The other day I told Tabby to open the atlas on my lap, and move my thumb to all the places there are: Belfast, and London, and Geneva, and as far away as St. Petersburg. I tried to imagine each place in all its colours. Stranorlar is on the far left of the book, next to the edge; it's a wonder it hasn't fallen off.
There, I'm being fanciful again. Mr. McGranahan told me last week, "You will never go far in life, Miss Franny, if you fall a prey to fancy." I love the sound of that: a prey to fancy. But I have every intention of bettering myself, and of going far in life.
Except that today, I threw away my chance, didn't I?
All might have been well if I could have kept my head down. The Reverend Ministers voice sounded so chilled, this morning, over the scrape he made wiping his feet at the door of the schoolhouse. "Mr. McGranahan," he began with his Highland r's that go on forever, "do not let me interrupt the good work; I merely observe."
But he butted in after half a minute of grammar, and somehow I knew it was me his eye had alighted on; I could feel his gaze scalding my cheeks.
"Who is that child?" he said.
Now he knew well who I was, for he came to our house on a Visitation not three weeks ago. But the Master told him my name, and off they went like dogs in the lane, snapping and scrabbling. The Minister asked the Master did he not think it a cruel mockery of such a child to bring her into school. Mr. McGranahan said it was I who had begged to come with my brothers, and what harm could it do me?
"Harm, Brother? The harm of making her a laughingstock in the sight of the whole congregation."
For a moment I was glad I couldn't see; all those eyes turned on me would have been too much to bear.
The preacher went on without stopping for breath. "To attempt to teach a child so blighted, and a girl at that, is to fly in the face of the Providence that made her so."
When Mr. McGranahan is angry he speaks quieter than ever. "Nobody gets the chance to teach Frances Brown anything, Brother, so quick is she to teach herself."
Even then, if I could have kept my mouth shut, he might have saved me. The words behind my lips are no trouble to anybody; it's only when I let them out that I give scandal.
"When I grow up I shall be a poet."
My words hung on the air like a foul smell. I felt the draught when the boys on either side of me shrank back, as if afraid to catch a fever.
The Master began to speak, but my fear made me rush in. "Mr. Milton himself was blind, was he not, Mr. McGranahan? Was he not? Did you not tell us so?"
But the Minister was standing over me now, his words falling like hail. "Milton was a great man. You are a stunted little girl."
Suddenly I was shouting. "Does it not say in the Book of Leviticus, Thou shalt not put a stumbling block before the blind?"
There was no sound at all for a few moments. I stiffened, ready for the blow that would knock me off the bench. But the Minister only took my wrist between his icy fingers and held my arm up high. When he spoke it wasn't to me, and his voice boomed over my head like the Orange drums on the Glorious Twelfth. "Who will lead this creature home so she will not fall in the ditch?"
Up close he smelt like vinegar. I ripped my hand out of his grasp. "I can find my own way," I said, shoving past the other children, past the long chalky coat of Mr. McGranahan, who tried to hold me. I got out the door before I started crying.
As a rule, I can follow any path through Stranorlar and not lose myself, but today I was so bewildered with rage that I very nearly stepped into the ditch opposite the smithy. Only the long grasses at the edge told me I was gone astray. When I got on the right track home I felt the last rays of sun on my face before the mountain snuffed them out.
Once the Browns were great folk hereabouts. Our grandfathers father owned a big stretch of land, but he squandered it all. I can see it in my head if I try: a wet green kingdom, with rivers sliding through the fields like thread through cloth. Now all we have left that is grand is our grandmothers rocking chair. Sometimes our mother lets me sit in it if my feet are clean. Its back is carved with fruit and flowers and shapes that I can't make out no matter how often I trace them with my fingers.
Our mother sits in that chair to do her darning. If I hold my breath now I can hear through the wall the faint creak of its rockers—unless that's more wishful thinking. Our father has been gone for hours. Mother was yawning at supper, but she'll not go in to bed before he comes home from Meeting.
They didn't beat me, when I came home from school, not even when I told them every word I said to the Minister. Maybe they're saving it till tomorrow. I would rather have the beating over with and then I could sleep.
Tabby's face is pressed against my hand on the pillow; I can feel her breath like an oven on my fingers. From the corner, Dickie lets out a faint snore. Martha turns over, without warning, and we all must shift too, myself and Tabby and Catherine and Billy at our feet, all packed together like mackerel in a pot.
If the others were awake I would tell them a story: maybe the one about the cottage that stood in the middle of a village that stood in the middle of a bleak moor in the north country, where lived a certain man and his wife who had three cows, five sheep, and thirteen children. One more than us. Martha likes the tale of the old woman who wove her own hair. Ned prefers the one about the prince with fourteen names.
If I had seven-league shoes and a cloak of invisibility I could be at the Meeting House now. Maybe they're too busy with other matters to discuss a froward child like me. Or else the Elders are arguing with my father this very moment, their big hands thumping the table. But even if I was invisible, it occurs to me, I couldn't make them listen; I couldn't change a thing.
Once when I was small, our mother was teaching me to shell peas. They bounced out through my fingers, and when I reached for them I upset the whole basket. Then I cried, and my mother would have let me go and play on the grass, but my father made me crawl round and pick every pea up off the floor, and then wash the dust off them, for he said he knew I could do whatever I set my mind to. And he was right. But tonight when he was putting on his greatcoat to go to Meeting, he didn't seem so sure.
I bury my face under the blanket and I make up pictures of things that cannot be. A town with seven windmills, and wolves with hair as long as sheep have, and a well in the woods that will make anything dipped in it grow. Sometimes in my imaginings I take a wrong turning, and scare myself. Then my thoughts feed on each other like worms in the black ground, but I must bite my thumb and lie still and not disturb the others, because we are so many in one room.
I remember the last three being born. We all heard, through the wall, though we pretended not to. Our mother doesn't make half as much noise as most women, I heard the midwife say. I know I will never make that noise. I am a girl much like other girls, but 111 not grow up to be a woman like other women. Who would have a blind wife if he could help it? But I am a great help with the little ones, our mother says. I've never dropped one yet.
I was just learning to talk when the smallpox got me, so Eliza says. Before that I could see, though I don't remember it. All I have is a sense of what seeing means, and what a colour might feel like.
Some of the Elders told my father that by rights I should not have lived after I was blinded. My father told my mother what was said, and she cried; they didn't know I was listening. And another time when my father asked the Minister the reason for my blindness, he was told it might be a punishment from the Almighty for some sin my parents had committed. But they couldn't think which sin that might have been.
I have a handful of pocks over my eyebrows still; I finger them sometimes, to remind me. The Minister must be wrong. Didn't I live, when bigger children died of the same fever? This must mean that I have been chosen for something. There must be another future for me, if I'm not to be a woman like other women and have twelve children. If I do not grow up to be a poet, then what does it all mean?
A heavy step on the path at last: Father. I hear the
tired squeak of the latch. My mother stands up to greet him, and the chair rocks like a branch in high wind.
The voices behind the wall are low, as if telling of a death, but I cannot make out the words. When I sit up, cold air worms its way into the bed; Martha burrows down deeper.
How can I wait till morning?
Tabby wakes when I clamber over her, and mutters something, but I put my hand over her mouth to shush her.
The floor is cold. My nightshirt shifts in the draught as I pull open the door to the kitchen. It makes a terrible creak.
"Franny?" says my mother.
I can smell the fire, and fresh mud on my father's boots. At times like these I wish I could read faces. How can I know what way he is looking at me?
"Here."
I think he's smiling.
I walk towards his voice with my hand out. Something hard stops my fingertips: a book. I take its weight into my hands and feel its cover; it is not one I know.
"Its called The Odyssey. Mr. McGranahan says if you bring it in to school tomorrow he'll teach you the first line."
I turn my face away so as not to wet the paper.
"Go to sleep, now," says my mother.
Note
"Night Vision" is about the childhood of Frances Brown or Browne (1816–70), known as the Blind Poetess of Donegal, who went on to become a successful novelist in London, living with her younger sister and amanuensis. The best source of information on her is Brenda O'Hanrahan's Donegal Authors: A Bibliography (1982). I have also used the autobiographical sketch that prefaces Brown's first collection of poems, The Star of Attéghei (1844), as well as her best-known work, the children's fairy-tale collection Granny's Wonderful Chair (1857).
Ballad
After the battle at Philiphaugh on the thirteenth of September in the year 1645, the Army of the Solemn League and Covenant presses north. On the broken road to St. Andrews, a cavalryman hangs back till he is out of sight of his comrades, till the dragoons and the musketeers and the regiments of foot have all marched past him. Till the flag, with its stained white cross on a blue field, is gone by. Then he turns off over the empty fields towards Perth. He wears a buff coat with a worn blue ribbon; his hands smell of salt-petre and blood. He is owed four months' wages. He feels nothing, nothing at all.
Beady Bell an Mary Gray,
They were twa bonny lasses
Scotland is plague-stricken. Folk wear bruises of mauve and orange and yellow for a few days, and then they die. Sometimes, of course, they drop dead before they've had time to bruise. Edinburgh has emptied out like a puking stomach, the cavalryman hears from a passing messenger; the city fathers' carriages are rattling into the countryside. Some say the pest has come down from the Dutch ports on the backs of sailors; others blame an evil miasma that hangs in the air; others, the war. As he rides along at a leaden trot, the cavalryman thinks of the pest, so he will not have to think of the war. Not the victories; not Marston Moor, last summer, when he was among the Covenanters who helped the Ironsides wrest the whole North from King Charles. Nor the defeats; Kilsyth, a month ago, when the Royalists scattered the Army of the Solemn League and Covenant like chaff on the wind. And in particular he will not think of Philiphaugh, yesterday. There is no end in sight. He will not dwell on it. He will ride on to Perth.
The pest attracts rumours, and the cavalryman hears them all when he stops for water, at various halts on the way. The people say that only men die of it, not women; that it appears as a lump in the armpit, long before the bruises, though others say a lump in the groin; that it is a city sickness, and those who breathe the clean country air are safe; that it is a disease of heat, and if you only last till the weather cools, you'll be healthy all winter. The cavalryman is almost amused to watch how feverishly his countrymen ward off this blight by both science and superstition, washing their doorsteps with lime and wearing their holy bracelets too, nailing up the sick in their cabins for the full of a fortnight so that the taint will not spread. He knows—as every soldier does—that death is whimsical and contrary, and picks whomsoever it chooses, and there is no kind of magic circle a mortal can draw that will keep death out. As he rides along, the cavalryman thinks not of death but of love. Not of one woman but of two.
Bessy Bell an Mary Gray,
They were twa bonny lasses
On the outskirts of Perth stand plague-camps, rough clusters of shanties and tents. In the fields the cavalryman notes the wide square pits, and three shapeless figures with spades, lifting the turf for another burial. He picks up his pace and rides by.
He is stopped at the bridge by a man in an official robe, and asked for a testimonial before he can be let into Perth—a certificate of health, signed by the magistrates of his home town. But the cavalryman leans down off his horse, and says that he has just come from fighting papacy and prelacy and the King's Highlanders, and he wants a bowl of meat and a bed for the night, and he will not be prevented by fiddle-faddlers. And besides, he has no home town but Perth.
At the market there is little left but oats and carrots, but plenty of them, and not rotted. The cavalryman fills his saddlebag. The market woman stands well away from him. She holds out a ladle for his coins, then dips them in a scalding pot of water before letting them into her pocket.
The house on the High Street is locked up. The neighbours say his parents have fled away into the country, but no one knows where. The cavalryman stands staring up at the shutters, scratching a hot bite on his neck, and tries to remember the boy he once was before he ever went to be a mercenary for Gustavus Adolphus in Germany and learned to cut down papists like wheat. The boy who used to sleep behind those shutters, dreaming of fair women. He thinks of Bessy Bell, daughter of the Laird of Kinvaid: his first love, her creamy hair, and her supple neck. And then he lets his thoughts move to Mary Gray, daughter of the Laird of Lynedoch, with her eyes as dark as crow-feathers.
As if he is being led, then, he turns his weary horse towards Lynedoch.
Fair Beddie Bell I lo'ed yestreen,
And thocht I ne'er could alter,
But Mary Gray's twa pawkie een
Gar'd a' my fancy falter
Seven miles the cavalryman rides, only seven miles on his stumbling horse, but it is as if he is emerging from a nightmare. There are no plague-camps on this side of Perth; the evening air sweetens as the day cools, and the birds chime in the thick hedgerows. He rides past two labourers at work in a field, and they have their blue bonnets on, and seem as well fed as in the days of peace. His horse startles a plump rabbit from the ditch.
At Lynedoch House he learns that the Laird is gone away on business, and that Miss Gray is holed up in the reed-cutter's hut by the river, for fear of the pest.
One more mile he rides, then, with his head full of what he will say to Mary Gray, and what she may say to him. The last time they met was before Marston Moor, when he was half a life younger. He remembers her red smile, and the sad way she shook her head, when she told him she'd rather walk to John O'Groats barefoot than steal a husband from her friend Bessy Bell. And he told her Bessy Bell was the best of girls, and worthy of such devotion if anyone was, but he was not Bessy's husband nor betrothed, nor had ever asked her, nor would be no woman's but Mary Gray's. At which she shook her dark head at him and went away.
Since then the cavalryman has not caught a glimpse of the daughter of the Laird of Lynedoch, nor written her a letter—for what could he speak of, this last year, but killing?—and not a day has passed without him thinking of Mary Gray. And Bessy Bell, too, if the truth be known, because the two names go together. He has never known such friendship, himself, except briefly in the heat of battle, when you stand back to back with another soldier and know that you would take a bullet meant for him, because that is what soldiers must do. But for such loyalty to last between two girls in the calm light of day—that mystifies him, and draws him all the nearer.
There is the river, a narrow glint in the trees. At first he thinks the reed-cutter
's hut is deserted—he can see no smoke—but as he reins in his horse, heart thumping with panic, they come walking up from the water. Two women, not one. Their skirts are hitched up, their pale legs wet to the knees; their arms are laden with rushes. They are laughing, and when they see him they stop for a moment, then laugh even more.
Oh, Bessie Bell and Mary Gray,
They were twa bonnie lassies!
They biggit a bower upon the ley,
And theekit it ower wi' rashes.
There is little need for explanations, in these times. They make him welcome. After the meal—the ladies are grateful for the oats and carrots, having run out of food yesterday, and the servants having failed to bring down any more—the cavalryman helps them mend their roof. Bessy soon gets the knack of weaving rushes into wide patches to cover the holes; Mary, being taller, stands on the table to poke them into place. "This reminds me of when we were children," Bessy Bell tells the cavalryman, as easily as if they were old friends and never had been anything less or more. "Mary and I, we used to make these little bowers, of green branches all carpeted with rushes."
He stares at her and remembers what he loved about Bessy Bell. Or loves. He cannot tell.
"Hours we spent," remembers Mary, "hours and hours squatting inside, playing at keeping house!"
He can picture them so easily, the two lairds' daughters; serious, ceremonial little girls. He wonders what it must be like to have a friend so long that you cannot remember a time before; to be woven together from the root. He is beginning to suspect that no matter what happens in the future—whether Mary Gray ever agrees to be his wife, or not—he will never come between these two. But he feels no resentment, not today.
As twilight falls, the two women spread a sheet on the grassy bank beside the fire, and open their last bottle of French wine. The cavalryman has not tasted such drink in years; his tongue seems to quiver in his mouth. He looks between Bessy's pale head of hair and Mary's black one; between the soft mouth and the scarlet. They talk of a fiddler they all heard once; of the varieties of apples that keep best for the winter; of some thistles in the field beyond, that grow as high as a man. The darkening world shrinks to a fire and its wavering circle of light. Beyond this fragrant, smoky riverbank, nothing is real, thinks the cavalryman: no pest, no war, no troubles of any kind. Perhaps this is a game, but it is better than growing up.