Chapter Twenty-seven
With Anna weighed down by fresh grief and my own days as available as ever, I took it upon myself to expand my household duties, although I kept to the upstairs so I wouldn’t get caught.
I began sweeping the bedroom carpets with the witchlike broom, which turned out to be made of dried heather, and then, since I was sweeping anyway, did the hallway to the top of the stairs. Less than a week after Anna’s return, I was doing the entire upstairs on my own, polishing the doorknobs, trimming and filling the lamps, gathering laundry, changing the sheets—even scouring the sink, tub, and toilet with Vim powder. Meg repaired my manicure as necessary, so while my nails were shorter, they were as flashy as ever, and Ellis remained none the wiser.
I grew bolder, and one day decided to sweep all the way down the stairs, since that was where the carpet ended. Too late, I heard the clicking of Conall’s toenails and a moment later was face-to-face with Angus. I was on the bottom step, in an apron, clutching the broom. I froze like a deer in the middle of the road.
A sudden widening of his eyes betrayed his surprise.
“Good afternoon,” I said, after a few beats of silence, trying to act as though we found ourselves in this situation all the time.
He frowned. “And how long has this been going on?”
“A while,” I said, feeling the heat rise to my cheeks. “Please don’t blame Anna—it was entirely my idea. I just wanted to help.”
The corners of his mouth twitched and a twinkle crept into his eyes. He laughed before continuing on his way, shaking his head and followed by a visibly confused Conall.
I sank down on the stair, light-headed with relief.
—
I had been restricting my efforts to the upstairs only for fear of getting caught, but since Angus apparently didn’t mind, I began to help in the kitchen as well. I always brought my coat, gloves, and gas mask with me, so that if Ellis and Hank returned early, I could slip out the back and return by the front, pretending I’d been on a walk. This was Meg’s idea, and Anna objected vehemently. She was adamant that it was bad luck for a person to enter and leave a house by different doors.
Although I was close to useless to begin with, I was a willing student and they were patient with me. I soon learned how to scrape, not peel, carrots and potatoes, and how to cube turnips. After my first brackish mishap, I learned how to properly salt water for boiling, and not just how to slice bread, but how to do it to wartime standards—vendors weren’t allowed to sell bread of any kind, even National Loaf, until it was stale enough to be sliced thinly. Anna confessed her suspicion that National Loaf was not made of flour at all but rather ground-up animal feed, and I thought she was probably right. It would explain a lot about the dense, mealy bread that was commonly referred to as “Hitler’s Secret Weapon.” It was rumored to be an aphrodisiac—a rumor many suspected had been started by the government itself to get people to eat it.
I learned that all tea was loose leaf and steeped more than once, and also that the strength of a guest’s tea was directly related to Anna’s feelings about the person. At that point, Hank and Ellis were drinking hot water with a splash of milk.
I discovered that in addition to Anna’s many personal beliefs—she couldn’t see a crow through the window without running outside to see how many there were and then analyzing what the number meant—there were all kinds of universally accepted sources of bad luck. One of them explained why I hadn’t been able to find any meat the day Anna thought I’d seen the Caonaig and run off before starting dinner. It was considered unlucky to store it inside, and so it was kept in a ventilated meat safe out back. I also discovered that Angus was responsible for the contents of many a meat safe.
In the hill just beyond the Anderson shelter was a tall, drafty dugout, which he kept stocked with venison, grouse, pheasant, and other game, hanging it until it was tender. Anna and Meg took what was necessary for the inn and wrapped the remainder in newspaper, which Angus then left on the doorsteps of families in need, delivering the packets at night so no one would feel beholden.
I’d already figured out that Angus was poaching—how else to explain the visit from Bob the Bobby, or the ample supply of game?—but I wasn’t shocked, as I once might have been. My education at the hands of Anna and Meg included enough history that I understood the policeman’s reluctance to enforce the law, and also that it reflected the prevailing attitude.
It started the day I asked Anna what made a croft a croft instead of just a farm, and got an unexpected earful:
“It is a farm,” she said indignantly, “only not quite big enough to support a family. That’s the definition of a croft.”
Meg shot me a glance that said, Well, now you’ve done it, and she was right.
Although the events Anna spoke of had taken place nearly two hundred years before, she railed on with as much outrage as if they’d occurred the previous week.
She said that in 1746, following the Battle of Culloden—the final, brutal confrontation in the Jacobite Rising—the Loyalists forced an end to the clan system so the Jacobites could never rise again. They seized their traditional lands and dispersed clan members, banishing individual families onto tiny tracts and expecting them to become farmers overnight. The former communal hunting grounds were turned into sheep farms and sporting estates, and anyone caught hunting on them was subject to severe penalties. The aristocratic shooting party’s right to an undepleted stock was held to be more important than feeding the starving.
But it didn’t end there. Beyond the physical displacement and the abrupt, forced end of the clan system was a methodical attempt to wipe out the culture. Speaking Gaelic became a crime, and the first sons of clan chiefs were forced to attend British public schools, returning with the same upper-class accent my father-in-law had affected during the heady days of his celebrity.
I imagined the Colonel strutting around in his estate tweeds with his smug sense of superiority on full display, and realized that the loathing Rhona and Old Donnie felt for him—and all of us by association—ran far deeper than anything he’d done personally.
“And that’s why the taking of a deer is a righteous theft,” Anna said, wrapping up with a decisive nod. She had unknowingly repeated Meg’s words from the day she showed me the Anderson shelter, and I finally understood.
The taking of a deer was a righteous theft because it was taken from land that was stolen.
—
Because of their overlapping shifts, I spent the first part of each day with just Anna and the latter part with just Meg, and during these times, our chitchat sometimes turned to confidences.
From Meg, I learned that Anna’s brother Hugh had stepped on a mine and what could be found of his remains had been buried in Holland. The other brother she’d lost, twenty-one-year-old Hector, had been hit in the chest by a mortar bomb during the D-Day landings. His body was never recovered, although a fellow soldier had paused long enough to grab his identification tags.
From Anna, I learned that Meg had lost her entire family—both parents and two younger sisters—four years earlier in the Clydebank Blitz. Five hundred and twenty-eight people were killed, 617 injured, and 35,000 left homeless during two nights of relentless air raids that left a mere seven out of twelve thousand houses intact. Meg had been spared only because she’d already joined the Forestry Corps and was in Drumnadrochit.
I kept hoping one of them would offer some information about Angus’s background, enough to confirm or refute my theory about the gravestone, but they didn’t, and I couldn’t ask for fear of giving myself away. I was fully aware that my desire to know wasn’t based on curiosity alone.