Legend of the Celtic Stone

by Michael Phillips

  With vague thoughts of the Celtic Stone swirling in his brain, and caught up in a general mood of thoughtful reflection brought on by yesterday’s incident, he found himself drawn to the past.

  Roots, a sense of belonging, he thought, links with the past . . . they mattered.

  Especially for one in his position. How else could he remain attentive and in touch with his constituency than by maintaining a keen awareness of who he was and where he had come from? Could he really blame the Scots for wanting to preserve their history and the links to their roots?

  Whatever had happened with Blair, however annoyed his mother might be with him in consequence, it could not be denied that he loved this place, Andrew thought. Perhaps no less than the Scots loved the land from which they had come. Maybe he had needed an emotional jolt to jar him briefly out of the present and remind him of the importance of this land and his roots.

  Cumbria held its dark and painful memories for him, it was true. But here was his heritage—this estate known as Derwenthwaite and the tiny village of Duddonskirk about three miles away. The small cluster of houses was situated in one of many twisting and uneven crooks created by the descending flanks of the Saddleback-Skiddaw ridge as it made its three-thousand foot drop from England’s third highest peak down through the Auchersdale District to the sea.

  This was home—the northwestern Cumbrian Mountains between the Skiddaw Forest and the Workington Plain. He had grown up under these skies, amongst these hills and lakes and rigorous walking trails, and he loved them.

  Andrew paused in his step and gazed out westward.

  There lay the sea, outspreading in the distance beyond the rural plain of farmland, crisscrossed by miles and miles of hedgerows, now brown and tidily trimmed for winter. The ocean was as blue as he had remembered it, stretching in its azure glory toward the horizon.

  Gradually he turned his vision in a slow quarter-arc until his eyes peered straight in front of him—across the patchy green farmland to the shoreline . . . and beyond, over the sea northward.

  There—on the distant side of the firth—Scotland was visible between the blue of the sea and the blue of the sky. Dimly he could make out Southerness Point, the East Stewartry Coast, and a few misty shapes of the Galloway Hills.

  Scotland—that mystic northern region whose people, at least some of them, still loved it passionately enough to risk all in the rescue of one of its sacred artifacts.

  When clouds lay thick and heavy, it was impossible to descry anything across the expanding width of the firth. But when the sun shone, the ten- to twenty-mile distance was hardly enough to require what old Duncan called the second sight. Today the first would do quite well enough.

  Andrew sighed with satisfaction, and went on his way.

  Two

  The solitary walker continued his morning’s excursion across the Cumbrian hillside overlooking the firth. But now an unexpected wave of melancholy began to creep over him like a chilly London fog. Once more Blair’s words attempted to intrude into his memory, and with them the pain and confusion he had felt at hearing them yesterday.

  “I’m sorry, Andrew . . . I am going to have to break it off.”

  Was it her words that had caused this whirlwind of mental activity—these thoughts of Scots and stones, roots and history? What did he have to do with Scotland other than growing up close to her borders and perhaps having a little Scots blood in him from somewhere generations back? His family’s faces had long been turned toward London, not Edinburgh. Why had the article about the theft of the Stone given rise to so many new thoughts?

  He accelerated his pace in the attempt to shake off the mood.

  At thirty-seven, Andrew Gordon Trentham was a man envied by many, widely judged as the prototype of one who had it all. Deep inside, however, he sometimes wondered what exactly he did have. What in his life could he look at and honestly say, “I did this, in and of myself . . . not because of my name or what I am expected to do”? Even the estate might not be coming to him had it not been for . . .

  He stopped his thoughts in their tracks. He didn’t want to go down that road.

  From his earliest childhood, others had expected him to do just what he was doing—to succeed, to rise above his peers, to become one of Britain’s new generation of elite. He had the sense of being “watched,” just as the Prince of Wales, now their new king, had been watched all his life.

  Being the son of Lady Waleis Bradburn Trentham insured that all eyes—especially his mother’s—were on him.

  Working out the conundrums of expectation and conviction in the pressure-filled cauldron of British politics, and within the hierarchical system of a fading aristocracy, was no simple assignment. He was already known as one who would not compromise his conscience, just like his mother, the old-timers said. Nor was he afraid to jump into the fray for a cause he believed in. He would not dirty his hands with questionable practices, but he was eager to discard his suit jacket and roll up his sleeves.

  Andrew’s was a personality still in the process of development. He was growing—a good thing to be able to say of any man. The data of his biography were not facts the young Trentham thought much about. The secret at the heart of that biography was almost too painful to recall—and usually he managed to keep it shoved so deep in his memory that he wondered if the incident had really ever happened. One look at the family portrait hanging in the Derwenthwaite entry, however, was sufficient reminder. And its effect in having thrust him inevitably toward a career in politics could certainly not be denied.

  He was one of several young and rising members of Parliament, widely recognized as the son of the former Conservative MP1 Waleis Bradburn Trentham, and now gaining prominence in his own right. The society columnists and tabloids spoke flatteringly of him as a handsome and articulate graduate of Oxford, the heir to a fortune, with a name that represented one of the last of the country’s great landed estates.

  None of this meant much to Andrew. He had grown up accustomed to the position that his family, and he in turn, held in the order of things. Thus, he gave little consideration to the honor that was accorded him. It did not seem to him a privilege, but rather an obligation, a requirement that accompanied his particular lot in life, and on a more personal level an obligation within his own family that he could not shed.

  Whether his mother put it on him or whether he put it upon himself because of what had happened would have taken Freud himself to figure out. He felt it—that was enough. He had been aware of what he perceived as his mother’s expectations almost every day since the accident. Whether these mirrored her actual expectations, she had never confided to him openly. She was a complex woman and did not herself begin to fathom the myriad of ways she subtly pressured him to conform to, yet always fall short of, the vision she held for what her daughter should have become.

  Fate had cast the role upon him. He would do his best to steward it wisely and to use what he had been given for the benefit of posterity and whatever good it might do for his nation and fellowman. His parents had trained both him and his sister with a rigid sense of duty and public responsibility along with—for her at least—a very modern view of a woman’s parallel duty to rise high in worlds formerly reserved for men.

  The political component of their training, therefore, had been focused on his sister, six years his senior. Lindsay had been cut from exactly the same cloth as their mother—ambitious, articulate, and sure to climb into prominence when her moment came. Their mother was a former Thatcherite whose ambitions for her daughter were far greater than had ever been her own.

  But those ambitions would never be realized.

  Silently as he followed after her on the somber rainy day of the funeral, Andrew had realized that the mantle of family achievement was now upon him, if for no other reason than to demonstrate his own worth in his mother’s stoic, teary, black-veiled eyes. As they walked silently back to the car from the graveside—he and his mother, the only ones on earth who knew what real
ly happened—he had determined that he would take Lindsay’s place. He would try to give his mother something of what had so suddenly been taken from her. He had been trying ever since.

  Yet if he was going to enter politics, Andrew had realized as he grew, he had to be true to his own convictions as well. His mother’s initial horror at his party affiliation when he decided to stand as a Liberal Democrat candidate for the Commons had now moderated. She had come almost to admire him for taking a position opposite from hers, though she never said as much to him. Praise was not something that fell easily from her lips.

  If Andrew’s sister would never reside at Number Ten Downing Street, Lady Trentham had reluctantly come to endorse her son’s political influence, if not his specific ideas. Yet to him she continued to convey in a thousand ways she was never aware of that Andrew could not possibly rise so high as Lindsay would have. It was ordinary and expected for a man to achieve, she would have said. But Lindsay Bradburn Trentham would have stood high above any and all her peers.

  Andrew sighed again and kicked at a pebble in the path. He respected his mother, and probably loved her. But they were not close. Maybe they never would be.

  A new odor, borne likewise by the winds but altogether distinctive in character from that which had brought him out earlier, distracted Andrew’s thoughts and pulled his eyes from the sea.

  He turned his head back inland.

  A wisp of white smoke ascended in the distance from a cottage hidden from view, tucked amid the folds of the hills as they rose gradually toward the peak of the Skiddaw some ten or eleven miles to the southeast. The smoke’s thin trail had dissipated long before reaching him, but the shoreward arch of its fading visibility left no doubt whence came the invisible aroma that had invaded his senses. It came from over the next ridge, and from the only human abode for miles in that direction.

  Old Duncan . . . never without a fire, Andrew thought with a smile. Instantly thoughts of London and his mother began to recede.

  And unless his nostrils betrayed him, a few chunks of peat were mingled with the scraps of oak and maple the old crofter was burning. A Scotsman through and through, reflected Andrew. Even if it meant hoarding what peat bricks he could lay his hands on, not so much for the heat they could produce, but to salt his fire with scents from the northern homeland of his ancestry.

  Duncan MacRanald, a transplanted sheepherding Scot, had occupied a humble stone cottage on the northeast corner of the Trentham estate, where Bewaldeth sloped down to the Scawthwaite Fells, for more years than Andrew had himself been alive.

  As a youngster Andrew had spent long and pleasurable hours listening to Duncan’s tales of the savage lands north of the border. The stories were made all the wilder by the thick Scots dialect MacRanald had made no effort to tame during his years surrounded by the more civilized English tongue.

  Though Andrew’s father had occasionally shown signs of a distant affection for MacRanald, Andrew had never heard any of his other relations speak of the Scots except with that lofty tone from which Englishmen have created a distinctive form of communication all their own, an inflection conveying unmistakable condescension while employing only the most gracious expression.

  There was nothing, on the other hand, that Duncan held in higher honor than his Highland heritage. Let the English lift their noses in whatever directions they chose, he was fond of saying—he was a Scot and proud of it.

  As the proud Scotsman he was, MacRanald displayed curiously more knowledge concerning the Trentham heritage along such lines than did any other member of the family. By virtue of such knowledge, scattered references to more personal influence of Scottish blood mingled with the stories he had told Andrew as a lad.

  The youngster, however, had been more taken with the tales of antiquity. As a lad, Andrew had paid scant heed to the cryptic hints that occasionally fell from the lips of Derwenthwaite’s quizzical neighbor.

  Nevertheless, Andrew had grown to love the man. And the elder Trenthams had never discouraged their son from associating with the shepherd.

  Three

  Andrew had always considered Duncan little more than a herder of sheep, his scraggly flock comprising his only livelihood. The significance of the fact that his dwelling sat within the grounds of the estate was only one of the mysteries surrounding MacRanald’s connections with the Trentham family, whose discovery yet lay ahead for the young parliamentarian.

  Thoughts of the old shepherd brought Andrew’s reflections to the present. What would old Duncan think of the theft from the Abbey? he wondered. He could not possibly have heard about it, for he owned no radio and took no daily newspaper. Did the old man even realize that his beloved Scotland seemed to be at the forefront of everything these days?

  Within very short order after he returned to London, Andrew would face several issues relating to Scotland’s future. He wondered what the old man thought about devolution2 and the new Scottish parliament. Some Scots were far from satisfied with these recent changes. Devolution, if anything, had only exacerbated the debate. The most strident nationalists continued to call for full and complete independence. Depending on who turned out to be responsible for the theft of the Stone, how would that affect the decisions the Parliament in Westminster would have to make?

  Andrew hadn’t seen his old friend in two years, and then it had been only a brief encounter across a wild and overgrown hedge in one of the fields of the estate.

  How long had it been since he had been inside those stone walls he had loved as a child? How long since he sat staring into the fire of peat and oak, listening to Duncan’s voice spin an entrancing tale of brave men whose memories were now lost in the distant folds of history? How long since he had heard that scratchy yet soothing voice hum a few lines and then break into some old Gaelic ballad whose words he could not understand, yet whose meaning he could somehow feel through haunting melodies of strange cadence and rhythm?

  How long since he took in, half with dread, half with delight, the fanciful descriptions of feral glens and isolated Highland peaks in whose hiding places dwelt valiant clans of kilted swordsmen? How long since his eyes widened as Duncan opened the boards and folded back the yellowed leaves of some tattered volume, there to let the boy behold drawings of warriors and bards, of claymores and harps and scenes of battle? None of the ten thousand volumes in the Derwenthwaite library back at Andrew’s own house could compare with the sagas of the mere dozen or so in old Duncan’s possession.

  It had probably been twenty years or more since he had heard one of Duncan’s stories. Where did the time go?

  And why on this particular day, did the memories come all at once so vividly back?

  Renewal of childhood affection for the man rose up within him. He would visit him again—today, in fact!

  Andrew turned to face the pleasant breeze that had driven him here, retraced his steps partway down the slope of Bewaldeth, then struck out on a course over the undulating terrain, bearing slightly more northward than the trail he had followed earlier.

  There was no path across this hump of the hill toward the Robin Hood and Scawthwaite Fells beyond. Just to the other side of it he would pick up the sheeptrack. Following it northward some three hundred yards would lead him to an eastward trail, which in turn would take him to a wider dirt wagon road leading to the northern edge of his father’s property. At least the land itself was not marred with confusing images of his mother. The land, if nothing else, belonged solely to his father. After about another mile, along the border to the east, he would arrive at Duncan’s cottage. It was the long way round, but the shortest route from where he was now.

  The ground beneath his feet felt wet and soggy in places, although the abundance of rocks and thick tufts of grassy clumps kept his boots mostly dry as he made his way down the slope of one ridge and gradually toward the side of the next. Andrew could scarcely make out anything resembling a visible path—another reminder how much time had passed since he had explored these places which
had once been so familiar to him. He had left Cumbria for Eton at age thirteen, Oxford at eighteen, and, with the would-be sophistication of youth, had neglected the playful byways of boyhood during every visit back to Derwenthwaite since.

  As is nostalgia’s habit, though his reflections were filled with pleasant memories, they brought in their wake a return of melancholy. Was memory of his sister partially responsible for his avoidance of these hills and pathways?

  He could make out sheep grazing in the distance—whether Duncan’s or from one of the flocks to the north, Andrew couldn’t tell. The mere sight of their white coats, fluffy in summer but grubby and mud-caked now, combined with the overgrown path beneath his feet, stabbed him with a pang of sudden loneliness, of time slipping uncontrollably away, of longings he could not put words to that neither national reputation nor stature in London could touch or satisfy.

  He tried again to shake off the unwelcome doldrums.

  He was content with his life, even if he had been sacked yesterday by the woman he was trying to propose to! Someday he would laugh about the whole situation. Maybe not for a while. But he would get over it. Though she had wanted him to marry Blair, his mother would get over it too. He would just avoid the subject around her for a while. And he would meet other women. He just needed a little time to heal, that was all.

  In the meantime, he would enjoy a visit with Duncan. That, at least, would get his mind off Blair and his mother!

  Andrew sighed, then took a deep, satisfying breath of the air whose breeze still mingled Duncan’s peat smoke with the fragrance of southern warmth.

  Four

  As Andrew continued across the fields, the breeze ruffling up his light brown hair as he went, an exuberance began to come over him, like that of a great adventure about to begin.

  Twenty minutes later he spied the cottage some hundred yards off. He broke into a run down the slope. Moments later he found himself approaching the worn oak door behind which the old Scotsman made his home.