The Sea-Harrower: A Scottish Highlander Historical Romance

by Abigail Clements

  ‘Och the poor soul,’ he said softly, in his sad, West Coast Gaelic.

  ‘But no,’ she said, impatient, grabbing his arm. ‘He is not dead at all. He spoke to me, just now. The sea has given him up.’

  Murdoch leaned closer and touched the bare wet throat of the man, feeling for the quickening of life there. ‘Indeed,’ he said softly, but still with his odd gentleness, and then added, ‘The sea gives nothing up.’ Marsali knew he was saying the man would yet die.

  Still, it was Murdoch who shook him into wakefulness, speaking all the while, in his soft tongue, never knowing if the sea man with his strange foreign dress would understand a word of it. But he kept at it and roused him enough to make him raise up and kneel on the rocks with Marsali supporting him. Murdoch took Marsali’s plaid and wrapped it around the stranger, all the while stirring him with talk and activity from that sleep he was too willing to take.

  Then he left them, crouched there at the edge of the grey tide and ran off up the hill for the pony.

  Marsali sat, shivering in the cold wind, her arms about the stranger, who rested his wet black head against her shoulder and whispered once again the name. ‘Sylvie,’ she heard it as, the woman he called with such a sad longing in his voice that she was hurt, her own comforting arms of so little use. Perhaps, though, he thought her that woman, for the Dear Lord knew what he thought, and Marsali could see he had no idea where he was, or why.

  Murdoch returned in minutes, riding the pony at a canter down the hill to the sea. It was a dusky-coloured creature with a bristly, stiff mane and bands of dark grey crossing its shoulders and back like the holy sign.

  Murdoch got down and helped the sea man to stand, and half lifted him onto the pony’s back, the way once, long ago, Norman would have done for Marsali. He obeyed like a child, with neither strength nor will to argue.

  ‘Now, you, up behind,’ Murdoch said briskly, ‘and hold him steady.’ And he boosted her up too, so she sat on the wet warm back of the pony, with her legs dangling free and her arms around the sea stranger, and her fingers clutching the pony’s mane. He sagged over her crossed arms, his face against the pony’s neck, and the wet hair tangling in its rough grey mane. His body between her arms had the frenetic warmth of fever.

  That way they returned home, in the mid-morning, with the weak sun breaking the mist and striking the sea. The dog barked and growled at the strange sight they made at the door. Ishbel came running, anxious, and James MacKinnon with his steady slow stride and his canny cautious eyes.

  ‘What have you here then?’ he said, to them both. Rather amazed he was; strangers from any direction were rare enough, from the sea, unheard of.

  ‘The sea cast him up on the shore,’ Marsali said. ‘Alive.’

  James MacKinnon cocked his head back at that and his eyes narrowed. He came to the pony and half turned the stranger’s head with his big hand, gently enough, but with no feeling. Then he looked across at Murdoch, who gave his quick shrug that angered Marsali for its callousness.

  ‘Well we’d best have him in by the fire,’ James MacKinnon said, calmly. He stepped closer to the pony then, and he had yet his lion’s strength. He lifted the man down from the pony’s wet back with no help at all, holding him up with one great arm until Murdoch came around the beast’s head and caught up the sea man’s legs, and they carried him together under the lintel. In the main room they laid him on the box bed where James MacKinnon slept and then James turned to Ishbel and said something and Ishbel came fluttering wise and quick like a brown hen and took Marsali by the arm to the door. ‘Away lass. Take the pony back; we will be taking the clothes from him, and you’re not to be seeing.’

  Marsali thought that nonsense; had she not seen her brothers, and even Rory, when they swam in the summers at Loch Arkaig? Still, that was Ishbel, and she went out, patiently, and took the pony up away to the hill and let it loose and came back again, slowly, to give them time.

  When she returned, Ishbel was bending over a pot by the fire, and the room was filled with the sharp stench of sorrel tea, Ishbel’s cure for all. It reminded Marsali of her childhood, tucked in her good bed at Glentarvie with childhood ills. The sea man was sleeping now, in James MacKinnon’s bed, and he twisted restlessly there, under heaped blankets. Ishbel believed in sweating illness away.

  She had hung his wet clothing over the back of the spinning chair, and Murdoch and James MacKinnon were musing over it, trying to puzzle something of the secret of the owner’s origin. Marsali went to the bed and looked down on the man. Just for a moment he reminded her of Rory. He had something of the dark, fine cutting of the face; that Spanish look of the black Scotch that was Rory’s. But the face was different too, a stranger’s face, and older. Though Rory, if he lived, would be older now too.

  But the mouth was sad, even in stillness; Rory had had the look of the devil about his smile. And the eyes were so pale, where Rory’s had been so dark, black-brown and rare in their northern land. If it weren’t for the eyes, she would have thought the stranger a Spaniard, for Spanish smugglers knew their coast. But so did many others, Dutch and Danes and French. The seas were wide; he could have come from any ship, and the ship from anywhere.

  ‘You were saying now that he spoke, Murdoch is telling me?’ That was her father, wondering as well. ‘And what would he have been saying, lass, and in what tongue?’

  She paused a moment, somehow wanting to keep private the thing she had heard. She said then, slowly, ‘Just a name … a woman’s name I think … Sylvie.’

  James MacKinnon laughed. ‘Is not that the nature of men. Wrecked in the sea and cast up on the shore, and drowned and dying most like, and yet they will think of a woman.’

  ‘And what else,’ she said suddenly, ‘when all is lost, but to think on one you loved?’

  ‘Aye well enough, lass.’ James MacKinnon turned away from the clothing and looked down at the stranger in his bed and shrugged and went back to the fire. ‘Aye, well enough indeed.’

  Marsali stayed by the bed, and Murdoch said, ‘I cannot be saying from the coat. It could be Italian or French. But it could be from London as well. I will tell you though, surely it is the coat of a gentleman.’

  ‘A gentleman, is it?’ James MacKinnon said slowly. ‘Och well, the sea is not choosy.’ He patted the dog at his feet. The room went very quiet. The stranger on the bed was quieter too, lying very still with one hand flung up beside his face and breathing as though that itself were tiresome work. He seemed distant, as if he had drifted away from them, as if he were still in some sea. Instinctively, she touched the outflung hand, took the hot fingers in her own, as if to draw him back.

  He woke and looked at her and seemed this time to know her, and, as James and Murdoch came closer out of curiosity, he whispered again the word he had spoken on the shore, whispered it twice and then slept again.

  James MacKinnon then laughed and said, ‘Aye well lass, you need not be worrying yourself. It is not a woman he calls for. Only help. Like a gentleman: “s’il vous plait … please”.’ Then he said it quickly, ‘ “Sylvie,” ’ the good linguist he was, like a native. ‘’Tis a Frenchman then, lass.’ He laughed again, pleased. ‘Welcome he is then to the house of MacKinnon. We will have him well again, and we’ll drink to the Auld Alliance, he and I.’ He turned away, still laughing. Marsali thought him heartless, a scoundrel, thinking only and always of his damnable politics.

  ‘And had he been a Hanoverian, no doubt you’d have flung him back into the sea,’ she said coldly.

  ‘Aye, that I might.’

  ‘Well, he is a long way from drinking with you, today,’ Marsali said, weary of him, her eyes on the stranger in the bed.

  Murdoch had come to stand beside her, and he said suddenly, ‘What will this be?’

  Marsali had seen it also, the dark wet band, like a necklace of leather thong, about the stranger’s throat. She shook her head, not knowing, and he reached then to see. It glistened silvery in the firelight as he turned it in hi
s fingers, a plaited thing, of soft fur. He made to untie the water drenched knot at the nape of the stranger’s neck beneath the still damp hair.

  ‘No,’ Marsali said, instinctively. It seemed wrong. Yet Ishbel and James had gathered, curious, and Murdoch fumbled with his big fingers on the knot. But then the sea man awoke and flung his head around and caught Murdoch’s wrist in his fingers and wrenched his hand from the thong necklace. His eyes flashed half-wild with defiance and fever.

  Murdoch pulled his hand free, and there were red lines about his wrist, so hard had the sea man held it.

  ‘Och the devil,’ Murdoch said low, growling, both angry and embarrassed. ‘So you think us thieves, and we just done with saving you.’ He turned his back.

  ‘Away,’ Marsali said angrily. ‘What does he know of that?’ She turned back to the stranger. He lay again with his eyes closed, trembling from that effort, and his fingers locked in the plaited fur as if he thought he must yet defend it. ‘Poor soul, let him be. Why should he not have that comfort?’

  ‘What would I be wanting with the trash?’ Murdoch demanded, his highland pride yet smarting. Marsali smiled to herself. For he was a thief of course, her brother, and her father too. Often enough in the old days, they’d stolen cattle from some enemy or even ridden bold down to the lowlands of the Tay for their raiding. That was within the rules; an elaborate brave game of the clan. But to steal from a friend or a guest was as unthinkable as theft from the church.

  Marsali ignored him but bent over the stranger and spoke softly to him to calm him, first in Gaelic, and then, haltingly in French. He made no answer, but his fingers loosened and he only shivered slightly when she stroked his hair.

  Murdoch laughed oddly and said, ‘Och, you’re soft on him, woman. Would that Rory could see you now.’

  ‘Rory is dead,’ she said, calm as cold metal, and gently took the sea man’s fingers from the fur necklace and entwined them with her own. She touched the necklace lightly with her other hand. He did not stir, and she stroked the silver-grey fur and said softly, ‘What will it be, father?’

  James bent over and studied it without touching and shrugged and said, ‘Some talisman. An amulet. Och, sailor-men are full of such superstition and magic. It is how they gird themselves to face the sea. A green stone from Iona, they say, or the dried caul of a newborn, sure to save them from drowning. It will be the same.’

  ‘Then he is wise, too,’ Marsali said slyly, ‘for did it not serve him well?’

  James shrugged again, but Ishbel said suddenly from the far corner of the room, ‘Take your hand from it, lass, and do not let me be seeing you touch it. It is sealskin … a pagan thing to wear.’ Her old grey eyes flickered quickly to James MacKinnon’s face, but he read nothing of her message, and she said again softly, ‘A pagan thing.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Marsali said, ‘it is nothing of the sort. He will be of the church, as we are, if he is French. They are Catholic and have a Catholic king.’ She was troubled then by the thought that they must fail in their duty by him, him so ill and unshriven of his sins. But what were they to do, here among the Reformers of Skye, and nowhere a priest to be found? She prayed fervently that he might be spared for the sake of his immortal soul.

  Still, he was spared, though James and Murdoch and even Duncan MacLeod said he would die, and whether it was her prayers or his plaited sealskin saved him, Marsali never knew.

  Duncan MacLeod came at midday as he promised. He was a tall man, as Rory had been, long and lean, like Rory. And he had been once as dark as his son, though black had turned white with the years. But his skin was dark tan and leathery, and his stride was strong as a lads. He came into the tiny, smokey house with ceremony, as once he had come to Glentarvie. Marsali must admit, though it irked her, that these men could make a grace out of a meal in a byre. And then, she thought laughingly, set the byre to fire and all to hell for the sake of two cross words. No wonder her mother had said, once, weary, ‘Marry a lowlandman, lass, or an Englishman, even ‒ a sassunach. And leave the highlanders to their hills and their pride.’

  Yet gladly she would have married Duncan’s son.

  He stood over the bed and made his judgment. ‘Aye, most like he’ll not see the day.’ Oh dreary they were, and as calm spoke of death as of morning. So he turned away and accepted James MacKinnon s brandy and said, ‘Well that will be the White Rose then.’ And he told them how the fisherlad, Niall Jamieson, had found the spars of a wrecked ship tangled in his nets and the name, lettered out on an oar. ‘And he there,’ he waved his bony hand to the bed, ‘is all that remains of forty men, no doubt. The fair luck he must have.’

  ‘The luck of the white rose,’ James MacKinnon said with his slow smile. It pleased him, like an omen, that the stranger shared their symbol, the white rose of the Stuart kings.

  Marsali laughed softly. ‘Aye. The Stuart luck. Forty men drowned and one more at the door of death. The Stuart luck indeed.’

  James growled something and turned away, but he was yet pleased about the Frenchman and the symbol from the sea. He withdrew with Duncan, the two of them by the lofty, silly bookcase, pondering over the paper that MacLeod had brought, the letter from some exile in France. They would not show it to Marsali, but James grew gay reading it and jests passed between them and that quick light of longed-for revenge.

  Marsali busied herself at her spinning wheel and would not think of them, would not look at them; her eyes remained on the sleeping Frenchman instead.

  For three weeks she nursed him faithfully, as if that sudden flickering scrap of life cast in their midst was an antidote to all the destruction of the past. She felt as if she were warring against her father, and the foreigner’s life was her weapon against the disastrous game that he played.

  There was a second letter from France. And a third. James grew remote and intent, scant noticing anything, least of all that weary creature in his bed fighting with fever and the aching, rending cough. Marsali held his head when the coughing became retching and wiped his face and bathed his wrists with water from the icy spring. Ishbel made herb tea, and broth, which he could not swallow; but she walked wary around him, as around the devil.

  Murdoch helped her, grudgingly, but James only glanced on him occasionally as he would on the dog, and Marsali hated him for it. Still he was not all unkindness; for the Frenchman’s sake, James slept those three weeks on the clay floor, wrapped only in his plaid. But that was the demand of hospitality, a reflection of pride.

  There was so little caring in him, no sense at all of the preciousness of life. But, Marsali thought, he had seemed to care little more for his son; cared only that he’d died bravely and for the Cause. What was the Cause of a king then that made it more precious than the lives that king was to serve?

  Still the three weeks passed and the fever with them, and one morning the sea man awoke quite rational and asked Marsali in French for water and thanked her politely and asked again in French where it was that he’d come to, and how?

  At that James looked up from his reading, and grinned, full of interest now. It was as if he’d not waste his time on something like to vanish away somewhere at any moment. He rose up and crossed the room to the box bed and pulled back the curtain and sat down on the edge of the bed, the curtain runkled up at his back.

  He looked carefully at the sea man, a thin, ragged, half-bearded creature now, but with a cool, secure calm about the dreamy sea-grey eyes. James decided he liked what he saw; there was strength there and independence and a streak of stubborn, illogical confidence for a stranger at the mercy of strangers. Those were things he could respect.

  ‘Indeed now,’ he said in French, ‘I think you shall tell us first who you are, and where you come from, since you have kept it a secret for a fortnight and more, and you the while a guest in my house.’ There was a challenge in his voice, and the sea man smiled slightly and tilted his head back against the feather pillow, legacy of Glentarvie. He managed to look a gentleman, even there, in Murdoch�
��s handsown nightshirt

  ‘Aye then. A fair request.’ He spoke softly, in perfect West Coast Gaelic, a trace of the islands in the accent. He smiled again, a subtle, island smile. ‘It is from Barra that I come.’

  James MacKinnon leaned back slowly against the curtain. The sea man was laughing at him, he knew, pretending to be foreign when he was but an island Scot the while. And yet James was rather enjoying the whole thing, so he said, very calmly, in Gaelic now, ‘And what does a Barra man do with a coat from France, and speaking until now in French? Would it be courting my daughter you are after, in the tongue of romance?’

  The sea man laughed aloud then, a lovely laugh, Marsali thought, soft and sweet, and he said still in Gaelic, ‘But you see now, I was thinking myself to be in France the while.’

  ‘Well you can think yourself to be in Trotternish on the romantic dung-heap of Skye.’ That was Murdoch, at the door with a string of shining herring and much bad grace.

  ‘The man is our guest, Murdoch,’ James MacKinnon said dangerously to the floor, and Murdoch glowered and said nothing more.

  ‘So it is Skye then,’ the sea man said softly, almost to himself.

  ‘A long way from Barra,’ James MacKinnon returned mildly.

  ‘Aye. A good day’s sail.’

  ‘And what was the White Rose to be doing with Barra?’ That was Murdoch again, from the scullery, where he’d gone with his fish. The sea man paused and rested his head back against the pillow as if thinking. Perhaps trying to remember, Marsali thought.

  ‘The White Rose,’ he said slowly. ‘She is gone then?’

  ‘She is driftwood on the shore,’ said James.

  He paused again, so long that Marsali thought he must be mourning his shipmates or someone else the sea had taken from him.

  ‘I am sorry,’ she said.

  He looked at her, for the first time with awareness, and studied her face and her long loose hair and when he spoke he said nothing at all about the ship, or his shipmates, but smiled slightly, saying, ‘Aye, maybe it was courting your daughter I was after.’