The Holding

Book by Simonds Merilyn

I am a woman Alone in all the wide World.

Until today I had three Brothers, William Wallace, Robert Bruce, Harry Douglas, named for good Scots heroes, every one. Margaret the Queen, they called me. Now the Queen has taken her Revenge.

Margaret pauses, regretting the baldness of the last sentence. But it ­won’t do to start crossing out. As it is, she has but a few pages at the back of the old book on which to tell her story. The task nearly overwhelms her. If only she could put it on paper as it exists in her mind, years recollected as a single moment — the seawall at Pittenweem, the Madawaska hills, the crossing, the clearing, Ewan, all one.

But time and space rule the page, force her to chip at the round stone of memory, choosing this bit, discarding that, so much overlooked, abandoned as she rearranges the fragments to make a path from then to now, from there to here where she sits on a stump within view of the cabin, the plates of rabbit stew unwashed on the table, sauce congealing on her brothers’ lips.

There’s just time to make this record, leave something of herself behind, then she’ll find her way out.

That was how it ended, but where does it begin?

Pittenweem. A small child on her knees, coarse grass pressing crosshatches into her skin. She is pushing a little boat around a puddle, a boat she fashioned from a scrap of paper she found blowing down the wynd. She wore it like a cap as she rambled the brae, looking down upon the cottages that clung like gannets’ nests to the cliff at the heel of the bay. Coming across the puddle, she removed the hat and kissed it, setting it on the water, keeping it steady with one hand until she spied the brown lug­sail, her father’s boat, the Mairead, moving out through the Firth of Forth, pursuing the herring, the silver darlings, into the perilous North Sea.

Seven times she circles the boat around, not sunwise but the other way, withershins, her eyes never off the dark sailcloth though it shrinks to the size of a pocket handkerchief, an envelope, a stamp. Then she stops, and as if impatient with her game or with a puddle so circumscribed, she strikes the paper sail, capsizing the little craft.

The child hears her name called and turns to see her mother running through the gorse, the flowers a shifting golden flame against the dark sky of the woman’s skirts.

The mother scolds the girl as she pulls her to her feet. Have you no thought for your father and brothers? Come, bring this wee Fifie to safe harbour.

And she stretches her daughter’s hand, forces her fingers to the sagging sail, but the child will not take hold. The two of them stand, their backs to the sea, wind fingering their red-­black curls, mother and daughter, alike as two leaves on one tree, each stubborn as the other.

The mother relents first. With her own hand she sets the boat right and guides it to the shore, lifting it into her apron pocket. You’re an odd one Margaret Jannet, with your tempers and your stares. Whatever shall become of you?

We will leave this place, she says, the words told to her so often they come to her as memory.

The wind, like a gossip, is everywhere. It fusses with their hair as they stand on the braehead and it writhes through the village kirkyard, too.

Margaret is older now, as tall as her mother. Her bedgown jacket, printed with blue heart’s-­ease, billows gently at her chest and her layered petticoats, the topmost one drawn back as an apron, give the appearance of widening hips, though by the slimness of her hands it is clear she is still a girl. She stands with her mother before the family marker, a plain grey stone like all the rest, inscribed already with too many names. Sophia, Robert Roy, and James Henry, all lost to the cholera, the babies Isobel and Bride, dead even as they entered the world, and the most recent, Angus Stewart, lost at sea when Margaret was only seven. For him, the weight of stone holds nothing down.

You ask too much of me, her mother whispers, although her father is nowhere near.

A sway of dark skirt, and Margaret leans to glimpse a woman slipping between the graves. She follows, for she has seen her before, though always at a distance, gathering simples on the brae or seaweed on the tidal rocks, pausing by the kirk tower or at the lip of the seawall, gazing down at the water that worries the stones, one hand fixed on the last bollard as if she were tethered to it. There is something odd about her clothes, the old-­fashioned white cloth she wears under her head-­square, the rough weave of her skirt. Odder still is her bearing, something furtive in her posture despite her frame, which is sturdy, and her glance, which is compelling, defiance in her eye. Margaret has followed her down the wynds from High Street to the Shore but she loses her every time, once by St. Fillan’s sea-­cave, once in the knot of fishermen that gathers at an upper turn to stare across the roof­tops, taking measure of the weather as it moves across the Firth. The old woman is an incomer, a stranger to the village who seems to pass unnoticed by everyone but her.

She pursues her now between the obelisks and the monuments until at last she has her trapped. The old woman turns to face her, a slight smile on her lips, as though this was her intention, the two of them alone in a crease of wall where the grass grows high and the markers are laid flat as if to make certain the dead keep to their place. The old woman regards Margaret with encouragement, a promise in her gaze, but before the girl can think to ask who she is or what she wants, the woman takes a step back and dissolves through the stones.

But that is not where the story starts, in childish games or faintly smiling ghosts. It begins, like birth, in blood.