Then he blinks, and releases both the gun and me.
“Alva?” he says, his voice low, a purr to it that makes my mouth dry.
I raise an eyebrow, not trusting myself to speak.
“I knew you weren’t going to shoot me,” he says in his normal voice, folding his arms behind his head and leaning back. “You didn’t cock the gun.”
I turn on the spot and run, leaving him there, a faint red ring on his forehead like a faded lipstick mark. The last image of him is burned into my brain: sitting on the stump, cheeks flushed, breath coming fast. Flushed as mine, fast as mine.
I have what I came for. So why does it feel like I’ve lost?
SEVEN
I race back up the mountain, shame dogging my heels. I can’t believe I drew my gun. How reckless. How idiotic. A despicable thing to do.
There’s no excuse, no reason, for pulling a weapon on an unarmed person, no matter what they’ve done. I should know that better than anyone. Like father, like daughter. What’s wrong with me? What if it had gone off? What if I’d hurt him? What if it had been worse? Ren…
I rage at myself the whole way home, the fury only ebbing away as I get closer to the cottage, when it’s replaced by the fear that if Da is back then he knows I disobeyed him and left. Maybe it’s no more than I deserve.
I find the cottage still and silent, heavy with the feeling of emptiness. And it frightens me. I should be relieved, but I’m not. I’m worried.
“He’s fine,” I say aloud to the kitchen, as if that will make it true. “Of course he’s fine, why wouldn’t he be fine?” Concern for my father is a new feeling. “You just worry about yourself,” I mutter as I put the kettle on to boil.
While it does, I hide the bullets beneath the floorboards in my room, replace the flintlock in the cabinet in my father’s study, and brush the mud from my skirt. There. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.
Everything is fine.
I mix dough for bread and leave it to rise; then, starving after my hike, I throw together a potato soup, leaving it on the hob to simmer while I fuss over the already tidy cottage, dusting surfaces that are spotless, straightening quilts and polishing cutlery. When the soup is finally ready I lace it with dill, taking the bowl through to my father’s study.
Settling in his chair, legs curled under me, soup balanced on my knee, I flick through the huge logbook that represents his life as the Naomhfhuil, going back, back, until I reach the year I was nine. The year he—
I stop dead as I find a piece of paper folded between the pages of the log.
Lachlan is written on the front. My father’s name, in my mother’s handwriting.
Suddenly I can smell lavender and hear her singing off-key as she hangs the washing out. I remember running through a maze of white sheets on the first good day of spring, her chasing after me. I remember her making shadow-puppet monsters with her hands and screaming with delight when they tickled me through the washing.
She’d been pregnant in the weeks before my father shot her, but something went wrong. She lost the baby, and a lot of blood too. She almost died. Harry Glenn, who was the nearest thing Ormscaula had to a doctor of any kind, told my father to stay home with her, that she would need him. But he didn’t. As always with him, the loch came first.
She wasn’t the same afterwards.
She slept later and later; some days she never got out of bed. She stopped eating, stopped talking, stopped getting dressed. Her hair grew lank, her eyes bloodshot. It was summer, and she started to smell, unwashed and sour, so bad I didn’t want to go near her. When she did get up, she’d leave me at home and wander the lochside for hours, returning after dark and going straight back to bed.
My father begged her to pull herself together and I wanted that too. I wanted my mam back; I didn’t understand why I wasn’t enough to make her happy, like before. She barely seemed to know I was there; my father would come home from his rounds to find me eating jam from the jar because it was all I could reach on the shelf and I was starving. He told her over and over he was sorry for what happened, but that he needed her to get better. For her own sake. For my sake. And she didn’t. Wouldn’t. Couldn’t, I see now.
It was her screams that woke me up the night he killed her. Her voice that dragged me from my bed. After weeks of silence, there was suddenly sound: guttural, furious shrieking, rage shredding her throat, making each cry raw and ragged. Something in my father must have snapped, because I opened my bedroom door in time to hear a scuffle in the parlour, and then a gun going off. Four times, one after the other, with no pause. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Faster than my heartbeat.
The revolving barrel made it quick. You wouldn’t be able to shoot someone four times like that with a flintlock; you’d have to keep pausing to reload each bullet, to stuff more gunpowder down the barrel. You’d have to really mean it, to shoot someone four times with that. Maybe it’s easier with a revolver.
One more outraged cry, and then the window shattering. I ran back to bed and hid under the covers. I told myself it was a dream. I was in bed, so it had to be a dream.
When I heard my father’s tread outside my window, I shut my eyes until I couldn’t hear it any more. He was gone. That was when I went to the parlour.
I longed to see my mam crouched on the floor, picking up bits of glass with careful fingers, plucking them from her pretty carpet, a spark finally back in her eyes, reignited by the shock of the gunfire and the thunderstorm air-clearing of the row. I wanted her to tell me to go back to bed, and not to worry. I hoped to lie awake and hear my father return, and the sounds of them making up. But there was none of that. No sign of her. Only a little gun left on the floor. I picked it up and went back to bed, where I put it under my pillow.
When he came back he looked for it, of course. I screwed my eyes shut tight and listened while he lifted up the sofa, while he reached under the sideboard. I lay still as the dead when he came to my room, the gun hard beneath my pillow as the door opened and the beam of light hit the wall. I thought he knew I had it. I thought he was coming to take it back and finish me off too. Those last two bullets, waiting for me. But all he did was bend and kiss my head gently, as though he hadn’t just gunned my mother down two rooms away and dumped her body in the loch outside my window.
When he finally closed the door I thought my heart would fly from my chest.
The next morning the door to my mother’s parlour was closed, forbidden now, and he told me she’d left in the night. When I asked if she’d be back he said he didn’t know.
A week later, when Giles Stewart came around, oh-so-concerned after hearing she’d lost the baby, and found her missing, I repeated what my father said – that she’d left us.
Even when he sent for a sheriff, I never wavered. I looked right into the sheriff’s solemn grey eyes and I told him she left of her own free will. I didn’t mention the gun or the shots. I didn’t say that my mother’s body probably lay at the bottom of the loch.
I remember later that night a great storm began, a sky-breaker, rain lashing down, churning the loch. My father spent most of the night by the window, watching it. Waiting to see if what he’d done would come to the surface.
Now, I lift this slip of paper out of the log, this note from my mam written so long ago, and slowly I open it.