Bonnie Dundee (28 page)

And I went out into the blackness again.

For a long time I was lost in the blackness; a blackness that was suffocating and hot; and swirling with dreams. One above all others: again and again the old dream came back on me, and there, out of the dark, the drummer laddie would be staring up at me with that terrible third eye in the middle of his forehead. Once I seemed to wake from that dream, to see other eyes looking down at me; two, not three, yellow as the
sun-shot eyes of a fish-eagle. I was sure that I had seen them before, but almost at once I lost them again, sinking back into the tangled swirl of dreams and darkness.

Once, maybe twice. I was aware of the world moving under me, jolting and creaking. I suppose that the Tinkler folk were moving camp. And then, little by little, the darkness lightened, and the tangle of dreams began to let me go. I was aware of feeling cool, which struck me as being interesting and unusual, I had been hot so long. There were dim memories in the back of my mind, of the taste of strange herb drinks; of constantly pushing down the animal-smelling rug that was spread over me, and somebody pulling it up again as often as I pushed it down. I began to be aware of light shining through a hole in the tilt above me, and sounds of life going on in the world outside my small dark shelter, voices and the barking of dogs and the stamp of ponies; the scent of bruised woodruff and watermint that I was lying on, sometimes a figure bending over me, pouring broth into me, doing things to my arm. Above all, Caspar lying pressed against my flank, and the silver pin still safe inside the breast of my filthy shirt when I fumbled up a hand to feel for it. The heat and throbbing had gone from my arm; but I remembered quite clearly that I had been wounded in it. I remembered the battle, and the bees booming in the young heather while we waited for the onset. I remembered that Dundee was dead, and Alisdair, and old Jock; but it all seemed a long way off and a long time ago. And I had an odd feeling that so long as I did not move, it would not wake and become real and hurt me more than I could bear. So I did not move. Even when I was strong enough to crawl out of the straw with its mingling of watermint, and sit with the tattered rug wrapped about me and my
legs dangling over the back of the tilt cart, I took care not to move deep inside myself, not to wake up, not to ask for news.

I do not know how long it lasted, the kind of half state that I was in. But a morning came when I woke to find the life running through me again, and hurting – hurting. When I was a wee lad I used to wonder whether it hurt the sallows to wake up in the springtime, that they flushed so darkly red when the sap rose in them…

The camp was already astir, the morning stew cooking, and the women making ready their baskets of clothes-pegs and laces to take into the nearest village, wherever that might be, the men busy with the tools of the tinklers’ craft or whistling their dogs to heel and setting off after the evening meal.

I slid down from the cart without waiting for anyone to come as they had done before to help me, and stood clinging to the side of the tilt to save myself from landing in a heap. And when I had more or less found my balance, whistled Caspar down after me, and set out in the general direction of the fire. My legs were like withies and the ground swam a little under me, and the grief was rising in me; but the foremost thing in my mind was that I must find out how to get back to the troop.

The folk gathered about the fire were talking together in the strange tongue that they used among themselves – I suppose it was a mixture of Lowland Scots with the Romany, for I could understand after a fashion much of what they said. But they stopped when they saw me, and a tall woman whose face and hands I knew, for they seemed to have been part of my sickness, swept two bairns and a lurcher bitch out of the way to make room for me. ‘Come,’ she said, ‘eat’.

I sat down in the cleared space, because sitting was easier than standing just then. But it was not food that I had come for. ‘My coat,’ I said, ‘I’m wanting my coat an’ my breeks an’ my boots; I must be away back to the General’s troop.’

They looked at me, neither friendly nor unfriendly.

But I thought the woman looked sorry. ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘Let ye wait a few days until ye can walk three paces wi’out falling over your own feet.’

And a man looked up from the kettle he was mending and said, ‘And e’en then, ye’d best not to stravaigling around the country in a coat the like o’ that one, ma mannie.’

And a second woman, much older than the first, took her pipe from her mouth and leaned forward to lay a narrow brown claw on my knee, and said in a voice of velvet, ‘Laddie, there’s nae general, and there’s nae general’s troop to be away back to.’

The grief that I knew was bad enough; the threat of more to come was more than I could bear, and I flung her hand off my knee as though it was something loathsome, and cried out on her, ‘What d’ye mean, ye old hag? We won! The General died for it, but we had the victory!’

They told me the truth of the matter kindly enough. Indeed I think there was something of sorrow on them also, for though they cared as little for King James as they did for Orange William, they had a certain caring for Dundee – had the Tinklers not acted as our scouts before now? – and felt it a sorry thing that his death should have been all for nothing.

They told me how at first there had been panic in Edinburgh, the Government knowing of the Loyalist victory, but not that Dundee was dead; and how
appeals for help were sent post-haste to London, for the rebels were masters of all beyond the Forth, and if Stirling fell would be masters of all Scotland. And how, when Dundee’s death was known, they had taken heart again, making little of MacKay’s defeat, since the man who had defeated him was gone.

They told me how MacKay, taking heart also, had brought his freshly gathered troops up to Dunkeld, and Colonel Cannon with the disheartened remains of our own troops (the sorry crumbling, that I had seen the beginning of, had gone on since) had found them barring his way across the Tay. How there had been a battle, and the new Orange regiment had stood its ground manfully for a while, until, just as they had taken all the steel they could, and were on the very point of yielding, Cannon had called his own men off.

‘Why?’ I cried, ‘Why?’

The man who had taken up the story shrugged. ‘Och now, who can be telling with a Highland army? Mebbe the heart went out of them, and they lacking their leader. Mebbe they remembered the Woman of the Sidh that so they tell was washing her bloody linen at the Garry ford as ye came down to Blair, which is no’ a pleasant thing to be thinking of once the blood is cooled in ye… They’re gone now, melted back into their own hills. That’s the way ’tis when one man builds an army, and he’s no’ there any more.’

‘Aye, and so MacKay is in command in the North, now.’ The younger woman pushed a wooden bowl of stew towards me. “Tis all in the past and over, for good or ill. Come, eat, and be glad that you are still alive to taste the rabbit.’

But I could not eat; not just then.

I got to my feet and lurched back to the tilt cart and
crawled up into it like a sick animal seeking the darkness and solitude of its lair, and lay down in the straw with my head in my arms. Something in the shadows under the tilt was greeting; drawing its breath in long harsh gasps. Caspar was huddled against me, shivering, but it was not Caspar. I did not know that it was me, until the cart lurched and subsided under a new weight, as somebody else climbed in beside me, and the sound stopped as I froze rigid. A dry bone hand was laid leaflight on the back of my neck, and the velvet voice of the old woman said, ‘Husheen, husheen now, my dearie.’

A quietness seemed to flow from the hand on my neck, and slowly the black wave of misery ebbed a little. Because I could not bear to speak of the thing itself, I turned to my own personal grief and perplexity, and asked without lifting my head from my arm, ‘What’ll I do, Grannie? What’ll I do now?’

She said, ‘I was hearing that already there are men slipping away to the west coast. To the Outer Isles, they will be going, and then across to Ireland to join King James. If ye had a mind, ye could go that way, when ye’re a wee thing stronger.’

And I knew, without the need for thinking, that that was the way I would be going. I rolled over under her hand, and lay propped on my sound arm, looking at her as she sat in the opening of the tilt. She was a very ugly old woman, shapeless with sagging flesh and wrinkled as a walnut; only her eyes under their shaggy grey brows were bright and soft; a lassie’s eyes still, and I mind seeing, between one breath and the next, that she was one of those women – there are not many of them – who are ugly the first time you see them, and less ugly the second, and by the third, are beginning to be beautiful.

She had begun to sing; the merest thread of outworn song, but bonnie –

It was a song that I had heard Darklis sing, time and again.

She broke off singing in a little, and pulled forward a bundle that she had brought in with her. ‘I have brought ye some clothes. Ye must promise me on the sun and the moon that ye’ll not go stravaigling off the moment that ye have them, an’ you as dwaibly as an hour-old calf. But a man feels more a man when he has his breeks on and a coat tae his back.’

‘On the sun an’ the moon,’ I promised; and then, ‘Grannie, would we be anywhere near Glenogilvie? I must take my leave of Lady Dundee and – and her kinswoman – Darklis, before I go.’

She looked round at me, ‘Darklis? That would be the Rawni – Mistress Ruthven?’

I nodded.

‘None so far. But in five days, my son Balthazar and his woman are for a wedding, Glamis way. There’s always siller for a good fiddler at a wedding, and for his woman, telling fortunes for the bonnie ladies. Gin ye go with them, they’ll pass but three – four miles from the place, and ye can drop off, an’ join them again later. By God’s Grace ye’ll find my lady and the Rawni still there.’

‘Still there? Why would they no’ be still there?’ I asked quickly.

‘There’s talk that Dudhope and Glenogilvie are to be
stripped from the Grahams for their part in what the Government will be calling the Rebellion.’ The old woman looked up from her pipe that she had taken from some pocket among her rags. ‘Have a care in going there, my dearie. There’s sorrow enough on that house, and harbouring rebels is a crime; see that ye dinna lead any more trouble to it.’

‘I’ll take care,’ I said.

FIVE DAYS LATER,
clad in a tattered plaid and breeks, and an old greasy bonnet in which Balthazar’s woman had stuck a bright knot of rowan berries for luck, I got down from the Tinkler cart where two tracks crossed each other, not far from Glenogilvie and, after arranging a trysting place for first light next morning, set off with Caspar padding joyfully at my heels.

My full strength was not yet come back to me, and though it was but the three or four miles to go, my legs were beginning to weary under me when I came into the head of Glenogilvie in the gloaming. I came down through the high orchard, dropping towards the house; and as I drew near I saw lights moving in the stable-yard, and a general cheerless bustle about the place, and yet there seemed to be fewer folk around than usual.

There was a dim taperlight in the windows of the bower, and with a vague memory of the old woman’s warning, I went in by way of the garden, through the overgrown rose trees. The nearest window stood a little open to the heavy August night, and from inside came the murmur of women’s voices. I knew them well; but Darklis and my lady might not be alone; I reached up and beat lightly with my fingers on the panes, hardly louder than the wing-flutter of a big night-moth. Inside the room the voices ceased; but nothing moved. After a few moments I drummed again, and Caspar whimpered. Quick footsteps came towards the window, and
there above me in the opening stood Darklis. I could scarcely see her in the dusk, but I mind how the candles behind her made a bright cloud round her soft brown hair. ‘Who is it?’ she demanded, and then, ‘Is it—’

‘Darklis,’ I said, “tis me. Me and Caspar. Can we come in?’

She gave a small sound like a sob, and leaned out to take Caspar in her arms as I handed him up to her. ‘So he found you? Och, ye wicked wee dog, we thought ye were lost for sure!’ she said, her face buried in the feathery top of his head. She stood back, and I got a grip on the windowsill and hauled myself up, making somewhat heavy work of it, for my left arm was not just that good, and climbed in. And Darklis with her free hand pulled the shutters across behind me.

My lady Jean had just risen from the great carved chair beside the empty hearth, and stood looking across the room to me, with eyes that seemed sunk into her head. She was gowned in stiff black silk, and her hair was as elaborately dressed as ever I had seen it. That will have been for pride’s sake. The cradle beside her chair was still swaying gently where her foot had only just left the rocker, and a contented snuffling came out from under the carved canopy. Otherwise, save for a table and a creepy stool and a couple of half-packed kists spilling over on to the floor, there was nothing left in the room at all.

‘Hugh!’ she said, warmly and gently. And then, ‘How does your arm?’

‘All but well,’ I told her, surprised that she should be knowing.

And I suppose she saw my surprise, for she said, ‘Captain Faa sent word to Darklis. We half expected you to come.’ She glanced round the room, seeming to
see its state of bareness and chaos for the first time. ‘But you are only just in time. Tomorrow we shall be gone from here.’

‘Where do you go to, Jean?’ I asked. It was the first time ever I had called her by her name alone, but it seemed natural, then, to all of us.

‘My mother has offered us sanctuary. We shall go to her for a while at Auchans.’

I minded that iron woman who had turned away from her daughter’s wedding. ‘But this is your home,’ I said stupidly.

‘I have no home now. I am the wife of a rebel – the widow of a rebel – who died with a price of eighteen hundred good Scottish marks on his head! Dudhope and Glenogilvie are both forfeit. The Marquis of Douglas is to have them.’