Entry Island

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

It is raining. A fine, wetting rain, almost like a mist. A smirr. It blows in off the sea on the edge of a wind that would cut you in two.

I am with my father. But we are gripped by fear, and running crouched along the line of the hill behind and beyond Baile Mhanais, where it dips down towards the sea loch that I know as Loch Glas. My clothes are soaked and I am almost numb with the cold. I am not sure of my age, but I’m not much older now than when Kirsty and I first kissed by the standing stones beyond the beach.

My father’s old torn cloth cap is pulled down low above his eyes, and I see how black they are as he looks back over his shoulder. ‘For God’s sake keep down, boy. If they see us they’ll come after us, and put us on the boat, too.’

We reach an outcrop of rocks almost buried by peat at the top of the hill. And splashing through a stream in spate, we throw ourselves down into the wet grass behind them. I can hear voices carried on the wind. Men shouting. We crawl forward on our bellies, until we have a view down the slope to the shore of Loch Glas, and the village of Sgagarstaigh with its little stone jetty.

My eye is caught at once by the tall, three-masted sailing ship anchored out in the loch. And by the crowd of villagers on the quayside. Before my attention is drawn to the smoke and flames that rise up from the village itself.

The paths between the blackhouses are littered with furniture and other household debris. Sheets and prams, broken crockery, children’s toys. A group of men swarms from house to house, shouting and yelling. They carry flaming torches with which they set light to the doors and roof thatch of the houses.

My horror and confusion is absolute, and it is only the restraining arm of my father that stops me from getting to my feet and shouting out in protest. I watch in total stupefaction as the men, women and children of the village are herded on to the jetty by constables in uniform wielding long wooden batons. There are boys I was at school with being struck across the arms and legs by those stout ash truncheons. Women and girls, too. Kicked and punched. They have with them, it seems, only such belongings as they have been able to carry from their homes. And I see for the first time the rowing boat ferrying its human cargo from the jetty to the tall ship.

Finally I find my voice. ‘What’s happening?’

My father’s own voice is grim as he responds through clenched teeth. ‘They’re clearing Sgagarstaigh.’

‘Clearing Sgagarstaigh of what?’

‘Of people, son.’

I shake my head, perplexed. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘They’ve been clearing folk off the land all over the Highlands ever since the government defeated the Jacobites at Culloden.’

‘Jacobites?’

My father glares at me in exasperation. ‘Jesus, son, did they teach you nothing at school?’ Then he shakes his head angrily. ‘Aye, right enough, maybe they wouldn’t. They say that history is only written by the victors.’ He raises his head, drawing phlegm into his mouth, and spitting into the flow of water that tumbles down the hill. ‘But I heard it from my father, who heard it from his. And now you’re hearing it from me.’

A cheer, carried to us on the edge of the rain, draws our eyes back to the chaos unravelling below, and we see that the roof of one of the blackhouses has fallen in, sending a shower of sparks into the air to be carried off in the wind.

My father turns back to me. ‘The Jacobites were supporters of the Stuart kings that once ruled Scotland and England, son. Just about a hundred years ago there was an uprising all across the Highlands. Jacobites who wanted to restore the Stuarts to the throne. With the Young Pretender, Prince Charlie, at their head, they marched south and came within striking distance of London. But in the end they were driven back, and finally crushed at a place called Culloden, near Inverness.’ He sucked in a long, slow breath and shook his head. ‘It was a slaughter, son. And afterwards, the government sent a battalion of criminals from English jails on a rampage through the Highlands. They killed Gaelic speakers and raped their women. And in London the government passed laws that made it illegal to wear the kilt or play the bagpipes. If you spoke the Gaelic in a court of law you were deemed not to have spoken at all, and so there was no way of getting justice.’

It is the first time I have heard any of this, and I feel a growing sense of outrage.

‘The government wanted to destroy the old clan system, so there could never be another uprising. They bribed some of the old clan chiefs, and sold off the estates of others to wealthy Lowlanders and Englishmen. And the new breed of lairds, like Guthrie, and Matheson, and Gordon of Clunie, wanted the people off their land. You see, sheep are more profitable than people, son.’

‘Sheep?’

‘Aye, they want to turn over all the land to sheep.’

‘But how can they do that?’

My father’s laugh was full of bitterness and no humour at all. ‘The landowners can do what they like, boy. They have the law on their side.’

I shake my head. ‘But … how?’

‘Because the law is made to keep the powerful in power, and the rich wealthy. As well as the poor in poverty. Tenants like us can barely survive on what we produce on our crofts. Well, you know that! But it doesn’t stop us having to pay rent, even though we have no money. So the landlords issue notices of eviction. If we can’t pay up we get thrown off. Burned out of our homes so we can’t go back to them. Forced on to boats and sent off across the sea to Canada and America. That way they’re rid of us once and for all. The bastards even pay our passage. Some of them. They must reckon it’s cheap at the price.’

I find it hard to take in everything my father is saying. I am bewildered. I had always thought that Baile Mhanais and everything I know here would be for ever. ‘But what if you don’t want to go?’

‘Pfah!’ My father’s contempt explodes from his mouth like spittle. ‘You don’t have any choice, son. Your life is not your own. Like I’ve told you before, the laird owns the land and everything on it. And that includes us.’ He removes his cap to sweep his hair back from his forehead before pulling it back on again. ‘Even under the old clan chiefs. If they wanted us to go and fight in whatever war they’d given their support to, we had to drop everything and march off to battle. Give them our lives. Even if it was for some bloody cause that meant nothing to us.’

More shouts from below draw our attention.

‘Jesus,’ my father almost whispers. ‘The poor buggers are jumping off the ship now.’

We crawl a little further around the rock to get a better view, and I see two men in the water, and a third jumping from the deck of the tall ship after them. The rowing boat is halfway between the ship and the shore, and laden with another load of villagers. So it can’t go after them.

The men who have jumped ship strike out for shore, swimming for their lives. But the water is choppy in the wind, and icy cold. I see one of the men struggling now, splashing frantically, before he vanishes beneath the surface. And he is gone, and doesn’t reappear. I find it hard to believe I am lying here on the hillside, not half an hour from my own home, watching a man drown in the loch as hundreds of people look on.

A quiet, slow-burning anger takes root inside of me. ‘Are you telling me it’s our own laird, Sir John Guthrie, who’s doing this?’ I say.

‘Aye, son, it is. He’s been clearing villages all up the west coast this last year.’ He turns to look at me. ‘I reckon if it wasn’t for you saving his daughter’s life all those years ago, Baile Mhanais would have been long gone, too.’

The two others who jumped ship reach shore below us. One of them can barely stand, and is easy prey for the group of half a dozen constables who detach themselves from the rest and run around the loch’s edge. They are on him in a moment, batons rising and falling in the rain, beating him to the ground.

The other is a bigger man, stronger, and he strikes off up the hill, setting a course almost directly for where we lie hidden by the rocks.

‘My God,’ I hear my father gasp. ‘That’s Seoras Mackay. A fine man.’ And he turns towards me, fear in his eyes. ‘For Heaven’s sake, son, hide yourself! They’re coming this way.’

I don’t see where it is my father goes, but in a moment of blind panic I roll through the icy waters of the burn and conceal myself beneath a bank of overhanging ferns. Half of me is still in the water, my nose filled with the smell of damp earth and rotting vegetation, and my teeth are chittering with the cold. I can feel the pounding of feet vibrating through the ground beneath me and then, getting closer, the harsh rasp of lungs desperately gasping for breath.

Seoras Mackay and his pursuers are almost right on top of me when they catch up with him and bring him crashing to the ground. The earth shakes with the weight of the big man, and all the air is forced from his lungs. His face is on a level with mine, no more than eighteen inches away. He looks at me through the ferns. For a moment it seems to me as if those sad brown eyes of his are appealing to me for help. But then they are clouded by resignation as he suffers several blows from the batons of the constables. One of them kneels on his back, pulling his arms behind him, and his wrists and ankles are locked in irons. I hear the dull, brutal clank of metal chains, and he is hauled to his feet to be dragged off back down the hill. Eye contact broken and lost for ever, like Seoras himself.

There is more bad weather on the way. I can see it gathering far out at sea. Behind me the sun sprays yellow light across a fractured landscape, and the wind blows strong enough to knock you off your feet if you don’t have them planted right. The tormentil and bog cotton are flattened by it, and I can hear it howling through the standing stones beyond the ridge of the hollow above my head. Even in the shelter of the hollow itself, the tough, spiky beach grasses that bind the sand bend and fibrillate, almost singing in the wind.

I am crouched on a stone, and might be carved out of the same gneiss myself. I don’t feel the cold. It would be difficult to be colder on the outside than I am within. I stare out at the whitecaps blowing in ahead of the coming storm, and feel waves of icy emotion breaking over me.

‘Hi.’ Kirsty’s voice rises above the roar of the wind and the sea as she jumps down smiling into the hollow to join me. I can hear the happiness in her voice, and I try not to let it affect me. She stoops to kiss my cheek and I turn my head away to avoid it.

I feel her tension immediately. She stands up straight. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Your father’s what’s wrong.’

I don’t look at her, but I can hear the immediate anger in her voice. ‘What do you mean?’

I stand up and turn to face her. ‘Do you know what he’s doing?’ She just stares back at me, her face a mask of confusion. ‘He’s forcing people out of their homes and setting their houses on fire so that they can’t come back.’

‘He is not!’

‘And he sends constables and estate workers to force them on to boats to sail them off across the Atlantic against their will.’

‘Stop it! That’s not true.’

‘It is.’ I feel my own anger fired by hers. ‘I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Folk I know beaten and kicked. Neighbours at Sgagarstaigh, kids I was at school with, made to leave the houses they were born in, and forced to watch as the bastards set them on fire. I saw them ferried out to a boat in the loch and put in chains if they tried to escape. Just ordinary folk, Ciorstaidh. Folk whose ancestors have lived here for generations. Folk whose parents and grandparents are buried here on the machair. Forced to leave it all and sent off to some godforsaken place on the other side of the world, just because your father wants to put sheep on the land.’

I see the shock on Kirsty’s face. Her hurt and bewilderment, her desperate desire for it not to be true. ‘I don’t believe you!’ she shouts in my face, giving voice to that desire, but I have no doubt, too, that she can see in my face that it is.

The tears that have been brimming in her eyes spill from them now, and are spread across her cheeks by the wind. Her hand comes out of nowhere, its open palm catching me squarely on the cheek. I almost stagger with the force of it, and feel how it stings my skin. I see the distress behind her tears. And as she turns and climbs back out of the hollow to run off between the stones that stand proud on the hill, skirt and cape flowing out behind her, I realise that I have just destroyed her world. And mine.

I so dearly wish I could run after her and tell her that none of it is real. But I can’t. And I understand fully for the first time how both our lives have changed, and how nothing will ever be the same again.

It is low tide, and the smell of the sea fills the air. A rich, rotting seaweed smell that is so familiar. For once there is no wind and the sea is a placid pewter reflecting a sky that lies low above my head, a sad, unbroken grey. It laps tamely along the shore, licking around the ragged tendrils of Lewisian gneiss that invade it from the shore, ancient hard rock encrusted with shellfish and made slippery by the kelp that grows here in profusion and covers it so abundantly.

I have two wicker baskets that sit at angles on the rock as I hack at the seaweed with a long, curved blade, shredding my fingers on shells like razorblades as I pull it free of the rock to throw in the baskets. My back aches, and my feet, which have been in the water off and on for hours, are frozen numb. The baskets are nearly full and I will shortly make the return trek to the croft once more to spread the kelp on our lazy beds.

I have not been aware of her approach, and only now as I glance up do I see her standing there on the rocks looking down at me. She wears her cape buttoned for warmth, the hood pulled up over her head, and with the light behind her as she stands silhouetted against the sky I cannot see her face. It is some days since our confrontation in the hollow and I had thought I would never see her again.

I straighten up slowly, stepping out of the water and on to the rock. Crabs scuttle about in the pools that gather there, scraps of reflected light scattered randomly amongst the sombre green seaweed.

Now I see how pale she is, dark shadows staining the pure unblemished skin beneath her eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says, her voice so tiny I can barely hear it above the breath of the ocean. She lowers her eyes. ‘It seems I’m always having to apologise to you.’

I shrug, knowing that whatever it is she feels, my remorse is greater. ‘What for?’

‘For slapping you.’ She pauses. ‘For not believing you.’

I don’t know what to say. I can only imagine the pain and disillusion that would have beset me if someone had dismantled the belief I have in my own father.

‘It’s still so hard for me to believe that daddy could be responsible for such things. I knew I couldn’t ask him straight out. So I asked the serving staff. At first no one would admit to knowing anything. Until I pressed them. It was my tutor who told me in the end.’

She sucks in her lower lip and seems to be biting on it to control her emotions.

‘Only then did I finally confront my father. He was …’ She closes her eyes in wretched recollection, ‘… he was incandescent. He told me it was none of my business and that I simply didn’t understand. And when I told him that what I didn’t understand was how he could treat people like that, he did what I did to you.’ She draws a trembling breath and I see her pain. ‘He slapped me. So hard he bruised me.’ Her hand moves up to her face instinctively and her fingertips trace the line of her cheekbone. But there is no sign of the bruising now. ‘He had me locked in my room for two days, and I’m not sure that I stopped crying once. My mother wanted to reason with me. But I wouldn’t even let her in the room.’

She lowers her eyes to the ground and I see defeat in the slump of her shoulders.

‘My tutor has been dismissed, and I am confined to the house. I managed to slip out the kitchen door this morning. They probably don’t know I’m gone yet, though I’m not sure I care if they do.’

I step close now and take her in my arms, feeling her tremble as I draw her into my chest and hold her there. Her head rests against my shoulder and she slips her arms around me. We stand like this for an age, breathing in time with the slow beat of the ocean. Until finally she releases me and steps back from my arms.

‘I want to run away, Simon.’ Her eyes fix me in their earnest gaze and I feel the desperate appeal in them. But running away is not a concept that I can easily understand.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean I want to leave here. And I want you to go with me.’

I shake my head in confusion. ‘Go where?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Anywhere but here.’

‘But, Ciorstaidh, I have no money.’

‘I can get us money.’

I shake my head again. ‘I can’t, Ciorstaidh. This is my home. My parents and my sisters need me. My father can’t manage the croft on his own.’ The whole notion of it is alien to me. ‘And anyway, where would we go? What would I do? How would we live?’

She stands staring at me, her eyes filled with betrayal and tears. Her face is bleak and hopeless, and suddenly she shouts at me, ‘I hate you, Simon Mackenzie. I hate you more than I’ve ever hated anyone in my life.’

And she turns and strides away across the rocks, both hands pulling her skirt and cape free of the kelp and the pools of seawater, until reaching the grass where she runs off into the morning gloom, leaving sobs of distress in her wake.

And me with a debilitating sense of guilt.