‘
Ach
,’ he groaned. ‘It’s been a long winter.’
‘So that’s all you’re after,’ she grinned, ‘a bed-warmer.’
‘No. Well, yes, that too. But I was sent. I’ve to bring you all to Moy.’
‘Then M
c
Intosh is dead.’ She was immediately sombre. ‘I thought I heard the lament, during the night, but so faint and far away I was sure I dreamt it.’
‘Shaw’s piper was sick and didn’t pick it up. But he’s fine now so you’ll hear tonight. And wait till you hear this.’ Now he was more excited. ‘They have chosen their new chief, his nephew, Aeneas.’
‘Aeneas M
c
Intosh?’ Anne’s mouth fell open in disbelief. ‘Are they mad?’
‘But he’s a great warrior.’
‘Great at smacking children!’
‘That was years ago.’ MacGillivray laughed. ‘Remind me never to cross you. Your memory is as long as waiting.’
‘And yours is as short as butter-bread. No wonder he hasn’t married, with you running after him like a catamite since the night my father died.’
‘He’s my cousin.’ He flushed at the accusation. ‘And he tutors me. Besides, he couldn’t marry till the chief’s heir was decided.’
‘Well, he can now. I hope you’ll both be very happy.’ She headed for the house, furious. MacGillivray was easily impressed. No doubt Aeneas beat him to the sword!
‘Anne,’ he called. ‘You have to go.’
She turned back to face him.
‘The M
c
Intosh was not here when my father died.’ Though she spoke defiantly, it covered a deep hurt. MacGillivray crossed the few steps to her, softened by her vulnerability, wanting to make things right.
‘It’s not just for the burial,’ he reminded her, gently. She held his gaze for a moment, tender for that moment, then the spell broke.
‘I know!’ she snapped. ‘Clan Chattan will also choose a new chief. So, will you lead the federation, Alexander? I think not. Maybe my brother, or MacBean, Macpherson, Davidson, Shaw, MacQueen? No! It will be none of them. M
c
Intosh will! Well, hear me now. That man will never be my chief! I won’t vote. And I won’t go!’ She grabbed his hand. ‘Here, you’ll want breakfast.’ She thrust the two eggs she held into his palm and marched off towards the woods. MacGillivray grimaced at the smashed eggs dripping thick white and yolk through his fingers.
‘You forgot M
c
Thomas!’ he shouted after her.
Anne strode out of the trees across the open grassland towards the burn. She meant to follow its course up to the great falls, to the deep brackish pool where the fine mist from cascading water drifted against her face. But there would be little spray today from frozen falls, and that was where she first made love with MacGillivray, last year, on the morning after her nineteenth birthday, the day after the last wolf died.
A rainstorm on the night of her birthday had ended before dawn. Up at the falls, in spring sunshine, the damp grass had still steamed of it. Rainbows hung in the mist above the white froth of water. She waded into the pool, dress hauled up around her naked buttocks, after a slow salmon. It circled, lazy, brushing her calf. She slid her hand into the water, stroked its long, heavy body, gently, gently. There was a rustle on the bank, a footfall on the pebbles. She knew who it was, without turning. The way he’d looked at her down at the house, the way he’d be watching her now. Without turning, she knew. Her fingers stopped stroking the fish. The caress
lost, it slid around her thigh and away. She turned to go to him, knowing what she’d see in his eyes and what she’d do about it.
So she wasn’t going to the falls. Not in her present mood. Instead she turned downstream, towards the strident bleating of the lambing pens. Her cousin leant indolently against a post, watching. Most warriors were tall. Francis Farquharson of Monaltrie was taller than most, his silver-blond hair startling in the crisp light. Baron Bàn folk called him, for that hair. Ten years older than her brother, he had administered Invercauld and mentored James since their father died.
‘Just late enough to be no help,’ he said, glancing over his shoulder as she approached. He and her brother had worked the night through. ‘The shepherds were back at first light.’
‘I can lamb a ewe,’ she snorted. ‘Small hands, see.’ She held them out. His were huge, useless for a difficult birth.
He laughed, amused by her indignation.
‘Except you might want for practice again. We’d be as well rid of sheep, bar what we can eat. There’ll be few sheared now the English have shut off our markets.’
Behind him, a suckling ewe trailed afterbirth from its stained rear. Beyond the pregnant and nursing beasts, her brother struggled to pull out a stuck lamb. The stink of birth and the stench of death mingled in the cold air. Shearing was a couple of months off. When the clan’s need of wool was met, spare fleeces were normally baled then sent to Moy. From there, the collected Clan Chattan wool was transported on to Aberdeen for export to the Low Countries. It was vital trade which funded imports and financed cultural travel to strengthen bonds with France, Spain and Italy, countries that were Scotland’s friends but England’s enemies. This year, spare fleeces would stay on the sheep. Britain’s parliament had banned Scottish wool exports to protect the English textile trade.
‘So what high dudgeon brings you down here?’ Francis asked. ‘Is it my aunt, again?’
‘M
c
Intosh is dead. Alexander brought word.’
Francis nodded. A light breeze ruffled the blond hair round his shoulders. His blue eyes gazed steadily at her.
‘Then it’s MacGillivray who annoys you.’
‘He is too patient,’ she burst out.
‘It will be years, Anne. He has no suit to press.’
‘It’s not that.’ She grabbed his hand, pressed it against her breast, above her heart. ‘When I want to marry I will know it here.’ Still gripping his hand, she thrust it down into the folds of her skirts, between her thighs. ‘And not just here.’
Her passion roused him to more amusement.
‘Maybe it’s here you should know it,’ he said, tapping the forefinger of his other hand on the side of her head. ‘Then you might have considered Louden.’
She slapped away his hand from between her thighs.
‘As if I’d wed a government lackey!’
‘Not even an earl?’ Francis queried.
‘Nor a baron either,’ Anne retorted.
He had asked her on that birthday, the day the last wolf died, but only to mock her stepmother. Anne had gone to the window, put her face to the damp glass, listened to the drumming rain. It battered against the panes, stoated up from the cobbled yard outside.
‘They say he’ll come this year,’ she said.
‘Or next,’ Lady Farquharson snorted behind her. ‘It’s a union of your own you should be thinking of. No good ever came of politics, not that I’ve noticed.’
The rain scythed down in the darkness, silver blades slicing through the yellow pool of light from the window. It was their custom for women to marry young. Children arrived without proper provision if they didn’t. Men married late, free to start their own family only when younger siblings were grown.
‘Nineteen,’ Lady Farquharson grumbled. ‘It’s time you were out of the house.’ Her suggestions of suitable husbands for her stepdaughter were less than generous: an ancient widower, a twice-divorced brute, and the earl, Lord Louden. At forty, Louden was a suitable age, but he was also a staunch supporter of the Union.
‘Countess would suit you better, Aunt,’ Francis suggested,
straight-faced. ‘He’d be wasted on Anne.’ He took hold of Anne’s hands then. ‘I should propose to you myself,’ he said, ‘for your birthday.’
‘And for my birthday,’ Anne retorted, ‘I would turn you down.’ He was only tormenting Lady Farquharson, making a better suggestion than hers. At thirty-four, her cousin was still not ready for marriage.
The lamb James worked to save slithered, lifeless, out of its mother. Tethering the ewe to a nursing post, the shepherd went to pick the best of the orphans. On his knees, her brother already had his dirk out, skinning the steaming corpse. Its skin would be tied on a motherless beast to induce the childless ewe to suckle it. Its carcass would add to the sweet-smelling heap of bloated dead. Francis leant his weight on the post and considered her.
‘Maybe it’s time I explained about men and women,’ he teased.
Anne snorted. Highland children witnessed copulation often, animal and human. As farming folk, they learned about mating early. And there was nothing she hadn’t heard from her stepmother about making a good match.
‘What do you know about women?’ she challenged.
‘Walk about a bit,’ he suggested.
Tossing her head, Anne strutted back and forth in front of him, typically arrogant.
‘Enough,’ Francis sighed. ‘I know enough.’
James came over then, bloodstained, tired but glad to have saved the ewe. He was slender and lithe, very like Anne with his brown hair, full mouth and wide eyes, but her opposite in temperament.
‘Just in time,’ Anne said. ‘Francis is about to tell me how to breed.’
Living in a family of voluble women, James never spoke just to fill a silence, spending his words carefully. He glanced at his cousin.
‘You haven’t told me yet.’
Anne shrieked with laughter. Francis hooted. Pleased with
himself, James smiled. As they set off through the field, Anne repeated the news of M
c
Intosh’s death to her brother. He accepted it solemnly, expressing no surprise that Aeneas was the new chief.
‘But we don’t have to choose him,’ Anne added, insisting that Macpherson was a wiser choice to lead the Clan Chattan federation. ‘At least he might try to influence parliament!’
Cluny Macpherson was certainly a persuasive talker, but the chiefs had lost their power in parliament at the Union. Demands for a federal arrangement were refused. Scotland was allowed only sixteen peers and, in the House of Commons, forty-five seats to more than five hundred held by England. Clan Chattan had ignored parliament since.
‘We’re outnumbered, Anne,’ Francis said. ‘However the Scots vote, it makes no difference. Only the English vote counts.’
‘One country can’t outnumber one other country,’ she protested. ‘There are only two in this United Kingdom of Great Britain. Size should not matter.’
Francis stopped walking. He stretched up to his full height, well over six feet.
‘I think you’ll find it does.’
Anne folded her arms and cocked her head at him.
‘What matters is the size of our ideas,’ she corrected, pointing back to the raucous sheep pens. ‘You’d leave them to sweat through summer and waste a season’s wool because England says we can’t trade it.’
‘What would you do, shear them and burn it?’
‘Store it. Things can change, or be changed.’
‘It would rot, Anne,’ James said.
‘Not if it was scoured first.’
‘The moths would still have it,’ Francis said.
Anne tucked her cold hands into the warmth of the thick woollen plaid. Soon, their winter clothes would be put away for summer.
‘Peighinn rìoghail,’
she said, triumphantly. ‘Pack the wool in double linen sacks with dried pennyroyal leaves between the layers. That’ll keep the moths out.’
There was a silence as the two men let the idea penetrate.
‘We’d be ahead,’ Francis looked thoughtfully at James, ‘ready to trade whenever the chance came.’
‘Without losing a year’s wool,’ James nodded.
‘You clever woman,’ Francis praised Anne. ‘Promise you’ll wait for me.’
‘Convince me that size matters first,’ she retorted, grinning.
They headed on home, discussing the storage of wool as they walked. Somewhere dry and cool would be needed, perhaps a barn sited among trees. With sacks to weave and wool to prepare, the clan’s shearers, spinners and weavers need not be idle after all. As they crossed the yard towards the house, the memory of wolves returned to Anne, this time of her childhood encounter, on a moonlit night with a dark man, of fear, a single shot taken in the dark, her father dying. Wolves were pack animals, hunters, yet their howls, which she had not heard since then, ached of loneliness. Now there were none.
‘Do you think it really was the last wolf ?’ she asked.
‘Last year?’ Francis shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ He looked down at her. ‘What does it matter, even if there was one other left? It couldn’t live on alone.’
The deceased M
c
Intosh had ordered that hunt. A baby had been taken and the cottars at Moy swore the creature responsible was a wolf. The day it died, before she knew it, was her birthday. That night, as rain battered the house, Anne stood before the long mirror in her bedroom. Naked in the guttering candlelight, her skin looked honey-smooth though, in daylight, it was buttermilk white. She shook out her hair so it drifted against her back, the length of it brushing her buttocks. Raising her hands, she cupped her breasts, feeling her own blood-heat in them. She stroked her palms down to the flatness of her stomach. Child-bearing let women create the future. But at a cost. She had cost her mother’s life.
For the beasts it was simple. Fertility, desire and mating all came at the same time. For women too, though desire could rise without fertility – the torment she’d suffered in the last few days was a certain sign. Except in marriage, men were to be avoided at such
times. Marriage meant childbirth. Maybe she avoided that too. But her skin was hot, fevered, heart thudding, her breath quick, her womb eager for seeding. She leant into the mirror, the glass cold on her cheek, on her breast, slid her fingers between her thighs, into the wetness there, gasping at the tremor that ran up through her belly.
‘What are you doing?’ her half-sister asked, sleepily, from the bed.
‘Nothing. Go on back to sleep.’
But Elizabeth was awake, fair hair tumbling out of her nightcap, pushing herself up on to her elbows.
‘I know what you’re doing,’ she said. ‘I do it all the time. That’s why I come to bed early.’ Elizabeth was sixteen, and very annoying.
Anne pulled on her night shift, tucked her hair up into a cap, snuffed the candle and slid into bed.
‘Go to sleep,’ she snapped, turning her back abruptly, pulling the covers up to her chin. When she slept, she dreamt of wolves. When she woke, it was to an empty bed, to birdsong and the absence of rain. She had gone to the kitchen in her shift, her sleep-tousled hair tangled around her shoulders. MacGillivray was there, unexpectedly there. He’d come to stop their party leaving for the hunt. MacQueen’s tracker had killed the beast the day before, her birthday, its head already presented to the old chief at Moy.