Chapter Twenty-four
It was an innocent embrace, I told myself for the thousandth time, hoping that I would eventually believe it. For hours after I returned to my room the night before, I lay in the dark wishing he was there with me. I wanted him to hold me, I wanted to fall asleep in his arms. I was aware of wanting more, too.
Despite being up most of the night, I got up early and waited at my door until Hank and Ellis were in the hallway. Then I joined them so we could all go down together. I was incapable of facing Angus—I could no longer think of him in formal terms—on my own. Even the thought of seeing him in the company of other people left me light-headed.
When the three of us went downstairs, he was standing by the front door talking with a very old woman in a language both guttural and burbling. When he glanced at me, I thought my knees might give out.
I couldn’t look at him for fear of giving myself away.
The air was so electrically charged I was sure Hank and Ellis would pick up on it, so I also couldn’t look at them. That left no one but the crone, who stared at me as if she were plumbing the deepest recesses of my mind and unearthing all kinds of terrible things.
“This is Rhona,” said Angus. “She’ll be here until Anna gets back. She doesn’t speak English.” And with that, he left.
“And the stellar service continues,” Ellis muttered, leading the way to our usual table. “What are we supposed to do? Learn Gaelic? Play charades?”
“Why not?” said Hank. “It’s always porridge anyway, and I can mime that.” He put his hands to his throat and pretended to choke.
“Don’t tell me you’re getting used to this,” said Ellis.
Hank shrugged. “At least they’ve started putting my things away.”
Ellis harrumphed. “Talk to me when they start ironing the newspaper.”
Rhona served our breakfast in dour silence and otherwise ignored us completely. I wondered if she was the wife of the old man who’d blown our cover the first day. Even if she wasn’t, it was clear she disapproved of us as much as he did.
She was ancient, with a dowager’s hump and bowed legs. Her hair was white, her clothes black, her complexion gray. She smelled like wet wool and vinegar and, as far as I could tell, wore a perpetually sour expression. Her upper lip and chin were lightly whiskered, her face so weathered that her eyes appeared as mere slits under the weight of her lids. Even so, I caught an occasional flash of piercing blue—usually as I was fighting off the memory of being held by Angus, or despairing of Anna’s brothers, and wondering how two such disparate thoughts could coexist in my brain.
“Maddie?”
Ellis was looking at me. His forehead was crinkled, and I realized he’d said my name at least twice, but I’d heard it from a distance, as though through a tunnel.
“Darling? Are you all right? You seem…I don’t know, shaken, or distracted, or something. Are you having an episode?”
“No. Nothing like that. I just didn’t sleep well.”
“Why not?”
“I was thinking about Anna’s family. I was here when she got the news about her brother.”
“What about her brother?”
“He was killed in action,” I said. “He’s at least the second brother she’s lost.”
“Ah,” he said, smiling sadly. “I suppose that explains why you wouldn’t come down last night. But I’m afraid these things happen, my darling. C’est la guerre. How are you now? Should I have sent for a doctor after all?”
I could only shake my head.
He patted my hand and turned his attention back to Hank.
I stared at him for a long time. If he wanted to end his search for the beast, he need look no further than a mirror.
—
I collected my things and escaped as soon as Hank and Ellis left with George, whom they’d apparently hired full-time, petrol restrictions notwithstanding. I wondered how fast Ellis was going through his remaining money. Perhaps Hank was already supporting us.
After I got outside, I was free of Rhona’s penetrating glare, but found myself yet again with no destination, no goal, and no purpose on a day I desperately needed to be occupied. However, even if we’d shared a language, I wouldn’t have had the nerve to ask Rhona about doing the rooms. She clearly despised me. Once again, I’d been lumped in with Hank and Ellis.
My brain was fevered, my system overwhelmed. My glass had been filled too full, too fast. The Caonaig, the death of Anna’s brother, my embrace with Angus, never mind finally recognizing the sheer callousness of my husband—
Even after he’d shanghaied me into a war, even after I’d realized our entire marriage was a sham, even after I’d watched him go below deck to avoid seeing the wounded on the SS Mallory, I had never believed him to be as cold-blooded as he’d just revealed himself to be. I’d always assumed his avoidance of all things war-related was guilt over not being able to serve, but now I realized that he just didn’t care.
Even if he didn’t think of Anna as quite human, had he never considered the fate of George’s leg? Apparently not, since he’d interpreted my distress as a symptom of fragility.
I thought of the moment Angus pulled me to him, gripping me tightly, not at all as though I might break, even as I was sobbing into his neck. We clung to each other as though life itself depended on it, and maybe it did.
I looked up with a gasp.
It’ll be like Angus, Anna had said, her face twisted in grief, less than a minute after laughing at me for getting his name wrong.
Was it possible?
I marched down the street, keeping my head down—especially when the lace curtain in a front window shifted by the width of a finger, as nearly all of them did.
If red was the new badge of courage, I was certainly a shining beacon of bravery, with my stupid red gloves and my stupid red gas mask case. I shoved my hands in my pockets and encountered the last of the elves’ cups, which I flung to the side of the road for the crime of being red.
Red, red, everywhere. I wanted to be gray.
I found myself back at the headstone, staring at its etched granite as though I could force it to reveal its secrets.
AGNES MÀIRI GRANT,
INFANT DAUGHTER OF ANGUS AND MÀIRI GRANT
JANUARY 14TH, 1942
CAPT. ANGUS DUNCAN GRANT,
BELOVED HUSBAND OF MÀIRI
APRIL 2ND, 1909–JANUARY, 1942
MÀIRI JOAN GRANT,
BELOVED WIFE OF ANGUS
JULY 26, 1919–FEBRUARY 28, 1942
I knew how many men in the village had the same names—I’d seen it myself on the other gravestones, and I knew that Willie the Postie was called that to distinguish him from Willie the Joiner and Willie the Box because every one of them was a Willie MacDonald—but I couldn’t shake the image of Angus putting snowdrops on the grave.
It seems there’s nothing so good or pure it can’t be taken without a moment’s notice, he’d said, and there was nothing so pure as an infant. Was it possible he’d returned from the war only to find that everything he loved had been snatched by cruel fate?
I thought back to the night we’d arrived in Scotland. When I realized it was the third anniversary of the child’s death, I was afraid I might break into pieces after all.
—
I was afraid that if I went back to the inn I might take a pill, so I headed down the A82, knowing that somewhere between the village and the castle was the McKenzies’roft.
Small houses dotted the hillside and I stopped briefly in front of each, wondering if Anna and her parents were inside. Eventually I reached the castle, and knew I had passed them.
The ruined battlements looked very different than they had when we’d approached them by water. There was a large dry moat around the castle, full of high grasses and scrubby weeds, and I lifted my coat and tromped down, across, and up the other side, ignoring the thorns that snagged my hems.
Directly beside the entrance was a massive chunk of stone—or stones, really, because they were still stuck together with mortar, still rigidly holding right angles. It looked like someone had torn a large corner piece from a very stale gingerbread house and flung it to the floor.
I paused beneath the arched entrance, where the drawbridge had once been, imagining all the people who had passed in and out over the centuries, every one of them carrying a combination of desire, hope, jealousy, despair, grief, love, and every other human emotion; a combination that made each one as unique as a snowflake, yet linked all of them inextricably to every other human being from the dawn of time to the end of it.
I walked through it myself and went straight to the tower. Within its gloomy interior, I found a winding staircase, and climbed the worn steps carefully. They were so narrow I had to brace my hands on either side.
I stopped on the second floor to look out, but pulled back immediately.
Angus was standing at an arched gate that led down to the water. He stayed for a long time, staring at the loch, which was as flat as if it had been ironed. Then he leaned over, picked up his gun and a brace of rabbits, and turned around. I ducked further into the shadows, although there was no reason—he plodded straight to and through the main gate without ever looking up.
—
The light snowfall turned into a flurry, and before I knew it, turned into a blizzard. I had no choice but to return to the inn—to stay in the tower would mean freezing to death.
Rhona was neither upstairs nor in the front room, and although I had been desperate to get away from her just a few hours earlier, my need for a cup of something hot now made me just as desperate to find her. I hoped I would be able to pantomime what I needed, and that she’d be receptive to interpreting. I took a deep breath and entered the kitchen. When my eyes landed on the big wooden table and the freshly skinned rabbits upon it, I stopped.
Angus was standing shirtless at the sink with his back to me, washing his arms.
I knew I should leave, but I couldn’t. I was rooted to the spot, watching the rhythmic, alternating movements of his shoulder blades as he cupped water first in one hand and then the other, sloshing it up past his elbows to rinse off the soap.
I don’t know what gave me away, but he whipped his head around and caught me watching.
Despite my heart being lodged in my throat, I couldn’t look away. After several seconds he straightened up and—without breaking eye contact—turned slowly, deliberately, until he was facing me.
His chest and abdomen were a network of thick, raised scars—red, pink, purple, even white. They were not puncture wounds. Someone had jammed a serrated blade into him and ripped through his flesh, over, and over, and over.
I stared, trying to comprehend.
“Oh, Angus,” I said, covering my mouth. I rushed a few steps toward him before coming to a halt.
He smiled sadly and raised his palms. After a few seconds, he turned back to the sink.
I reached a hand out as though to touch him, although a good fourteen feet still separated us. The illusion was there, though, and I let my quivering, outstretched fingers graze his shoulder. When I realized what I was doing, I bolted to my room.
I took my pills out and put them back no fewer than three times. I did not know what to do with myself, and ended up pacing between the bed and the window, turning on my heel as precisely as a soldier.
Had he answered my suspicion about the gravestone? Had he been assumed dead and somehow survived? And what in God’s name had happened to him? I couldn’t imagine, and yet I couldn’t stop imagining.