Читать книгу On the Edge of Darkness - Barbara Erskine - Страница 8

‘Why don’t you take a knife and kill me, Thomas? It would be quicker and more honest!’

Susan Craig was shouting now, her voice harsh with despair. ‘Dear God, you drive me to do this! You and your sanctimonious cruelty.’ She was standing near the window, tears pouring down her face.

Adam, thin, skinny, and tall for his age, which was fourteen, was standing outside his father’s study window, his arms wrapped tightly around his body, his mouth working with misery as he tried to stop himself shouting out loud in his mother’s defence. The quarrel, growing steadily louder and louder, had been going on for what seemed like hours, and for what seemed like hours he had been standing there, listening. What had she done – what could she have done? – to make his father so angry? He didn’t understand.

‘Now you take the name of the Lord in vain as well! Is there no end to your wickedness, you stupid, senseless woman?’ Thomas’s voice too was almost incoherent.

‘I’m not wicked, Thomas. I’m human! Is that so evil? Why can’t you listen to me? You don’t care! You never have, damn you!’ His mother’s voice was shrill, out of control, his father’s a deep rumbling torrent of words designed to override and to annihilate.

The boy’s eyes were blind with tears as he put his hands over his ears, trying to block out the sounds, but it was no use; they filled the echoing rooms of the huge old stone-built manse and spilled out of the windows and doors until they seemed to fill the garden and the surrounding village of Pittenross, the woods and even the sky.

Suddenly he couldn’t bear it any more. Stumbling in his haste, unable to see where he was going for his tears, he turned and ran for the gate.

The manse stood at the end of a quiet village street, hidden behind the high wall which all but encompassed house and garden, save where, at the far end of the vegetable patch, the broad sweep of the River Tay rattled over shingle and rock. To the left of the house stood the old kirk amongst its attendant trees, its lawns and gravel paths deserted behind high ornate railings and an imposing gate. To the right the street, lined by grey stone-built houses, was silent and at this hour empty of people.

Adam ran along the street, cutting down through Fishers’ Wynd, a small alley between high, blank walls, skirted some rough ground, half-heartedly gardened by the wife of one of his father’s elders, hopped across the river by way of shining black rocks and stones and, climbing a wire fence, began to run up through the thick woods which clung to the lower slopes of the hill. He ran until he could run no longer, sure that if he stopped he would still be able to hear the sounds of his parents quarrelling.

The quarrels had been growing worse over the past few weeks. He had no brothers or sisters to share his burden, no other family in whom he could confide, no one in the village he felt he could talk to. His loyalty to his parents was absolute and somehow he knew that this was private, not something that anyone else should know about, ever. But he didn’t know what to do, and he could not cope with what was happening. His beautiful, young happy mother, happy at least when he and she were alone together, whom he adored, had changed into a pale, short-tempered shadow of herself, whilst his father, always a large man, burly and of florid complexion, had grown larger and more florid. Sometimes Adam looked at his father’s hands; huge, powerful hands, the hands of a labourer rather than the hands of a man of God, and he shuddered. He knew how hard they could wield the strap. His father believed in beating his son for the good of his soul at the slightest transgression. Adam did not mind so much for himself, he was used to it. Almost. But he was terrified, blindly, completely and overwhelmingly terrified that his father might beat his mother.

He never knew why they quarrelled. Sometimes at night, lying in his dark bedroom, he could hear the occasional word through the wall, but they made no sense. His mother adored the mountains and the river and the village and the life of a minister’s wife, and she had dozens – hundreds, or so it seemed to her son – of friends, so why should she cry out that she was lonely? Why should she say that she was so unhappy?

Without thinking about where he was going, he had taken a favourite path up through the trees, following a tumbling, rocky burn up the hillside, seeing flashes of white foaming water from rock pools and waterfalls as he climbed on between birch and rowan and holly, through larch and spruce, to where the woods thinned and the mountainside took over.

His pace had slowed now and he was badly out of breath, but still he ploughed on, following a sheep’s track through the grass and prickly heather, skirting the rocky outcrops flung up millennia ago by volcanic and glacial fury. He was heading for the carved stone cross-slab, erected, so tradition had it, by the Picts, the people who had inhabited these hills even before the Scots came, to stand sentinel on the hill far above the village and the river. He always went there when he was miserable. It stood near a small wood of old Scots pine, part of the ancient Caledonian Forest which had girdled the mountains centuries before, and it was his own very special, private, place.

It had stood there on the flat top of the ridge, half circled by the old trees, for more than fourteen hundred years, rearing, at a slight angle to the vertical, over a view which on a clear day extended perhaps thirty miles to the south, to the north only two or three before the high mountains blocked the sky. On the face which turned towards the sun there was a huge cross, set within a wheel in the manner of the Celts, carved with intricate lacy patterns, the everlasting design which represented eternal life. On the back were stranger, heathenish carvings – a snake, a jagged broken stave, a mirror and a crescent moon – and of these symbols the village as a whole and his father in particular disapproved violently. Thomas Craig had told Adam that the symbol stones had been carved by worshippers of the devil, who had left them there on the high lonely hillside with their hidden message to all who came after them. Sometimes Adam used to think it was a miracle that the stone had not been torn down and broken and utterly destroyed – perhaps it was because it was too far from the village, too much effort to do it, or perhaps it was because secretly the people were afraid to touch it. He wasn’t afraid. But he could sense its power – its special, wild magic.

Reaching the stone he flung himself down at its foot and, sure that no one could see him save the distant circling buzzard, he abandoned himself at last to his tears.

The girl had seen him coming, though. Often, before, she had noticed him, a boy about her own age, winding his way up through the heather and she had hidden, either behind the stone or amongst the trees, or in the soft, drifting mists which so often descended on this place.

Three times lately she had heard him cry. It made her uncomfortable. She wanted to find out why he was so unhappy, to see him laugh and jump about as he had when he had brought the brown-and-white sheltie puppy with him. She had never approached him. She was not supposed to be here. Her brother would be furious if he knew she had strayed from his side, but she had grown bored with watching him carve the stone. The chisels, the small hammer, the punches, the tools of his trade laid out neatly on the heather with the rolled vellum template which he fastened to the stone to punch out the designs.

The dog had seen her and barked, its hackles raised along its back. She was puzzled by that. Dogs usually liked her. But she kept her distance. She didn’t want the boy to see her.

His tears were exhausted at last. Sitting up he sniffed and, rubbing his face with the sleeve of his sweater, he began to look round. Far above him he could hear the lonely yelp of an eagle. He squinted up into the blue but the glare behind the clouds was too bright and he shook his head and closed his eyes. When he opened them he saw the girl for a fraction of a second, peering at him from the trees. Startled, he jumped to his feet.

‘Hey! Hello?’ His call was carried away on the wind. ‘Where are you?’

There was no sign of her. He ran a few steps towards the trees. ‘Come on. I’ve seen you! Show yourself!’ He hoped she hadn’t seen him crying. Blushing at the thought he peered amongst the soft, red, peeling trunks of the trees. But she had gone.

It was twilight when he retraced his steps reluctantly towards the manse. From the path amongst the thickly growing trees on the steep bank of the burn as it tumbled towards the river he could see in the distance the lamp already lit in his father’s study window. Usually by now there would be a curl of blue smoke from the kitchen chimney but he couldn’t see it yet against the darkening sky. Nervously he wondered if Mrs Barron had stayed on to cook supper as she often did, or was his mother, an apron tied over her dress, standing in the kitchen wielding the huge iron pans?

It was the back door he approached on tiptoe from the yard at the side of the manse. There was no one in the kitchen at all and no pans on the range. In fact the range was cold. With a sinking heart he crept out into the back hall and listened, half afraid that the quarrel would still be in progress, but the house was silent now. Breathing a quick sigh of relief, he tiptoed through to the front and stood for one long, daring moment outside his father’s study, then he turned and fled upstairs.

His parents’ bedroom looked out over the wall towards the kirk. It was an austere room, the iron bed covered by a pale fawn counterpane, the heavy wooden furniture unrelieved by pictures or flowers. On his mother’s dressing table, uncluttered by make-up or scent or powder sat, side by side, neatly aligned, a matching ivory-backed hair brush, a clothes brush and a comb. Nothing else. Thomas Craig would not permit his wife to paint her face.

Nervously Adam peered into the room, though he could sense already that it was empty. It was cold and north-facing, the room where he had been born. He hated it.

Normally he liked the kitchen best. With the warmth from the range and the smells of cooking and the cheerful light-hearted banter between his mother and Jeannie Barron it was the nicest and most cheerful place to be. When his father was out. When his father was at home his dour, disapproving presence filled the house, Adam’s mother fell silent and even the birds in the garden seemed, to the boy, afraid to sing.

Standing in the doorway, he was about to turn away when he paused, frowning. Like a small animal, alert, suspicious, he sensed that something was wrong. He looked round the room more carefully this time, but in its bleak tidiness it gave no clue as to what might be amiss.

He had two bedrooms to himself. One, as sober and tidy as his parents’, his official bedroom, was next to theirs on the landing. But he had another room, up in the attic, known to his mother and Mrs Barron, but not, he was almost sure, to his father, who never climbed up there. In it he had a bright rag rug, and several old chests for the treasures and specimens which formed his museum, his books and his maps. It was up here, alone, when he was supposed to be doing his school work in his official bedroom, that he led his intensely private life; it was here that he wrote up his notes and copied diagrams and studied musty textbooks which he had picked up in second-hand bookshops in Perth, all designed to lead towards his ambition to be a doctor, and it was here that he sketched the birds he watched out on the hills and here he had once tried to dissect, then to dry and stuff the dead body of a fox he had found in a snare. Jeannie Barron had soon put paid to that enterprise, but otherwise the two women had left him more or less to his own devices up there. Today however it did not provide the sanctuary he had come to expect. He felt restless and unhappy. Something was very wrong.

After only a few minutes’ leafing half-heartedly through a book on spiders he threw it down on the table and went out onto the landing. He listened for a moment, then he ran down the narrow upper flight of stairs, then the broader flight below and went to peer once more into the kitchen. It was as cheerless and empty as before.

It was a long time before he plucked up enough courage to knock on the door of his father’s study.

Thomas Craig was sitting at his desk, his hands folded before him on the blotter. He was a tall, rangy man, with a shock of dark hair threaded with silver, large, staring pale blue eyes and his skin, normally high-coloured, was today unusually pale.

‘Father?’ Adam’s voice was timid.

There was no response.

‘Father, where is Mother?’

His father looked up at last. There was a strange triangle of livid skin beneath each high cheekbone where his face had rested on the interlinked fingers of his hands. He propped himself wearily on his elbows on the desk, then cleared his throat as though for a moment he found it hard to speak. ‘She’s gone,’ he said at last, his voice lifeless.

‘Gone?’ Adam repeated the word uncomprehendingly.

‘Gone.’ Thomas lowered his face back into his hands.

His son shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. An inexplicable pain had settled in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t dare look at his father’s face again, fixing his eyes instead on his own ragged plimsolls.

Thomas sighed heavily. He looked up again. ‘Mrs Barron has seen fit to hand in her notice,’ he said at last, ‘so it would seem we are alone.’

Adam swallowed. His voice when he spoke was very small. ‘Where has Mother gone?’

‘I don’t know. And I don’t wish to.’ Abruptly Thomas stood up. Pushing back his chair he walked over to the window and stood looking out into the garden. ‘Your mother, Adam, has committed a grievous sin. In the eyes of God, and in my eyes, she is no longer part of this family. I do not wish her name to be mentioned in this house again. Go to your room and pray that her evil ways have not corrupted you. A night without supper will do you no harm at all.’ He did not turn round.

Adam stared at him, barely taking in what he had said. ‘But, Father, where has she gone?’ Little panicky waves of anguish were beginning to flutter in his chest. He wanted his mother very badly indeed.

‘Go to your room!’ Thomas’s voice, heavy with his own grief and anger and incomprehension, betrayed the depth of his emotion for only a moment.

Adam did not try to question him again. Turning, he ran into the hall, out through the kitchen and on into the garden. It was growing dark, but he did not hesitate. Loping round the side of the house he headed down the silent street towards the river once more. Slipping on the rocks in the dark he felt his feet sliding into the icy water but he did not hesitate, plunging into the woods and climbing as fast as he could up the hillside.

Once he stopped and turned. The manse was in darkness save for the single point of light, the lamp in his father’s study. From where he stood he could see the kirk and the dark trees round it, and the whole village, where one by one the lights were coming on, the evening air hazed with the fragrant blue smoke from the chimneys. The village was friendly, busy, warm. He knew every single person who lived in those houses. He was at school with children from many of them, in the same class as five other boys all of whom he had grown up with.

He stood looking down for a few minutes, feeling the wind, cold now, on the back of his neck, and he shivered. There were goosepimples on his thin arms beneath his sweater. He felt sick. Where had his mother gone? What had happened to her? Why hadn’t she told him where she was going? Why hadn’t she taken him with her? Why hadn’t she at least left him a note?

It was better to keep moving. Walking in the almost-darkness amongst the trees with the flash of white water on his right needed all his concentration. If he walked he couldn’t think. He didn’t want to think.

Turning, he scrambled on, feeling his wet plimsolls slide on the track, and he grabbed at the wiry branches of the larch which hung over him to stop himself falling as he headed for the stone.

It was completely dark when he reached the cross-slab at last. He doubled over, panting, aware that the moment he stopped moving the icy wind would strip away his bodyheat within seconds. He didn’t care. The moment he stopped moving he could no longer fend off the misery which was flooding through him. His mother. His adored, lovely, bright, pretty mother was gone and, he shuddered at the memory of his father’s words. What had she done? What could she have done? He wrapped his arms around himself, hunching his shoulders. He had never felt so alone, or so afraid.

She had never seen the boy come up here in the dark before. Behind the hills in the east a silver glow showed where soon the half moon would rise above the black rocks and flood the countryside with light. Then she would be able to see him more clearly. Quietly she waited.

Behind her, her brother Gartnait, five years her senior, was packing up his tools and stretching his arms above his head until his joints cracked. Between one moment and the next a black silhouetted moon-shadow ran across the ground at his feet. The light caught the gleam of an iron chisel and he stooped to pick it up.

Brid crept forward a little. The boy had a thin, attractive face with a child’s nose still, but his shoulders and knees were beginning already to show the coltishness which would come before he developed the stature of a man. She stared at his clothes, colourless in the pale light, and she crept nearer. He never seemed to do much when he came up to the hill. Sometimes he sat for hours, his arms wrapped around his legs, his chin on his knees, just staring into space. A few times he had come up to Gartnait’s stone and touched the carving with his finger, tracing the lines. Twice, in the hot months, he had stretched out on the hot ground and slept. On one of those occasions she had drawn closer, until she was standing over him and her slim shadow had touched his face. He had frowned and screwed up his nose and put his hand to his forehead, but he hadn’t opened his eyes.

She could feel his misery. It was sucking at her energy, swirling round him in a cloak of black waves which lapped out into the darkness and touched her with its cold.

Perhaps her sympathy was so great it had become tangible; whatever the reason, he looked up suddenly, startled as though he had heard something, and he looked straight at her. She saw his eyes widen. Instinctively his hand brushed his cheek and he straightened his shoulders to hide his misery. His momentary fear at seeing a figure in the shadows gave way to relief when he realised it was the girl he had seen earlier and he made a brave attempt at a smile. ‘Hello.’

She frowned. She did not recognise the word, though the smile was friendly. She stepped forward.

When she spoke to him it was in the language of her birth, the language of the ancient Picts.

His heartbeat had steadied a little. The exhaustion of the steep climb, for the second time that day, and then the girl appearing out of the darkness of the trees had made him gasp for breath. He stared at her, more puzzled than startled now. She had said something to him in words he didn’t understand. Gaelic, he supposed, a language his father considered to be barbaric. He shrugged at her. ‘I don’t understand.’

Even in that dim light he could see the brightness of her eyes, the pert tilt of her nose and chin. She was wearing a rough dress which looked as though it were made of some sort of leather.

She shrugged back, mimicking him, and then she giggled.

He found himself laughing too and suddenly daring she moved closer and touched her finger to his cheek, removing imaginary tears. Her mime was clear. Why are you sad? Cheer up. Then her hands dropped to his and she gave a theatrical shiver. She was right. He was very cold.

He wasn’t quite sure how he came to follow her. His misery, his cold, his hunger, all were persuasive. When she caught his hand and tugged at it, miming food in her mouth, he nodded eagerly and went with her.

He followed her towards the stone, his fingers brushing across the well-known shapes as he walked past it. There was a drift of mist across the path and he hesitated, but when she tugged again at his hand he went on, stopping only when he saw her brother. The tall young man, his tools now stowed in a leather bag slung over his shoulder, looked as startled as he was himself. He spoke quietly and urgently to the girl and she retorted with words quite obviously cheeky. It was then she introduced herself. She pointed to her chest. ‘Brid,’ she said firmly. She pronounced it Breed. ‘Gartnait.’ This was said thumping the young man’s shoulder.

Adam grinned. He pointed to his own stomach. ‘Adam,’ he said.

‘A-dam.’ She repeated the word softly. Then she laughed again.

They walked for about twenty minutes around the shoulder of the ridge, following a faint deer track through the heather before Adam saw in the distance below them the flickering light of a fire. As they scrambled down towards it he smelled meat cooking. Venison, he reckoned, and the juices in his mouth ran. He hadn’t eaten since lunchtime. He refused to think about the empty cold kitchen at home, concentrating instead on his new friends.

At the sight of their destination he frowned slightly. It was no more than a round ramshackle bothy, thatched with rushes, hidden in a fold of the hill beside a tumbling burn. The fire, he saw as they drew closer, was being tended by a woman, from her looks the mother of Brid and Gartnait, who, he had already guessed, were brother and sister. The woman, tall and slim, very erect when she straightened from poking the logs beneath her cooking pot, had hair as dark as her daughter’s, and the same clear grey eyes. Throwing down her makeshift poker she made him welcome, a little shyly, and pointing to a fur rug spread on the ground near the fire indicated that he sit down. Her name, Brid told him, was Gemma. Gartnait, he saw, had gone to wash the stonedust from his hands in the stream. Brid too had disappeared inside the bothy. She returned seconds later with four plates and a loaf of bread which she broke into four pieces and laid on the plates near the fire.

The meal he was given was, he thought, the best he had eaten in his whole life. The bread was rough and full of flavour, spread with thick creamy butter. With it they ate – with their fingers – venison cut into wafer-thin portions by Gartnait’s razor-sharp knife, mountain trout, cooked on slender twigs above the fire, and wedges of crumbling white cheese. Then there was more bread to mop up the rich gravy. To drink they had something which Adam, who had never touched alcohol in his life, suspected was some kind of heather ale. Mesmerised by the fire and the food and by his smiling though silent companions he drank heavily and within minutes, leaning back against a log, he was fast asleep.

He was awakened by Brid’s hand on his knee. For a moment he couldn’t think where he was, then he realised he was still outside. To his surprise he found he was lying warmly wrapped in a heavy woollen blanket. The fuzz of the wool was soaked with dew as he sat up and began to unwrap himself, but inside he was warm and dry.

‘A-dam.’ He loved the way she pronounced his name, carefully, liltingly, a little as though it were a French word. She pointed up at the sky. To his horror he could see the streaks of dawn above the hill. He had been out all night. His father would kill him if he found out. Frightened, he began to scramble to his feet.

Behind Brid her mother was bending over a brightly burning fire. Something was simmering in the pot suspended above it. He sniffed and Brid clapped her hands. She nodded and, taking a pottery bowl from her mother, spooned some sort of thin porridge into it. Taking it from her he sniffed, tasted, and burned his tongue. As breakfasts went it was pretty tasteless, not nearly as nice as the meal the night before, but it filled his stomach and when at last Brid led him back the way they had come he was feeling comparatively cheerful.

The cross-slab was wrapped once more in mist as they passed close beside it and he walked onto the hillside and stood looking down at his own valley, still wrapped in darkness. Brid pointed, with a little smile, and Adam stepped away from her. ‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘And thanks.’

‘Goodbye and thanks.’ The girl repeated the words softly. With a wave she turned and vanished into the mist.

The manse looked bleak in the cold dawn light. There was still no smoke coming from the chimneys and the front door was locked. Biting his lip nervously Adam ran soundlessly round the side, praying under his breath that the kitchen door would be open. It wasn’t. He stood there for a moment undecided, looking up at the blank windows at the back of the house. The awful misery was returning. Swallowing it down he turned and headed back into the street.

The manse might still be asleep but the village was stirring. The sweet smell of woodsmoke filled the air as he turned up Bridge Street and into Jeannie Barron’s gate and knocked tentatively at the door. The sound was greeted by a frenzy of wild barking.

The door was opened seconds later by Jeannie’s burly husband, Ken. A pretty sheltie was leaping round his heels, plainly delighted to see Adam, who stooped to give her a hug. The dog had been his once. But for some reason Adam had never understood his father had disapproved of his son having a pet and the puppy had been given to Jeannie. Ken stared down at Adam with a surprised frown and then turned and called over his shoulder, ‘Jeannie, it’s the minister’s lad.’

Jeannie’s kindly pink-cheeked face appeared behind him. She was wearing her overall just as she always did at the manse.

‘Hello, Mrs Barron.’ Adam looked at her and to his intense embarrassment his eyes flooded with tears.

‘Adam.’ She pushed past her husband and enveloped the boy in a huge plump hug. ‘Oh, my poor wee boy.’ He was almost as tall as she was but for the moment he was a small child again, seeking comfort and warmth and affection in her arms.

She ushered him into her kitchen, pushed her husband outside and sat Adam down at her table. A mug of milky tea and a thick wedge of bread and jam later she stood looking down at him. His pale face had regained its colour and the tears had dried but there was no disguising the misery in the boy’s face. The dog was sitting pressed against his legs.

‘Now, do you understand what’s happened?’ She sat down opposite him and reached for the large brown teapot.

He shrugged. ‘Father said Mother has gone.’ The tears were very near. ‘He said she had sinned.’

‘She’s not sinned!’ The strength of her voice helped him control the sob which was lurking in his throat. ‘Your mother is a decent, beautiful, good woman. But she’s been driven to the end of the road by that man.’

Adam frowned. Not recognising her metaphor he pictured a car, driven by a stranger.

Jeannie Barron scowled. Her fair hair leaped round her head in coiled springs as she wielded her pot and filled both their mugs again. ‘How she put up with him so long, I’ll never know. I only hope she’ll find happiness where she’s gone.’

‘Where has she gone?’ He looked at her desperately.

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Adam, and that’s the truth.’

‘But she’d tell you?’ Adam was biting his lip.

She shook her head again. ‘She told no one that I know.’

‘But why did she leave me behind?’ It was the bewildered cry of a small child. ‘Why didn’t she take me with her?’

Jeannie pursed her lips. ‘I don’t know.’ She sighed unhappily. ‘It’s not because she doesn’t love you. You must believe that. Perhaps she didn’t know herself where she was going. Perhaps she’ll send for you a wee bit later.’

‘Do you think so?’ His huge brown eyes were pleading.

Meeting them she couldn’t lie to him and give him the reassurance he wanted. All she could say was, ‘I hope so, Adam, I do hope so.’ Susan Craig had been her friend but not her confidante. To confide too much in another was not in her nature. It was enough that she knew that Jeannie would be there for Adam.

It was as he was standing up to leave he remembered why they were here in her kitchen and not in the manse. ‘Do you really not work for us any more?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Adam. Your father doesn’t want me there.’

She would never tell anyone, never mind the boy, the vile, furious words the distraught man had flung at her when she had tried to defend and then excuse his wife’s decision to leave. She put her hands on Adam’s shoulders, her heart aching for the boy. With her own family long gone and scattered round Scotland and one of them in Canada she had always thought of Adam privately as the child of her middle years. ‘Listen, Adam. I want you to remember I’m here if you need me. You can come to me any time.’ She held his gaze firmly. ‘Any time, Adam.’

She had a shrewd idea what the boy was going back to and she didn’t envy him. But he had courage, she had always admired him for that.

When he turned into the gate and approached the house this time the front door was open. He hesitated in the hall. The door to his father’s study was shut and he glanced at the stairs, wondering if he could reach them in time on his silent rubber soles. He was almost there when he heard the door behind him open. Panic flooded into his throat. For a moment he thought, as he turned to face his father, that he was going to be sick.

Thomas Craig stood back, gesturing the boy into his study with a sharp jerk of his head. The man’s face was grey and he was unshaven. As he closed the door behind his son, he reached up to the hook on the back of it and brought down the broad leather belt which hung there.

Adam whimpered, the ice of fear pouring over his shoulders and down his back, his skin already taut with terror at the beating that was coming. ‘Father –’

‘Where were you last night?’

‘On the hill, Father. I’m sorry. I got lost in the mist.’

‘You disobeyed me. I told you to go to your room. I had to look for you. I searched the village. And the riverbank, I didn’t know what had happened to you!’

‘I’m sorry, Father.’ He was ashamed of himself for being so afraid but he couldn’t help it. ‘I was upset.’ His words were very quiet.

‘Upset?’ His father echoed them. He pulled the leather strap through his hand and doubled it into his fist. ‘You think that excuses disobedience?’

‘No, Father.’ Adam clutched his hands together to stop them shaking.

‘And you accept that God would want you punished?’

No, he was screaming inside himself. No. Mummy says God is the God of love. He forgives. He wouldn’t want me beaten.

‘Well?’ Thomas’s voice came out as a hiss.

‘Yes, Father,’ Adam whispered.

His father stood for a moment in silence, looking at him, then he pulled an upright wooden chair out from the wall and placing it in front of his desk he pointed at it.

Adam was trembling. ‘Please, Father –’

‘Not another word.’

‘Father –’

‘God is waiting, Adam!’ The minister’s voice roared suddenly above his son’s whispered plea.

Adam gave up. His legs shaking so much he could hardly move he went to the chair and bent over it, stuffing one fist miserably into his mouth.

Thomas Craig was a just man in his way, sincere in the austere, hard religion which he preached. He knew in some part of himself that the boy’s misery at losing his mother must be as great, perhaps greater, than his own at losing his wife, but as he started to swing the leather strap down onto the child’s defenceless back something inside him snapped. Again and again he swung the belt, seeing, not the narrow hips and scruffy shirt and shorts of a fourteen-year-old boy, but the figure of his beautiful, provocative, unruly wife. It was not until the boy slid into an ungainly heap at his feet that he stopped, appalled, staring down in disbelief.

‘Adam?’ He dropped the belt. He knelt beside the boy and stared in horror at the oozing welts which were appearing on the back of the boy’s thighs, the long bloody stains soaking through his shorts.

‘Adam?’ He reached out his hand to his son’s awkwardly angled head and drew back, afraid suddenly to touch him. ‘What have I done?’

Swallowing hard, he backed away and moving blindly to his desk he sat down at it and picked up his Bible. Clutching it to his chest he sat without moving for a long time. On the blotter before him, torn into small pieces, lay the note Susan Craig had left for her son, a note Adam would never see.

In the hall outside, the long case clock ticked slowly on. It struck the half hour and then the hour and as the long sonorous notes echoed into silence Thomas stirred at last.

Lifting the unconscious boy he carried him upstairs and laid him tenderly on the bed and only then did he find the strength to walk into his own bedroom for the first time since Susan had left him. He stood looking round. Her brushes and comb lay on the table in the window. Otherwise there was no sign of her in the room. But there never had been. He had always discouraged ornaments and fripperies. He did not permit flowers in the house.

He hesitated for a moment then he walked over to the huge old mahogany wardrobe. The righthand door concealed his own meagre selection of black suits; the lefthand door her clothes. More than his, but not many more: the two suits, one navy and one black, the two black hats which sat on the shelf above them and the three cotton dresses, washed and ironed again and again, with the high necks and the long sleeves and sober autumnal colours which he considered suitable for her summer wear. She had two pairs of black lace-up shoes. He pulled open the door, steeling himself to find the clothes gone, but they were there. All of them. He was not prepared to see them, not prepared for his own reaction. The wave of grief and love and loss which swept over him shook him to the core. Unable to stop himself he pulled one of the dresses from its wooden hanger and, hugging it in his arms, he buried his face in it and wept.

It was a long time before he stopped crying.

He looked down at the dress in his arms in disgust. It smelled of her. It smelled of woman, of sweat, of lust. He did not immediately recognise the lust as his own. Throwing the dress on the floor he pulled the rest of the clothes out of the cupboard into a heap, then he descended on the bed. He tore off one of the heavy linen sheets and bundled it around her clothes and shoes and even the two hats. He pulled open the drawers which contained her meagre collection of much-darned underwear and threw them in the pile, then he carried it all out of the room. The tangle of rusty wires and the iron frame which was all that was left of Susan Craig’s beloved piano was still there in the garden behind the neat lines of vegetables. Her clothes were thrown down there and Thomas poured paraffin all over them before setting them alight. He waited until the last thick lisle stocking had turned to ash, then he walked back into the house.

He did not climb the stairs to see how Adam was. Instead he walked into his study and stood looking down at the chair over which the boy had bent. He was full of self-loathing. The anger, the misery, the love which he mistook for lust which he had felt for his wife, were evil. They were sins. The most terrible sins. How could he tend his flock and rebuke them for their backsliding when he could not control his own? Walking blindly to the desk he picked up the strap which he had dropped there after he had given the boy the thrashing and he stood looking down at it as it lay across his hand. He knew what he must do.

He locked the door of the old kirk behind him and stepped down into the shadowy nave, looking round the grey stone building with its neat lines of chairs and the bare table at the east end. A church had stood on this site for over a thousand years, or so it was believed, and sometimes in spite of himself, when he was alone in the building, as now, he could feel the special sacredness of the place. He was shocked to find this superstition in himself but could do nothing to rid himself of it. Enough light filtered in through the windows for him to see clearly as he walked halfway along the aisle and sat slowly down. In his right hand he carried the strap with which he had beaten his son.

He sat for a long time upright, rigid, his hands clenched, his eyes shut in prayer to the Lord. But he knew the Lord wanted more than this. He wanted punishment for Thomas’s weakness. As the last rays of light died in the sky outside, throwing pale streaks through the windows onto the ancient stone of the walls and floor, he stood up. He walked to the front of the lines of chairs and slowly he began to remove his jacket and then his tie and his shirt. He folded them neatly, shivering as the cold air played over his pale shoulders. He hesitated for a minute, then he went on: shoes, socks, trousers, all meticulously stowed on the pile. He wondered for a minute if he should remove his long woollen underpants but the male body naked, like the female, was an abomination before the Lord.

Then he picked up the leather belt.

The pain of the first self-inflicted welt took his breath away. He hesitated, but only for a second. Again and again he raised his arm and felt the merciless strap curling round his ribs. He lost count after a while, glorying in the pain, feeling it cleansing him, feeling it wipe out all trace of his own vile sin.

Slowly the strokes grew weaker. He collapsed to his knees on the stone floor and the strap fell out of his hand. He heard the sound of a sob and realised it had come from his own throat. In despair he slid down until he was lying full length on the floor, his head buried in his arms.

When Adam woke he was curled face down on his own bed. He tried to move and cried out with pain, clutching at the sheet beneath his face.

‘Mummy!’

He had forgotten. In the past when his father had beaten him she had crept upstairs later, secretly, and put iodine on his cuts and given him a sweetie to comfort him. But she wasn’t here, and this time the pain was worse than it had ever been before. He tried to move and stopped, sobbing silently into the pillow.

The house was very quiet. He lay still for a long time as the blood congealed and dried and his clothes stuck to his back. After a while he dozed. Once he awoke with a start when a door banged somewhere downstairs. He held his breath, frightened his father would appear, then when he didn’t he slowly relaxed again and once more sleep numbed his pain.

The need to urinate drove him at last from his bed. Moving stiffly, biting his lip to stop himself from crying out loud he made his way to the lavatory and, locking himself in, he unbuttoned his shorts. He was too stiff to twist round to look at his buttocks, but he could see the bruises on his legs, the blood on the cotton of his clothes. The sight frightened him. He didn’t know what to do.

Creeping back into his bedroom he crawled back into the bed. When he woke again it was almost dark. Pulling himself up he crept to the top of the stairs and looked down. No lamps had been lit. Stiffly he tiptoed down. His father’s study door was open. There was no one there and he stood for a moment, staring in.

He pulled an old raincoat from the line of hooks in the tiled vestibule and draped it round his shoulders, afraid he might meet someone, afraid that they would see what his father had done to him and afraid they would know that he had been bad.

He almost did not dare knock at Jeannie’s door again, but he didn’t know what else to do. As he stumbled up her front path his head was spinning. His feet felt as though they belonged to someone else a long way away. He raised his hand to the door knocker and grasped at the air, falling forward so his fingers clawed at the boards.

The dog heard him.

‘That man should be locked up!’ Ken Barron was pouring water from the pans on the range into the hip bath before the fire. ‘He ought to be reported.’

Jeannie shook her head. Her lips were tight. ‘No, Ken. Let be. I shall deal with this myself.’ She had had to fight back the tears when she saw the state of the boy.

The bath had been the only way. He couldn’t sit down in it, but she had him kneel in his clothes whilst she poured jugs of water over the thin shoulders and slowly worked first the shirt and then the shorts free of the dried blood.

When at last the wounds were clean and she had soothed them with Germolene she put one of her husband’s clean shirts on the boy, cursing the roughness of the linen as she saw him wince, then she gave him some broth and put him in the press-bed in the corner of the room.

What she had to say to the minister would keep until morning. He was not going to get away with what he had done this time.

‘Don’t be a fool, Jeannie.’ Ken was only half-hearted in his effort to dissuade his wife from visiting the manse the next morning. He had enormous respect for Jeannie’s towering rages.

Her blue eyes were blazing. ‘Just try and stop me!’ Her hands were on her hips as she faced him and he moved back hastily and stood in the doorway, watching as his wife sailed off down the street, clutching Adam’s hand.

The front door of the manse was open. She dragged Adam in with her and stood in the hall looking round. She could smell the unhappiness in the house, the lack of fresh air and flowers, and she shivered, thinking of the beautiful young English woman Thomas Craig had somehow won when he was training for the ministry and brought back to this house fifteen years ago. Susan had been full of the love of life, her hair bright, her clothes pretty and the high-ceilinged rooms of the two-hundred-year-old house had resounded for a while to the sound of her singing, to the piano she played so beautifully, to her laughter. But slowly, bit by bit, he had destroyed her. He forbade the singing, frowned at the laughter. One day when she had gone into Perth on the bus he had someone take the piano out into the garden and he had burned it as an abomination in the eyes of God, for was not all music frivolous and shocking if it was not played in the kirk? Susan had cried that evening in the kitchen like a child, and Jeannie, young herself then too, had put her hand on the bright hair, now tied back in a tight styleless bun, and tried in vain to comfort her.

Adam had been born ten months after Thomas Craig brought Susan to the manse. There had been no more children.

Her whole life was bound up with the little boy, but Thomas had views on his son’s upbringing too; children should be seen and not heard; spare the rod and spoil the child.

Jeannie sighed. Adam was a bright child. He went to the local school and was now at the Academy in Perth. He made friends easily but, too afraid and ashamed to ask them home, became more and more engrossed in his books and his hobbies alone. The only love and happiness he had experienced in his home life had been sneaked behind the closed door of the kitchen, where his mother and the manse’s warm-hearted housekeeper had in a conspiracy of silence tried to make the boy’s life happy out of the sight of his father.

At the private life of the minister and his wife, Jeannie could only guess. She sniffed as she thought about it. A man who could order the shooting of a dog for covering a bitch in a country lane just because it was outside the kirk on the Sabbath, a man who ordered the village girls to wear their sleeves to their wrists even in the summer, was not a man at ease with sensual needs.

Thomas had seen them walking in through the courtyard from the window in the cold empty dining room. His clothes were immaculate, his shirt white and starched. There was no sign in his face of the pain he was feeling as he appeared in the doorway and confronted them. His eyes went from Jeannie’s belligerent, tightly controlled expression to that of his son, white, exhausted and afraid. He did not allow himself to waver.

‘Adam, you may go to your room. I wish to talk to Mrs Barron alone.’

He moved stiffly in front of her into his study and turned to face her at once, before she had a chance even to open her mouth. ‘I would like you to take your old job back. There has to be someone to look after the boy.’

His words took her breath away. She had been ready for a fight. She clenched her fists. ‘I nearly had the doctor to him last night,’ she said defiantly.

She saw his jawline tighten, otherwise his face remained impassive. ‘It will not happen again, Mrs Barron.’

There was a moment’s silence between them, then she lifted her shoulders slightly. ‘I see.’ There was another pause. ‘Is Mrs Craig not coming back, then?’

‘No, Mrs Craig is not coming back.’ His knuckles went white on the desk as he leaned forward to ease his pain. The scattered pieces of Susan Craig’s note had disappeared.

Jeannie nodded in grim acknowledgement. ‘Very well then, Minister. I shall resume my position here. For the boy’s sake, you understand. But it must not happen again. Ever.’

Their eyes met and he inclined his head. ‘Thank you,’ he said humbly.

She stared at him in silence for a long moment, then she turned towards the door. ‘I’d best go and light the range.’