Corrag: A Novel Read online

  ON, and on. We had our brave times. Those were when we’d pass a sign for carrots or fresh milk, and want some. So I’d lick my thumb and clean my face with it. I’d tidy my hair, and knock on a door. I’d smile. I tried a Scottish accent to the carrot-selling man, and he blinked, shook his head, said pardon? When I used my proper voice he stepped back. But still, I got some carrots—maybe voices do not matter if there are pennies to be had.

  In fog, we came to a farm. I came through the mist in a mist-coloured cloak, on a mist-coloured horse. And I tried to buy some oats, for my mare was looking thin. The farmer’s wife stared beadily, said what’s in that purse? I looked down. Some leaves were spilling from it, which she saw. I had no words. I shrugged. She said if you have cures in there, I need some.

  What for?

  Nightmares. My boy has so many he fears sleep, and has grown ill.

  And I helped her with that. I gave some peony, and spoke of its virtues, and she nodded and gave us some oats. But later, as I groomed the mare with thistles in a wood, I heard there she is! Witch! She cured my wee boy! Witch! Witch! How unfair. What a kindness returned. I could not see her, for the fog—but it was surely her. And the mare sighed, lifted her foreleg so I might climb aboard, and I said go—as best you can in all this fog. She went. She saw the way. And we did not knock on doors, after that.

  We drank bog-water. We slept in old byres.

  We passed a ditch, thought of settling down in it, when a twig snapped and the mare reared up. A boy was crouching in there. Why are you hiding? I was cross with him. He did not say a word. But in the fields I heard dogs, barking, and he whimpered at the sound, and I knew he was frightened for his life. So I said climb on. Quick! The mare waded through a river with us. It was fast-flowing with snowmelt, and loud, and her hooves clattered on the river’s rocks. But the boy was safe from the dogs, after that, and was gone.

  On a very wet evening, as we trudged through the mud, we heard a gasping sound which was not rain. I looked about, frowned. And there, in a hedgerow, was a hare—snared in wire. It was bleeding at the neck, and I dropped down from the horse to tend to it. I said poor you, poor you, prised the wire away, and it cut into my fingertips so my blood mixed with the hare’s, but at least it scrabbled free. Off it went, long-legged. And I wrapped my hands in dock leaves for a day or so.

  I still have scars from that snare. See?

  I have more scars than that—for a running life has its wounds. It has its wire and rope. It has the stones thrown out with witch, as I ran, and most stones were only fast air by my ear, or a thud on my mare’s behind—so that witch stung more. I have scars from a dog that tried for me.

  But a running life has its lonely times—such lonely, long ones—so that I think the soul’s wounds are the worst of all. I do. To pass homes, as we did. To hide in the woods as a family passes by on the road, laughing. A family! What one had I known? I’d been happy enough—Cora and me, and the pig before I killed it. Our scrag hens. That had been my family life—no father to speak of, and no family name. Just Cora, just Corrag. That red-skirted woman by the burn, and her child… And had I minded? I’d never minded. We were as we were, her and I. But I held the mare’s nose as I stood by her, and I watched. This was a true family passing by—parents, and brothers, and children, and wives.

  I scratched the mare’s neck, as they went on their way.

  Maybe she felt it, too. She would see fields of horses, or a stable-door, and put her ears forwards at them. She never called out. But she’d put up her tail and dance on her toes, and once I took her over to a bay filly in a barn. They pressed noses, and breathed. They rubbed their rumps on the wall, side by side. And I was sorry she had to leave her friend—but she did. We had north-and-west to do.

  It is being lonely—that night-time, running life.

  Like a twilight I came to. It was feather-grey, and red. I thought look at the beauty… But the mare was busy with the ground nuts, so I watched the sky alone, and I knew that that moment—seeing the shadows grow long on my own—was how Cora’s life had been, also. She’d lost her parents, and run. And she’d run and run. And I hoped that she’d had a twilight or two with a person beside her, hand in hand—not all of them on her own.

  SO YES, the heart has its scars. It has its spaces, so that I wondered if it whistled when the wind was strong. I wondered if it leaked, on rainy days. A heart with holes in it.

  In rough, open country, on a full-moon night, I was thinking of hearts, and witches. I was looking up at the moon, as I rode, and dreaming my dreams. When I heard voices.

  The mare heard it too—ears up. I slid down from her, and crept towards the sound. Through some hawthorn bushes and past a fallen log, I saw firelight. It was a warm, good glow. By it, I saw a rabbit roasting on a stick, and a group of men were sitting by the rabbit, drinking ale. They were not like usual men—for they were redcoated, with shiny boots on their feet. They had yellow breeches.

  Soldiers. I spoke this under my breath, into the leaves.

  Why here? I didn’t know, or cared to. If they had been sitting very soberly, and talking in a measured tone, I might have dared to venture forth, and ask for a taste of their rabbit in return for a herb or two. But sober was not the word—not at all. They were passing a bottle of some such about themselves, and they drooled, and one said shall I say why they have whisky, and drink it so much?

  Why?

  For the Devil drinks it. He drinks a dram each evening…

  They laughed. He’s a Scotsman.

  The Devil? A man from Glencoe, most likely!

  They laughed.

  ’Tis being unfair to the Devil, sir! The chief of that sept is far worse than him…A butcher, he is. And that valley is worse than all his flames!

  I trusted no part. I did not like this talk of the Devil, and I did not like the sound of this Glencoe place. For all their bright buttons and scarlet coats, I thought do not show yourself to them. Turn. Let them be.

  So I turned.

  But as I did my skirt caught on a bramble, and I pulled the branch as I left so that it strained, creaked, and then let go of me. It jumped back to its starting place, and rustled.

  The laughing stopped. There was silence. Then I heard short, hard words, and a growl, and metal drawn out, and they were getting to their feet.

  One of them looked up, and saw me. He had red eyes from the drink and the fire, so that his face matched his coat, and he said well, well. An English voice. An English voice in a Scottish field, and he came towards me. I answered him. I said keep away, so that he heard my own voice, and said she’s English to them. An English girl so far north…Well, well. And he came at me.

  He fell through the hawthorn bush. I hurried away, but he reached, and found me, and his weight came down on me so that I fell to the ground. I scrabbled. I screamed, and tasted earth. I screamed again, and no no please no and when he put his hand on my mouth to silence me I bit him very hard, so he let go, and I pulled myself out, stood up.

  My mare was whinnying, and I leapt onto her back. But I was pulled back down, straight down, and I fell very heavily so that I lost my breath. The weight came back upon me so that my cheek was in the grass, and my chest was breaking, and I heard shh. Hush now—I won’t hurt you… He said it very gentle, like he meant no harm. But I knew he meant harm. He licked my ear, said ye be good for me now…

  I would not be good for him. I would not be good for him or his friends who were cackling by the fire, and I wished I was stronger—I wished I was tall, with claws and sharp teeth, so that I might rise up and kick him away. I wished I was a true witch who could do magick or bring the sky down with rage, and I thought of Mother Mundy who a reiver had climbed upon, and the thatch above her had burned as he did, and I thought how mangled she was, and the soldier was working under my skirts, now, and saying that’s right, and I hated it, I hated it, and the mare hated it also for she was rearing up and snorting, and I thought not this! Not this way and not with him, and not here—and
I would not let him grapple with my skirts anymore. He was pulling me, so that I slid, and I thought I will not let him find me, I will not let him… I closed my eyes. Gritted my teeth.

  Pop.

  A neat sound.

  A hot, huge pain. In it came. It flooded me, and slowly I began to roar with it. I roared, and screamed, and his hands stopped. His weight came off me. He stood back, said what the…?

  I staggered to my feet. I stumbled with my shoulder high up, like a wing, and my arm swinging freely, and all the time I roared like I had done in Thorneyburnbank, in the elm wood, long ago.

  God save me, he said. At my shifting shape.

  Then, he said a witch…

  I wailed. I clung to the mare with my left arm. I hung on her side, said go! Please go! And she’d never carried me like that—half-on, and roaring like that. She turned her head, briefly, to look. And as she looked, the soldier came back with his hands, and whisky-breath—and he clawed at her. He grabbed her tail, and pulled. It made her squeal, and kick with her legs, and she put her ears forwards, snorted and carried me fast fast fast into the northern dark.

  How we galloped. How we went, that night—but on other nights, too. How the mare was, with her ears back and her neck stretched far, far ahead of me, and her mane between my fingers, and her hooves striking rocks and mud, in the dark. I held on tight. When we galloped, I kept my head low. I put my cheek by her shoulder, and looked down at her foreleg, flashing white, white, white. Or I watched the grasses rush by, felt the river splash up at us and the branches catch my hair. If there were stars, I might look up. But also, when she galloped over moors, when my mare was at her wild, midnight fastest and the air was cold, and the moon was full, I might close my eyes—and with her warmth against one cheek and the wind against my other, I felt a magick in me. I thought go to my mare. I thought faster! Faster! And briefly, it did not matter that I was dirty, or tired, or I had no meat in my belly; it did not matter that they called me witch, and I had no safe place to be—for I was galloping on my mare, through a cold and unknown landscape, and I thought I live. I am living, and alive. My mother was not. Others were not. But I was—and I was so glad of my mare, and I smiled into her shoulder as we galloped through the night.

  Over moors, and through forests. A beach, too—we galloped on the sand with salt in our hair. And we galloped up the sides of hills so that, as dawn broke, we seemed higher than all other things, and we were black shapes against the spreading sky.

  We’d slow down, at first light. We’d catch our breath, and rest a while. We looked back to see the shiny, broken water, and birds coming back to where we’d chased them from. The paths through grass, where we had been.

  Quiet, now. You have no words to say.

  The shoulder? It does that. It leaps out at its own bidding, but I can force it too. I can make it unclick and lift up, like a wing. And later, when the mare had carried me away, I slid down upon the floor and knocked my arm against a rock—pop, again. And so my arm was righted.

  I cried a little at the pain. I cried at what had happened, and what had nearly come to pass. I cried, too, on seeing my mare’s tail—for it was mostly gone, tugged out by a soldier’s hand. But she nuzzled me, and scratched her nose on her foreleg, and I patted her. I pulled her rabbit ears.

  Who loves a horse, in this age? Who loves a creature? I loved my mare, who galloped for three hundred nights with me. Who nuzzled my pockets for mint, or pears. Who stared very firmly at things, sometimes—a tree, or field’s gate—as if they might say boo at her. I loved her—I knew I did. And I knew, by loving her, that the heart could not be ordered, and the head could not keep it down.

  Do not love—but already I did.

  She was my best friend ever, I think.

  She took me to Glencoe.

  Tell me, Mr Leslie—how do you love your wife? I think you love her greatly. You have spoken of her every time you’ve sat there on that stool. Your handkerchiefs are embroidered by her, I think, and your inkwell is silver-topped—a gift? It is very pretty. You said my hair is like her hair, and I’ve seen you watching, when I twist it—like this.

  I knew what I was. When I first stood in the marshes, and heard the frogs croak, and saw the clouds moving, I knew. Different. Lonesome. That it might be hard to find love.

  But I knew I would find it. I always knew.

  As the soldier had worked away at me, and my mouth had filled with mud, I’d thought—I’d known—I will love a man with all my heart, one day. He will hold my hand. And it would not be this soldier that took me, or made me known. Not him.

  And I say this: what creatures we are. What powers are in us—in all of us. What we already know, if we choose to spend some time with ourselves. What a deep love we can feel.

  LEAVE me, now? I am lost, tonight. Lost with it all.

  I will tuck myself up with the man I found, in the end. His name was Alasdair. He had hair like hillside when it is wet, and the ferns are old—deep, earth-red. He saw the beauty of an eggshell, and loved his son. Once, he said you…

  Come back? Tomorrow?

  I will take us to the Highlands. To height. To blowing skies.

  My love,

  I am joyful. It snows, and I am far from what I love—but I am joyful. What a joy (it is too weak a word for how I felt) to see your neat handwriting, to touch the bottom of the paper where the heel of your hand would have rested, as you wrote it. I imagined I could feel your body’s warmth from it. I could not, of course—but in such a climate as this we can often dream of warmth, and think we feel it. As you know, I miss you very much.

  I read your words in my chair, by the window. I had a view of the hill, and the north-east of the loch which is still thick with ice. I stoked my fire, pulled a rug about me and unfolded your letter—and it was as if you were speaking them to me, in that room. Once, I asked you not to say darling—remember? I thought it took all dignity and solemnity away—the qualities my father said a man must always have. I scolded you for darling, once. I was a fool to do so. Youth brings in such foolishness. Age, and absence, has changed me, for as I sat in my chair, I was grateful for the word darling, in ink. How did I ever think it took dignity away? The word itself is dignified, I think—for love is an honest, dignified, God-given gift between a man and his wife. I am blessed by it. I smoothed the word with my thumb.

  I love that we are not the same. Some men wish for a wife who agrees with her husband, always—most men, I think. Not I. You are the wife I want, and no other, and Jane I love, deeply, how you see the world with your wide and dark-blue eyes. You reprimand me, I think? I will accept it. I can be zealous, I know, and selfish.

  You write, perhaps the word “witch” harms her, and your cause? How you speak of the prisoner (I shall use this word, instead—for she is a prisoner, is she not? It is not wrong to call her that) is how I knew you would, for you’ve never liked the term. Yet still, you surprise me with your eloquence, and truth. She is a human, as we are, you wrote, but if we do not nourish or water a living thing it will twist itself, and rot. You are right, my love, and I am ashamed that I forgot it, or did not see—for I did not. I heard witch, and I saw her, and I was reviled. What did I write, in my letter to you? Of disgust, I recall. I will ask for the Lord’s forgiveness—for does He not teach tolerance, and that no lost soul was always lost? “For he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted” (Psalm 22:24—it is one of the torn pages in your Bible, where the moths found it. I trust it is still readable. One day, I shall buy you a new, uneaten one, my love—when I am on Irish soil again, which will be a good day).

  So I must not see her as a witch, or a half-creature. She is ill. And perhaps, as with so many illnesses, a little care is half the remedy. Her lonesomeness and matted hair, and how she talks to herself are all parts of her twisting, from lack of love. It is indeed a wonder that she is not savage, and cruel.

  I’ll say, Jane, that any cruelty in her life seems to have been done against her, rather
than by her. But these are early days.

  Such tenderness in you. I glance down on your note and see if she speaks of loneliness, then she is poor indeed, and they are tender words. You have not met Corrag, yet you talk with such measure that I feel you have—that you visit with her on your own, and neither of you tell me. Perhaps you cross the Irish sea weekly, take a lantern and your violet scent into the tollbooth, sit on that stool…I know you do not. But I also know that women keep secrets between them. Last night, I heard Corrag speak of a winter sunrise—of its pink skies and silence—and I think you would have loved to hear such words, to have seen such a sky. You are my little bird. You sing, and fill the house at Glaslough with your singing—even when you do not say a word.

  Here is a truth that you have taught me: that if it was you, Jane, who played with your hands as you spoke, and whose voice was high-pitched, I’d think it delicate, and enchanting. Yet because it is a prisoner who has done, and does, these things, I call it madness. It is wrong of me.

  Do not be blinded by James, dear one. Do not assume God’s will. You write far better than I do—and I was the student, the essayist. I read these words and pondered on them, in bed. Do I assume His will? His purpose for me? I cannot tell. But you are right to remind me of the need for a humble, open mind. I have always thought that James’s restoration was—is—my reason for being in this country. It is, after all, the reason that Ireland has banished me, called me a traitor for not accepting William as king. But I may be wrong, in thinking it. He—our Lord—moves in wondrous ways.