The Sea-Harrower: A Scottish Highlander Historical Romance

by Abigail Clements

  The Sea Harrower

  Copyright © Abigail Clements 2020

  This edition first published by Wyndham Books 2020

  (Wyndham Media Ltd)

  27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX

  www.wyndhambooks.com/abigail-clements

  First published in 1980

  The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Cover artwork: images © periodimages.com and inigocia (Shutterstock)

  Cover artwork design © Wyndham Media Ltd

  Titles by Abigail Clements

  from Wyndham Books

  Mistress of the Moor

  Christabel’s Room

  Highland Fire

  The Sea-Harrower

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  FOR BLAZE

  And all the Atlantic watering will show

  Seed follow seed, that shared soil long ago

  I am a man upon the land

  I am a silkie on the sea

  And when I’m far an’ far frae land

  My home it is in Sule Skerry

  ‒ Traditional

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Preview: Abigail Clements

  Chapter One

  Three things Marsali remembered of that morning: the cow gave no milk; the glaistig, the dairy spirit, did not come for its offering; and the grey dog, her father’s foolish pride of a hound, set to howling in the dawn. She had been warned.

  But she was young, and warnings fall like spring rain on the young. Not so, Ishbel. She was neither young nor ignorant. She was older than Marsali’s father, and had been a nursemaid not only to Marsali, but to her mother as well. Ishbel went quite still in the dim light of the byre, and half turned to the sound, her hands forgetting their task.

  The crooked-horned cow, Dun Meg, groaned and shifted its hoofs in the dung, and Ishbel paid it no mind. The milk pail at her feet was dry, and as the dog moaned on in the dawn outside, she returned to the fruitless tugging at the dry teats. Yesterday there had been little milk, and the day before that. Today there was none.

  Ishbel murmured in the Gaelic to the cow. Marsali said, sudden, impatient, from where she held its shaggy head, ‘Let me try, Nana, surely.’

  ‘Away girl.’ Ishbel shook her head, her old jaws chomping steadily at her tobacco cut. ‘She’ll not let down for you.’ Which was a lie, and Marsali knew it. She could milk, and she had no minding of it. It was Ishbel’s pride, more than a mother’s pride, that her high-born ewe-lamb would not do byre work. Not yet. Not yet.

  Marsali shifted her bare feet on the cold earth floor. It was October; the door of the byre half of the house stood open for light. The cottage was windowless, and oil was far too costly now to be wasted on milking. Not when James MacKinnon would wish to read that bit of a winter evening. The salt wind swept in, lifting the frayed hem of Marsali’s woollen skirt, and she tightened her plaid about her, tucking the long end of it in around her arm.

  ‘Go in, lass, by the fire,’ Ishbel said softly. ‘It is cold the morning, and the beast is useless … forlorn excuse for a cow it is.’ Oh that was true, a shag-eared, bony-backed, half-wild beast. Never trained, it still needed two for the milking, one to hold its restless wavering head.

  ‘We’d as well slaughter the wretched thing,’ Marsali said wearily, ‘and salt it for winter.’

  ‘And what then of next year, and then next?’

  Marsali said nothing. There was nothing to say. Five years they had scratched at this salt-ridden corner of Skye, mocked and taunted by the cold surf of Trotternish. Each year had been poorer than the last, had seen them buying seed in the spring with the price of some fine thing ‒ a chair, a tapestry, china, glass ‒ for the few pence some other, not quite as devastated as they, could spare. There was little left of their few salvaged treasures of Glentarvie.

  This year’s seed would come dear indeed. Last spring; in the hungry gap, they had lived on thin porridge and sour ale. Two cattle-beasts had starved in the fields before their eyes. James MacKinnon, Laird of Glentarvie, had dug potatoes with his own bare hands.

  Outside, in the salt wind, the dog set to howling again.

  Ishbel rocked back on the three-legged milking stool and closed her eyes a moment, her soft-haired lip trembling. Then she made an animal moan, too, like the dog and the cow, and said in a whisper, ‘What now on the House of MacKinnon?’ She twisted her head over her shoulder, as if she were asking God Himself.

  ‘Wheesht,’ Marsali said, ‘it is nothing; a fox on the hill, some wild thing about.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Ishbel, resting her grey head against the brown-flurred flank of the cow. ‘Some wild thing about.’

  But the grey dog kept its howling on, till James MacKinnon rose from his bed, and through the wicker of the partition between living place and byre, they heard him calling to it, and then her brother Murdoch rising as well and shouting out, ‘Och, throw your boot at it, the brute.’ Murdoch was impatient with man and beast, these days.

  Marsali heard the howls die away to a sad whine and her father’s soft quizzical voice coax it to silence. ‘You see, then,’ she said to Ishbel, trying to smile, ‘it is spoiled, the old foolish thing. Spoiled by petting. My father is daft for it.’

  Ishbel said only, with portent, ‘The cow is dry. The glaistig did not come. Now the dog howls.’

  Marsali said angrily, ‘The cow is dry because there has been no goodness in the grass this weary year.’

  ‘The glaistig did not come. It is offended.’

  Marsali shook her head warily, half smiling. ‘The milk was there for it, yesterday, in the stone hollow. It is still there this morning. I would drink it myself in half a moment.’

  ‘Wheeesht, girl. You would not. Maybe then it would never come, and never the drop of milk will you see again of this cow, or any other. We have offended the good spirit; we must find out how.’

  ‘Perhaps it preferred a rat today, your glaistig.’ Marsali smiled again, slyly, and giggled with the daring of a favoured child.

  ‘Will you tease a
n old woman, now? That your mother, God rest her, could see you. Barefoot in the dung, making mock of your elders. The dairy spirit is not a cat. The MacKinnons have had always their glaistig, when you were a bairn, and when your mother, God rest her, was a bairn, even then. Always would I leave milk for it, and always it guarded my dairy … you see, lass, the glaistig, she was once as you and I, and cares still a little for the fate of human folk.’

  Marsali let go of the cow’s head, and it pushed past her stumbling out of the dark into the grey October pasture, its soft mouth working already in search of morsels of grass. She went to the door and looked out over the grey-green sweep of fields filling the curve of the cliff-edged bay. The smoke from the kelping pits still drifted over the shore. Murdoch had worked late into the night.

  ‘If ever I could believe anymore that there is anything, anything at all, that cares for the fate of human folk, then it is more contented I would be,’ she said, shaking back her coarse, thick hair.

  ‘For shame, lass,’ Ishbel said, ‘that is blasphemy.’

  ‘If it is, so be it. If God wanted us, why did He see us scattered, and sent away from our own lands, and our own church? Even the churches here are in the hands of the Reformers, and our land in the hands of strangers …’

  ‘It is an old habit of folk to blame God for the work of their own hands,’ Ishbel said grimly. She straightened her thin old back and tucked grey wisps of hair under her white linen curtch. ‘Och, poor glaistig, ’tis poor it has faired with us. Small wonder it is gone. Away home to Glen Arkaig again, and the ruins of Glentarvie, perhaps. Would God we could go with it.’ She narrowed her old, grey eyes and looked bitterly on the sea dawn breaking. ‘Salt and sand, salt and sand, and never an end to the rain and the wind. As barren a land as ever there was. Small wonder the cow is dry. The wonder is it lives at all.’

  The dog howled again, as if to agree, and Ishbel said, ‘A poor, poor land indeed. Shame it is that the daughter of James MacKinnon should come to this.’

  Marsali laughed then, almost gaily, and shook again her splendid, thick brown hair. ‘There’s better daughters of better men have come to less, Ishbel. It is no matter to me to be poor. But my father … he is old to change his ways.’

  ‘I am old as well, girl. I have changed mine. And your poor mother changed hers. James MacKinnon could well do the same.’

  ‘He will not though.’

  ‘Och, no. He will not. But that is not age. It is the cursed highland pride. An affliction of men, alone, girl. An affliction of men.’

  ‘Aye, then,’ said Marsali with a bright light in her eyes, ‘I am thinking that we womenfolk are like to the glaistig. Wee long-haired silent things that drift about at men’s beckoning, and ask for nothing but a bowl of milk, in the night. And they take the cream.’ She giggled. ‘I will not be a glaistig for any man, Ishbel. I will have my own, all my own, house and byre and cows and goats, and no man will throw it away for the sake of a beggar prince.’

  With that the dog, skulking like a wolf at the house door, once more moaned on the salt air, as if it knew her words. Ishbel said softly, ‘Och it is eerie, the beast. Do you mind, now, Marsali, the day that prince came?’

  Marsali stopped short, and half turned, tilting her head in her proud young way, a tall, strong, graceful creature in the grey light. ‘And would you be thinking I could forget?’

  ‘Och no, girl,’ Ishbel said impatiently. ‘But the dog, now, did it not howl like that the day the prince came? Did it not howl in the morning, when all was gaiety and pride and laughter, and the prince so fine on his white horse? And your mother, eerie girl she was, saying yet, over and over, it was a sign. Only there was none to listen, all the while.’

  ‘Of course it howled, and a wise dog, too, that grand Italian beggar on my father’s land. Did we not teach all our dogs to howl at a beggar’s passing?’

  ‘Hush, girl, your father will hear.’

  ‘Let him hear. I heard the dog howl, and I heard it howl again the day they hung my brother in Carlisle, in the name of that gallant fleeing prince.’

  The dog, scuffling at the rubbish heap, whirled around, as if its tail were afire, and set once more with its whining. Marsali, angry suddenly, picked a clod of mud from the ground and hurled it at the beast. ‘Away,’ she shouted, ‘away.’ And then all to herself, ‘There will be no more hangings here. And no princes either.’ She wrapped herself proud and cold in her plaid and walked in under the smoke-stained lintel of the door.

  James MacKinnon turned to her shadow in the doorway. ‘Is that you there, girl,’ he asked softly. The room was dim, smoke-filled for want of a proper chimney, and he peered over the glow of the newly stirred fire.

  ‘It is, father,’ she said quietly. ‘Ishbel is yet at the milking.’ She did not tell him about the cow. Later, she would speak to Murdoch, alone, and they would decide what to do. For some time now, they had taken to having secrets from their father, and James had little idea how bad things were. Marsali sometimes felt that he did not wish to know.

  She stirred the porridge that Ishbel had started heating in the black pot above the peats. It was thin and watery; Ishbel was wise enough to go sparing with the harvest grain, with all the long winter ahead. Marsali spooned some out into a wooden cuach and handed the two-handled dish to her father.

  He sat eating it then, wrapped in his worn, dirty kilted plaid, its yards of woven homespun buckled about his waist and its long end covering his shoulders, and she watched him. He was like a lion, an old lion, with his shaggy mane of white hair, and his full beard, and that proud light in his pale eyes. He sat as always with his left shoulder, the bad one, stiff from an old, old wound, near the comfort of the fire. Half gentleman, half brigand, totally highland, that was James MacKinnon. Marsali knew that the world would not see again men of the likes of her father. His time was done, ended six years before on the battlefield of Culloden, the graveyard of the Old North, where the great Forty-five Uprising ended and the Stuart kings stepped backward out of history.

  The old dog came in from the wet and sat on its bony haunches beside him. It was useless, and archaic. Scotland would belong to new dogs, as to new men: working dogs, lowland collies, black and white and without pretensions, bound to the working of sheep.

  Murdoch, fed up of finding food for it, when there was scant food for themselves, would have been done with the thing, long since. He’d have shot it with that pistol her father hid in the linen chest, against prying eyes and the Disarming Act.

  But James spoke up for the old dog, and would not be parted from it. Once they had sent red stags fleeing over the moors of Glen Arkaig, it and he. One day more he would do the same, he swore, and the old dog would again prove its worth. Murdoch just laughed over that, that cynical laugh he’d brought home from Culloden.

  Murdoch came in, too, like the dog, wet from the morning rain, and the salt spray of the sea. He was smiling, his grim strong smile, and had in his hand a string of silver herring. He’d been to the fish cairidh, that stone weir he’d built at the sea-loch shore for the trapping of fish, and come back in triumph. Marsali laughed and caught them up, as once in her girlhood she’d have caught up a fine silk. She strung them in the scullery out of the reach of the dog and, as she ladled porridge out for Murdoch, said an Ave for thanksgiving, losing her morning’s rebellion in habit.

  The herring at least made up for the cow.

  Murdoch sat on the wooden bench against the limed wall, taking off his boots. They were handsown leather; he had made them himself, and though they shielded his soles from the stones of the shore, they kept no water out at all. He came nearer the fire then, in his bare feet, and warmed them by the peats.

  Murdoch dressed in the new way, in knee-britches and footless stockings, and a lowland-style coat over his shirt. Not because of the law; though the law forbade indeed the old way of dress. When James MacKinnon heard that he had only shrugged and wrapped the familiar plaid the tighter, and said, ‘Well then, they can hang me i
n it.’ Murdoch was not such a fool; but his reasons were his own. A man who worked the kelping pits and the potato field must dress for his work. The old plaid did fine by the drover, and better by the warrior, but their day in the highlands was over.

  The future belonged to cottars and fishermen, and the weapons today were not the broadsword and claymore, but a strong back and an almighty humbling of the pride. James MacKinnon might well have won many a glorious charge against the forces of the Usurper, King George; but it was Murdoch who would fight, and would win, the new drear battle against hunger.

  He was a strong solid man of twenty-one, a year younger than Marsali. Face and body were square and stocky, neither softened by youth, nor graced any longer by humour. His eyes were an honest blue, narrowed always by shortness of sight, and his hair was thick and brown, like Marsali’s, and hung over his shoulders. When he was working, he plaited it like a gentleman, an ironic convenience.

  He was so unlike his older brother, Norman, that a stranger would doubt the tie of blood.

  Norman had been tall, taller than his father, and lean like him, with red-golden hair. During the Rising he had been more than once taken for the prince himself, and only half because of his similar colouring. He was born to be a highland chief and raised in the state of a highland chief’s home. He had the bearing of a ruler and his skills were the useless skills of rulers the world over: he could ride and hunt and fight, and make elegant talk in three languages with ladies and gentlemen of renown.

  He had travelled to France and to Rome and had studied with the Jesuits in Saint-Omer, all before he was twenty-one. Only Norman, of all the MacKinnon clan, had met the prince before that summer day when he had come riding through their lands on his way to Glenfinnan. Norman had known him in France. Norman had played cards with him in Paris, that year he roamed, restless, in open disguise, seeking help from the French king. The help that never, ever came, and for want of which the prince was defeated and Glentarvie was forfeited and Norman MacKinnon was hanged in the market square of Carlisle.