Bonnie Dundee (13 page)

‘Then whyfore will ye run?’ said I.

And I made to shift my grip for a better one; but he took the instant’s chance, and up he came as swift as a weazel indeed, and fetched me a jab on the nose that drew the good red blood.

Folks were pressing in round us to watch, and somewhere in the back of my head (the main part of it was full of the need to hang on to the chiel that had stolen
my purse with the precious brooch in it, and get it back from him again) I heard someone laugh, and a voice crying us on as though we were a pair of game-cocks. And then there was another voice, I never heard what it said, but on the instant, hands were hauling me up off my enemy, and the chiel himself stumbling to his feet, whining out protests of his innocence. And I found myself staring up at something that looked at first sight like a very splendid and lordly tatty-bogle – what they call a scarecrow in the South.

A very tall thin man wearing the wreck of a coat that had once been mulberry velvet trimmed on cuffs and pocket-flaps with tarnished silver lace, and a proud, if something weather-worn, bunch of blue-black heron hackles clasped into his battered bonnet by a brooch like a silver targe. Grey hair hung in thick greasy locks to his shoulders, and out of the mane of it looked a long brown-skinned rogue’s face with a great hooked nose that could have belonged to a Roman emperor, and a short stump of a blackened pipe that seemed as much a part of it as his nose did, and a pair of yellow eyes – blazing wicked yellow like those of the fish-eagle that the Highlanders call
lolair-Suil-Na-Greine
, the Bird with the Sunlit Eye.

A scarecrow he might be, but clearly he was a scarecrow in some kind of authority, and I appealed to him. ‘Sir, yon de’il stole my purse!’

The wrinkles round the yellow eyes deepened, as though there were amusement somewhere at the back of them, and he jerked his head towards the pickpocket. ‘Search him,’ he said to the world in general, without moving the pipe in his mouth.

Two men from the gathered crowd set about it, pulling open the man’s ragged shirt and delving into his
breeches’ pockets, while a third went through the pockets of his cast-off coat. But there were tiny glances going to and fro between them all the while, and when a few coins that might have been anybody’s and a rabbit snare and a knife and such things had been brought to light, my purse was not among them.

I turned back desperately. ‘He did take it, he
did
! He must have passed it on somehow!’

‘What was in it, young master?’

‘Three siller shillings, and something else – a lassie’s geegaw that I was to take wi’ a message to Captain Faa.’

Nothing moved behind the yellow eyes, but he gave a slow considering nod. ‘See to it,’ he said, again seemingly to the world in general, and to me, ‘Let ye come wi’ me then.’

And he turned and headed away towards the edge of the fairground. I went after him, close as a burr; there seemed nothing else to do. In a little the crowds thinned away, as fine horses and their buyers and sellers were left behind and we were among the tethered ponies and tilt-carts and the humped black tents of the Tinkler camp.

Here and there in front of the tents the light of the cooking fires was beginning to bite, and faces with the queer shuttered look of the gipsy kind wormed out of the shadows and turned a little but never more than a little, to watch us go by. Faces of old grannies, walnut-wrinkled and with pipes as firmly rooted between their blackened teeth as that of the man I followed; hawk faces of men intent on the horse harness or the pots and pans that they were mending; flaunting vivid faces of girls with bright shawls about their heads and shoulders, as I had seen Darklis wear hers only an hour
since. The smells that came from the cooking pots brought the soft warm water to my mouth. A man sat on the shaft of a tilt-cart playing softly on a fiddle. Bairns and dogs and once a little pig ran in and out across our path as we went. It was like a strange country, and I mind wondering if the strangeness of it accounted, at least part-way for the strangeness that was in Darklis, too. Darklis’s left-hand world that reached out to her sometimes in this right-hand world that was hers now…

Close to one of the fires, we passed a knot of bairns and bigger louts amusing themselves by throwing clods and bits of wood and the like at a miserable mongrel pup tied by a piece of cord to the gaily painted wheel of a cart. Every time it tried to get round behind the wheel into some kind of shelter, someone kicked it out again, yelping dismally, and the game went on.

I looked to the man I followed to do something about it, as he had done about my own affair, but he only cast a casual glance that way in the by-going, and ducked into the entrance hole of a big black tent close by. And again I followed him. It was not to be worrying about ill-used puppies that I was there, I told myself.

Inside the tent was very dark with a kind of animal darkness, and closely warm with a faintly animal smell to it. The man struck flint and steel and kindled a horn lantern that hung against the tent pole. And as the tawny light grew and steadied, I saw the place where I was; the few pots and crocks, a three-legged stool, the thick-piled heather of the bed-place with a couple of old rugs flung across it. And save for a pair of fine brindled greyhounds tied to the tent post, the man’s lordliness certainly did not seem to include his living-place. Yet lordly the man was, even more so now that I looked at him fully.

He sat himself down on the creepy-stool and gestured me towards the piled heather of the bed-place.

But I was not sitting down for a chat. ‘It’s Captain Faa I’m wanting to speak wi’,’ I said.

‘And it’s Captain Faa ye’re speaking wi’,’ he said. ‘Sit ye down.’

I think I had known it all along.

So I sat me down on my haunches in the piled heather. ‘I am from Mistress Darklis,’ I said, ‘from Mistress Darklis Ruthven.’

He nodded, ‘I was thinking ye might be so. And is it well wi’ the Rawni – wi’ Mistress Darklis Ruthven?’

‘It’s well with her,’ I said. ‘She bade me come because she canna leave my lady Jean while she is ill – an’ tell ye that all’s well wi’ her and she’s no’ needing to be rescued. She gave me the wee brooch to bring to ye, for proof that ’tis herself that sent me.’ And then the thought of what had happened rose in my throat, and the thought of going back and telling her that I had lost her bonnie pin, and I burst out, ‘But yon thieving de’il—’

Again the lines deepened at the corners of his strange yellow eyes.
‘Bide a wee, and ’twill surely come back to ye. Meanwhile, what like is it, this brooch?’

‘Siller,’ I said, ‘like a heather sprig wi’ sparks o’ amethyst for the flower bells.’

‘And these heather bells, would ye have noticed the number o’ them?’

‘Seven, I think.’

He knocked out his pipe, and began to refill it from the tobacco box he brought forth from a silver-laced pocket of that once-splendid coat. ‘Aye, that would be the number.’ And he lit his pipe at the lantern and settled to puffing away, gazing into the shadows beyond the tent pole as though I were not there at all.

‘Bide a wee,’ he said once again, when in my desperate impatience I began to fidget, and that was all. And as I sat listening to the voices outside, and the shifting of the tethered ponies and all the distant sounds of the fair, until at last somebody ducked in under the tent flap, and gave something into the hand Captain Faa held out for it, and was gone again almost before I knew he had come.

Captain Faa opened the purse – aye, it was my purse, sure enough – and took out the silver pin with the bright flecks of amethyst, holding it to the lantern, on the thin brown palm of his hand. ‘Aye, seven it is,’ he said, and tossed it to me, and my purse after it. ‘It seems ye are a messenger to be trusted. Go back now to the Rawni, and tell her ye have done as she bade ye, and brought her back her bonnie pin again.’

Eh! I was glad to have it back in my hand! But I was looking into my purse before I dropped it back in; and it was empty. ‘There were three siller shillings in here when ’twas taken,’ said I. ‘Where would my three siller shilling be now, Captain?’

He looked at me without a blink. ‘Och, well now, that’s a different matter. One siller shilling is much like another, and no’ so easy to trace as a siller pin wi’ seven amethysts in it.’

I gave him back look for look. ‘I’m thinking ye could come by them easy enough, gin ye were minded to, Captain.’

‘Aye, but then ye see ’twould be a poor-spirited kind o’ thing, and going altogether against the customs o’ the Tinkler kind, to be handing back good siller that was honestly stolen,’ said he blandly. And then he turned thoughtful. ‘On the other hand, I myself might well feel that a small recompense for your trouble – aye, and your bloody nose…’

By that time I was on my feet, and all the stubbornness had set hard within me. ‘I’m no’ wanting payment for a service done in friendship,’ said I, in what you might call a dignified snuffle, for my nose was indeed sadly the worse for wear.

‘A stiff-necked young callant,’ said Captain Faa, and blew out a cloud of tobacco smoke that curled about his head in the lantern light.

‘An’ come to that, was Mistress Darklis’s siller pin no’ honestly stolen, too?’

‘Mistress Darklis is one of us,’ said he, watching the smoke with one eye narrowed; patient speaking, like one explaining something very simple to a dim-witted bairn.

I knew that he was playing with me, idly, finding some kind of amusement in my utter helplessness to do anything about it.

I stood silent, glaring. I wanted my money back, for silver shillings did not grow on trees, but if I accepted it as a recompense – I knew that I had but to say the word – he would have won his game, and I would have backed down in some way that mattered more than the money did; and if I went back to Dudhope without it, still I would have backed down, though in a different way…

And at that moment a shrill shower of yelps rose outside; the piteous yelping of a pup in distress. And into the dark inside of my head flashed the picture of the miserable little creature tied to the cartwheel, and the gleeful tinkler louts gathered round.

And suddenly, that was something more important still. ‘I’ll take yon pup for my three shillings,’ I said, not knowing that I was going to, until the words were out of me.

He brought his gaze back from the wreathing pipe smoke, and looked at me full with those yellow eyes. ‘How if I’m no’ selling?’

‘Ye dinna’ seem to set much store by the wee beast.’

‘No’ much,’ he agreed, reaching out a foot to flick the ear of the nearest greyhound. ‘How if he’s no’ mine to sell?’

‘I’m thinking that most things hereabouts are yours, gin ye choose to make them so,’ I said. ‘I’m thinking three siller shillings would be a good price for him.’

He went on looking at me, consideringly; then he gave a kind of laugh, soft at the back of his throat that never broke through into the open; and he came to his feet all in one piece and one fluid movement as a cat does. ‘It might be,’ he said. ‘Aye, it might be that.’

And I knew that he had conceded the game and left my honour safe; and suddenly I was not at all sure what the game had been about, anyway.

So I returned to Dudhope with Darklis’s silver pin safe in my pocket again; with a bloody nose and a faintly bewildered mind, and a bedraggled brown and white mongrel pup under my coat, his muzzle puffing warmly into the hollow of my neck.

And when I got back, it was assumed that I had got the bloody nose in fighting somebody for possession of the small beastie. I let it bide that way. The truth was too complicated to try explaining it to anybody. Besides, the thing was between Darklis and me. But I did not tell even Darklis until long after, lest she should think in some way that she had cost me my three silver shillings.

For me, there was never money so well spent, for it brought me Caspar.

I felt strongly that he should have a noble name, for
his front end, with its little flattened muzzle and long silky ears, once he was cleaned up, was like the little soft-bred dogs that I had sometimes seen in the laps of great ladies passing in their coaches along the Edinburgh streets – my father had once had one of them to paint, on a velvet cushion, with a collar of wee silver bells round his neck – though his back legs and long stringy tail seemed to belong to another sort of dog altogether. And I felt also that by rights he should have a gipsy name. Darklis said that Caspar was a gipsy name; and it was also the name of a king. The same of course is true of Balthazaar and Melchior; but neither of those would be so good for shouting. In naming a dog, one should always consider the shouting.

Caspar he became. My dog. A jaunty wee dog when his bruises were mended, and valiant, once the fears and sorrows of his mistreated puppy days were forgotten. I have had four dogs since Caspar, and loved them well, but they do say that however many dogs a man may whistle after him, there is always one that comes closer and stands taller with him than all the rest, and despite the partings that came between us, Caspar was that one to me.

But I am getting ahead of myself again.

LADY JEAN CAME
down from her room in a while, and after that ’twas only a matter of days before she came out into the stable-yard, looking white and somehow burned out, and muffled close in a great fur cloak with Darklis watchful beside her; but with her old smile coming back again, and wilful-set on having a word with Linnet and Laverock, aye, and thanking me for fetching himself to her when she had sore need of him.

But long before that, Claverhouse was away back to his regiment again.

He was to and fro between Dudhope and Edinburgh and the South West all autumn and into the winter, whether or no the roads were fit for travelling; while at home my lady grew stronger and the house began to be full of its old comings and goings, whether its master was there or not. Sometimes Balcarres or Lord Ross would be with us, or Captain Livingstone in the by-going; sometimes Philip of Amryclose with his stories of Montrose and the Highland legends that he would be telling; and his Greek and Latin, and him marching on his long crane-fly legs up and down the terrace before the house with his pipes under his arm and over his shoulder and the skirl of them floating down to Dundee town.