UNTYING THE KNOT by Gillard Linda

Author:Gillard, Linda [Gillard, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-08-27T16:00:00+00:00

“And, when he shall die,

Take him and cut him out in little stars,

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night

And pay no worship to the garish sun.”

Anxious and agnostic, I needed to know where I could find Magnus in the event of his messy death. I needed to know where I could go to feel his presence, to feel that his sacrifice had been worthwhile, that something of him somehow persisted. I tried to see him in Emily, but she favours me, not Magnus. I would study Jessie’s features in the hope of seeing an older version of Magnus, but Jessie didn’t resemble Magnus either, apart from her curly hair. (She once told me he was very like his father as a young man, but she didn’t offer to illustrate her point with photographs. Now I knew why.)

I looked for Magnus and I found him in the stars. What could be more eternal, more beautiful or more glorious? Sentimental of me, I know, and irrational. But it got me through the night. A lot of nights. And when Magnus was away on a tour of duty it comforted me to think we both looked up at the stars; that however big the world was, we at least shared a sky.

As I searched for familiar patterns in the sky above Tully, my eyes began to water with the cold – I like to think that was the cause – and my craning neck started to complain, so I looked down at the courtyard garden, patchily visible in the light from the Great Hall’s windows, then I looked beyond the barmkin wall to the Dule Tree, an ancient sycamore. According to local legend, if you stand beneath the Dule Tree’s boughs, you can hear the sound of a corpse swinging.

Earlier inhabitants of Tully used the tree to hang wrong-doers and the merely troublesome. Into the latter category fell an unlucky fellow known as Gypsy Jack. He was supposedly hanged from this tree in the seventeenth century, after he’d abducted Isobel Moncrieffe, mistress of Tully. Isobel was very young and her husband very old. Since Jack was also known as The Black-eyed Gypsy, we can perhaps assume Isobel was not entirely unwilling. She might even have connived at her own disgrace.

Isobel and her lover were eventually apprehended and Jack was summarily hanged by her cuckolded husband from the Dule Tree (dule being an old Scots word for sorrow). Isobel was forced to watch. She was dragged, so the story goes, to the top of Tullibardine Tower, from where the Dule Tree is plainly visible. Her lover died to the accompaniment of her screams, which might have been a comfort to him I suppose, but not, I would have thought, a great one.

Jack’s body was left to hang, putrefying, as a lesson to other lustful young men. Isobel was imprisoned in Tully and her husband decreed she would never leave the confines of its walls.

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