Over the Seas

by Josephine Bell

  For he continued to think of Francis Leslie even while he planned and watched and waited for an opportunity to escape from his present bondage. He and Francis had been close friends as students at St Andrews. Together they had left their studies to follow the king at his accession to the English throne. Together they had shared the excitement and hazards and wonders of that long royal progress to London and together had found lodgings they sometimes shared, sometimes exchanged.

  Their parting had been abrupt, disastrous; Alec’s flight and subsequent outlawry inevitable. But his disappearance, he hoped, had been complete and though he had escaped capture and death by a hairsbreadth on his return to St Andrews, he still prayed and hoped that no harm had come to his former friends there, particularly to his early love. In the long days and nights of his journeying into the wilds he had understood fully that this love had died a natural and expected death from separation and his added years. But he knew as well that in all his later traffic with women, especially in his brief passion for Kate Ogilvy, that early love had never been replaced. Janet’s face as he had seen her briefly on his return was clearer in his mind than the lovely features of Katherine though he had enjoyed the sight of her for three whole years in London city.

  But Francis, his friend, meant more to him than any woman, he swore to himself. It was to Francis he longed to speak, to explain, to beg forgiveness, simply to declare that he still lived and would make all possible amends. Surely by now Francis would have recovered from his sad infatuation for that dangerous and worthless girl. Surely he would have found a worthier object for his devotion.

  These thoughts and others like them, sifting his past motives, accepting his failures stoutly, but always looking forward, spurred Alec to plan and prepare his escape. His success with the longboat brought him a good deal of praise. He found he was beginning to be accepted by the fighting men; above all trusted. When he proposed to take a boat out on the loch by himself, no one objected.

  He moved slowly and with great care. He made his excursions longer. He took to rowing himself across to the quiet sunny bays at Torig, towing some half-finished craft to work on in the sun. Wrapped in a bundle with his tools and rations for the day he took, piece by piece, the small store of clothing he had accumulated through the kindness of Mistress MacRae, together with some useful objects such as a platter, a pewter mug, a spoon. Above all a dirk he had found in Nial’s workshed lying beneath a heap of sawdust, rusty, neglected, but still sound. He had hidden it and later managed to get the blacksmith to sharpen and polish it at the castle forge, saying it was wanted for cutting ropes for the boats. Then privately in solitude across the loch he made a leather sheath for it with a clip to fasten it to his breeches’ belt under his jacket. It gave him great comfort to be armed again, though so poorly.

  All his small possessions he ferried by degrees, patiently, ceaselessly, to the far shore of the loch and carried them up the hill beside the stream to the ancient broch, where he hid them in the double wall, covered with a few stones to mark the place and deceive any casual inquisitive visitor. After a few weeks he decided that he had as much as he could conveniently carry and that he might arouse a question in the good housekeeper’s mind if his reserve of clothing grew markedly less.

  The season helped him. He had not for some time worn the padded jacket the constable had given him soon after his return to work, when Nial had complained that his assistant was too blue and stiff with cold in the shed to be able to handle tools. The jacket was now in the broch and Alec’s outer garment a loose linen smock. His plaid he decided to leave behind; it would be missed too soon and besides was nearly as worn as the old kilt he had been wearing when he was found in the snow. He had not worn the poor tattered thing at Eilan Donan but had kept to the seaman’s breeches the hunters had not seen fit to rob him of. The breeches were far more comfortable for working at the boats.

  Money he could not hope for. He doubted if any used it in this barbarous place. Torquil himself might visit civilisation from time to time. He had been absent on two occasions since Alec’s arrival, but he had been to the island of Raasay and it seemed unlikely he would find any use for coinage there. So Alec continued quietly to prepare and await his opportunity.

  It came in the last week of May, a sudden unlooked for explosion of violence in the shape of a large-scale raid on a hamlet near Dornie on the far side of an inlet of the loch.

  The raid was mounted, as it had to be, by boat across the water. Alec was put in charge of the fleet to see each craft was filled with men and their weapons, with oars to propel them and warps to secure them on landing. He was ordered into the last boat, the sailing longship, in which the constable himself embarked. Alec was to sail this vessel to the head of the fleet, lead the other boats to the point of landing, then stand off to see the men get ashore before going in with Torquil and his particular bodyguard of four.

  When the orders for the raid first went out Alec had no idea of the cause of it. But a few words with Mistress Biurnag told him it was a serious matter.

  The old woman was in tears.

  ‘Ill work! Ill work!’ she cried to him. ‘They will kill and burn! I spoke to him but he threatened me. His devil hath him by the hair and will not let him go till this dreadful night be ended.’

  ‘A short night!’ Alec told her. ‘’Tis near midsummer. The sun in these parts seems never to go down. Surely the folk will take to the trees? They will see us coming and run for it, will they not?’

  She shook her head, too overcome with fear to speak.

  ‘I am to marshal the boats,’ Alec told her. ‘We are to start at sundown, but it is not dark. As I said they will see us coming. Though there be no moon there is but a gentle breeze from the head of the loch and no cloud.’

  At his first words Mistress MacRae looked at him with horror. But as he went on telling her the orders he had been given she got to her feet and began to search in one of her big chests. When he finished she turned to him and he saw that she held a sheathed dirk very similar in size to the one he had found and kept.

  ‘I do wrong to arm thee,’ she said in Scots, ‘but I’ll no see a braw young lad butchered by yon fiends wi’out a chance to defend himsel’. Take this to thy comfort. See thou use it not save in service of thine own life. And God be wi’ thee, my poor boy.’

  The Lord be wi’ thee too, mither,’ Alec said, putting an arm round her, and stooping put back the grey hair from her forehead and kissed her gently. ‘And all my thanks. This is my life a second time ye hae gi’en me. If I never see thee more after this night, remember my gratitude.’

  She looked at him steadily and he returned her look.

  ‘Go wi’ God,’ she said and turning resumed her seat and took up her knitting pins.

  So Alec entered on his part in the raid with a certain dread but a very clear determination. When he heard Torquil tell his four guards the prime reason for their action his intention became more firm still.

  For the expedition was to be an act of revenge. The constable had sent some hunters to bring in a bullock from the pasture beyond Dornie. It was to be driven to the waterside, slaughtered there and brought off by boat to provide fresh meat for the garrison, whose winter stores of salted fish and flesh had long since run out while it was now considered to be a close season for venison. On arriving at the lochside with their prize the men had been met by a flight of arrows from angry farmers hidden nearby. They were to be taught a lesson for their audacity.

  Alec had heard of the incident, but since no one had been seriously hurt, and though the bullock had been abandoned before slaughter and ran away, he had thought no more of it.

  Torquil, it seemed, had brooded on what he chose to consider a mortal personal insult and a wrong to Eilan Donan.

  As Alec listened he was filled with a cold anger greater than any he had known before. The fact of his own utter powerlessness increased rather than subdued it.

  The boats arrived at the shores beyond the creek in p
ractised silence and dread efficiency, the rowers judging their pace accurately so that they rested on their oars for the run in. There was no splashing, no shouting. The whole deadly rout moved ashore leaving one man with each craft to tie its painter to any suitable rock or stout tree stump. Then they followed their companions across the rough foreshore.

  The constable gave Alec this task for the sailboat before he moved away with his particular four villains. But he also ordered him to see that the rest of the moorings held and to keep an eye on the fleet until the party came back.

  As usual Alec nodded obedience; this time it suited him very well. He did indeed see that the boats were well tied up, but he arranged a knot for the sailboat’s painter that could be slipped in an instant and he took the smallest of the rowing craft and fastened it to the stern of the large boat with its oars laid down in the bottom ready for use. Finally he made the sailboat’s jib sail ready to hoist and very lightly tied, for the wind was still the smallest of airs off the land. Then, treading carefully, with Mistress Biurnag’s dirk in his hand and his own knife in its sheath at his belt under his smock, he went up the bank in the tracks of the fighting men.

  At first it was too dark to see them but almost at once a torch flared and another until a larger burst of flame showed where a rick had been fired, next a bothy and then, amid rising yells and more distant screams of fear and pain, a whole series of fires lit up a scene of destruction and carnage that stopped Alec in his tracks as he understood the enormity of Torquil’s revenge.

  The whole hamlet, not only the poor hovel of the offending husbandman, was ablaze. Every man, woman and child that had not already abandoned all and fled, was to be put to death. The wild men of Eilan Donan were at work upon it, making their hideous bonfires and falling upon the wretches who fled from the blaze with their long spears or their sharp knives.

  Alec turned about, sickened, furious, but aware again of his impotence. He saw beside him, so intent upon the hideous actions of his men that he himself was not observed, Torquil with his bodyguard.

  They do not run from this blaze,’ the constable shouted, pointing to the nearest hut that was well alight.

  ‘It was here the knave defied us,’ one of his men said.

  ‘See!’ another cried. They have loosed their litter, thinking to hold us off while they burn themselves, but the brats make away to safety.’

  ‘After them!’ Torquil yelled. ‘Let not one of that brood escape!’

  The four, baying like hounds, leaped forward. The poor children, three in number, ran this way and that, confused by the noise and the red light of the fires, the acrid smoke and falling sparks. If they had gone back into the woods behind the hamlet they might have got away, but they were too young and terrified to follow the plan their father had ordered. Two of them were caught and slain at a little disstance from the sheltering trees. The third, the smallest, ran desperately back towards his burning home. Alec saw the swiftest of the bodyguards catch him up, seize the wretched mite by an arm and a leg and fling him shrieking into the flames.

  ‘Back to his sire!’ screamed Torquil, beside himself with evil joy at the sight. ‘Bravely done! Back—’

  ‘To thy master in hell!’ The dirk took the constable from behind and he fell, choking, kicking, coughing up his life-blood as he died.

  Alec plucked out the knife and ran, back across the field, down the slope to the shore, where he flung the dirk in a long arc out into the loch. He came to the sailboat, cast off the painter, gave the craft a great shove, leaped on board and with a powerful thrust on the tiller turned her round, so that she slid away from the other boats. He left her to the tide which was on the ebb while he sprang forward to pull up the small foresail. It filled at once and getting back to the tiller Alec set the boat across the loch. The current ran more swiftly as he made away from the land. The small boat was following, held by its tow. On shore the noise, the flames, the martyrdom continued. Against his better nature Alec prayed fervently that it might continue just long enough to secure his escape.

  Chapter Three

  His impious prayer was heard, or at any rate overlooked, Alec decided when, calmer now, he sailed crab-wise in the ebbing tide at the middle of the loch. The kernel of his plan had succeeded, but Torquil’s death had not originally formed a part of it.

  He had no regret for dispatching that fiend. He believed literally Mistress MacRae’s account of the constable’s satanic possession. It was an accepted phenomenon. He had been brought up by his bigoted, puritanical father more in the fear of hell than in any promise of heaven. Though he himself trusted more to the love of God than to fear of the Devil to help him to salvation he had never questioned the power of the Evil One. So now, far from considering himself a murderer for the second time, he began to compare the two victims in their several wickedness and had almost begun to feel a certain complacence as he floated comfortably towards the Sound of Sleat when he recalled his present position and considered how he was to escape from it.

  Torquil’s slain body would be discovered, he himself would have disappeared. Those two facts could not fail to be put together. And so a fiercer hunt for him would be made than he had planned. The sooner he set about the second phase of his escape the better.

  Moving forward in the sailboat he loosed the stays and halliards, pulled down the mainsail and unstepped the mast. Together he bundled the lot overboard. Next he ripped up the little foresail, still flapping in the wind and left the shreds festooned about the bows. Then, lifting out the tiller he cut loose the rudder and let both drift away.

  The sailboat was now helpless. It and its various gear would presently drift back up the loch on the flood. The men of Eilan Donan would find some or all of it and conclude, he hoped, that he had come to grief or been attacked by pirates. If there had been a fair wind he would have sailed away and on down the coast. But these light airs were useless for that purpose. It hurt him to destroy the work of so many weeks. He thought regretfully of old Nial. But he understood what he was doing and as he jumped over into the small boat, sat down and took up the oars, he set out for the far shore of the loch with fresh hope of success.

  It was now nearly slack water and so not difficult to make up the distance down the loch he had lost on the tide. He went in under the shelter of the hills as quickly as he could and presently came into the little bay where he and Nial had so often taken their work. Arrived there he set about hiding the boat. The rocks were now all exposed at the bottom of the ebb. He jammed the small craft into a cleft in them and filled it full of stones. He pulled long strands of kelp over it with more stones on top. With luck, he thought, if they came searching here, it would be hidden deep below water at the flood and not revealed as the rocks came out again, until at last it rotted and the fragments floated away.

  Working hard, Alec did not realise how clearly he could see what he was doing, until he straightened his back and looked across at the castle. Then he understood. The dawn was upon him. The hills opposite were palely outlined. The fires in the meadows had nearly burned out. And though he could not see any figures moving he knew that before long the raid would be over, the dead constable found and a fresh revenge set on foot.

  He turned from the shore, cursing the short summer night and the rising sun that cut short his active escape. He had been too long about the boats. He had meant to be clear over the hill and down to Glenelg before daybreak. But this had miscarried. He climbed to the broch with the sky above the hill lightening all the time from grey to palest gold to a flush of pink on the little clouds in the east. Before he stooped to the doorway of the broch and dived into the hollow of the great double wall he looked back and saw the sun flash from the rocks on the mountain above Eilan Donan.

  His bundle was lying undisturbed where he had hidden it, which proved that no searching hands had explored its hiding place. Mistress MacRae had no doubt spoken truly of her own generation when she told him of the superstitious fears that kept visitors away from the anc
ient stronghold. All the same he did not believe that such an obvious hiding place as the broch would be immune from search when the object was to take the murderer of the chieftain’s substitute. His breath caught in his throat when he remembered the scenes of horror he had witnessed during the night.

  Nevertheless, with his usual energy and good sense Alec soon controlled his dread and turned his mind to the next stage of his escape. It seemed clear to him at first that he must remain hidden for the hours of daylight, not venturing to expose his familiar large person to any view from Eilan Donan, nor himself, a stranger, to the folk upon this south side of the loch, who might well report his unwelcome presence.

  But how could he stay in the broch until dark when the men of the castle would certainly search the hills and woods, even if they avoided his ancient refuge? Once spread across the countryside he might expect to find an avenger behind every rock and tree, lurking, following on silent feet preparing the crippling blow that would deliver him up again as helpless as on the winter morning in the snow. But this time not to Mistress Biurnag’s gentle care but to a savage death.

  It was a situation he could not resolve by reasonable calculation. From the doorway of the broch he could see very little. Even from its summit there would be no view of the loch nor of the castle on its causeway. He had looked often enough from those turrets and from the water of the loch and had never caught a glimpse of the grey stone tower where he now hid. He could judge the time only by the sun and reckon up solely from his seaman’s knowledge how long it would be before the hunters and their hounds would be swarming up from the beach to seize him.