T. Boyle - Water Music

The Joliba sails on, amidst the gnashing of teeth and the crunch of bone, heading north, into the nether regions.

♦ THE BEAST WITH TWO BACKS ♦

The Reverend MacNibbit’s voice is disembodied, a deep, sure, mellifluous presence suffusing the clerestory with power and promise, with a prick of foreboding and a balm of reassurance. “And yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” he rumbles, shaking his great shaggy head and wagging his jowls, an admonitory tremolo creeping into his voice to underscore just how black and hopeless things can be. . but Ailie isn’t listening. Nor watching. Her head is bowed, as if in prayer, but her thoughts are elsewhere. Specifically, they are on Georgie Gleg — and the trip, the jaunt, the adventure she’s about to embark on. This very afternoon. The preparations have been made, her bags are packed. She can think of nothing else.

Georgie had invited her to accompany him on a six-week tour of the Highlands, through Fife, Angus, Aberdeen, Banff and Moray, culminating in a week’s stay at Avis House in Drumnadrochit, within sight of Urquhart Castle and one of the great deep churning lochs every schoolgirl knew so well in song and legend, the grandest loch of them all. Loch Ness. Avis House was the ancestral home of the Highland Glegs, currently tenanted by Georgie’s second cousin, Fiona Gleg, a spinster in her early fifties. During her recent stay in Edinburgh, Georgie had treated her for peripractitis and gout, and to show her gratitude she’d invited him to pay her a visit and “ken the glories o’the grand old loch.” Georgie immediately thought of Ailie. How a tour such as this would lift her spirits, allow her to live her own life for a change, take the onus of the patient wife, mother and housekeeper off her shoulders for a bit. It would be just the thing for her.

It would. She’s never in her life been farther than Edinburgh, and she’s only been there twice. Never been to London, the Continent, never even been to Glasgow. Mungo just packs his bags, takes her brother by the arm and tramps off halfway round the world. Any time he pleases. And she’s stuck at home with the children like some drudge in a fairy tale. Well this is her chance, and by God she’s going to take it.

Oh, everything will be very proper of course. Both Georgie’s mother and Betty Deatcher are coming along as chaperones, and she’s decided to bring her five-year-old with her as well. There’ll be no hanky-panky, nothing scandalous. Still, her father is violently opposed to her going. He sees it as an affront to her husband, whether she’s chaperoned or not. “And what if he comes home while you’re away, lass — what’ll I tell him?” the old man had demanded, his voice raw with anger and a stinging edge of accusation.

“Tell him I’ll be back the second week in April.”

“But Ailie, ye can’t do that to the mon — he’s your husband.” In her father’s own personal hagiography, Mungo ranked right up there with Saint Columba and Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Her eyes widened till there was nothing left of them but an angry splash of green, cold and brilliant as the Firth of Forth, and her voice trembled with the effort to keep it under control. “He did it to me.”

Now, sitting beside her father on the long hard pew, his breathing harsh and righteous, the children fidgeting, she can think only of release, of escape, of turning her back on MacNibbit’s fire and brimstone and stepping into Georgie’s carriage. Above her, the stained glass is suffused with sun, radiant, bright as blood, and it seems to pulse with the quick breathless cadence beating in her veins. The Highlands! Inverness! Loch Ness! She can barely contain herself, she wants to jump up and dance round the room, shout out the news. Suddenly, the minister’s words are playing in her ears, refreshing, resuscitant, a breath of air in a drowning girl’s lungs.

“Surely,” he exclaims, his voice rich with piety and exaltation, the good word melting on his tongue like a thick pat of butter, “surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. .”

Ailie looks up, as if the promise were meant for her alone, as if it were a blessing for the road, a sign that she’s made the right choice. The sermon is over, the parishioners rustling in their seats. She can’t help smiling. Amen, she thinks. Amen.

♦ ♦ ♦

Georgie’s diligence carries them as far as Leith, where they take ship for Kinghorn and pick up the post chaise. From there they work their way up the east coast, through Cupar, St. Andrews, Ellen, Fochabers and Cawdor, stopping at inns and country houses for refreshment, taking time out to reflect on such curiosities as Dunbuy Rock and Gordon’s Castle. Ailie presses her face to the window, rapt, gazing on the windswept coast with its stunted spruce and fir and heaps of rounded boulders. Thomas, child of the century, is almost six. He clings to his mother’s sleeve and whines, uneasy with the pitch and yaw of the coach, or interrupts Georgie’s delirious monologue with aboriginal screams and resounding raspberries. He looks, absolutely, precisely, and in every detail, the image of his father. Mrs. Quaggus, in widow’s weeds (“Poor Tyrone: his heart failed him as he was tossin’ off a sillabub with Archbishop Oughten one night — it was a sort of contest, a wager, you know — and Tyrone he woulda won it hands down because the Archbishop dinna have the stomach for more than six or seven and my dear departed was already into his twelfth — his twelfth —when the good Lord called him to his reward. .” [a sigh] “I guess he shoulda knowed better than to bait an Archbishop.”), sits against the far window, erect as a hatrack. From time to time she bathes her son in a smoldering look of maternal regard, as if he were nothing short of Molière for wit and a veritable Hippocrates for skill and accomplishment. Betty, in her late twenties now, still unmarried and with a nose like a garden implement, tries her best to be gracious and to respond to Georgie’s nonstop barrage of words, while Georgie, for his part, is so exhilarated by the very fact of Ailie’s presence that he is unable to shut his mouth, even when it’s stuffed full of onion and oatcake, all the long way from Selkirk to Drumnadrochit.

At Inverness, like Boswell and Johnson before them, they put up at Mackenzie’s Inn, and Ailie is in such a state of anticipation she hardly notices the rough-hewn furniture and the desiccated flies in the corners, or that the haggis tastes like stewed leather. All she knows is that the loch, the glorious loch, is no more than three miles off. She tucks her son in, then throws open the windows and looks out on the darkening treetrunks, the raw wet smell of the loch in her nostrils. There is the distant cry of an embergoose, and then the moon slips up out of the grasp of the trees. Pocked and scoured, it is the very same moon that squats over Selkirk, but here it looks different somehow, as if it were newly created, as if it were something magical, a sign in the sky. She sleeps like a drugged princess.

In the morning they take the road for Drumnadrochit, winding through stands of birch and scotch pine, the loch stretched out below them like a great glittering arm of the sea. Ailie feasts her eyes, a strange sense of fulfillment, of rightness, coming over her. Finally she’s making her own expedition, doing a bit of exploring for herself. She laughs out loud at the thought of it — the explorer’s wife exploring — and Mrs. Quaggus lifts her eyebrows, as if she too would like to be let in on the joke. Ailie can’t remember a happier moment.

At Avis House they are greeted by an ebullient and talk-starved Fiona Gleg, a red-haired woman in a bulky wool cardigan who sweeps past her servants to embrace them, one by one, on the front steps. They’ve barely had time to catch their breath before she knots them up in a concatenation of questions, opinions, observations and suppositions, touching on everything from Uncle Silas’ eczema to the egregious food at Mackenzie’s, from the stonework at Cawdor Castle — shoddy, isn’t it? — to the disappointing size of Dunbuy Rock and the odd color of little Thomas’ eyes. In the wainscoted vestibule, servants scuttling to and fro with trunks and bags and hatboxes, Cousin Fiona turns to Ailie with a wide wet motherly smile. “Mrs. Park,” she says (it sounds as if she’s saying Mrs. Paddock ), “I’ve heard so much about you — it seems the young physician here can talk of nothing else — and I’d like to say it’s a pleasure, it is, and that ye’re unco welcome at Avis House.”