Czytaj książkę: «On the Edge of Darkness»

1

‘Why don’t you take a knife and kill me, Thomas? It would be quicker and more honest!’

Susan Craig was shouting now, her voice harsh with despair. ‘Dear God, you drive me to do this! You and your sanctimonious cruelty.’ She was standing near the window, tears pouring down her face.

Adam, thin, skinny, and tall for his age, which was fourteen, was standing outside his father’s study window, his arms wrapped tightly around his body, his mouth working with misery as he tried to stop himself shouting out loud in his mother’s defence. The quarrel, growing steadily louder and louder, had been going on for what seemed like hours, and for what seemed like hours he had been standing there, listening. What had she done – what could she have done? – to make his father so angry? He didn’t understand.

‘Now you take the name of the Lord in vain as well! Is there no end to your wickedness, you stupid, senseless woman?’ Thomas’s voice too was almost incoherent.

‘I’m not wicked, Thomas. I’m human! Is that so evil? Why can’t you listen to me? You don’t care! You never have, damn you!’ His mother’s voice was shrill, out of control, his father’s a deep rumbling torrent of words designed to override and to annihilate.

The boy’s eyes were blind with tears as he put his hands over his ears, trying to block out the sounds, but it was no use; they filled the echoing rooms of the huge old stone-built manse and spilled out of the windows and doors until they seemed to fill the garden and the surrounding village of Pittenross, the woods and even the sky.

Suddenly he couldn’t bear it any more. Stumbling in his haste, unable to see where he was going for his tears, he turned and ran for the gate.

The manse stood at the end of a quiet village street, hidden behind the high wall which all but encompassed house and garden, save where, at the far end of the vegetable patch, the broad sweep of the River Tay rattled over shingle and rock. To the left of the house stood the old kirk amongst its attendant trees, its lawns and gravel paths deserted behind high ornate railings and an imposing gate. To the right the street, lined by grey stone-built houses, was silent and at this hour empty of people.

Adam ran along the street, cutting down through Fishers’ Wynd, a small alley between high, blank walls, skirted some rough ground, half-heartedly gardened by the wife of one of his father’s elders, hopped across the river by way of shining black rocks and stones and, climbing a wire fence, began to run up through the thick woods which clung to the lower slopes of the hill. He ran until he could run no longer, sure that if he stopped he would still be able to hear the sounds of his parents quarrelling.

The quarrels had been growing worse over the past few weeks. He had no brothers or sisters to share his burden, no other family in whom he could confide, no one in the village he felt he could talk to. His loyalty to his parents was absolute and somehow he knew that this was private, not something that anyone else should know about, ever. But he didn’t know what to do, and he could not cope with what was happening. His beautiful, young happy mother, happy at least when he and she were alone together, whom he adored, had changed into a pale, short-tempered shadow of herself, whilst his father, always a large man, burly and of florid complexion, had grown larger and more florid. Sometimes Adam looked at his father’s hands; huge, powerful hands, the hands of a labourer rather than the hands of a man of God, and he shuddered. He knew how hard they could wield the strap. His father believed in beating his son for the good of his soul at the slightest transgression. Adam did not mind so much for himself, he was used to it. Almost. But he was terrified, blindly, completely and overwhelmingly terrified that his father might beat his mother.

He never knew why they quarrelled. Sometimes at night, lying in his dark bedroom, he could hear the occasional word through the wall, but they made no sense. His mother adored the mountains and the river and the village and the life of a minister’s wife, and she had dozens – hundreds, or so it seemed to her son – of friends, so why should she cry out that she was lonely? Why should she say that she was so unhappy?

Without thinking about where he was going, he had taken a favourite path up through the trees, following a tumbling, rocky burn up the hillside, seeing flashes of white foaming water from rock pools and waterfalls as he climbed on between birch and rowan and holly, through larch and spruce, to where the woods thinned and the mountainside took over.

His pace had slowed now and he was badly out of breath, but still he ploughed on, following a sheep’s track through the grass and prickly heather, skirting the rocky outcrops flung up millennia ago by volcanic and glacial fury. He was heading for the carved stone cross-slab, erected, so tradition had it, by the Picts, the people who had inhabited these hills even before the Scots came, to stand sentinel on the hill far above the village and the river. He always went there when he was miserable. It stood near a small wood of old Scots pine, part of the ancient Caledonian Forest which had girdled the mountains centuries before, and it was his own very special, private, place.

It had stood there on the flat top of the ridge, half circled by the old trees, for more than fourteen hundred years, rearing, at a slight angle to the vertical, over a view which on a clear day extended perhaps thirty miles to the south, to the north only two or three before the high mountains blocked the sky. On the face which turned towards the sun there was a huge cross, set within a wheel in the manner of the Celts, carved with intricate lacy patterns, the everlasting design which represented eternal life. On the back were stranger, heathenish carvings – a snake, a jagged broken stave, a mirror and a crescent moon – and of these symbols the village as a whole and his father in particular disapproved violently. Thomas Craig had told Adam that the symbol stones had been carved by worshippers of the devil, who had left them there on the high lonely hillside with their hidden message to all who came after them. Sometimes Adam used to think it was a miracle that the stone had not been torn down and broken and utterly destroyed – perhaps it was because it was too far from the village, too much effort to do it, or perhaps it was because secretly the people were afraid to touch it. He wasn’t afraid. But he could sense its power – its special, wild magic.

Reaching the stone he flung himself down at its foot and, sure that no one could see him save the distant circling buzzard, he abandoned himself at last to his tears.

The girl had seen him coming, though. Often, before, she had noticed him, a boy about her own age, winding his way up through the heather and she had hidden, either behind the stone or amongst the trees, or in the soft, drifting mists which so often descended on this place.

Three times lately she had heard him cry. It made her uncomfortable. She wanted to find out why he was so unhappy, to see him laugh and jump about as he had when he had brought the brown-and-white sheltie puppy with him. She had never approached him. She was not supposed to be here. Her brother would be furious if he knew she had strayed from his side, but she had grown bored with watching him carve the stone. The chisels, the small hammer, the punches, the tools of his trade laid out neatly on the heather with the rolled vellum template which he fastened to the stone to punch out the designs.

The dog had seen her and barked, its hackles raised along its back. She was puzzled by that. Dogs usually liked her. But she kept her distance. She didn’t want the boy to see her.

His tears were exhausted at last. Sitting up he sniffed and, rubbing his face with the sleeve of his sweater, he began to look round. Far above him he could hear the lonely yelp of an eagle. He squinted up into the blue but the glare behind the clouds was too bright and he shook his head and closed his eyes. When he opened them he saw the girl for a fraction of a second, peering at him from the trees. Startled, he jumped to his feet.

‘Hey! Hello?’ His call was carried away on the wind. ‘Where are you?’

There was no sign of her. He ran a few steps towards the trees. ‘Come on. I’ve seen you! Show yourself!’ He hoped she hadn’t seen him crying. Blushing at the thought he peered amongst the soft, red, peeling trunks of the trees. But she had gone.

It was twilight when he retraced his steps reluctantly towards the manse. From the path amongst the thickly growing trees on the steep bank of the burn as it tumbled towards the river he could see in the distance the lamp already lit in his father’s study window. Usually by now there would be a curl of blue smoke from the kitchen chimney but he couldn’t see it yet against the darkening sky. Nervously he wondered if Mrs Barron had stayed on to cook supper as she often did, or was his mother, an apron tied over her dress, standing in the kitchen wielding the huge iron pans?

It was the back door he approached on tiptoe from the yard at the side of the manse. There was no one in the kitchen at all and no pans on the range. In fact the range was cold. With a sinking heart he crept out into the back hall and listened, half afraid that the quarrel would still be in progress, but the house was silent now. Breathing a quick sigh of relief, he tiptoed through to the front and stood for one long, daring moment outside his father’s study, then he turned and fled upstairs.

His parents’ bedroom looked out over the wall towards the kirk. It was an austere room, the iron bed covered by a pale fawn counterpane, the heavy wooden furniture unrelieved by pictures or flowers. On his mother’s dressing table, uncluttered by make-up or scent or powder sat, side by side, neatly aligned, a matching ivory-backed hair brush, a clothes brush and a comb. Nothing else. Thomas Craig would not permit his wife to paint her face.

Nervously Adam peered into the room, though he could sense already that it was empty. It was cold and north-facing, the room where he had been born. He hated it.

Normally he liked the kitchen best. With the warmth from the range and the smells of cooking and the cheerful light-hearted banter between his mother and Jeannie Barron it was the nicest and most cheerful place to be. When his father was out. When his father was at home his dour, disapproving presence filled the house, Adam’s mother fell silent and even the birds in the garden seemed, to the boy, afraid to sing.

Standing in the doorway, he was about to turn away when he paused, frowning. Like a small animal, alert, suspicious, he sensed that something was wrong. He looked round the room more carefully this time, but in its bleak tidiness it gave no clue as to what might be amiss.

He had two bedrooms to himself. One, as sober and tidy as his parents’, his official bedroom, was next to theirs on the landing. But he had another room, up in the attic, known to his mother and Mrs Barron, but not, he was almost sure, to his father, who never climbed up there. In it he had a bright rag rug, and several old chests for the treasures and specimens which formed his museum, his books and his maps. It was up here, alone, when he was supposed to be doing his school work in his official bedroom, that he led his intensely private life; it was here that he wrote up his notes and copied diagrams and studied musty textbooks which he had picked up in second-hand bookshops in Perth, all designed to lead towards his ambition to be a doctor, and it was here that he sketched the birds he watched out on the hills and here he had once tried to dissect, then to dry and stuff the dead body of a fox he had found in a snare. Jeannie Barron had soon put paid to that enterprise, but otherwise the two women had left him more or less to his own devices up there. Today however it did not provide the sanctuary he had come to expect. He felt restless and unhappy. Something was very wrong.

After only a few minutes’ leafing half-heartedly through a book on spiders he threw it down on the table and went out onto the landing. He listened for a moment, then he ran down the narrow upper flight of stairs, then the broader flight below and went to peer once more into the kitchen. It was as cheerless and empty as before.

It was a long time before he plucked up enough courage to knock on the door of his father’s study.

Thomas Craig was sitting at his desk, his hands folded before him on the blotter. He was a tall, rangy man, with a shock of dark hair threaded with silver, large, staring pale blue eyes and his skin, normally high-coloured, was today unusually pale.

‘Father?’ Adam’s voice was timid.

There was no response.

‘Father, where is Mother?’

His father looked up at last. There was a strange triangle of livid skin beneath each high cheekbone where his face had rested on the interlinked fingers of his hands. He propped himself wearily on his elbows on the desk, then cleared his throat as though for a moment he found it hard to speak. ‘She’s gone,’ he said at last, his voice lifeless.

‘Gone?’ Adam repeated the word uncomprehendingly.

‘Gone.’ Thomas lowered his face back into his hands.

His son shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. An inexplicable pain had settled in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t dare look at his father’s face again, fixing his eyes instead on his own ragged plimsolls.

Thomas sighed heavily. He looked up again. ‘Mrs Barron has seen fit to hand in her notice,’ he said at last, ‘so it would seem we are alone.’

Adam swallowed. His voice when he spoke was very small. ‘Where has Mother gone?’

‘I don’t know. And I don’t wish to.’ Abruptly Thomas stood up. Pushing back his chair he walked over to the window and stood looking out into the garden. ‘Your mother, Adam, has committed a grievous sin. In the eyes of God, and in my eyes, she is no longer part of this family. I do not wish her name to be mentioned in this house again. Go to your room and pray that her evil ways have not corrupted you. A night without supper will do you no harm at all.’ He did not turn round.

Adam stared at him, barely taking in what he had said. ‘But, Father, where has she gone?’ Little panicky waves of anguish were beginning to flutter in his chest. He wanted his mother very badly indeed.

‘Go to your room!’ Thomas’s voice, heavy with his own grief and anger and incomprehension, betrayed the depth of his emotion for only a moment.

Adam did not try to question him again. Turning, he ran into the hall, out through the kitchen and on into the garden. It was growing dark, but he did not hesitate. Loping round the side of the house he headed down the silent street towards the river once more. Slipping on the rocks in the dark he felt his feet sliding into the icy water but he did not hesitate, plunging into the woods and climbing as fast as he could up the hillside.

Once he stopped and turned. The manse was in darkness save for the single point of light, the lamp in his father’s study. From where he stood he could see the kirk and the dark trees round it, and the whole village, where one by one the lights were coming on, the evening air hazed with the fragrant blue smoke from the chimneys. The village was friendly, busy, warm. He knew every single person who lived in those houses. He was at school with children from many of them, in the same class as five other boys all of whom he had grown up with.

He stood looking down for a few minutes, feeling the wind, cold now, on the back of his neck, and he shivered. There were goosepimples on his thin arms beneath his sweater. He felt sick. Where had his mother gone? What had happened to her? Why hadn’t she told him where she was going? Why hadn’t she taken him with her? Why hadn’t she at least left him a note?

It was better to keep moving. Walking in the almost-darkness amongst the trees with the flash of white water on his right needed all his concentration. If he walked he couldn’t think. He didn’t want to think.

Turning, he scrambled on, feeling his wet plimsolls slide on the track, and he grabbed at the wiry branches of the larch which hung over him to stop himself falling as he headed for the stone.

It was completely dark when he reached the cross-slab at last. He doubled over, panting, aware that the moment he stopped moving the icy wind would strip away his bodyheat within seconds. He didn’t care. The moment he stopped moving he could no longer fend off the misery which was flooding through him. His mother. His adored, lovely, bright, pretty mother was gone and, he shuddered at the memory of his father’s words. What had she done? What could she have done? He wrapped his arms around himself, hunching his shoulders. He had never felt so alone, or so afraid.

She had never seen the boy come up here in the dark before. Behind the hills in the east a silver glow showed where soon the half moon would rise above the black rocks and flood the countryside with light. Then she would be able to see him more clearly. Quietly she waited.

Behind her, her brother Gartnait, five years her senior, was packing up his tools and stretching his arms above his head until his joints cracked. Between one moment and the next a black silhouetted moon-shadow ran across the ground at his feet. The light caught the gleam of an iron chisel and he stooped to pick it up.

Brid crept forward a little. The boy had a thin, attractive face with a child’s nose still, but his shoulders and knees were beginning already to show the coltishness which would come before he developed the stature of a man. She stared at his clothes, colourless in the pale light, and she crept nearer. He never seemed to do much when he came up to the hill. Sometimes he sat for hours, his arms wrapped around his legs, his chin on his knees, just staring into space. A few times he had come up to Gartnait’s stone and touched the carving with his finger, tracing the lines. Twice, in the hot months, he had stretched out on the hot ground and slept. On one of those occasions she had drawn closer, until she was standing over him and her slim shadow had touched his face. He had frowned and screwed up his nose and put his hand to his forehead, but he hadn’t opened his eyes.

She could feel his misery. It was sucking at her energy, swirling round him in a cloak of black waves which lapped out into the darkness and touched her with its cold.

Perhaps her sympathy was so great it had become tangible; whatever the reason, he looked up suddenly, startled as though he had heard something, and he looked straight at her. She saw his eyes widen. Instinctively his hand brushed his cheek and he straightened his shoulders to hide his misery. His momentary fear at seeing a figure in the shadows gave way to relief when he realised it was the girl he had seen earlier and he made a brave attempt at a smile. ‘Hello.’

She frowned. She did not recognise the word, though the smile was friendly. She stepped forward.

When she spoke to him it was in the language of her birth, the language of the ancient Picts.

His heartbeat had steadied a little. The exhaustion of the steep climb, for the second time that day, and then the girl appearing out of the darkness of the trees had made him gasp for breath. He stared at her, more puzzled than startled now. She had said something to him in words he didn’t understand. Gaelic, he supposed, a language his father considered to be barbaric. He shrugged at her. ‘I don’t understand.’

Even in that dim light he could see the brightness of her eyes, the pert tilt of her nose and chin. She was wearing a rough dress which looked as though it were made of some sort of leather.

She shrugged back, mimicking him, and then she giggled.

He found himself laughing too and suddenly daring she moved closer and touched her finger to his cheek, removing imaginary tears. Her mime was clear. Why are you sad? Cheer up. Then her hands dropped to his and she gave a theatrical shiver. She was right. He was very cold.

He wasn’t quite sure how he came to follow her. His misery, his cold, his hunger, all were persuasive. When she caught his hand and tugged at it, miming food in her mouth, he nodded eagerly and went with her.

He followed her towards the stone, his fingers brushing across the well-known shapes as he walked past it. There was a drift of mist across the path and he hesitated, but when she tugged again at his hand he went on, stopping only when he saw her brother. The tall young man, his tools now stowed in a leather bag slung over his shoulder, looked as startled as he was himself. He spoke quietly and urgently to the girl and she retorted with words quite obviously cheeky. It was then she introduced herself. She pointed to her chest. ‘Brid,’ she said firmly. She pronounced it Breed. ‘Gartnait.’ This was said thumping the young man’s shoulder.

Adam grinned. He pointed to his own stomach. ‘Adam,’ he said.

‘A-dam.’ She repeated the word softly. Then she laughed again.

They walked for about twenty minutes around the shoulder of the ridge, following a faint deer track through the heather before Adam saw in the distance below them the flickering light of a fire. As they scrambled down towards it he smelled meat cooking. Venison, he reckoned, and the juices in his mouth ran. He hadn’t eaten since lunchtime. He refused to think about the empty cold kitchen at home, concentrating instead on his new friends.

At the sight of their destination he frowned slightly. It was no more than a round ramshackle bothy, thatched with rushes, hidden in a fold of the hill beside a tumbling burn. The fire, he saw as they drew closer, was being tended by a woman, from her looks the mother of Brid and Gartnait, who, he had already guessed, were brother and sister. The woman, tall and slim, very erect when she straightened from poking the logs beneath her cooking pot, had hair as dark as her daughter’s, and the same clear grey eyes. Throwing down her makeshift poker she made him welcome, a little shyly, and pointing to a fur rug spread on the ground near the fire indicated that he sit down. Her name, Brid told him, was Gemma. Gartnait, he saw, had gone to wash the stonedust from his hands in the stream. Brid too had disappeared inside the bothy. She returned seconds later with four plates and a loaf of bread which she broke into four pieces and laid on the plates near the fire.

The meal he was given was, he thought, the best he had eaten in his whole life. The bread was rough and full of flavour, spread with thick creamy butter. With it they ate – with their fingers – venison cut into wafer-thin portions by Gartnait’s razor-sharp knife, mountain trout, cooked on slender twigs above the fire, and wedges of crumbling white cheese. Then there was more bread to mop up the rich gravy. To drink they had something which Adam, who had never touched alcohol in his life, suspected was some kind of heather ale. Mesmerised by the fire and the food and by his smiling though silent companions he drank heavily and within minutes, leaning back against a log, he was fast asleep.

He was awakened by Brid’s hand on his knee. For a moment he couldn’t think where he was, then he realised he was still outside. To his surprise he found he was lying warmly wrapped in a heavy woollen blanket. The fuzz of the wool was soaked with dew as he sat up and began to unwrap himself, but inside he was warm and dry.

‘A-dam.’ He loved the way she pronounced his name, carefully, liltingly, a little as though it were a French word. She pointed up at the sky. To his horror he could see the streaks of dawn above the hill. He had been out all night. His father would kill him if he found out. Frightened, he began to scramble to his feet.

Behind Brid her mother was bending over a brightly burning fire. Something was simmering in the pot suspended above it. He sniffed and Brid clapped her hands. She nodded and, taking a pottery bowl from her mother, spooned some sort of thin porridge into it. Taking it from her he sniffed, tasted, and burned his tongue. As breakfasts went it was pretty tasteless, not nearly as nice as the meal the night before, but it filled his stomach and when at last Brid led him back the way they had come he was feeling comparatively cheerful.

The cross-slab was wrapped once more in mist as they passed close beside it and he walked onto the hillside and stood looking down at his own valley, still wrapped in darkness. Brid pointed, with a little smile, and Adam stepped away from her. ‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘And thanks.’

‘Goodbye and thanks.’ The girl repeated the words softly. With a wave she turned and vanished into the mist.

The manse looked bleak in the cold dawn light. There was still no smoke coming from the chimneys and the front door was locked. Biting his lip nervously Adam ran soundlessly round the side, praying under his breath that the kitchen door would be open. It wasn’t. He stood there for a moment undecided, looking up at the blank windows at the back of the house. The awful misery was returning. Swallowing it down he turned and headed back into the street.