Bergamot & Sulphur
Chapter 14: Scottish Morn
Down the craggy hurdle of the cliffs, the churlish sea carves away at the Scottish coast. The patchwork of green and grey wind-flattened fields stretch away from the bluff, dotted with sheep and hemmed by lichened stone walls. There is the sweet smell of heather mingling with plumbs of peat, rising from the hearths of limewashed cottages. A thermos of Scottish Morn, a strong tea with a malty finish, bolsters Crowley on his walk through the highlands. A glimmer in the corner of his eye, Juliet dashes along the edge of the cliffs, snapping at playful seelie fae. The soft slope of the coast, the parish church slowly crumbling into the sea, the presence of Scottish magic. It should all be at least somewhat familiar.
Traveling to the United Kingdom for a clandestine meeting with rogue members of the British Men of Letters is one more stone in the long road of building Mother Mary's Home for Wayward Sons and Daughters. A little excursion north to Inverness, to the tiny hamlet of Canisbay, for a walk with crowned cromach and tartaned scarf seemed overdue. Through the crofts and lanes of the Scottish countryside, in which languish vague remembrances of a life once lived. Where a tailor waited out the bloodshed of the Scottish rebellions, worked his body to the bone, gathering and stitching together some meager comfort for himself in an otherwise impoverished time. Where he fell in love with a woman who scorned and cockled him, raised a hand to a son he hadn't wanted, sold an otherwise worthless soul at the crossroads, and slowly drank himself to death.
Fergus MacLeod is lost in the gently enveloping fog of time. To having lived nearly three centuries, to the interminable, ageless throes on the rack, where humanity and memories alike are slowly, painstakingly stripped away. Not for the first time, Crowley insists to himself that he does not care about the life he lived, the person who may or may not have sold their spark of ethereal gleam for such a small price as three inches of something undefinable and finite. He tells himself that worthless and unmourned wretch laying in that ditch and quaking at the howl of hellhounds deserved his lot. To imagine otherwise – to consider that he might have been something resembling a decent man who made grave mistakes – to conceive of an alternative preamble to his now-noteworthy existence would be too disruptive to Crowley's sense of himself, his own self-constructed history.
With each step, Crowley puts the past where it belongs – behind him. And he enjoys the roar from the cliffs, the thatch of thistles growing wild along the lane, the crumbling stone walls and quaint cottages along the Scottish coast. Time continues its work, carving away at the centuries and their accumulated memories. Nothing about any of this is the least bit familiar. And that is just the way Crowley wants it.
There is very little we know about Fergus MacLeod, and even what we do know, we cannot trust, as it comes almost entirely from the embittered spirit of his dead son and his manipulative mother, neither of which can be considered reliable sources. I very much enjoy how little Crowley himself seems to really remember of his human life, and how that opens up endless possibilities. It is so easy to vilify Crowley, and therefore want Fergus to have been an awful sot who deserved to die in a gutter and then be tortured for hundreds of years. But maybe he wasn't. Maybe he was a normal, average person. And any of us could end up the same. There's far more to be learned from that than thinking all villains ultimately earn their torment and loneliness.
One thing I did learn in doing a bit of research for this chapter. We know Fergus was at least born in Canisbay, Scotland – though he likely moved away to nearby Wick, an actual town compared to the tiny hamlet of Canisbay, when Rowena abandoned him to the workhouse. It may even be that Fergus' philandering laird of a father was from Wick. The patron saint of Wick and the surrounding shire? St. Fergus.