Another man, a Salish who worked at Bannockburn, followed behind in a truck with their luggage. Marian slept through the drive, willfully indifferent to the conversation of the men or the first glimpse of her new home. Barclay had to shake her awake. For a moment she thought she was back in the Scottish Highlands. She saw snow, mountains, a square, dignified, symmetrical house made from gray stone, roofed in slate.
Barclay’s mother and his sister, Kate, were standing on the front steps between two enormous stone urns. Kate, in riding boots and sheepskin jacket and broad-brimmed hat, shook Marian’s hand. At their wedding, she’d said, “He won’t be talked out of it. I’ve tried.”
“I’ve tried, too,” Marian had replied.
Kate had scowled, said, “I’m sure.”
Barclay’s mother, Mother Macqueen, as she wished to be called, wore a brown dress and heavy shawl. A silver crucifix dangled nearly to her waist. Her gray hair was bound in two thick braids looped back up on themselves, and her face was pleated with long, delicate wrinkles. She surprised Marian by embracing her and patting her back as though offering reassurance to a child. “You are very welcome here,” she said in a low murmur. Her accent was an odd mix of Salish and French.
Marian had not been prepared for such a warm greeting, for warmth at all. Barclay had said little about his mother. She wondered if Mother Macqueen was remembering being a bride, being taken under the auspices of Barclay’s father, encompassed by his whiteness and wealth.
Mother Macqueen was holding her hands and gazing into her face. “You are a blessing,” she said.
Gently, Barclay separated them. “Come inside, Marian,” he said.
Life as a wife began.
Marian had trouble finding any way to be useful. There was a landing strip on the ranch, but the Stearman was back in Missoula. She asked when she might go and get the plane, but Barclay put her off with vague admonishments about settling in, finding her place, enjoying being a newlywed. She told herself she needed to wait, to make the best of things, and eventually he would relax his vigilance. At least on the ranch she needn’t wear silk dresses.
A Salish girl did the dusting and sweeping and laundry, one in a long succession of girls who had been educated, like Mother Macqueen, in a convent school where the French-speaking nuns emphasized domestic skills and the Bible’s most frightening pronouncements and tried to drive the nativeness out of their charges. Mother Macqueen had graduated with an esoteric set of beliefs, partly of her own concoction, that Barclay said had both enchanted and deranged his father: She perceived life as a continuous storm of divine wrath and celestial mercy, human beings blown one way and then the other by competing gusts on which angels and devils flew like bats.
An older Scottish woman did the cooking. A gang of men worked the cattle and cared for the horses and mended the fences. Kate worked with the men, but any attempts Marian made to help were rebuffed. She had the sense Barclay had forbidden anyone to allow her to work, leaving her with nothing to do but wander aimlessly around the ranch. She suspected he was trying to bore her into having a baby.
“What are you doing today?” she asked Kate one morning when she contrived to meet her on horseback.
Kate’s cheeks were flushed with cold. “Mending fences.”
“I could lend a hand.”
“No, we just want to get on with it.” She rode off, her horse’s hoofbeats muffled by snow.
* * *
—
Just after the new year, the parcel of held mail arrived from the hotel in Edinburgh.
In their bedroom, Barclay read Jamie’s letter aloud in a furious, tremulous voice: “？‘I hope you will leave Barclay one day and find your way back to your own life. Please, Marian. Don’t give in.’？” He waved the pages at her. “Horseshit. Meddling horseshit.”
“I told you I didn’t want a baby,” she said feebly.
“You don’t mean it.”
“I do. What can I say to make you believe I know my own mind?”
“Don’t you care what I want?”
“Is what you want for me to be miserable?”
“You won’t be. You’ll see—you’ll love the baby. And it’s your duty to give me children. You’re my wife. Won’t it make you happy to do your duty?”
“Never,” she said, loudly, getting louder. “Never ever.”
He clamped a hand over her mouth. His mother and Kate were in the house. The Salish girl was somewhere. The cook was in the kitchen. “I could make you,” he said. They blazed at each other. She pushed his wrist away.