Bonnie Dundee, Page 3

  ‘Hush you,’ he said, ‘’tis only me.’

  He was squatting beside me. I could just make out his shape in the faint light from the hole in the thatch that served as a window.

  ‘I’m sorry you saw what you saw the night,’ he whispered out of the dark, ‘but we need those carbines for the Lord’s work, and for the freedom of Scotland. And when bairns go thrusting their noses into the doings of grown men, often enough they get more than they bargained for.’

  He was trying to make it all sound quite reasonable. Somehow small. Was that how it seemed to him?

  He had taken his hand away from my mouth, and I managed to get out two words, ‘Go away!’

  ‘I’ve somewhat to say first,’ he said, ‘and you’d best listen. The sojers are bound to come asking questions and hunting in the thatch at all the houses round about by morning. Mebbe before morning. And mebbe they’ll be the same ones that saw ye back at the alehouse, so mind that ye are still like Daft Eckie over to Lochinloch market! And mind also that I was with Grandfather and his sick cow all evening!’ And then suddenly he was bending very close, and his breath was on my face and his hands came up round my neck, quite lightly. ‘If ye tell, we shall all hang.’ His hands tightened for an instant, making me choke. ‘But if we hang, Hugh Herriot, so will you!’

  He kept his grip for a moment just long enough to be sure I’d got the point, then took his hands away, and got up and turned him to his own sleeping place, leaving me crowing for breath and with a new sense of sick astonishment upon me.

  For until he put it into my head, it never for an instant occurred to me to betray my own kinfolk.

  It was scarce cock-light when the troopers came. They were not the ones that I had seen the night before, and so I did not have to play Daft Eckie again, which was a merciful thing, for I am no actor, and I doubted my ability to play the part a second time.

  ‘Where were you yestere’en?’ demanded the corporal in charge of them.

  ‘And why would you be spiering to know that?’ returned my grandfather. ‘What was to do yestere’en?’

  ‘Ye’ve no heard?’

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘Never mind for that.’ The corporal came a menacing step forward, but my grandfather never gave back an inch. ‘Where were ye?’

  ‘Most of the evening I was in the byre with a sick cow,’ said Grandfather.

  The corporal looked round about. ‘And the rest of ye?’

  ‘My older grandson was with me, the younger was here in the kitchen with the women. That’s so, Hugh?’

  ‘Aye,’ I said.

  ‘And I was where all God-fearing bodies should be, at home with my woman and bairns,’ put in one of the farmhands, and the rest added their voices to his.

  ‘And for why would ye be seeing to the cow yourself, when ye’ve farmhands and to spare?’ The corporal turned back to Grandfather.

  ‘Because she’s a good cow, and dropped a good calf at the evening’s end, and I’d not trust her to any care but my own at such a time.’

  So it went on. And when the questions were over, they herded us, farmhands and family alike, into the parlour, which had but the one door, and held us there, a man standing in the doorway with his carbine at the ready, while the rest went through the house and outbuildings like terriers rat-hunting in a barn – we missed half the hens afterwards! But they found no sign of stolen carbines or smuggled Dutch muskets; only the ancient fowling-piece which every farm possessed, and my grandfather’s pistols in their holsters hanging in their usual place at the head of the big box-bed.

  The corporal sniffed at both barrels, but they had been cleaned too well to carry any smell of burned powder, and anyway it was upward of twelve hours since the one had been fired.

  When the search was finished, and they had found no sign of anything that was not as it should be, my grandfather asked again, ‘Now that you have done turning my house out of doors, will you be telling me the meaning of it all, and what happened yestere’en?’

  The corporal considered, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘Och well, I don’t see there’s any harm telling ye. For the one thing, three Government issue carbines are gone missing; for the other, the alehouse over at Blackmoor was burned down and the four of our men inside – fools that they were – slaughtered for the sake of those same carbines.’

  There was a little silence, and then my grandfather said, ‘It’s sorry I am to hear it… What became of old Phemie that kept the alehouse?’

  ‘Found dead in a ditch this morning,’ said the corporal. ‘Sore burned, she was, and old to be taking a shock the like of that one.’

  And he gathered up his men, and in a while they mounted their horses that were waiting in the farmyard and clattered away.

  Nobody moved until the last dwindling hoof – beats had quite died into the distance. Then a kind of sigh ran through the little parlour. And I mind a whaup rose crying from the moors behind the house.

  And oh, but the grief was on me, for the drummer laddie, and for my own loss of Alan that left me like a stray dog with no heel to follow. My head felt stiff on my shoulders when I forced it round to look at him. He was an odd pearly white, and he was looking at Grandfather. But in a little, as though my looking had reached him like a touch, he turned and answered it with a long cool stare.

  Feeling like somebody much older than myself, I said, ‘So we’ll not be hanging. Not this time, anyway. Bu you be awfu’ careful another time, because I’d like to kill you, Alan Armstrong; I’d like to kill you fine.’

  I do not know what I meant by it; it was just a bairn’s threat, I suppose; though it did not feel like one.

  Alan laughed at it. He stood with his head tipped back, and laughed. ‘Thanks for the warning, my mannie! I’ll mind it – another time!’ And that was certainly no bairn’s threat.

  ‘Now may God forgive you your wicked words, you ungrateful –’ my Aunt Margaret began. But I heard her bitter voice behind me, for I had already turned and was blundering from the room.

  I made for the stable and flung myself face down in the straw of old Janot’s stall, and bided there a long time, smelling the comforting smell of horses, and hearing their stir and rustle and soft puffing breaths. I wanted no more to do with men and the world of men ever again.

  The pull of two loyalties within me was over and done with, and there was some relief in that. I knew now that I was like Montrose: that I was no Covenanter nor ever could be.

  But oh, the grief was on me sore.

  3

  My Lady Jean

  A FEW DAYS later, Grandfather bade me saddle Janot for him, and rode into Lochinloch market.

  He got home in a silent mood, and in silence ate the supper that Aunt Margaret had ready for him in the parlour. Dinner in the kitchen with the farmhands, supper in the parlour with just the family; that’s the way of it in the big farms and small manor houses of Lowland Scotland. And when he had done, and we had just left the table, Alan and I careful never to catch each other’s glance, as we had been ever since the morning that the soldiers came, he called for his clay pipe, and when Aunt Margaret had filled and lit and given it to him, he sat back in his chair and took a long steady pull, and puffed out a blue smoke-garland round his head. (I never knew any man to make more smoke with his pipe than my grandfather did.) And out of the midst of the smoke cloud, said he, ‘I was talking wi’ Dundonel’s factor at the market.’

  ‘It would not be the first time,’ said Aunt Margaret, sitting herself down at her spinning-wheel beside the fire.

  ‘About Hugh,’ said Grandfather.

  The sound of my own name seemed to give me a small jab in my belly, and I stopped playing with Jess’s ears, she having her head heavy and warm on my knee; and we all looked at Grandfather.

  And Grandfather took another pull at his pipe and spoke out of a fresh cloud of smoke. ‘I was telling him that I’d a daughter’s son here that I was wishing to find a place in the world for, seeing that I had already a son
’s son to follow after me here at Wauprigg. And he was telling me that they had room for another laddie in the stables, over to Place of Paisley.’

  My Aunt Margaret’s foot checked on the treadle, and the thrum of the wheel fell silent. ‘And you’ve struck a bargain with him to take Hugh?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Grandfather.

  ‘After all the to-do you made about his getting his book-learning from the dominie?’

  ‘Book-learning will maybe stand him in good stead one day. Meanwhile – he has a way with horses.’

  ‘But to go for a stable laddie!’ cried Aunt Margaret. ‘An Armstrong of Wauprigg!’

  Oh well, I suppose ’twas the disgrace to the family, all over again; and I my mother’s son.

  I mind getting up so sharply that I all but knocked over my creepy stool, and hearing my voice speaking as ’twere of its own accord. ‘But I’m not an Armstrong of Wauprigg, Aunt Margaret, I’m a Herriot of nowhere in particular, and plain enough you ha’ made it to me, all this while. And, Grandfather, I would like it well enough, to be a stable laddie for Lord Dundonel.’

  Two days later, when the carrier passed by on his weekly way, I was waiting for him at the foot of the driftway, with all that I possessed in the world bundled in an old plaid; a clean shirt and a plumbago pencil and some odd bits and pieces of paper that I could be drawing on, and the like.

  Grandfather and I had had a final word under the rowan tree by the gate. ‘I’ll no’ be needing to bid you keep a close mouth on what happened up at old Phemie’s,’ he’d said. And suddenly he’d been not Armstrong of Wauprigg but just a troubled old man. ‘But I’ll ask ye not to think of us more hardly than ye can help, Hugh.’

  ‘I’ll never think hardly of you, Grandfather,’ I’d said, with a sudden aching in my throat.

  He had put his hand for an instant on my shoulder, then turned back towards the house; and I mind old Jess thrusting her rough muzzle into my hand before she padded after him.

  That was my last parting with Wauprigg, that had been my mother’s home, though it had never been mine. Then I had picked up my bundle and set out down the driftway to meet the carrier.

  I did not look back.

  Place of Paisley is a fine great house, and the stable-yard a good enough place to work in, for old Lord Dundonel was one for the keeping and breeding of fine horses. Life was not exactly easy there, not with Willie Sempill in charge of the stables, but there was a goodness to it, all the same.

  And so I was part of another Covenanting household, though one that for the most part followed the cause more gently than the last that I had known. Sir John Cochrane, the second son of the house, was refuging in Holland after being caught up in a plot to kill the King; and the first son, who was dead before ever I came to Place of Paisley (they said, praying with his last breath for the death of that same King), had married Lady Catherine Kennedy, of as black a Covenanting family as ever prayed to the Lord, a grim-faced, godly woman who divided her time between Paisley and Auchans, her own house some miles off. And most of their sons and daughters were safely married into families of their own way of thinking, and rearing broods of fledgeling Covenanters in their turn. But old Lord Dundonel, the head of the house, had been made Earl for his loyalty to the first Charles, in the bad days; and I have often thought that there was a likeness between him and my grandfather, and he could have done with a sick cow himself from time to time…

  And no house could have been quite without light and laughter that held my lady Jean.

  Lady Jean Cochrane, youngest daughter to the eldest son and that bleak-faced widow woman he left behind him. Sixteen or seventeen she’d have been, the spring I first saw her; old for a lassie to be still unwed, but I’m thinking she was hard to please, and the old Earl would not force her, though there was talk that her mother would have taken a whip to her if she’d had her way. A slight, long-boned lassie, with straight dove-gold hair that she wore at most times tied back with a ribbon as though she were a boy, and a pair of straight grey eyes like a boy’s too, and a wide mouth that seemed made for joy. She was in and out of the stable-yard more often than any well-brought-up lady should have been; for she had all her grandfather’s love of horses; and wherever my lady Jean wished to be, there she would be, whether or no. And always with her would be her young kinswoman, both henchwoman and friend, and maybe two—three years her junior, a nut-brown lassie with a kind of cool quiet darkness about her, like the coolth of tree-shade on a hot summer’s day. In some ways she was like my lady; they were the same shape, and would have had both of them the same grace, but that while my lady Jean met life with a dancing step, the other carried herself always as though she was braced for something. I never knew what, I doubt she did herself; it was something in her, like the strangeness she had as though part of her came from another country… Mary, she was mostly called; Mistress Mary Ruthven, but I heard my lady call her Darklis between themselves. Darklis is a gipsy name, a Tinkler name, aye. There were tales of gipsy blood mingled with the Kennedys’ – or Kennedy blood with the gipsies’, way back…

  So then, wherever my lady Jean went, there also went Mistress Mary. I mind I envied her, having someone to follow.

  But I’m running ahead of myself. My lady was up at Auchans with her mother when I first came to Place of Paisley, and I’d been there two—three weeks when she returned.

  She came back in wild April weather; and that same night, as though she had been waiting for her mistress’s return, Linnet, her old mare, dropped a fine filly foal. We got the mare into the big loose-box at the doorward end of the stable, where we would have plenty of room to work; and a long hard night we had, all three of us, the mare herself and Willie Sempill and me. Willie had taken a good opinion of me, finding me better skilled with the horses than most of my kind, and showed it by unloading on to me all the extra work about the place, and keeping me out of the warm straw in the loft where the other lads were snoring, to help him get old Linnet through her foaling. But when the light beyond the open stable door was turning green with daybreak and the gold of the big horn lantern fading, all was safely over, and the foal, still damp from its birth, already staggering on to its long legs and thrust blindly around its mother for the warm milk.

  And I mind somewhere a lark leapt up into the sky, singing like the morning star.

  We gave the mare a warm bran mash with a dash of good ale in it; and then Willie went off to douse his head in the horse-trough and get a bite to eat, leaving me to clean up the loose-box and put down fresh straw, while the world woke and the other stable-hands came down yawning and scratching themselves from the loft.

  I had just about finished – working slow and quiet so as not to fret the mare – when I heard a lassie’s voice outside, talking to Willie Sempill. ‘Why did you not send me word last night, Willie? Ye know how much Linnet means to me.’

  ‘Aye, I ken that fine, my leddy,’ said Willie, in the tone of a patient man hard tried, ‘and ’twas for that reason I didna send. Where would ha’ been the use? Ye would but ha’ fretted all night, and that wouldna be helping the mare.’

  And next moment, with a sudden dazzle of April sun behind her, and rain sparkling on the shoulders of the dark green cloak that she had flung on crooked in the by-going, was my lady Jean, and behind her the nut-brown lassie that at that time I scarce noticed at all.

  Coming in out of the April dazzle, I do not think she saw me at first in the brown shadows of the loose-box; and indeed I would have slipped out, knowing that she and the mare were well acquainted and there would be no risk of old Linnet becoming scared and unchancy, as can happen to a mare with a new foal when strangers come too close; but my lady and her henchwoman, and Willie Sempill hovering behind, were all across the doorway, and I could not well push past them, so I bided where I was.

  She gave her first attention to the mare, fondling her muzzle and crest, and speaking the small soft words of love and pride into her twitching ear, in the broadest of the Lowland tongue,
while Linnet slobbered on her shoulder. And then she turned her to the foal, kneeling down in the straw – mercifully it was the clean straw, but indeed I do not think she would have noticed whether it was or no – and putting her arms round the little creature’s neck to drop a kiss on the white star upon its forehead.

  ‘There’s a kiss for welcome,’ said she. ‘Eh, my bonnie, my bonnie wee burd, what will we be calling ye? Wi’ the star on your forehead an’ all.’

  ‘There was a laverock singing like the morning star when she was but just born,’ said I, not thinking till I heard my own voice.

  My lady looked up then and saw me standing there. ‘Were you here when she was born?’ said she.

  ‘Aye, Master Sempill and me, we spent the night wi’ her.’

  ‘You must be tired,’ said she; and then, looking at me more closely, ‘You’re new-come while I have been from home.’

  ‘Aye, my leddy.’

  ‘And what do they call you?’

  ‘Hugh,’ said I, ‘Hugh Herriot.’

  She gave the foal a gentle hug, and then got to her feet as it went back to its mother and the warm milk, its squirrel tail a’wag behind its little doddering rump. And we watched it together, and laughed. And said she, ‘Then thank you, Hugh Herriot, for your night’s work; she’s a credit to you and Willie Sempill. And as to her name – Laverock will suit her just fine.’

  She gave me her lilting smile for the first time, and turned away; and Willie Sempill must have got his share of it, too, for I saw his face creak into an answering grin. ‘Willie, I forgive you,’ said she, ‘because it’s April and I’m home again. If ye’ll just remember from time to time, dear man, that I’m old enough to fret if I choose, and not just the bairn I was when you set me on my first pony.’

  And she was gone; and behind her the nut-brown lassie who had spoken never a word all the while.

  After that, my lady Jean was never in the stable-yard but she would have a word with me in the by-going – which was well enough save that Andy Burns, another of the stable laddies, was inclined to jealousy, and took it upon himself to see that this did not swell my head for me.