Chapter Eight
Edinburgh, 1926
Sean flew around the Edinburgh townhouse in a fury. His wife wasn’t anywhere to be found. It was four months after their wedding, and Sean had really thought Bobbie had changed; that she no longer had the urge to gallivant off to who-knew-where as soon as she caught a sniff of information. Yet, here they were on a quiet January day and she’d disappeared once more.
He found a disturbance in her bookcase of maps, where she had cartographic representations in varying levels of quality and detail of most places around the world. The Ordnance Survey map of Orkney was sticking out. There was a space, then the next map was Iceland. He stared at the empty space, trying to think about what would be between Orkney and Iceland. Then he almost kicked himself, as he realized she had gone to Shetland.
He ran downstairs to the hallway and caught up with his butler.
“Cancel dinner. Cancel everything. Blasted girl’s gone north.” What bothered him quite a lot was that the cook had acquired a goose for dinner, and Sean had been especially looking forward to the tender, moist meat and delicious roast potatoes. Nothing in the world compared to roast potatoes cooked in goose fat.
“You mean Lady Roberta, sir?” The butler insisted on only calling Bobbie by her full name.
“The very same. Who else, in late January, would decide to go to Shetland?” Sean put on his sturdiest boots and his thick oilskin coat, then turned back to the butler.
“I’ll be gone a few days at the very least. Tell cook I’m sorry about the goose.”
“Indeed, sir.”
Sean went out of the door and straight to the railway station, where he got the next train to Inverness. He sank into the first class compartment and tried to calm his thoughts. Being furious at Bobbie wasn’t going to bring her back. He would certainly spank the living daylights out of her for just leaving, but most of all, he was hurt that, after everything they’d done together, she hadn’t told him what she was doing.
She had to know by now that he was on her side, that he was supportive of her need to travel and find antiquities, but that his overriding concern would be to keep her safe. If she hadn’t told him where she was going, Sean could only conclude that whatever she was about to do was probably unsafe.
The train travelled north, over the Forth rail bridge, through the smaller mountains, then past the taller, cloud-capped rockier ones. All the while, Sean willed the engine to go faster, so he could reach his errant wife before she did whatever dangerous thing she was planning. If she was hurt before he got there… he didn’t know what he would do.
* * *
Shetland, 1926
Before leaving Edinburgh, Bobbie had looked at herself sideways in her cheval mirror. There was perhaps a slight softness around her lower belly but nothing that was immediately obvious. It would certainly be a while longer before old women would start approaching her in the street and putting their hands on her belly. That was a phenomenon Bobbie was sure she could forego. However, the knowledge that she hadn’t bled for the last two months had sat heavily atop her breakfast.
Bobbie had managed to pull a change of clothes, a map, and her travel journal from their various places before she had to bend over the wastepaper basket. The nausea was a damned nuisance. She had filled a small kit bag and slipped out of the house. The driver already had a car prepared, and he headed to the railway station with no further questions. Bobbie was glad not to have to explain herself.
At Wick, the very tip of Scotland, she got the ferry. Seasickness and morning sickness fought one another to leave Bobbie face down in her cabin, barely able to get to the bucket. She hardly ate or drank on the journey, and eventually reached Stromness with wobbly legs and a pallid complexion. With gratitude, she collapsed into the soft bed of her room at a guesthouse for two days, too exhausted to investigate anything beyond the teakettle. She was horrified at how helpless she was.
Was this the end of her freedom? The thought started off quiet, barely credible, but it grew louder and more confident as it repeated itself. She was in no fit state to investigate Jarlshof, despite all her research. All she wanted to do was to sleep and nibble small bites of plain bread until the suffocating nausea and exhaustion abated. They would abate, she hoped. Nine months of this would be intolerable.
On top of that, she was afraid that Sean would never look at her the same way again. They had never discussed children, and she had no idea whether he wanted them or not. Would he be angry at her for allowing herself to become pregnant?
Even if Sean was furious, Bobbie wished he were here, with her, because she didn’t want to do this on her own and she wasn’t quite sure how to undo her travelling. She felt far too ill to make her own way home. Could the post offices out here send telegrams? She wasn’t sure. She tried to think if she’d seen any telegraph poles outside, but couldn’t think of any. Didn’t some places have the underground wires, though? Like across the Atlantic, there weren’t tiny wooden poles with wires going between them all the way to New York, there was a cable that went under the sea. Wasn’t there? She was sure she’d read something about that.
The digression almost distracted her from the quickly building nausea, but then her thoughts petered out once more and she was left in the room in the guest house, in Shetland, wondering if this was where she would die. The rational side of her brain told her nobody had ever died from this. A disturbing memory, of her strict English literature teacher discussing Jane Eyre, reminded Bobbie that the author Charlotte Bronte had died of severe pregnancy sickness. Like there wasn’t enough that could go wrong with childbirth. Bobbie sincerely hoped times had moved on since then.
She wished she hadn’t allowed herself to get into such a vulnerable state. If she needed to make a quick escape, she knew she stood no chance. Her English literature teacher had told them all about the untimely demise of Charlotte Bronte to serve as a cautionary tale, and Bobbie sincerely wished she’d listened. She knew first-hand how badly adapted humanity was for this simple purpose. She’d seen so many records of childbirth deaths. Why hadn’t she been more cautious?
As she accosted herself, she realized that she’d been careless about when she and Sean made love. She had wanted a baby, on some level.
It was almost a relief when a man’s knock rattled the door, followed by a key in the lock. Bobbie smiled weakly as Sean burst in, looking furious.
“You ran off to the bum end of Scotland, and you didn’t even tell me you were going! Sometimes I wonder what goes on in your head, Bobbie!”
“I’m sorry.” Bobbie was contrite about the trouble she was in but more than anything, she was relieved that he was here. She was too ill to care about anything much beyond that. “I made a mistake,” she added.
“Too right you did. Now get over the end of the bed and I’ve got a tawse here with your name on it.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a length of leather, then closed the door softly behind him. She gasped, but got into position. She knew she’d done the wrong thing, this time, by running away.
The tawse landed on her rear with a sharp crack that made her gasp then keen as the sharp pain seared through her bottom. It wasn’t a terribly hard strike, but all the same she found her eyes becoming tearful. The deep emotion of the whole situation seemed to have come to the fore, then she was sobbing and Sean rubbed her back softly.
“Why did you run off again without telling me where you were off to?” he asked.
“I’m sorry. I panicked. I wanted to prove to myself that my life wasn’t over. Fat lot of good that did.” Her stomach roiled as she waited for another blow, but it didn’t come. He turned her over, and she saw confusion all over his face.
“I thought we settled this after we got married! You’ll always be able to do your antiquarianism. So long as you’re mindful of your husband, that is.” He raised an eyebrow and she shrank against the bed. The movement made her stomach lurch with more urgency.
“Things have changed a little.” Quickly, she leaned over to the wastepaper basket and let her breakfast go. Ordinarily, she’d be furiously embarrassed to let people see her when she was this sick, let alone Sean, because she was the sort of girl who liked people to think she was invincible. Right now, however, she felt far too vincible. Whatever a vince felt like. Unless it was one of those strange words like inflammable, which meant the same as flammable, in which case she most certainly felt unvincible.
“Oh.” Sean gathered up her hair and held it away from her face as she continued to be ill. “How long have you been like this?”
“About a week,” she said sheepishly, between retching. Tears streamed down her face from the force of her stomach. “I’m sorry. I should have stayed at home and sat this one out.”
“So… you’re… enceinte?” He flailed around for a polite word, and Bobbie was surprised that he settled upon French. She’d been sure Scotland would have had its own words for pregnancy.
“Oui. Deux mois. Or possibly three. I’m finding it frightfully disagreeable so far.”
Sean ensconced her in his arms. “I will take care of you, lassie. You just have to let me.”
“I’m not very good at letting people take care of me,” she replied dolefully. “Is there some other option? One that doesn’t require me to feel like I drank a gallon of castor oil?”
“Not if you want to hold our baby in your arms in several months’ time, and admire its tiny hands, and marvel at the eyes, and wonder how something so incredibly perfect grew from nothing at all.” Sean’s voice was wistful, and Bobbie sighed as she thought about what he said.
She’d never been much for babies, because she had never expected to have one. She had always planned for things she could take control of, like her career, rather than things that were completely down to chance, like finding a man whom she might want to marry, and who might want to marry her, too. Now, faced with the possibility of a new arrival, she struggled to decide whether she wanted this new challenge or not.
“I rather do,” she replied.
“Nothing worth having is easy, lassie. You ken that.” He stroked her hair and kissed her forehead. Bobbie found herself being comforted. She was so glad that he’d tracked her down this time, that he was still protecting her, even when he had to protect her from herself.
“I’m a little scared,” she confessed. More than a little. Almost completely full of terror at the prospect of being a mother, which had always been the last thing on her mind. Upon reflection, that might have been what got her into this predicament in the first place. Perhaps if she’d given it more thought, it wouldn’t have happened.
“Me, too.” Sean’s admission might have seemed like a weakness, but Bobbie actually found it reassuring. She didn’t want him to tell her she was being silly. All she’d ever heard about babies, her whole life, was women being excited. Nobody ever aired their worries, or if they did, these were quickly brushed away as nothing significant. That was why she hadn’t felt that any of her female friends would understand that, while she wanted this baby, she was also afraid of how much it would change her life. So, instead, she’d done what she always did when she was afraid of something and couldn’t talk about it with anyone: she’d run away to the past and hidden herself amongst artefacts and maps.
“I suppose I wanted one last hurrah before I had to settle down and stay put forever more,” she explained, waving a hand to indicate why she was in Shetland.
“You chose a fine time to come out here. D’you have a goal or did you plan on sightseeing this time? Given that all you’ve seen of Shetland so far is the bottom of that bucket, I’d prefer if you didn’t buy me a postcard of it.”
Bobbie giggled, despite herself. “There’s a rather old site called Jarlshof around here, and I’ve got a good tip that Jarlshof has a drinking horn that allegedly belonged to a famous ancient god.”
“How are you going to find it?” Sean asked.
Bobbie shrugged. She was exhausted already and she hadn’t even done anything today. She wanted to pore over maps and go out in the rain to take measurements of stones, and record her findings in her usual neat pencil drawings, until she felt she understood the site enough to know where the drinking horn might be, but all she’d had the energy for so far was to refill her water glass. “I don’t know. The plan was to go and do some digging; enlist some local help. But I just want to sleep.”
If she had any more energy, she was sure she’d be quite frustrated by her lack of wherewithal.
* * *
The whole trip was more of the same. Bobbie awoke, felt ill, craved water and fresh bread, felt ill again, slept, and craved more fresh bread. She didn’t get much done, and she felt like a failure.
“Stop fretting, lassie,” Sean said for the tenth time that day. “D’you want to come down for dinner? The landlady is doing haggis, with a spot of tatties and some fresh eggs and bacon.”
“Sounds more like breakfast,” Bobbie replied. The thought of all that fried food made her stomach protest again. “I think I’ll stick with the fresh bread.”
“Aye, suit yourself, but you’ve been in this room for two days and I think it would be good for you to get out.”
While Bobbie felt sick and tired, she allowed Sean to gently extricate her from her room. They started off simply walking around the guest house’s neat garden, which overflowed with flowers, in direct contrast to most of the barren scenery on Shetland. After two tours of the azaleas, however, Bobbie looked wistfully out at the foggy horizon.
“I need to see it, you know.” The mist was beginning to turn into rain, and the falling water seemed to absorb sound.
“Are you feeling well enough?” Sean asked. Bobbie sighed. She hated that her health was now the deciding factor in what she could and couldn’t do, after all the adventures she’d had; all the things she’d survived. Even though part of her brain told her this had to be temporary, there was another part that hastened to point out that, when women became mothers, they tended not to go out and investigate ancient relics. Mind you, she decided, they rarely did that anyway.
Would her future be different than that of every other married woman she knew? If she had known that pregnancy wasn’t a breeze, would she have still allowed it to happen? At this time, she had no answers and more questions than room in her mind to think about them.
“I feel old,” she grumbled, as her hips creaked in the cold.
“You’re twenty-six.” Sean put his hand on her shoulder, and a shiver surged through her body.
“But I’m older than I’ve ever been. So I still feel old.” She wondered if this feeling would pass; whether, after she’d had her baby, she might be less inclined to thinking like a grandmother. Or was this just an inevitable part of growing up?
“Give it time. If adventuring is still your passion, we’ll find a way to make it happen between us.” Sean’s voice was gentle and when Bobbie looked up at him, his expression was tender.
“I’m not going to find that drinking horn, am I?” she mumbled, fighting back tears.
“Not this time, lassie. But there’s a whole world full of history out there and you’ll have plenty of time to explore it in the future.”
Bobbie digested his words as they watched the rain. Up here, it was easy to see the rhythmic dance of nature juxtaposed upon the changeless land; leaves grew, leaves died, but trees perpetuated. Hills never moved. The rain and wind were persistent, constant. In all her traveling, she’d never been so attuned to the landscape as she felt at that moment.
And she had married a man. He was here, with her, although they were newly-enough-weds that it still jarred her ears when people referred to her as Mrs. McClintock. She was in the process of becoming a mother; working in harmony with nature, not defying it to prove her own worth in a world that never valued her. Like the trees whose leaves grew.
Perhaps it wasn’t such a terrible fate, after all.