The Applecross Spell Read online

  The Applecross Spell

  The Applecross Spell

  a novel by

  Wendy MacIntyre

  Copyright © 2003 Wendy MacIntyre and XYZ Publishing

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  National Library of Canada cataloguing in publication

  MacIntyre, Wendy, 1947-

  The applecross spell

  (Tidelines)

  ISBN 1-894852-03-6

  I. Title. II. Series: Tidelines (Montréal, Québec).

  PS8575.I68A86 2003 C813’.54 C2003-940623-7

  PS9575.I68A86 2003

  PR9199.3.M32A86 2003

  Legal Deposit: Second quarter 2003

  National Library of Canada

  Bibliothèque nationale du Québec

  XYZ Publishing acknowledges the financial support our publishing program receives from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) of the Department of Canadian Heritage, the ministère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec, and the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Layout: Édiscript enr.

  Cover design: Zirval Design

  Cover photo: Morgan-Le-Fay by Frederick Sandys, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery

  Printed and bound in Canada by Métrolitho

  (Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada) in May 2003.

  X Y Z Publishing Distributed by: Fitzhenry & Whiteside

  1781 Saint Hubert Street 195 Allstate Parkway

  Montreal, Quebec H2L 3Z1 Markham, ON L3R 4T8

  Tel: (514) 525-2170 Markham, ON L3R 4T8

  Fax: (514) 525-7537 free ordering, tel: 1-800-387-9776

  E-mail: [email protected] Fax: 1-800-260-9777

  Web site: www.xyzedit.qc.ca E-mail: [email protected]

  For Heather

  Contents

  1 The House

  2 A New Bride

  3 Her Mother’s Teachings

  4 The Signs

  5 Beware of Lambs

  6 Gemma

  7 Murdo

  8 The Journal

  9 By the Thames

  10 A Frugal Meal

  11 The Children

  12 Mathematical Drills

  13 Thomas the Rhymer’s Stone

  14 Callum

  15 Walking the Ridgepole

  16 A Letter to Ada

  17 Clarity Must Come

  18 Defying Gravity

  Epilogue

  1

  The House

  Rain sleeked down the tower, like water pouring over the flanks of a horse. The stone was buff pink. In the sunlight, Suzanne remembered, it had had the luminosity, the blush, of healthy flesh.

  The tower itself was thirty feet high, topped by a small conical roof shaped like the truncated tip of a dunce’s cap. This cap, like the massive roofs of the two main wings of the house, was covered with a dove-grey slate, gone leaden now in the rain.

  Yesterday, in a buttery autumn light that had made the pine needles sing silver, Murdo had taken her on a brief tour. His delivery had been perfunctory, yet seamless. Suzanne sensed it had been honed by a hundred repetitions, to visiting colleagues or old school friends. With his mathematician’s precision, Murdo had stripped the subject to a few salient points: the age of the house (the tower and east wing dating from the fifteenth century with various additions over the centuries), the number of bedrooms (eight), the minimum thickness of the walls in the original structure (five feet), the size of the grounds (seven acres of mostly tangled woodland, but encompassing also a long-defunct apothecary’s garden and a slender tributary of the River Tweed, spanned by a narrow arc of stone barely broad enough to call a bridge).

  The house contained “few treasures as such,” Murdo said, other than what he described as a “rather baleful Renaissance Madonna,” which might or might not belong to the school of Leonardo.

  Suzanne’s first reaction had been benumbed shock. Murdo had in no way prepared her for the sheer size of the house, nor for its antiquity. “I have a house outside Edinburgh,” he had said, a simple enough sentence from which she had conjured up something stolidly bourgeois: three stories of dark hewn stone, the back of a dressing table mirror glowering like a black sun from the top floor bedroom window. This was a furniture arrangement, she had observed on her various stays in the city, much favoured by Edinburgh’s middle class. She saw it as a kind of unconscious barricade, the blank face of the mirror pushed tightly against window glass to warn off eyes that might probe the intimacies of bed linen and human nakedness. The city’s obsession with propriety had already struck her as strangulation, a kind of small daily death.

  Murdo was not Edinburgh-raised. Had he been, Suzanne thought it unlikely that she would have been drawn to him. He had spent his early boyhood in the Caribbean, and so she imagined the boy, so many years before she was born, barefoot on ivory sands, sleeping with cockatoos, dreaming of wild pink blossoms that would forever heat his blood.

  He had had, she understood, a most fortuitous deliverance. For his sexuality was cleanly forthright; not the squinteyed Scots Presbyterian view of the body, all hobbled and grimy with shame.

  From their first time together, Murdo had an unfailing capacity to astonish her. Not in the sense of revelations throwing her off balance. Rather, her discovery of some totally new aspect of his experience or character simply reaf firmed for her his apparently fathomless mystery. She realized that she was “in love,” and that Murdo’s remarkable selfcontainment had much to do with it. He had an interior vastness, she sensed, that mirrored the sidereal worlds he studied. Ada might have said that he was part of the world of making.

  Of course, Suzanne had not had Ada’s counsel to bolster her when she made her leap of faith. She had, on the other hand, encountered plenty of external resistance. Several women friends in London had invited her out, or over, for “a drink,” shamelessly exploiting her liking for single malts. These encounters had a peculiar sameness. A dispassionate and reasoned prologue, and then the drama itself, in which her friends variously displayed disbelief, anger, and outrage, all mixed with plentiful libations. They had all in the end wished her well, while making their reluctance quite evident. Their tighter-than-usual ritual hugs saddened her. She saw that they wanted her to recant (Charlotte Meredith, who belonged to a feminist theatre troupe, had done a charming pantomime of begging on her knees, which had made them both laugh) and that they saw her decision as heresy. And then there was Gemma’s reaction. But Suzanne still could not bear to think too much of Gemma.

  Although she did not encourage them, she knew her friends saw her as a sort of figurehead. Her books had been well reviewed, and more importantly, they were popular, partly because of her lavish use of illustrations. She had herself always loved picture books. She was a feminist “name,” although certainly not a star. Not that she would have wished such a status. She did what she did, delighting – almost too much so – in the research, poring over physical images of women produced over the centuries. These were images, wrought mainly by men, that women throughout the Western world had absorbed – often, as Suzanne tried to show, to their own cost. Her first book was titled The Whore, its longest chapter devoted to Mary Magdalene. Her second, The Maiden, had gone into three
reprints.

  She had not been surprised to find neither of her works for sale in Edinburgh’s most comprehensive book store. Not that it much mattered. She had her research for her next book to begin, and her life with Murdo. She did believe that she had purged herself of all doubts. Sometimes she recalled with hurt anger the most extreme of the reactions to her decision. On three separate occasions, radical feminists of her acquaintance had cut her dead on the street. To marry, she understood, was to move beyond the pale.

  She savoured the irony. For this was what she desired. A migration beyond her known world that would match her leap of faith. Never – before Murdo – had she conceived of marriage with a man as a possibility in her own life. Certainly, the words “husband” and “wife” were anathema to her: the one with its insidious implications of management and control; the other so stripped of character and particularity that a woman was speedily objectified. She hated most the way some men would refer to “the wife,” as if they said “the table” or “the fire grate.”

  Murdo had understood when she explained that these were loaded terms, that would burrow like worms into the life of their relationship. “But of course,” he had said. “Of course.” He had regarded her so gravely, she had been momentarily mesmerized by the golden flecks in his eyes. A second later it occurred to her that she might perhaps have been insensitive. He was after all twice widowed. “Wife” might therefore be a holy word to him. Doubly so, and fraught with pain. But he had smiled, and taken her hand, so that she knew by his silence all was well.

  It was a “marriage” she wanted, a word that was for her numinous and honeycombed with light. She was aware that she had probably sucked in these mystical associations with her mother’s milk. She had grown up surrounded by Ada’s tomes of magic and theosophy. Isis and Osiris were as real to her as the man who delivered the bread or the foreign sailors she and Ada saw when they walked down to the Halifax harbour.

  Suzanne had believed in that divine couple, as much as she had in the conjoining of Solomon and Sheba. This was the union of irreconcilables Ada spoke of: “Opposites underpin the world, Suzanne.” This saying was indelibly linked with an engraving, whose tissue-thin protective covering Ada would lift carefully with the tip of her fingernail. Here was the female Water, her hair a torrent that streamed down her back, and then curved upward to embrace the male body of Fire. Water streamed too from her fingertips, as flame did from his. They were depicted in profile, their faces tranquil and human, their eyes locked in love.

  The first time Suzanne saw Murdo, she had seen in him that old childhood image of the male Fire. Murdo’s abundant hair massed in waves that called to mind a slow-burning bed of flame. Only in stark daylight did one notice the streaks of grey amidst the red-gold. Her first time in bed with him, it had seemed only right that he had radiated such heat against the coolness of her flesh.

  None of these things could she confide to any of her women friends, most especially the mystical groundwork she had inherited from Ada.

  “Everything that is holy, is secret.” Another of Ada’s precepts. So Suzanne had kept secret, even from Murdo, the most compelling of her reasons for marrying. She could never have said aloud: I love you for your mystery and your silence and the fact that your spirit has been tempered by much suffering. To speak that would have trammelled it. The utterance itself might well kill love.

  Watching the rain sleek down Murdo’s tower, she could, for a moment, believe herself in a dream. Here she was, standing in front of a Gothic structure in a man’s vermilion rain slick that reeked of pipe tobacco. Even the umbrella she held was a sort of surreal creation, its ivory handle yellowing like old teeth, its mammoth dome alternating segments of orange and lime-green. Worse, she had discovered the umbrella in a hall stand that had obviously once been an elephant’s foot. The thought of it made her shudder. Had Ada been there, Suzanne was sure she would have performed a purifying ritual over this cruelly offensive object, exorcising the beast’s final pain that clung still in the hair.

  Tomorrow she would tell Murdo that she would like the thing moved out of sight.

  Suddenly, as though prompted by a dream-like illogic, she experienced an irresistible urge to lay her cheek on the wet stone of the tower. She drew back at once, because where she had anticipated smoothness, there was a rasp of stucco against her skin.

  2

  A New Bride

  Murdo mistrusted words. Once he had confided to her that he considered language a kind of neurotic babbling, a peculiarly human disease. Sound, syllable, sense, all paled beside the flawless arabesques of his equations. These symbols, whose meaning was forever locked away from her, sometimes resembled stark-branched trees, or the spiny ferns that frost scribes on a window. They had the sharp-edged delicacy of winged insects. Suzanne could imagine them wafted in by a south-borne wind, settling themselves on the page in groupings that matched the design in Murdo’s brain. Were she to pick up the piece of paper and shake it, they might well fly off, and write their secret elsewhere.

  When she pictured his formulae in this way, she could more easily understand how words might seem to him clumsy, heavy things that encumbered the tongue. Indeed, in the weeks after they were married, he spoke to her less than when they had first met. Suzanne accepted this as part of the structure of their being together, a companionable silence that flowered daily in ways she had not anticipated. She took a real sensual pleasure, for example, in the gestural play of his fingers, a manual dance that mirrored the tentative testing, then the buoyant surge, of his mental calculations. He would become so totally absorbed, his long fingers weaving invisible architectonics in the air, that she felt she witnessed an intensely private ritual.

  There was a storybook element in their silent companionship as well. For so much did Murdo’s broad, sculpted face resemble a lion’s, she sometimes imagined she had tumbled with him into a world where beasts walked and talked and dreamt of Platonic forms.

  His body too, had a leonine muscular tautness, and there was an underlying tawny hue to his skin. In bed he continued to radiate that almost fierce desert heat she found both sensual and comforting, for in Britain it seemed she was never quite warm enough, despite duvets and the hot water bottle she tucked under her feet. At night sometimes, he would wake her with a restless tossing, or an arm flung out suddenly. When she touched him then he would be feverish, and she understood that in dreams, he was reliving some old suffering. The loss of his first wife. Or the second. Or most painfully, dreams of the two together. It pleased her then to comfort him, to wrap her arms about him as though he were a child she was easing out of the grip of a nightmare. The fact he was twenty-eight years her senior would strike her most sharply then. It meant he had had so much more time to accumulate pain, in which fate had cruelly conspired.

  She did not pity him. To pity, she realized, would poison love. Nor did she pry. She had had relationships, even with women, where the dedication to “honesty,” the too deliberate stripping away of each other’s facades and defences, had resulted in a mutual contempt. One must accept the vast inner darkness of one’s lover, she told herself. He would tell her what he chose in his own good time. These were the guidelines she set herself.

  Meanwhile, she relished their easy silences. When Murdo did speak, she sensed he selected his words with tact and sensitivity paramount. Unlike the sureness of their physical lovemaking, his speech with her was often tentative. It was as though he saw the invisible relation between them as a new and tender organism that even his breath might harm.

  So that she was profoundly taken aback when on the third morning at his Scottish Borders house, he asked her a question she considered both blunt and intrusive. They were sitting in the garden behind the house. The day was almost hot, the sky an unmarked azure. The weather seemed to Suzanne miraculously un-Scottish. Earlier, from the window of her study, she had seen the triple crown of the Eildon Hills free of cloud shadow. The clear light clung to their green like silk.

&n
bsp; Murdo had on a broad-brimmed Panama hat so that his face was shaded from her when he asked abruptly: “Can you have children?”

  She did not know then why she did it. Perhaps it was the rage she felt flaming in her head. It was not so much the question itself that set her anger off, as his tone. Challenging? Sly? Whichever, she disliked it intensely. The garden changed suddenly. Murdo might have been a sadistic jailer subjecting her to interrogation. The sun was spoiled for her. It was a bare bulb now, in a caged lamp he thrust near her eyes. So she lied. “No,” she said, certain that he would believe her. She had learned long ago that it was essential in life to know how to lie well.

  “So,” he said. It was a word Murdo much favoured. Like Q.E.D., it seemed to signify closure for him, the proof accomplished. So.

  “Is it a problem?” she asked, making no effort to hide her irritation.

  “Of course not,” he replied. “No, of course not.”

  He crossed over to her chair, drew her up by the hand. She pushed back the niggardly thought that this was a learned, courtly gesture. As he held her, and her own body registered his familiar heat, she felt her annoyance melt away. She had misinterpreted, she thought, been overly sensitive. It was sometimes an unfortunate adjunct of feminism, this excessive defensiveness. Like those women friends who suggested she perceived in Murdo the father she had never had. Warning of dangers. Of the inevitable erosion of her own power. Suzanne believed they were wrong. On the other hand, she was aware, as was every thinking woman, that she must stay vigilant.

  Later that day as she worked through the reproductions she had collected so far, renderings of seductive witches, hideous hags, Macbeth’s three sisters huddled over their cauldron, she found herself remembering with satisfaction her first act she had consciously kept secret from Murdo. She had had an intense need simply to do something covert, a deed without his knowledge.

  It happened in Amsterdam, where they went for three days immediately following their marriage in a North London registry office. She did not think of it as a honeymoon, a word she found sickly and loathsome. Simply, it was their first trip away together, a kind of symbolic removal from the British Isles.