."

  A lump rose in my throat. I thought that might be the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me--and meant.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  When Anna brought the tea, she also handed me the newspaper.

  "Since she'll probably just sleep, I thought you might want something to pass the time."

  After Anna left, I checked on Meg, laying a hand across her forehead and watching the rise and fall of her rib cage. Except for her ravaged face and the blood that matted her copper curls, she looked as peaceful as a sleeping child.

  I settled into the chair with the newspaper.

  IT WON'T BE LONG, NEARING THE END, and GERMANY'S APPROACHING DOOM, blared the headlines, although the articles themselves revealed a far grimmer reality.

  There was a report from a war correspondent who was traveling with the Seaforth Highlanders as they fought along the Western Front, describing "scenes of utter devastation"--of soldiers trying to clear minefields in torrential rains, of abandoned towns that contained only shells of buildings, of corpses piled high along both sides of the road. In another article, the very same battle was characterized by a stiff-lipped field marshal as "going very nicely although the mud is not helping it."

  There was an article about the respiratory illness that raged through Inverness, as well as the fuel shortage. A recent cold spell had caused such a sharp rise in consumption that the municipal authority, the source of the city's firewood, ran out completely. Despite suggestions that emergency fuel supplies in the North should be made available to people in dire distress, nothing had been done about it. One government fuel dump alone had more than seven hundred tons of coal and a thousand tons of timber, yet the sick and elderly in Inverness had nothing at all to put in their grates or stoves.

  Sprinkled among reports that the Red Army had killed more than 1,150,000 German soldiers in just over a month, and that Tokyo had been bombed again, and that two days of raids conducted by the Allied Forces had reduced the city of Dresden to rubble, were advertisements for the Palace Cinema on Huntly Street announcing two new movies, You Can't Ration Love and The Hitler Gang, which would be shown three times a day, and for vitamin B yeast tablets, because "Beauty Depends on Health." A purveyor of effervescent liver salts promised its product would "gently clear the bowels, sweep away impurities, and purify the blood." A circumspect warning about venereal disease admonished that its rise was one of the "very few black spots" on the nation's war record, although it wasn't offering advice on what to do about it.

  Perhaps the most absurd juxtaposition of all was of a statement issued by Field Marshal Montgomery, declaring the war to be in its final stages, which was set immediately next to an article about a horse pulling a milk cart that had bolted while the driver was setting milk on a stoop. The horse made a mad dash "along Old Edinburgh Road and down the brae" as milk bottles "flew in all directions." It failed to take the corner at High Street and crashed, cart and all, through the front window of Woolworth's. While "badly cut about the shoulder," the horse was rescued by a policeman and several soldiers, and was expected to make a full recovery.

  The sheer scope of detail and information, as well as its seemingly random placement, was proof to me that the world had both gone mad, yet remained the same as it ever was.

  Mass killings were described right next to information about laxatives. Cities were bombed, men slaughtered each other in knee-deep mud, civilians were blown to pieces from stepping on mines, but horses still spooked, people still went to the cinema, and women still worried about their schoolgirl complexions. I couldn't decide if this made me understand the world better or meant I'd never fathom it at all.

  --

  Dr. McLean came in the late afternoon and said that while he was no longer worried about her concussion, Meg was by no means out of the woods. We were still to watch carefully for signs of shock. He encouraged us to try to get some sustenance into her, although he also warned that we should be gradual about it. He nodded approvingly when I told him that Rhona was downstairs at that very moment working on a soup.

  When he left, I followed him downstairs and went into the kitchen. He'd wakened Meg for the examination but followed it with an injection, and I wanted to get something into her before she slipped back out of reach. As soon as Rhona saw me, she ladled out a bowl of rich, fragrant broth and held it out to me with gnarled fingers.

  "Thank you," I said.

  She returned to the soup, her back so stooped her face was nearly parallel to the steaming liquid. Her white hair was pulled tightly into a bun and parted in the center, showing almost an inch of pink scalp. I couldn't even hazard a guess about how old she was. She could have been anywhere from seventy to ninety, perhaps even older.

  I managed to get only a few spoonfuls into Meg before the morphine pulled her away from me.

  --

  At three minutes before nine, Angus brought an armful of logs upstairs.

  I hadn't heard him come back. As far as I'd known, I was alone in the building. I then wondered what Ellis and Hank were up to, because to my knowledge they also hadn't returned. Perhaps they'd gone elsewhere after seeing the sign on the door.

  Angus dropped the logs by the grate, brushed off his hands, and went to Meg's side.

  "How is she?" he asked.

  "A little better," I said, before relating the events of the doctor's visit. "She had a tiny bit of soup earlier. She's been stirring for about hal
f an hour, so I've been trying to get her to sip some water."

  "What time did Dr. McLean give her the shot?"

  "Around five."

  "Then she's due. That's why she's restless."

  I sat in the chair, watching as he administered it. This was the first time I'd laid eyes on him since Anna told me what had happened to him.

  He filed a groove into the neck of one of the glass ampoules, snapped the top off, and filled the syringe. Then he wrapped a length of rubber tubing around Meg's arm, slid the needle in, and slowly depressed the plunger. After, he stood at the side of the bed, looking down at her.

  "You should go," he said, glancing at me. "Get some rest while you can."

  "You're the one who should sleep. You were up the entire night."

  "If I'm not mistaken, I wasn't alone."

  "Yes, but I slept for nine hours after Anna came. I can easily last until morning, although I can't give her morphine. If you go to bed now, you'll get almost four hours before she's due again, and then you can go right back to bed."

  He put his hands on his hips, considering.

  "Please," I said. "I insist."

  His eyebrows shot up. "You insist, do you?"

  "I promised last night that I'd hold up my end, and it's clearly your turn to sleep," I said, nearly tripping over my tongue in my haste to explain. "That's all I meant."

  "I rather preferred it when you were insisting."

  I glanced at him. He was grinning.

  I lifted my chin, trying my best to channel the headmistress at Miss Porter's. "In that case, I'm afraid I really must insist that you get some rest."

  He laughed quietly. "Well, when you put it like that, I suppose I have no choice."

  He eventually did go down to sleep, but not before replacing the bowl of ice, stoking the fire, and extracting a promise that I would get him if I needed anything else--or even if I just changed my mind about going to bed--and that in any case, he'd be back in just under four hours.

  --

  I curled up in the chair, which was deep enough that I could fold myself sideways and end up almost horizontal. It was only when I tucked the quilt under my legs that I realized I was still barefoot, still wearing the nightgown I'd donned the night before, and therefore had paraded around like that all day--in front of the doctor, in front of Rhona, in front of everyone. Getting dressed simply hadn't occurred to me. Although I was embarrassed, at that moment I was also relieved. Keeping an overnight vigil would almost certainly be more comfortable in a nightgown.

  Apparently, it was too comfortable.

  The fire let out a loud snap and jolted me awake. A red ember sat on the carpet in front of me. I leapt from the chair, grabbed the poker, and pushed it onto the stone flags.

  After a quick scan of the room showed that nothing else was on fire, my eyes landed on Meg. I looked and looked with rising fear, because I could not see any movement beneath the quilts.

  I was at her bedside in an instant, hovering in blind terror. Her face was gray, her mouth slack. Her right eye, the one that wasn't swollen shut, was slightly open, displaying a sliver of white. I laid a hand on her rib cage, trying to discern movement, but my hand shook too violently for me to tell. I pressed three fingers to the side of her throat, seeking a pulse.

  "Meg?" I said, and then again, loudly, "Meg?"

  I grabbed the hand mirror from her dresser and held it in front of her mouth. It jerked wildly despite my best efforts to keep it steady, but it was aimed at her face at least part of the time and I never saw so much as a hint of fog.

  Seconds later I was stumbling down the stairs in the dark, feeling my way along the walls, and screaming, "Angus, Angus!"

  We ran into each other in the doorway to the kitchen. He caught me by my upper arms to steady me. "What is it? What's wrong?"

  "She's not breathing--"

  He sprinted past and was thumping up the stairs before I even had a chance to turn around.

  By the time I found my way back, he was sitting on the bed holding two fingers against the inside of her wrist.

  I crept over, breathing heavily, too afraid to ask.

  After an unbearably long time, he laid her hand down and felt her forehead.

  "Her pulse is steady," he said. "She's a little hot, if anything. Probably from the fire. Shock has the opposite effect."

  I covered my mouth to contain a cry of relief.

  "Oh, thank God! Thank God! I fell asleep and then when I woke up she wasn't moving, and I thought...." I sucked air through my steepled fingers before finishing in a whisper. "I thought I'd let her die."

  "You didn't, lass. Everything's all right."

  My vision filled with swarms of gnats, then disappeared completely.

  The next thing I knew, my forehead was resting on my knees and I was looking at the folds of my nightgown.

  I was on the floor, and Angus was propping me up. He had an arm beneath my legs, lifting my knees, and the other behind my shoulders.

  "Stay as you are until the blood comes back," he said, when I tried to lift my head.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "I don't know what happened."

  "You fainted is what happened," said Angus. "You went down pretty hard. Are you hurt?"

  "I don't think so. I'm sorry."

  "Don't apologize. There's nothing to be sorry about."

  Sweat broke out on my brow and upper lip, and the buzzing in my ears grew louder. A wave of nausea ran through me.

  "Oh God, I think I'm going to be sick."

  He grabbed the stacked bowls from the bedside table and set them on the floor next to me.

  I was horrified at the thought of vomiting in front of him, but for a while it seemed inevitable. Eventually, mercifully, the feeling passed.

  "I'm all right now," I said.

  "When did you last eat?"

  "I'm not sure," I said. "Yesterday, I think. Although I had a cup of tea earlier."

  "Well, that will do it. Where did you put the first aid kit?"

  "It's under the bed."

  A minute later I was nibbling the small square of emergency chocolate. As soon as it was gone, I folded the foil wrapper and said, "I think I can walk now."

  "And I think you should wait another minute or two."

  He took a facecloth from the bowl, wrung it out, and held it against my forehead. After a moment, I took it from him and wiped the front and back of my neck.

  "I think I really am all right now," I said.

  "Then let's get you to bed."

  He stood and offered me his hands. As he pulled me to my feet, I crumpled. He caught me with both arms and held me upright.

  "Steady, there. Do you need to sit back down?"

  "No," I whispered, leaning heavily against him. "I'm fine."

  "Take your time. Just let me know when you're ready."

  When I finally thought I could control my legs, I said, "I'm okay now. Really, this time."

  "All right," he said, keeping a firm grasp on me. "One foot in front of the other. I can't grab a candle, but I know the way. I won't let you fall."

  "You should know something," I said as he steered me into the darkness of the hall.

  "And what's that?"

  "There are a few things on my floor."

  "What sorts of things?"

  "Mostly clothes. My husband was looking for something this morning."

  Angus supported me into the pitch black of my room and through the flotsam.

  "Here you are, then."

  I sank onto the bed and against my pillow. As Angus found and pulled the covers up over me, his hands grazed the top of my foot, my throat, my chin.

  "I'm really sorry, Angus," I said, after he wrapped me into a cocoon.

  "For what? You couldn't help fainting."

  "No, for promising I'd look after Meg and then falling asleep."

  "Don't fash yourself."

  "But now you're not going to get any rest at all."

  "I got a couple of hours, and I'll grab a
few more winks here and there. But I'm afraid there is something that I must insist on."

  "What's that?"

  "No more skipping meals. I can't have all of you out of commission at once. The inn doesn't run itself, you know."

  His words caused a bittersweet lump in my throat, my second of the day.

  Although I couldn't see a thing, I knew exactly where he was. I could feel his presence, and for a moment I thought he might reach for me. I held my breath and lay absolutely still, waiting, hoping, yet also fearful.

  When nothing happened, I said in a cracked voice, "Angus?"

  "Aye?"

  For a short time I thought I might say something, even though I didn't have a clue what, but the silence rose and overwhelmed me, a vast, oppressive thing that billowed around me until I was sealed within it.

  "Thank you for helping me back to my room," I finally said.

  "I'd best get back to Meg now," he said. "Sleep well, Maddie."

  A few seconds later, the door clicked shut behind him, and I was left gasping in the dark.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  The next day, I stopped long enough to gather some clothes off the floor and get dressed before rushing to Meg's room. I was still trying to smooth the wrinkles from my skirt when I got there.

  "Sorry I'm so late," I said, batting at the creased material. "I guess I really did have some sleep to catch up on, but with any--"

  I glanced up, expecting to see Anna. Instead, I found an old woman with peppery hair sitting in the chair. She was knitting up a storm: clickity-clickity-click went her needles, which were fed by an endless strand of yarn that coiled out from a carpetbag beside her. A sock was forming beneath them.

  She peered at me over the top of her wire-framed spectacles. "I suppose you'll be the one from America, the one Anna's been talking about. Maddie Hyde, is it?"

  "Yes. That's me."

  "I'm Mrs. McKenzie, Anna's mother, but the folk around here call me Mhathair. You might as well too. When it comes right down to it, we're all Jock Tamson's bairns."

  I moved closer to Meg. "How is she?"

  "Taking a bit of soup when she's awake, and also sipping tea."

  "One of your teas?"

  "Aye. I've left some more with Rhona. Try to get as much of it down her as you can. It's for the bruising and swelling, and will only work for the first couple of days. Then I'll bring another."