Shadow in Hawthorn Bay

Book by Lunn Janet

Come, Mairi!

Come, Mairi! Come you here!”

“Duncan, I cannot! Here is the lamb making sore trouble getting itself into the world. Come you to me!”

Mary went back to her work. Swiftly she turned and tugged the struggling lamb, crooning softly all the while, until, with a cry of triumph, she held it firmly in her two hands.

“There now, Sally, there is your wee uan,” she murmured. She laid the lamb beside its mother. It began at once to suckle. Gently stroking the ewe’s still heaving sides, Mary sat back on her heels, tossed her thick black hair from her sweaty face, and watched with satisfaction as the ewe began to clean her baby. Only then did she realize that Duncan had not called from the other side of the hill. He was three thousand miles away in Upper Canada. Yet he had called! Sudden tears prickled her eyes. In four years it was the first time she had heard his voice. He had sworn so often they could never be parted in life or death but he had gone away. And barely a word since.

“While you are gone,” she had said, “we will still be together, Duncan. Our thoughts will travel the miles. And you will be soon home.” Mary had never doubted that. She and Duncan had always been like one person, two halves of a whole. Cousins, they might as well have been twins, they had been so inseparable -- until Uncle Davie and Aunt Jean had decided to leave the Highlands. Over the plaintive cry of the lapwings, the chirping of the thrushes, and the ewe and her baby bleating softly at one another, she heard Duncan’s voice again, “Come, Mairi!” In it there was a note of such pain, such urgency, she could feel the sharpness of it in her own breast.

“How can I?” she cried aloud. “How can I?”

“Was you wanting help with the ewe, Mairi?” Annie Morrison called from across the field.

“I was not.”

“Come away then, it is dinner time.”

“In a minute.” Mary rested on her heels, pulling her plaid around her against the chill April wind and fine rain. She looked down the green slope over the valley and the hills beyond, remembering the day Duncan had left the glen. Everyone in the township had gone down to the wide path by Loch Ness to see them off. The sun was shining on their six dark heads -- Uncle Davie, Aunt Jean, Callum, the baby, Iain, and Duncan. Standing beside the cart that held the few Cameron possessions they would take with them, tears large in his black eyes, Duncan had promised, “I will come home, Mairi. Next year I will be twelve, I will be soon grown, and I will earn the money to come home.”

But it had been four years and the only word he had ever sent was a brief letter in English, not in the Gaelic they all spoke, a letter enclosed in one of Uncle Davie’s a year after they had gone away.

Upper Canada near the settlement of Collivers’ Corners 10th day of July, 1812

Dear Mary,
Here the land is low and dark with forest. We are expected to make crofts of it.

Respectfully,
your cousin,
Duncan Cameron

Mary hated it. And she had every word memorized. There was nothing in it of the Duncan she knew, of what he was feeling -- beyond those mournful words “dark with forest” -- and there was nothing in it of plans to come home. There had been letters from Uncle Davie and Aunt Jean to Mary’s mother and father, letters to say that life was hard but good in Upper Canada, letters urging them to emigrate. But although she had written and written to him, there had never been another letter from Duncan, nor any sign at all.

“Four years,” Mary thought bitterly. “Four years and the two of us fifteen years old already. Is it not old enough to be earning the passage home? And now you call me to come to you. Och, Duncan, you know I cannot do that.”

Returning to the present, Mary gave the ewe a final loving pat and rose to her feet. Absently she crossed the field to eat her bannock and her bit of cheese with the other young herders who had gathered in the lee of the hill.

The talk was all of May Morning, the big spring festival only a week away.

“And Mairi, you will have your rowan wreath and your May Morning fire made, and your bannock rolled down the hill, and you be halfway up Clachan Mountain before the rest of us are out from our beds,” laughed Jenny Macintyre.

“And I wonder do you ever go to bed at all before May Morning?” sighed Callum Grant.

“I would be a bent old woman did I wait for you to rise, Callum Grant,” retorted Mary.

The others laughed, full of the joy of summer coming. The first of May was Beltane, the ancient festival with its ritual fires on every hilltop, its bannock rolling, and the herding of cows and sheep and goats up into fresh pastures in the high hills. There the women and young people would stay in their shielings, the little rough mountain huts, all summer while the men farmed in the lower hills. In the autumn they would trek home again, people and animals fat and happy.

The chatter went on but Duncan’s call and the terrible need in it were so powerful that Mary got suddenly to her feet and, without a word, left the group. The others took little notice. They were used to Mary’s abrupt ways.