A Falcon for a Queen

by Catherine Gaskin

Shakily, Samuel Lachlan motioned me with his glass. I went and poured another whisky for him and didn’t care, nor did anyone seem to notice, how much I spilled.

  ‘But your son, Angus! A son for Cluain. I remember … I remember the time your wife took Mairi Sinclair into Cluain and I did not think it wise. But your wife was a very determined ‒ and a very soft ‒ woman. I remember the child being born. If I had known …It would have been better, Angus, if you had spoken. I could have done something! I could have persuaded Mairi Sinclair that she owed something to her son … This girl here ‒’ His gesture towards Morag indicated distaste, but considerable respect. ‘This girl here is right. I question her motives, but she is right. There should be no settlement of Cluain’s future without telling Callum Sinclair this. He has rights … Perhaps no rights in law, but in nature.’

  ‘And nature has always been between us, Samuel. It was as if Callum’s knowledge of me as a coward and an adulterer was there from the moment that his eyes were fully opened. He grew up in this house, but he could have been as far from me as my grandchildren in China. Do not forget, Samuel, that when my wife died, he was a grown lad already, and past my possessing. He would take nothing from me. Not the smallest gift. Not the least help. All he would take from me was knowledge, and he milked me of that, whatever I had to give. He took it all, as he took knowledge from everyone. He had all his mother’s intelligence. He seemed his mother’s son entirely. Independent, proud, stubborn ‒ no, obstinate. Many times I believed he hated me, and perhaps that is the truth. But he never tried to hide it. There was no currying favour with the Master of Cluain. I could have made life easier for him as he grew up, but he did not choose the easy way. He learned all I had to teach him ‒ the farm, the distillery. He already had his mother’s way with animals and nature. And then there came the day he walked out of his strath and went to school in Edinburgh on money provided by his mother, and his own savings from wages. Neither he nor she would take a shilling beyond what they had earned ‒ and doubly earned ‒ in work for Cluain. Nor will he take it to this day. The privileges he seems to have are his by right and agreement. When I asked him to return to the distillery we both knew it must be on his terms. He takes no favours from me ‒ expects none. Since he has rejected everything else I have offered, I have no reason to believe that if I told him the truth, offered him a share in Cluain, he would not throw it back in my face. You see, I know him ‒ and I know myself. He would know that if I made such an offer it would not be because I loved him as a father should love a son, but because Cluain needed him. I have tried to love him ‒ it is not in my heart. And once he knew, if there was revenge in his heart, he could have it simply by refusing Cluain. That would be the surest way …’

  ‘And he would refuse it, Master. I know my son.’

  Could we have forgotten Mairi Sinclair just because she had remained silent? She stood there, the dark eyes deepened in that half-light, tall and majestically straight, a compelling, handsome woman, and one did not wonder at the magnetic quality she would have possessed at seventeen, beautiful then, and with knowledge beyond her years, different from other girls as she was from other women now. I imagined her up on the shielings, staying apart from the others when the fires burned at night, and there was laughter among the young people, and banter she could not join. The last flush of the twilight on the mountain, and the Master of Cluain for her companion. Not the man we saw now, but a younger man by thirty years, still struggling to make Cluain what it was, still with dreams unrealised, still hungry with wants and hopes. And perhaps it had been the same way with the black-haired girl, the girl with gifts already apparent, and beauty, and the beginnings of wisdom in her face, the girl from a crofter’s cottage, as fierce in her pride as in her poverty. Not a girl to flirt, beg, nor afterwards to tell, even though her life was almost beaten from her. Nor one to deny life to the child she carried. How could we have forgotten her, even for a few seconds?

  ‘You should never have written that name, Master. If I had known it was written, the Book, even that sacred Book, would have been destroyed. Not even that ‒ there are acids that would have burned the paper, leaving only a cipher for the prying eyes of scheming little girls ‒ little girls who know only the face of what they see, not the heart of it. It should never have been written, Master.’

  He sighed. ‘I wrote it after my wife died, remember. Perhaps I wrote it in remorse, knowing that then the truth could not hurt her ‒ but great-souled woman that she was, I think she could have borne the truth, and perhaps Callum would have been less perverse with her than me. Perhaps I had some notion of it as a last testament. If those unknown grandchildren could not be mine, then after my own death, the truth would be clear. I looked at that name again ‒ Callum’s name ‒ on the day that I made the entry of William’s death. But Callum and I were so far apart that he seemed no more to me than that other grandchild, still in China. And then she came …’

  ‘Master, remember that it would have been a useless cruelty to have told the Mistress. Remember that I swore to you the time when you forced from me the admission that it was your child I carried, that if you ever spoke to the Mistress, then I would be gone from Cluain that same day, and so would the child. Could you have two women of your acknowledged loving under the one roof? Could you have expected me to stay? In the beginning it was a penance every time I had to meet the Mistress’s eyes, but I stayed because I wanted my child brought up here, not in some city tenement. What punishment I bore would have to be my own, not his. But he would not be your son. He was no one’s son but mine.

  ‘And yet, I have always thought that he knew. As he grew, the knowledge seemed to come to him, though it was never spoken by me. It is, as you say, Master, as if he were born knowing, and perversely used the knowledge to punish you ‒ to withhold from you what we all knew you most wanted, your own son. If he never accepted any gift, it was because he could never bring himself to thank you for it. Callum could thank no one. It is a hard fault, Master, and one that I am cursed with. I can give no thanks, but neither can I accept thanks. I do what I can, what I see to be right, as the Lord gives me to see. When your grandson came ‒ so easy he was, so charming, and you both going along together as if it were he, not Callum, who had been here all his life, I felt myself possessed of jealousy and greed. I wanted your thoughts only for Callum. I prayed very long over that, and I believed my soul was finally freed of it. Then your grandson died, and I felt as if a judgement had been made on both of us, to see your happiness so destroyed. But then this girl came to take his place, and I suffered my jealousy and greed once again. I fought it, and prayed, and I began to see that my son was never to profit from the wrong I had done. And I knew what wrong he was committing with that woman, Margaret Campbell. It was wrong ‒ compounding wrong. It seemed to stem from me, as if I had given him the seed of evil. For what fault I am not yet free of, I can only pray for forgiveness.’

  ‘And I say damn your prayers for forgiveness, Mairi Sinclair!’ Morag cried it with the fierceness of pent-up anger. ‘You and this old man here ‒ so concerned with your souls and your consciences! What of your son? Until you have told him, face to face, what his position is in this household, you have no right, between you, to be worrying about your salvation and your repentance. It has gone beyond that. Now it is a matter for Callum. Will you take from him his inheritance because your soul is troubled? And you, Master, will you now weakly slide along into some plan for joining with other distillers, and leave your own son out of it because long ago you had not the courage to acknowledge him? Do you not stand high enough in your own estimation now to be able to afford this gesture? Is the Master of Cluain so small a man that he cannot make others accept his son? Think on it, Master, because if you do not tell him, then most surely I will. And can any of you deny now what you have seen written there?’

  ‘But he knows!’ I had found my tongue at last. ‘He knows! Even if he has not heard it in words from his mother or my grandfather, he most certa
inly knows.’

  Morag turned on me. ‘You are sure of that?’

  ‘Certain. And by the certain, sure way that a woman knows. I’ll say it before all of you, because I am not ‒ I cannot ‒ be ashamed of it. If I could have had him, Callum Sinclair would have been my husband. Yes ‒ I wanted him in that way. But he would not give himself to me, and he went his own way, and he followed another woman to the moment of her death. But even if he had not loved Margaret Campbell, he would never have been mine. I see it now ‒ so clearly. But I could not before. He tried to tell me ‒ he tried. Even if there was nothing to prove whose son he was, he sensed it, and he tried to stop me from loving him. As if he could! I went on, and I kept my hope. Now I know what held us apart, and there never was a hope at all.’

  I did not care that they all knew now the way I had loved Callum. Let them know the dangers they had run of a dark and forbidden love growing up; let them know how close I had come to the ultimate disaster. I remember how he had called back to me that day on the mountain: ‘Forget this day, Kirsty. Forget it!’ His instinct had tried to save me; if he had known for certain he would have said it in words. But we were alike, Callum and I; we had both persisted in our loves against reason and against hope.

  Now I went back deliberately and seated myself again in front of the Bible, reading once more the names ‒ William’s and my own, set down before Callum’s, which should have preceded them.

  ‘So there is something to be put right, Grandfather. I can see that so long as there was William, you still might have hoped for a legitimate heir for Cluain ‒ but even so, justice would not have been done. I think you have made it too easy for yourself all these years since my grandmother died. When Callum was a child, his mother could speak for him, force conditions on you. But when Callum was grown, there was no excuse, before God, not to tell him the truth. He should have been given a share in Cluain ‒ on whatever pretext you or he wanted to present to the world. Either that, or a chance of honestly refusing it. Of saying no to you! But you kept placing your hope in William, and pushing aside an old shame. How can either of you speak for Callum now? ‒ most especially now, when my brother no longer gives you even the faintest reason to hold off. When William died, Grandfather, your last excuse died with him. There is more shame to you now that you talk of bringing in Cameron’s and Macquarie’s, and even of marrying me off to one of them ‒ and your own son is left out.’

  ‘He will refuse. He will take nothing from me.’

  ‘Then let me hear it from Callum himself! Let us all hear it. Do we need Morag to do this task for us? I will tell him myself if you do not. I will tell him, and then I will leave Cluain. Because I have loved him. Do you understand love, Grandfather? I doubt that you do. This was a wrong love, a wrong and twisted thing. I could not stay here, and see him day after day, and have the knowledge of it fester in me. But before I go, I will tell him ‒ I swear it! And I will not see Cluain parcelled off without his consent. If he wants to let it go, then let him say so. But in all that you are now deciding for Cluain, remember that the Camerons and the Macquaries will not stand still after your death. They will chip away at what Cluain is, at what you have built up. It is how these things always go, no matter what promises are made, what contracts are signed. You must know for the Camerons and the Macquaries you have one great counterweight. Dear God, in Callum Sinclair you have a man!’

  Then I could stand it no longer. I put my face in my hands, and prayed that I would not weep here and now for all that I had lost, and for all that I was throwing after it. Callum could never be mine ‒ never. And now I had said that Cluain would not be mine. I felt the awful bleakness of it. There was nothing left to love.

  ‘Is there some whisky in this house? I have need of a dram or two. I have just come from Edinburgh … and from Ballochtorra.’

  Callum’s voice. My head flew up, and my spirits seemed to bound with pleasure; and then came the dull remembrance. He stood in the doorway of the kitchen passage, his body slumped against the frame, with the look of exhaustion upon him. He had never seemed more like his mother. His eyes seemed sunken with sleeplessness; I wondered if he had thought to take any food at all since Margaret had died; his face and lips were pinched and white. There was silence as he advanced into the room, and took, uninvited, a chair at the table. The movement seemed to release us all from a kind of spell. My own chair scraped back as I rushed to the decanter, to be there before Morag. But she already had her hand on it, and I banged it loudly against the glass as I pulled it from her.

  ‘I will pour,’ I said. I had had enough of Morag. She was right in her demand for justice for Callum, but she did it with no sense of disinterest. I wondered why I had never seen ambition before in those bright, knowing eyes, the ever-present willingness to help, the thirst for knowledge. For a young girl in this quiet, slow strath she knew so much, and she had kept her most important knowledge to herself until it could be made to serve herself. I wanted no more of her.

  I poured a large glass of whisky, and spilled a little water into it. I placed it on the table before Callum. He took it slowly, and drank a little, and then set it down.

  ‘You need some food,’ I said. ‘Morag will bring you something.’

  ‘Morag will bring nothing. She will stay where she is. And I need no food.’

  He took another drink. ‘I wonder what Cluain is coming to? I have come in and stabled the pony, and no one has heard me. Not a dog barks. Big Billy’s flock does not open their mouths. A man can be too well known to a household. You’re all so full of your own concerns, you have ears for nothing. I’ve been standing there near half an hour. Not hiding ‒ just standing there where any of you could have seen me if you cared to look. It made too interesting hearing to interrupt. It isn’t often a man gets a chance to hear the truth about himself ‒ good and bad. Mostly, it seemed to be bad.’

  ‘If you’d had the decency to declare yourself …’ my grandfather began.

  Callum’s weary gesture of dismissal silenced him. ‘Do you want to talk now about decency, Mr Macdonald?’ He looked around us all. ‘Well, between you, you’ve left almost nothing unsaid. I’ve never heard such a lot of pious prattling in my life … no, I’m sorry.’ He turned himself sideways and reached for my hand, pulling me down into the chair next to him. ‘I’m sorry, Kirsty. That wasn’t for you. I’m sorry about everything. For me, this summer has been the whole climax of my life ‒ it has been … everything. For you, it has been hell. The kind of hell that I live in now. Yes, I did try to stop it, but how can you tell someone not to love? I didn’t want you hurt, but I didn’t understand how deep it went with you. Forgive me for not allowing you the feelings I had myself for Margaret. I did you an injustice. If I had guessed that it was more than a light fancy, I would have said more. I would have stopped it. Because I knew that I would leave Cluain when Margaret went, at the end of the summer. Oh ‒’ he gestured with the glass. ‘I knew I would not be with her. I wouldn’t have followed her to London like a love-sick boy, though that’s what I was. And I could not wait here to be a summer diversion for her again next year. I was not completely blind, even if I was in love. I did not blame her ‒ she never fully knew what she was to me. But I knew I could not endure it here without her. I would go away, and in time you, Kirsty, would love someone else, and no damage would be done. How stupid it sounds now ‒ no damage would be done. But that was what I thought. If I had dreamed it could hurt you so, nothing would have stopped me speaking.’

  ‘You knew then ‒ about my grandfather?’

  ‘My father.’ We could have been speaking alone together in that room. Suddenly all the barriers were down. The first free and unconstrained speech we had ever had, and it took place before an audience. It didn’t matter. All the pretence was gone, the striving. The love was still there. Like the name written in the Book, it could not be wiped out, even with the acid of my pain; but it had undergone a strange transmutation. I looked at Callum with other eyes, but not less
loving eyes.

  ‘My father. Yes, I knew ‒ or guessed. Not that anything ever was said, and I didn’t suspect that he could be capable of the kind of sentiment that would cause him to write my name where he did. Perhaps we had a chance, and lost it ‒ long ago. But only between two people related as closely as we are could the kind of feelings we had exist. I could not have been so involved with someone not close to me. I would simply not have cared. It seems I can only love or hate. Most of the time I thought I hated him ‒ overbearing, arrogant, too full of himself and Cluain. And then at times I knew great pity for him, growing old alone, sitting here at nights alone, going to his bed alone. If my mother thinks she has saved her soul by refusing to marry him, then she should look into her heart for a little Christian charity towards him. For all she says of praying, she has not forgiven him ‒ or herself. She had her own revenge, my mother, and called it penance. All these years, however she tries to deny it, she must have believed Cluain would be for me. Who else was there? We quarrelled, the old man and I, and still he had to call me back. I was glad when William came. I was released. The old man had company, and hope. And I was free. I was no longer possessed by a future which might be dictated for me. I neither had to accept nor refuse Cluain. Then everything changed again when William died ‒ and Margaret came to me. It all changed so suddenly that my head spun with trying to comprehend. I lived in a haze of joy so long as I had Margaret, and I was so blind to what you felt. I knew it was going to hurt like death when it came to an end. And like death it is. I’m sorry, Kirsty. I would never have let it be this way for you if I hadn’t been so wrapped in my own joys and woes.’

  The exhausted face looked at me with a kindliness I had never experienced before. Suddenly I put my hand on his, as it lay on the table, just gently put it on his, not gripping. It might have been William I touched.

  ‘We will both survive,’ I said. ‘One does not die so easily. I will leave Cluain, and you will stay, because you must. But we will both survive.’