The shadow of the mountain remained with her, dwarfing the past and the present, subduing whatever resistance remained. It seemed that Ben Nevis always huddled over her, its ragged peak piercing her memory, the ridges of the mountain fixed to her spine. She was scrambling over rocks, scrambling over the red thorn bushes, scrambling as the dirt and pebbles scattered beneath her feet. The mountain could not hold her. The mountain would not hold her. She tore the skin from her palms and feet as she scrambled, her hands bleeding on each stone she touched. Papa was below her, far far down. Where was Culross?
Cordaella reached higher, ever higher, the mountain growing, swelling in her face, pressing against her forehead and her chin and her eyes were full of the dark sharp mountain. She reached up and up for yet another ledge, a fresh fistful of coarse dirt and pebbles streaming in her eyes. She blinked back the dust, the grit between her lashes, beneath her eyelids. She could taste the dirt. It was in her nose, coating the inside of her mouth. Cordaella knew she had tasted this dirt all her life. Exhausted, she leaned into the wall of rock, the mountain her only mother.
She craned her head, searching for a glimpse of her father. She could see him, he was still there, still at the base of the mountain, his own face pressed to the rock. Wasn't he coming? If he didn't hurry it would be too late. Time was running out. "Papa!"
His voice was faint and yet the urgency carried, "Fly Cory! Fly." His desperation echoed thinly on the silver air. The mountain trembled and she screamed, her body hugging the cliff, her eyes wide with terror. "Help me!"
"Fly Cory! Fly away!" He was bleeding worse, more and more red pouring from his mouth. She couldn't hear his words, the blood taking them all away. Cordaella couldn't hear him. She shook her head violently, her short nails digging into the cliff. The mountain trembled again. He would die down there. He would die without her. But he wouldn't let her come down, drowning in his sea of blood.
She threw herself from the mountain, leaping madly into the air, the legend of Icarus coming to life all over again, poor brilliant Daedalus far beneath. She pumped her arms harder, more vigorously and sobbed, "Papa! Wait!"
He died.
"Wake up! Wake up, you wretched wild thing!" Elisabeth pushed Cordaella angrily, her small hand snaking into Cordaella's tangled hair. She gave it a hard pull. "Whatever are you howling about now?"
The dreaming. Cordaella would forever be dreaming the end.
"Leave her be, Beth." Philip groggily raised his head from the pillow. "She's having another of her bad dreams."
"She is a bad dream--" Elisabeth cried petulantly. "Why does she have to be in here with us?"
"Because she's our cousin." Philip swung his legs clear of the bedcovers. "You shouldn't be so nasty to her. She can't help it. An orphan and all."
Elisabeth flounced back to her bed, "She doesn't even speak English properly! She doesn't belong here with us. What can Papa be thinking?"
Grudgingly Philip had to agree with her. "It doesn't make very much sense."
"It certainly doesn't. Falconer's daughter indeed! Papa is a fool to think she will
ever change. What is he to do with her? He ought to put her with the other servants-"
"But the inheritance-"
"Keep it of course. But send her to a convent. Ugh!" She shivered in disgust. "A stable animal, that is what she is."
Cordaella lay silent, listening, her eyes open and fixed intently on the high vaulted ceiling of the nursery. Now that the dreaming had begun it would never end. Nothing was real anymore. It was as if she had fallen into a deep sleep and could not wake. God only knows what they did to him. Why couldn't she remember better? Somehow she only saw the blood. There was so much of it.
Elisabeth turned on her side and Cordaella could feel Elisabeth staring at her. Cordaella turned to look at Elisabeth, her cousin's blue eyes brittle in the moonlight. "You do not belong here, Cordaella Buchanan," Elisabeth said.
Softly Cordaella whispered back, "Aye. I know that much."
"I am the lady of the house. And I say you shall go."
Cordaella would not cry. It didn't matter. None of this mattered. Nothing would ever matter again. "Then I shall go."
"Have some pity, Beth," Philip whispered.
Elisabeth ignored him. "I shall have her sent to sleep with the pigs."
Cordaella squeezed her eyes shut, a hot emotion splitting her heart into two, and then into two again. She would have promised anything at that moment if it meant she could escape.
Abruptly Philip rose from his bed, his footsteps heavy on the wooden floor. "Hush, Elisabeth! You are too cruel!" He crept to his cousin's bed and knelt beside it. Awkwardly he pulled the covers up around her, his voice uneven. "Go to sleep, Cordaella. It is too late for this." He patted the covers down before standing up. She closed her eyes. "That's right," he said approvingly, "Sleep now or Mrs. Penny will take the strap to all of us."
Cordaella kept her eyes shut until she heard his steps retreat across the nursery floor. She had been here two weeks and it seemed like forever. Everything was so new, so strange that it was still difficult to sleep in this room with these people. Her cousins. They were supposed to be her people-kin-but they didn't feel like anybody she had ever known. Cordaella listened to Philip climb back into his bed, his eleven-year-old body still skinny, all pointy elbows and knees, and she remembered his gangly walk and the odd way he ducked his head when he laughed.
She wanted to smile because there was something funny about Philip, a nice funny, but she wouldn't let herself. She was too angry at being brought here, too angry at what happened to her father. Not wanting to think anymore, Cordaella turned onto her stomach and buried her face in her pillow. Against the black of her eyelidsm and the dark of her mind she saw the rocks, and the rocks were dark red.
By night, the nursery served as a bedchamber for the children. By day it became a schoolroom, lunchroom and playroom. Now, in the early hours of the afternoon, it was a schoolroom and the tutor from London--a young man recently completing studies at Queen's College-was assisting Philip in translating a Greek poem into English.
"It is the new development," he was saying to the boy, "this resurgence of interest in the Anglo-Saxon language. Since early time, historians and poets have written in Latin. Latin is the universal language of Europe and the educated people. But now, more serious works have begun appearing in translation."
"In English?" Philip asked.
"Not just English, but many vernaculars--French, Italian, German. And some very modern authors have recently composed in English, like the Londoner, Geoffrey Chaucer, and William Langland, who wrote Piers Plowman."
Cordaella lifted her head from her book. "Then why do we not read in English?"
The tutor considered her for a moment in surprise. So far in his instruction, she had never asked a question, never directly addressed him. After two and a half months he was almost shocked to hear her speak.
She repeated the question. "If there are books in English, why do we not read them?" It was, to her, a perfectly logical question. It seemed ridiculous to learn Latin only to read a book which might already be available in English. She was sure that if the Latin verse could be translated into English verse, Latin prose could also be translated into English prose.
The tutor, Simon Pole, sniffed. "Only the common people," he said, giving her a meaningful look, "need books in English."
"But why?" she interrupted. "Why do the common people need books at all if--as you say-they cannot read and do not need to read?"
Philip lifted his head quickly up and to the side as he was wont to do when amused. He would have laughed, but he was embarrassed by his laugh, and instead he covered his mouth, his head bobbing silently and his eyes, light gray like Cordaella's, creased.
Mr. Pole shot a reproving glance in Philip's direction before turning his hard gaze on the younger girl. "Some common people read."
Elisabeth closed her book. "Even you can now read," she said coldly.
Cordaella glanced from Elisabeth to the tutor. She thought the entire argument was stupid. Why should some people read one kind of book and others read another? It would be far simpler if all books were the same. "If I learn to read in Latin-"
"You are already learning to read in Latin," the tutor corrected impatiently.
"Yes," she answered, "but if I read in Latin, may I still read in English?"
"Why would you want to read in English if you could read in Latin?"
"Perhaps there are books in English that will not be translated into Latin-"
"For example?" He sighed, exhausted and nervous.
"The Londoner."
"Chaucer?"
She nodded. "Yes. If he was English and wrote his poems in English, why should they be translated into Latin? An Englishman ought to be able to read his own language. Isn't that so?"
Simon rubbed his forehead anxiously. "But there are those in Denmark or Portugal who might want to read Chaucer. Thus, a Latin translation of Chaucer would be necessary."
She still didn't know the places he named, her world barely large enough to include Scotland and England and France that she had heard so much about. "Why wouldn't Chaucer simply be translated into another native language-"
"Not native, vernacular!"
"Into another vernacular?" She said the word strangely, the accents stilted on her tongue. It was hard for her to lose the Highland inflection, her words soft, the consonants full, round.
"You ask too many questions," Mr. Pole said.
Her papa had said that, too, but at least he always answered them. "You can't explain, then?"
"I won't explain," he said irritably. "Your questions are irrelevant...no, it's not even that. They are ignorant. You ask because you don't want to learn. If you don't want to learn, then waste somebody else's time."
"I'm not," She shouted, preparing to throw her book at him. "And you are the one who is lazy. You don't want to explain, or you can't, because you don't know the truth."
"The truth?" he shouted back. "How would you know? Do you want the truth? I'll give it to you. You're a bastard, did you know that? A shame on your entire family."
Cordaella hurled the book, catching Mr. Pole squarely on the forehead. The years hunting with her father had given her an extraordinary arm. "Liar."
"True." He dropped his voice as he rubbed the spot where she'd hit him, a look of fury in his eyes. "It is. Your parents were never married."
Tears welled in her eyes, furious tears that she dashed away with her balled hand. "It doesn't matter," she said, but her own voice failed her, all conviction gone. She felt Philip's and Elisabeth's eyes on her. She wished she were dead, killed along with her father. Anything would be better than this. "It doesn't matter to me," she repeated, hoping for a measure of defiance, for some disdain to disarm the tutor. "I loved them anyway."
------------
If lessons were bad with Mr. Pole, Mass with Bishop Langford was far worse. The only interesting part of Mass was the chapel itself, which, the Earl had noted in his most puffed voice, had been built only eighty years ago in the Gothic style, a style copied from Paris at the height of its popularity. The chapel was supposed to be a miniature of the great cathedrals in France, with its small ceiling soaring towards Heaven, which Philip confided, was meant to help one's soul draw closer to God.
Saintly statues had been carved into the small portal, more reminders that the chapel was to be-indeed-an image of Heaven. Yet Cordaella dismissed the figures as ludicrous. They were neither delicate nor expressive, carved by a village mason who knew too little either about limestone or about the human body. These saints had limbs and heads that were oversized for the small torso and the grouping of saints looked more like peculiar animals. Cordaella would kneel during Mass and half close her eyes, squinting at the statues to see if she could make them move.
Without turning her head, Cordaella could look from the statues to the row of her relations. From her position in the pew, she could see all of their bent heads-one short uncle, the Earl; his new wife, Mary, who only talked in a whisper; and her true blood relatives-three sickly-looking children terrified of their father. She lifted her head slightly to get a better look. The Lady Eton still knelt, her lips moving in silent prayer. The Earl's chin was in his shoulder; he was probably sleeping. Philip read, Elisabeth traced the embroidery in her skirt, and little Edward picked his nose. Trust little Eddie to be picking his nose.
The priest's intonation began again, his chanting a singsong of Latin. Cordaella could only understand the odd phrase, partly because her knowledge of Latin was still scant, and partly because the priest was very hard to follow. If the priest prayed in Latin, did that mean God spoke Latin? Did that mean she was supposed to only pray in Latin?
The priest said "Let us pray," and everyone moved forward to the kneelers. Cordaella knelt with the others, folding her arms in front of her as Lady Mary had directed. The black sleeves of her gown fell back, revealing her small white wrists. She would wear mourning for a year in honor of her late grandfather, the Duke of Aberdeen, John Macleod.
To wear black for mourning. It was another new idea, a peculiar idea to wear only one color, and such an awful color, for a year. Nothing in the Highlands had been black, not even the night. In the mountains, the sky was blue or purple, violet streaked with gray, but never black, never so heavy and unrelenting. In the mountains, the sky was full of stars and wisps of cloud, the moon, and even the wind which was but a whisper in the summer.
Elisabeth moved suddenly, her elbow sharp on Cordaella's arm. "What are you looking at?"
"Not you," Cordaella answered, pulling her arm away.
"I hate you!" Elisabeth said.
Cordaella fixed her gaze on her cousin's face, the light gray pupils unblinking. For a long minute she said nothing, content to look at Elisabeth with that hard pointed stare. Cordaella had faced fiercer beasts than this. "It is not as if I take every breath just to spite you-"
"You are not one of us!"
"I know."
"You haven't the breeding to become one of us."
"And I don't want your breeding!" Cordaella whispered angrily, pressing her hands closer to her mouth to stifle the sound. "The last thing I want is to become one of you, just a sheep, with no thoughts of its own."
"Shut up."
"I'm a wolf, and I eat sheep, " Cordaella said, baring her teeth.
"Shut up!" Elisabeth's angry retort rose above the prayers, even the priest momentarily interrupted, his concentration broken. The Earl had been roused and, shaking himself from his drowsy state, he tapped Elisabeth and glowered at Cordaella who was just out of reach.
"I've been asked to Court. Bolingbroke wants to see me," the Earl said smugly, holding out the letter to Mary. She smiled gently but shook her head; she couldn't read. "Anyway," he continued, "a week from today I'll leave. I might even take Philip with me."
The four children were just returning from a riding lesson, and the girls hung back as the boys continued towards their father. "Where does Philip go?" cried Eddie, overhearing the last part of his father's conversation. "Why can't I go? Why do I never get to go?"
"None of your concern, Edward." The Earl half-heartedly rebuked his younger son, ignoring his daughter and Cordaella completely. Cordaella caught the look on Elisabeth's face as her father passed her without acknowledgment
"Father." Philip hesitated in front of his sister. "Where was it that you said you might take me?"
"Oh, yes," Eton offered the letter to the thirteen-year-old. "London. I've been asked to a meeting with the King."
Philip's face brightened. "If it could be arranged, I'd like to go with you. I haven't been to London in years."
"The city has changed. It's much bigger. Twice the size, or so it's said." The Earl read over Bolingbroke's invitation again, thinking of what he, Grey Eton, would do with his revenues. It was clear to him by now that he'd never make a tremendous profit from the land. It was time to go into trade; maybe his son could help him.
"Mary," he said, rousing himself to a decision, "take the girls in with you. I trust they have other things to do besides stand here in the way."
Lady Eton nodded, drawing Cordaella and Elisabeth after her, Elisabeth's face flushed with color while Cordaella appeared not to care. "Father." Elisabeth stopped in the doorway, not wanting to be left out, again ignored. "Father-"
"Yes? What is it?"
"Could I go to London with you?" She wanted him to say yes, she wanted more than anything for him to smile at her, to include her in his conversation.
"Of course not. If Edward can't go, you certainly may not either."
"But why Philip?" wailed Eddie.
Eton sighed, signaling again to Lady Eton.
"Because he is the eldest, the first son. Now Elisabeth, don't be tiring, go along with Mary." He waited until his wife had closed the door leaving him alone with his sons. "Boys," he said with a groan of pleasure as he took a seat in the solar's great chair, "have I told you about my last trip to Rome?"