Read Online The Pirate Queen by Barbara Sjoholm - Free Book Online Page B

was promoting “Kilts for Hire.” Standing inside a woolen blizzard of green, red, black, and yellow, I had a sudden memory of my father. How, as our world fell apart with my mother’s illness and death, he used to tell me stories of his own childhood, the early death of his mother, his unrecalled first years in an orphanage, his adoption by the Wilsons when he was five. His real father was named Walter Stewart. “Stewart was the name of the royal house of Scotland,” he told me. “So that means we’re related to the former kings and queens of Scotland.” Even as an eleven-year-old, I was skeptical of this assertion, an orphan’s fairy-tale dream of having secret royal blood.
    I bought my father a tie nevertheless, and when the clerksaid, “Ah, the Stewart clan. Are you a Stewart?” I answered, “Er. Yes, I guess I’m a Stewart,” tasting it on my lips. I remembered at sixteen trying on the identity of a writer, practicing a new signature on lined notebook paper: Barbara Stewart. Barbara Stuart. Even then I seem to have had my doubts about Wilson. In fact, my father’s relatives were more Swedish than Scottish. His mother, who died in childbirth at age twenty, was born in Stockholm. In the one photograph we had of her, from her wedding when she was sixteen, I looked almost exactly like her at the same age.
    Bonnie Stewart? Bonnie Stuart? Was it too late to change?
    Around six o’clock, I finally made contact with the cruise-company couple. “We’re not going out again till next week,” the young woman apologized. “Aside from the weather forecast, we need to replace a part. The motor.”
    I had a vision of being at the lip of the whirlpool and the motor suddenly failing. Down, down we’d be pulled, as helpless to stop our suction as the paralyzed narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “A Descent into the Maelström.”
    How often we made the circuit of the belt it is impossible to say. We careered round and round for perhaps an hour, flying rather than floating, getting gradually more and more into the middle of the surge, and then nearer and nearer to its horrible inner edge.
    â€œYou won’t be around next week?” she asked. “It should be fixed by then.”
    â€œI’m on my way to Orkney,” I said regretfully, but with some sense of having postponed death for yet a little while. The rain lashed against the plastic walls of the phone booth, and when Istepped out onto the quay at the end of the esplanade, the wind came at me horizontally. All day I’d heard people grumbling, “It’s winter again, isn’t it?”
    Again I had the sense, feeling the icy rain on my face, that the Cailleach was still at large this May. Along the coast she was taking huge strides, her face blue-black and her one tooth rusty and red; she was peering at her tubs of washing with her goggle eye, and giving them a stir with her magic weather wand. I walked again through the streets, which were mostly empty, and passed a variety of eateries, including one that touted “Steak Mince Bridies” on a card in the window, before settling on a take-away of chicken curry from an Indian restaurant. “I’m sorry about the weather,” said the young woman who took my order. “Global warming, I expect.” In earlier times she would have said, “The Cailleach is tramping her blankets tonight.”
    I DIDN ’ T much like the look of the water between me and the Orkney Islands. All day the rain had flailed against the windows of successive buses, from Fort William to Inverness and now to John o’ Groats. While some of the loveliest lochs and glens of the Highlands slipped by, I felt as if I were in a gray tunnel. The towns looked depressed and bleak. Inverness is not best appreciated from the environs of the bus station. The waiting room consisted of two benches, and the café next door