Of Stone And Sky Episode 8

Agnes stood watching, then pushing her fingers through her hair and licking her lips, slipped into the back of the hall. The air was thick with the fug of perfume and hair cream, cakes and tea, sweat and breath, and as the reel ended and grinning people fell away and jostled back to seats, the band struck up a waltz.

The young men scooped the pretty girls into their arms, the farmers took their wives and the kids shot through to the buffet tables in the next room.

She stood inside the door, scanning the hall, sick with fear.

“Agnes!” a voice cried.

She turned to see a tall woman in a pink crepe dress and blonde hair with a cigarette in her hand. “What you doing here?”

It was Beulah, Gid’s younger sister. Agnes had met her a handful of times before he left for the front, and occasionally during the war when the lumberjills at Glenmore came into the villages for a dance.

Beulah was a parlour maid at Rowancraig House, the mansion on the local estate that owned the Munro sheep farm and thirty thousand acres of moor, but she swanned about like she owned the place.

She’d also been possessive of her brother and scornful of Agnes – Gaelic speaker, vagrant, tink.

“I came for Gideon,” Agnes said. Beulah lit up her cigarette, took a long, deep draw, then blew out a blousy cloud of smoke. “Seen him yet?”

“Yes.” Agnes lifted her chin. “Through the window just now.” Beulah eyed her. “He was hit.”

“I know.”

There was another hard look, then Beulah puffed out a breath of smoke and shrugged.

“God knows he could do with a bit of fun. He’s in there.” She pointed with her cigarette to the buffet room and swept off.

Entering, Agnes recognised Dougie MacPherson, as he also had spent the war serving the Timber Corps in the strath and they had met at the dances.

His face lit up at the sight of her and he nudged Gid, who was standing with his back to the door.

When he turned, the rawness of the scar was a shock. She made herself smile and look deep into the remaining blue eye.

He stared back, the flesh around his wound blanching, till he finally gave his plate of sandwiches to Dougie and brushed his fingers on his trousers. As he hesitated, she moved forward and took his hands.

“Welcome home,” she said and stretched up, kissing him on the scarred cheek.

His hands gripped hers and then he caught her in a tight hug and she felt how all the boyish excess had been stripped away. His smell was stronger, his hands sinewy and his voice, when he finally spoke, was darker.

“We won.” The words were harsh. She understood, but believed this bitterness would pass. Time would heal, love would heal, she would heal.

Right now, it was a time to dance. And so they did, for as long as the band played, Gid holding her like he feared she might disappear, and when he had to release her to swing with another man, catching her back again with a fierce pull.

He and his friends had already been drinking at the Ferryman before the dance, and every now and again he whispered to her that it was time to pay old Moothie MacDram a visit, and he would draw her out the back door to the beech hedge where he’d hidden a half-bottle of whisky.

For each of his slugs he insisted she have a sip as well, and while the fire of it hurt her throat, she saw how it brought a softening to his limbs and face.

By the final waltz he was holding her so close it was long past decent, but she had no reputation here to lose and he, she could tell, didn’t give a damn.

Afterwards, he walked her down the road to the oak tree behind the Ferryman where he pressed her against its gnarled trunk and kissed her hungrily, his breath heavy with alcohol.

Giddy herself, she met his kisses with all her sweet power, opening her mouth to him, running her lips across his face and brushing them over the scar.

And when he tugged at her blouse she helped him, till the wanting and needing peaked, and they welded in a clumsy rush against the dark tree. Her head reeled, eyes stung; she was a good girl. She had wanted this, but not now.

It seared her, a branding that would tie her for ever to him and his land, binding her – whose family walked the whole Highlands – to him, hefted like his fathers to one farm.

“Marry me,” he said, kissing her softly across the forehead.

“I just have,” she whispered. And so it was.

Union

When he turned, the rawness of the scar was a shock. She made herself smile and look deep into the remaining blue eye

By that accounting, Gid had already married several times.

The giggling barmaid in the Southampton pub; the ladies of the night in France; the ones in London on the way home. But he did not count them.

It’s what war did to you, he believed – indeed, what it owed you. Flesh for flesh, an eye for an eye.

For all that, none of it compensated; not a thousand good-time girls could balance the scales.

He never confessed any of it to Agnes and she never asked, not even about the gossip in the village after they married, the drunken fumbling at the Ferryman, the hook-ups away on market days or the maid at Rowancraig who had to leave. Instead, she gave herself only to him. Colvin was the same: the wild goose that partners for life.

Sorley, on the other hand, as he freely confesses, played the field. Sowed his wild oats.

Was a Casanova, a Lothario, a Don Juan. By what other glorified titles shall we name him? Playboy, Stud, Stag?

As for me – Mo the Maid (ha!) – never. Though I came very close. Once.

More tomorrow.

Merryn Glover is the author of three novels. She was brought up in south Asia and has lived in Scotland for nearly 30 years. She was the first writer in residence for Cairngorms National Park in 2019 and is published by Birlinn.