There would be time to explore, to examine the many rooms, the great dining hall, the kitchens, the stables, the storerooms, the round tower rooms, one of which would be his bedchamber and one of which should have been the chapel… But there was something he had to see first. The vital thing. He dismounted, unfastening the girl’s grip as if undoing a belt, and kicked his good leg over the pommel of the saddle, sliding face-out to the ground. His injured leg gave him a mighty pang, but he righted himself and handed the reins to his chief groom, a man who had crossed from youth to early middle age since he had left.
‘Robert McGregor? Is it you under that grey thatch?’
The man knuckled his forehead. ‘Aye m’laird. Welcome home.’
‘I must inspect my dungeon!’ McLennan muttered. Then he limped away.
Rob was holding the horse’s reins and staring, not after his master, but at Peony. She was so tired that when she was left unsupported on the horse’s back, she began to slip off. Rob was so astonished at the sight of her that he only just managed to reach out and break her fall. But he didn’t like touching her. He led the blowing horse away, leaving the child on the cobbles.
Inside the stable, he prepared to hand the reins to a boy who was waiting there. He’d been peeping out over the half-door, open-mouthed, watching everything – the legendary laird, the great lathered horse, but most of all, the little lass who had ridden pillion and now lay on the stones of the courtyard like a dead thing.
‘Aw’richt, Finlay,’ said Rob the groom good-naturedly. ‘I can see ye’re dying to have a look at her. I’ll rub him down for ye. But dunna be long. Take a pail, and if ye see the Master coming, draw some watter for the horse and get yersel’ back in here, quick.’
Fin needed no second telling. He grabbed a pail and rushed out of the stable. He stood over Peony, looking down at her. She didn’t move. He stirred her gently with his foot. She jerked, and sat up a little. Her hair stuck out around her face, stiff with dust; her eyes were almost sealed up from exhaustion and the salt from wind-summoned tears. Fin burst out laughing – he thought her the funniest thing he had ever seen in his life. He bent and peered into her face.
‘Can ye see me out of those wee eyes?’ he asked her.
She stared at him. He pushed her again with his boot.
‘Can ye no’ talk?’ he asked.
She nodded.
‘Say something then. Tell me your name, if ye’ve got one.’
‘Wo shi mudan,’ she said, as she said it so often in her head. She had no notion of what her name might be in English.
The boy said, ‘Och, I canna catch that! I’ll call ye Wee Eyes. Get up, lass!’ He pulled her up by the hand. ‘D’ye understand me?’ She nodded. ‘Are ye hungry?’ She nodded again. ‘Come on, then.’
He first drew water for the horse, then led Peony to his corner of the stable, where he slept. He dug in the straw and took out some bread and a piece of cheese kept shut in a box against the mice. She looked at them askance. Scottish food still didn’t look like food to her, and besides, the box was grubby and the cheese reeked.
But Fin chose to ignore her pursed lips. He sat her down in the straw and fed her, breaking off bits of bread and cheese and pushing them into her mouth. For the first time she let herself taste a cheese that was not bland, like the yak’s milk kind, but strong. It smelt so bad she could hardly swallow the first pieces, but mixed in her mouth with the bread (and her hunger) it became tolerable, then tasty.
Next, he put some into her hand, opened his mouth wide, and pointed a grimy finger into it. He wanted her to feed him, like a mother bird! What did it mean? But some dimly remembered instinct for fun awoke in her. She who had not played a game for years, recognised that he wanted to play with her. She smiled, suddenly and widely, and pushed the first bit halfway down his throat, nearly choking him.
He almost bit her fingers off. She snatched them out, and they both burst out laughing.
‘There’s chewing to do first, ye ken!’ he said, pretending to be stern. But she knew he was not really angry. They played the game, turn and turn about, till the food was all gone and Rob the groom was in the doorway calling Fin to his duty.
‘Gi’ me a few more minutes!’ he begged. ‘I mun get her cleaned up!’
He touched Peony’s golden skin, her black hair, both encrusted with the dirt of travel.
‘Ye need a wash!’ he grinned. ‘Ye’re a dirty Wee Eyes!’ He pretended to scold her, the way his mother scolded him.
He took her to the well in the courtyard, and pumped some cold water into the wooden pail. Then he stood by while she washed herself. She hated to be dirty, and was grateful to him for understanding her need. She put her face down into the pail, catching a glimpse of herself as she did so. She quickly dipped her face, not letting herself examine her image for more than a second, because it frightened her. She had hardly ever seen herself and the few glimpses she got contradicted her notion of herself as a being that matched her magic garden, beautiful and radiant like the flower she was named for.
Fin watched her approvingly as she rubbed her hands over her face and neck, and rinsed the dirt away again and again till her golden skin shone. He drew more water for her to dip her hair.
When she stood before him, dripping and shining, he said, ‘Have ye no clothes but these?’ She shook her head solemnly. The clean new clothes the old woman at the croft had given her weren’t so clean any more. But they were all she had. Then he said, ‘Why dunna ye walk right?’ He had noticed her strange hobbling gait. ‘Are ye stiff from the ride?’
Bewildered, she tried both to nod and shake her head at once.
He passed over this. ‘How did the Master find ye?’
‘He buy me,’ whispered Peony.
‘So ye’re worse off than me,’ said Fin. ‘I’m a tenant and a groom’s boy. Ye’re a true slave, bought and paid for.’ He stared at her in awe. He didn’t feel like laughing any more.
Peony’s life in the castle began.
Bruce McLennan had other servants now. Peony didn’t have to work hard, as she had before. But he liked to know where she was – if he had not seen her for a day, he would make some excuse to summon her and give her some task to do for him. She made his tea, and served it in the small porcelain cups, without handles, that they had brought from Chi-na. Sometimes she had to polish his boots, or mend his clothes, jobs she was used to. He never spoke kindly to her, and of course never thanked her, but he didn’t shout at her or try to hit her, either. He had no reason to.
He had come home and he was satisfied, for the moment. His castle put him in a good humour. Master Douglas had lived up to his reputation. Every part of the building was exactly as McLennan had planned it. And now – also according to plan – he had a much larger tenantry. Most of the men who had been recruited from other places to build the castle had chosen to stay and settle within it or near it; not only was the village growing, the surrounding countryside was now dotted with hamlets and farms. McLennan was now laird over perhaps a thousand people. For one who had started life as a poor lad in a highland fishing village, he had reason to be proud.
‘I know they whispered that I was as lowborn as themselves,’ he thought. ‘Let them raise themselves as I have! Let them build themselves a castle before they whisper that I’m no’ a true laird!’ But these thoughts about status avoided the darker motives he had had for building a fortress, for gathering able-bodied men.
The castle that seemed to its master the fulfilment of a dream was in Peony’s eyes grim, damp and darkly cold, but it breathed a kind of safety. Sometimes as summer came, and the unambitious northern sun at last climbed overhead and shone into the courtyard, the members of McLennan’s large household grew more cheerful, and, though at first suspicious of her because of her foreignness, some learned to be kind to her. It was a new life indeed, and she often thought of Li-wu. She knew that the kind of ‘new life’ he had told her about involved passing through the gates of death and being rebo
rn into another body, but this sort was good enough for the moment. Living in the castle, with no war or hard riding and her master in a good temper, was better than anything she’d known since she left her family. The memories of past hardships faded.
So did the magic garden in her head. She hardly ever visited it nowadays, because she hardly needed to.
And the best of all was Fin.
She had never really had a friend. She didn’t know the word. But Fin taught it to her.
‘We’re friends, ye ken,’ he’d say. ‘I’m your friend, and you’re my friend. Say it.’
‘Friend,’ she repeated. It seemed a serious matter to her. Fin was always grinning but she was solemn and didn’t always smile back. One day he put his fingers to the corners of her mouth and pulled them up.
‘That’s a smile,’ he said. ‘Ye’re no’ used to it. But ye’ll learn. Go on. Try it. Like this, see?’
And he was so kind and funny that she began to smile more and more.
When Fin got leave, he would visit his parents’ home in the countryside near the castle. He told her about it.
‘It’s a bonny wee hoos. Mother keeps it warm and bright and clean – ye’d like that, Wee Eyes, wouldn’t ye? And she’s a gie good cook! I’d make her cut things up small, so ye could eat wi’ your wee sticks. She’d help to fatten ye up. Ye’d be right bonny if ye had more flesh on ye, och aye!, and if we could make your eyes round! Then I could call ye Round Eyes!’
Peony didn’t understand all his talk. But she liked to listen. She learned new words. She understood her nickname and sometimes she tried to open her eyes wide.‘Round eyes!’ she said.
‘Aye! Ye’re doing your best! But I doubt ye can ever make them come right,’ he teased her. Secretly he thought her eyes beautiful and mysterious with their smooth, straight-edged lids. He would sometimes bend and try to peer into them, as if to discover what she was thinking, but she would cover them and run away.
Fin asked Peony time after time to come with him to visit his parents. But she just shook her head.
‘Master not let,’ she said.
‘He wulna mind! He wulna know.’
Rob, Fin’s boss, heard him.
‘Let the lassie be, Fin, dunna tempt her. The master might kill her if she took leave.’
Fin stared at him incredulously. ‘Kill her? Why would he?’
‘Ye dunna ken his temper.’
‘He seems quiet enough to me.’
‘Aye,’ said Rob soberly. ‘He was quiet once, calm and good-natured – another man altogether.’
‘That would be – before McInnes—’
‘Hold your whisht! One day if you’re unlucky, ye’ll see the worst of what he’s become.’
‘What’s the worst he could do to me?’
The groom looked at him without speaking for a while. Then he said, ‘Have ye no’ seen the dungeon?’
‘Not – not since it was finished.’
‘Well, I have. It’s a terrible, terrible place. And if I’m no’ mistaken, the Master would like nothing better than a prisoner or two down there. That’s what he had it made for. I’d not like to see you chained up in the dark wi’ the rats, wi’out even a bit o’ straw to lay your silly young head on.’
The groom had good sense.
Bruce McLennan could not enjoy his castle without being constantly reminded of what lay under it. He didn’t like the dungeon being empty. It needed its destined prisoner. Or else for what was all that digging and carrying away the spoil, and lining with stones? For what were the iron rings in the wall and the chains? What use was the big iron-clad door with the brass key? The key now hung on a nail in his bedchamber, and was the first thing he saw each morning when he woke under his red silk sheets, lit up like a reminder by the sun striking in a shaft through the narrow window. There was a connection here with his conscience and his manhood.
The years abroad had gone some way to making him, not forget what had happened, but to distance him from it to some extent. Time and new things, the fighting and the journeys – and something else that he would never have acknowledged – had softened the cutting edges of his hideous memories and his thirst for revenge.
But now the satisfaction and relief of getting home and settling into his castle, that had gone into his system like meat, was digested and absorbed, and soon he was hungry again – restless and unrelieved. The air of the Scottish moors brought scents of heather and broom and bog and the tang of sheep; the changing light brought sights that set the past before him again: the days when he and his bride climbed the crags and lay together in the hollows and embraced, and later played with their young ones and planned the future they would have together. That future that they’d planned had no castle in it, no dungeon. It was a thing of peace and prosperity for them and their children, a future destined to be broken into, despoiled and destroyed.
He spent much time up on the battlements, looking out over the countryside, a view much altered by his own endeavours. His will had brought about the village that now lay at the foot of the crag. He often stood staring down at it, watching the people who lived there. He especially liked the midweek market day, when the wagons, carts, or laden beasts from outlying farms would trundle in through the gates in the palisade, along the dirt tracks to the marketplace in the middle of the village. People would come out of their houses and flock to buy, and then would hurry back to open up their shops. On a shutter, lowered to make a counter, they would set out their goods – home-baked bread and cakes, eggs and chickens and cuts of meat, fresh-caught pike and eels from the river, vegetables, fruits, jars of honey, stone bottles of beer and wine, household wares and tools, balls of wool and homespun cloth…
His own servants would leave the castle and cross the moat into the village to mingle with the villagers, to buy supplies for his large household and no doubt to exchange news and gossip. He could hear the sounds – drifts of distant laughter and shouts, children’s cries as they played, dogs barking, occasional singing or playing of instruments… On Sundays he watched the people, in their best clothes, streaming to the church. His own people, too, who had no place of worship inside the castle walls… When the wind blew in his face, he could faintly hear the hymns.
This was his village and these were his people. How easily satisfied they were! How simple their lives! They worked hard, but they were rewarded for it. He remembered the strange sights and customs, the elegance and superiority he had glimpsed on his travels, the evil vices and filth and stench of the streets and quays of London… Here was better than either. Here, there was fresh air, fields, flocks, game, fish, crops, orchards. Self-respecting, decent folk, upheld by their simple faith… What more was needed for happiness and well-being?
And he thought, ‘If I do nothing!’ That was all that was needed for this to continue. These people lived in peace and sufficiency. He needed only to rule them benignly from his castle and do nothing, change nothing, initiate nothing and they could go on as they were, and they would tip their hats to him and teach their children to respect him, and bless him in their prayers. ‘They trust me to take care of them’, he thought. ‘Their lives are in my hands.’
But then a griping pain began to gnaw his vitals. He could feel it, like a rat inside him. ‘If I had been left but one,’ he thought. ‘Only one of my dear ones to love and be loved by, then I could perhaps forgive. Then maybe I could give up my revenge and live, and let live, in peace! But he left me not one, nor hen nor chicks, not one!’ And his fury would return. He would grind his teeth in his bitter aloneness, and turn his face away from those below who rejoiced in living for their families. He would climb slowly down the stone steps inside the great curtain-wall, and go to his room, and send for ‘the girl’ to bring him his tea. His eyes, blankly staring as his mind turned inward and backward to the beautiful, then terrible, and all unchangeable past, would not even follow her quiet passage between the door and the table at his side where she carefully laid the fragrant cup.
He would not even notice her.
One morning he rose from his bed with a violent jolt. He had been dreaming of those he had lost. He saw them from the battlements, coming through the village, and when they drew close his heart leapt with happiness and he shouted and called to them till his throat was sore. But they stood off from the castle, and though he ordered the drawbridge lowered to let them in, the gaping moat-ditch lay unbridged between them. They didn’t look at him but stared at the gate as if waiting for him to come through it…
Later that same day, glancing from the window that overlooked the courtyard, he caught sight of Peony running across the open ward near the well, being chased by Fin. They were there and gone in a flash. But that glimpse of her with her flying dark hair and upturned face – that free motion of happy childhood – broke his dream of the night before, and awoke such memories that he was struck almost senseless and staggered backward, stunned. When he came to himself he was standing in the middle of his chamber with his sword gripped in both hands, breathing in great gasps.
His enemy lived. Within reach of McLennan’s vengeance, the villain lived out his life in peace. It must not be.
From that moment, the die was cast.
McLennan sent out spies. He instructed them not to approach the enemy’s stronghold – some forty miles distant – directly. Instead they rode through several villages belonging to McInnes, where any traveller might stop to buy a tankard of ale at the tavern. They lingered there to listen to local talk. They returned to report that the neighbouring laird was not the man he had been ten years ago. He had taken to drinking too much whiskey, being often drunk from midday. Though this man, too, had a castle of sorts with strong walls, his defeat and capture should be easy.
Despite Rob’s warnings, Peony did leave the castle to go home with Fin.
It happened when, unusually, the Master had gone away for a few days. It was rumoured he was visiting his more far-flung tenants to do a sort of census – to count how many able-bodied men he could call on to fight for him. Most lairds did this from time to time, or rather, ordered it to be done. Perhaps, Rob hinted, he wanted to make himself known to the newcomers, to assure himself of their loyalty.
The Dungeon Page 7
