A Falcon for a Queen

by Catherine Gaskin

  He came and bent over me; I could smell the age of that black suit. ‘You understand this sort of thing?’

  ‘Naturally I haven’t done exactly this kind of thing before. But I used to help my father with the accounts of the diocese. It released one of his curates for other work.’

  ‘Did the Chinese cheat you?’

  It was useless to pretend; he would know. ‘In the beginning they did. And when I found out, and tried to stop it, the system wouldn’t work any more. It was like dealing with the Chinese cook ‒ but on a much bigger scale. In a way, it was agreeing to ignore a certain proportion of stealing. It is the way things have always worked in China. If it got above the limit, then there were great rows ‒ discussions, really ‒ and all based on making an allowance for face-saving on both sides. Very important. But I learned ‒ I actually began to enjoy it. I think I saved my father some money ‒ we were always stretched so thin for money. The Chinese thought it was very funny to have a woman sitting in my father’s office ‒ but then they laugh at everything the Foreign Devils do. They think we are all very ugly, especially the women ‒ big hands and feet, long sharp faces. It’s one of the things you have to get used to in China ‒ whenever you go out, there’s always a crowd about you, just pointing and laughing …’

  He forgot his suspicion for a moment, and seated himself close to me. ‘Interesting … did they sell concessions for the contracts ‒ supplying the mission stations?’

  ‘Oh, yes ‒ that had always to be allowed for in the bargaining.’

  ‘Did you speak the language?’

  ‘Mandarin ‒ the official language. I spoke it ‒ I wrote it far less well. It is very difficult ‒ complicated. I often had to use my father’s chief clerk ‒ it was he who tutored William and me in the language. But I learned to deal with the people who came to ask for the contracts myself ‒ it was a system of agreeing how much cheating there could be. My father was glad not to have to do it. He wasn’t … well, he wasn’t a businessman. I don’t think he would have been made a bishop if he had stayed in England. He wasn’t good at asking people for money. I don’t think he could have built any cathedrals …’

  ‘Don’t approve of cathedrals,’ Samuel Lachlan said. ‘A lot of show, and waste of money … And what else did you do in China ‒ what else did you learn?’

  I talked, quite forgetting to whom I talked. It was freer talk than I could have with my grandfather. This lonely man soaked it up with an eagerness he did not know he betrayed. ‘China …’ he mused. ‘Well, it’s a very long way. They say there are great fortunes made there. I once went to London ‒ when the railway was finished to Inverness. Only stayed two days. Very expensive. China is too far.’

  We were still talking when Morag came to summon us to the midday meal. I saw Samuel Lachlan’s embarrassment, and Morag’s disbelief. I was glad my grandfather was late for the meal; there was a weakness discovered in Samuel Lachlan’s façade, and it would have been cruel to show that I had seen it.

  He was always an honoured guest at Cluain. The meals were always especially lavish when he came, the fire heaped high, as if to try to warm those fragile bones. There were always his favourite dishes ‒ large cuts of roast beef or lamb, fragrant herb gravy, inevitably apple tart and cream. He always carried back to Inverness a basket full of food from Mairi Sinclair’s kitchen ‒ ‘it’s shocking what they charge in Inverness for a scone.’ He said her food relieved his dyspepsia, as did the tonic she gave him. ‘Samuel’s life is very narrow,’ my grandfather said, seemingly unaware that his own was not much different. ‘We try to give him some ease when he comes here. There is nothing in his life but work. He has never married. He has only one relation I know of ‒ a great-nephew who used to live in London, and who has now gone to America. Samuel didn’t approve of him … Cluain is his child. We have built it together. It is his pride to be associated with the greatest whisky to come out of the Highlands. Money alone could not buy him what he gets from Cluain.’

  Morag sniffed, and shrugged when I went to help her make up the room Samuel Lachlan always occupied at Cluain, and I suggested that I might put a few flowers on the mantel.

  ‘Och, don’t be fussing yourself, mistress. He’d never notice them, that old man. Doesn’t he live on the smell of an oil rag there in Inverness? He has a wee house on the quay there by the bridge ‒ three articled clerks he has working in the downstairs rooms, short of space and candles they are. And Mr Lachlan lives in the rooms above ‒ he’s at work by six in the mornings, they say, winter and summer. I’ve seen the place. The Master once sent me to Inverness with an urgent paper for Mr Lachlan. I wouldn’t care to sleep there, myself ‒ so dirty you can hardly see out of the windows. He has all his meals sent round from a chophouse close by. Slops, they are, by comparison with Cluain food. And yet they say he could buy and sell half Inverness, so much money he’s made. He underpays and overworks his clerks, and still they tumble over each other to be articled to him. Each will learn the business so thoroughly with him that they will all look to make their own fortunes when they leave him. Och, he has the pick of them. Only the brightest, quickest lads will ever see the inside of Mr Lachlan’s office, you may believe me, mistress. Reminded me of the way Mr Dickens described that old man ‒ that miser ‒ in one of his books …’

  I did believe her, and pitied him more. The history of Cluain was there in his neat hand; the first small production figures, the loan and interest paid to build the distillery, the charges for the sherry casks to store the first runs, the price of the fence that was all that had protected Cluain’s precious product in those far-off days. ‘We called it a bonded warehouse,’ my grandfather said, ‘but all that guarded it was a pair of dogs, and my gun beside my bed. I didn’t sleep soundly in those days ‒ the Excise would have had their price on every cask, stolen or not. And when I built my warehouses, one at a time, as they could be paid for, I built them strong and good, with a house for the gauger tight against the wall. I slept more easily the first night my casks were safe behind bars, with good stout walls, and under a roof.’

  The scraps of Cluain’s history came to me fitfully, and I was never allowed the full picture. The post that came daily was left for my grandfather to open, and there were still many letters that were answered by him, and then locked in the drawers of his desk, away from all other eyes except Samuel Lachlan’s. The early ledgers, in their faded red leather bindings, were available, but the later ones, the last twenty years of Cluain’s production and profits, were locked in tall oak cupboards. ‘Why should I leave my business lying around for the world to see?’ my grandfather asked of me when I remarked on the security of locking the cupboards, and then locking the office itself. ‘Shall I have every man from here to Inverness gossiping about what is in Cluain’s warehouses, and what is sold to what blender at what price? The Excise know right well ‒ it is only a fool who would try to hide anything from them, but they are paid because they are men who keep their mouths shut. They would not stay in the service else. Shall I let one blender know what another paid the year before? ‒ not every run of whisky turns out to be of the same quality, though all of Cluain’s is good. So they come and they taste, and we make a price, and they pay ‒ the Excise have the revenue fixed, and we cannot afford to give away our product. But I keep my samples locked up, as I am bound by law to do, and I see no reason why I should not keep my information locked up as well. All that is known of Cluain is that it makes a fine whisky and it pays its wages and bills at the right time, not sooner, not later, than the due date. Chatter is for fools like James Ferguson. Cluain has to impress no one.’

  I had my visit to the bonded warehouses, as Callum Sinclair had predicted I should, and in the company of my grandfather, attended by Neil Smith. Big Billy was there by the door, surrounded by his flock, but we had long ago come to terms; I was accepted by Big Billy in the same way as everyone who belonged to Cluain ‒ we reserved a distance on both sides. My grandfather observed the courtesy of asking Ne
il Smith if we might go into the warehouses and the little man nodded, and produced his keys, cackling a little with pleasure, as if he were showing off something he owned.

  ‘And I suppose you might say the Excise does own it ‒ or a goodly part of it ‒ until the duty is paid. They’d hardly stand, these days, for the way it was stored in the beginning. But it was hard enough in the early days of this century to stop the smuggling traffic in the Highlands. Just to get a man to take out a licence to distil, and then to pay the tax was an accomplishment. In the first years after licences were issued, the distiller himself often had to ride with his casks strapped on the ponies and guns at his side to bring it to his buyers ‒ so bitter was the feeling here in the Highlands against those who they said had thrown in their lot with the Excise. Ever since the first tax was put to whisky it was considered an honourable thing to distil illicitly, and slip your whisky past the gaugers. It isn’t done now, except for the odd bit of rot-gut distilled in a hurry up in the mountains ‒ you see smoke in an odd place, and you may know someone is brewing their few gallons. But if an exciseman goes to investigate, there’ll usually be nothing for him to find. No, it’s an ordinary, dull enough business now ‒ except that every time the government wants a few more millions, up goes the tax on whisky. All we distillers would be millionaires if we saw anything like the price that whisky fetches when it’s sold over the counter.’

  He didn’t seem to care if Neil Smith heard this. Both men might have respected each other, but they had their roles to play. I thought there would be little companionship for the exciseman among the distillery workers. He would have to like his own company, would Neil Smith, given a lonely place like Cluain. Perhaps Big Billy and his dog, a big yellow mongrel called Rover, were enough.

  Inside, the warehouses were beamed, earthen-floored caverns, bigger than they seemed from outside. The smell was of sour dampness. The casks were laid in rows, with racks made of huge wooden beams which had been fashioned to take the weight of the filled casks. There were high barred windows in the stone walls. Whatever chemistry or magic was happening to the whisky as it waited out its maturing phase, there was no beauty in the place it waited. We passed by the racks ‒ row upon row of them. One warehouse opened into the other, with great oak double doors, very high ‒ high enough to take horses and a loaded dray. Neil Smith was there at each door with his keys. We hardly spoke ‒ what was there to say? The whisky stood in its kind of sombre, grim majesty, the casks lettered with the names of those who had come and bought, and had left it here in Cluain’s climate to reach the age they desired before blending. The dates were there, the names, and Cluain’s own burned into the oak of the casks. They would eventually come back to Cluain to be refilled. What stood in those casks, I thought, must have represented a small fortune, and never had a fortune worn such a plain cover.

  The silence, as we walked through to the last warehouse, was broken by a dull, tapping sound ‒ a measured tap, deliberate, with a steady pause between each stroke.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That will be Andrew Maclay,’ my grandfather said, nodding towards Neil Smith for confirmation. ‘Each day he makes his round. He has grown old, Andrew has, listening to that sound. He is tapping the casks, you see. Each day he taps and he looks, lest there be one that leaks ‒ you will tell from the sound of it very soon how much is in it. He gets through a certain number each day. We cannot take them down all the time to keep weighing them, and the Excise allows for two per cent evaporation each year. If there is less in volume in the cask as it leaves the warehouses than there should be, calculated on the size of the cask and the amount of evaporation that should have taken place in the number of years it’s been stored here, then we must pay the duty. So a leaking cask can cost us dear. No distiller can afford to let his product run into the ground.’

  I was glad we were through. Cluain’s wealth might lie there waiting, but its heart was in the distillery. I did not envy the unknown Andrew Maclay his job.

  As we crossed the yard again my grandfather pointed out the pipes that ran from the distillery to the building where the casks were filled, and weighed by the Excise. ‘Nothing that holds spirits may run underground,’ he said. ‘And anywhere it passes through a wall, the wall must be broken into a hole so that the gauger can see that the pipe is whole and untouched on each side. Smuggling has been tried in many ways, and most of them discovered. You’ll hear plenty of tales of the distillery with the pipe underground to some other building ‒ even into the home of the distiller himself. But you need not be believing very much of it. Those are tales of a long time ago. We live by the law now, don’t we, Mr Smith?’

  ‘Aye.’ The wizened little face split into a grin, and the keys jangled loudly in his hand. ‘Aye ‒ and must. The law is the law.’

  I wondered why he made the law sound so unattractive. Or was it just the presence of Big Billy, who escorted us triumphantly out of his domain?

  Morag was hurrying towards us across the yard, her white apron whipped by the wind, the tendrils of shining hair lighted by the morning sun.

  ‘The gentlemen have arrived, Master. Mistress Sinclair has them in the dining-room. The office was locked.’

  ‘So ‒ we are late.’ It seemed to disturb my grandfather. ‘Ask them kindly to step over to the office now, Morag.’ He made a little chuckling noise. ‘I have never been late to meet my buyers before. They will say Angus Macdonald is getting old.’ He turned away towards the distillery, leaving me to linger by the back kitchen wall, watching the procession of three tweed-suited men, who somehow managed still to look as if they were in the city, cross the yard, accompanied by Morag, who flapped her apron to keep Big Billy at bay. A trap stood in the stableyard, and the horse was munching oats. The buyers had arrived, and there would be more entries in my grandfather’s ledgers, and more names placed on the casks buried in the warehouses. I went upstairs reflecting on the strangeness of the business ‒ the samples taken from small, plain labelled bottles locked in the cupboards of my grandfather’s office, the tasting, the bargaining ‒ though there was little enough of that; the price of Cluain’s whisky was almost as fixed as what the Excise would take in its turn. The decisions would probably be made now as to how long they would leave what quantities to mature at Cluain. A strange business, where one bought so far into the future. Some of these men might not live to receive the product they now bought ‒ perhaps my grandfather would not live to see it leave his warehouses. They bought and sold the future. Whisky men were a strange breed.

  And then came Morag’s quick tread on the stairs to the tower room, the opening of the door without ceremony. ‘Quickly, mistress ‒ the Master has brought the gentlemen back to the dining-room. I’ve never known him do that before, and it almost the dinner-hour. They’ve always taken their dram in the office, and been off. And he says for you to come down at once …’

  She was flustered; perhaps that accounted for the near-sharpness of her tone. I decided to take no notice of the fact that she had not knocked before coming in; it was not often that the routine of Cluain was disturbed.

  I tidied my hair and went down. I never did remember the names of the three men who came that day ‒ they were but the first of a series of buyers and heads of distiller’s groups who came to Cluain to sample and taste and leave their order ‒ or, in some cases, to plead with my grandfather for more of Cluain’s whisky than he had to sell. ‘I never have been able, in the last ten years, to distil enough to meet the demand.’

  ‘Expand, Mr Macdonald. Expand. Cluain’s name would bring you credit from any bank ‒’

  My grandfather’s face crumpled with scorn, but he held back the words that rose immediately. Instead he went and poured more whisky, and took his time about answering.

  ‘We have no need for banks at Cluain. And we have no need for expansion. You may carry the word back to your friends that Angus Macdonald will not wake up in his bed one morning and find that he is owned by another. We make what we
want at Cluain, as much as we want ‒ and it will stay that way.’

  I said I did not remember the names of those men, but I remember the remark of one of them as he took his leave, thanking me, as if I were the lady of the house, for the hospitality.

  ‘My sister’s son, Douglas MacAdam, will be touring in the Highlands this summer, Miss Macd ‒ Miss Howard. A walking tour, I believe ‒ he works with us in Glasgow. May I say that he has your permission to call if he should find himself on Speyside?’

  The question was addressed to me, but I looked to my grandfather to answer; I could make no assumption about who might and might not call at Cluain. My grandfather nodded. ‘We shall be pleased to see your nephew if he should come this way, Mr Hamilton.’

  And when he had seen them to the trap in the yard, he came back to his belated dinner, and there was a kind of grim triumph about him as he went to the sideboard to carve the meat.

  ‘And that word will pass along too. There is a granddaughter at Cluain. The wasps are gathering to the jam …’

  It was what any girl might have heard, and my grandfather had made the conditions of my staying at Cluain clear enough. But he could not make me like them; I did not like them at all. I could hardly choke down the generous slices of meat placed before me. It was a silent, and, on my side, a dispirited meal. I felt as if I were being sampled and sold, like Cluain’s whisky.

  The little restored kirk across the river from Ballochtorra continued to draw me; so many times on the rides I took with Ailis, when we crossed the bridge, we would go there. Her reins slipped over the post of the kirkyard gate, and I would wander along the path that led me to the two granite stones. I did not think it morbid that I went there so often; I would spread that all-useful plaid on the grass by William’s grave, and there was peace and companionship there. I sometimes wondered if I came because the ancient Chinese custom of reporting to the ancestors had unconsciously become part of me also. If I talked to William sometimes, it did not seem strange ‒ I had always talked to William. I expected no answer from the wind that blew through the long grasses in the kirkyard, and swayed the tops of the trees. There were no answers which I would not have to find for myself. But I talked aloud of Cluain, of my grandfather, of the life that flowed about the distillery, the herb garden, of Mairi Sinclair and Margaret Campbell, of Ballochtorra and Gavin Campbell. I talked of Callum Sinclair as my eyes scanned the sky for a sight of Giorsal, the falcon. I dreamed, and I wondered, in the way that I did when I lay wakeful in the big bed in the tower room of Cluain, seeking, searching, the firelight leaping under the copper hood, and William’s Chinese scroll an unanswered message. William’s presence was in that room, here where he lay; it was also an imagined figure in all the places of that world, on the close-cropped slopes of the shielings, and the rocks of the glen of Ballochtorra, in Margaret Campbell’s sitting-room, and a third presence when my grandfather and I sat with the candles lighted beside the chessboard at night. The wind played in the long grasses, and there was music in it.