The View from Castle Rock

trying, my girl. You must try harder.” Her mother is all dressed up and talking fine, like some Edinburgh lady.
    Evil stuff is poured into her mouth. She tries to spit it out, knowing it is poison.
    I will just get up and get out of this, she thinks. She starts trying to pull herself loose from her body, as if it were a heap of rags all on fire.
    A man’s voice is heard, giving some order.
    “Hold her,” he says and she is split and stretched wide open to the world and the fire.
    “Ah-ah-ahh,” the man’s voice says, panting as if he has been running in a race.
    Then a cow that is so heavy, bawling heavy with milk, rears up and sits down on Agnes s stomach.
    “Now. Now,” says the man’s voice, and he groans at the end of his strength as he tries to heave it off.
    The fools. The fools, ever to have let it in.

    She was not better till the 18th when she was delivered of a daughter. We having a surgeon on board nothing happened. Nothing occurred till the 22nd this was the roughest day we had till then experienced. The gib-boom was broken a second time. Nothing worth mentioning happened Agnes was mending in an ordinary way till the 29th we saw a great shoal of porpoises and the 30th (yesterday) was a very rough sea with the wind blowing from the west we went rather backwards than forwards…

    “In the Ettrick there is what they call the highest house in Scotland,” James says, “and the house that my grandfather lived in was a higher one than that. The name of the place is Phauhope, they call it Phaup, my grandfather was Will O’Phaup and fifty years ago you would have heard of him if you came from any place south of the Forth and north of the Debatable Lands.”
    Unless a person stops up his ears, what is to be done but listen? thinks Walter. There are people who curse to see the old man coming but there do seem to be others who are glad of any distraction.
    He is telling about Will and his races, and the wagers on him, and other foolishness more than Walter can bear.
    “And he married a woman named Bessie Scott and one of his sons was named Robert and that same Robert was my father. My father. And I am standing here in front of you.”
    “In but one leap Will could clear the river Ettrick, and the place is marked.”

    For the first two or three days Young James has refused to be unfastened from Mary’s hip. He has been bold enough, but only if he can stay there. At night he has slept in her cloak, curled up beside her, and she has wakened aching along her left side because she lay stiffly all night not to disturb him. Then in the space of one morning he is down and running about and kicking at her if she tries to hoist him up.
    Everything on the ship is calling out for his attention. Even at night he tries to climb over her and run away in the dark. So she gets up aching not only from her stiff position but from lack of sleep altogether. One night she drops off and the child gets loose but most fortunately stumbles against his father’s body in his bid for escape. Henceforth Andrew insists that he be tied down every night. He howls of course, and Andrew shakes him and cuffs him and then he sobs himself to sleep. Mary lies by him softly explaining how this is necessary so that he should not fall off the ship into the ocean, but he regards her at these times as his enemy and if she puts a hand to stroke his face he tries to bite it with his baby teeth. Every night he goes to sleep in a rage, but in the morning when she unties him, still half-asleep and full of his infant sweetness, he clings to her drowsily and she is suffused with love.
    The truth is that she loves even his howls and his rages and his kicks and his bites. She loves his dirty and his curdled smells as well as his fresh ones. As his drowsiness leaves him his clear blue eyes, looking into hers, fill with a marvellous intelligence and an imperious will, which seem to her to come straight from Heaven. (Though her religion has always taught her that self-will comes from the opposite direction.) She loved her brothers too when they were sweet and wild and had to be kept from falling into the burn, but surely not as passionately as she loves James.
    Then one day he is gone. She is in the line for the wash water and she turns around and he is not beside her. She has just been speaking a few words to the woman ahead of her, answering a question about Agnes and the infant, she has just told its name-Isabel-and in that moment he has got away.