Distilling this to English for MacPherson, Mary only said, “It’s broken.”
And he nodded, losing interest.
Mary nearly asked if he could fix it, as he’d fixed the watch at Mâcon, but his face didn’t invite questions. Instead, she turned her focus to her own concerns.
There was her gown to sponge and clean; her stockings to be mended where they’d torn when she fell running to the ground. And after that, she took her journal out and brought it up to date as best she could from the last time she’d written, through their day of walking in the rain and their most welcome sojourn in the hillside town—whose name, she had since learned, had been Joyeuse, a name of happiness—and all of their encounter with the wolf, that led to where they were today.
We are to spend another night here. Mr. M— claims it is to confound any who have sought to follow us, but I believe it is because I slightly hurt my ankle in my fall and he would let me rest a little longer before I must face a full day’s walk on it.
She had no rational foundation for that curious belief, nor could she think of any reason why MacPherson might have gone against his nature so completely as to change his plans so she could be more comfortable, but more and more she felt it must be so.
He’d gone out late that morning with his gun in hand, returning with a brace of rabbits and an observation. “They have a mule in the barn,” he’d told Thomson. “Ask if they would sell it.”
And with the deal done and the money exchanged, Thomson had said with pleasure, “At last we’ll have something to carry our baggage.”
“It’s carrying her.” With a curt nod at Mary, the Scotsman had set Thomson straight.
Mary, thinking it imprudent to say anything, had bent her head a little closer to her journal and continued writing her new fairy tale about a huntsman and a wolf, in which the wolf was magic, and the huntsman not at all what he appeared to be.
But she’d asked Effie afterwards, while they had worked together to tuck in the blankets of their bed, “Are all men of the Highlands so unfathomable?”
“Some.” Effie smiled slightly, then grew serious. “And some like him, who’ve seen the wars, have depths we’ll never reach or know.”
“How do you know he’s been to war?”
“It’s in the eyes,” said Effie, very quietly. “It changes them. They go to war as boys and are made men too soon, too violently, and all of them return with something lost, with something missing. You can see it in their eyes.”
Mary had thought about this later, when MacPherson’s eyes had briefly met her own while they’d been sitting with the others after supper by the kitchen fire, the children all in bed except the baby who, resisting sleep, was cradled still in Effie’s arms.
The mother said, by way of an apology, “He does not like to sleep, this one. He is afraid he’ll miss something.”
“I nursed a child like that, once,” Effie said. “Always watching, always thinking, with a mind that would not rest.”
“It must be difficult,” the mother said, “to leave the children you have cared for.”
Effie, looking down upon the baby, started rocking gently in her chair. “They have their own lives, in the end. They grow, and they forget.”
Mr. MacPherson, Mary thought, had not forgotten. She was watching him when Effie began singing softly to the baby in their Highland language, and she saw his eyelids close for just a second as though he’d had something pain him from within, and Mary wondered whether his own mother had perhaps once sung him that same lullaby.
But when the song had finished and she said—in English, so he’d be included in the conversation—“That was very pretty,” he surprised her more than he had ever done.
He smiled.
As smiles went, it was but slight and did not show his teeth, but it did carve a line much like a dimple down his cheek and made his face look younger. “That,” he told her, “was the ‘Griogal Cridhe,’ a widow’s lament about seeing her husband beheaded.”
Mary was still too surprised by that smile to respond, but it didn’t keep Thomson from commenting, also in English, “And this is the sort of thing mothers will sing to their children, then, up in the Highlands? To teach them that life’s full of treachery?”
Shrugging, MacPherson said, “Or where to seek their revenge.”
Effie, still rocking the baby, directed her words to the Scotsman. “Shall I sing a song better matched to your mood, then?”
The shadow of the smile still lingered on his lips as he returned the older woman’s gaze, his own more of a dare, thought Mary, than an invitation.
But when Effie started singing this time, nothing of the smile survived. MacPherson sat in silence with his gaze cast downward, fixed upon the hard edge of the table, and when Effie’s voice had sung the final note he looked at her, and Mary thought she saw within his eyes the lost and missing things that Effie had been speaking of. Or rather, she could see the hollow places they had left behind.
He stood, and without speaking, went outside.
Soon after that they heard the steady striking of an ax blade chopping wood, and Thomson, attempting to lighten the mood, said to Effie, “Another beheading song, was it?”
The baby had fallen asleep now, and Effie replied in soft tones, “The lament of a warrior for his dead comrades and those whom he loved who lie cold in the ground and unable to comfort his wounds while he wanders alone and unloved. Fada atà mise an déidh chàich, it begins, and in English the verse would be: ‘I have lived too long after the others, and the world yet troubles me, and there are none left to talk to,’” she said, “‘of the lives we once had, in the time before.’”