Bonnie Dundee (5 page)

Aye, that was a good moment, too. As good as the moment when I had made the sketch of Laverock in the home paddock, and looked at it when it was done, and saw that it was Laverock, and not just any other foal at all.

But then came running feet and shouting, and suddenly a pailful of cold water sluicing over us both, and two of the grooms had us apart and hauled to our feet, shivering and gasping. ‘Yon’s the way to stop a dog fight,’ one of the men said, giving me a good hard shake, and there was a laugh; and as the red mist cleared from my head, I realised that Willie Sempill, lord of the stable, was on the scene. Aye, and so was Dundonel and my lady Jean!

The laughter stopped, and a stillness came over the stable-yard, save for the pigeons that we had startled, still circling overhead.

‘That’s a bonnie black eye ye have there,’ said Dundonel to me, with a kind of detached interest, ‘and a bloody mouth. You should learn to keep your guard higher.’

‘Most of it’s no’ mine,’ said I, rubbing the back of my hand across the juicy mess.

The groom holding Andy gave a startled curse, and
dragged forward the lad’s arm with the marks of my teeth in it. And Andy just stood there, white as buttermilk and bubbling through his bleeding nose and saying nothing at all.

‘So, a dog fight indeed,’ said Dundonel, ‘what was it about?’

‘What pup could ever tell you what a fight was about, my lord?’ said Willie Sempill. ‘Best you take my leddy away and leave these two to me.’

‘I will so, in a while,’ said Dundonel as man to man. Then turning back to me with his shaggy grey brows quirked up, ‘Why did ye bite him?’

I shook my head, trying to clear it as much as anything. ‘Because he’s bigger than me.’ And, my brain flinging up an old memory, I added, ‘Alcibiades, him they called the Lion of Athens, bit the chiel he was fighting, when he was a laddie. He said if he was a lion he’d fight like one.’

Lord Dundonel nodded. ‘So he did, so he did. But who told you about Alcibiades?’

‘My father,’ I said, and then for good measure, ‘He said ’twas no’ a very gentlemanly thing to do, but Alcibiades was an aristocrat, which is a different thing altogether.’

‘Hugh Herriot—’ began Master Sempill, outraged.

But Dundonel gave a bark of laughter. ‘Nevertheless, I seem to remember that Alcibiades was beaten for it,’ said he. And with a nod to Willie Sempill he turned and strolled away. And my lady with him, she glancing back anxiously as they went.

Oh aye, I had my beating, and Andy also. Willie himself saw to that. He always kept the strap in his own hands, and never allowed the grooms to administer more than a stray cuff in passing. But scarcely was it
over, and us washing the blood off each other’s backs at the well – no one else would have done it for us, and it’s not easy to wash the blood off your own back – than Mistress Mary came running into the stable-yard, with a pot of some herb-smelling salve in one hand, and a lump of juicy raw beef in the other.

‘My lady says that you should always salve a lion bite. And there’s enough there for the stripes as well,’ said she, and set the pot down on the rim of the well. Then to me, ‘Bide still,’ as she clapped the chunk of raw meat none too gently on my eye. ‘There. Hold it there for a while, and ’twill draw out the evil humours.’

And those were the first words ever she spoke to me. And she turned and kilted up her skirts and ran lightfoot back the way she had come.

SPRING TURNED TO
summer and the summer went by, and the great old house backed against the ruins of Paisley Abbey became the familiar centre of my life. I cannot say that Andy and I became friends, but I have often noticed that a fight and a little blood-letting can act like the bursting of a boil, and after that blood-letting of ours we got on well enough together; and my lady went on talking to me, for the shared interest that we had in Laverock as she grew to be a fine filly alongside her mother in the home paddock.

News drifted in from the outside world. The Covenanters had quieted for the while, and Colonel Graham of Claverhouse was busy on the Borders, keeping watch for fugitives from the round-up of the plot to kill the King, the Ryehouse Plot, they called it, as they came fleeing north to friends in Scotland. There was a good deal of coming and going after dark that we in the stable-yard, tending half-foundered horses by lantern light, were well aware of; for the Border patrols could not be everywhere at once, and old Dundonel had ever a soft spot for a fugitive, him with his own son fled overseas and all…

There was another kind of coming and going as well, for Dundonel kept open house and a welcome for all, even those who came wearing the King’s uniform. And among those was Lord Ross, my lady’s cousin, and a certain Captain William Livingstone, a dark, quiet man who had been at Saint Andrew’s University with her
eldest brother. Seeing those two together, you would have thought that
they
were brother and sister, for the closeness that they had to each other; though it was in my mind even then that Captain Livingstone would gladly have been something else to her if she had looked at him in another way.

But she never did. It was clear that he was a friend to her, and nothing more; and he accepted the place in her life that she gave him.

Towards the end of that winter, the troubles that had quieted for a while began to flare up again in the South West; and again the Government sent cavalry to reinforce the dragoons that were already there, and again in command of them came Colonel Graham of Claverhouse, back to his old hunting-grounds.

Paisley town was full of troops. Claverhouse’s own troopers, His Majesty’s Regiment of Horse, to give them their full and proper name, were quartered in the long gatehouse by Abbey Bridge that had once been the guest-house of the Cluniac monastery; there were horse lines in the home park; and when there began to be wounded for tending, as there did soon enough, they were lodged in the Place itself.

It was care for his wounded that brought Claverhouse up to the house in the first place. And for the first few times I saw no more of him than a big sorrel charger with a military saddle on him being walked up and down before the main door, and once a distant glimpse of a slight man in buff and steel, too far off to tell if my grandfather had been right in his guess that he was the man I had seen at the burning of old Phemie’s alehouse. I knew more about him now than the stories of bloody persecution that I had gathered in the old days at Wauprigg. I knew that he had started his
soldiering with the Scottish Brigade in the Low Countries, serving under William of Orange. There was a tale that he had saved William’s life in battle by bringing him off on his own horse when the Stadtholder’s charger was shot under him, but maybe there was no truth in it; either that or William was not the rewarding kind, for a couple of years later, so said Willie Sempill, the promotion that should have come to Claverhouse went instead to a Highlander called MacKay. And Claverhouse left the Scots Brigade and returned to England; yet with much praise and personal recommendation from Orange William to the Duke of York whose daughter he – William – had lately wed. And it was the Duke of York, now become a friend, who had made Lieutenant John Graham of Claverhouse captain of a troop of horses, and sent him to deal with the Covenanters the first time ever he came down into Ayrshire and Galloway, years ago.

It was a story that woke and held my interest, so that I watched out for the man whenever he came up to Place of Paisley. But I took good care that he should not see me, lest my grandfather had been right, and by some unlikely chance he should remember me in the flamelight of the burning alehouse.

That was until one wild March evening with wisps of straw eddying in the wind all across the cobbles, and the sky flying the gold and saffron cloud-banners of a stormy sunset overhead, when he came clattering into the stable-yard before I knew it, and called to me – being the nearest – in that cool pleasant voice of his, to come and take his horse.

There was no help for it; and I dropped the yard broom and went to hold the sorrel as he dismounted.

If I kept my head down…

But I could not keep my head down; something stronger than my own will, a kind of terrible fascination, forced it back on my neck, to gaze fearfully up at him. He had come straight off the moors by the looks of him, and was as weather-worn and weary as his horse, but his face was cool and arrogant though none too clean in the shadow of his battered hat with its sodden and drooping plume.

And my grandfather had been right.

For one hideous moment the fiery sunset sky became the flames of the burning alehouse behind him; and at my feet the drummer laddie lay staring up at me with that hole like a third eye in the middle of his forehead.

For that moment cold shock seemed to stop my breath, and panic whimpered somewhere in the midst of me. Then Colonel Graham swung his leg over and dropped somewhat stiffly to the cobbles. And I mind him looking at me, quick and concerned. ‘What’s amiss, laddie? You look as though you’d seen a ghost.’

I shook my head. I saw he did not know me – why should he? – and my breath was coming back, though the feeling of icy shock remained. ‘Och, ’tis nothing, Colonel Graham, sir; I was thinking of something else.’

‘Whatever it was, I’d not be thinking of it too often,’ said he; and then, ‘So you know who I am.’

‘I ken your horse, sir,’ I said, ‘I’ve walked him up and down for you more than once while you were in the house.’

His somewhat stern face lit into a smile – if I was writing of a lassie, I would have said that it was a smile of uncommon sweetness. At all events it was not the smile that you would have expected from Colonel John Graham of Claverhouse. Nor from Bloody Claver’se. No.

‘Ah, that explains why Hector looks to you as a friend,’ for the big charger had swung his head round and was slobbering at my shoulder. ‘It seems you’ve a way with horses. See to him well for me, I’ll be a while inside.’

And he turned and went off towards the arched entrance of the stable-yard. And I mind that, for all he held himself so straight, his steps behind the jaunty silver jingle of his spurs had a weary sound on the cobbles. And watching his flat back and slight, braced shoulders, I thought that if he was a horse I’d say he was on too tight a rein.

I turned myself to Hector, and led him towards the stable to off-saddle him and rub him down.

I was still shaking with shock, but Claverhouse’s face in my mind was not as I’d seen it against the flames. He had looked at me as I took his horse, in a way that nobody had ever looked at me before. I had yet to learn that any man Claverhouse looked at knew himself to be the only man that Claverhouse was looking at in all the world. It was one of the things that gave him his power to lead men. But I knew that something had happened in my life that could not unhappen again, though I did not at that time know what it was.

Colonel Graham went on coming up to the house, to see how it fared with his wounded troopers. But as the spring drew on, he began to come up in another way, with a cock to his hat, and his uniform brushed and spruced up.

‘Och, I ken the look when a chiel comes courtin’,’ said Willie Sempill, who was as much of a gossip as any old grannie. There was not much happened in the great house that we did not know about in the stable-yard.

But I had another idea in my head that took up most
of my thinking about that time. The idea that by and by, when I had seen a few more summers, I might go for a soldier. Maybe you will think that a strange and unlikely thing. Maybe you will picture me torn between two loyalties. But you will mind that I had been dragged up by a father who cared more for the picture taking life under his hand, for its trueness of colour and line, than ever he did for King or Covenant; and my time at Wauprigg had done little to bind me to the Covenanting cause. There was the time when I had been torn, between Alan with the freedom-fire in his eyes and Grandfather with his sick cow. And Alan himself had slashed through that tangle for me.

So now I was free to think long thoughts to myself about finding my way into Claverhouse’s Horse (which was no easy thing in itself!) and wearing a fine uniform coat, and maybe ending up myself with a third eye in the middle of my forehead, at the hands of my own people…

It was not easy for a stable laddie in a big house to get much time to himself, nor anywhere to get away by his lone, when he would have solitude for his thinking; and most of my fellows seemed not to feel the need. I felt the need; and after a while I had found a place where I could betake me when I would be free of my own kind. It was in the ruins of the Abbey, no distance at all from the house, but yet as it might be a world away; a narrow space between the remains of the chancel wall and a crumbling table-tomb. It was difficult to swing a scythe in so narrow a place, and so the grass there grew as it would, and a briar rose out of the broken top of the tomb itself. The place had no fears for me, but a friendly feel to it, and I kept my bits of drawing stuff that my lady had given me when she found the fondness
that I had that way inside the broken corner among the roots of the briar rose.

One evening well into the spring, I was lying up there like a fox in its earth, for I had an hour to myself and a mind to try drawing the clump of little wild daffodils that grew there, as they did in all the green corners of the Abbey ruins where the scythe could not reach them. But daffodils are of all flowers the most difficult to catch, to my way of thinking; and after a while I gave up the attempt, and returned my bits and pieces to their hiding-place, and just lay there with my head on my arm. It was drawing on to dusk, the sky shadowing to the colour of a fading harebell, and half a moon hanging in it clear and pale – pale as the wind-stirred daffodils which seem always, in a spring gloaming, to turn starry and shine with a faint light of their own.

And as I lay there, I heard steps brushing over the turf, and a murmur of voices. Clearly, to two other people than myself the old, kind Abbey ruins meant refuge. They came nearer, and I would have slipped away if I could, but they were close upon me, and if I stirred I should betray my own hiding-place. Nearer and nearer; I heard the silken frowing of long skirts through the grass, and the jingle of a man’s spurs. I could not look out; but when the man spoke again, I knew his voice.