The Sea-Harrower: A Scottish Highlander Historical Romance

by Abigail Clements

  ‘But they did not of course. They were arrested, och, hours later. There were soldiers everywhere then, for the prince was in the lowlands, and they had strengthened the garrisons at Inverness and Fort Augustus, with him away. We knew we must not touch it, surely, it not being ours. But the boys could not resist a peek at it, so when all was quiet again, the three foreigners away, we crept down and uncovered it from the wee shelter they had given it, and we pried up the lid and saw gold, och so much gold, never ever will I see so much again. Like sunlight, trapped in that box. But we hid it away, and told my father.

  ‘Well enough, he knew all about the ship, Ste. Genevieve, which was meant to bring money to the prince. You see, he was always without that, and he could never buy food enough … the fool he was, never seeing that even brave men and loyal must yet eat. Still the money had been sent, but the ship was caught, off the shore, and chased and run onto the rocks. And those three, they saved some of the gold and all, but what then could they do with it?’

  ‘My father had it hidden of course. To wait for the prince.’

  She laughed then, bitterly, walking beside Antoine up the steep, frosty path, her bare feet numb. ‘Aye, and it waits yet. And it will wait. Until the wood is rotted to nothing and the gold creeps back into the earth. For that, I am telling you, will all happen most surely, before our gallant prince returns. And we go barefoot yet,’ she laughed again, kicking her skirt aside to show him, ‘all for his gallant sake.’

  ‘Would you have another use for that gold?’ Antoine asked quietly.

  She was silent, wrapped in her loose hair and the greyed plaid. She said honestly, ‘Time and again I think of it. When we are cold and hungry. When there is not enough seed, or no tools, or the Dear knows what. I thought of it most when my mother yet lived, like a pretty bird she was, in that bleak winter cage.’ She waved to the Ghillies Cot below. Then she said coldly, ‘But I am not a thief, yet, Antoine, though I am not rich. And I am proud of my father. He is loyal and fine. And he does not trade in slaves.’

  ‘Och, he would, you know lass, if it suited his Cause.’

  ‘Maybe he would,’ she said fiercely, spinning about and facing him on the cold winter hill. ‘For his king. But not for gold.’

  ‘And is that so much a better thing?’

  She shrugged. ‘I would not be knowing.’ She shook her head, wildly, letting the plaid fall back, leaving her hair free in the first of the morning sun. ‘I think it such madness. And yet when they stand and sing their songs, and toast the prince and tell all the brave stories of all the years, I cannot but weep for the joy of it. Is that not mad?’

  Antoine smiled and said, ‘Some men weep for gold. That surely is madder.’

  ‘And you,’ she said softly, as they stood by the thatched roof eave, mouldery brown and filled with the scurrying of mice. ‘What do you weep for, or have you never wept at all?’

  ‘For an old world, Marsali, that is dying. That is something to weep for. Like yon prince, now, lass, it will not come again. The glaistig has not come for the milk, has it now?’

  ‘How are you knowing about the glaistig?’

  She studied him, a little fearfully, but he only said, ‘It will not come again.’ He stretched his arms up to the drift wood eave of the house, stretching his long, cold body like a cat. They could hear Ishbel in the byre, muttering to the hens, and her father’s voice and Murdoch’s in the house. The grey dog came out and cringed against the wall at the sight of Antoine there, by the door.

  He caught Marsali by the length of her hair and said, ‘I am going away, lassie, a day yet again. Will you come with me to the land of flowers?’

  ‘I will not.’

  ‘Then you will never see me again.’

  ‘And why should I be minding that?’

  ‘No reason,’ he said, and turned to the door. Still she could not let him go, but caught his hand, and he looked down, coolly, with his grey eyes and did not even bend. She must stretch then, and did, and reached to kiss him. He turned his head away.

  ‘Go to your porridge, lassie,’ he smiled.

  ‘The devil with you,’ she whispered, angry but not to be heard by the listening ears about.

  ‘To the ends of the earth, Marsali,’ he said just as softly, ‘to the ends of the earth.’

  Then he went in, and she was alone. Och never, never, she thought. The sea wind rose and rattled in the rowan tree, that blessing by their door. The dry crisp yellow leaves, frost-tinged, shook free and clustered onto her hair. She remembered another rowan, another time, where she and Rory had pledged, long gone.

  She reached up and caught a waving branch of the tree. She broke it free and snapped it in half, and halves again. She clutched them tight in her hand and closed her eyes and said, holy tree, I fling thee in the wind. Let me see my true love’s face. She whirled around and cast them away and closed her eyes again. She saw in her mind not Rory, nor Antoine’s face. But the seal creature he had swum with, grey and sleek, that had embraced him, like a lover, in the sea.

  Chapter Four

  ‘Scotchman.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Scotchman, we make a bargain.’

  ‘Aye,’ said the young man, mildly wary. He kept his head down over the plough shafts, the hat brim pulled over his face and his dark eyes on the broken black loam. Jean Dubois walked at the lead oxen’s heads, two beasts’ lengths ahead. But Jean had eyes quick and sharp as a cat.

  February in the Carolina colony was mild and wet, sun breaking through the steamy mist above the bare cottonwoods. It would be warm by noon. The Scotchman would take off his coat and swear and give a devil’s glance to the sun. You would think, Jean Dubois would say to him, that six years would be enough, and he’d just call a truce with Carolina. But the Scotchman had his eyes and his mind and his heart on the east and the wet grey country he’d come from. It was no way to emigrate.

  You had to fling yourself into your new land and love it, heat and swamp and malaria; like Jean’s father had, Jean Dubois did not mind for himself. He was native-born, a man of the New World: the Old, France, Scotland, all of it, could go to hell for all he cared.

  He was a big man, heavy, with broad, fleshy shoulders and a neck that folded over his stained shirt, like his belly folding over his britches. Louisa yet cooked in the old French style of her mother and fed them all too well. His hundred acres of half-won river soil were fertile enough. But this field would not feed them; it was for tobacco, their cash crop, and Jean ploughed it with pleasure. He would not be a poor man forever.

  He glanced too casually back at the Scotchman’s bent head. He’d caught the wariness, but he chose to ignore it. He said, just as casually, as if he were giving the Bible lesson in his church, ‘Now Joseph was a man you might understand. He had seven years to work, also. And there was a woman in it, as well.’ Jean talked with a funny placeless voice. His English was right, but not perfect, and his French was the same. The slow language of Carolina had not crept into his speech though, and he kept the formal inflection of the Old World. ‘Of course Laban had two daughters. But me, I make it easy for you, I have just one. But ah, that daughter, she is prettier, I swear, than Rachel and Leah heaped together. No?’

  ‘Oh indeed, indeed,’ the young man said, with a smile. That was easy said, and honest. Charlotte Dubois was a pretty woman, fair and pale as a forest flower with her white-blond hair flicking about her hips. And she could hold the plough as well as himself. She would no doubt make a splendid wife.

  ‘Forty acres. I cannot give you more. But it is a start, and who knows, soon I grow old and die, and it is all for you.’

  ‘The hell you do. You’ll outlive us both.’

  ‘Scotchman, you strike a hard bargain. Fifty acres.’

  ‘Och, will you not see, Jean Dubois. ’Tis not your land and not your daughter I want. I am not a farming man. And I am less a Carolina man. I am going away home the day I am free, and no day later.’

  Jean nodded, not surprised; he�
��d expected that. ‘So Scotland and your crownless king, they are yet with you?’ Jean stopped still and the oxen stopped and the young man looked up. Jean swept his broad linen-sleeved arm about in a mocking circle, sweeping in the cottonwoods and the swamp land by the river, with the steam rising and the grey moss-hung boughs of the bald cypress. ‘Is it not an odd thing that I cannot see them?’

  ‘Odd indeed,’ the Scotchman said, calling up the beasts and shaking the reins so that Jean would have to move, whether he liked or no. ‘I see them everywhere.’

  ‘Only the other day,’ Jean said, walking backwards, shaking his big, shaggy brown head, ‘I hear a mighty groan from the swamp, and I think, at last here is the Scotchman’s crownless king, come out of the forest to fetch him. So I creep, like a fox, into the swamp, and there, sitting on a log, is a big alligator, with a green-brown horny head. And I say, “Your majesty?”, but the alligator, he say nothing. Maybe now, he has not heard of the Auld Alliance, no?’

  ‘Go to hell, Jean Dubois,’ the Scotchman said, laughing.

  ‘I think it is better than Scotland.’

  ‘Aye, maybe. Surely now, it is no warmer than Carolina,’ said the young man. Then he bent to his work, and Jean knew he would say no more about it.

  It was not the first time they had discussed it, Scotland and the Rising and Culloden; and the exile that had brought the Scotchman here. Jean was wise about men, and even that day on the dock, six years past, when he’d picked from a line of men this dark-haired stranger with the hardened, scarred young face, he’d known already that the man had a tale to tell. But he’d liked him. That was the way of Jean Dubois. Given any beast: horse, dog, bull-calf, it was his nature to pick the meanest and usually make a kind of brutal peace with it.

  So he had done with the Scotchman. He was Jean Dubois’s property, fair enough, for those seven years of indentured service. The only difference between him and the black Africans on the same Charleston dock was that limit of time. The English, tired of hanging Scotchmen, or whatever, had sent him, and dozens like him. Jean Dubois paid back the price of his passage, and that then was the price of the man. For three days he’d kept him locked in the barn at night. But that did not suit his nature, much, anymore than it suited the Scotchman.

  So he’d made a bargain. That fourth morning, he’d looked coolly in the eye of the Scotchman and said, ‘You are free now, to come and go. You may eat in my house, and sleep in my barn. You will work for me, true, but the Sabbath you will have free. I will not tie you in any way. But if you run off, I will catch you and I will kill you. Agreed?’

  Then the Scotchman had smiled, that slightly fearsome smile, twisted by the sabre scar on his cheek, and said, ‘I do not think you would catch me, and I do not think, once caught, that you would likely be the one to do the killing. However, you have bargained for me, fairly; you have paid my unwanted passage; and I will not cheat you. I give you my word that I will stay the seven years. On this day, seven years hence, I will leave. Now we will not talk more about it.’

  And that was the end of it. Only it wasn’t, because for six years they had shared a hundred acres of reclaimed Carolina swamp, and ploughed and sown, and dug and hoed, and harvested side by side. Even the most reticent of men gives a bit away in a life like that. And the Scotchman was forever eager of news and asking after strangers. Once he had walked forty miles into the Upland, bound only by his word, to speak to a stranger who had news of his surrendered homeland.

  He had come home bleak and spoke no word of it. Jean Dubois knew well enough that those seven years were a torture of restlessness and longing, and fair bargain or no, it weighed heavy on his mind.

  And then there was Charlotte.

  She had been a child when the Scotchman came, a scrawny long-legged girl of twelve, wild as a piebald filly. Jean Dubois’s farm was twelve miles of river swamp from the next; he had no neighbours, and Charlotte was his only child. She had scarce seen a young man, much less talked to or touched one. Those first years he had watched with an uneasy, undefined concern. She had played with him, a child in all but form, rode his back as she rode a pony, her long pale arms about his neck, and her skirts hiked up, thin bare legs about his waist.

  It was not the Scotchman he mistrusted. Clear enough he could see the poor, lonely soul was finding in Charlotte the echo of others, brothers, sisters, whatever lost family he had possessed. She was only a child to him, a mock-sister, fair and pretty and innocent.

  Jean Dubois knew better. He knew women, as well as men. He had chosen Louisa, his wife, at a wedding dance. She was neither beautiful, nor stylish, a small round person with black hair tied up neat the way her French mother taught her. Her eyes were dark and downcast, her little hands folded neat. A sweet, mild, Huguenot miss in a white linen bonnet, prayer book under her arm.

  Jean danced with her and ran his hand down her back and felt her shiver and shudder. He proposed the next day.

  Charlotte was the same kind of a creature.

  She was eighteen now. She had come to him, three days ago, and said, calm as a whore, ‘Papa, I want the Scotchman. Give him to me.’

  Little the use him saying the Scotchman was not his to give; a servant, but not a slave. Little the use him saying, as he had said, ‘Daughter, you’ll not keep him.’ Women did not comprehend that a man could be more in love with war than with love itself.

  He looked long and cool at her, then, in her cotton frock and apron, and the bonnet, shadowing her nervous, shifting eyes. She twisted her apron strings and swayed back and forth like a child, shifting her feet. He’d seen her like that when she loitered, shameless in the barnyard, watching the stallion man and his beast at its work on the mares. She with her hungry eyes, and her restless mouth; hot as a hound-bitch his daughter with the white madonna face.

  ‘I will ask,’ Jean said, and went away.

  And now he had tried. And failed. Frustrated, he said angrily, ‘You’re a jackass, Scotchman.’

  ‘Aye.’

  The man could drive you crazy with his ayeing and naying and never listening the while. ‘What good has your king ever done you? What good has any king ever done anyone? Your fine allies, those noble kings of France, they saw us slaughtered in our thousands, for our faith. And then they up and change their minds, and then, oh, we are welcome, we are fine Frenchmen again. And then they change their minds again, and we are chased and harried and played with like mice before the cat.

  ‘My father, he was a wise man. He moved his arse out of there and left the fat papist pussycat to play with other mice.’ Jean bent and picked a clod of damp dung from the black earth. ‘That,’ he said, waving it, ‘that for my king and your king alike. And for the Pope as well.’ He flung it, whistling past the Scotchman’s head.

  The Scotchman would not be stirred. He plodded on, in the steps of the oxen, and said quietly, ‘And you would have your daughter marry a papist?’

  ‘Ah, be damned. Papist, Protestant, it’s no matter to me, Scotchman. Not here. This is a big country, a big empty country. Men only scrabble over such things in little countries, where there is no room to live without falling one over the other. Here, my neighbour, he give me trouble, I move. Or he move. You give me trouble, papist, I blow your head off. This is the New World. We are tolerant.’ Jean grinned, his big wide, engaging grin, twitching up his bushy brown moustache.

  ‘Aye, but you have a king as well, here, that brave Hanoverian bastard.’

  ‘Aye, indeed we do,’ Jean mocked the singsong, putting that quizzical highland tone into his own voice. ‘But he is a long way away. He gives me trouble, I blow his head off. But funny now, Scotchman, how one man’s king is another man’s bastard.’

  ‘He is a usurper.’

  ‘They are all usurpers. Usurping the time, and the peace, and the rights of men like you and me. And the gold. The sooner you learn that, the wiser the man you will be. What has your king given you, but that mark of Cain on your face?’

  He turned his back on the Scot
chman, and he in turn looked at Jean’s broad uncompromising shoulders and touched that sharp line down his cheekbone to his jaw with light fingers, as if the pain were still there. For a moment he saw, not Jean, but the road from Culloden, in the April rain, with Cumberland’s forces like the archangel, behind them.

  ‘It is over,’ said Jean Dubois, without turning. ‘That Scotland you knew. Make your life here, Rory MacLeod.’

  They stayed then, both unbending, in a sour temper, with silence between them, until midday. Then they went back across the wet, ploughed field, to the long log house in the cottonwood grove.

  Louisa Dubois was at her soap-making, under the boughs of a vast live oak, with the slow smoke of the fire swirling lazy around her. The black pot, with hickory ash lye and hog tallow, bubbled and steamed, and she stirred it methodically, pretending not to notice the two men walking by. She knew very well the question of the morning, and, from the faces of both, she knew the answer.

  She did not know if she was pleased, or not pleased. She liked the Scotchman, but her French Huguenot upbringing was stricter than Jean’s, She did not see her daughter married to a papist. And being gentle mother, rather than pragmatic father, she did not see what Jean saw: that Charlotte was like to have him, papist or Protestant, married, or in sin, any way, but have him.

  They went into the shadowy cool house. Charlotte was busy with her bake-kettle baking rye bread. In summer, that hot work would be done out of doors. But they were yet in the half-chill, undefined days of spring. Charlotte looked up with half-chill eyes, uncertain as the day. She knew, too, what her father had proposed. Rory’s dark face, handsome for all its scarring, was turned away. There was her answer.

  Charlotte served the dinner, and did not look at or speak to anyone.