A Falcon for a Queen

by Catherine Gaskin

  ‘I will not stay at Cluain,’ he answered. ‘Not for anything. Not for this old man, or anything he can give me. I gather there is some talk of a merger with Cameron’s and Macquarie’s ‒ well, I will not stay for that either. There is nothing anyone can give me now. So it is you who must stay, Kirsty. You who will have to battle out Cluain’s future. They will try to arrange a marriage. But take nothing you do not want yourself ‒ accept no one and nothing in which there is not willingness and love. Once you have known love, you will either seek it again, or live without it. You will not take what pretends to be love ‒ not for money, or convenience, nor for the sake of peace. You and I, Kirsty ‒ we are not made for peace, it seems. It is not a family inheritance.’

  Samuel Lachlan could contain himself no longer. His glasses came off, and his glass tipped wildly, so that the whisky spilled on his trousers.

  ‘Do you mean, Sinclair ‒ Callum ‒ that you will not stay at Cluain? That you refuse, should Mr ‒ your father ‒ offer? That you would not stay and take over? ‒ when the time comes, of course.’

  Callum seemed not to hear him. He was looking at me very directly, a way he had not looked almost since the first time we had encountered each other, a look that searched my face, with tenderness, with compassion. Then I felt his hand, which had rested under mine, quietly, slowly, fold over, until it encompassed mine, held it, gathered it to him, for what comfort it would offer. ‘I’m sorry, Kirsty,’ he said again. ‘I’m leaving you an uneasy future. Cluain is no gift, but a burden. I’m sorry.’

  It was only then he looked beyond me to the two men. ‘No ‒ I am not staying. My years of service to Cluain are ended. We cannot unmake the past ‒ my father and I. It is too late, for both of us. We cannot stop being what we are, and what we are will not live together. So go on and make what plans you must. I will not be part of them. I will be going as soon as you can find a man to replace me.’

  ‘You are certain?’ my grandfather said. He looked at Callum and his face twisted with bitterness. The pretence was gone from between them also. It must be almost impossible for Angus Macdonald to comprehend that Callum could be willingly leaving behind a chance to be master of Cluain, even though, to this moment, he himself had not formally offered it. He looked very old, the lines of age unnaturally harsh. I thought that for thirty years he must have carried at the back of his mind the thought of Callum, perhaps unconsciously believing that if every other plan failed there was the ultimate heir to Cluain. And now thirty years were gone, and so was Callum. He was left with me.

  ‘It turns to ashes,’ he said. ‘A man works all his life … for what? You and I, Samuel, what have we laboured for?’

  The other man looked more bewildered than ever. All around him, the forces on which he had based his life, the sanctity of hard work, the sacredness of capital, of possessions, was being challenged. Before him were two young people, and in these last minutes he had heard each of us refuse what had taken Angus Macdonald and himself a lifetime to build. He shook his head, mute.

  ‘Well, then, Callum Sinclair, let us not detain you,’ my grandfather said. ‘I am still capable of a day’s work in the distillery. We are about to begin malting, and I have a fair knowledge of how it’s done. I have not yet lost my eye and nose for good whisky. Let us not keep you a day longer than needs be. If Cluain does not satisfy you, then let us not hold you here against your will. Another man will be found. There are many who would be glad to come to Cluain. Do not trouble yourself that we shall not continue to make good whisky without your help.’ It was the final dismissal.

  Mairi Sinclair made only one sign of protest. Her hand went out suddenly in a gesture, as if she would have kept Callum seated there, as if she would have kept him forever. Then slowly it fell again to her side. She also was losing Callum. For her also the years at Cluain without him stretched ahead.

  Almost at the same instant as her hand fell, the real protest came from Morag. ‘Callum ‒ you are mad! You cannot do this thing! You cannot throw away such a prize. Think of it! ‒ Cluain! It is not everything a man could want? A fine house, a fine farm ‒ a famous distillery. Look at those two old men! ‒ you have only to nod your head, even now, and it is yours. Do not believe what he says about going. He would have you ‒ and gladly. He is pushed ‒ he needs you. Och, you have lost your senses over this dead woman. In time ‒ in a very little time, you will come to yourself, and find what you have thrown away. You will find that she did not matter. Frivolous, light-minded creature she was. You will wonder how you could ever have given time or thought to her. She was not worth more than her looks.’

  Callum turned slowly towards her. After her struggle with me over the decanter, Morag had retreated to the kitchen-passage door, almost beyond the candlelight, where Callum had stood, as if she would remain unnoticed, and not be sent away.

  ‘And what is it to you, Morag, how I choose to give my time, where I choose to give my love? I gave both ‒ gladly. Never mind what Margaret was. She gave me back things no woman has ever given me. Her death has not taken them away. They remain forever.’

  ‘Then you are doubly a fool! Your sense is in your loins, not in your head. You ask what it is to me? My life ‒ that is what it is! Since you came back here, since I was fifteen, I have waited for you, Callum Sinclair. I have waited, and learned to do and be everything that a wife for a man like you should be. Do you think there have not been others after me? ‒ and I have withheld myself until you would one day see me. Yes, see me! If I had had the clothes of Margaret Campbell, and the soft hands, and rode a mare like hers, would you not have noticed me sooner? My hands are rough, but my face is not, nor my body. There has never been anyone else for me but you, Callum. I cannot stand to see you throw away Cluain. I have counted on you ‒ and it. It was to be your future. And mine. Even Angus Macdonald must see this. Together, you and I, Callum ‒ we could make a whole generation to succeed at Cluain. Children … sons. I could give you everything ‒ and Cluain what it most needs. No, you cannot throw it away. I will not let you! It is too much if what I have done is for nothing.’

  ‘And what have you done, Morag?’

  She was silent for a time. I stared at her, fascinated. She was like a creature suddenly broken from a shell; the red lips were full and passionate; there was now no winning smile, but the wilful stance of a woman in the full spate of her needs and desires, someone who sees the fruits of a long toil about to be snatched from her. She was so different from the faded, resigned old-age acceptance of Samuel Lachlan and my grandfather. There was no acceptance in Morag; she was fighting.

  ‘What have I done?’ she repeated, at last. ‘I have loved you, Callum Sinclair. That is what I have done. I have loved you lawfully, keeping myself for you. It has not been like the love of that woman, Margaret Campbell, who sought to pass an idle summer and bewitched you out of your senses. She who lost a lover when Master William died, and looked about for the one to take his place. No, my love has not been like that, nor like the love of this girl here, who has loved where she should not have done ‒ well, it is not her fault, but she is foolish, and was love-sick, and would not listen to me when I tried to tell her that you were not for her. I have loved you the way a woman should, ready to do anything for you, to be anything. And I have waited. So you see, you cannot leave Cluain. You can’t leave me.’

  Callum drank from his glass again. ‘How old are you, Morag?’

  She drew herself to her full height. ‘Old enough. Nearly eighteen.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s a sad waste, Morag. You think I haven’t seen you? I have. I have seen you about my mother’s kitchen, and I have seen no woman, but a child with a scheming heart. There is no innocence in you, Morag. You talk of Margaret Campbell ‒ but what did you know of her? It is the evil minds of those like you who make her seem sullied and corrupt. She was not that. She was never capable of a calculated gesture. She was simple ‒ even guileless, no matter what the world says of her. She never stopped to consider tha
t friendship with a man, laughter, enjoyment, could lead to love. And when love came, she took it gladly, whole-heartedly. You do not understand that kind of love. You never could. You don’t know what love is, Morag. You have waited, and planned. Planned for what? ‒ I don’t know. So far as I’m concerned, it’s all wasted. Turn your talents elsewhere. I will leave.’

  ‘I have said, Callum Sinclair,’ Angus Macdonald broke in, ‘that we have no need of you here.’ How cold and tired his voice had grown; I sensed the anger of his rejection taking hold.

  ‘I will go,’ Callum replied, ‘as soon as I am permitted to go. There may be legal procedures which require me to stay some time yet.’

  ‘An Enquiry?’ My grandfather said it with contempt. ‘And what will that be but a formality? Because the sheriff is a friend of the Campbells he will gloss it over. But of course you will have to describe what happened, since you were with her. However carefully you choose your words, the whole countryside will know what you were about. The relationship between you and Margaret Campbell was already a scandal. You could hardly claim you were in attendance on her as a groom.’

  ‘I will never pretend I was anyone’s groom! But there will be more than a police glossing over of her death. The reason for her death is quite clear. She broke her neck when the mare stumbled on the rocks below the waterfall, and pitched her down on her head. She did not live beyond that second. But there was more than that. It was not a normal fall the mare took. I was riding after Margaret and I saw it clearly. The mare did not slip ‒ she staggered. And at a bad place. I had noticed there was something wrong and I called to Margaret to dismount. But she seldom paid heed to advice like that. She went ahead, crossing the ford, and it was there the mare’s legs suddenly folded under her, and she and Margaret together fell down on the rocks below.’

  ‘The mare was ill?’ My grandfather leaned forward. ‘It is not like Ballochtorra to send an unfit animal out from its stables.’

  ‘The mare was well enough when she went out. I told you I have just come from Ballochtorra. I have spoken to Gavin Campbell, as I had to do before, to get his permission to act in the first place. Before the mare was buried, up there by my cottage, I removed her stomach. Then I took it to a pathologist in Edinburgh ‒ a friend I made when I was at school. I did not tell him the full circumstances. He trusted that I would make the right use of the information he gave me. And the law will probably be about my neck for taking things into my own hands. But I wasn’t absolutely certain. If I had been wrong, there would only have been more gossip and speculation, and Margaret’s son would have suffered all the more ‒ without need. If I had waited to call the constable from Grantown, and all the rest, the countryside would have been ringing with the news. And perhaps I had been wrong. I hoped I had been wrong. But I wasn’t.’

  ‘What did the man find, then?’

  ‘Hemlock ‒ more than a trace of digitalis ‒ foxglove. Henbane ‒ hyoscyamine. The mare had taken enough hemlock to have eventually killed her. She had eaten while we ‒ while Margaret and I were in the cottage. That staggering walk was the beginning of the vertigo that comes from the drug ‒ so the pathologist tells me.’

  His voice had faltered as he recalled the details of the scene. He leaned back and sipped again from his whisky. ‘There was a feed bag with oats there. I had made a rough little stable of the second half of the croft ‒ just to shelter the animals from the weather, perhaps to shelter them from prying eyes if anyone came that way. But people never went up that track except on purpose ‒ the gorse up there is above head high, and they would only come looking for a strayed sheep. I never saw any ‒ so that is unlikely. But also I never left any feed there. Why should I? I did not want to advertise our presence ‒ the use of the place more than I had to. But the feed bag was there that day, when I tied up the mare and my pony. Margaret had dismounted and gone into the cottage. I did not say anything to her about the feed bag. I thought it was some kind of cruel hint from someone who knew we met there, and who wanted to make an ugly joke. Nothing we did there was ugly ‒ and I did not want to make it seem so to Margaret. But I can never forgive myself for not taking the feed bag beyond reach of the mare. There is no doubt she ate from it.’

  ‘Och, what nonsense,’ Morag cried. ‘You are making a big and tragic event because your fancy woman has been killed, and you want to make someone else suffer for it. The countryside is filled with hemlock in the wild places. Where it is not cut it will sprout and grow wild and big. Every child knows that.’

  Mairi Sinclair intervened. ‘Hemlock is a rank, evil-smelling plant ‒ repellent. Only hungry animals would graze on it. Horses from the Ballochtorra stable would never touch such a thing in its wild state. As to the henbane ‒ I do not know. It was in the oats. It would have been a potent dose.’

  ‘How do you know it was in the oats?’

  ‘I know. I know the mare could never have grazed on enough of it to make such a concentration in the stomach to kill her. Mice may die of nibbling at hemlock ‒ not horses. It was not a natural fall she had. Was she dead when John went to shoot her?’

  Callum shook his head. ‘She was not. But she was not screaming and struggling as an animal would do who is in great pain from a broken leg. The drugs would have been having their full effect by then. John told me she was lying very still, and she hardly opened her eyes when he came near her. I asked him to say nothing, and he agreed. He trusted me, too. I thought of the oats myself, and I went up at first light the next morning to bring the bag down. But it wasn’t there. I have no proof that the mare got the hemlock from the oats ‒ or the henbane, or digitalis, or belladonna. What I have to know ‒ and I may never know ‒ is who it was who knew that Margaret and I met there. If it was meant simply as a warning ‒ the warning of some narrow-minded zealot that the wages of sin is death, then it succeeded. But it was meant for the mare ‒ and now Margaret is dead! God, if only she had dismounted when I called to her! If she had never crossed the ford …’ He wiped his hand across his forehead. ‘The Enquiry may reveal nothing but these facts ‒ and I cannot produce the bag of oats. But I will not leave the strath until I know every single person who knew that Margaret and I met there. I will know!’

  ‘I knew,’ I said. ‘I knew ‒ and I went there the day before Margaret died.’

  Callum shook his head in disbelief. ‘Kirsty! ‒ you couldn’t …’

  ‘I did not. I told you I knew. I went there. Even with all I had seen, even after the night of the Prince’s ball, I still did not quite believe. But when I saw the cottage ‒ how could I not believe it then? The feed bag was there, and in the few minutes I stood at the door of the cottage Ailis got to it. She did not have time to take very much. She lived.’

  ‘How did you know, Kirsty? ‒ about the croft?’

  ‘Morag.’

  She did not flinch under all our eyes. She stood erect, blazing with anger and passion.

  ‘Yes, I knew. And so did half the strath.’

  ‘But you told me about it the night the harvest feast was spread, Morag. You told me where to go, and what to look for. And very early the next morning, just at first light, you left Cluain. I saw you. Later you told me you had gone with something Mistress Sinclair had given you for a sick child of one of the workers.’

  Mairi Sinclair’s words were sharp and dry. ‘I did not send her.’

  Morag’s head went up further. ‘And so ‒ what if she did not send me? What business was it of yours to enquire? I have no life of my own? Is Callum Sinclair the only one who may go to meet a lover if he chooses?’

  Callum leaned both arms on the table, and put his chin in one hand, rubbing it wearily. He did not look at Morag any longer. ‘And what is all this you have said about keeping yourself for me?’ He sighed, and I thought he would rather not have gone on. ‘Morag ‒ Morag, don’t lie! There was or there was not a sick child? There was or there was not a lover to meet?’

  When Morag made no attempt to answer, I spoke. ‘She meant it for
me. She dangled the knowledge of the croft before me that night like bait, and she went with the feed bag the next morning, knowing that I could not resist seeing the evidence for myself. To those like Morag, I must seem such a fool ‒ but who in love is not foolish? I went, as she guessed I would. There was nothing so obvious as poison for me ‒ but something to tempt Ailis. Who knew what could have happened? Everyone knows that Ailis will eat anything presented to her, for as long as it’s there. She could have fallen anywhere along that track ‒ most of the glen is narrow and steep, and boulders most of the way ‒ some of it dangerous to a rider like myself. A fall ‒ perhaps a night in the open. Ailis too drugged to get back to Cluain. Perhaps dead. Perhaps myself hurt, and with luck, some rain. Who knows that I would not have followed on the way William went? It took three days and two nights to find him.’

  ‘What has this to do with Margaret?’ Callum demanded sharply. He forced himself upright in the chair.

  ‘Yes … what?’ I was asking it of myself, remembering, trying to recall each moment of the day that Callum had hammered on the door, and Margaret’s slackly hanging boots had dripped rain, almost on my face.

  ‘I remember I got up very late that day ‒ the day Margaret died. We had been up all night in the stable with Ailis ‒ Mistress Sinclair and myself. And as I was getting dressed I saw Margaret riding along by the river. It was a surprise to see her ‒ Morag had told me she and Gavin were at Cawdor, and were going on to some other place. It was such a terrible day ‒ the rain pouring down. I guessed where she was going. And just to show Morag that I did not care as much as she supposed ‒ what a stupid pretence that was ‒ I told her I had seen Margaret out riding. Morag hurried with my meal, I remember, and talked about having vegetables to prepare. But when I went out into the scullery, she wasn’t there.’

  ‘What are you saying, Kirsty?’ Callum said impatiently. ‘Make yourself plain, for God’s sake!’