The Applecross Spell

by Wendy MacIntyre

  “In an otherwise empty room, I suppose.”

  “Yes. Virtually.”

  “Ah,” he said, nodding at Callum and Clara, who leant together, shoulders touching, as if huddling against a bitter wind. “We rarely venture up there, you see. We’ll come to the reasons for that later, shall we, twins?”

  Clara and Callum nodded forlornly. “More whisky, please, Clara,” said Callum.

  Clara topped up all four glasses.

  Suzanne did not protest. I shall be quite drunk, she thought. I shall probably need to be quite drunk. Was it really any comfort that they at least did not accuse Murdo of sexual abuse? Was it not sufficiently heinous that he had regularly and brutally beaten his son, taken obscene control of his young wife’s body, and apparently hastened her death?

  Jeremy continued in his measured, priestly tones, answering her unasked question. “Miranda developed ovarian cancer. It wasn’t caught in time and of course her immune system had been devastated by Murdo’s regime for the recovery of her supposedly perfect form. When I was old enough to grasp the truth of the matter, I was given the facts of Miranda’s decline by my maternal grandmother. Her story was corroborated by my nanny. They were both powerless to stop what was happening or perhaps they realized too late. My grandmother never forgave herself. But, you see, Murdo has the cunning persuasiveness of all heartless people.”

  “It’s his lust for control, you understand,” said Clara. Her arm circled Callum’s shoulders. “I think it’s related to the mathematics. He wants to reduce the world to a set of chilling equations. You know, like that horrible time-space net he talks about with all its nasty little nodules. When I was younger, I used to have nightmares of being tangled up in that net, choking with its cords in my mouth and around my throat and my body all contorted and twisting in the webbing. But that relates too, to how he killed our mother.” Here, she hugged Callum harder.

  “Can you manage this, Callum?” Jeremy asked gently. “We can stop now if you wish.”

  Callum drank down a good inch of whisky. “A bit more’s okay, I think.”

  “Just say the word, Callum,” Jeremy reassured him.

  Suzanne took another sip of whisky. Without the alcohol, she thought, we would all find this quite unbearable.

  “It was Murdo who encouraged our mother to get interested in hang gliding,” Clara began. “She was very strong and at school she excelled at gymnastics. Her instructor said she had a natural state of suspension. When she jumped hurdles, she seemed to hang a few seconds in the air above them. She would tell us this, you know, when we were little and we would say – ’Well, Mummy, it’s because you’re an angel.’”

  Callum shuddered.

  “And she was, you see,” Clara continued, “all the things Murdo was not. Warm, affectionate, funny, kind. We had her until we were eleven. In that way, I suppose, we were luckier than Jeremy because he didn’t really know Miranda at all. To have real memories of her, I mean.”

  “I think Kirstie enjoyed the hang gliding at first. But Murdo was always pushing her to take more risks. He didn’t participate in the sport, of course. He was the observer. He stayed on the ground, making his horrid little notes, drawing his wretched diagrams of the arcs she made in the air.”

  Suzanne’s stomach lurched, as she recalled the incomprehensible diagrams she had found in the portfolio in the tower.

  “It all had something to do with a theory of gravity he was pursuing. He used her body, he used up her life, to serve his own disgusting intellectual greed. And there was probably an obscene pleasure for him in seeing her trussed up in that ghastly harness, performing for him like a puppet in the air.”

  “One day, while she was doing a glide, the wind suddenly dropped. The winds in the Border country are fickle. She fell and she died.”

  Callum stood up, his lovely face a rigid mask of pain. Instinctively, Suzanne stood too, reached across the table to touch his arm. His skin was cold. She was relieved that he did not pull away. Her urge was to walk around the table and hold him close. This task fell to Clara.

  “Right,” Jeremy said, after a moment’s silence. “That’s quite enough for now, I think. Children, how about one of the old games to break the spell. A complete change of pace is in order, I think. A tableau? Charades? A ballad?”

  Suzanne was amazed to see both twins grow visibly calmer at Jeremy’s suggestion. He is a magician with their moods, she thought. Then again: But, of course, he is their real father.

  “A ballad,” piped Clara. “How about Thomas? Jeremy, you make such a lovely road.”

  They were all three immediately on their feet, Jeremy a tall beacon in the centre, the twins on his either side. Jeremy began to recite:

  True Thomas lay on Huntlie bank;

  A ferlie he spied wi’ his ee;

  And there he saw a lady bright

  Come riding down by the Eildon Tree.

  Still reeling from the full force of the children’s revelations, Suzanne found it difficult to concentrate on the words they recited with such intensity. It dawned on her that she was witnessing an apotropaic ritual: a theatrical performance that reinforced their bond to each other and made an imaginative world whose bounds repelled Murdo.

  They were casting off Murdo’s shadow. They were showing her one of the ways they had found to cleanse themselves of their father’s corruption. She understood that they were extending her a great privilege. She remembered how Ada would burn sage or open the back door and breathe in the night air after she had dealt with a particularly demanding client. “Our survival depends on ritual, Suzanne, pure simple ritual, without the taint of blood. An homage to nature. Nothing else.”

  So Suzanne interpreted the children’s performance for her and for themselves. Here was Callum become True Thomas and Clara the Queen of Elfland, trilling out her seductive invitation, twirling about on her slim feet: “Harp and carp, Thomas. Harp and carp and come along with me.”

  When Jeremy lay full-length on the floor, Suzanne was at first perplexed. But as Clara went on with the poem in her clear, sweet voice, Suzanne began to see that Jeremy was not now the narrator, but a road. In fact, three roads, one of which True Thomas must choose.

  He lay to the right, his arms pressed tight to his sides, his expression pained, his whole body twitching. This was the narrow road of righteousness, set with thorns and briars. He lay to the left, like a drunk fallen on his back, arms akimbo, legs sprawled, a besotted grin on his face. This was the broad road, the path of wickedness. And for the middle road, the road to Elfland, which of course Thomas will choose, he lay between the twins, absolutely relaxed, his face smoothly beatific as a knight in effigy.

  Clara could barely contain her mirth. Jeremy did indeed make a wondrous road, Suzanne thought. Then Jeremy was on his feet, once again the narrator, and too soon, it seemed to Suzanne, the ballad was at an end. Jeremy declaimed, an arm about either twin, his voice melancholic:

  He hath gotten a coat of the even cloth,

  And a pair of shoes of velvet green,

  And till seven years were gone and past,

  True Thomas on earth was never seen.

  Suzanne applauded. Clara beamed. Callum’s face flushed. Jeremy bowed.

  “Oh, did you really like it?” Clara asked, as all three sat down again at the table. “We’ve never had an audience before, have we Jeremy?”

  “No,” he said. “Only invisible watchers.”

  “Yes,” Clara said. “Shall we have a toast to Kirstie and Miranda.”

  “To Kirstie and Miranda, then,” said Jeremy, raising his glass. As they all did, everyone at the table. Suzanne felt the heavy burden of the truth settle on her again. She knew she had painful days ahead, with the absorption of that truth and the making resolute of her will to confront Murdo. Her feeling for him was, at the moment, a burnt dead taste in her mouth.

  Jeremy put his hand over hers and if she had the least doubt about the three’s sincerity, it disappeared at that instant. “Will y
ou be all right,” he asked, “if we leave you for a while? I want to take the twins into Edinburgh to break the mood. But this all must be a terrible shock to you.”

  Both Callum and Clara were also watching her with concern. And so she smiled, as bravely as she knew how.

  “You could take a walk to Thomas’s stone,” suggested Clara. “Couldn’t she, Jeremy? And we’d likely be back by the time you returned. It’s between Melrose and St. Boswells. The stone marks the spot where Thomas met the Queen of Elfland. I’ll get the map to show you exactly where.” And Clara ran off.

  “I’ll just get my jacket and wallet,” Callum said to Jeremy. But before leaving the room, he came to Suzanne and put his lips to her forehead. “You must leave him,” he said quietly.

  When she and Jeremy were alone, Suzanne began to cry.

  “We’re so sorry you had to meet him,” said Jeremy, stroking her hand. “But we’re sure you have the strength to survive his machinations and poisonous nature.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Without doubt I have the strength.”

  “Because there’s more, I’m afraid, some of which only Callum can tell you, if he is able. He was the worst wounded of the three of us; that is, Murdo hated him the most.”

  “But I must at least tell you this, in case Callum is unable.” He stopped; then leant over to whisper in her ear. “It was Murdo who blinded Callum’s eye. He threw a hammer at him. Callum was ten at the time.”

  Jeremy sat back again, and without looking at her, poured Suzanne another drink.

  “Thank you,” she said. “But I believe I’ve had enough.”

  “Yes,” he said with a wry smile. “I believe we all have.”

  Clara appeared with the map, Suzanne’s destination already marked with an X.

  “It’s quite a tramp,” said Jeremy. “A good twenty miles round-trip, I’d guess. You’d best take a sandwich and something to drink. And stout shoes, of course. You do have some?”

  Suzanne nodded.

  “Oh, Jeremy,” Clara exclaimed. “You are such a thoughtful, lovable old thing.”

  Suzanne laughed. Good, she thought. I am still able to do that.

  “We’ll be back by seven, I expect,” Jeremy said, as he and Clara left. “You’re quite sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes.” I have the armour of your kindness and your truthfulness to put on, she thought. And she set about studying the map, readying herself mentally for her march.

  13

  Thomas the Rhymer’s Stone

  A favourite story of Ada’s was how Aeolus gave Odysseus the bag of winds to help speed the ship home. A fearsome gift, a leather pouch tied with a silver wire that bulged and throbbed as the confined winds fought for primacy and release. Aeolus instructed Odysseus to free only one wind at a time from the pouch as he had need of it to change course. Instead, Odysseus’s men opened the bag, for they thought it contained wine. The resulting tempest drove the ship back to the palace of Aeolus, who refused Odysseus further help because he was obviously not favoured by the gods.

  For Ada, the whole point of this tale was that live thing, the stopped-up pouch that warred within itself, a hundred tempests heaving inside a confine of skin. Her skin. After a particularly gruelling exorcism, plucking dark remembrances from her client as one might draw barbs from flesh, Ada would become for a while that wild, silently wailing receptacle. This was the supreme price she paid for her gift. She could not draw the venom out of another’s soul without sucking it into herself. So until her own release came, Ada would roam the house, trembling, striking out at nothing visible (at least to Suzanne), her shoulders twitching as if to throw off the strictures of a winding sheet. Suzanne learned that no ministrations on her part could ease her mother’s distress. “It will pass,” Ada would say brusquely. After some hours, she would at last be released, restored to the full dimension of herself, the whining alien currents stilled and banished.

  The deed of magic returns threefold to the doer. Intellectually, Suzanne grasped this concept well enough. Yet watching the excruciating agony her mother sometimes underwent to bring her clients succour, Suzanne thought the threefold recompense puny enough.

  Now as Suzanne walked by sheer force of will toward Melrose, she felt she experienced that same invasion of voices not her own. “I am being squatted by devils,” Ada had once cried out. Suzanne had not then been familiar with the term squat, and only later realized that her mother must have learned it from a British sailor. But the edge of terror had been unmistakable, a terror that had spread its contagion that day to Suzanne. For if any one virtue characterized Ada, it was fearlessness.

  She had heard her mother cry out, as much in horror as in anguish, and through contagion, had felt her own self hollowed out. She was an empty gourd. First, there was a ghastly silence of nothingness and Suzanne knew she was in a world forsaken by every imaginable god. Then there was the sibilance, which she recognized immediately as demons hissing between their teeth. Here was the very taunt of madness, the flicking of serpents’ tongues against her eardrums.

  The devils Ada exorcized that day were so virulent, they had spilled over to Suzanne. And the hideous colonization of the self Suzanne then underwent was nothing to what her mother suffered.

  “I am squatted by devils.” Suzanne walked, much as her mother had walked. The erect spine. The long stride. The steady rhythm that gradually became consonant with an undercurrent of earth beneath her. As she went on, Suzanne felt the clamour of the disjunct voices begin to subside. If she just kept moving, she might be able to separate the fact from the misconception, the honesty from the hubris. Look on it as a magical task, she told herself. Like the sorting of seeds.

  She did find it disturbing that all three of Murdo’s children were apparently such accomplished actors. They switched moods, faces, guises as smoothly as any stage veteran. She had wholeheartedly believed Callum’s poor little mad boy act. She had believed too, in his tears.

  She stopped for a moment to take the map from her backpack. As soon as her body was still, the inner voices grew louder and more insistent.

  She gave the map a cursory glance, and saw she had at least five miles to go. She decided to pluck one voice out of the clamour, to try to begin to examine them, strand by strand.

  The loudest voice was also the most inarticulate. This was Murdo’s; or rather, Murdo’s pain, stopped up in his throat, pressing down on his shoulders, making itself visible in the dark pouched flesh under his eyes. This was the tragic note that had drawn her in the very first place, a note she believed was already transmuted into a full-bodied music that plumbed universes. And now she must decide if that tragic tone were something quite other: hollow and all too sickeningly familiar. A discordant self-pity, all tricked out in a noble disguise. How many millions of men have seduced women in just this way, with a melancholy stare, a mute cry that if she will only climb the steps of the gallows and cut the rope, he will not hang?

  Who else was there?

  There was Jeremy saying Murdo was a monster.

  There was Callum weeping.

  There was Jeremy insulting her, saying her life’s work was an indulgent mental dress-up game for pampered women. (No, that voice did not carry with total conviction. He had been far more responsive to her subsequently.)

  There was Clara describing her father as a gobbling whale, with an unbridled lust for control.

  There was Gemma saying: Marriage is bad for women’s health.

  There was Callum babbling at her feet.

  There was Gemma saying: Talk to the children.

  There was Callum weeping.

  There was Miranda wailing for her baby. Her breasts are sore. Her hips bear the impression of a cloth tape measure pulled tight. (This voice was not a new one. Suzanne realized to her shame that it had persistently tried to claim her attention but that she had pushed it away.)

  There was Murdo’s breath in her ear during love-making, so hot it made a small furnace in the cavity and then s
pread a fire along her flesh, so that she writhed under or above him. This miraculous fire that extinguished her own separateness.

  Or was it simply lust, a superficial and ultimately meaningless accident of two bodies that met, fit, and shuddered in intensest pleasure? Had she fallen into the clutches of the Demon Lover, thereafter to be consigned to Hell?

  She thought she might already be in Hell.

  She heard Kirstie scream as she fell in her harness, the artificial wings collapsing about her body.

  She heard Callum cry out as his left eye filled with blood.

  Jeremy whispered: It was Murdo who blinded Callum.

  Was that it? Or were there more voices in this seething hive that was herself? This self that walked toward Melrose to see a stone that the children’s tableau had revealed as her goal. For after their horrendous narrative, she had badly needed an imposed task.

  In times of trouble, walk, said Ada. And fix on a destination, no matter what. A certain lamppost that sends a snake of light into the harbour. A tree whose bark you can finger and ask to share in its deep vegetative peace. Walk. The body’s movement through air, and your feet touching the earth, your will fixed on your destination. All this will help your mind to settle.

  I am walking, thought Suzanne, toward a stone that marks the place a human male met the Queen of the Fairies. A goal no more ludicrous than any other because it is tied to my tentative trust in the children.

  In their dramatic rendering of the ballad, she had seen the shimmering edges of the imaginative world they erected against their father. She supposed she had been privileged. We never had an audience before, Clara said.

  Far ahead of her on the horizon, the softly rounded hills looked eerily insubstantial, as if made of a concentrated blue-grey mist. All around her the Borders weather worked its habitual transformative sorcery. A swift uprising of wind, a scud of thick cloud, and a verdant hill went dungeon dark. This might be the mouth of Hell, or a gloomy exterior door that promised bliss inside.

  Suddenly, just ahead, she saw a buff-coloured tablet, unostentatious, unremarkable even, except for its graceful ogival form. She approached the stone, crouched down, and traced her finger along the carved letters. Here Thomas of Ercildoune met the Queen of the Fairies and so began Scottish literature. No irony here or sentimentality. Take it or leave it, the stone implied.