Bonnie Dundee (19 page)

Edinburgh was throbbing like a softly tapped drum. The Privy Council had sent a message of welcome to Orange William; and a great Scottish Convention was fixed for March 14. But three weeks before that, my lady’s bairn was due. And so out from Edinburgh we rode, under the Castle Rock where the Duke of Gordon was sitting like a moulting eagle on his crag, holding for the Stuart King, and away back to Dudhope for the while.

Dudhope in early spring is a bonnie place, with the rooks busy in the top-most branches of the tall oaks and sycamores that are flushed with rising sap and woolly with the thickening buds that will soon be breaking; and the furze flaming gold on the slopes of the Law, and the late snowdrops in sheltered corners of the garden. And eh, but it was good to be home again after those grey ghost-months in the South!

My old welcome was waiting for me; from my lady Jean, swathed in a great soft velvet wrap the colour of mulberries, and her face seeming all eyes, for I think that she had found Claverhouse’s bairn not easy in the carrying; and from Darklis with the same gladness and the same holding back that I had known so long; and from Caspar with all the gladness and no holding back at all, with eyes of liquid amber and his tattered bracken-frond of a tail so hard a’wag behind him that his whole rump must go where it led.

I gave him my cupped hands to thrust his nose into, the way that we had, then picked him up and held him aloft while his frilled pink tongue licked and licked at the air at arm’s length from my face. ‘Mistress Mary,’ said I – for we were in the stable-yard and there were others by – ye’ve let him grow fat! Eh, but ye’re growing to be a leddy’s lapdog, ma mannie!’

‘Ye’re jealous because he hasna pined away for lack of ye,’ said Darklis.

But we were only skimming words on the surface of things, for the things beneath the surface, the things that mattered most deep with us, we could not be speaking of at all.

So we settled down to wait, for my lady’s bairn and the great council in Edinburgh, and which of the two came first was like to be a close-run thing.

Claverhouse spent a good part of the waiting time walking the hills. Horseman that he was, and lover of horses, there were times when the fret within him seemed to demand that he should leave his horses in the stable and walk, far and fast, as though to outwalk something that he could not outride. Then he would whistle the dogs to heel, and myself also, like as not, and head for the high moors.

So a day came, only two or three before he must leave for Edinburgh again, when he whistled up the dogs and me, and I whistled Caspar – there was an established custom in the thing – and we headed northward for the long lift of the Skiddaws. And with the sun beginning to wester, and the cloud shadows drifting across the hills, we sat looking out over the blue levels of Angus, with the first rampart of the Highlands at our backs, and the whaups skirling over their matingmoors, and the dogs sprawled at our feet.

We had scarce spoken all the way; one does not talk much, walking in high hills; and beside, I am thinking that there were times when Claverhouse took me as a walking companion much as he took the dogs, and for the same sort of company. I am not complaining, mind you, we understood each other fine, Claverhouse and me.

But there was a thing I was fain to ask him. It had been nagging at me ever since we came north again.

I looked from picking bits of last year’s bracken out of Caspar’s long flopping ears, and began, ‘Sir—’ and then found that I could not go on.

‘Hugh?’

I shook my head. ‘No, ’twas nothing.’

Claverhouse brought his gaze back from the blue distances of Angus, and turned it on me, intent and deeply focused in the way that he had. ‘Something, I think,’ he said after a moment.

I swallowed, and began again. ‘Sir, the Scots Dragoons were in Edinburgh when we passed through.’

‘Aye.’

‘And had taken service with William of Orange.’

‘Which will be a sore loss to the King’s fighting strength in Scotland,’ Claverhouse said. And then, as I bided silent, ‘But there’s more to it than that?’

‘And I was hearing that Colonel Livingstone was serving with them still.’

Claverhouse’s gaze went back to the soft distances and the cloud-shadows drifting in from the coast.

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘Colonel Livingstone has chosen to bide with them, and I make no doubt that he has his own reasons. And I make no doubt that whatever they are, they will not smirch his honour.’ Suddenly he smiled. ‘Try to remember, Hugh, that honour is an intensely personal thing. I am one of the fortunate ones; for me, it is for the most part a simple thing, a straight road to be followed. For you, I think, also. For some men it is not simple at all.’

He was a loyal friend to a friend, was Claverhouse, as well as a loyal man to his king.

He drew his legs under him to rise. ‘We must be
starting home, for the shadows are lengthening, and I would not that the bairn should be born while I was stravaigling among the Skiddaw mosses.’

We came back to Dudhope in the first of the spring gloaming; the time when it still seems all but daylight out of doors, and yet within doors the candles are lit and the light shines out through the windows in squares of shadowy apricot. There seemed more lights than usual for that time of day in Dudhope windows, and a watch must have been kept for us, for as we came through the postern gate into the garden court, old Leezie the housekeeper, she that had been Claverhouse’s nurse when the world was young, came scurrying to meet us.

‘Praise be you’re back, my lord, my dearie.’

‘The bairn—?’ said Claverhouse.

‘Aye, the bairn.’ And as he would have strode past her she shot out a hand and gripped like a cockle-burr on to his arm. ‘None so fast, my dearie dear, ’twill be many hours yet. Mistress Mary and the midwife are with her now —’

‘Let me go, old nurse,’ said Claverhouse, ‘I must see her —’

She cackled, ‘Aye, and so you shall. But only for the moment, mind, then leave her to the women. There’ll be work enough for all us women, my lady most of all, between now and dawn. And for you, just the waiting, my dearie, as many a good man has waited afore ye since the world began.’

That night I could not sleep. In a little room under the eaves of the north wing that had become mine whenever I was at Dudhope, I lay hour after long hour staring at the pale square of the small high window,
until the waning moon rose and made a kind of cobweb paleness that showed me my boots in the corner and my sword propped against the clothes kist beside them. I listened for any sound, but heard only the creak of a floorboard as the old house settled, and ‘Kee-wik-wik-wik’ of a hunting owl. Somewhere in the house Dundee would be listening as I was listening; hearing the silence, pacing up and down, I guessed, up and down; and only the hunting owl to keep him company.

Once I thought I heard a door slam, very far off, and a man’s voice; and then just the silence again…

At last I gave up all attempt to sleep, and getting up, pulled on my coat – I had lain down in shirt and breeches, as many of us did in our young days – and stole out of my room and down the turnpike stair to the side door giving on to the drying green. I knew fine that there would be no locked door in all Dudhope that night, for there must be nothing to hinder the new life coming, just as there must be nothing to make the passing of an old life harder when the traffic runs the other way.

At the foot of the stair, the doorway was in wolf-dark shadow. I put out a hand and felt for the pin. It lifted easily, and I opened the door and slipped out and across to the stable-yard, Caspar as always pattering behind me. From the second branch of the old fig tree it was possible to see the great central gable of the house, and even catch a sideways squint at the window beneath it that I knew belonged to my lady’s chamber. It was full of light; and now and again as I sat watching, with Caspar, disappointed because he had thought we were going ratting, curled up on the ground beneath me, I saw the shadows of people moving in the room pass across the light.

Slowly the sky began to change colour, the faint promise of sunrise that was still far off mingling with the snail-shine of the moon, and the light in my lady’s window faded back to dim apricot again. There was a first sleepy stirring and stamping of horses in the stables, and then as though in answer a shimmer of faint birdsong waking among the bushes of the garden.

And then somewhere in the house I heard it, a very small sound caught in the waiting quiet of the morning, like as it might be the bleating of a newborn lamb.

Then for the second time I heard a door slam, somewhere very far off. And the tiny sound was lost behind it, and strain as I would, I could not catch it again.

It seemed a weary long time after that, but in truth I think it was not so long as it seemed, before I heard quick light footfalls speeding from the house, and a shadow came through the arched gateway, a lassie’s shadow with skirts gathered and spread on either side like wings that came straight towards the old fig tree.

I dropped from my branch, all but landing on Caspar, and met her on her way. ‘Darklis! Is the bairn born? – I thought I heard something. How is it wi’ my lady Jean?’

I was drawing her back into the shelter of the fig tree, and she came, lightfoot and breathless. ‘The bairn is born,’ said she. ‘A son – and it is well wi’ him and wi’ Jean.’ A faint laughter shimmered in her voice. ‘And wi’ Viscount Dundee, from the looks o’ the poor man, though we came near to losing him in the night.’

The laughter took me too; if laughter it could be named, for it was not the kind that is called up by a jest, but born of relief after long anxious waiting; and our hands came out to each other in the midst of it, suddenly glad of each other in the way that we used to be in
the days before I followed Claverhouse down into Ayrshire.

‘How did ye ken where to find me?’ I asked.

And she answered as though it were the simplest thing in the world. ‘I knew you would be here. I felt you here, waiting for word; and so I came as soon as I could.’

‘This is the brave morning for Dudhope,’ I said. ‘Listen to the bell-tit and missel-thrush in the garden!’

But even as I spoke, the birdsong fell quiet for a moment, and with a soft whirr of wings a small bird came over the wall into the topmost branches of the fig tree, then fluttered down to a branch only just above our heads and began the strangest little sad-sweet song of its own; a thin trail of single long-drawn notes that had in it somehow the sound of autumn.

Darklis heard it, too, and raised her head to listen, and I saw her face very pale in the growing light, like a face seen under water, and the eyes in it huge, with all the laughter gone from them. ‘Listen,’ she said, and suddenly she seemed a long way away; further than ever she had been. ‘Oh, listen, Hugh, robin’s keening!’

‘Och away,’ I said, ‘’tis naught to fret you – just foolishness. I’ve often heard him make that sad bit song in the early springtime. Mebbe he’s crossed in love.’

But she shook her head and said again, ‘Robin’s keening.’

And pulled herself away from me and turned and ran back towards the house.

And the robin sat on in the branch of the fig tree, keening, as they say.

Three days later we were back in Edinburgh. But not for long.

On the fourteenth day of March the great Convention sat in the Parliament Hall; gathered there for the fore-chosen purpose, after all the talk was done, of deciding to offer William the Scottish crown. It was a squally day, with the rain and the sunshine darkening and lightening beyond the windows of the ante-chamber where I waited, kicking my heels along with other messengers and the like. There was a great coming and going through the chamber, and from time to time the inner door would open, letting out loud voices that rose to anger as the time went on. And once Colonel Livingstone passed through, and in a while came back with a set face that looked stiff and heavy like his own effigy that had been carved from wood by a none too skilled hand, and he looked straight before him, neither to right nor left, as if he strode through an empty room.

A good while later the inner door opened again and I heard the angry scrape of a chair being thrust back, and somebody crashing to his feet, and Claverhouse’s voice, not overloud, but with an edge to it that cut like a Toledo blade. ‘My lords, it seems that the Parliament Hall is no longer any place for me; nor this Convention any company in which I would spend another moment of my time. Therefore I bid you goodbye!’

And then his quick step sounded on the polished floor as he came out into the ante-chamber and the door crashed to on the sudden babel of angry voices behind him.

I knew then that the decision had been taken – if it had not been already taken before the Convention sat at all – and the King had lost Scotland.

Claverhouse looked round for me, then strode straight on and out into the street where a fresh shower was pox-dimpling the puddles, with me at his heels.

He walked past the kirk of St Giles and straight on up the High Street as though he knew where he was going, but in truth, I do not think that at that moment he cared, wanting only to be clear of the Parliament House and those within it. He walked until he came to the Grass Market, and then checked and looked around him at the tall many-eyed houses. ‘I wonder did the houses stare just this way when my kinsman Montrose came here to the scaffold for
his
king’s sake?’ he said.

‘So ’tis all over for the King?’ said I.

‘Not yet.’ He began stripping his gloves between his hands in the way that he had. I could see how he must have snatched them up from the council table as he came away. And then he looked round at me, and the odd thing is that he was smiling. ‘Hugh,’ said he, ‘you would be knowing the De’il’s Turnpike?’

That was the name we gave to the unlawful way down the shielded side of the Castle Rock, which I have spoken of before. I was surprised he knew it.

‘Aye,’ I said, ‘I know it well enough. Is it a message you’re wanting taken up to the Castle?’

‘No, I must go myself, and not in full view of the town; but my education has been neglected, and I am thinking that I need a guide.’