O Caledonia

by Elspeth Barker

But then the lighthouse beam came in mercy, revolving its reassurance over the ceiling and down the walls, around and out again, and she was safe enough to return to the forest, the knights and the princesses and maidens and their bleeding hearts.

She had rid her life of one haunting fear. And she had known the toxic joy of power.

“Do as you would be done by” went the credo, and it meant “Ask for nothing and you will be given nothing and no one will ask you for anything either.”

Anyhow she had no need for a mother. She had the dogs, the cats, her pony, and all the woods and hills and waters and winds of Auchnasaugh. And she had books.

It was a rigorous life, but for Janet it was softened by the landscape, by reading, and by animals whom she found it possible to love without qualification.

She recognised in herself a distaste for people, which was both physical and intellectual; and yet she nurtured a shameful, secret desire for popularity, or at least for acceptance, neither of which came her way.

She would live out her days at Auchnasaugh, a bookish spinster attended by cats and parrots, until that time when she might become ethereal, pure spirit untainted by the woes of flesh, a phantom drifting with the winds. What fun she would have as a ghost. She could hardly wait.

Man’s inhumanity to man and beast dominated a world of vicious anarchy and disgrace. Only the trees and hills and the night sky held to their orderly beauty:

What use was it to be racked by pain for animals and the general woes of the world when she was unmoved by the sorrows of the people she knew?

It is said that those who are visited by a vision are not to be envied, for they are thereafter haunted.