Billie's Kiss

by Elizabeth Knox

  ‘Choose whom to kiss,’ Billie said.

  There was a hitch in Henry’s stride. He squeezed her hand. ‘You should have a choice.’ Then he went on to say something Billie couldn’t quite follow. He said that Edith chose him, but he was her only choice. He knew that Billie could never get far enough away from Edith to sense Edith’s size. But he had come to understand that Edith was immense – very strong, and beautiful in a way that made her out of place everywhere she was able to be.

  But Billie could see it now, could see Edith stalking over the sliding litter of broken floor tiles that made the beach at Garavan, her shawl shading her head. Billie’s beach friends – some Edith’s age – falling silent and, if they were tussling, apparently fainting out of their tangles, and lying still, speckled with grit, staring at Edith. It was her sister’s scowl, Billie had always thought. But really it was Edith’s beauty – scowl, shawl, flapping shade – Edith’s density and size, what Billie sensed now when she was puzzled by how to be Edith.

  ‘Edith loved me,’ Henry said. ‘But she was poor in choices.’

  Henry meant that Edith was better than they were. And he was saying be patient. Wait – but not for him.

  They were below the west face of the castle. Above them the glass in its leaded windows shone like a cliff of white scales. In the sky there were two visible streams of cloud, many thousands of feet apart and moving in different directions. One rind of sky wound against the other and reflected in the west windows in sections, in separate panes, a movement of mismatched instants, as if some bits of the whole real world were destined to catch, or falter, or wind down before the rest.

  ‘We should go in,’ Henry said.

  Billie thought: ‘I should kiss you.’ She put her palm against his face, her fingertips forming a grille over his ear, the heel of her hand on his jaw, his springy side whiskers. His skin was soft, and a little tacky to the touch. Its exact temperature reminded Billie of another warmth, and for a minute Billie was adrift, she was in a room that plunged and kicked, her hand on Edith’s forehead, wiping Edith’s mouth; she was by the ladder with Henry; she was cold and wet, struggling free of a clammy grip not because it was clammy, but because through his wet clothes a specific warmth had surfaced and her own had jumped out to meet it.

  Henry put his hand over her own, pressed it briefly, then pulled it down, cheerful, like someone detaching an overexcited kitten from a curtain. He said he’d stay out here for a time.

  ‘I’ll stay with you,’ she said. But it was like trying to pull herself out of water on the air. She couldn’t get any purchase. Henry said she should go in.

  Billie went in, and upstairs. Three steps below the landing she raised her head and saw a massive shadow, a silhouette, a head with a squared beard, like a trenching tool on a thick haft. Lord Hallowhulme said to her that he thought she was very good.

  ‘Thank you, Sir,’ she said.

  He put a hand on her arm. Heavy but unstable, it twitched rather than trembled. He drew her toward him, so that she could smell sherry, cigar, the orange flower water in his hair or beard. He meant to show her something. Below them, on the terrace, Henry still stood where she had left him. James Hallow took Billie’s hand and lifted it to his own cheek. He put her hand on his face in a position that corresponded to where she had touched Henry’s a moment before. Billie felt a smaller ear, sleeker beard, the bone in James Hallow’s blunt jaw.

  Billie removed her hand, but he kept her fingertips trapped between his own. No more proper, but less alarming, he kissed her hand. It was ordinary gallantry and had as predictable a trajectory as investigations by the San Remo ragazzi of her nine-year-old knees. There was no boat to overturn, though, and it seemed to Billie that her only available defensive gesture was to return the kiss. Because Henry hadn’t wanted to be kissed.

  Billie jumped up against her host like a steep wave against stonework. He was tall, so she set her foot on the toe of his blocky boot, got enough elevation, and rose in and up to his face.

  He gasped and jerked back as if expecting her to bite him. They both overbalanced and his elbow knocked a pane of glass and shoved it, whole, out of its lead. It fell onto the terrace beside Henry. Billie put both her hands against James Hallow’s chest and, launching herself off him, found her feet and clambered away upstairs.

  MINNIE OBSERVED to Geordie that Billie hadn’t come back for her slice of cake. ‘I saved one for her.’

  Minnie had taken down her playbill. The servants were clearing the tables and carrying away the screens. Alan had finished everything around Billie’s saved slice, even clearing the crumbs from plates, pressing them flat and licking them off his fingers.

  Minnie asked Alan if he would go and see what had become of Billie.

  It was a long while before Alan came back. The servants had gone to their beds. Geordie and Minnie were alone, in an island of candlelight by the ballroom door. Minnie had been talking to Geordie about Ingrid. Or about after Ingrid. After Ingrid, Minnie had found it almost impossible to let her brother out of her sight. She was a sore trial to him. But their father insisted that Rixon go away to school. This summer was the longest she and her brother had been together for two years.

  Alan returned and stood by the cake. The cake was on the seat of a chair drawn up by Geordie and Minnie. Alan was pale, Geordie saw, and his eyelashes were in glistening spikes. ‘I couldn’t find her,’ he muttered. Then, more audible, but dull, ‘She must have gone to bed.’ He hovered, then he asked, ‘Can I have her cake?’

  ‘Of course,’ Minnie said. She told him she was sure Mr Betler wanted his bed. She was about to turn in, and Alan should carry the cake away.

  Alan broke the cake in two and put it in either pocket of the made-over jacket that was his costume. He ran out without saying good night.

  BILLIE TRAVELLED all night – at the traces of Minnie’s trap, Kirsty in harness – and all the next morning, slower. She managed not to run the trap into a ditch. By afternoon they were twenty miles from Southport, on the inland road and near a ruined abbey. Kirsty had stopped, up to her hocks in a burn, when Billie saw two horsemen on the farthest rise of the rolling strip of road, coming toward her, going one before the other, as if the road were too narrow, or they didn’t know each other – were one traveller about to overtake another – or as if they were companions who’d had a falling-out.

  12

  Coming to Grief

  MIDAFTERNOON, FROM a high road that followed the kinked spine of the island, the men saw a black line appear on the horizon, definite, like a lead join in a stained-glass window. The line was the shadow of a thick rain cloud and, before long, a squall swept across that end of the island. Behind the men Southport vanished, its terraced streets and white houses. The corrugated-iron structure of the cannery reappeared for a moment, whitely haloed with rebounding rain.

  Murdo turned up the collar of his summer coat and looked back at Rory Skilling, whom he’d met just outside Southport, where its streets turned into road at the top of the town. Murdo had kicked his horse to catch up, and Rory turned with a look of plain friendliness and inquiry. Then his face fell. He said: ‘Mr Hesketh, you’re expected at Stolnsay!’

  Rory had explained why he was at Southport – to look over the cannery. Mr Hesketh surely remembered that Lord Hallowhulme had offered Rory a manager’s job? Rory hadn’t tried to explain his initial dismay at their unexpected encounter. Murdo was sure that even after his display the other day – of indignation at being left behind – Rory wasn’t happy to see him, and didn’t really want to ride with him. But they were both bound for Stolnsay, and the road took them along together.

  There was another road, the new one James had built, not in its entirety, but connecting several dots and dashes between villages at the heads of the East Coast sea lochs. This road – inclusive, meandering – appeared several times far below them, occasionally linked to their way by a node of houses, a solitary chapel or ruined keep. From time to time Murdo glanced at Rory
to see if the man would make his excuses and take the other road, but Rory couldn’t seem to see his way out of Murdo’s company, any more than he looked to his employer for conversation as they went along.

  The rain came and made enough noise between them. They passed a herd of red cows, and the cattleman, his hat the brimming lip of a fountain.

  Later, the sun reappeared, the road steamed, and the turf began to talk, to tick and wheeze. They climbed a long narrow valley beside a burn. The water course was at its summer level, and soon absorbed the rain, running with no more sound than the bands of slickness that crossed the road between burn and rock outcrops. The rocks and road gleamed as if greased. It was close in the valley, humid, and whenever the sun wavered midges appeared and pursued the riders. Murdo’s hair began to lift as it dried. He felt the heat tampering with it, like admiring fingers. He thought of Clara, of being appreciated, and at a close proximity. He thought of the limits on the intimacy he’d enjoyed with Ian Betler. Ian, who was always at his elbow. Murdo considered Rory, whose eyes he could feel on the back of his head. Was this appreciation? It did seem a kind of covetousness. Rory coveted something about him, as Ian had coveted the air between them, the distance he kept, the space he hadn’t dared cross.

  Murdo dropped back. Looking at Rory, he saw avid attention, and that Rory was touching his teeth together over and over behind sealed lips, not as if chewing, but as a kitten’s jaw will tremble as it stalks a fly.

  I must speak to him, Murdo thought. I must clear this up. Perhaps he could show Alan’s shoes to Rory. Murdo touched the bag strapped to his saddle. He felt the bulge of a shoe heel. But the shoes might be a reproach to Rory – even more of a reproach than Billie’s unfilled commission had been to Murdo, who had stayed away another day, missed his passage to Stolnsay, and sailed from Dorve to Southport instead.

  ‘Rory –?’ Murdo began.

  But Rory looked past him, frowning.

  Some distance away, where the road swerved toward the ruin of Ormabeg Abbey, there was a horse in harness to a small trap. A small horse.

  ‘That’s Kirsty, and Miss Minnie’s trap,’ Rory said. Then, irritable, ‘God save us!’

  They went on, picked up the pace some. The sun came fully clear of cloud, a sleepy wave of warmth.

  Kirsty was cropping at the edge of the road, tender grass, not tussock. Her nose was wet and coated with grit like coffee grounds. Rory dismounted and went a short way toward the ruin, calling his son.

  Three fledgling plover shot up out of the heather, went in a wide circle fussing, unbusinesslike, still only practising fear.

  Rory stopped still, stood listening.

  Murdo leaned down to see the bag between the seats in the trap. It was old, the surface of its leather crazed with dusty grey cracks. Its owner was a T P Paxton.

  A tide of shadow started after the men from the south, came making a meal of hilltops and hurrying into hollows.

  Murdo stood on his stirrups, looked around at the heath, road, ruin, Rory on the track to it, calling, not anxious, but in the way someone calls when they enter a house they hope is empty.

  Murdo took off his coat and draped it over the trap’s seat, concealing the bag. Then he dismounted, applied the trap’s brake, and looped his reins there to tether his horse.

  He caught up with Rory on the tumbled stones heaped by one of the arched eye sockets of the abbey’s main nave. Within the shelter of the ruin grew fuchsia bushes, thickly flowered now, in August.

  ‘There is no one,’ Murdo said. ‘Who knows how far Kirsty has wandered.’

  Rory rounded on him. ‘My son is none of your business! Alan is none of your business!’ He was savage.

  Murdo stepped back, his foot turned, and a stone clattered down the pile and fell with a hissing thump into the bracken.

  Rory went on speaking, but not to Murdo. He spoke to the air, to the roofless nave, to bees wandering among the red and pink pendant blossoms. ‘I will be wed,’ he said. ‘I will be made. A wealthy man.’ It was as if he was setting out reasons to the still, sunny space of the nave. And Murdo, who hated to be forced back even a step, shrugged, and turned to pick his way back down the piled stones.

  He felt the silence consolidate behind him, and looked back – so that the clubbing stone fell on his shoulder blade and not his skull.

  AS SHE listened for the horses, Billie became sleepy. The heather was a damp but resilient bed. If they found her, she’d rather they believed she was sleeping, not hiding. The violet-striped silk dress was in her bag. Lord Hallowhulme had wanted her to wear it – had wanted to see her in it. She remembered his lips and the smell of his beard. She turned her head to brush her mouth back and forth on the aromatic heather. Perhaps she was asleep, supine on the flank of a big animal whose heart was beating through her own. If Mr Hesketh opened the bag the dress would foam up. She saw it, glossy, costly, really scarcely even hers – worn only twice – foaming up, as if still partly filled with her flesh, into his gloved hands. She thought she heard it, a hiss of decompression. She thought she understood James Hallow’s gift – a man can keep track of a woman who wears silk.

  Then she did hear the horses. Rory Skilling called, ‘Alan!’ She heard his boots in the mud, then his calling moved away. Several minutes later she knew they were up at the ruin, on the far side of the road from her. She heard Rory raise his voice to Mr Hesketh.

  There was a pause. Then a thump, stones grating together, the fall of something not stony – of something bony and articulate.

  Billie lifted her head. She saw Murdo Hesketh head down and faceup on a slope of piled stones, his hands raised. She saw Rory in the arched window, one arm uplifted, like St. Michael the Archangel above a prostrate Satan.

  Billie sprang out of the heather and blundered to the road. She dropped behind the cart and peered through its wheels.

  Hesketh deflected the flung stone and rolled heels over head off the broken wall. Rory leapt after him. Before Hesketh found his feet Rory was on top of him, holding him down by his throat and casting about for another stone. Then he had one. But Hesketh slowed the blow – didn’t prevent it, there was something amiss with his braced shaking arm. His shirt cuff was torn and soaked red.

  Clawing at the cart, only agitated, without intention, Billie pulled down Hesketh’s coat. It slid onto her knees and something dropped out of its pocket, knocked against the spokes of the wheel, and fell with a clang onto a jutting rock in the road. Only an instant in the sun and it was already warm. Then it was in her hand – hot and heavy. She scrambled out from behind the trap, ran across the road, and up the path to the abbey. Her dress had a wider gait than she, and caught in the bracken so that she was wading through cloth more than heath. She wasn’t quiet – but they couldn’t hear her. They were in a grunting struggle. Then she heard a hollow crack, a groaning gasp, and only one man breathing. Rory had his back to her; he had straddled Mr Hesketh. She saw his whole body heave as he breathed, saw one fist move slowly to his side, fastidious, a dark separation between each of his fingers, blood seeping from the rock – it seemed – the rock dripping. Rory dropped it and thrust himself off Hesketh. For a moment he held his hands, palms curled, only an inch from his own chest, then he looked down at them, one soaked, the other sprayed red. He remembered evidence of guilt, or perhaps that his jacket was new, and didn’t wipe them. He raised the worst hand to his face, dropped his jaw, put out his tongue, perhaps to groom the blood away. Then he noticed Billie.

  Billie saw light alive still in the pure fall of Hesketh’s hair – and she saw blood pooled in his ear. Then she saw him move. Rory saw it, too, made a sound between whine and howl, and flung himself after his dropped stone.

  ‘No!’ Billie yelled. She went forward, her arms straight out before her, a water diviner, but her wand – a gun – waving loose, not yet coming to the point. Billie stumbled, squeezed the trigger, and heard a click as the hammer hit an empty chamber. A spring, a mechanism in the gun, turned the cylinder. Billie watched
it roll around as if pushed by invisible fingers.

  Hesketh moved. He turned his head. The blood, already viscous, trembled against its own skin at the rim of his ear, then oozed down into his hair. Rory’s eyes flicked sideways to take in this movement – then returned to Billie. He made hushing motions. Don’t wake him. He had the rock in his hand again, wrapped in its blood-varnished scabs of lichen.

  ‘No,’ Billie said. She squeezed the trigger again and the gun leapt backward and bit her – she thought – at the base of her thumb. She was knocked over, her whole body following her wrist, and a pain like a mooring line that was pulling something vast in toward the firm earth. Billie crouched, crying, and looked at her hand. Her thumb was bent back toward her wrist, white between base and wrist, white with pressure, permanently pinched. She couldn’t move her thumb; it felt dead. She shook her hand, as if to dislodge the stark thumb. For a moment the joint was frozen, then she shook it back into place – another sharp pain that settled into a throb. Aubergine bruises began to rise from within the joint and burst onto her skin, like a stain soaking through. Billie couldn’t stand to watch it. She sat and wrapped her hand in her skirts.

  The men were motionless. Billie heard a whispering, the gossiping commentary of wind in bracken and heather. She thought she heard flies, hundreds of them, among the dark timbers of the pitched roof of Stolnsay Kirk. Her ears had refused the sound when she first heard it, weeks earlier. Now she remembered it perfectly. Then she registered what she really had to hear, the rattle of the trap’s wheels. Hesketh’s horse, tethered to the brake handle, had reared, raising the whole trap a foot from the road. The trap dropped, the brakes disengaged and Kirsty bolted, the trap and Hesketh’s horse going along behind. Billie watched them go, Rory Skilling’s horse following at a more sedate pace.