A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h hill. “Make sure that you have something to put on up there. You know how things can change on the hills. One moment it’s summer, then it’s semi-arctic. Our delightful Scottish climate.”
She moved forward and took over the struggle with the zip, which she eased past its obstruction. Her hand remained against the front of the garment, gentle against his chest. She looked up and into his eyes. There was light in them, and she wanted only to embrace him. She did not want him to go away; she wanted him to stay. She did not want to be anywhere but with him, because now, at last, she felt a happiness so complete that it was a mystery in its own right. Simple love, she thought, not a mystery, but the vision of
He leaned forward.
“My beautiful one,” she whispered.
“Isabel.”
“My beautiful one,” she said. “Be careful of the rain.”
“You too.”
“ N OT E V E RY BODY U N D E R S TA N D S,” remarked Tom during a pause halfway up the hill. “Not everybody understands why I should feel as I do about this country. I have a brother who has no interest—none at all—in Scotland. Even when I show him the papers that spell it out—how our people came from here, their names, the places they lived. He shrugs and says, ‘A long time ago—we’re Americans now.’ How can anybody be so indifferent to the past?”
“It depends on the past,” said Isabel. “Some people find the past just too painful. What if you come from a past that is full of unhappiness and indignity? A place in Russia or Poland where T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N
2 0 9
there have been pogroms and oppression? Would you want to be reminded of that? I’m not sure I would.”
Tom used the end of his stick to prise an encrustation of mud off his boots. “Maybe. But don’t you think that it’s breaking faith with the people who had to put up with all that—to ignore, to forget about them now? And anyway, there’s nothing like that in being from here. Our Scottish ancestors weren’t miserable.”
Isabel looked at him with incredulity. Texans, she thought, were at least realistic; did Tom not know what it was actually like? Having read as much as he seemed to have done about Scottish history, he surely could not believe that. She watched him scrape the rest of the mud off his boots and then wipe the stick clean on a clump of heather beside the path.
“I don’t know how to put this,” she said, “but those distinguished Scottish ancestors you’ve unearthed—they weren’t exactly angels, you know. They can’t have been; not if they were at all prominent. All the leading Scottish families were just a bunch of rogues. They plotted and raided and disposed of one another with utter abandon— utter abandon. The Sicilians could teach them nothing. Nothing.”
Tom stared at her, and for a moment Isabel regretted what she had said. We have to believe in something, and a belief in the goodness of the place from which one had sprung, or one’s ancestors had sprung, was one of the ways of arming oneself against the cold knowledge that it would all be over in a moment and was nothing anyway. Meaning—that’s what we need, and if it helps to be Irish or Scottish or Jewish, or anything, for that matter, then we should let people believe in these scraps of identity.
“Of course one shouldn’t make too much of it,” said Isabel.
2 1 0
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h
“Not everybody was ruthless. There were saints too—lots of them. It’s just that it’s difficult to find many figures in Scottish history who didn’t have blood on their hands. You mentioned Mary, Queen of Scots, Mary Stuart.”
“She was wronged,” said Tom quickly. “And she didn’t kill her husband.”
“Darnley? No, there’s no evidence that she blew him up.
But since you mention him, let’s not forget that he was himself a murderer. He was in on the plot to kill Mary’s Italian secretary, wasn’t he? And when his friends came into the room he grabbed Mary and pinioned her while they dragged Rizzio away from her.
He did. That’s on the record. Which makes him a murderer.”
It was not one of Edinburgh’s most successful dinner parties, she thought. Mary Stuart had invited her guests to a room off her bedroom in the Palace of Holyrood. The guest list was small: her illegitimate brother, Lord Robert Stewart, and his wife; the Laird of Creich; Sir Arthur Erskine; and, at the other end of the table, David Rizzio. Rizzio was dressed in a gown of fur-trimmed damask, a doublet of satin, and velvet hose.
He wore a cap, too, by permission of the Queen, which was resented by those who had to remove their headgear in the presence of the monarch (everybody else, except Darnley, who was married to Mary). The loutish Scottish lords came into the room and seized Rizzio, who burst into Italian, and then French, in his desperation.
Tom pointed to the top of the hill, which still looked far away. Now they would have to leave the path, a glorified sheep track, as it followed the contour of the hill and they needed to T H E R I G H T AT T I T U D E T O R A I N
2 1 1
climb. They set out, making their way slowly over low heather. A female grouse broke cover suddenly, cackling in alarm, running along the ground, head lowered, to avoid what she thought would be her murderers. Isabel looked at her in pity, and felt a sudden tenderness, brought on by love. Love paints the world, she thought, enables us to see its beauty, its vulnerability, its preciousness. If we are filled with love, we cannot hate, or destroy; there is no room for such things. She closed her eyes for a moment, a dizzying moment, and she was back in that room, with Jamie beside her and the half-light of the summer sky outside, and her heart full of that very love she felt now.
“Are you all right?” Tom had stopped and was looking at her with concern. “Tell me if this is too steep.”
