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Updated: May 6, 2025
Oh go get out all of you!" and she waved her hand to her dreams and sent the shining Lover riding on on his quest without her. It was just as she used to talk to the gulls and the winds on Ben Grief when she was having things out with herself before. "I've taken the man I want as all the Lashcairns do unless they are like Aunt Janet and Oh, anyway, I'd rather be killed than be like her.
"I won't believe it. What's more, I don't believe it," she said decidedly. "Louis may be a drunkard. Father was. So were all the Lashcairns for ages. But I'm not. And my child is not going to be. After all is he our child ? I mean Jesus was not Joseph's child only " She stopped, waiting. This was an immense, breathtaking thought.
Wullie do all the Lashcairns die like that?" and she pictured again her father waiting, as he put it, to be drowned in his bed while a procession of killed and killing ancestors seemed to glide before her eyes over the rushing water. "The men folk, yes. They canna rule themselves." "And the women?" she said sharply, realizing that she and Aunt Janet were all that were left.
Many a girl would have died; Marcella proved herself more a child of the Lashcairns than of her little English mother by living and thriving on it. Her father sent her to work in the fields with the men, but forbade her to speak to any of the village women who worked there, telling her to remember that her folks were kings when theirs were slaves.
And so the night would wear on; sometimes he would talk to God, sometimes to Marcella, telling her how he had hated her because she was not a boy and seemed, to his great strength, too much like her frail English mother to be of any use in the world. "We're a great folk, we Lashcairns, Marcella," he would say, his sunken eyes brightening. "A great name, Marcella.
She loved it because it enshrined the family story; the scratches on the refectory table showed where heavy-clad feet had been planted as Lashcairns of old had pledged each other in fiery bowls. The heavy oak chairs had each a name and a history, but until the man from London came Aunt Janet had not realized their value.
Yon flooer's the reaping of a seedtime many a hundred years gone by. If ye was tae dig doon an' doon all the day ye'd find yon apple tree buried deep i' th' sand. The last time it fruited was afore Flodden, when Lashcairns were kings " "What, Wullie, a poor old tree buried all those years, pushing up to light like this? How could it?" said Marcella, staring at it fascinated.
"The Lashcairns are a wild lot, lassie especially the men folk. They kill and they rule others and they drink. It's drink that's ruined them, because drink is the only thing they canna rule. That's the men folk I'm talking of. Your great-grandfather lost all his lands that lie about Carlossie. The old grey house and the fields all about Ben Grief and Lashnagar were lost by your father.
It was never the way of the Lashcairns to notice overmuch the demands of the body. And now they sat by the almost bare refectory table, and none of them would mention hunger; Andrew did not feel it. His zeal fed him.
She had lived in a world of friends a world that knew her, barefoot and hungry as she was, for the last of the Lashcairns, a world that had open doors for her everywhere. And Aunt Janet knew about as much of life outside the wall that held her own smouldering personality as Marcella knew.
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