Bonnie Dundee (4 page)

I do not know what I meant by it; it was just a bairn’s threat, I suppose; though it did not feel like one.

Alan laughed at it. He stood with his head tipped back, and laughed. ‘Thanks for the warning, my mannie! I’ll mind it – another time!’ And that was certainly no bairn’s threat.

‘Now may God forgive you your wicked words, you ungrateful –’ my Aunt Margaret began. But I heard her bitter voice behind me, for I had already turned and was blundering from the room.

I made for the stable and flung myself face down in the straw of old Janot’s stall, and bided there a long time, smelling the comforting smell of horses, and hearing their stir and rustle and soft puffing breaths. I wanted no more to do with men and the world of men ever again.

The pull of two loyalties within me was over and done with, and there was some relief in that. I knew now that I was like Montrose: that I was no Covenanter nor ever could be.

But oh, the grief was on me sore.

A FEW DAYS
later, Grandfather bade me saddle Janot for him, and rode into Lochinloch market.

He got home in a silent mood, and in silence ate the supper that Aunt Margaret had ready for him in the parlour. Dinner in the kitchen with the farmhands, supper in the parlour with just the family; that’s the way of it in the big farms and small manor houses of Lowland Scotland. And when he had done, and we had just left the table, Alan and I careful never to catch each other’s glance, as we had been ever since the morning that the soldiers came, he called for his clay pipe, and when Aunt Margaret had filled and lit and given it to him, he sat back in his chair and took a long steady pull, and puffed out a blue smoke-garland round his head. (I never knew any man to make more smoke with his pipe than my grandfather did.) And out of the midst of the smoke cloud, said he, ‘I was talking wi’ Dundonel’s factor at the market.’

‘It would not be the first time,’ said Aunt Margaret, sitting herself down at her spinning-wheel beside the fire.

‘About Hugh,’ said Grandfather.

The sound of my own name seemed to give me a small jab in my belly, and I stopped playing with Jess’s ears, she having her head heavy and warm on my knee; and we all looked at Grandfather.

And Grandfather took another pull at his pipe and spoke out of a fresh cloud of smoke. ‘I was telling him
that I’d a daughter’s son here that I was wishing to find a place in the world for, seeing that I had already a son’s son to follow after me here at Wauprigg. And he was telling me that they had room for another laddie in the stables, over to Place of Paisley.’

My Aunt Margaret’s foot checked on the treadle, and the thrum of the wheel fell silent. ‘And you’ve struck a bargain with him to take Hugh?’

‘Aye,’ said Grandfather.

‘After all the to-do you made about his getting his book-learning from the dominie?’

‘Book-learning will maybe stand him in good stead one day. Meanwhile – he has a way with horses.’

‘But to go for a stable laddie!’ cried Aunt Margaret. ‘An Armstrong of Wauprigg!’

Oh well, I suppose ’twas the disgrace to the family, all over again; and I my mother’s son.

I mind getting up so sharply that I all but knocked over my creepy stool, and hearing my voice speaking as ’twere of its own accord. ‘But I’m not an Armstrong of Wauprigg, Aunt Margaret, I’m a Herriot of nowhere in particular, and plain enough you ha’ made it to me, all this while. And, Grandfather, I would like it well enough, to be a stable laddie for Lord Dundonel.’

Two days later, when the carrier passed by on his weekly way, I was waiting for him at the foot of the driftway, with all that I possessed in the world bundled in an old plaid; a clean shirt and a plumbago pencil and some odd bits and pieces of paper that I could be drawing on, and the like.

Grandfather and I had had a final word under the rowan tree by the gate. ‘I’ll no’ be needing to bid you
keep a close mouth on what happened up at old Phemie’s,’ he’d said. And suddenly he’d been not Armstrong of Wauprigg but just a troubled old man. ‘But I’ll ask ye not to think of us more hardly than ye can help, Hugh.’

‘I’ll never think hardly of
you
, Grandfather,’ I’d said, with a sudden aching in my throat.

He had put his hand for an instant on my shoulder, then turned back towards the house; and I mind old Jess thrusting her rough muzzle into my hand before she padded after him.

That was my last parting with Wauprigg, that had been my mother’s home, though it had never been mine. Then I had picked up my bundle and set out down the driftway to meet the carrier.

I did not look back.

Place of Paisley is a fine great house, and the stable-yard a good enough place to work in, for old Lord Dundonel was one for the keeping and breeding of fine horses. Life was not exactly easy there, not with Willie Sempill in charge of the stables, but there was a goodness to it, all the same.

And so I was part of another Covenanting household, though one that for the most part followed the cause more gently than the last that I had known. Sir John Cochrane, the second son of the house, was refuging in Holland after being caught up in a plot to kill the King; and the first son, who was dead before ever I came to Place of Paisley (they said, praying with his last breath for the death of that same King), had married Lady Catherine Kennedy, of as black a Covenanting family as ever prayed to the Lord, a grim-faced, godly woman who divided her time between Paisley and
Auchans, her own house some miles off. And most of their sons and daughters were safely married into families of their own way of thinking, and rearing broods of fledgeling Covenanters in their turn. But old Lord Dundonel, the head of the house, had been made Earl for his loyalty to the first Charles, in the bad days; and I have often thought that there was a likeness between him and my grandfather, and he could have done with a sick cow himself from time to time…

And no house could have been quite without light and laughter that held my lady Jean.

Lady Jean Cochrane, youngest daughter to the eldest son and that bleak-faced widow woman he left behind him. Sixteen or seventeen she’d have been, the spring I first saw her; old for a lassie to be still unwed, but I’m thinking she was hard to please, and the old Earl would not force her, though there was talk that her mother would have taken a whip to her if she’d had
her
way. A slight, long-boned lassie, with straight dove-gold hair that she wore at most times tied back with a ribbon as though she were a boy, and a pair of straight grey eyes like a boy’s too, and a wide mouth that seemed made for joy. She was in and out of the stable-yard more often than any well-brought-up lady should have been; for she had all her grandfather’s love of horses; and wherever my lady Jean wished to be, there she would be, whether or no. And always with her would be her young kinswoman, both henchwoman and friend, and maybe two—three years her junior, a nut-brown lassie with a kind of cool quiet darkness about her, like the coolth of tree-shade on a hot summer’s day. In some ways she was like my lady; they were the same shape, and would have had both of them the same grace, but that while my lady Jean met life with a dancing step, the
other carried herself always as though she was braced for something. I never knew what, I doubt she did herself; it was something in her, like the strangeness she had as though part of her came from another country… Mary, she was mostly called; Mistress Mary Ruthven, but I heard my lady call her Darklis between themselves. Darklis is a gipsy name, a Tinkler name, aye. There were tales of gipsy blood mingled with the Kennedys’ – or Kennedy blood with the gipsies’, way back…

So then, wherever my lady Jean went, there also went Mistress Mary. I mind I envied her, having someone to follow.

But I’m running ahead of myself. My lady was up at Auchans with her mother when I first came to Place of Paisley, and I’d been there two—three weeks when she returned.

She came back in wild April weather; and that same night, as though she had been waiting for her mistress’s return, Linnet, her old mare, dropped a fine filly foal. We got the mare into the big loose-box at the doorward end of the stable, where we would have plenty of room to work; and a long hard night we had, all three of us, the mare herself and Willie Sempill and me. Willie had taken a good opinion of me, finding me better skilled with the horses than most of my kind, and showed it by unloading on to me all the extra work about the place, and keeping me out of the warm straw in the loft where the other lads were snoring, to help him get old Linnet through her foaling. But when the light beyond the open stable door was turning green with daybreak and the gold of the big horn lantern fading, all was safely over, and the foal, still damp from its birth, already staggering on to its long legs and thrust blindly around its mother for the warm milk.

And I mind somewhere a lark leapt up into the sky, singing like the morning star.

We gave the mare a warm bran mash with a dash of good ale in it; and then Willie went off to douse his head in the horse-trough and get a bite to eat, leaving me to clean up the loose-box and put down fresh straw, while the world woke and the other stable-hands came down yawning and scratching themselves from the loft.

I had just about finished – working slow and quiet so as not to fret the mare – when I heard a lassie’s voice outside, talking to Willie Sempill. ‘Why did you not send me word last night, Willie? Ye know how much Linnet means to me.’

‘Aye, I ken that fine, my leddy,’ said Willie, in the tone of a patient man hard tried, ‘and ’twas for that reason I didna send. Where would ha’ been the use? Ye would but ha’ fretted all night, and that wouldna be helping the mare.’

And next moment, with a sudden dazzle of April sun behind her, and rain sparkling on the shoulders of the dark green cloak that she had flung on crooked in the by-going, was my lady Jean, and behind her the nut-brown lassie that at that time I scarce noticed at all.

Coming in out of the April dazzle, I do not think she saw me at first in the brown shadows of the loose-box; and indeed I would have slipped out, knowing that she and the mare were well acquainted and there would be no risk of old Linnet becoming scared and unchancy, as can happen to a mare with a new foal when strangers come too close; but my lady and her henchwoman, and Willie Sempill hovering behind, were all across the doorway, and I could not well push past them, so I bided where I was.

She gave her first attention to the mare, fondling her
muzzle and crest, and speaking the small soft words of love and pride into her twitching ear, in the broadest of the Lowland tongue, while Linnet slobbered on her shoulder. And then she turned her to the foal, kneeling down in the straw – mercifully it was the clean straw, but indeed I do not think she would have noticed whether it was or no – and putting her arms round the little creature’s neck to drop a kiss on the white star upon its forehead.

‘There’s a kiss for welcome,’ said she. ‘Eh, my bonnie, my bonnie wee burd, what will we be calling ye? Wi’ the star on your forehead an’ all.’

‘There was a laverock singing like the morning star when she was but just born,’ said I, not thinking till I heard my own voice.

My lady looked up then and saw me standing there. ‘Were you here when she was born?’ said she.

‘Aye, Master Sempill and me, we spent the night wi’ her.’

‘You must be tired,’ said she; and then, looking at me more closely, ‘You’re new-come while I have been from home.’

‘Aye, my leddy.’

‘And what do they call you?’

‘Hugh,’ said I, ‘Hugh Herriot.’

She gave the foal a gentle hug, and then got to her feet as it went back to its mother and the warm milk, its squirrel tail a’wag behind its little doddering rump. And we watched it together, and laughed. And said she, ‘Then thank you, Hugh Herriot, for your night’s work; she’s a credit to you and Willie Sempill. And as to her name – Laverock will suit her just fine.’

She gave me her lilting smile for the first time, and turned away; and Willie Sempill must have got his
share of it, too, for I saw his face creak into an answering grin. ‘Willie, I forgive you,’ said she, ‘because it’s April and I’m home again. If ye’ll just remember from time to time, dear man, that I’m old enough to fret if I choose, and not just the bairn I was when you set me on my first pony.’

And she was gone; and behind her the nut-brown lassie who had spoken never a word all the while.

After that, my lady Jean was never in the stable-yard but she would have a word with me in the by-going – which was well enough save that Andy Burns, another of the stable laddies, was inclined to jealousy, and took it upon himself to see that this did not swell my head for me.

For a while, chiefly because he was bigger than I was, I put up with having my head held down in the horse-trough until I was half-drowned, with finding evil things in my sleeping straw and being called ill names. But the day came – I’d not be knowing why it was that day and no other – when he called me a wee boot-licking, snivelling bastard just the once too often, and I hit him.

I took him by surprise and he went sprawling into the muck-heap. So, I had the one moment of triumph. But as I plunged yelling after him, bent upon the avenging of many insults, he came up to meet me, fists flailing, and the next thing I knew was a kind of star-burst in my right eye that made the stable-yard spin for a moment. It was a bonnie fight while it lasted; and not just a laddies’ tussle, for both of us were out to kill the other if that might be; but in the end he hooked my legs from under me, and there I was, flat on my back, with Andy on top of me, his big bony hands round my neck, and
him set to banging the senses out of my head of the cobbles. But between one crack and the next I jabbed a knee up into his groin, and half-choked as I was, contrived to force my head down till my mouth found his wrist, and I bit into it and hung on like a dog at the bear-baiting.

I mind the salt-sweet taste of blood between my teeth, and he yelled and let go of my throat, and began to jab away at me with his other hand, trying to get free, and howling all the while for help.