Chapter 67 The Red Gable

Camas Beg was a handful of crofts and a natural-arch cave under a headland the color of dried blood, and it had one feature the whole coast knew it by: a barn with a gable built of red sandstone blocks, standing alone in a field above the shore, which is why the place went by the Red Gable on every chart and tongue from Achmore south. The stone they had come to see was not in that gable. It was in the *byre* wall of the same building — a long slab set horizontally at knee height, its face turned inward to the cows for two hundred years, smooth as a table where generations of hands had leaned on it without knowing why it felt good to lean there. The woman who met them at the field gate held the keys and, as it developed, everything else. Ena Soutar was the session clerk's great-granddaughter, seventy or near it, straight as her own garden fence, with the parish's paper memory stored in a kist in her front room and indexed, as she said, after a fashion known only to God and herself. She heard Lila out on the doorstep. Then she said, "Come in and mind the mud," which on that coast constituted enthusiasm, and led them to the kist, and brought out a ledger bound in vellum stiff as board, and opened it to pages dated in a hand like fences: the Kirk Session of Camas Beg, 1694 onward. *June ye 14th, 1697,* she read aloud. *The Session, having intelligence that certain women doe repaire to the stanes at the shore and there give names to the drowned after a superstitious manner, ordains the stanes to be strucken and defaced, the characters thereof hewn out; and the said women — * and here followed the names, seven of them, listed with the disapproval of ink that expected obedience — *to be admonished from the pulpit, first, second and third.* "The stones were struck," Ena said, closing the volume. "That slab yonder in the byre was the worst-used of them; my family bought the ground off the kirk in 1740 and built the byre round it like a scabbard, because my four-times-grandmother could not stomach seeing it broken further in the open air. And now I'll tell you the thing you don't know yet, that makes our house strange." She looked at each of them in turn, clerk to clerk, one keeper of records recognizing others. "The third name on that list of the admonished is Soutar. The session clerk's own sister. He defaced her stones with his own hands, and wrote her into his book for it, and neither of them ever left this parish, and they're buried forty feet apart in the yard yonder, and my grandmother said we were never to wonder about it aloud." The silence in the kitchen had the weight of three centuries. Neve broke it, gently, practically: "The list itself. Seven names. You understand what you've been keeping, Mrs. Soutar? Your great-grandfather meant it as a punishment record. It's a keeper's roll. Those are the names of the women who would not stop." "I had begun," Ena Soutar said dryly, "to suspect something of the kind." They worked at the byre stone through the afternoon. The faces had been chiseled smooth in 1697 and the smoothing had done its work well — but Iris raked her light along the surface at dusk angles, and the chisel blows had not gone quite so deep as the old carving, and shadows moved in the micro-relief like fish under ice. By evening, with tracings and torches and Neve's patient chalk-dusting, they had recovered enough to be sure: the cluster, once, twice; strokes below; the beginning of a column. A station, mutilated but present, holding its ground inside a cow-byre while its keepers' descendants farmed round it in enforced innocence. It was there that the question Lila had been carrying since Edinburgh finally demanded its answer, and she put it to the circle that night in Ena's parlor, with Quarrie's latest letter — forwarded, inevitable, beautifully typed — lying on the table between the teacups. "Halloway wants the grammar published, and he's right: if the script isn't read soon by more than us, it dies with Iris's patience. But publish the map and we hang a sign on every station saying COME AND DIG." She looked round at their faces, Wren's absent and Wren's presence somehow strong among them anyway. "I keep thinking what Sorley taught us at Carrowhead. Amend the specification. Keep what matters safe inside your own drawing." "Then we do the same," Neve said slowly, feeling her way. "Iris publishes the script — letters, grammar, how to read it — so any village that finds marks can know what they've got. But the sheet stays ours. The locations go home by letter, hand to hand, the way the names always traveled. We give the world the alphabet and keep the addresses." Iris was quiet a moment, twenty-six years old and watching a piece of her future arrange itself. Then she nodded, and grinned, fierce and young. "Dr. Halloway will call it medieval," she said. "He'll also help me do it, because he saw the Maiden stone photograph and he's not made of stone himself, whatever Quarrie is." They did one thing more before leaving Camas Beg, and they asked Ena's leave to do it. At the byre wall, at low golden evening, they spoke aloud the seven names from the session book — the admonished women, restored by their own record three hundred years late — and Ena Soutar stood with her hand flat on the smooth red stone her family had guarded like a scabbard guards a blade, and wept exactly once, briefly, and then blew her nose and thanked them in the voice of a woman closing a very old account. At the gate, on parting, she gave them the last of it, the way keepers do when the account is settled and the interest can flow freely. "There was fragments, you know," she said. "Pried loose by the minister's men. My family always held that his wife gathered what she could and hid them in the meal-chest, being of a repentant turn, and that when her daughter married north — to Kilvane, as it happens; these coasts marry in circles like everything else — a tin of pebbles and cut letters went with her in the bottom of the cart." She looked down the road toward the cape, where the light was failing over water. "A story. I have kept it sixty years and can vouch for the chest and no further. But you'll be going to Kilvane."