Bonnie Dundee (16 page)

WHEN I GOT
back to the troop some five evenings later, news had come in of another of James Renwick’s conventicles, called for next day on the high moors north of Douglasdale – aye, we had our friends in that countryside, too. And next morning the bugles sounding the ‘Stand to Horse’ gathered us from the houses where we were quartered, almost before daylight. The horses were fed and made ready, and with our breakfast bannock still in our throats, and the sun scarce clear of the hills eastward, we were off and away up Douglasdale, the Brigadier’s troop of Claverhouse’s Horse, and a company of dragoons, heading for James Renwick’s latest gathering.

It was a bonnie morning, with the pools among the moorland heather and bilberry reflecting back a blue sky and high-sailing clouds, and the whaups skirling fit to break a man’s heart with the sweetness of it, and just enough wind in our faces, together with the wind of our own going, to lift the troop standard back from its lance and let the silver Graham phoenix spread wing on its blue silken folds. I could hear the soft heavy wing-flap of it, for I rode close up behind the cornet and his colour escort, my job being, as usual, to keep as close as might be to Claverhouse himself.

It must have been close on noon when we came to the foot of the last long moorland ridge, and knew that the chosen village of the conventicle lay beyond it. We set the horses’ heads to the rough track that snaked
upward. We rode two by two, the track being not wide enough for more, dropping gradually from a trot to a foot-pace as the slope grew steeper towards the crest; for whatever was waiting for us over the skyline, it would be as well not to meet it on blown horses.

Just on the crest, somewhat to the right of the track, a spinney of wind-frayed fir trees broke the skyline; and following Claverhouse and the blue-and-silver glint of the colours, we turned aside into the shelter of the trees. Most of us were old hands at this game, and even I, who had been at it only a few weeks, knew about the dangers of getting skylined. So we came down through the trees, and broke into the open again well below the crest on the far side.

From our feet the hillside dropped away gently through rough pasture and little plots of ploughland where the young barley was silken green, to a narrow burn looping its way between hawthorn bushes milky-flecked with their first blossom. And where the track came down to cross the burn, a sizeable clachan huddled close under its roof of heather thatch.

Across the burn was open pasture, coarse grazing dotted with more may trees and green broom, and then the hills rising again to heather beyond. And on the open pasture land was gathered a great crowd of people, a dark multitude spreading up even over the lower slopes of the hillside beyond. And now that we were over our crest, the little wind through the rough grass brought up to us the sound of singing:

Next instant a shot cracked the Sabbath quiet of the hills, and away on our right, well out of range, a dark figure sprang out of the scrub, and went hurtling down the hill towards the burn and the congregation beyond it.

‘They have kept their eyes on the hills, all right, but ’tis no’ exactly their aid that’s coming this way,’ said the trooper beside me out of the corner of his mouth.

Then Claverhouse’s arm rose and swept forward in the signal to advance, and we were heading downhill ourselves on the heels of his raking sorrel, fanning out as we went.

We passed by the cottages of the clachan, empty save for a few scratching hens and a cow, and came down to the burn. On the far side the conventicle folk were still at their psalm-singing, but a faint movement had begun on the outer fringes of the great crowd, men rising from their knees, and here and there the spring sunlight glinting on a musket barrel or the slim new-moon curve of a billhook.

On the near bank, we drew rein. The burn was only a few feet wide and maybe a foot deep, lost altogether in places where the elders and hawthorn bushes leaned together over it, but none the less it seemed to form a frontier of some kind, a barricade with the Covenanters massing to defend it on one side, and ourselves tensed for the attack on the other.

The chanting came to an end, and the ripple of movement was spreading in from the fringes to the heart of the crowd; the solid mass of country folk’s hodden grey hackled with the black streaks of the preachers’ gowns, the glint of weapons that seemed to spring up in hand after hand, as though kindling one from another like torch flames; the faces all turned towards us. That was
when I first noticed that there were no women among them, no bairns, no old men.

Claverhouse urged his horse forward to the very brink of the water, and shouted to them. He was a quiet-spoken man, but his war-shout was a clarion, that could carry from one end of a battlefield to the other. ‘This is an unlawful gathering! Lay down your arms in the King’s name; yield up your leaders; and the rest of you may depart quietly to your homes.’

A kind of low angry snarl that was the voice of the crowd made him answer; and in the midst of the gathering, a tall man in black with the white flash of Geneva bands at his throat – like enough it was Renwick himself, certainly he seemed to be the leader among them – stood with arms upraised, his grey hair blowing about his face, and shouted back, ‘In the name of God be gone from us, ye sons of Belial! For we own no king save God himself and no law save His Covenant. Unbelievers! Boot-lickers and tame butchers to a papist so-called king and his hell-spawned bishops! Get you gone and leave the righteous to their peaceful prayers!’

‘It seems that the righteous are well armed, for these same peaceful prayers!’ Claverhouse returned. ‘I bid you once more to lay down your weapons and deliver up those who have led you into this revolt!’

They stood and looked at us, each man with his weapon, sword or pike or pitchfork, ancient flintlock or new Dutch musket, ready in his hand. They must have outnumbered us by upward of three to one, and eh, but they looked so ugly. Then in the midst of them, close beside the leader, somebody put his musket to his shoulder, and a ball sang past my ear.

‘Right,’ said Claverhouse, while the puff of smoke drifted away. He gave an order to the dragoon officer
behind him. Further to our right, the dragoons had already dismounted and turned their horses over to their horse-holders, and stood ready with carbines unslung. There was a barking of orders, and they dropped to their knees and fired their first volley over the heads of the crowd.

Across the burn there was a great shouting and crying out, and the crowd scattered at the edges and gave back, while at the same instant a ragged burst of firing answered the dragoons.

Claverhouse’s arm went up and swept forward in the gesture to advance.

‘This is it. This is us!’ said something within me; skirmishing I had seen before, but this was my first set-piece action, and my mouth was uncomfortably dry as, with the rest following the blue and silver standard, I urged my horse forward. The burn was nothing in the crossing; some of us jumped it, some just walked our horses through; I am not sure which I did, I seemed to have too many other things to think about, just then.

I found myself on the far side and still close to Claverhouse, and the feeling was in me of having passed a frontier, pushed across some kind of defence line into the enemy stronghold. Aye, and I mind the whole lot of them coming in a great sudden surge towards us, and someone shouting above the tumult, ‘Death and damnation to the enemies of the Covenant! On them in the Lord’s name, and
kill,
brothers!’ And they came pounding on, seeming unaware of carbine fire that was no longer aimed in the air.

I fired my right-hand pistol, and slammed it back into the holster; I had no thought for the left-hand one, there was no time; no time for dragoons or troopers to reload; and as the blood-thirsting mob, yelling ‘Kill!
Kill!
No quarter!’ hurled themselves upon us with their hideous mix of weapons – you have never seen the wounds that can be made by a bill hook on a pole, and you can thank God for it! – we of the troop betook us to our swords, while the dragoons for the most part reversed their carbines and used them as clubs.

I mind the kind of surprised half-unbelief in me, at the sight of men with hate-filled yelling faces surging about my horse, and the slashing and thrusting weapons in their hands, and knowing that they were going to kill me if they could, if I did not first kill them. Raw as I was, I doubt if I killed any, for all that. I mind a man coming at me with a snickie, one of the curved blades they used to cut the bridles and make the horses unmanageable, and sending him reeling back with a hand dripping red that maybe lacked a finger or two. I mind an ancient firelock going off at close quarters, and the sight of a dragoon with his head half blown away and some of his brains spattering my knee…

How long it lasted, I’d not be knowing. It could have been half-a-dozen heart-beats of time; it could have been from sunrise to sunset of a summer day. Now that I have seen more of fighting, I should guess that it was maybe something over a quarter of an hour. Then there began to be a change, a lessening of the thrust against us, a different note to the uproar that was made of shouts and weapon-ring and the scream of stricken horses. The Covenanters had had numbers to make up for their lack of soldierhood, and for a while it had been a near thing, but now the fine balance of the fight was tipping against them; they were beginning to give back, then to stream away, breaking from their solid mass into desperate pockets.

But away to the right they were holding still, among the hawthorn bushes around an old sheep fold.

Claverhouse swung his sorrel and headed that way. And I, having only the one thought, to keep close to him, went after him as close as a man’s shadow follows him into the sun.

A short sharp struggle among the may trees broke the last of the resistance, and it crumbled into running figures making for the heather and a few fallen left behind him. Claverhouse rose in his stirrups, his arm up in the familiar signal, ‘After them! Take Renwick!’ and we were off again. And at that moment three things happened, so quick together that there was no saying which of them came first.

Hector stumbled, and Claverhouse pitched forward in the saddle gathering him from a fall; and from the hawthorn brake on our right came the whip-crack of a pistol shot, and again something whined past my ear, and this time knicked the white plume from his hat. If his horse had not stumbled, his head would have been just there.

He held straight on. Maybe he was not even aware of the escape he’d had. But hardly knowing what I did, I wrenched Jock’s head round and plunged into the thicket. I think it was in my mind that a pistol is most often one of a pair; or maybe there was nothing in my mind at all… I ducked low under the branches and thrust Jock forward.

There, crouched against the trunk of an age-snarled hawthorn, was a young man in weather-stained homespun, with bright red-gold hair tumbling about his head. A pistol lay before him on the ground, a faint wisp of smoke still curling from the mouth of the barrel. My grandfather’s silver-mounted pistol. And even as I recognised it, its fellow seemed to come of its own accord from his belt into his hand.

Time, that had been wide-spread and without shape, became suddenly slow and narrow, fragile somehow like a strand of spider’s silk. In the long-drawn stillness of it, I had a sharp awareness of things; the first creamy knots of blossom on the hawthorn sprays, aye, and the scent of them too, the milky sweetness, and the dark under-scent that one catches only with the back of the nose, a little like the smell of blood; the sun-spots dappling his figure and the rough bark behind his head; the light bright familiar devil-dance at the back of the man’s eyes. All about us, fading now, but still walling us in, rose the hideous tumult of fighting still fouling the spring noontide; but it was very quiet within the hawthorn tangle.

‘The De’il’s greeting to you, Hughie lad; here’s turning your coat with a vengeance!’ said Alan.

And his pistol hand came up…

The queer moment of stillness was over. It was him or me, and the sword was still naked in my hand. I flung forward in the saddle and used the point on him as though it had been a rapier.

The point went in through the loose end of his neck-cloth just below the collar-bone. I felt it grate on bone. He arched back against the hawthorn trunk with a short-cut bubbling kind of cry, and his pistol hand flew wide with the pistol still in it.

I tried to drag my point out again, but it was jammed in the shoulder-blade and would not come. No time to dismount and set my foot on his chest and drag it out that way. I abandoned it there, and swung Jock out from the thicket, and headed after the standard.

I came up with Claverhouse again in a little, and rode on after the fleeing Covenanters. But the country ahead was boggy, and they knew the ways of it while it was
strange to us; it was clear that most of them would get away. And anyway it was only the leaders that Claverhouse wanted. We got a couple. Later, they took the oath or promised to quit the country, and were let go. James Renwick, as I heard later, got clean away.

In a while Claverhouse called off the chase, and ordered us back to the ground we had fought over. I had learned from the older hands by that time the unwisdom of leaving the wounded too long unguarded when the women of a conventicle might be near-hand.

So we got back to the open pasture by the clachan, weary men dropping from weary horses. There were a good few bodies lying across the level ground between the burn and the heather, red coats and dragoons’ grey among them. Women had appeared from somewhere, and were moving among their own wounded. They took little notice of us when we went in to bring off our own.

Now it so happened that Claverhouse came in again almost over his own tracks, close beside the sheepcote and the hawthorn thicket, and drew rein there to eye the fighting-ground. And it was only then that I, sitting my weary Jock a little behind him, saw the blood-trail leading in among the may trees, for it was on the far side from where I had gone in. Two other troopers saw it in the same instant, and went in like a couple of terriers.