Bonnie Dundee (9 page)

Then there was a deal of kissing and laughing and weeping, and by and by the grand folks sat down to the highest of the tables under the linden trees; and the rest of us, household and Redcoats together, gathered to the lower tables or took our food and drink and settled in clumps and clusters on the grass. And there was feasting and health-drinking and speeches made that I would not be remembering one word of. And I was sitting on my heels with my back against the old sun-warmed wall of the orchard, sharing a jack of ale and a vast mutton pasty with one of the troopers, a long-legged, sandy-headed man, who told me his name was Tam Johnston. A friendly soul, and one that enjoyed the good things of life. I mind how he took a great bite out of the pasty and leaned back against the wall and thrust his long legs even further out in front of
him, slacking off his belt with a sigh of content. ‘We should marry our Colonel off more frequent. This is the life that suits me fine. Better than stravaigling up and down the high moors after those accursed bog-trotting “Saints” as they ca’ themselves, and mebbe a bullet from behind any bush o’ broom.’

‘But the countryside’s quiet enough these past few weeks, is it no’?’ said I.

He nodded, ‘Aye. That’s always the way o’t. When Ayrshire an’ the South West gets beyond any other man’s handling, they send Colonel Graham an’ His Majesty’s Scottish Horse down to deal wi’ it. And the shriek goes up again about Bloody Claver’se and his butcher’s ways wi’ the poor folk that seek only the freedom to worship God in their own fashion. And no one thinks to mention the poor de’il of a trooper shot in the back wi’ a smuggled Dutch musket.’

I saw in my mind’s eye the flames of the burning alehouse, and the drummer laddie staring up at me with the third eye in the middle of his forehead; and I pushed the memory away, for it was no fit memory for such a day as this.

And Tam Johnston took a swig of the ale jack. ‘Och well, ’tis Glasgow way that’s got the trouble this time, an’ no concern of ours.’

‘Is there trouble that way?’ said I, more to keep the conversation going than for aught else.

He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, and pushed the great leather jack towards me. ‘Aye, the Dragoons have been out from Glasgow chasing the Godly rebels since Saturday, so the story runs.’

I took the jack and had a swallow myself, and the talk turned to other things.

Groups broke up and drifted to form fresh groups,
and the food and drink went round, and the shadows of the lime trees shifted in the hazy sunshine over the grass; and it was time for dancing. But just as the fiddlers were being parted from the last of the food, and starting in to tune their fiddles, there came the sound of a horse hard-ridden on the road that came from the Abbey bridge.

Everybody looked that way, for a rider coming at that speed would not be just a late-arriving guest. I had my legs ready under me, thinking there might be a call for me in the stable-yard. But there was a flicker of scarlet beyond the lime trees, and the trooper swung aside from the drive and headed across the grass towards us, slackening his pace as he came. The chatter and the laughter and the sad squeal of the tuning fiddles were silent; and everyone craned to watch as the man dropped from the saddle, tossing his bridle to another trooper who had come running to take it from him, and came striding across to the top table, where Claverhouse was already rising from his place, my lady Jean beside him, to open the dancing.

The young lieutenant got up quickly, and the trooper spoke to him, and was passed on to the Colonel, pulling off his beaver hat in salute. ‘From General Dalyell, sir,’ I heard him say, handing over a packet.

Claverhouse took it and broke the seal and read it, a frown drawing together those black brows of his. ‘I think they might have left me Tuesday,’ he said.

I was none so far from him, and in the quiet and the heavy air I could hear every word.

He bowed to Dundonel; a stiff bow, and his voice sounded wooden. ‘My lord, my troop is recalled to the King’s service. Pray your lordship and all this company excuse the bridegroom from the wedding feast.’

He gave an order, and the troop bugler put the bugle to his lips, and almost before the first notes of ‘Boots and Saddles’ cut the uneasy summer quiet, the Redcoats were up and gathering from all over the pleasance, heading for their horse lines. Beside me, Tam Johnston drew his long legs under him and came to foot, tightening his loosened belt. ‘Och well, ’twas good while it lasted,’ said he, and was gone to join the rest. Lord Ross and Captain Livingstone bowed hurriedly over Lady Dundonel’s hand and then over Lady Jean’s, and turned to be on their way; and in the midst of it all, Claverhouse pulled my lady into his arms and kissed her hard and loving, and openly before us all as though he would be setting his seal on her in the eyes of the world. And she, she kissed him back, but with her hands stiff at her side. I think now that maybe she was afraid to touch him lest she should start to cling, and not be able to let go.

Then he was gone with the other two who had turned to wait for him, and already as he went he was pulling the wedding favour from his sleeve, thrusting it into the breast of his coat. ‘I think they might have let Tuesday go by,’ he said again, as they strode past me. ‘Ah well, back to the Red Lion and get out of these geegaws.’

And they were gone, leaving a low, startled, distressful murmuring behind them.

Then old Dundonel stood up and bade the dancing go forward, for Colonel Graham would never forgive us if we allowed his absence to mar such a day. ‘The bride is with us yet,’ said he, ‘and bids us still to take joy in her wedding.’

So my lady Jean stepped out from among her lassies that had come flocking around her, to lead the first dance with Lord Cochrane, her brother. And her head
was up – aye, she was a valiant lassie, and a proud one – and her face the same milk white as her gown; and she smiling fit to make your heart ache within you.

The fiddles struck up and the dancing began. And behind it all the while we heard the ordered bustle of ready-making for the march. We were dancing
The Flowers of Edinburgh
when the bugle sounded again; aye
Monte Caballo
, and then the drumming of horses’ hooves, and we knew that they were gone. And the bride danced on down the long line without losing the rhythm of the fiddle-tune.

But for all Dundonel’s brave words, the heart was gone from the merrymaking; and by and by the thunder clouds began to back up behind the Abbey ruins; and the great folk who lived near-hand and were not sleeping at Place of Paisley began to take their leave and call for their horses and carriages, so that we were kept busy back in the stable-yard.

Word had drifted round, and by then we all knew that Tom Johnston’s Glasgow Covenanters had crossed the Clyde and were into Renfrewshire, and calling others to join them; and it was for that that Claverhouse had been summoned from his wedding feast. And that night I lay in my bed of warm straw, and listened to the thunder, and the rain beating on the stable roof, and the fitful wind that came and went squalling by, and thought about the man spending his wedding night on the high drenching moors over Clydesdale way. And I wondered if my lady Jean too was listening to the voices of the storm, lying awake and weeping, maybe, by her lee-lone in the great bed under the beautiful broidered coverlid worked with Adam and Eve in the Garden. Or whether Darklis Ruthven was there to keep her company. I hope that was the way of it.

IT WAS THE
best part of a week before Claverhouse got back out of the wilderness, mired and weary from a long marsh-light hunt after revels who had simply melted away into country where horses could not follow them. And at last we were off and away from Paisley, my lady riding Linnet at the Colonel’s side – she was always seasick in a coach, and on the rough cross-country ways riding was an easier thing in any case, though most women still rode pillion on a journey in those days, not solo using a side-saddle as my lady did. Mistress Darklis followed her, riding in the same way; myself with Laverock on a leading rein coming after, a groom with the baggage horses bringing up the rear, and part of the Colonel’s own troop by way of escort.

Three days we were on the journey; long June days with the hills shimmering in the heat, before we came at last in the long damp sweet-smelling dusk to Glenogilvie.

The great house of Dudhope was the true end of our journey; Claverhouse’s new-bought home hard by Dundee. But I am thinking that he was fain to bring my lady first to the old home where he had been born and where he had been a laddie. And I am thinking that in his place I would have done the same.

For it was a happy place, the glen winding lazy down the north slopes of the Skiddaws and opening towards the misty blue lowlands of Angus. The old house and its
outbuildings sitting low-roofed among orchards sloping to the burn, and the swallows busy under the eaves; and old servants waiting, and old friends to come visiting…

Among those same friends was a distant kinsman of the Grahams, James Philip of Amryclose, who truth to tell seemed almost to live at the house during the week or so that we were there.

If I had read Cervantes at that time, I would have thought him a Don Quixote of a man, but at that time my only books were the Bible and the
Iliad
, and I knew only that he had the long uncontrolled legs of a crane-fly, and a pair of great eyes aglow with dreams in his long, drooping face; that he had a fine knowledge of the Highlands, though himself he was a Lowlander like the rest of us, and as fine a knowledge of the classics and the faery world, a strong feeling for heroes and lost causes, and a certain skill with the bagpipes. He had a fine carrying voice and was for ever talking, and no one could be within hearing of him or his pipes without knowing all that after the first day or so.

I have aye remembered those days at Glenogilvie, there was a peace to them, a feeling of sanctuary that set them apart from ordinary life. Backwater days, you might say. But they passed, until there were but two – three of them left before we rose on the last ten miles to Dundee and Dudhope. (Claverhouse was made Constable of Dundee around that time. Did I say?) And it was Midsummer’s Eve.

I had an idea in my head, not an over-important one, but new, that it would be pleasant to take out to think about in peace and quiet. So that evening when my work in the stables was finished, I wandered off down through the lower orchard to the burn; and followed
the water down towards the old cattle-ford midway between the house and the clachan, where an ancient elder tree split into two limbs only a few feet from the ground, and one of them, leaning out over the water, made a good place for sitting. It was a soft heavy-scented gloaming, and when I looked back I could see the taper light dimly apricot in the windows of the bower, where the shutters had been left wide; and when I looked forward again the cream curds of elder-blossom were beginning to shine to themselves among the dark of their leaves, in the way of pale flowers at dusk. But when I came down the bank, there was someone, something, sitting there already in the crotch where the two limbs parted. A girl in a gown that was pale almost as the elder flowers and yet seemed made of webbed and dappled shadows.

For an instant my heart lurched within me, for was it not Midsummer’s Eve, and the tree an eldern tree…

Then I saw that it was Darklis, wearing a gown of print stuff with little flower sprigs all over the whiteness of it – calico they call it for it comes from Calicut in India – that I had seen her wearing often enough in the daytime.

‘Would you be one of the People of Peace, then?’ I said, speaking the first thing that came into my head, and using the name that I had heard Amryclose use for the Faery Kind. ‘You perched up there in an eldern tree on Saint John’s Eve and all?’

She laughed at that. ‘I’ll no’ disappear back into the tree, Hugh Herriot. But have ye no’ heard that all Ruthvens, whether they be of the Tinkler kind or the Earl of Gowrie himself, have a streak of the witch blood in them? All of us kin to the Fair Folk?’

‘That’s but an old story, mistress,’ said I, firmly changing my tune, ‘and ’tis dangerous to talk so,’ for to speak of the People of Peace half in jest was one thing, but to claim witch blood quite another. The duckings and burnings were too real a hazard.

‘That depends on who you talk to,’ said she. ‘But I’m thinking you’ll have come here for much the same reason as myself. And I found it first, and I’ll not give up to you my bonnie secret place; but I’ll share it wi’ ye a while. Sit ye down on the grass.’

And whether it was the time or the place or – nay, I’d not be knowing. We had had few enough dealings with each other, save for that one shared secret, in all the year and more since I came to Place of Paisley, and she was my lady’s kinswoman and I but a laddie out of the stable, but I sat down with my back against the deep-fissured tree trunk and her feet swinging within a hand’s span of my shoulder, as though the meeting had been long fixed between us and the most natural thing in the world.

‘So it is from your Tinkler kin that you have your name, Mistress Darklis Ruthven,’ said I.

‘And how do you know my name?’ said she.

‘I have heard my lady call you by it, whiles and whiles.’

‘Aye, here am I, kin to the Tinklers and kin to the fine stiff-backed Covenanting Cochranes; and there’s a daft way to be! Did ye ken that Jean’s great-grandmother – oh, not on the Cochrane side, her Casselis great-grandmother it would be – fell in love wi’ a Tinkler laddie that came wi’ his fiddle to play beneath her window, and ran away wi’ him from her rightful lord?’

‘That’s
The Ballad of Johnnie Faa
. You were singing it that time in the Little Dining-room. And her lord hunted them down and hanged her bonnie Tinkler laddie before his castle gates.’

‘Aye, so the song tells. But it doesna tell that nine months later when her hedgerow-bairn was born it was put out to foster, while the lady bore her lord his rightful brood until she dies o’ the last of them.’