The Lammas Bride

The glen tells it that every soul between the sea loch and the shielings came down to St Fillan's on the morning of the truce to see whether Ranald's daughter would take the man who had lifted her father's cows, or bite the priest. Some of them had laid a hen on the biting. They lost it.

The chapel was too small for a feast day and always had been. So the glen did what it did at every handfast and stood outside. Durrach filled the green rise in front of the door, women at the front and men behind, and the old men from the boats at the back of everything, where the talk began. Brannoch's men stood further down by the burial wall, forty of them in dull green check. They had come over the pass at first light and left their spears stacked against the priest's house, as the truce said, and their hands looked empty without them. Between the two crowds lay a strip of trodden grass the width of a cart track. Nobody had marked it. Nobody stepped on it.

Marjory stood at the door with her back to the old wood and watched the strip.

She had kept her father's house for nine years. She knew how a quarrel lay in a room before anyone opened their mouth, and this one lay on that grass like a dog waiting for a bone to drop.

Father Kenneth came out of the dark of the chapel with his stole over his black gown and his hands in his sleeves. He looked at the crowd, and at the sky, and at her. He did not look pleased with any of the three.

"Durrach," he said, in his voice like a slow cart. "Brannoch. You will say it before me, so that I have heard it."

Her father stepped up beside her. Ranald was big and heavy in the shoulder and gone thick in the middle, and he had put on his best saffron shirt and his good brooch, and his grey-shot beard was combed for once. He set his feet as if the green rise might try to throw him.

Brannoch did not step up. Two of his men had carried a stool over the pass on their backs, and he sat on it at the edge of the strip with his old judge on the grass at his knee. He was old and tall and spare as a rake, with a grey beard down over his belt, and his face was all crag, hard and grey as the hill in January. He had not stood up since he came down off the hill. The glen said he did not stand for less than a bishop.

"The peace holds," said Ranald, loud enough for the back of the crowd, "from this door until these two go to the priest and are married before the Church at the day. If they go, it holds for good. If they do not, it does not."

"The peace holds," said Brannoch from his stool, "as Durrach says. And not one day past it."

The judge at his knee said, "Aye," with his eyes shut.

That was all of it. Three lifetimes of lifted cows and burnt thatch, and an old killing nobody living had seen, and it came down to two men saying one thing in the open air. Marjory had heard her father haggle three days over a bull. She thought this was quick, for a peace.

She had thought it through the night before at her own hearth, with the rushlight smoking, and she thought it through again now, because it was a comfort to have it straight.

If she said no at this door, the truce broke here on the grass, and it broke on Durrach. Ranald's own daughter would have refused Brannoch's man in front of both glens. Every cow lifted for the next ten years would be lifted because of her. So she would not say no.

But a handfast was a year and a day, and a handfast could be walked out of. If he walked, the truce broke on Brannoch. Her father would have his peace for as long as it lasted, and the blame for its end would go home over the pass where it belonged.

So she would make him walk. It was a plain plan and she liked it. She had sent two men home from her father's hall already with their ears hot, and neither of them had been given a whole year to suffer in.

Then she looked at him, and the plan went out of her head like a hen out of a gap in a wall.

Gregor of Brannoch stood at the front of his men, at the edge of the strip, because he was their war-leader and that was where he stood. She had seen him before. Everybody in Glen Durrach had seen him, mostly from behind, driving their cattle. She had seen him once on the sea-loch shore when she was a girl, fighting Finlay to a standstill in the shallows while both clans yelled from the shingle. She had not seen him close.

He was a head and more taller than she was, and thick through the chest and neck and shoulders, like a byre door set on its end. His shirt was saffron linen, and his belted plaid was the dull green and brown of Brannoch, thrown over his left shoulder and pinned with a ring-brooch of iron and bronze. His arms were thick and bare and freckled, and the wind off the loch pressed the linen flat to a hard stomach. His hair was dark copper, cut to his collar, and he pushed it back off his face with one hand as she watched. His beard was short and close and the same red. His eyes were green-grey and gave her nothing at all.

This was the man who had taken the white-faced cow out of her father's own fold four summers ago, on a night with no moon, and the brindled stot after her, and half the beasts off the Durrach shieling the Beltane before last. The women of the glen cursed him by name at the churn. She had cursed him by name at the churn.

And she wanted him. She stood at the chapel door with the whole glen at her back and felt it go through her plain as hunger at noon, low in her belly and hot up her throat, and she knew her throat had gone red because it always did. She wanted to put her two hands flat on that chest and find out whether it was as hard as it looked. She wanted it so much and so suddenly that she was furious, with him for standing there and with herself for looking.

He looked back at her. His eyes went down once, over the blue kirtle laced close at her waist and the swell of her hips under it, the way a man looks over a beast at a fair. Then they came back up to her face, as flat as before.

"Well," she said, low, so that only he and the priest could hear. "Will I do?"

"You will have to," said Gregor.

The miller's wife, three rows back, had heard none of it and laughed anyway.

Kenneth held out his hand. "The cloth."

By custom it came from the woman's mantle or the man's plaid, and Marjory had made up her mind on that a week ago. She was not going to stand at St Fillan's door tied to Brannoch with Brannoch's own wool. She took the hem of her mantle in her left hand. It was her best, a heavy grey and blue check pinned at her shoulder with her mother's silver brooch, and it fell open over her kirtle as she lifted it. Her hair was loose down her back for the last time out of doors, fair as bere straw, and the wind took the ends of it. She held the hem out to Kenneth. He took the knife from his belt and cut a long strip off the end of it, and the glen made a small sound, as it always did when good cloth was cut.

"Your right hands," said Kenneth.

She gave hers. Gregor gave his. It was very large and dry and warm, and hard across the palm from a spear shaft, and it closed round hers without any squeezing. She had half hoped he would squeeze, so that she could squeeze back. Kenneth laid the grey and blue strip across both their wrists and wound it twice and tied it, and the knot sat on the back of Gregor's hand where everybody could see it.

Marjory stood with her arm against his arm. She could feel the heat of him through her sleeve. He smelled of heather and peat smoke and clean sweat, like a man who had walked over a hill since dawn, and she supposed he had.

Kenneth spoke the form. He spoke it slowly and word for word, the way he had spoken it at that door for forty years.

"I take you to my hand and to my hearth for a year and a day, and at the end of it I will marry you before the Church or let you go with what you brought."

He looked at Gregor first, because Brannoch was the guest.

Gregor said it. He said every word in its order, and none of the words sounded as if they had done anything to deserve him. It was the voice a man used to count sheep into a fold. When he got to let you go with what you brought he did not slow down and he did not hurry. He might have been telling the price of meal.

Kenneth looked at Marjory.

She lifted her chin and said it back. She said it louder than he had, a good deal louder, so that it went over the women at the front and over the men behind them and down the green rise to the burial wall, where forty men in green check heard Durrach's daughter take their war-leader to her hand and her hearth as if she were buying him at a fair and had got him cheap. She did not drop a word. She leaned her weight on at the end of it.

Somebody at the back whistled. Somebody else told him to hold his noise.

Beside her, Gregor turned his head a little and looked down at her. It was the first time his face had moved. One heavy red brow went up a hair's breadth and came down again. She could not have said whether he was angry or amused, and she found that she minded which, very much.

Kenneth took the knife again. He set the edge against the knot on the back of Gregor's hand and cut through in one stroke, and the strip fell into two halves, one across each of their wrists.

"It is done," said Kenneth. "God help the pair of you."

Gregor let go of her hand. He did not do it quickly and he did not do it slowly. He opened his fingers and she took her hand back, and her half of the cloth hung off her wrist, and the place where his palm had been went cold in the wind off the loch.

The glen let out its breath. The women at the front began to talk all at once. Brannoch's men stirred down by the wall. The strip of grass between the crowds was still there, but two Durrach boys had run across it after a dog and nobody had shouted.

"You are mine for a year, then," Marjory said to him, not loud.

"A year and a day," said Gregor. "I heard you. So did Glen Brannoch."

"Good."

"They will be hearing it for a week."

She did not answer that. She tucked her half of the cloth into her belt and turned her shoulder to him, and found her father on her other side, beaming like a man who had sold a lame horse.

The betting started at the yew, as it always did. The yew stood by the chapel wall, black and old, and the bettors stood under it, because Kenneth would not have wagers laid on his step.

Ranald went down to it first. He laid the first bet on every match in the glen and he was not going to stop for his own daughter's.

"A heifer," he said, "out of the white cow, that these two go to the priest at Lammas next and are married before the Church."

"A cheese against it," said the miller's wife at once. She was a big woman with flour in the creases of her knuckles and her kerchief pushed back, and she had a cheese on her hip already, as if she had known. "A whole cheese, Durrach, that she has him thrown back over the pass before the cattle come down."

"Before Samhain?" said someone.

"Before Samhain. Look at her."

The glen looked at her. Marjory looked back at the glen until it found something else to do. The miller's three daughters went off into giggles in a pack behind their mother, and the old men from the boats were already counting on their fingers.

Down by the wall, a long raw lad with brown hair in his eyes said something to the Brannoch men round him that made two of them laugh and one of them cuff him. Gregor did not look round. Marjory saw his jaw set under the red beard, and then let go.

Kenneth stood at the door with his hands in his sleeves and watched all of it. He would not wager. He would cut his notch in the hazel stick by his shutter that night, as he did for every handfast, and he would wait and see.

At the far end of the wall, on the warm side out of the wind, Finlay and Isobel stood together, married before the Church since the spring and not hiding it. Finlay was the only man on the rise as big as Gregor. He looked across the strip at Brannoch's war-leader, and Gregor looked back at him, and something passed between the two of them that had the sea-loch shore in it, and no finish. Isobel had her hand tucked into Finlay's arm. She caught Marjory's eye and raised her straight black brows, very slightly, and did not laugh. Marjory was grateful for that and would have died before she said so.

A woman may choose her husband, the glen says, or she may choose her cow, but nobody yet has chosen both on the one day. The miller's wife said it under the yew, loudly, and then she looked at Gregor's back and said it was a pity, because she would have chosen that one either way.

Marjory heard her. Everybody heard her.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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