On the Edge of Darkness. Barbara Erskine

ducked down out of sight of the manse’s study window and led Adam back down the street and towards the river. Only when they were in the wood by the burn did he stop and find them a fallen tree trunk to sit on, out of reach of the spray from the waterfall. He reached into his pocket and produced a crumpled envelope. ‘Here. It’s from your mother.’

      Adam stared at him. His mouth dropped open and he found he was having to fight a sudden urge to cry. It was two years, almost exactly, since his mother had left home and he had long ago given up hope of hearing from her ever again.

      He put his hand out for the envelope and sat staring at it. It was her writing all right. Every thought of Brid and Gartnait fled from his brain as he turned it over and over in his hands.

      ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ Robbie was eager to know what it said.

      Adam shook his head. He shoved it into his pocket and leaning forward, elbows on knees, picked up a moss-covered stone to throw towards the burn.

      ‘She came to see my grandmother,’ Robbie prompted him. ‘She said she had written to you and you never bothered to answer. She said she understood that you must be very angry with her.’

      ‘She never wrote.’ Adam’s voice was strangled. ‘Not once.’

      Robbie frowned. ‘She said she did.’

      There was a long silence. Adam was struggling to control his tears. When he managed to speak at last it was in a croak. ‘How was she?’

      ‘Good. She was looking very pretty.’

      ‘Pretty?’ Adam picked up on the word sharply.

      Robbie nodded. ‘She had a blue dress. And pearls round her neck. And her hair was kind of long and curly. Not like it used to be here.’

      Adam bit his lip. The description did not fit the repressed, meek minister’s wife who had been his mother. Perhaps his father was right. She had become a whore.

      Miserably he stared at the narrow tumbling glitter of the water in front of him. He said nothing.

      ‘Are you still planning to be a doctor?’ Robbie threw his own stone at the water, angling it so it skittered over the rocks and disappeared over the edge into the whirling brown pools.

      Adam nodded bleakly.

      ‘Are you going to Aberdeen medical school or Edinburgh next year? Tell your father you want to go to Edinburgh. We could have some wizard fun together. It’s great there, Adam. I’m going to read Classics.’ The boy’s face had lit up with enthusiasm. ‘And I’m going to fly. They all say war is coming. If it does I want to be in the RAF.’

      Adam shook his head. Talk at the Academy was all of war too. ‘Then I hope they see you coming. You can’t even ride a bike, if I remember, without pranging it!’

      ‘That was a while ago, Adam. I can drive a car now! Grandfather taught me. He’s got a Morris Cowley. And I’ve a licence to ride a motorbike. I can take you on the back!’ His enthusiasm was beginning to cheer Adam up.

      ‘What does your father say about all this?’ Adam had always rather liked the factor, who used to take him and Robbie on bird-watching trips up in the hills when they were too young to go on their own.

      ‘Och, he’s fine about it. He doesn’t care what we do.’ He sounded just a little too casual. ‘What about you, Adam? What about the minister?’

      Adam grimaced. ‘I can’t wait to get my Highers and go.’ It was true, he realised suddenly. Without Brid and her family, what had he to stay for?

      It was nearly dark when Adam sat on the window seat of his attic room and took his mother’s letter out of his pocket. He turned the envelope over several times and looked down at it. It had the one word Adam written on it. The sight of his mother’s handwriting made him feel strange. First he thought he might cry; then he felt angry. He crumpled it up and threw it in his waste paper basket, overwhelmed by a feeling of lost betrayal, then as suddenly he dived on it and tore it open.

      My darling Adam,

      I have written to you several times before, but I don’t know if you ever got my letters. It may be your father didn’t pass them on.

       Please try and understand. I could not live with your father any more. Why need not concern you now, only believe me, I had no choice. I had to come away. I know how hurt and angry you must be with me. Please, let me explain. Your father won’t let you come and see me now, but when you leave school, if you would like to, please come then. I love you so much and I miss you dreadfully. Your loving Mother.

      Adam put down the letter. His eyes were full of tears. No, of course his father had not given him her letters. He looked at the piece of paper in his hand again. She did not say if she was alone or what she was doing. There was just an address, in Edinburgh, and those few impassioned words.

      The light was on in his father’s study. Pushing open the door without knocking Adam thrust the letter across the desk. ‘Is it true? Did she write to me?’

      Thomas stared at the letter. There was no anger in his face when he looked up at Adam, only a terrible haggard sorrow.

      ‘And what was the sin you told me she had committed?’ Adam wasn’t sure where the courage had come from to allow him to speak to his father in this way.

      Thomas’s face darkened. ‘That is not your business, boy.’

      ‘Was it another man? Wee Mikey said she ran away with a Frenchman.’ The question he had wanted to ask for so long burst out of him. ‘Did she? Weren’t we good enough for her?’ Tears were pouring suddenly down his face.

      His father stared at him without expression for several seconds, then at last he shook his head. ‘I do not know, Adam, and I don’t want to.’ And that was all he would say.

      The stone was silver in the moonlight, the old symbols showing clearly, their deep incisions darkened by lichen, their design as clear as the day they were cut. Adam stood looking at them miserably. The serpent, the crescent and the broken rod, and there, at the base, the mirror and the comb. He frowned. Gartnait had never copied the mirror on his stone. The designs had been finished last time he had seen him but that small corner of the stone was empty. He bent and touched the outline with his fingers. The mirror on his mother’s dressing table, with her brush and comb, had been burned with all her other things on his father’s bonfire. He had found the blackened ivory and splintered glass next to some charred pieces of brown fabric which had once been his mother’s best dress.

      He would see her again. Whatever she had done, she was still his mother. She wouldn’t have gone if his father hadn’t driven her away. Even if she had found someone else – his mind slid sideways around the thought, not able to confront it – she still loved him, her letter had said as much. And she missed him. His mind made up, he found himself smiling in the moonlight. He would go to Edinburgh next year, to study medicine as planned, and he would go and see his mother. And in the meantime he would write to her and tell her his news.

      Chastened and obedient, Brid learned the names of the thirty-three kings. She learned the rituals of fire and water. She learned divination from the flight of birds, from the clouds and the stars, from the trees and the falling of the fortune sticks. She learned spells and incantations and healing. She began to learn the nature of the gods and goddesses and how to intercede with them and about the sprinkling of the blood; she learned about the soul which dwells within the body but which can fly free as a bird, to travel, to learn, and to hide and she learned how she too by dint of study and dreams and the use of sacred smoke could enter the dream and travel through the layers of time to the worlds beyond the world.

      Her special study was the wildcat. She left the school as did the other women from time to time, completely alone, and followed the animals’ secret trails into the hills. She studied their hunting and their killing. She studied their sleeping and their lazy washing on a hidden sunlit ledge amongst the rocks and cliffs. She studied their meeting and mating and the secret places where the she-cats