His face did not change under her railing. His majesty made him seem as aloof in those wretched clothes and shameful position as if he were once again at the head of his armies, the conqueror and ruler of Scotland; and so the crowd felt him to be, for in awe rather than pity they drew back from him and pulled the old woman away, hushing her more in fear than anger. It was not canny to curse a man the like of that.
‘They can dress him in rags and shackle his feet, they cannot make him alter his countenance,’ said the Rev. Mr John Anand to his fellow-minister.
They may have come to reproach but they had stayed to converse. Mr Anand had met Montrose in the past when that young nobleman had been one of the gilded youth at St Andrews and he a worthy tutor. Now the undergraduate had become the Commander-in-Chief of the Royalist forces in Scotland, and the tutor a respected minister and servant of the Covenant which had condemned him. But Mr John Anand’s present convictions as to the holiness of the Covenant and the evil of its enemies became strangely insignificant as he looked at the man who was now in its power, but who yet seemed above the power of any man to touch.
The Provost offered him wine, but with that burning thirst still on him Montrose asked for water instead – and for leave to join the little group of his former comrades-in-arms by the fore-stair.
As he came up to them, Hurry stood stiffly to attention as if he were on parade, and the others drew away a little from the two of them. The sight of Montrose’s wasted face and fever- haunted eyes sunk deep in their sockets, his ragged peasant’s clothes, the sound of that horrible voice proclaiming him as traitor still echoing in his mind, had caught Hurry by the throat; all his tough insouciance dropped from him, and he could not speak lest he should howl like a dog with helpless fury.
‘Well, Hurry,’ said Montrose. ‘So they got you at Corbiesdale. What happened at the end?’
Hurry swallowed so hard he nearly choked, but could get no word out.
‘Go on drinking, man – as I’m doing.’
‘But only water, my lord,’ said Hurry, as tragically as if it were the worst of his Commander’s sufferings. ‘Won’t you let me mix a little of this wine with it?’
Montrose let him, as he felt it so deeply. ‘Is Frendraught safe?’ he asked.
‘Yes, my lord, his uncle is seeing to that, though he’ll be a prisoner for a bit for the look of the thing.’
‘And the rest of our men?’
‘Strachan’s fellows finished it thoroughly, sir – combed the countryside for every man they could find for days after, and cut ‘em down as fast as they found ‘em.’
‘Did any of the Orcadians get away up north?’
“Mighty few, sir.’
Hurry had taken another long drink and was finding his tongue.
‘They were drowned in shoals trying to swim the Oykell, and some of Strachan’s troopers were drowned too, pushing off in a boat to shoot at ‘em in the water and tipped the boat over doing so – it’s the only good laugh I’ve had since then. They say the tide is bringing the islanders’ bodies upstream now as thick as pilchards after a storm, poor devils. Well, for myself I’d as soon drown as hang.’
Montrose gave a short laugh. ‘They told me I was born to be hanged when I swam Tweed in spate three times running one night to make our men cross it.’
All Hurry’s eternal optimism leaped up again in him. If he could not die, how much more impossible it was that this man should do so!
‘They’ll never dare to do it, sir. There’d be a storm all over Europe.’
‘So there was when a greater man than I was executed.’
‘King Charles – that fell like a thunderbolt. But this news is travelling like wildfire, I have just heard of a boat leaving from this very port here at Inverness as much as five days ago with the news of your capture. The King of France, the Emperor, the Dutch States, they’ll all raise hell itself to prevent it.’
‘And therefore they’ll hurry it on here before their protests and King Charles arrive.’
‘If King Charles arrives in Scotland to see his Viceroy’s head on a spike, may he take the omen to himself! There’s no decent man would follow him after that. If he comes with Lauderdale and that crowd to shake hands with Argyll, may he get what he deserves from Argyll!’
‘Well, he may not come. We know nothing. And we don’t know what’s happening over there even now at this moment, so what’s the good of racking our brains? Tell me, were Monro of Achnes and his sons killed or taken?’
‘Neither that I could hear, my lord. They may have led us into that death-trap and then joined with those swine their kinsmen against us at the end. Nothing’s too bad for a Monro to do, or a Macleod, – curse those Northern clans, I’d stamp ‘em all out, man, woman and child, if I had my way.’
And the man from Aberdeen spat at the names of the man and woman who had brought his Commander to this pass. His fury gave him at last the courage to speak of it. David Leslie had been a decent soldier when he had come across him in the German wars. No doubt he had lost his head a bit in his hysterical relief at the capture of Montrose before he himself had had to tackle him.
‘Not unmixed relief,’ said Montrose with a grim smile; ‘he is fit to be tied now his subordinate Strachan is getting the credit and already dashing south hot-foot for his reward – he calls him “that upstart” even to his men.’
Hurry could well excuse Leslie for that. But what had happened to him that he could lead his prisoner, the King’s Viceroy, in this shameful fashion through Scotland, like a wild beast in a cage?
‘Government orders,’ said Montrose shortly, even indifferently.
‘Government’ meant Argyll. The agony of fear that he and his colleagues had suffered from Montrose now found its relief in the cruelty of humiliating him to the uttermost. It was also, perhaps mistakenly, a precaution. There must be no sympathy among the people for the soldier who had been so great and terrible a figure and was now broken.
But it had not worked like that in Inverness, except for one old woman.
Nor did his victorious enemies dare take the quickest road south to Edinburgh, less the Farquharsons, who had fought for him before, should spring down on them as they passed through Mar and rescue him. So the journey would be prolonged all through the eastern counties, and Montrose would be led as a ragged captive behind that accursing herald through the very towns that he had conquered.
‘It is a triumph after Argyll’s own heart,’ he said, smiling, as he and Hurry discussed the route.
‘If he dared take it!’ said Hurry quickly. ‘He’d not dare accompany you even now, my lord.’
After a long pause he added slowly and in some astonishment, ‘And the triumph is not his.’
VIII
Argyll’s Government was having to work hard to induce the right point of view among the people. So far from mocking or even shunning him, the gentry in Moray followed Montrose as far as they were allowed to bear him company. Fines and severer punishments had to be used to check his sympathizers.
Men were sent to prison for singing songs in praise of ‘James Graham’; a merchant called John Bryson, who had been heard to say that Montrose was as honest a nobleman as any in the kingdom, was sent to Edinburgh and condemned to be imprisoned in the Thieves’ Hole for several weeks. Sins of omission, even partial, were punished almost as severely, and a minister who did not preach ‘enough’ in condemnation of James Graham might find himself deprived of his ministry.
Mr William Kinnanmond, the minister of Keith, took warning by these examples, and when the prisoner James Graham was taken to his church he abused him to his face in his Sunday sermon with such howls of violence that even his Covenanting congregation were revolted. He chose for his text one that was very popular with the Covenant ministers, of the hewing of Agag in pieces by Samuel.
‘ “As thy sword hath made women childless, so shall thy mother be childless among women.” ’
‘ “Rail on, Rabshekeh,” ‘ Montrose said at las
t in answer, and turned his back on him.
But the answer he gave himself was even closer to the context. ‘Surely the bitterness of death is past,’ he said to himself as he lay out that night in his tent on the open moor.
He had asked for that instead of being quartered in a house. He lay on straw, the flap of the tent drawn back to get the air on his head. The legs of the sentry standing just outside the opened flap were as motionless as the stump of a tree. Beyond them, where the moor swept away to the long low rounded hills, he could see the windy, hurrying sky, and one star showing among the clouds, alone and forsaken of its fellows as he had been.
But presently the bitterness of that hideous shouting abuse left him, and since hatred had so little power to hurt him, surely the bitterness of death was past? People made God in their own image, a monster of cruelty or a God of love. Here in the cool stillness of the open moor, though a moment since he had not known it, he knew now that he was neither alone nor forsaken.
As on the hills, starving and wounded in the rain, he knew now that Louey was with him, knew it even though he no longer saw her hair astream in the night wind and her face transparent through the darkened air. He knew it now, not through his disordered brain but through the cool certainty of faith. He could neither see nor hear her, but she talked with him in his mind, and he was able to say all the things he had wished but dared not say while he was with her, for fear of distressing her too much.
‘To die for what we love, that should be easy,’ he had said when he had asked her to live for it. He had known her thought, that, yes, to die is easy if it is death sought in battle, quick and furious, as she knew he had sought his at Philiphaugh. But how would she bear the death that now lay ahead for him? Could he make her understand that it was but a few hours’ agony? Perhaps far less, for the numbed body loses its capacity for pain – in any case far less than in many a death from natural causes where the sick body may lie unrelieved of its torture for days or weeks.
Though there were clouds hurrying over the sky, the air had the peculiar luminous quality of night in a Northern May. And sleep, like the darkness, came to him, not deep nor heavy, but shot through with a shimmer of dream, half sleeping, half waking, and the wind came not in gusts but in a great cool wave of air, bringing him the scents of earth and dew and young bracken, lifting him as a wave of the sea lifts a light boat.
It bore him out of his aching body and the memory of the shouting turmoil of his journey, the parched thirst and painful riding without saddle or stirrup, the dust from all the horses’ hooves round him, the harsh monotony of the clanking harness and tramping horses of his guards always round him, hemming him in, and of the herald’s voice proclaiming him traitor, – and then all the people running and staring, staring, and the raving, frantic preaching of that man today, flapping his black sleeves up and down like a carrion crow that only bided his time to fasten his claws and beak in his prey.
All that journeying by day had become a distant nightmare; the wave of wind had borne him away from it to where Louey was leaning from her window at Rhenen, towards the night’s loveliness, looking at this one star. Below her the chestnut trees in the garden waved their dark branches – ‘if you listen on a spring night, you can hear their buds bursting’, she had once told him.
She too had found the night too lovely for sleep. Did she know what had happened? Not yet, but so soon she would, that its advancing shadow already lay deep within her.
All that long bright hot day at Rhenen it had been a shadow, but now at night, when the silence was spread all round her over the sleeping fields, a glimmer of light softer than dawn lay behind the darkness and in her heart. All this day she had not lived at all, but moved and talked and laughed among a show of figures; now she knew that she was not parted from her love, but with him, and giving him the solace that he now gave her.
That day at Rhenen had been crowded with people, and their uneasy, snatching thoughts. There had been bustle since sunrise. Sophie had set sail in a pinnace that afternoon to travel up the Rhine to stay with her brother Carl, the Elector Palatine, at his home in Heidelberg. She had been planning it for months, and now it had come true. To make that long journey in a carriage would have been horribly uncomfortable, but the States of Holland had given her a pinnace. Lord Craven was to take charge of her and the expedition, and Sophie, the Cinderella of the family, started off just six months before her twentieth birthday on a greater adventure than any of her elder sisters had ever had.
All that hot spring day Louey had been helping her pack last-minute treasures that Sophie had kept on discovering simply must not be left behind, for ‘Who knows when I shall see them again – or any of you, either, for that matter?’
‘You will see hills,’ said Louey, who had also never been out of Holland, ‘and the great rocks with castles on the top that hang over the Rhine.’
‘Yes, it will be an amusing journey. I am thankful I have not to go in a carriage, I should have been jolted to death.’
‘You will see Heidelberg,’ said her mother. ‘But from what Carl says, that is not amusing.’
‘No. It is monstrous we cannot even now sleep in the Castle. But he is repairing it as fast as he can. “Commissariat House” – to imagine that your daughter, Maman, should have to stay at a citizen’s private house with a name like that!’
‘Since my son the Elector has to stay in it I can easily imagine it,’ Elizabeth dryly replied.
She was not pleased by this journey. To her mind it savoured of flight. Sophie had refused to stay and see out the issue of King Charles’ hopes in Scotland and this venture there of his greatest servant.
‘If it should succeed and Charles should really want me for his Queen, he can still send for me,’ Sophie had argued with her mother. But she had preferred to go while, as the canny Dutch saying had it, ‘the going was good’. She would get clear away to Germany from all English and Scots entanglements lest she should stay to run the danger of being left in the lurch.
For if Montrose failed, Charles’ policy, and marriage too, most probably, would be chosen for him by the Covenanters.
And only three days ago news had come from Breda that Charles had signed a treaty with the Covenanters.
‘This Treaty of Breda, that settles it,’ she had said to Louey. ‘Charles has not yet taken the Covenant, but that will be only a matter of time, mark my words. Now you see how far- sighted I have been, and how right I am to go.’
Yes, Louey saw that. Since it was Sophie, she was right to go. If she had not been Sophie, if she had really loved Charles, might she have influenced him? She might have done so, it might have made all the difference, but, being Sophie, she could not. She was going to Germany and would marry someone quite different, most likely some other German Elector, for she was determined to marry, – and the fate of Montrose, whatever it might be, would be no more to her than the fate of one ‘among those who sought their own fortune in my service’.
There was no more here that could be said or done but wait for news of that fate – and help Sophie pack and sort her dresses and trinkets, and promise to give all her messages to her friends and to look after Snowball, her old white dog, over whom Sophie showed more sentiment at parting than for anyone else.
And see Sophie on board the pinnace with little Craven, his face crumpled up into rueful smiles at saying goodbye for so long a time to his beloved Queen, see the white sails unfurl and the graceful boat skim away between the low green shores, and Sophie’s yellow scarf waving goodbye on deck, waving, waving till it was no bigger than one of the bright marsh kingcups growing at their feet, and then turn back up the path with her mother’s hand in hers.
‘When I sailed up this river to Heidelberg,’ said Elizabeth, ‘I was four years younger than Sophie is now.’
‘You have always been younger,’ said Louey.
‘That may be her advantage. She has great spirit and a good mind – more mind than I ever had. She will go far – much farther
than Commissariat House,’ she added with a burst of laughter.
‘You will go and stay with them next year, Maman, when more of the Castle is repaired and you can be in your old home again.’
‘No, I shall never go. Carl has made that quite clear, he doesn’t want me for however short a time. And could I bear it, that castle where I went as a bride, now smashed to bits? They can never build it all up again. But one thing is untouched, he tells me – my English garden, the rose-walks, and the stone arch that my husband set up for me in a single night to give me a pleasant surprise when I walked out the next morning. That still stands among the ruins, and his message of love on it to me, his “Conjugi carissimae”.’
She was crying. ‘I am an old fool,’ she said sharply. ‘As I told Sophie, if my daughters want to leave me, I am sure I do not want anyone to stay with me unwillingly.’
But Louey knew that it was not for Sophie that she was crying.
The long day spun itself out in a thicket of chatter, of visitors, of clearing up after the departure.
‘Etta will be the one to go next,’ said Eliza proudly. She had set her heart on Etta’s marriage to the young Prince of Transylvania who had fallen headlong in love with her portrait. He had written such charming letters about it that Etta too was in love. If only she were stronger, it would make them less anxious at her having to endure such a much greater journey than Sophie’s, – ‘to go so far for so little’, as Carl had written caustically, since he did not think the match good enough for his prettiest sister. He would do better than that for Sophie, he had already assured her.
That did not trouble Etta. ‘If only the Prince will love me when he sees me,’ she confided tremulously to Louey. ‘That portrait is flattering, I know, and I cannot always wear a pointed cap with a veil billowing out from it.’
‘It never does billow except in a portrait,’ said Louey, ‘it flaps round one’s face and gets into one’s eyes.’
‘Is that why you never wear that pretty cap you had in green velvet? Oh, but I think the Lord Montrose did not like it, wasn’t that it? Dearest Louey, you will hear soon of him, I know.’
The Bride Page 36
