‘Besides,’ he added with a small smile, ‘the place fair seethes with priests; we may throw ourselves on the mercy of the church, if all else fails.’
But that proved unnecessary, for Antoine, with calm surety, led them beside the River Rhone and into the city and through the narrow, cobbled streets until he found, tucked in between a church and a convent, a solid, old two-storey house. It had many shuttered windows and small balconies of black iron before the upper ones; the door was plain wood, fastened firmly shut.
There was a bell, hanging at the doorside, a proper bell too, no mere tirling pin like in Glasgow. He rang it boldly and stood waiting, with the confident air of an aristocrat for all his travel-weary look and dust-stained clothing. When the door was opened by a servant girl, he said only, ‘Antoine Sainte Marie,’ and at once they were hurried within.
The servant girl disappeared, with a clatter of wooden shoes on the old, wood floor. Marsali stood looking about her, while Ishbel hobbled stiffly into the hallway, leaning on Antoine’s arm. It had been once a fine house, and indeed still was, but everything in it, from the carved straight-backed chairs, with their brocaded cushions, to the plastered walls and charming provincial paintings, was dulled over with age and neglect. There were cracks along the edges of the plaster walls, and the mural of flowers and fruit above the empty fireplace in the hallway was peeling and chipped. The room was cold, for the spring air was raw yet in the evening, and the mistral wind was blowing rough round the towers of Avignon.
‘’Tis like a graveyard in here,’ Ishbel said, shivering.
‘’Tis a graveyard indeed,’ Antoine said. ‘As is all of Avignon. Where they once buried popes, and yet bury princes, even when they are not yet dead. And old causes come, like great grey elephants, to die.’ He laughed softly to himself, and said then, ‘’Tis no wonder that poor Tearlach spends as little time here as he might. Louie and Geordie, they are edging him off the map of the world, you see. First from Scotland, and then from France. Avignon in Venaissan he is allowed, for it is no real country at all, but a pension-state of the Pope’s. It is Rome where they want him, to be sure, for that is the centre of the old world that is dying, a fine and rightful place for kings and princes of the past.’
‘But he has a household here, surely, and all his following …’ Ishbel protested.
‘Indeed,’ Antoine said, ‘and here comes the pick of them.’
The door at the end of the hallway opened and a short, round man in a frock coat and a worn, unstylish wig came in with both arms extended. He had a red face, from long years in Scottish winds, not yet modified by the gentler climate of Venaissan, and he roared out, ‘Robert Cameron, at your service, and an honour it is to be serving yourself.’ That was all for Antoine, and though he made a short proper bow to both Marsali and Ishbel, he more or less ignored them.
‘I am hearing from your father in a letter only the week past,’ he went on.
‘Then that is more than I have heard,’ Antoine said quietly, ‘for near six months. Is he well?’ Marsali sensed an odd reserve, as if he spoke of a stranger.
‘He is as well as a man is whose son never writes.’
‘I was shipwrecked and ill and in danger of my life in your far treacherous North,’ Antoine said, dramatically. ‘How could I be writing?’
‘You were in Glasgow, as well, lad, and in fine health there, and were it not for Annandale the tobacco merchant, your father would yet think you lost with the White Rose. You could have been kinder.’
Antoine shrugged. ‘I did not come here for a father’s wrath from one who is not my father,’ he said sharply and Robert Cameron withdrew visibly from the reprimand.
Marsali, annoyed at Antoine’s churlishness to a man from whom they would seek help, said suddenly, ‘I would not waste a good reprimand on him. He has no manners and never shall, and whoever his father is, he deserves his treatment, no doubt, for rearing such a haughty, impossible son.’
Cameron gasped and looked shocked, but she ignored that and stared bold-eyed at Antoine, whom she expected to find outraged. He was not. He blinked once, like a sleepy cat, and said, ‘She is quite right, you know. I am thinking I am better for her company. You see, lass,’ he said mildly, ‘in this country I am very much a special person, because of my father, and he so, because of his father, and if you carry on with that, the begetting of one and another, like in the days of Noah, you will find at the end some terrible tyrant who slaughtered all the countryside and made all the land and animals and people there his own. Because of him now, I am treated with respect, and showered with gold, and men like the Chevalier Cameron, who otherwise have much good sense, bow and scrape and fawn all over for me. What are you thinking of that?’
‘I am thinking it is idiotic,’ she said.
‘Indeed,’ Antoine said with his long, slow smile, ‘and for just such a reason, and such a man as I, your father has sent us to Avignon.’ Then he laughed aloud and said like a proclamation, ‘Robert Cameron, this is Marsali, the daughter of MacKinnon of Glentarvie, who fought as you yourself fought, in forty-five. She has journeyed the whole way from Trotternish on the Isle of Skye, all for the love of the sweet cause and the service of bonnie Prince Tearlach. Will you be telling her now, where well she might find him?’
There was a great silence in the hallway, and in the silence the door opened, and all four turned quickly to see. A young woman was standing, quite still, in the doorway. She made no introduction but said quietly, ‘And who is seeking Prince Tearlach at the house of Robert Cameron?’
She was not a beautiful woman, but young, tall and strong-boned with striking dark red hair and deep brown eyes and a fair clear complexion that belonged to the North. Robert Cameron said at once, ‘Come in, come in.’ He caught the girl by the white muslin sleeve of her blouse and said, ‘’Twas not long, surely, since you dined here with the Comte de Sainte Marie, Mary. This then is his youngest son, Antoine, who in the winter we all thought lost.’
She smiled and curtsied and nodded to Marsali and Ishbel. Robert Cameron said, ‘He has come with his friends seeking the prince all the way from Skye.’ Suddenly the woman became animated, and her face was at once charming, with a misty remembrance.
‘Och surely you have not? And have you been by way of Argyll? For that was my home, and all.’ When they said they had, she begged to be told all the news of home, for she too was an exile.
‘So pretty an outcast,’ Antoine said gently. ‘What have you done to King Geordie to be sent thus away?’
‘Oh nothing, surely, I but a poor clansman’s wife. But my husband was out with all his clan and taken prisoner after Culloden. I fled away when they burned our poor house, but Robert Cameron gave me shelter.’
‘A poor shelter it was,’ he said. ‘Within a month Cumberland had burned it too, and we came here then, my wife and Mary Grant and I. And here we will stay,’ he added solemnly, ‘until King James himself goes home.’ He smiled at Mary Grant and she at him, and Marsali saw that their hopes of the homecoming of King James had become a threadbare thing, like the weary old house.
‘And your husband?’ asked Antoine.
‘Oh, dead. Long dead. On the prison ship; of the cholera, I was told.’
‘It is lonely you must be so far from home.’ Antoine’s pale eyes conveyed a melting sympathy which Marsali saw with amazement. But Mary Grant curtsied again and thanked him for his kind concern.
Robert Cameron led them into the drawing room, where Ishbel gratefully sat in a deep soft chair and closed her eyes as if she would sleep. Antoine said suddenly, ‘We will be needing shelter; can you provide it?’ He spoke rather like a prince, expecting service from all about him, and to Marsali’s surprise, he got it.
‘I will be honoured, to be sure, though I fear my household lives meagrely. But you are most welcome, if you are willing to share what I can offer.’ Antoine nodded, but made no thanks, only an acceptance.
‘Marsali and Mistress MacLean will stay with you.’ An
d then, as if thinking of something else entirely, he went on, ‘I will find lodgings in a tavern nearby,’ adding quickly, ‘I would not wish to burden you too heavily.’
‘But I am only too willing …’
‘A tavern,’ said Antoine. He was looking with cool, careful eyes at the slender back of Mistress Grant, where she leaned now over a delicate gilded table, pouring brandy into crystal glasses. She turned and glanced down from his look as she handed the glasses about.
Only when they had toasted each other, and Antoine’s father, and King James, did Robert Cameron say quietly, ‘What proof have you, sir, that the lady is who she claims to be? I have heard of MacKinnon of Glentarvie in the old days, but I knew of no daughter.’
‘She was but a child in the old days,’ Antoine said sourly. ‘How would you have heard of her? She is the lass I found living in the house of MacKinnon, he calling her daughter and she calling him father. The same lass who nursed me when I was ill and the same who travelled here with me. I cannot think what more proof I could give.’
‘You must forgive me, sir,’ Robert Cameron said, ‘but the world is a dangerous place for us these days. There is treachery everywhere, and struggle amongst men who once were loyal. We have been too long waiting for a thing which does not happen. The prince himself is threatened left and right. The French who were his friends are enemies now, and the English are everywhere with spies and informers. We have learned to live carefully indeed.’
‘That is fair enough,’ Marsali said, hating herself as she said it, ‘but I am indeed the daughter of James MacKinnon, and he did indeed send me here with a message of great importance for the prince.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper as she spoke, finding it hard to speak so edgily around her own treachery.
Robert Cameron whispered also, thinking it was privacy she sought. ‘Shall we withdraw to my study?’ he said. His head bowed low, conspiratorially, and he glanced nervously to the windows that fronted on the busy street. But at that moment the door to the drawing room banged open, and a big, broad-hipped woman, with a mass of grey hair pushed resignedly under a stained linen cap, stood, blocking the doorway and crying out, ‘An’ yet they whisper, as if the devil himself were awaitin’ whenever they speak o’ Chairlie. Will ye not admit that he turned his back on Avignon, three long years since an’ scarce the sight we have o’ him.’
‘Hush woman,’ Robert Cameron said, embarrassed. ‘This is Elizabeth, my wife,’ he said, adding, ‘a lowland woman, and blunt. Here is the son of the Comte de Sainte Marie come seeking Charles Edward, and you will mind how you speak in front of him.’
Elizabeth Cameron strode into the room and flopped her bulk down in a chair, hands on knees like a gossiping farm-wife. ‘Och well, the son of himself, I will mind my manners.’
‘You needn’t bother,’ Antoine said happily. ‘I have none myself, I’ve just been told. And do you not honour Tearlach like all the rest?’
She smiled, a red-cheeked, motherly smile, out of place in this southern and formal drawing room. ‘’Tis a coarse woman I am, I fear, lad. His highland lairdship there could not change me, nor could Avignon, nor I fear could Chairlie. Aye, I did honour him, long ago. But for the sake of Chairlie I have lived in this braw palace with its kitchen wall half crumbled away, and nothing to eat but what we scratch out the garden, and the poor guileless rabbit from time to time.’ She glanced quickly to Marsali and Ishbel and said, ‘Ye’re not like to have brought a wee salt-herring with ye from home?’ and then shrugged at once, shaking her own head to answer herself.
‘I am weary of it. An’ weary, too, of the whisperin’ an the talkin’ an’ the waitin’ from day into day, into month, into year. Five years now, we bide on Chairlie makin’ his move. Och he comes, or they say he comes, or he sends minions, and that wee bit money when the debts are over bad. An’ he keeps the house with the servants, an’ Sheridan an’ Stafford awaitin’ his comin’ and makin’ plans for the Dear knows what. But then he is gone again, and none knows where.
‘I mind well the day he left, tellin’ all the folk he was ill, and us worryin’ and prayin’ for his health, and away he goes in the night, with his crony Goring, the while. I know his kind, liking the tricking of us, and the picture of us glowerin’ with loyal eye up to his window, an’ picturing him languishing there. Och, ’tis the way o’ princes and kings and all o’er rich, spoiled men; they cannot bide folk not circling round them all ways, like auld cluckin’ hens.’
Mary Grant was laughing softly, and Marsali with her, but Robert Cameron grew gruff, and said, ‘Enough woman, you make a mockery of a serious thing.’
‘I am thinking it is better than making o’er serious a thing of a mockery,’ said Antoine. ‘Go on, mistress, I am enjoying this.’
‘Och well, there is little to say. Only that here we remain, still the cluckin’ hens, circlin’ around an empty nest, with no thoughts in our wee hen-heads but Chairlie. An’ ’tis an empty life.’
Marsali said desperately, ‘My father said always that Tearlach would be here. ’Twas his friend, Donald MacKay, who is here among you, who said it. And ’twas from Sheridan he had it, too. And even upon the ship, Sea-Harrower, when we sailed, there was a man who swore …’
‘Lassie, always there is one who swears he is here. Another swears he is in Rome.’ That was Robert Cameron, solemn and glum. ‘Again he is in Paris, to be sure, and expected next week in Ghent. I have heard for certain that he is in Lithuania, and about to marry a princess there as well. I have heard as certainly that he is in London, at Geordie’s own front door. Again and again I have heard he is dead. I have come to know I must believe only what I see. If you are wanting surely to see him, then you may well expect to wait. He will be here, but the Dear Lord knows when, and the Dear Lord alone knows where he is now.’
Marsali sank back in her chair and said softly, trying to control her voice, lest she give herself and her desperation away, ‘But I must find him. I cannot wait.’ Then she cried out angrily, frightened for her father and frustrated, ‘Will you be telling me now, how you managed to lose so obvious a thing as a prince?’
Elizabeth laughed and her red cheeks glistened with warmth and she slapped her knees with broad, damp palms. Then she said, ‘A prince, with nary a crown nor a country, is not so remarkable a thing. Very like a beggar he can become, slipping down the road like a wraith, and living off the world, like it owes him it. Scant difference now between a pauper beggin’ bawbees on Glesca Green, an’ a prince beggin’ pension from King Louie. Ye see, lassie, once ye come to strippin’ the fancy trappins off, a prince is very like a man. An’ the world is full o’ men.’
Marsali nodded slowly, taking that in, and turned without really looking and said, ‘Antoine, what am I to do?’ But Antoine did not answer. He was drinking slowly from his brandy and looking down into the brown eyes of Mary Grant.
‘You are jealous, lass,’ Ishbel said firmly. ‘That is what is wrong with you.’
‘I am not,’ Marsali replied. ‘’Tis not of himself I am thinking at all, but of my father, and my promise to him. We are ten days now in Avignon.’
Ishbel snugged herself more securely beneath the faded but luxurious coverlet. The spring sun lay in bars across the wooden floor, and warm air, sweet with the scents of the garden beyond, drifted into the room. Marsali got up from her chair at Ishbel’s bedside and went impatiently away, out onto the balcony. The room the Camerons had given Ishbel was surely the finest in the house, with its charming balcony and view of the courtyard garden and the olive and orange trees fluttering fresh boughs against the windows. That was the doing of Elizabeth, warm-hearted and kind.
For Ishbel had spent most all of those ten days in that room, and most of that in the bed. It was not like her, tough, old hearty soul she was, and had Marsali been less concerned over her father, and the finding of the prince, she might have worried more over the old woman. But she was driven by impatience with all delays, and the truth was, she was sure of Ishbel as children are of t
heir parents and had never lost that childish faith in her old nurse’s invincibility.
Elizabeth Cameron had made a great fuss over Ishbel and insisted she take to her bed and stay there until utterly well and would hear no talk of travelling on. And Antoine, always the restless one, ready to be roaming, was for once no use. Content he was, to remain apparently forever.
‘What think you then of Mary Grant,’ Ishbel called in a thin, inquiring voice from within. Marsali remained on the balcony, looking down on the red brick courtyard and stuccoed walls half-hidden by trees.
‘I think she is a fine young woman, and you have asked me that twice before, wifie.’ She almost smiled but did not turn and kept her eyes on the churchyard to her left. To the right of the garden was another high wall, and beyond, the gardens of the convent beside them. Two nuns walked, arm in arm, about the brick walk of their own courtyard, the black and white of their habits like the plumage of the peewits on the ploughed fields of home.
‘Aye, so I have. Perhaps if I got the truth I would need not be asking again.’
‘That is the truth,’ Marsali said angrily.
‘Then you’re not minding that Antoine spends his days with her.’
‘Whether I mind or no, she is still a fine young woman. Too good for him by half,’ she added sharply.
Ishbel said, ‘Proud women, when truly jealous, side with the woman against the man. It is a saving of the pride to call him worthless.’
Marsali spun about angrily, and would have had harsh words, but the church bells began to ring in the convent, for some secret religious reason of their own, and by the time they were done, her anger was done as well. She came in from the balcony and sat on the foot of Ishbel’s bed, looking uneasily down at her leather shoes. ‘It is not my right to determine where he spends his days, or with whom. He is but a friend I travel with.’
The Sea-Harrower: A Scottish Highlander Historical Romance Page 16
