Only Sofia-Elisabete

by Robin Kobayashi

  “A thousand times I’ve forgiven her for the past.”

  “Then, ye didna truly forgive her. Ye’ll never heal that way.”

  After a while, I admitted, “I wasn’t always nice to my mother. In fact, I could be downright hateful. Sometimes when we argued, I blurted out cruel things.”

  “Ye’r punishing her.”

  “It seems”—I swallowed hard—“I didn’t wholly forgive her, and she knew it.”

  “Ye’ll need to search yerself for the path o’ forgiveness.”

  I gasped into my hand. “My path … my true path. I still need to find it.”

  “An’ follow it when ye’r ready.”

  But I wasn’t quite ready.

  Just before we parted, the healer gently squeezed my hands to bid me farewell.

  “Peace to ye, Sofia Munro.”

  “Peace to you, Cairstine MacColl.”

  At four o’clock, it being the twilight hour this deep into autumn, the men returned carrying three brace of rabbits and five of birds amongst them. They hung the game in a cool dry place. The birds that were too shot up to be hung we ate for dinner.

  “Your Mr. Munro—he’s a good shot,” the colonel admitted. “He’s not soft.”

  “You misjudged him. His aim is true.”

  Just then, Kitt joined us.

  He said in a crackling voice, “Conn MacPhee will deliver a brace of rabbits to the Widow MacPhee, and another to Sorcha, along with some sacks of meal that will help them survive the winter.”

  My husband’s generosity and his forgiveness of Sorcha didn’t surprise me. He was more than half-way to his usual self.

  “Dear Kitt, each day you are more exceptional than the last,” and I kissed him.

  He smiled, and then he laughed for the first time since Iona. Gargling with the rowan-berry tonic that old Cairstine had given him, had much improved his voice beyond muffled whispers. In fact, almost everything about him had improved. His firmness of frame, his rosy cheeks, his tempting looks—none of these things escaped my notice.

  Darkness came on suddenly after that, and the stars so bold and brilliant spelled out Kitt’s name across the vast Stygian sky. And when that sign from the universe happened, I took myself to bed, where my man lay resting, to warm with him. He smelled of smoky peat, whisky and the sea. Gently I dabbed each of his eyelids with my violet love potion.

  He murmured lazily, “Violets … your delicate scent … wafted into my dreams each night,” and then he warmed me for some minutes. His lips tasted of sea-salt mixed with honey.

  A cough sounded, followed by three heavy knocks. We warmers nearly tumbled out of bed.

  “Mrs. Munro?” The colonel spoke to me through the loose boards that served as the door.

  I squeaked out, “Yes, colonel, what is it?”

  “It’s downright quiet in there. Your Mr. Munro—is he in health?”

  “I am in capital form,” Kitt assured him in his croaky way.

  “Oh, capital! Capital!” cried I.

  The colonel said, “Ah, well, Mrs. Munro, I shall leave you to your capital frog-prince.”

  Ten minutes later, the colonel knocked again. He must’ve been feeling terribly lonely.

  “I say, does anyone want to join me for a whisky toddy?”

  The time had come for us to go home. Our long-suffering servants Neville and Baillie were glad of it. No more rustic tasks for them. No more smoky peat fires. No more sleeping on the earthen floor, upon a spread of sheepskins.

  We avoided Glasgow entirely. Our return route took us higher north to Stirling, and eventually we reached Edinburgh, the ancient capital. As we stood upon Calton Hill, admiring the vast views, we could see part of the university building, and I knew Kitt yearned still to go there, but something was bothering him. We then took a turn to look at the splendid memorials. At Hume’s Monument, the colonel told us plainly that he wished us to marry again but this time on English soil. Only the English way would do for him. He cared not that we were already of age to marry under Scottish law.

  “But, sir,” Kitt protested, “we were already wedded in Spain.”

  “Look here, Munro,” the colonel snapped at him. “We don’t know for certain whether that Spanish wedding of yours is legal. What if Doña Marisa raises an objection? Believe me, the woman can’t be trusted. Better to stay dead for now, so that old Mr. Munro doesn’t send his press gang for you. On the day you become one and twenty, you marry my daughter, and I’ll give her a dowry the size of which will make your head and toes spin.”

  I cried out, tearfully, “Did you call me your daughter?”

  “I might’ve done.” He was funning me.

  “Six years I waited for you in Spain.”

  “My dear girl, it seems I forgot you there, and I’m sorry for it.”

  Instantly, and with such great tenderness, he folded me to his heart, where we became father and daughter once more. Oh, the love of a true father at last! We cried and cried for a great while. Patting my back, he then manfully declared, “Enough tears! Enough sadness!” He made a joke about how our long-awaited reunion had occurred on Scottish soil, not Spanish soil as originally intended, and the oddity of it made us laugh for whatever reason. We were both silly that way.

  Kitt rejoiced to see us happy together. While my father and I talked on in excitement, remembering things from our past, he continued to ruminate upon my father’s offer—thinking of everything, always thinking and deliberating.

  He said, finally, “If I marry your daughter a second time, sir, it’s not because of her dowry.”

  “To be sure not.” My father gave me a teasing wink.

  “We became married for life, that day in Biescas, when we were poor,” I reminded my husband.

  Kitt squeezed my hand, and smiled faintly.

  I added, “We shan’t need Brodie’s help any longer, so that you can study medicine.”

  “So that we can both study,” he corrected me. “We shall find you a tutor.”

  This certainly pleased me.

  “Well, then, there’s an end on it,” declared my father.

  “There’s an end on it,” Kitt repeated.

  “Good, excellent.” My father would have the last word.

  He, my dear father, had finally given us his blessing. It was a momentous occasion. The men, however, simply resumed their fascination of monuments—this time the Nelson Monument that loomed in the distance. Why were the most important monuments dedicated only to men? Why do men get to decide this, that and other matters?

  “Not so fast, Kitt Munro,” said I. “If we are to marry again, then there must be a second proposal of marriage for it to be official.”

  “Oh, Sofia … not here,” he mumbled, with a nervous side glance at my father.

  Taking his arm, I teased him with, “They say that until a man praises a woman to the heavens and declares his love to her in a poorly written poem or a bungled marriage proposal, the woman cannot possibly think herself in love with him. Pooh, nonsense, thinks I.”

  He smiled not a little at my wry humor. Seriously thinking, always thinking and deliberating he was. I, too, was seriously thinking—thinking about how to get my way. Placing my gloved hand upon his, I gently stroked his palm with my thumb. His love-sigh became my reward.

  “Must you discompose me here and now?” he whispered in a strained voice. “You know how much I crave you.”

  My red beads, so warm against my skin, urged me on.

  “Mr. Munro, what will you do with this hunger of love that you feel for me?”

  Pink in the face, he willed me to hush.

  “Really, sir,” I persisted, “you ought to give me your love, nicely dished up.”

  He must’ve known by now it was useless to try and stop me. After a moment, he spoke his mind.

  “What will you do with it if I serve it up again?” he challenged me, drily.

  “Well, now, once I’ve consumed a second helping, I suppose I’ll want a third.”


  We laughed under our breaths. My father noisily cleared his throat, reminding us we were not alone.

  “I say, Munro. Who is proposing to whom here? How can this silly food talk be official?”

  “It’s official, sir,” Kitt declared. “I accept my wife’s offer of marriage.”

  The triumph of it pleased me, because soon I could write to Tito in Cádiz, to tell him that I had married for love and that he would have his great-grand-babies. And if I could ever discover which convent Emmerence had gone to, I would write to her as well. My second engagement to Kitt made me happy, which made my husband happy, which made my father happy that the whole thing had been happily resolved according to his wishes. In this state of triple happiness, we left Edinburgh for now.

  Three days later at Whitby, we stopped for some refreshments at the White Horse Inn. On a brief stroll afterwards, below the East Cliff, Kitt and I met with a woman playing a smallish Irish harp of painted green wood. She sat outside her cottage, a vision of mermaid loveliness, with the crashing waves of the North Sea as her orchestra, and the whistling wind as her vocalist.

  Thinking of my own harp in Sevilla, it occurred to me that I still didn’t know what Kitt had done with it—the one that Doña Marisa had sold to him when she had sorely needed money. Kitt had teased her by saying he would perch atop it and float down the river. Where was the harp?

  “It has probably reached America by now,” was Kitt’s enigmatic reply.

  With his dreaming eyes, he invited me into his wandering fancies. Together, then, we spun a tale.

  “After mending the poor harp’s broken strings, I set it adrift.”

  “On the Guadalquivir,” I chimed in.

  “Where it floated downstream.”

  “Past the rows of fragrant acacia and the sweetly-scented orange and lemon groves.”

  “And the sandy plains that stretched to the horizon.”

  “Past the lazy cows and sheep and the fierce Andalucian bulls.”

  “And the shining pyramids of salt twenty feet high.”

  Wrapping his arm round my waist, he swayed us gently from side to side. Oh, his honey-sweetened scent of the sea bewitched me. He murmured in my ear the rest of the tale.

  “It floated into the mouth of the river, where the currents were strong. A balmy breeze swept it out to the Atlantic and, several days later, it was tied to the stern of a fast-sailing cutter bound for America.”

  “Ah, it was towed there.”

  “So, you see, despite being battered and bruised, it refused to be beat down and forever broken. Nothing could quell its adventurous spirit and desire for a new life.”

  Kitt was in my mind, and I was in his. Why shouldn’t my tragic harp get a happy ending? We were imaginarians in every positive sense of the word. Though I congratulated Kitt on inventing a good story, something still puzzled me about my clever husband. I asked him how could someone like he, a man of science, be also a man of imagination?

  He thought on it, and then he described how the best of science combines the rational with the imagination and an empathetic heart. The imagination is boundless, as is scientific possibility. Did I not recall what Goya had told us? Imagination united with reason is the source of marvels. While I liked his explanations, I was just glad to know that my Kitt could believe in the unbelievable.

  Mine wasn’t the only unbelievable tale of love in Scarbro’ that cold and windy day when we returned from our long journey. The best physicians and surgeons of London had given up on my father. They said his loss of memory couldn’t be cured. But the impossible was always a-happening in my tale. I’ll never forget how, after our butler let us in and we crowded into the entrance-hall, Aggie’s hopeful teary eyes searched my father’s face. He bounded towards his object of affection, catching her in his arms and kissing her fervently. Passionate lovers they are again.

  “Do say hello to the Munros before we disappear for hours,” he half-joked.

  Aggie’s joyful laugh made us laugh. “My dear colonel, we can’t disappear yet. Dinner is ready to be served—roast beef and macaroni pie, your favorites.”

  He made a wry face. “Macaroni—no, no, no—I can’t eat such an unmanly thing.”

  “Well, I could. I’m monstrously hungry,” said I.

  Kitt put a hand to his stomach. “I am in need of a monstrous dinner.”

  When, the next morning, Kitt ate a monstrous breakfast—five soft-boiled eggs, five buttered toasts, five slices each of cold roast beef, roast pork and ham—Aggie fussed over him, pouring him plenty of sage-tea, with vinegar and honey in it, which she said would help to soothe his throat.

  “Oh!” cried Aggie. “I can’t bear the thought of how much you suffered and starved. You must be considerably fatigued from your journey.”

  “I’m very well now,” Kitt assured her.

  She sighed with worry. And then, so did he for some reason.

  He said in his scratchy voice, “I found twenty guineas amongst my things this morning. I cannot possibly accept it. It is too much.”

  “You are family.”

  A beat of time passed. In that quiet moment, just like the other quiet moments he had these days, he must’ve thought of his family in Glasgow and being dead to them.

  “I shall repay you as soon as I am able,” he replied.

  “Nonsense! You lost everything, even your watch.”

  “I didn’t lose everything,” and he cast me a sweet look.

  Aggie’s motherly devotions to Kitt didn’t go unnoticed by my father. He grumbled about the young man’s large appetite. He grumbled about the expense of the food. There are days when I think he and my Kitt will get along famously, and then there are days when I think not.

  “I shan’t miss Scottish oat-cakes,” said I, hoping to change the subject. “One can’t swallow them without a cup of ale.”

  My father scornfully remarked, “I could hardly manage them myself. Even buttering them up, when there was any butter, didn’t help.”

  “Oat-cakes are nutritious. Without them, the isle-folk and Highlanders would go hungry,” came Kitt’s solemn remarks. The two men exchanged a long look.

  Have I mentioned the torrent of rain outside? This meant those two were thrown together in the house for the entire miserable day. The peace didn’t last for more than a few hours. What happened was this. Kitt and I had hidden ourselves in the library to read and not to read. While we were not reading, my father, in his foul mood, came upon us. He growled out something in Portuguese, and I wondered what had rekindled his latent memory of our shared language.

  “Did I speak in Portuguese?”

  “Indeed, you did.”

  He rubbed the scar on his forehead. “I wonder what I said?”

  I hemmed and hawed, because no proper lady would dare to utter such epithets.

  He whirled upon Kitt. “Have you lost your senses, Munro? I could force you to marry her after the way you’ve compromised her in the library.”

  “Really, sir, we are to marry a second time when I am one and twenty.”

  My father clutched his head as though his brain were muddled.

  “Come here, Aggie!” he shouted from the doorway. “I’m having an episode.”

  Aggie laughed out loud from somewhere. “Another? So soon? Oh, colonel, you’ll exhaust me.”

  Why did she laugh?

  Later that afternoon, Aggie explained to me how it was with my father. In London, some years ago, when he was soon to retrieve me from Spain, she had helped him to purchase dainty girlish things to make me English again.

  “He even bought a gelding for you. How he longed to dote on you, his only child. Then, the vicious prank happened, his brain became damaged, and he lost what remained of your childhood years. And when he met you, and slowly realized who the young Mrs. Munro really was, he found that you no longer belonged to him but to a handsome usurper of your affections.”

  “But Aggie, I must warn you. He challenged Kitt to a duel.”

  “I�
��m sure he didn’t mean it.”

  “Truly, I heard him so say in Portuguese.”

  She shook her head. “Dear Sofia, can you not guess? It was your father, not me, who gave the money to your husband.”

  I gaped at her. “I’m all amazement. How did such a thought enter his mind?”

  “His is a complicated mind.”

  Still, my complicated father worried me. Given his temper, he must never know what had occurred in Spain. Otherwise, he would surely duel with Don Rafael and even with his own brother, Lord Scapeton. The burden of my Spanish past was mine alone to bear, though it helped to have an understanding husband and a beloved step-mamma to whom I could confide anything. Dear, dear Aggie—she must have felt much love for me by now, having heard so many of my confessions and reminisces.

  “Aggie, where are you?” my father called out. He claimed to be having another episode.

  “Let me attend to my father this time,” I told her. “I have a great mind to scold him for feigning some of these attacks of illness.”

  Having hastened down the passageway, I tapped at his door, very officious-like. Presently the door opened a crack.

  He said, much disappointed, “You’re not my Aggie.”

  But I forced my way into his bedroom. Something was odd. Sniffing him, I detected a strong musky scent. He never wore scent.

  “Why are you wearing a silly night-cap at this time of day?”

  His face turned a hottish red. Quickly he threw it off, and he kicked it under the bed. What on earth was he about? It occurred to me then that he was engaged in lovemaking with Aggie, under the excuse of an episode—a lie for the sake of intimacy.

  He looked out the window. “Now that you have found Munro, he will take you away from me, and we shan’t make any other excursions together.”

  “Shall we not? But you must put an end to any of these false episodes. Your real episodes are worrisome enough.”

  He turned eagerly to me. “Oh, do you have another excursion planned for us?”