‘I am thinking you are right,’ Rory said. He went forward and knelt beside the grave and leaned over it, rubbing the grey mould that would soon be moss, off the letters, MARGARET MACKINNON, carved there.
‘Are ye prayin’, sir?’
Rory turned his head to her, not really seeing her. He shook his head, and she said, ‘Were ye knowin’ the lady, yourself?’
‘Aye,’ Rory said softly. ‘And I knew her daughter well, as long as I could remember, since she was no bigger than yourself, and I the same.’ Jamesina looked at herself and at him, doubtfully. Rory said then, quietly, a little painfully, ‘Can you be telling me, lassie, whose house was yon?’
She looked over the wall at the scraggy broken eaves, blackened from a long-gone fire. She shook her head. ‘Surely it was a grand house.’
‘Aye,’ said Rory. ‘’Twas your laird’s house, once.’
The child withdrew slightly and said, ‘’Twas long ago, if it was at all. Long ago, afore I was born. It has been a ruin like yon, all my life.’
Rory paused, his fingers tracing the name on the gravestone, again. Above him, rooks cawed aimlessly in a tall elm tree. Culloden was history. Like Queen Mary and Robert the Bruce. A lifetime ago; before she was born. Yesterday.
‘The English laird has built a fine new house, sir, down in the glen, by Loch Arkaig.’
‘I do not doubt,’ said Rory. ‘I do not doubt.’
He touched her head with his hand as he passed and aimlessly rubbed the cow’s grass-slimed nose. Jamesina tamed at his touch, blue-grey eyes pensive in the thin, dusky-skinned face. She left the cow in the graveyard and reached to pull a branch, as gate, across the entrance. Absently he bent and did it for her. Then he forgot her and walked to the entrance of the house, with James MacKinnon’s arms set in stone above the empty doorway. Hens, half-wild, scuttled about the entrance hall. He went in among them.
Daylight shone down two stories through the broken, burnt roofbeams into the great banqueting hall. The table was gone, and all the tall carved chairs. The tapestries were torn from the walls, or burnt. Charred beams, old now and grown over with the green spring nettles, lay in corners, and a tang of mould was in the air. Beside the vast hearth, black yet from its own burnings, lay a small carved wooden stool. Rory crouched beside it. Yesterday, yesterday, Marsali had sat there, playing, and the prince had danced where the sheep now left their dung.
‘Jamesina,’ he called aloud.
She came creeping in, her hands over her fair head. ‘My mam says I mustn’t, the roof’s not done fallin’.’
‘You’ll be safe with me,’ Rory said calmly, ‘and I’ll take you safe out again.’
‘Will there be bats? ’Tis awful fearful I am of bats.’
‘No bats, Jamesina, no bats till nightfall.’
She came then, curiosity growing stronger than her fear.
‘In here,’ he called, and she found her way to the wreckage of James MacKinnon’s hall. ‘Come,’ Rory said, for he was standing yet by the great hearth. He turned the small stool on its feet and found a flat place for it between the nettles and brambles that grew through the floorboards. He brushed the top of it of mud and dust and beckoned to her. ‘Sit there.’
She did, lifting her ragged skirt over her single petticoat and giggling as she sat. ‘That will be fine now.’ He turned away, and then swung back and cried suddenly, ‘Will you be telling me, lassie, who it was who was called Tearlach MacSheumais? Are you knowing that name?’
He stood high, and distant above her, a dark shape, but she craned up to see him. ‘Aye,’ she cried, happily, pleased to show her knowledge. ‘I know of Tearlach MacSheumais.’
‘And what do you know?’
‘Och he was a terrible evil man, and a beggar and thief, who came to murder our good King George. For the minister has told us all about him.’
Rory sighed, and asked softly, ‘And what says your father, of what the minister says?’
She shrugged, ‘I don’t know. He is dead, ye see, sir, long ago, afore I was born.’
Rory sat down slowly on a fallen spar of James MacKinnon’s roof. Slates crumbled and cracked beneath his feet. He closed his eyes and rested his forehead on his hands.
‘Are ye tired, sir?’
‘Aye. Can you sing, Jamesina?’
‘That I can,’ she cried. ‘Shall I sing for ye?’
‘Aye, you shall. But I will start, and we will see if you can finish. He began to sing, softly and beautifully,
‘My bonnie moorhen, my bonnie moorhen,
Up in the grey hill, down in the glen …’
‘Och, I know, I know,’ she cried, and sang, high and whispery and sweet,
‘It’s when ye gang butt the house, and when ye gang ben,
Aye drink a health to my bonnie moorhen.’
Rory stood up, laughing, and grabbed her up so she shrieked with delight, and swung her around. ‘Sing it well, lassie, sing it all your days and ne’er forget …’ And with his loud crying out, like that, there was a clatter and bang and scuttling and they ran together from the room.
‘What’ll it be? What’ll it be?’ Jamesina shrieked. ‘’Tis ghosts, now, ’tis haunted, for sure.’
At the broken foot of the stairs, with the raw sun shining down through the black roofbeams, they stopped. A white Cheviot ewe, a big, lowland sheep, stood there with wild, glittery yellow eyes and curling horns.
‘Och ’tis only a sheep, one o’ the laird’s new sheep.’
‘Not at all,’ Rory said softly. ‘No sheep at all. ’Tis Tearlach MacSheumais, come home.’
She laughed gleefully at that, and jumped up and caught his hand and danced about him, till he lifted her up and carried her carefully beneath the broken lintel of Glentarvie House.
Outside he set her down and said solemnly, ‘Away lassie, tend to your milk cow, now.’
‘Are ye leavin’, sir?’ she said sadly, having enjoyed his diversion on a spring afternoon.
‘I am that. You’ll not forget my song?’ She shook her head. ‘Beannachd leat, Jamesina,’ he said, blessing her, and walked steadily away. He turned once, and saw her yet standing, solemnly before fallen Glentarvie. Then he went on, westward, on the road to the Isles, and when he turned again, she had gone.
They had not burned his father’s home, beyond Portree. He saw that as he passed through the town and on up the hill to the westwards, where it stood yet, as it had always stood. But when he was closer, he knew it was his father’s home no longer.
The windows were broken and boarded roughly over, and the high front door swung crazily on one black iron hinge. Before the beautiful French windows a woman stood in a ragged shawl, stirring a black cook-pot over an open fire. In the orchard there were rough hide tents, and dirty bairns kilted up in tatters of old cloth ran about screaming and shouting. A goat tugged fretfully at the roots of the rowan tree beside the old door.
They were travelling folk, and twenty-five of them had made camp in and out of the grand old house of Duncan MacLeod of Portree. Rory felt no anger with them, only a lonely dismay. They would not have been here had his father been. But as certainly too, they were not the cause of his going.
The woman by the pot looked up, curious, but unconcerned, as he approached. He did not scorn her. He had seen too many of her kind, wanderers homeless and landless, about his ravaged homeland on his journey north. She might have been a lady once, like Margaret MacKinnon, and might today be envying Margaret her neat roof of turf. There had always been travellers in the Old North, but now there were many, many more, uprooted and lost, doomed to raise children of the road.’
Rory said softly, ‘Woman, will you be telling me, where is the master of this house.’
She stared at him blankly, not comprehending. Then realizing suddenly that he spoke of the past, she shrugged and cried out defensively, ‘And how should I be knowin’ that? I swear t’ ye, there was none here when we came. No harm, surely, our stayin’ on, for why should it all go empty? …’ She gestured bold
ly at the house beyond, but her eyes were weary and frightened.
‘No matter,’ he said. ‘’Tis no affair of mine, I am sure. But I am looking for one called MacLeod. Duncan MacLeod. Can you be telling me anything of him?’
She shook her head and went back to stirring the broth, tasting it off the black ladle. Frustrated, Rory turned away and studied the house carefully. He did not wish to go in and see it in ruins, as he had seen Glentarvie. But he tried to fathom how long it had stood like this, open to the weather, for that was the measure of the time his father was gone.
The glass seemed newly broken, shards yet lay about on the muddy ground. The scars on the broken door were wood-white and fresh. Not long, surely, not long. He stepped to go in the door, but a scrabble of fighting children and dogs came between. No use, surely, there would be no papers, no books, nothing written to give a clue. All that would burn would no doubt have fuelled the fires before they took to breaking up the furniture. And the polished sides of a French cabinet were smouldering faithfully beneath the black pot.
He turned away and looked blindly out to the distant sea. Where now? He began to walk, unseeing through the remnants of the garden where once, as a child, he played.
‘Laddie,’ the woman called.
He turned, tired and uncaring.
‘Will ye be having some broth?’
Rory smiled and shook his head. They would have none to spare, and the place was wild with hungry children. He was young and strong, and used to doing without. But she persisted, coming after him, warily, twisting her hands in her apron. ‘Do ye know this house, laddie?’
‘Aye,’ he said quietly.
‘Was it friends of yer own?’
‘’Twas my father’s.’
She stopped, face gone white. ‘Forgive us, sir, we didn’t know there’d be any comin’ back …’ She was terrified and yet oddly kind. ‘Och laddie, a terrible sight it is.’
‘I am not minding, wifie. It is no use any longer to me. I would … I would only you could tell me what’s become of my father …’ Suddenly he found words difficult, he a grown man, and all. ‘Dear God, but I’ve been so long alone.’ He walked on away from her quickly and would not turn his face, even when she called him back again.
He found the road at the foot of the brae and turned weary back to Portree. But he was not seven yards along it when a scurrying, scuttling thing burst out of the bracken, a small, thin child, a boy, with a dirty scrap of tartan cloth wrapped around his bare body, and nothing more.
‘Sir.’
‘Away with you, please.’
‘Sir, my mam is saying …’ he stopped short, as Rory spun around, angry, but then cried out, ‘only that ye may go on, to the Ghillie’s Cot, away to the sea, and find one called MacKinnon there, Murdoch MacKinnon, and maybe he’ll know the fate o’ yer father.’
Rory stopped short, in his walking, and whirled about again and cried softly, ‘The name again, laddie?’
‘Murdoch, sir. Murdoch MacKinnon.’
Rory grinned and leapt forward, and the child cringed by habit, but Rory only ruffled his wild, tangled hair. Then he turned, long-legged and strong, with his face to the west and the sea, and broke, impatient, into a run.
He knew the Ghillie’s Cot on his father’s land, down by the sea cove on the lonely, mist-wet shore. As a child he had played there, and as a young man, trysted. A scrap-roofed, weary-sodded thing, with a few lean scraps of fields. The Dear knew what Murdoch MacKinnon was doing there, but such things no longer surprised him. His homeland was riven apart and turned topsy-turvy, and there was no knowing where and with what fate, one would find anyone.
As he stumbled, weary from the long and hurried miles, around the gorse-ridden rocky bend, he saw that the roof was gone at last from the old cottage. As he drew nearer though, he saw yet signs of life, and signs too that the roof’s loss was recent. There was a scattering of sodden, burnt thatch about the place, and the riggantree, though charred, yet stood above the walls on its black skeleton of beams.
There were too the remnants of a neat stack of peats and a round cornstack as well, weighted with nets and stones against the island winds. As he stepped nearer, a grey form shuddered out from behind the cornstack and set up a long lamenting howl.
‘The deerhound,’ he said to himself. ‘Surely, from Glentarvie.’ He crouched down on his haunches, making himself less imposing, and held out a hand to it and whistled softly. But if he knew it, it did not know him, and cringed whining like a wolf, and then scuttled away towards the sea.
Rory shrugged and stood up and stepped warily to the dark, burnt door. He touched the thing with its homemade leather hinges and thought foolishly of knocking upon it, but then merely pushed it, scraping awkwardly on the sodden clay as it swung in. It was brighter within with the flow of daylight through the roofbeams than ever he’d known the place. As in Glentarvie, the light of day seemed an intrusion, an indecency upon the private darkness of the home. The main room was furnished simply, with a now ruined box bed, a small table, homemade stools, of wood and bent grass. At the far, limed wall was a tall, beautiful bookcase, stained grey-white by the rain, and filled yet behind its incongruously unbroken glass, with leather-bound books.
Rory went forward and stood before it, not wishing to touch. He read the titles, awkwardly, for he had not the education of the man who owned them. They were in Scots and English, Latin and French. James MacKinnon’s books, he knew. Like the lurking wolf dog, they carried the mark of their owner. No other of his acquaintance would have bothered with either.
He turned slowly and saw beneath the table a scattering of dairy things, churn and milk bowl, and small three-legged stool. Beside them, tipped crazy over, was an ancient harp, a clarsach, tangled in its own broken strings.
Rory whispered softly, ‘Marsali.’ He bent down and then knelt joyously beside it, rubbings the water-stained wood with his work-roughened hands. He ran his fingers awkwardly over the remaining brass strings, and they gave out with a sad, tuneless jangle. Rory laughed and jangled the strings again, and a shadow fell suddenly across his hands.
He twisted around, surprised, and saw only a dark shape above him, the light behind it, a man’s figure, holding something out in his two hands.
‘You’ll be getting up,’ said a low and cautious Gaelic voice. ‘You’ll be getting up with your hands right away from yourself, and you’ll not be moving quickly.’
But Rory leaped up, laughing and cried out, ‘Murdoch, ’tis myself.’
There was a white flash and a crashing sound, and the crumbling walls shook. The bookcase behind Rory exploded in shards of glass, and Rory flung himself full length on the dirt floor. ‘For the love of God, man.’ He turned his head, slightly, and froze. The sleek tip of a highland broadsword was cold against his throat.
‘’Twas unfortunate that,’ the voice said calmly. ‘I am not accustomed to the accursed thing, being an old-fashioned man by nature. No doubt my aim with this will be that wee bit better.’
‘You’re not like to miss from there, damn you. Murdoch, will you put it away and greet a man like a brother ought?’
The sword tip pressed belligerently closer.
‘I’ve no brother, man, no longer, and how you’re knowing my name, I do not know. But there’s a good few could have told you. I am not finding this amusing.’
‘Och well,’ Rory said softly, ‘you were never the one for jesting. And indeed, you were not laughing when I saw you last, on Drumossie Moor.’
The sword tip scraped reluctantly against the clay and lifted warily away. There was a long onwaiting silence, and outside the dog howled mournfully. Rory said, ‘Six years I’ve been gone and there’s none yet thought to throttle that devil-begotten beast.’
‘Rory?’
‘Glory be to God.’
‘It cannot be.’
‘I assure you, it can, if you’d only just give it the chance.’ Rory sighed wearily and turned his head and finding his throat yet intact,
he rolled himself over, cautiously, so Murdoch could see him in the full light.
Murdoch looked down for a long, solemn time, peering with his old short-sighted, squint-eyed look, and then said quietly, ‘Indeed, I am knowing you now. And I see you’re not like to forget Drumossie Moor, either.’
‘Aye, ’tis pretty, is it not?’ Rory said mildly, touching the sabre scar. Then he grinned and Murdoch grinned and threw away the sword and flung himself joyously full length on the floor on top of Rory, and they rolled over wrestling and fighting viciously with fists, like the wild boys they were once, until they both were exhausted and cut from the scattering of broken glass.
Uncaring, Rory pinned Murdoch down in the black soot of the long dead fire until he cried, ‘Enough, enough. I am sorry I near shot you and all, but these are troubled times.’
‘Aye,’ Rory said, sitting up, and remembering his home, and Glentarvie, and his father, and grown solemn.
‘How did you find me?’ Murdoch said, getting up from the blackened floor. ‘And where came you from? And where, man, have you been these long years we thought you dead?’ Rory got to his feet and stood looking down at the broken strings of Marsali’s clarsach. He said, ‘I found you by word of some tinkers in Portree. I came by way of Glentarvie, and beyond there, Glasgow, and beyond there, the sea. I thought ’twas Carolina where I was meant to be, in service, but I am thinking now was the fairy-land Tir Nan Og, for seven magic years, and I have returned now, to find my world bewitched away.’
He smiled sadly, and Murdoch gave a wry grin as he stood and said, ‘You’ve not changed, you know, all handsome words as in the past, the poet of Portree.’ He spoke scornfully but his eyes were gentle and he felt suddenly years older than Rory, and indeed, most of the world.
Rory went to the doorway and stood looking out, down to the sea. ‘Will you be telling me, now,’ he said with false calm, ‘what has become of my father? For he is gone now, from the house in Portree.’
Murdoch sighed, and came slowly after him, and put his hand on Rory’s shoulder, and then leaned his forehead against it. He said quietly, ‘I will not lie to you, and say I know, for I do not. I am thinking he is safe, and likely across the sea. ’Twas Nova Scotia he spoke of when last I saw him. There are others of the Skye-folk there. But we parted in haste and I cannot be sure.’ Then Murdoch cried out bitterly, ‘Och damn them, damn them. Six years he’s awaited you, waited and prayed and lived for little else. And now you’ve returned and he’s missed you by scarce a month. You’ve come home at last from your exile, and he is away now, to his.’
The Sea-Harrower: A Scottish Highlander Historical Romance Page 18
