In the dim familiar stable, their place of refuge, Fin hugged Peony and settled her deep in some clean straw. She was shaking with cold and weariness, and now her back did hurt. He wrapped her in a horse-blanket, brought her water to drink and dug out a piece of rookie pie for her. She ate it ravenously.
‘What happened to ye? Was it terrible? Did he go mad when he didna win?’ he asked. And then suddenly, like a thunderstroke, he remembered. ‘Where’s Donald? Is he aw’richt?’
She looked at him wordlessly. His face, all one big smile a moment before, now fell into lines of alarm. ‘Och, he’s no’ dead! Tell me he’s no’ dead!’ he whispered pleadingly.
She closed her eyes against his look of suffering she knew would come. He threw himself face down beside her and choked the tears back as he thought of his mother and the family table, now forever blighted with an empty chair. Peony watched him, and at last reached out and stroked his hair. His inner stiffness broke at her touch and he sobbed and let his tears flow.
McLennan had to have his wound seen to, before he could do the thing he meant to do, the thing he had decided on during the long march home. So Peony had a little time left.
She spent it with Fin in the stable, untroubled by any fear. McLennan had come back for her, he had carried her through the showers of deadly arrows and turned his body so that she wouldn’t be hit. The fact that he had thrown her over his pommel instead of letting her ride behind him, that he hadn’t spoken a single word to her and had not let her serve him nor sleep near him during the journey was a little disturbing, as was the tying – he had never done such a thing before. But she was used to his rages and moods; she knew that part of her duty to him was to absorb them. It never entered her head that he might blame her for his defeat, even though she had not been able to carry out her task.
She and Fin sat together, with the good warm smell of horses and hay around them, and she tried to tell him what had happened. He couldn’t make much out of her tale.
‘He told ye to wail and cry? What for?’
‘Ban shee,’ she said earnestly. But she said it in such a foreign way that he didn’t recognise the word. ‘Tell me in English, Wee Eyes!’ But she couldn’t explain. Still, she was able to tell him how she’d walked around the cold black walls at night, and how she’d thought of him and felt happy. He understood that all right.
‘What a beast he is, to send ye off by yerself in the dark! Who can tell what got into his head! I wish I’d been with ye!’ And he put his arm around her. ‘But ye did it!’
She shook her head. She hadn’t done it. She felt a slight shiver of unease because she hadn’t done as she’d been told.
Fin didn’t notice. He was so glad to be with her. He thought it a triumph that she had got to the castle all alone, and passed the night under its walls while the battle raged, and lived to come back to him. ‘Ye’re such a braw lass!’ he said again and again. She didn’t know what ‘braw’ meant, but she knew he was pleased with her. She leant against him and smiled and smiled. She felt again the warmth and comfort of being close to someone who cared for her. She felt the happiness she’d felt in the cottage with the old woman. Only this was better. This was the happiness, like being in her garden, only it was real.
McLennan came looking for her at sunset.
He had had his arm bound up. The doctor-barber who did it was clumsy; his fingers were blunt and rough, and he had hurt him. He had cursed the man roundly, shouting at him to get back to his haircutting, wanting Peony with her small, gentle hands. But he gritted his teeth and wouldn’t let himself send for her. He sensed that if she tended his wound, he would lose the will to punish her.
And he had to punish her. Someone had to suffer for what had happened to him. And for what might happen. Because he had begun to look ahead. McInnes would hardly let matters rest as they were, even though – McLennan ground his teeth again at the thought – he had not lost a single man. Oh yes. Someone must pay for this! The witch must pay!
He stood in the stable doorway. Fin and Peony looked up when his shadow fell on them. Peony jumped to her feet. She wasn’t afraid, she was concerned for him when she saw the wrapping on his arm. She even ran to him and looked up into his face, eagerly, because he had come looking for her and might need her, which would mean his bad mood had passed.
But what she saw in his eyes suddenly struck fear into her very marrow. She backed away – Fin was on his feet too – and shrank against him, and Fin, seeing the black hatred in the Master’s face, tried to get between them. But it was no use.
Bruce McLennan strode up to them. He knocked Fin out of the way, sending him flying against one of the wooden stable partitions. He picked Peony up and carried her out into the courtyard.
Fin got up. His head was muzzy from where McLennan had clouted it. He stumbled out into the ward. He saw McLennan with Peony under his good arm, disappearing into the darkness of the castle. There were no battlements, no moat now, to stop him running to rescue her. But his legs wouldn’t obey him.
He stood motionless, powerless, with the most horrible foreboding in his heart.
Bruce McLennan carried Peony down a long flight of stone steps. At the bottom was a flaming torch, set against the wall in a metal basket. It showed a great door with iron hinges and nails with large round heads driven into the wood. It had a lock with a keyhole as big as an eye on edge… McLennan put Peony down.
‘Dunna move or I’ll kill ye,’ he said.
She didn’t believe it. Though almost fainting from fear of him now, she still thought it was an empty threat. But she had a flashing memory of how she had pleaded with him not to send her up the hill in the dark. She remembered what she had not let herself remember, the cruel cut he had given her with his whip. He had done that when she’d been begging him. What would he do to her now?
He took a huge brass key from his belt. He put it in the lock and turned it. It made a terrible screeching sound. The door swung open.
Inside was only darkness.
McLennan pushed Peony in. She resisted. Her resistance angered him more. He thrust her into the dungeon so hard that she fell on her knees on the wet stones. Then he stood in the doorway.
Peony crouched on bruised hands and knees for a few moments, and then slowly knelt up and turned. She saw only his familiar black outline against the flaming torch. She could see his wild hair trembling on his head, and his chest heaving. She couldn’t believe what was happening.
‘I’ll no’ chain ye,’ said this fearsome black figure. ‘A witch should be chained. But ye’ve served me, so I’ll no’ chain ye. But I’ll no’ let ye out.’ He paused, as if waiting for someone to stop him, but there was nothing but silence and her white face against blackness. He knew he should stop talking now, finish the thing, and go. But somehow he went on speaking, not letting himself see it as a kind of argument.
‘It’s no’ just that ye disobeyed me. Ye put a curse on my enterprise, or I’d no’ have failed. Ye’re a witch and ye dunna deserve to live. Think yourself lucky I dunna burn ye.’
He took the key out of the lock and held it up.
‘Ye see this key?’ he said. ‘It’s going in the river this hour. Ye’ll never see the light of day again! And so perish all who go against their laird!’
And he backed away and swung the great door shut.
But not quite quickly enough to prevent himself hearing her voice, a voice that, because of her quiet ways, he seldom heard, suddenly piercing and as Scots as his own.
‘Och, dunna! Dunna! Dunna!’
As his children had cried! The same plea! Oh, she was a witch, or how could she know to plead just as they had?
His hand made to turn the key back without his order. For a long, long moment he stood there, gripping it with whitened knuckles. Two men warred in his breast, the father who had helplessly heard his children’s last cries, and the man of wrath, bent on vengeance. Then, with a terrible effort, he wrenched the great brass key from its lodging and ran up th
e steps as if pursued by demons, leaving the torch to burn itself out.
Peony heard the screech of the key turning in the lock. She froze with horror. He was leaving her. It was not just an angry threat. Those were his heavy, running footsteps on the stone stairs. She watched in dawning realisation as the strip of torchlight under the door got dimmer and dimmer, and then vanished.
She saw, as clearly as if it were before her, the key flying out from his hand over the battlements and down into the river. In that awful darkness she could see nothing real, but she seemed to see the key, landing with a splash, sinking into the water, lying on the muddy bottom. Never to be found. Never able to let her out.
She believed he would do it. Now she truly believed it. And, believing it, her inner world collapsed.
She had never really thought him evil. Harsh, yes. Ill-natured, yes. Cruel – sometimes, when he was hard-pressed, when his rage got the better of him. But who that knew of his suffering could blame him for his black moods? She hadn’t blamed him, even before she knew. He was a young soul. He couldn’t help himself.
But this?
Her vision of the drowned key at once took away any hope she might have had that he would change his mind. Even if he did, he couldn’t let her out without the key.
Chapter Twelve
Bruce McLennan climbed directly from the dungeon up on to the battlements and leaned out between two blocks of stone. He drew back his hand with the key in it and commanded himself to throw it.
He could imagine it flying, fatally, unrecoverably, down into the murky water. That would settle it. That would fulfil his given word.
But his hand would not obey him. His fingers gripped the brass loop at the top of the key in a rigid grip and would not let go.
McLennan stood poised between good and evil, between mercy and vengeance.
At last he came to himself a little. The raw edge of his anger blew away in the gusts of wind from the moor. He had not meant what he’d said. Of course he was not going to let her die down there. He’d threatened it to frighten her, to punish her, to show her who was master. But he would let her out after a day or two, when she had learned her lesson.
He lowered his arm in a spasm, for something terrible had almost come to pass. What if, in his rage, he had really flung away the key? How, then, would he have used his dungeon for its avowed purpose – to shut McInnes up there some day, and bend him to his will? Hah! He needed his dungeon! No, certainly the key must be kept, and kept safe. He strung it to his belt and descended the steps again to begin planning his defence.
McLennan’s first duty now was to summon within his walls all vulnerable tenants, and house them there until the danger had passed. There were now a lot of these defenceless people – orphans and widows whose men had died in the failed attack. He owed them protection, and maintenance; with a counterattack expected, he must send armed men out to escort them to safety. He must garrison the village.
A laird who had inherited his position from his forebears would have done it immediately, so deeply ingrained was the concept of noblesse oblige, the responsibility of the highborn for the low who served them. But McLennan was a come-lately laird, son of common folk. His considerations were practical; his first priority was survival, his second, revenge.
First came the defence of his castle. How could he conduct its defence when it was cluttered with women and children that he had to feed?
When he had spent five or six hours alone, planning strategy, he came to a hard decision that was going to have terrible consequences. He had only a limited number of messengers and armed escorts at his disposal, and he needed to let his fighting men know what he required of them. So he would bring in only the people he needed. The rest would have to take their chances. He had more important considerations.
‘But where is she? Where’s he taken her?’
Fin stood in front of Rob, desperately blocking his way. The groom took the boy by the shoulders, but then, looking into the eyes he’d been trying to avoid, he dropped his head with a heavy sigh.
‘My lad, ye must forget her.’
‘Forget her!’
‘Aye. For she’s where Donald is, or as near as makes no odds.’
The boy stiffened and turned ashy white. ‘Ye don’t mean – he’s killed her!’
‘He’s locked her up.’
‘That’s not being dead! He’ll let her out! Ye said she was his candle! He’ll no’ be left alone in the dark!’ Fin was gasping now, for it was a real dark he was thinking of, the lassie’s dark, locked in the dungeon. Already it was twenty-four hours since the master had borne her away from the stable.
‘Listen, Fin. It’s full moon tomorrow. Ye need to gang hame to see your mother.’
‘Tell her, ye mean,’ said Fin fiercely. ‘I’ve to tell her – about Donald.’
‘Aye, and then give her comfort.’
Comfort? What comfort was there? Donald killed, and now Little Flower – his own Wee Eyes – locked away in the depths of the earth, as stone-stifled as if already in a tomb. Where was the comfort to be got or given?
Rob saw his distress. But he had no more time to give him. There was work to be done. He had to ride out and bring orders to the far-flung tenants. Very strange orders, to his thinking, but it was not his way to think too much.
‘Get Cora ready,’ he said shortly, naming a fast mare.
Fin straightened. His eyes were red, his jaw tight. ‘I wullna.’
‘Ye what?’ asked the groom in astonishment.
‘I’ll no’ serve him. Not now.’
Looking into his furious face, Rob suddenly feared for him, for his youth and passion and recklessness. He did what he felt he had to, to save the boy from dangerous folly.
Raising his voice suddenly, he roared, ‘Do as ye’re bid!’ Fin jumped, and then felt a stinging slap to his cheek that knocked him sideways. Before he could stop his head ringing, he was grasped and thrust forcefully towards the mare’s stall. Shocked and dizzy, he got her ready. The habit of obedience was stronger than rebellion.
Rob said no more, but prepared to ride out on his mission. At thirteen Fin should already have learned that self-control, loyalty and obedience alone spelled survival in the feudal world. If he hadn’t, it was Rob’s place to teach him.
But his hand still held the sting of the blow it had given, and at the last minute he relented.
‘Work done?’ he asked gruffly, when he was already mounted in the courtyard. Fin nodded sullenly. ‘Jump on behind then. I’ll take ye home. I’ve to go there anyhow.’
All the way home Fin tried to prepare himself for telling his mother and father they’d lost their eldest son. But when he got there, he didn’t have to do it. Word had already reached them and the house was in mourning.
Rob tethered the horse and together they went in. Janet was sitting by the fire with her shawl over her head, crying in groans, with Jamie, pale and stunned, close at her side. No one else was there. When she saw Fin she threw her arms out for him to come to her. He had nothing to do but be hugged and share her misery.
‘Och, Donald!’ she wailed, clinging to Fin as if she were drowning. ‘My dearie! My darling boy! Dear God, why did Ye take my beautiful son?’
Fin cried for his mother. It broke his heart to see her so wretched, and the pain pushed Peony for a little while to the back of his thoughts. Rob stood awkwardly, turning his bonnet in his big hands, looking at the ground. At last Janet noticed him.
‘This is Rob, Mother.’
Janet rose unsteadily. ‘Aye – I’ve heard good things of ye,’ she said, her breath ragged. ‘Ye’ve been good to Fin.’ Rob, thinking how he had slapped him, flushed and didn’t meet her eye, but said, ‘I’m gie sorry for your loss.’
‘Thank ye. What have ye come for?’
‘To see your man.’
‘He’ll be back soon.’
The four of them sat in silence till the head of the house returned from work. He, too, had red eyes and when he sa
w Fin he brushed them with the back of his hand. He hugged the boy tightly, then acknowledged Rob.
‘You bring orders from the laird?’
‘Aye.’
‘McInnes will counterattack?’
‘Aye, it’s expected.’
‘So we’re all to get inside the castle walls with our women and wee’uns.’
Rob shuffled his feet. ‘No. That’s no’ it.’
‘What? But in time of war—’
‘The laird’s plan is to have some men within to mount a frontal defence. That will include you and your – your sons. He wants other men to muster under commanders he’ll send, to go around behind McInnes’s force and attack them from the rear.’
‘Just me and my big lads are to go? No’ my wife?’
Rob nodded.
‘And while we’re away from home on the laird’s business, who’s to protect ma wumman and ma wee boy there? Are they to be left defenceless?’
Rob said, ‘I’ve no orders as to that. Perhaps ye can leave young Angus at home.’
‘Angus!’ cried Janet. ‘Of course he’ll no’ go! He’s only fifteen!’
‘There’ll be younger than him under arms in this fight,’ said Rob.
The father narrowed his eyes. It was not right. It was not according to custom. It did nothing to strengthen his loyalty to the laird, or the will to fight in his cause.
Still, there was no choice. Fight they must, himself, Malcolm, and Rab. What if one of them—? He glanced at his wife, who was gazing at him piteously, pressing both hands to her belly as if she could protect the baby growing there. The man’s heart twisted. Surely a man’s first duty was to his family! But it was not so. His first duty was to his liege-laird. Even a laird was subject to the law.
The Dungeon Page 11
