by Leah Fleming
‘Whatever for? They’re not going to be fishermen.’
‘I would have thought all civilized people need to know how to swim, especially on an island.’ Ewan felt his cheeks flushing at this dressing down.
‘Your mother doesn’t want Agnes near boats. Her chest is weak and exercise will exhaust her. It would not be wise to continue these lessons for your own good. If you must go down to the sea, make yourself useful on the harbour. Help collect in the lobster creels. Do I make myself plain? Stay away from the Macfee girl. She was born to trouble, that one!’ John Mackinnon wagged his pulpit finger again.
‘Yes, sir.’ Ewan bowed his head to his father’s will. What was wrong with Agnes’s friend? Minna might only be a rough cottar child but she had shown courage in overcoming her fear of the water. Now she swam like a mermaid, with trailing white hair. She made Agnes rock the boat with laughter when she sang to the seals. He could see no harm in their friendship at all.
*
Three weeks later, towards the end of the summer, Ewan was rowing off Balenottar Point checking the lobster pots when he spotted the two girls on the shore waving to him, beckoning him to heave to. He had been careful to obey his father’s wishes, leaving his sister to her games. Now they were playing tag on the shingle and jumping out of the sand dunes in a makeshift slide, dancing and waving.
He paused to watch them, envying them their friendship for he had always been a loner. No one wanted to play with the minister’s son. Each time he had made a friendship his father moved on to another parish and Ewan was forced to start all over again.
He found companionship amongst fishermen in boats, watching the sea creatures and birds, sketching them in charcoal in his sketch pad.
The water around his boat was calm enough but further out he could sense the sea was strengthening and soon breakers would be forming. He could read the wind and the waves and he was uneasy. Ewan watched the girls stripping off their skirts and shoes, racing towards the water leaving clumps of clothing dotted along the beach.
Minn was shouting, ‘We’re coming in! We’re going to walk on water like Jesus!’
‘No! Not here… Go back at once! It’s further than you think,’ he yelled out to them, standing up, forcing his voice above the swell, rocking his own boat in his anxiety to warn them.
Their two heads bobbed in unison as they ploughed towards his boat against a racing tide. Ewan’s heart was pounding with fear as he watched helplessly. They hadn’t the strength to swim against the tide to reach his boat; the stupid pigheaded kids. Had he not warned them? ‘Go back now!’ he screamed into the wind.
His arms were burning as he rowed like a galley slave, letting the current push the vessel inshore, trying to race the glassy heaving swell. Balenottar Cove was edged with fingers of rock and steeply shelving. The Atlantic rollers roared and crashed on to these rocks when the sea was angry. Each rise of the swell pushed him further out of reach of them. ‘Go back! Agnes… Go back!’
Ewan’s seagull screams were useless. He was praying out loud but the God of the swelling tide was deaf to his pleas. The roar of the rising water in his own eardrums drowned out any voice he might have.
The girls were in deep water now and tiring fast. ‘Float on the water… For God’s sake! Let the tide take you back!’ he willed them to hear his command.
His arms were useless propellers against the current. He strained to keep their heads in view but the waves were breaking over them and the white spume engulfed them and they kept disappearing.
There was no time to panic, for a huge unexpected wave crashed over his boat, hurling him into the water, throwing him up into the air and flinging him helplessly towards the shore. He could feel the grit under his feet and stood shaking to see where the girls were heading.
In slow motion he saw the dark head of his sister bobbing helplessly, drifting to the finger posts of jagged rocks. He saw in horror her tiny body thrown up on to the rock like a limp rag doll as over and over the waves played with their toy, dashing it against the rock until it disappeared, wedged in some gully out of reach.
He thrashed out in that direction but his arms were like lead weights and would not turn. His strokes were powerless to propel him forward. He was thrown once more on to the sand where he gasped for breath. Why was there no one on the shore to help him? Where was Minn?
Then he saw the girl rise up on the crest of a mighty wave, propelled lifeless on to the shore. He was half crawling with exhaustion, dragging her from the edge to safety. He pumped the water from her lungs.
‘Live you stupid caileag,’ he prayed, hoping he was lost in some nightmare. He turned her face down, lifting her arms in the only way he knew until she coughed and sicked up the seawater. With relief he saw her face was turning pink and she gasped for breath. He left her to recover, yelling for help. Surely someone was around?
Then he caught sight of his own upright boat coming in on the roaring tide, unbroken, and he threw himself in the water to launch himself towards the rocks where Agnes had last been seen. He was crying with panic,
‘I must find her!’ She might still be wedged safely into some rock. ‘Agnes, I’m coming.’
Ewan bobbed up and down on the water in pursuit of his boat; the damn thing was elusive, drifting beyond his grasp, but he swam on like an automaton, using every last ounce of strength in his body, until he grabbed the side and hauled himself in. Then the sky went dark and he could no longer feel his limbs.
He lay too exhausted to care if he lived or died at the mercy of the cruel tide.
Then there were voices and arms and other strong hands pulling at him, dragging the boat back to the shore.
‘My sister. I have to find her… over there… He fooar! So cold.’ He was too weak to point or raise his head, so cold as a blanket fell over his shoulders. He could see the heads shaking and knew it was too late to save her.
Little Agnes’s body was recovered the day after the accident. She was washed up naked on the white sands of Ardnag Point, bruised and battered, tiny in death, her black hair tangled in seaweed, tossed by the tide, barely recognizable. She was wrapped quickly in a blanket of jackets to hide her disfigurement and carried back to the Manse.
Ewan sobbed as the little bundle was lifted from the cart. His mother lay sedated in the darkened bedroom and his father stood like an alabaster statue trying to compose his features as he viewed what remained of his child. He had barely spoken one word to his son since that dreadful evening when Ewan was brought home shivering by Doctor Murray. Now the parson must contain his fury and find words for an elegy of hope for his only daughter. He laid into his son only when they were alone.
‘What have you to say for yourself? I forbade you to take those girls in the water. Her death and our sorrow are on your hands.’ John Mackinnon’s words were like ice on his skin. ‘The other bairn is saved, I hear. Trust the sea to deliver back its own. I hold you solely to blame.’
How could he offer anything in reply? He sat in his room for days unable to eat or sleep. What was the point of telling them the honest truth that he had come upon them purely by chance or that Agnes had disobeyed his warnings when she answered Minn’s challenge to ‘walk on water’.
‘No one walks on water but the Lord! Blasphemers will be punished,’ his father would have answered. How was the Macfee girl supposed to know such sophistry? It was not the child’s fault. She was too young to know that no one challenged the sea, too innocent of the ways of water and tide, too ignorant to realize its treachery, for the ocean’s ways were cruel and its heart was ice cold.
Someone must take the blame for the accident so it might as well be him. It was his fault for teaching them to swim in the first place, for taking away their natural fear of water. He had killed his sister.
He sat watching the silver-grey waves crashing on to the shingle in the darkening light, the breaking water pounding the sands. Once he had found comfort in watching the power of wind on water, but there was nothing rom
antic in its bleakness, only the hypnotic thrash of the waves on shingle.
A great emptiness filled his heart knowing he must watch the battered remains of his sister being placed deep in Balenottar kirkyard; the agony of his mother trying to be Christian about this terrible tragedy. There was no sleeping as the nightmares of guilt haunted his dreams. He kept swimming out into that black endless sea without a shore, trying to catch Agnes’s arm to save her from the rocks.
How many nights had he woken in a sweat of ‘if only’s, seeing Agnes drowning over and over again? Did she gulp in salt, her eyes bursting, limbs thrashing, alone and terrified? The sea was a fickle mistress in snatching one to its bosom with cruel fingers yet casting the other unharmed ashore. He had prided himself on his knowledge of the cruel sea, but who could sound its unfathomable deep? There was no peace in the running waves, memories like waves tumbling over each other, scratching his mind like grit between his toes. How could he live knowing it was all his fault?
*
For days after the drowning Minn woke screaming with terror, choking and sweating, but she could never recall the nightmare. All she could hear was the waves pounding in her ears, the water over her head and her struggle to reach the surface for breath. All she could see was Ewan’s face looming over her, shouting her back to life. The rest was a blur. There was no comfort back in the croft.
‘You bring shame to our clachan. To swim in a rough sea, to challenge the witches of Ardnag Point…’ Mother paddled the treddle of the spinning wheel with peat-stained boots as if she didn’t care.
‘It is a thrashing you’ll be getting when Uncle Niall returns, you wicked girl. Your wilful disobedience was the death of the minister’s child!’ That was the moment she found out that Agnes was drowned and it was all her fault. Not one ounce of sympathy was given to the shivering child.
She ran to the rocks to hide from the silence and the stares, throwing boulders into the water in fury. The sea shimmered like polished silver in the moon’s pale light. It looked calm and inviting but she knew underneath raged wicked spirits brewing another cauldron of boiling water especially for her this time.
Everyone hated her and for a second she wondered if she must jump into the sea and join Agnes for ever in Tir nan og.
No, not yet, whispered a little voice inside her head. You have to stay on this dry land for ever.
If only they had played on the dunes and ignored Ewan’s presence. If only she had not tried to be clever and show off to him. Minn knew behind all the excuses there was always this wish to impress the boy, to show him she was as good a swimmer as he was now. Pride was her undoing. It was all her fault and she must be punished.
There were whisperings in the cottage doors as she passed by. ‘What do you expect from a bastard Macfee? That’s the cursed one, that bairn with the silver hair and mermaid’s tail. Don’t play with her or you’ll die!’ shouted the children, running away from her.
‘I’m no going to school,’ Minn whined, backing away from her morning walk down the coast track to Kilphetrish. ‘My guts is churning.’
Eilidh Macfee was deaf to her pleas, shoving her roughly on her way. ‘You’ll go and take your medicine. I’m no having one o’mine shaming us anymore than you have. On yer haunches and walk!’
Minn crept slowly to the play yard, pausing to wait at her usual spot where Agnes was dropped off the cart for school. What was the point in hovering for a cart that did not appear? In that instant she knew Agnes would never play with her again, and Minn was alone.
The teacher, Mr Macpherson, was stern faced and said, ‘Minna is not to be blamed for the tragic accident. The ways of the Lord are strange to our blinded eyes and we will not question His holy judgement in choosing one to be saved and the other lost. It is up to Minna to prove herself worthy of such a mercy.’
They sang, ‘There’s a home for little children above the bright blue sky’, which was Agnes’s favourite hymn, and said lengthy prayers.
The teacher said she was not to blame but his cold eyes told Minn a different story. They could not hide his doubting.
The children gathered at the manse door with wild flowers and wreaths but none of them was let indoors to pay respects. Agnes was not for public viewing. Agnes was buried in the churchyard by the men of Balenottar.
Minn wept by the shore but no one comforted her. For months afterwards she was shunned in the playground and after school. There was no volunteer to take Agnes’s place as her friend. Ewan disappeared from school to the mainland and Mother decided to walk three miles further down the coast to join another kirk with a stricter congregation.
Sometimes when the blanket of gloom was wrapped tight on her shoulders she would spit at Minn. ‘I canny bear to look upon that poor minister’s sad face knowing it’s all my bairn’s doing: devil’s child that you are: conceived in lust and born in fear. From now on you will wear black weeds to mind you of your sin and disobedience, to bring you to salvation. Why did the sea no take you to its bosom instead of that angel child?’
Minn had wished that on many a tide but said nothing. The years would roll on until it was time to put books away and be at the mercy of a poor girl’s fate. Her punishment was to stay on the island for ever.
Two
The Crannog, 1933
‘Don’t you step out of that scullery, lassie, until you’ve shed every one of those rags, ma girl! Off with they sacks and skirts, down to your vest. What’s the world coming to when I have to train up a wee bastard of Eilidh Macfee?’ The cook sighed, her bosoms heaving at the sight of the ragamuffin standing in a pool of dirty woollens, her eyes like blue enamel saucers. ‘Still, you canny help yer birthing, but shove that mop of straw hair in this cap. Who knows what’ll jump out of yon wild lugs and bite me?’
Minn shivered in her knitted underwear, her bare feet were not used to stone-flagged floors. There was a dark chill in the storeroom with its grey-painted shelves high to the ceiling, stacked with brown crock pots and stone jars. To her left was a walk-in pantry where rows of dead creatures swung in the cool breeze from the wire mesh window. On the sink board a fish with glazed eyes was staring at her with its guts ripped open. This was a place of death and mutilation, and she was expected to make her home here?
‘Take this overall and the pinny, wrap it round and see to that bucket of vegetables. We’ll give you a good scrub later. Go on… sharp to yer duties, lassie! I want all they carrots and tatties scrubbed and peeled, no black bits left. And take yon footstool to reach to the sink. You’ve still a few years growing in you by the size of you.’
Minn stood awestruck by the rattle of orders. She bobbed and bent her head.
Well? Say ‘Yes, Mistress Lamont’ to me. Rules is rules here. This is no the schoolyard now, Macfee. You’re here to watch and learn, follow me like a shadow, silent and respectful, for you never know the time or the hour when that bell will clang and I’ll be needed upstairs.’ Susan Lamont was examining the specimen before her like a lump of butcher meat, hardly the size of tuppence halfpenny, a sharp-jawed little madam in the making, if ever there was one. The girl’s bottom lip was trembling.
‘None of yon sulky mouth on you. Stick that bonnet straight and find a kirby grip in the jar to tidy away yer wisps. We keep a tight ship in ma kitchen even though it’s no the Queen Mary it once was. We must do our best for Lady Rose, so not a peep out of you until that bucket is emptied.’
Minn stood on the stool to reach into the sink, tears plopping on to the peelings. This was not what she’d hoped for on leaving Kilphetrish school: to be sent for a skivvy to the big house, stranded on the island. At the end of her first long shift she ran home across the damp grass to the cottage on the shore.
‘Well?’ said her mother as she sat knitting, making the most of the evening sunshine.
‘I’m no going back there again… I hate it. It’s full o’ dead things! I want to go back to my schooling.’ Minn sat on the grass, feeding the wool from the basket to her mother like a m
achine.
‘Wheest… wheesht, mo ghaoil!’ Mother replied as she drew an arc of spun wool like threads of gossamer into the air. ‘It’s an honour for the likes of us to be serving at the big house.’
‘No it’s no. Even I know fine that the best servants go to Glaschu to seek their fortune. Why does it take so many people to look after one old woman? The Lady Rose Struther hardly leaves her bedroom. I hate it and I’m no going back the morrow.’ Minn stared out to flat sea glinting like green glass. It wasn’t fair to have to leave the school.
At the summer prize giving at Kilphetrish school, Lady Rose had arrived in a pony and trap, her silver hair tucked under a flowery straw hat. She was escorted by the minister to the platform in the yard before the assembled school, the wind whipping up her long gauzy skirt to reveal layers of silken petticoats and white calfskin boots. She was so thin she curved against the force of the breeze in a C shape, her shoulders hunched and rounded.
Minn joined the queue for her leaving certificate and a small prize for knitting and mending. The minister’s son had taken all the best prizes alongside Johanna Macallum, the factor’s daughter. She had won the Struther scholarship to a Glasgow college.
Minn hung back at the unfamiliar sound of her Sunday name, Mairi-Minna, until she felt the fist of the dominie in her shoulderblades propelling her forward to bow to Lady Rose.
‘You should be proud to be fished out of the pond, honoured that you were specially asked for at the Crannog. Was it not you who never once missed a day’s schooling? Who won the prize for the neatest spinning and mending?’ Mother nodded with satisfaction, thinking her task well done. There was little else to offer a child with such an unfortunate history.
‘Why did ma father drown at sea before your wedding?’ Minn screamed like a seagull. If only they could read into her soul how she longed to go to the mainland and study for a teacher or smooth the sick brows of the fevered ones like a Florence Nightingale or even row madly into the storm like her heroine, Grace Darling.
