Bonnie Dundee (2 page)

My grandfather had small love for the Government troops who had killed his only son at Drumclog. But he was not a good hater, the like of my Aunt Margaret, and I’m thinking he had small love either for what the Covenanters – ‘The Saints’ as some of the leaders called themselves – had become. He was a peaceful man who wanted to be free to tend his own land and beasts in peace. He wanted an end to killing. And so he found a sick cow that needed him as often as might be when the Covenanting congregation gathered.

I did not know at that time whose side I was on. I
would have liked to join my grandfather with the sick cow, and yet there was a cold excitement that drew me to the gatherings and the danger and the shuttered windows and hidden weapons. And Alan was for the Covenant. ‘We are fighting for Scotland’s freedom from the English yoke, as well as for our own way of worship,’ Alan said.

I suppose none of it was quite real to me as yet.

But it was to become real to me, that night.

I found that the minister was done with his preaching, and all the folk were getting to their feet; and the big smoke-darkened kitchen was filling with the deep murmur of the next psalm. Generally it was the more fierce and grievous of the metrical psalms we sang, but this one I joined in with sudden surprised delight, for it was one I loved well.

What had possessed the minister, what had possessed the Godly congregation, to choose anything so joyful, I wondered.

I looked across at Alan, wanting to catch his eye and share the splendour of the moment with him. But even as I looked his head whipped round towards the windows, and I saw that he was listening. A second or so later I caught it too, above the voices of the good folk; the sound of someone running, desperately, stumbling as they ran. A few seconds more and everybody heard it. The rhythmic murmur of the psalm dwindled and died away.

‘Douse the candles,’ said my Aunt Margaret.

Master Grey shook his head, ‘Yon’s no trooper. ’Tis one of our own – you can hear the brogues on his feet.’

For an instant the whole scene seemed frozen in the candlelight as I have seen a bee caught and held for all eternity in a drop of Baltic amber; while the running footsteps drew near and nearer yet, swung in through the steading gate and crossed the yard. The door burst open, and there in the dusk on the edge of the candles’ reach stood Willie, the cowherd from High Fold way. He dived in and slammed the door behind him – no one stood in an open doorway with a conventicle gathered within – and stood panting against it.

‘Willie,’ said Master Grey sternly as the scene melted back to life, ‘you come late to the worship of your God!’

We all knew what Willie would have been up to; he was the best poacher in those parts, and a fat hare would hold him from divine worship at any time. He did not even attempt to deny it, but stood there puffing and wagging his head until he had enough breath to speak.

‘I came by old Phemie’s alehouse,’ he got out at last. ‘Phemie Saunders has four of Claverhouse’s men inside. Three troopers an’ a wee drummer!’

There was a blink of silence; and then Master Forsyth from Arkle said one word, ‘Carbines!’

‘Three carbines, there’d be,’ said Willie, ‘no’ the laddie, of course, but three carbines is better than naught.’

‘Three would go halfway to replacing the muskets we lost when they searched the kirk last month,’ said Master Carmichael. ‘Right, then, Reverend, let’s be away!’ And together he and the minister heaved up the table – not the Lord’s Table any more, but the table of Wauprigg kitchen, and hauled it aside.

Underneath, with the loose flagstones that covered it laid by, was the shallow space before the hearth where the congregation put their weapons when they came to worship – quickly covered in case of need, and quickly got at also. Man after man stooped and came up with his own weapon. Two muskets, a carbine and a couple of old muzzle-loading hand guns, and several knives and hangers of one kind and another. But I was watching Alan as he stood in the inner doorway holding one of Grandfather’s pair of horse pistols – a fine breech-loader, old but in well-loved condition. Grandfather had shown them to me once; he had carried them when he followed Montrose and they were a part of his youth and the old shining days of the Covenanting cause.

I saw Alan’s face as he looked down at it in the candlelight. It was already loaded, but he cocked it to make last-minute sure, then pushed it into his belt. For a moment his eyes did meet mine, across the ordered bustle of the big crowded kitchen, and I saw the brightness in them that was somehow cold and unchancy like marsh fire.

Then they were all heading for the door.

‘Go forth in God’s name and do His work!’ cried my Aunt Margaret, as Willie pulled it open and they
shouldered out with the minister in the lead, into the deepening dusk.

One of the bairns began to cry. The women left behind stood and looked after them, listening to their footfalls until they were swallowed up in the gusting wind. One of the farm dogs barked, and was silent.

And there I stood, left among the women and the bairns. And part of me wanted to accept the shame and bide there; and part of me wanted nothing to do with what was going to happen. But another part of me was filled with a rising tide of excitement, and that part would be out and away after Alan, heading with the other men through the gusty March gloaming with Grandfather’s pistol in his belt. And in my inner ear was that light quick voice of his, ‘’Tis not just for our way of worship, ’tis for the freedom of Scotland that’s crying out under the English heel!’

And I knew that where Alan was going, I had to go too. That whatever was going to happen, I had to be a part of it. I had at least to be there… I had to see… I mumbled something about going to see did Grandfather need any help with the cow, and bolted out into the farm garth.

No one said me nay, or seemed to notice my going. Indeed I am thinking that nobody cared much whether I went or stayed.

Outside, darkness had taken the valley, though there was still light in the sky, and a lopsided moon caught in the swaying still-bare branches of the rowan tree by the gate was pale and insubstantial as a bubble. From the doorway of the byre dim lantern-light spilled out over the straw-wisped cobbles, where Grandfather kept company with his sick cow, and I wondered if he had heard the comings and goings. There was still time to turn aside.

One of the dogs came padding across and thrust her muzzle into my hand. I fondled her for a moment, then pushed her away. ‘Back wi’ ye, Jess. Good lassie, get back.’

Then I was out on the driftway and heading down towards the burn. The wind was hushing through the whitethorn trees along the edge of the out-field. I kept well among them, and took care not to get too close to the knot of dark figures I could just make out ahead of me on the track.

They were down to the cattle-ford now, stringing out across the timber foot-bridge beside it. On the far side they clotted again, and by the cobweb light of the moon I could see a handful more figures coming down the braeside to meet them where the track forked on the far bank. Seemingly Wauprigg was not the only place to have received the word. I hung back until they had crossed the low ridge and dropped out of sight beyond it, then made for the bridge myself, and went after them, top speed.

On the far side the track dropped to join the drove road. Left hand below me a few half-hearted flecks of light showed from the huddled cottages of the clachan; right-handwise the way climbed up towards the moors, and far up that way a single glim, lonely in the dark billows of the land, shone, I knew, from old Phemie’s alehouse.

I turned up towards it, and again saw that flicker of dark movement way ahead of me. A sort of shadow-loping that made me think of a pack of something, wolves maybe, on the hunting trail. Then it was lost among the thorn trees that arched over the lane. But a few moments later I glimpsed it again, among the furze of the rough pasture. They were leaving the drove-way,
spreading out like a hunting pack to surround the quarry.

It came to me for the first time in that moment that there were living men where that light was, and the hunt closing in on them out of the dark. Then part of me was for shouting and making a warning uproar; part of me was for heading back to Grandfather and the cow, and hoping that it was all a dream. In an odd way it was like a dream, but suddenly I was caught up in it and I could no more have broken free than spread wings and flown to the moon.

There was a cold clemmed sickness twisting in the pit of my belly, but still I headed on towards that nearing blink of light, and the thing that was going to happen there.

The alehouse crouched beside the lane, its roof of heather thatch like the back of some big crouching beast against the sky. I did not dare get too close for fear of being discovered by the dark shapes – I had long since lost all thought of them as human folk I knew, and the feeling was in me that if they found me in their midst they would tear me to pieces. But I saw the smoky light leaking out through the gaps in the ill-fitting shutters. And somewhere inside I heard laughter and a snatch of drunken song.

And then it was as though the night with its creeping shadows blew up in my face. From away to the right and left of me – I must have been closer among them than I knew – owls began to cry, and away beyond the alehouse others answered them. There was a small red glow as somebody brought out a tinder-box from under their plaid; other, sharper flecks of light from slow-match for the old-fashioned muskets. Someone dipped the corner of a bundle of rags – pitch soaked, they
must have been – into the tinder-box, and as it flared up I saw faces springing clear for a moment out of the dark. And the one with the bundle of rags was Davy Meickle the blacksmith, and the one with the tinder-box was the minister.

Then all in the same moment as it seemed Davy was kicking in the ramshackle door, flinging in the burning bundle, while someone else crouching behind him lobbed after it something in a flask. There was a whoof of flame – dry rushes there would be, on the floor. Somebody shouted, ‘What of old Phemie?’

And somebody shouted back, ‘She can run for it with the rest! If not, let her burn for the accursed witch she is!’

There was ragged shouting from inside the alehouse, and old Phemie screaming, shrill and high like a hare in a trap; and shadows lurched to and fro, maybe they were trying to quell the flames, but with the rush-strewn floor there was no hope of that.

And then old Phemie came running out, skirling and beating at the flames that fringed her shawl as she ran. They let her pass. But in the same instant there came a ragged rattle of shots from the back of the alehouse. There was no door that side, but there were windows, and on that side too there would be shooting-light, for the inside was well ablaze and the shutters catching. Then there was a shout of triumph as four more figures broke from the burning building, running low after Phemie, their carbines in their hands; and firing as they came, but they could not see what they were shooting at. They must have known how small a chance they had, but they would have had none at all in any other way. And maybe they were thinking, if they had time for thinking, that a bullet is a better way out than burning, as a good many have thought before them.

They were clear targets against the flamelight, and the men crouching among the thorn scrub dropped them in their tracks. The first two and the last went down with no more than a choking gasp or a scream that ended halfway; but the third, him with no carbine, and small in his grey coat, twitched about and cried out for his mother; and someone went over to him and finished the work. I recognised Grandfather’s pistol first; and then Alan that held it; and there was no shred of pity on his face, nothing but a kind of savage satisfaction as he turned away.

And then, not knowing how I came there, I was out of cover and staring down at the drummer laddie. He was no more than a year or two older than myself, maybe a year or two younger than Alan; and there was a surprised sort of look on his face, and a neat round hole in his forehead where the pistol ball had gone in, and blood already spreading from the back of it – a ball makes more mess coming out than it does going in, but I did not know that at the time. Where he’d been shot in the first place I never saw.

It was all over, and they were stripping the dead of their carbines and anything else that might come in handy. In the leaping flamelight and the confusion no one seemed to notice me. Only the drummer laddie seemed to be looking at me; him with the hole in his head, that had cried for his mother. And the cold black vomit rose in me, and I blundered away into the ditch under the thorn trees, and crouched there, throwing up all that was in me, and sobbing and shivering the while.

I mind falling forward into a great darkness that was more than the darkness of the ditch. And for a while there was nothing more.

PRESENTLY THERE WAS
jagged light, thrusting at me with bright, sharp fingers; and someone had a hand twisted in my hair and was forcing my head up, and, blinking against the dazzle, I saw that there were men all around me. Men in grey uniform coats, their hard and angry faces lit by the flames of the bit of burning timber that one of them held high.

‘Here’s one that hasna got clear,’ said the man gripping my hair.

‘Too busy puking in the ditch,’ said another. ‘Och, he’s naught but a laddie.’

‘Not so much younger than Johnnie, I reckon,’ said a third, coldly savage.

All of what had gone before had come back to me by that time, and I knew that Johnnie would be the drummer laddie, and the sickness heaved in me again. I gagged, but I’d nothing left to throw up. I crouched there staring up at them, and waiting for them to kill me.