The reputation of St Brigid’s must have reached the ears of Rebecca Macshuibhne, though it was on the mainland, some thirty miles south of the island on which she now lived, and for all that her husband, Fridleif, had taught her to think ill of Roman Catholics. Before she met Fridleif she had made no distinction between Catholicism and Congregationalism. In her home Christianity was Christianity. Such ignorance of fine and not-so-fine distinctions was not intended to be contemptuous. It was just that Jesus was understood to be central to all Christian faiths and wasn’t central, except in a negative sense, to hers. Not an immoveable aversion, however, as was attested to by her subsequent marriage to the Rev. Fridleif Macshuibhne, her eager assumption of her pastoral duties as his wife, and the baptism of their daughter Coira.
That this solemn rite, which her grandparents Wolfie and Bella Lestchinsky made no effort to attend, constituted Coira’s once-and-for-all initiation into the care of Christ, neither Rebecca nor Fridleif thought to question. They had promised on the child’s behalf to reject the Devil and all rebellion against God, to renounce deceit, to submit to Christ as Lord.
The deed was done, the child was a Christian.
And there the matter would have rested had not the final letter Rebecca sent to her parents been returned to her in that chilling fashion.
Rebecca could not stop looking at the stamp.
‘It won’t tell you any more than it already has,’ Fridleif said.
‘What do you think it means?’
He showed her his clear, Arctic eyes. ‘It’s possible,’ he said, ‘that it was they who returned it.’
‘With an official stamp, Fridleif?’
He took the envelope from her and held it to the light.
‘I’ve done that a thousand times,’ she said. ‘And anyway, why would they send my letter back? They never did before. Not replying is one thing — and I know it hurt you, Fridleif, as it hurt me — but returning my letter unopened is something else again. That’s not their way. We don’t behave like that in my family.’
Her husband looked at her in a manner she found provoking. But theirs was a proudly peaceable marriage and she wanted it to remain that way. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence,’ she went on, ‘that this should happen when there’s so much trouble down there. I’m frightened.’
He touched her hand. ‘The Lord will protect them.’
She had heard her father invoke the name of the Lord in the face of danger often enough. But with him the invocation had been ironical, angry, disappointed. The Lord should protect them but wouldn’t. Hadn’t. And wouldn’t ever. Which her father took to be a personal affront to him. And yet his had never been a counsel of despair. There was something out there in which he believed, an idea that answered to the name of the Lord no matter that the Lord himself did scant justice to it. Reason. Human resourcefulness. Intelligence.
Of what use to them their intelligence was now, however, she couldn’t imagine.
Seeing her eyes fill with tears, Fridleif stretched out his other hand to her. ‘Look,’ he said in his gentlest voice, ‘we don’t really know how bad it is down there. These things get blown out of all proportion.’
‘These things?’
‘Rumours, I mean. That’s all we have to go on.’
He seemed insubstantial to her, all of a sudden. He was a feathery man — that had been his charm. He had flitted into her life, a creature of light and optimism, so unlike her father. His translucent faith a wonderful release to her after the weighty, frightened sonorousness of her parents and their friends. But it was as though he had never before been tested in her presence, and now that he had — well, he was failing. You have God but you have no gravitas, Rebecca thought.
‘Then if rumours are all we have to go on,’ she replied at last, ‘I must see what’s happening with my own eyes.’
He didn’t say anything, assuming that having spoken from her heart she wouldn’t think it necessary to act from it.
But the next day she repeated her determination to find out for herself. He shook his head. ‘I can’t let you go,’ he said. ‘It’s too dangerous.’
‘Too dangerous? Yesterday you said it was blown out of all proportion.’
‘We don’t know what’s true or what isn’t, but I can’t let you put yourself in danger. You have a child. Our child. You have a husband. You have the people of Mernoc.’
‘I have a mother and father,’ she reminded him.
‘You could have fooled me,’ he said.
‘Say that again.’
He knew not to say it again.
‘I will take Coira with me,’ she said. ‘If it turns out they’re all right they’ll be glad to see her. Grandchildren always do the trick.’
‘And if they’re not all right?’
‘Then we’ll come back.’
‘Rebecca, I can’t allow this,’ he said.
She told him he had no choice. He told her he was Coira’s father. He couldn’t allow her to endanger the child. And as for grandchildren always doing the trick. . he hesitated. . not this grandchild.
What Rebecca then said, what Rebecca then felt, was a surprise to her. ‘They won’t see Coira like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘As lost to them.’
‘How will they see her?’
It was her turn now to hesitate. ‘As a little bit of both.’
‘She isn’t a little bit of both. She’s been baptised.’
‘You make that sound pretty final.’
‘It is pretty final.’
‘So I’ve been bypassed, have I?’
‘How can you ask that? You too have been baptised.’
‘That doesn’t change everything, Fridleif.’
‘Yes, it does. It changes everything. Otherwise it’s of no meaning.’
‘It doesn’t change what’s in me, my blood, my genes.’
‘Your blood?’
‘We didn’t start at the beginning, you know. By our law Coira remains within the fold. As do I, as the daughter of my mother.’
Fridleif put his hands together and prayed silently. He had never expected to hear the phrase ‘our law’ on his wife’s lips. He felt as though she had struck him in the heart.
Rebecca didn’t join him in prayer. She looked out of the window at the featureless grey sea.
‘I never thought we would fight over who our child belongs to,’ Fridleif said at last.
‘I’m not fighting. I know who she belongs to. She belongs to us. You and me.’
‘And to Christ.’
She waved the idea away. If it had been beautiful to her once, it wasn’t beautiful to her now. ‘She belongs to us, Fridleif. Us! And I am half of us.’
‘I won’t allow you to take her away.’
If it was a threat, it had no menace in it.
The following morning she was gone. She and the child.
But she made a concession to her husband, though she never told him of it. She decided against taking Coira with her. If her parents weren’t alive, she would be subjecting her to danger for no reason. If they were alive, God willing, she would make peace with them face to face herself, and then return with the child. Her reasoning was clear. If Coira was her daughter by blood, in direct line of descendancy from her mother and her grandparents and their grandparents before them, then she wasn’t safe. No one in whom the lust for murder had been aroused was going to stop to consider the finer points of lineage and conversion; no one was going to care that Coira had been baptised and was, in her father’s eyes, the child of Christ. She had heard her parents make the argument again and again — ‘When they come to get you, Becky, they won’t be making subtle distinctions. They won’t spare you because you’ve changed your name and happen to think differently from us on a few points. They won’t release you with a kiss because you think it couldn’t ever happen here. It’s who you are by blood that interests them, nothing else.’ She had despaired of them. Well, for different reasons she was despairing now. But she couldn’t leave Coira with her father. Not after the words that had been exchanged. She had made great sacrifices for Fridleif. She had broken the hearts of her mother and father who in her own heart she did not expect ever to see again. She had given him everything else; she would not give him her child.