Chapter Two
Jayne watched from the rocks as the men brought over the last of the animals to board the Dunara Castle . They had been going back and forth in the smack for two days, bringing down the sheep from An Lag in small groupings, and Hamish had caught a black eye off one particularly angry ewe who kicked while he rowed. Now they were towing the cows behind the small boat, ropes looped around their horns as they mooed in bleak protest. Jayne had never seen such a curious sight, and she wondered what the animals must make of it all; they had no context for the historic event of which they were a part. They didn’t know the beginning of the end had begun.
Wooden trunks now sat outside every door, looms and spinning wheels were set against the walls, the slates cleaned in the schoolhouse, the hearths gradually growing cool. Every family was down to one cooking pot, one wash pot, their beds and tables and chairs. The rest of their worldly belongings were packed, and for the first time in their lives the villagers felt themselves held in a state of abeyance – no longer fully here, but not yet left. She saw how everyone kept looking out to the bay, as if checking the cargo ship was still there or else keeping an eye out for the Harebell that was coming to spirit them away tomorrow. She sensed they were half expecting a message to come that it was all off, a misunderstanding; they’d be staying here after all.
But with every passing hour, that likelihood was fading. Amid the teeming activity in the glen, realization was sinking in that this really was their final day in their ancestral homeland.
That there was no chance of rain made the transition simpler. The skies were baked a deep sapphire blue, the late summer sun pulsing down on a languid sea. Jayne looked around as she knitted, watching the buttercups and pink thrift nodding in the meadows, hearing the wrens singing loudly from hidden crevices in the dyke, and thought St Kilda had never looked more beautiful. Was this her goodbye? An apology for the harsh winter and all the others before it, which had taken so much from them? Or perhaps she was trying to make them stay, beguiling them with warmth and comfort and pretty views.
Only the seabirds were unmoved, whirling in their thousands in a white lattice in the sky and shrieking at one another as they dived for fish to bring back to the colonies on the cliffs. For them, life would grow easier now too. After tomorrow they would be predators and not prey; no more men on ropes snatching their eggs or grabbing at their necks.
Jayne heard footsteps, the rustle of a skirt, and looked back to see Rachel MacKinnon making her way over the rocks. ‘Of all the things I shall miss about this place, one shall be this familiar sight of you on the rocks,’ the woman said with her apple-cheeked smile.
‘Rachel,’ Jayne grinned. ‘No wee ones?’ Rachel had nine children in all, the youngest being only eleven months. It was so rare to see her without them, it was like she was missing a limb.
Rachel settled herself on the smooth rock beside her, tanned feet and slim ankles peeking from her skirt. A look of calm settled upon her face as she looked out to sea and gave a happy sigh. She tossed her red hair back and looked over at Jayne. ‘Ian’s taken them up to the gap for a last look...He said it’s for them to remember, but really it’s for him.’
‘Aye. Norman’s been the same. He’s been out almost every hour for the past few days.’ She had heard him stir from the bed a few hours after their nightly ritual, when he had supposed her asleep. He’d moved soundlessly for a big man, only the click of the latch on the front door telling her he’d gone back outside as the moon shone. ‘He says he’s helping Mathieson, but whenever I catch a sighting of him he’s up a slope, taking in the views.’
‘And he was one of the keenest to leave, too!’
‘He was,’ Jayne nodded. ‘I think the service tonight will be fair heavy in spirit.’
‘Aye,’ Rachel sighed, watching closely as the Gillies’ cow was hoisted, helpless, onto the boat. ‘The Reverend’s not stepped outside today.’ She gave a small groan. ‘I imagine he’ll be wanting this sermon to frighten the devil from our heads, with all the temptation we’ve ahead of us now.’
Temptation: it was an alien concept for a community that had only ever focused on existence. Lorna’s promises of more and better, once only a mirage, were slowly beginning to take on solid forms. For the younger men, that meant the new lassies they would soon meet, while the older men talked of earning a wage and feeling the weight of coins in their pockets; the children wanted to see motor cars and go to the pictures; the women dreamt of a wireless, hot running water and private lavatories.
The two women sat in companionable silence for a while. Jayne had – uncharacteristically – dropped a stitch on the last row, and she went back, rehooking it on the needle. Of course, she knew perfectly well she no longer needed to knit any socks. There would be no more tourists to buy her wares before they departed now, and the rent quotas for MacLeod had been fulfilled, the barrels of fulmar oil and sacks of sheep wool, tweeds and feathers assessed already by the factor in the featherstore and now loaded onto the ship. But knitting was the only way she knew to quell her restless spirit. It concealed her shaking hands and gave her body something to do as she waited for the clock to run down and fate to run its course. It was the only way she could appear normal as she alone anticipated the swing of the blade.
‘Your Mhairi’s been working hard on the high slopes,’ she said. ‘She and Effie have done a fine job of bringing the flocks over.’
‘Aye. I’ve missed her, but it looks like Donald’s plan to send the girls over there for the lambing wasn’t so harebrained after all. They only lost three in total and there were plenty of triplets. Did I hear right, we’re twenty-eight over last year?’
‘That’s what Norman told me.’
‘So then we’ll make some coins at the roup between us all. We needn’t have fretted so much after the sheep drama—’ She stopped herself, her hand shooting out to Jayne’s arm in quick apology.
‘It’s all right,’ Jayne said. ‘I know what y’ meant.’ Over sixty sheep had been lost in that snow storm, but the successful lambings this spring had more than made up the numbers. It meant Molly’s death had been needless; they could have all stayed indoors that fateful day and they’d have still come out with a profit this summer. ‘No sign of Flora, of course.’
‘Aye,’ Rachel said in a sombre tone. Terrible news had come in the past few days, which had laid the girl low. Flora’s fiancé, James Callaghan, a rich businessman from Glasgow, had been on an expedition to Greenland, but word had come that his ship had been caught and crushed in the ice. ‘Lorna says she took the news awful bad. It must have been made all the worse by the fact that she was so close to being reunited with him. She was right on the cusp of stepping into her new life.’
‘Has Christina been over to see her?’
‘She tried, but Mhairi told her Flora’s gone to Cambir Point. She wants to be alone for a while.’
‘She didn’t even want to see her own mother?’ Jayne asked, surprised. Flora and Christina had always been so close.
‘That’s what Christina was told,’ Rachel shrugged. ‘And with things so busy here, it was difficult anyway to spare the time to get over there. At least she’ll see her tomorrow, no matter what. And Flora’s got Mhairi with her, so she’s not alone over there.’
Jayne started on a new row of stitches.
Rachel lay back on her elbows, enjoying the sea view. ‘Did y’ hear Mary’s tightenings have started?’
‘No!’ Jayne gasped. ‘Will the baby come today?’
Rachel shrugged again. ‘Lorna’s been monitoring her most of the day but she says her waters are still intact, so she’s probably a way off yet. Y’ know what it’s like with firstborns; they tend to drag their heels.’
Jayne didn’t know – she was versed in deaths, not births – but she let the comment pass. Rachel loved to gossip and she often forgot her audience. ‘So then it could come tomorrow instead?’ Was that even worse? ‘How would we get her on the boat?’
Rachel pulled a face. ‘If they can get the cows up, they’ll get Mary up too.’
Jayne hoped they wouldn’t have to lash her with ropes and hoist her. ‘But a boat’s no place to have a bairn,’ she said. ‘If I was her, I’d be crossing m’ legs and holding on till we land tomorrow.’
‘The way Mary holds a grudge, I’m sure she could hold on for another month,’ Rachel grinned. ‘What’s twenty-four hours?’
Jayne smiled at the joke, but she looked back out to sea, hiding her eyes from scrutiny. She knew exactly how much could – would – change in the space of a day, but it wasn’t her place to warn her friends. Nor to frighten them.
The silence that fell had lead weights in its skirts, pulling down from the rafters of the old kirk and settling heavily upon the villagers as they knelt on their cushions, praying into clasped hands. Jayne glanced around, not a hair on her head stirring as she took in her neighbours’ white knuckles, tears falling past scrunched-shut eyes, whispers hovering on moving lips. Even the Reverend, standing in full power at his pulpit, had run out of words. His sermon done, his warnings spent, all any of them could do now was hope that this was for the best after all, and that a bright new beginning really was coming on the back of this ancient goodbye.
Almost every seat in the tiny chapel was occupied. The smallest of the children sat quietly for once, and even Mad Annie – notorious for her resolute abstinence from God’s house since the drowning of her husband fourteen years prior – was sitting stiffly on the wooden bench beside Ma Peg and Old Fin. Her lips didn’t move and she wouldn’t bend her head, but nonetheless she was here, reluctantly surrendering to forces even greater than her indignation. Only four villagers were absent: Mhairi and Flora still in Glen Bay, and Crabbit Mary and Lorna. Mary’s waters had broken after all, and Donald was sitting in the pew alone, wearing the apprehensive expression of every expectant father.
There was a stranger among them, too: Mr Bonner, a reporter from The Times in London, had come over on the Dunara Castle to bear witness to the ‘historic event’. He was staying at the Manse with the reverend and his wife, and in the space of a day had made a nuisance of himself, wanting to ask the villagers questions while they finished packing up and cleaning their homes. No one believed him when he said the evacuation had caught the public’s imagination. Why should anyone care what their thirty-six souls did or didn’t do?
Jayne looked past him as she scanned the congregation, taking in the faces young and old that she knew as well as her own, and trying to memorize this moment. Never again would they sit here as a community, praying to the God whose mercy had been but a thin skin protecting them from the full might of Mother Nature.
Next to her, Norman cleared his throat; it was an innocuous gesture but she knew her husband too well and recognized the impatience it contained. He was a man of action, not of contemplation, and there were still jobs to be completed before they could step onto the boat in the morning.
Stirred by the prompt, the minister’s voice rose into the silence, the islanders sitting back on the benches in a muted symphony of rustling tweeds and creaky joints as he invoked a final blessing upon their souls. None of them were ignorant, now, to the mortal temptations awaiting them on the other side of the water; he had made sure not to squander this opportunity to terrify his flock into moral obedience.
They watched with lowered gazes as he strode down the aisle and took his position by the door. There was a pause, then the villagers rose, turning to one another and beginning to talk in low voices. Usually there was a rush for the doors, but tonight was different. This was the final time they would ever walk out of here.
Jayne looked around at the simple white walls and beamed roof of the kirk they were leaving behind. There was no master stonemasonry here or dazzling stained-glass windows. Take out the pews and the altar and, to anyone else, it could be a schoolroom. Only the St Kildans themselves knew of the hope that had breathed colour into this space: marriages and christenings marking the high days; frantic prayers uttered as the crops failed, the seas rose, the winds blew and the babies died. Lockjaw and smallpox had bludgeoned their community in times past, but it was comfort and ease – or at least the promise of it – that was finally propelling them away from here.
That and a needless death.
Jayne stared down at her feet, shuffling on the wooden floorboards in a slow-motion stampede as everyone talked around her without quite seeing her. She stole a look towards the MacQueen pew, where Archie and Christina MacQueen had bookended their boisterous brood. David, as if sensing her stare, looked up and caught her gaze; his lashes were wet, his cheeks flushed. She knew it was a struggle for him to contain himself. If he had been able to find Molly anywhere, it had been in here...but now, no more.
She smiled, trying to remind him with her eyes that they still had tonight to say goodbye too, and his head dipped fractionally, confirming the plan, but she saw no comfort in his face.
She glanced over at Norman. He was a step ahead, talking with Neil Gillies about the bother with getting the cows onto the boat earlier. She hadn’t yet found the opportunity – or words, or courage – to explain the plan to him, and her nerves pitched. What if he said no? Defying him, even arguing with him, was impossible to consider.
They were almost outside now, and she could feel the cool night breeze whickering past the doorframe, peering in like a curious cat but not quite able to curl inside. She felt clammy and a little dizzy, for reasons other than the heat, and she needed to gulp down some fresh air.
‘Norman. Jayne,’ the minister said, shaking Norman’s hand and nodding his head at her. ‘I trust you found comfort in the sermon? You were in the forefront of my mind when I was making my selection about leaving our loved one—’
‘Aye, thank ye. Keep us in your prayers, Reverend,’ Norman said briskly; he had a way of saying the right thing and yet somehow undercutting it too. Jayne knew it suited him to have someone to pray on his behalf. He had never been a natural churchgoer and he had resented the power the minister had wielded over their island community; but like the factor’s, the minister’s power was now on the wane here. As of tomorrow, he would no longer be the guardian of their souls.
‘Thank you, Reverend,’ Jayne said, smiling apologetically for her husband’s curt manner as he stepped past the churchman without further ceremony or thanks. ‘It was good of you to remember us on such a momentous occasion.’
‘One might argue this evacuation is all but happening in Molly’s name, and of course your loss is still fresh...’
Raw was a better word, she thought, still smiling politely.
‘...I know it shall be difficult for you to leave her behind.’
‘Aye, but we’ll carry her with us in our hearts,’ Jayne said quietly, squeezing her hands to suppress the tingles. She felt a shadow pass over her.
‘Honour her memory through good deeds. I know you will, Jayne.’
‘I’ll try,’ she said, stepping out into the night. Though it was only just past nine, the days were already growing short and the stars were beginning to peep above them, distant galaxies winking in a white haze. The tide was out and the curlew moon threw a silver shadow onto the water.
Norman had already gone ahead, oblivious to her absence at his side. Ahead of him she saw Effie’s father, Robert Gillies, limping along the street with his brother Hamish, and it struck her that although she and many of the villagers were leaving behind the dead, some would be parted from the living too. The Gillies brothers had spent their entire lives – fifty years or more – never more than thirty yards apart. But tomorrow, when the majority of the islanders disembarked at Lochaline, Hamish and his family, along with Donald and Mary McKinnon, would continue on to Oban, further down the coast. The rupture was already beneath their feet, the first tremors beginning to be felt.
Many of the villagers were already halfway back up the street now, their voices carrying over the hiss of the sea sinking into the sand. She could see the youngsters – having dodged around legs in the kirk – were now tearing over the grassy path and jumping onto the low stone wall, knowing tonight was no ordinary night. Ahead of them, Lorna was standing by the door of the McKinnons’ cottage, watching the villagers heading back. Was there any further news on the baby?
She looked for Donald, wondering if he had seen the nurse too, but she caught sight of him peeling away from the crowd instead and heading somewhere with a determined look. She watched as he strode over to where Effie was standing; she was in conversation with someone hidden by the coffin cleit – only, conversation wasn’t the right word. Argument looked more like it. She was standing rigid, her arm outstretched, though she was pulling back, and it was only dropped as Donald made his fierce approach.
Jayne stared as hot words were exchanged between them briefly, before Donald took Effie away from the confrontation with a black-eyed look. But he didn’t see Effie turn back and nod to the other person, reluctantly though almost conspiratorially too.
Jayne frowned, confused by the encounter, and as she passed by the coffin cleit a few moments later, she glanced over to her right and saw Frank leaning against the stones.
Another shadow passed over her, her heart quickening as indistinct images surfaced – or were they memories? She looked again at the islanders walking back towards their cottages for the last time: Donald hastening Effie away; Effie’s furtive look back; Lorna standing in the McKinnons’ doorway...Jayne had a sense that nothing was quite as it seemed.
Only that players were already moving into position, and that the ending had begun.
Every cottage door was open, amber lights blazing through the windows as if the tiny isle was trying to announce itself to the moon, now high in the sky. They were approaching the midnight hour, the sea shushing its lullaby, but though the number of people lingering on the street had finally dwindled away, still voices carried through to outside, as if the villagers were restless and unnerved in their denuded homes. No one knew quite what to do with themselves. All evening Jayne had watched the comings and goings from the rocks, shrouded in the darkness as she knitted socks she didn’t need. Waiting.
She had seen Norman and Frank heading up earlier towards the cleits on Ruival, heads together as they strode out; she had watched as the Gillies brothers sat on the street wall, smoking their pipes. Effie had streaked towards the Am Blaid ridge like a white moth, flitting and darting and glancing back as she headed to see her friends in Glen Bay. The curtains had been drawn on Crabbit Mary’s bedroom window all evening – the only curtains still up in the village – but Lorna hadn’t come again to the doorway; too busy within? And she had seen David kiss his mother on the cheek and slip around to the back; away from the cottages, he was lost to the darkness, but she knew exactly where he was heading. She slowed her stitch rate, knitting several more rows to give him some time alone with Molly before she decided to head back to number two.
She slowly walked the grassy path, barefoot in the moonlight. If she had been in more of a rush, she wouldn’t have caught sight of Frank Mathieson’s stocky silhouette as he walked along the top of Mullach Bi, backlit by stars, and it stopped her in her tracks as she watched him heading for the ridge. The rush of static came again, flooding through her veins and rooting her to the spot.
It felt so unnatural to know what he did not, the stalled vision of his face, blood, rocks and a rusty knife flashing behind her eyes. It told her only who – not when, where, how or why.
Where was Norman? The question pressed into her consciousness and she swivelled her eyes, locked in a body that could channel but not direct. There was no sign of him that she could see from here, but the island had fallen into an inky immersion with only a narrow strip of lighter sky along the top of the cliffs. He could be anywhere on the moor, walking around on the far side in Glen Bay, or out of sight around Ruival by the Lover’s Stone, or meeting up with Frank on the saddle of the Am Blaid ridge.
Or heading back here alone, right now, their work done for the night.