The Camerons Page 2

  “What I don’t understand,” her mother said, “is who do you think you are?”

  There was no way to answer it. She didn’t know herself. Some of the half-blind pit ponies were standing out in the row waiting for a boy to come and lead them up onto the moor.

  “You know,” she said to her mother. “There are pit ponies and race horses in the world and I plan to be a race horse.”

  One of the Hope children was playing in the row, trying to make a snowman before the snow turned black, and she called him and gave him a ha’penny to run and get Mr. Japp and his wagon.

  “What you don’t know is that you are what you are,” her mother said. “You’re a Drum and a Hope, and what I don’t understand is why a race horse would want to spoil his bloodline with yours.”

  She was clever, her mother. Fat and careless, but clever.

  “Any woman can get any man she wants if she knows how to go about it,” Maggie said. “Look at you.”

  “Your grandfather was a slave with a metal collar around his neck, don’t forget that. I’m sure no one else will let you.”

  Her mother was smiling at her. Maggie smiled back.

  “Yes, your blood and my blood. But not my husband’s blood. Not my children’s blood.”

  * * *

  She went about putting the last of her things in the Gladstone. She hated it, the Gladstone, the feel of it, the look of it, the smell of it. It smelled of coal dust and the mines. It was the one weakness to her outfitting. If she could sever herself from the bag then she would have cut it all, all ties to the town, but she had lacked the last pound to do it, and now there was a piece of Pitmungo trailing her wherever she was to go. She could hear Mr. Japp shouting at his horse, forcing it up the slippery hill from lower Pitmungo. It was almost time to go.

  “And what are they going to do about the school?” her mother asked. “Who are they getting to teach?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You just upped and left the little children without a teacher? Without so much as a word? The great, dedicated teacher.”

  “Listen, Mother, I gave those children more teaching in two years than they got in five before. They’re taught out.”

  “I suppose you drove them, like you do everything else?”

  “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? They learned from Miss Drum.”

  “No wonder they didn’t like you.”

  “It’s all right; I didn’t like them. I only taught school to get what I wanted, and I got it.”

  The Gladstone was full and she carried it to the door.

  “I saved you some breakfast, anyway,” Maggie said. “I saved you the good Crowdie cheese because of your teeth.”

  “Och, well, that was nice of you.”

  “I’m sorry we had to snash with one another that way. Will you wish me a little luck along the way?”

  “Aye,” her mother said, “I do,” but neither one was able to move toward the other.

  “And where are you going to get this marvelous man?”

  “In the north somewhere, the Highlands somewhere, where the people have never been beaten.”

  “Oh, nonsense, Maggie. All Scotchmen have been beat. Ask your daddie. It’s the story of the country,” her mother said, but Maggie was shaking her head.

  “No, not true. Scotland may have lost but not all Scotsmen.”

  There was a squeak of brakes on wheels and a sliding of metal and Mr. Japp was at the door.

  “Well, good-bye, Mother.” Still they couldn’t move. “When you see me next, I’ll be Mrs. Something-or-Other. Mrs. Highland Something-or-Other.”

  “I hope you’ll speak to us.”

  “Speak to you? I plan to live with you.”

  * * *

  Mr. Japp didn’t bother to knock but simply threw the door open, coal-town style.

  “Well, who’s to Cowdenbeath, the Missus or the Miss?”

  “I should think your eyes could tell you,” Maggie said. He looked her up and down.

  “Oh, aye, aye, I should say so.” He had never seen her as a woman before. He pointed at the Gladstone. “Is this it, then?” He lifted the bag and took it to the wagon and came back in. “I had a load of fish but it isn’t going to bother that bag. Let’s go, then. Give us your hand, Meggie.”

  She wouldn’t give him her hand.

  “Miss Drum to you.”

  “Ooh?”

  “I’m sixteen today, the age of consent.”

  “Ooh?”

  “I earn my way teaching school and I’ll be Miss Drum to you from now on.”

  “Aye. If that’s the way you want it, that’s the way it will be.”

  “It’s the way I want it.”

  * * *

  They went up the high way, up from Doonietoon across the Sportin Moor into Uppietoon because the Low Road was flooded, and from Uppie onto the High Moor. Before they crossed over the crest she turned to take a look back. The town looked small from where they were, and black. That was it, black, a stain on the moors and snow surrounding it, but a place to make money in. She was glad to be gone.

  They didn’t talk. She had offended him. Coming down from the High Moor she could see the train sitting in Cowdenbeath station, breathing heavily in the early morning frost.

  “Well, you have managed to make me miss my train, Mr. Japp.”

  “Your arse, Miss Drum, will be on that train when it leaves Cowdenbeath station. And as far as that goes, the snow and the extra time makes the cost an extra shilling.”

  She gave him the look she had for students in her class who came unprepared and gave stupid answers.

  “Because God chooses to bring down the snow, I’m supposed to pay for it?”

  He whipped the horse on its rump in anger and it trotted the rest of the way to Cowdenbeath. At the station his anger couldn’t overcome his curiosity and he asked her what she was doing on the Aberdeen train.

  “Going to find a husband.”

  He nodded his head as if that was a perfectly valid thing for a sixteen-year-old Pitmungo girl to be doing.

  “Aye, I see. Well, I’ll say this. You’ll get one and that’s for certain.”

  “What makes you so certain?”

  “You always do get what you want, don’t you?”

  “Isn’t that what we all try to do?”

  He thought about it carefully.

  “No,” Mr. Japp said, finally, “most of us learn to settle.”

  “Then that is why, Mr. Japp, I’m not like most of us.”

  She had him carry the Gladstone on board the train and put it away, so that on the long journey north she wouldn’t have to be associated with it. It was her last recognizable link to Pitmungo.

  2

  She had no idea what the town she needed would look like, only that she would recognize it when she saw it. When the train reached Strathnairn, she brushed the steam from the window and asked the conductor to see that her Gladstone was put off.

  “Your ticket reads Inverness, Miss.”

  “Yes, but I want my bag down, please.”

  “Aye, Miss, and have a good holiday. It’s a lovely town for a stay.”

  It was all working, the soft tweed suit and the little velvet tam slanted downward on one side of her pile of brown hair—a Highland hat, the tailor had assured her in Dunfermline, classless and timeless, in the classic tradition of some clan and some section of the Highlands that she didn’t quite catch. Her shoes were new and unsoiled. There was no snow in Strathnairn.

  From the station, which lies back up from the sea, it is possible to see the whole sweep of Strathnairn, the longest, as they never tire telling you, town or city in Scotland. Because of the abrupt rise of the hills behind it, the entire town hugs the narrow strip of land between the hills and the water of Moray Firth which it faces; for all the length of the town, there is only one street and everything faces or backs on it.

  “Which one is it to be, Miss?”

  A porter had taken her bag and
without asking had put it up on the roof of the coach that serviced the resorts.

  “Highland Lodge, Fiddich House, Ashton Burn, Royal Golf, Royal Marine, Glenriddle Inn, The Links?”

  He took her for gentry on holiday, even with the coal-stained Gladstone.

  “In point of fact, I’ve come to stay with my aunt in … what is the name of your main street?”

  “Lovatt.”

  “Yes, in Lovatt Street.”

  “We only have the one street. What’s her name?”

  “In point of fact, I’ve forgotten her name since she’s been married but I can recognize the house when I see it.”

  She handed the man a shilling, and although he was supposed to go out only to the resorts, he helped her up into the carriage, the first she had ever been in, and they started down the serpentine road from the station to the town.

  The guttural thickness of his accent depressed her. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. It went beyond an accent into distinct dialect.

  “Does everyone speak the way you speak?”

  He looked back at her, his face ruddy with anger.

  “What’s the matter with the way I speak?”

  “Nothing is the matter with it. It is a very pleasant way to speak. What do you call it?”

  The man was affronted.

  “English!” he shouted back at her. “King’s English, I speak.” He switched his horse with a stinging blow.

  She could see the lamps being lit on the glass-enclosed porches of the resorts, one after another, as if it were a ritual. A resort town was a good town, she thought, an ideal town for her needs although she had never been in one. Something of the style and class and manner of the visitors would have to rub off on the workers. Who in Pitmungo would know how to behave in a restaurant? Lord Fyffe and Lady Jane and Mr. Brothcock, the mine superintendent, and a few of the others up on Brumbie Hill. No one else. No one else had probably ever been in a restaurant or sat at a table with a cloth on it. Probably hundreds of people in Strathnairn, some of them poor as field mice, would know. It was a matter of logic that the people who catered to the whims of the rich would be a cut above the people from the hard-work and heavy-duty towns.

  “Well, Scotch-English, at least, as good as anyone else I know.” He was less angry. “Scotch, in fact.” He thought about that. “Aye, Scotch. What’s the matter with a man speaking his own tongue, I ask?”

  “Nothing, it’s very becoming on you. I only asked did everyone here speak it.”

  “Nooo,” he said, in disgust, “only the people in Herringtoon. All the rest of them go around trying to ape the Southroners, the Sassenachs, you see. They won’t let you work in the resorts if you speak Scotch, can you imagine that? We’re happy being ourselves, you see. Honest Scotchmen.”

  It was pleasant news she was learning.

  “Then there’s the Highlanders. They come down when they’re starving or cold or can’t stand one another; I don’t know why they come. Lazy bastards for the most part. Excuse me, Miss.”

  “And how do they talk?”

  “Some speak the Gaelic, but not many. But they don’t speak Scotch, I know. Look, you can see the Highlands now.”

  He pointed to the west across the green Moray Firth waters. She could see the dark walls of the mountains there, rising from the sea. The crests of the higher hills were masked by banks of dark swollen clouds.

  “It will be snowing up there,” the coachman said. “Two worlds, you see; winter there and spring here. I don’t like them. They think they’re better than other people.”

  They were down the hill and into Lovatt Street and even in the carriage she could feel the chill in the wind driving across the narrow beach from the water. It was a hard wind but not unlike the wind on the High Moor, and all at once she had the feeling that things were going to be all right here, that she could handle herself in Strathnairn.

  “Say when, Miss.”

  “I don’t know yet but I’m looking.”

  She knew what she needed. She had seen them in Dunfermline—one of the merchants’ houses fallen on lean times where they put discreet signs in the window inviting lodgers as if they didn’t really care to take anyone in. She would ask for a small room and off-season rates, because there was, after all, still winter in the air. With a few rolls for breakfast and a few bannocks for lunch and a tea in the house, she could hold out indefinitely. They had no idea, Maggie felt sure, how little a girl from a mine town could get by with. With luck, she might be able to exchange a few hours of gentle lady’s work for a part payment of her room.

  “This is what we call the Toon,” the driver said. “Out there is Herringtoon, where the fishing folk live. My people. Every bastard there—excuse me, Miss—is named MacAdams. And then out to the west there, where the resorts and golf courses are, is Poshtoon.”

  As they neared the business district, more and more large old houses displayed lodger’s notices, some in the windows, some almost apologetically hidden among the salt-stained daffodils on the tight little lawns.

  “This would be it,” Maggie said.

  “Then your aunt’s name would be Bel Geddes.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Mrs. Alexander Bel Geddes.”

  “So she is.”

  “And she would have died, oh, eight or nine years ago.” He smiled at her, stumps of teeth showing through the redness of wind-whipped lips and face. Gleed-eyed bastard, she thought. It was the Gladstone. He maneuvered his carriage into the narrow carriageway off Lovatt Street and to the front of the Bel Geddes house. The house was larger than the rest of the houses around it, gray stone, parapets, dark wood, gloomy but reassuring and respectable.

  He was standing with the bag, keeping the carriage between the bag and the house.

  “Do you ken the words poor boire, Miss?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Weel, for a little one of those—say a shilling, Miss—I might just be able to get this up the back stairs without Mr. Bel Geddes ever setting eye on it. Whatever happened to it?”

  “Fell off the train.”

  “Aye, and dragged all the way from Aberdeen.”

  It was a game and she could play it.

  “Aye,” she said, “all the way,” and handed him a shilling.

  “Tell him your bags are being sent from the station. When you get to your room open the window and I’ll know where to go. And Miss?”

  “Yes, Mr. MacAdams.”

  “If you ever need anything done, I don’t know what, you can trust Mr. Cherry MacAdams to help you do it.”

  “Jerry?”

  “Cherry. And it would make me blush to tell you why.”

  “Aye, I’m very sure it would.”

  They recognized one another from the start.

  * * *

  Looking back on it, when she was far enough away from it to look back on it, she always relished two little pliskies she managed to play on young Rodney Bel Geddes, who was manning the desk.

  “Is it Miss Drum? Miss Drum, is it? As in bass drum!”

  “As in snare drum.”

  Young snot, she had thought, lank dark hair plastered down on head with Macassar so that it looked like patent leather, so English-speaking that the words could barely reed their way through his nostrils.

  “And what, if I may ask…”

  “You may.”

  “Brings you here? Fishin’, the waters, golf?”

  “Huntin’.”

  He never knew he had been lanced.

  “Home?”

  “Carnegie Terrace. Dunfermline. Fife.”

  “Ooh.” There was a show, a flicker it was, of interest. “And do you know the great man?”

  “I would like to but our family doesn’t bow to theirs. They were weavers, you see.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Had a loom right in the house. Used to take dinner on it.” Mr. Bel Geddes looked perplexed. “On the loom.”

  “Oh.”

  “
And speaking of that, what time do we eat here?”

  “We don’t eat here. We dine.”

  “Ooh.” And Maggie knew she had been lanced.

  * * *

  That first evening she had not been able to wait to eat or even to dine and she had walked down Lovatt Street to a shop she had seen and bought two little plump hot mutton pies, tuppenny each, and brought them back to her room. She liked the looks of the people she saw in the street. What she wanted was there.

  She had gotten her off-season rates, and the room, despite the gray-stone gloom of the house, was airy and bright and there was a duck-down mattress on her bed, the first she had ever felt. The room was above the rest of the house, isolated from it, a garret with a winding private stairway leading to it, and she felt cut off from the rest of the world. After Pitmungo she liked that.

  She lay on her bed and thought about the man she must have. Tall, that was essential, and fair. Speak clear English, essential, and have, if possible, one of the fine historic Scottish names. While she was lying there the light came in, the extraordinary light of late afternoon in the north of the country, golden light flooding in the room, the gloamin tide they called it in Pitmungo, and she knew, she was sure of it then, that she would find the Gael she required.

  There was a tap at the door.

  “Miss Drum?”

  “Aye. Yes.”

  “We’re dining.”

  “Thank you.”

  It was no help to her at all to find that every man at the table was thirty years old or more, and weak.

  * * *

  Her heart was set on an eligible Gael, but the problem, she discovered, was finding one. The Highland boys either went to sea and were gone for long periods of time or worked in the great resorts and never seemed to come out of them. If these were the Gaels so famed for their boldness in battle, they had left it all on the battlegrounds. They were the shyest men she had ever met. If she caught their eyes they turned away like deer surprised on the browse.