John felt suddenly weightless, as if a great burden had been taken from his shoulders. His mother had loved him after all. A memory came back unbidden of standing under a dazzling sky watching an eagle hover overhead and his mother telling him what it was as he stood in her warm hold. John bowed his head, fighting back hot tears.
‘I’m sorry if you thought your mother was still alive,’ said Norman, his face scored with anguish. ‘I never thought it needed explaining.’ The old man stood up and walked out of the house so that the boy would not see his tears.
Morag crouched down beside John. ‘You were too young to go to the funeral and we thought talking about her would upset you even more. Your grandfather finds it difficult to speak about your mother – she was very special to him. To both of us.’
John leant towards her and buried his face in her hold. Then he let the tears come; great wracking sobs that came up from his belly.
Morag stroked his hair and crooned. ‘She would be very proud of you, John.’ She kissed him on his head. ‘And glad in her heart that you’ve found your voice again.’
CHAPTER 6
Skye, 1820
At fifteen, John was a robust and popular figure around Ramanish, riding out bareback to hunt with Azlan, as expert at falconry now as the Afghan was. When his grandfather had died three years previously, Hercules had fostered John, taking the boy under his roof and treating him like the son he had never had. John was tutored at the castle alongside sons of local tacksmen, proving a quick learner in the classics, mathematics and languages. He had a passion for maps and was fascinated by Hercules’s ones of India. He loved to point out to his friends the kingdom of the Afghans and the Khyber area from where Azlan came. Yet it was the vague unmapped areas to the east and north that intrigued him the most.
‘But what about there, sir?’ John had once asked of Hercules, tracing his fingers across the large blank areas where only tentative brushstrokes denoted mountains. ‘Before you get to Russia or Tibet.’
‘The Himalayas,’ his foster father had said.
‘Yes, but who lives there?’
‘Mongol tribes – Himalayan kings,’ Hercules would answer with a shrug.
‘One day,’ John had declared with a passionate look, ‘I’m going to be an explorer and find out.’
He was a restless youth and often escaped to his friends in the village for sport and to help in the fields as he had always done. He had an unruly streak; he was a daredevil who would climb pinnacles in the mountains for wagers. Aged twelve, he had disappeared with a party of drovers, driving cattle to the mainland markets, curious to see the world that lay beyond the island. He had got as far as the southern Highlands before men from Ramanish had caught up with him and fetched him home, where his furious and ailing grandfather had given him the biggest thrashing of his life.
They had sparred right up until Norman’s death, yet John missed him more than he would have imagined. His grandfather had been cantankerous and bullying in drink but occasionally, in tranquil moments, had shown John a grudging affection. But to John his grandfather could never take the place of his beloved father, and he had kicked against the old man’s petty strictures. If it hadn’t been for his Aunt Morag’s constant intervention, there would have been no peace in the home of the Spanish MacAskills. More and more, John had looked to Hercules as a father figure, and once Norman had been laid to rest with his forebears in the simple family grave under the rowan tree, John was happy to go and live at the castle.
To the surprise of all but John, Morag – after her father’s death – had swiftly married Azlan, who chose to move into the village house with her.
‘I am more at home here among the animals with my woman,’ the Afghan declared, ‘than in that cold and draughty fortress. Morag keeps me warm.’ He chuckled.
John knew how happy the foreigner made his aunt and she turned a deaf ear to gossip about her marrying a heathen. At harvest dances and village weddings, she went proudly on his arm, exultant that the pitying looks she had endured for years on account of her crooked back had turned into envy and admiration.
Azlan was not the only man who caught the interest of the womenfolk. Tall and broad like his Lowland father, John’s handsome, swarthy looks and vivid green eyes brought him attention from the village girls and the sisters of his friends among the gentry. By seventeen, young Sinclair was in demand as a dancing partner at Highland balls held in neighbouring country houses, and he even returned to Foxton Hall for the twenty-first birthday party of Jeremiah Fox’s youngest daughter. Overcome by painful memories at the sight of his former home and its apple orchards, John got very drunk and was seduced by Miss Fox’s lady’s maid.
Discovering a new enthusiasm for the opposite sex, John was constantly falling in and out of love. Azlan grumbled that this distraction was blunting John’s concentration for hunting and shooting game but Hercules was indulgent.
‘It’s in his Highland nature,’ the chief declared. ‘John has the courage of a tiger and the heart of a poet.’
Of all the local girls, it was the factor’s spirited daughter, Katrine, whom John pined for the most. Ever since he had first seen her dancing in the torchlight on the beach at Hercules’s return feast, ten years ago, John had admired her. But Katrine was three years his senior and seemed merely amused by his adoration. She treated him with casual indifference – teasing him for the poems he wrote for her and pushed into her hand when he called with gifts of venison for her father.
‘What a funny boy you are!’ Katrine would giggle and give him a playful shove. ‘You’ll have to improve your spelling if you are to become a proper romantic poet.’
John redoubled his efforts in the classroom, struggling to rid his thoughts of Katrine’s brown eyes and her red lips that he longed to kiss. Then, when John turned eighteen, Hercules threw a party for his young ward and Katrine attended with her father. John danced with her more than any other girl and while supper was served in the interval he took her hand and led her onto the gun-court to look at the stars.
With heart thumping, he kissed her hand and said, ‘You must know I’m in love with you?’ She arched her eyebrows. He ploughed on before his courage failed him. ‘Will you marry me, Katrine?’
She stifled a laugh. ‘No, certainly not!’ He looked so crestfallen that she put a hand to his burning cheek and added, ‘But seeing as it’s your birthday, you can give me a proper kiss.’
John grinned back, pulled her into his strong arms and kissed her vigorously on the lips. If her father had not come looking for her, John was sure Katrine would have kissed him a lot longer – perhaps agreed to meet him later to continue their courtship uninterrupted.
But her father led her swiftly back to the dance and shortly afterwards they left. To his frustration, Katrine was sent to Edinburgh for the social season and did not come back till the following year. John was sent half mad with longing, baffled that his passionate letters and poems were answered with brief, infrequent notes that told him of a life of balls and outings but nothing of her feelings.
‘They must be going astray,’ he complained to his foster father. ‘I know she cares for me.’
Then news filtered back that Katrine was engaged to be married to an Edinburgh lawyer. John refused to believe it until he saw with his own eyes that his beloved wore another man’s ring. Her father brought her to visit Hercules, who gave her a wedding gift of a gold filigree box that had once belonged to a maharajah. John sat through the ordeal mute with fury and misery – angered at himself for being so wrong about her feelings for him. It struck him that Katrine smiled at everyone with the same warmth – and had probably only let herself be kissed by him because it was his birthday and she had felt sorry for him.
Hercules, together with Azlan, took the lovesick John away on an extended hunting trip.
‘Best remedy for a broken heart,’ his chief declared. ‘The only woman I ever loved was the wife of my commanding officer. Doesn’t do to dwell on what might h
ave been.’
After that, John courted Donald’s giggling, red-cheeked sister Peigi, who was as enthusiastic as John was to kiss and cuddle in the heather on short summer nights. He imagined himself in love and might even have proposed and settled down in marriage with the affectionate girl had things not changed dramatically the following spring.
The year 1825 came in with ferocious storms and great hardship for the people of Ramanish and far beyond. Cattle froze to death, children sickened and empty-bellied people turned grey and gaunt with hunger and worry. Hercules sold off paintings and silver to buy in grain to keep his half-starved tenants alive. John went with Azlan into the mountains to hunt what they could, but the snowdrifts were deep and treacherous and John was haunted by memories of his ordeal as a child.
When the spring finally came, people were thankful yet weakened by the ordeal. A lethargy seized them and a spirit of gloom hung over the village. Hercules encouraged them back to the kelp burning but it was harder now to make any money from it.
‘Since peace came to the Continent,’ Hercules confided in John, ‘the chemical factories can get an abundance of cheap potash from Spain instead of our kelp ash. Falkner says the kelp trade is dead – and we can’t even fetch good prices at the cattle markets anymore. He’s telling me to invest in sheep like they’ve been doing on the mainland.’
‘But sheep farming needs a lot of land and only employs a handful of men,’ John said. ‘What can the others do?’
Hercules sighed. ‘Precisely.’
The castle roof leaked and the ancient structure needed repairs but the MacAskill chief would not entertain giving up the old ways of farming or generous entertaining. Yet others of the impoverished gentry were selling up or renting out their land to incomers – men with money to invest. It grieved John to see his foster father’s spirits droop as one family after another moved south to the cities or emigrated to Australia.
‘I’ll join the army or the navy,’ John suggested, ‘and make my fortune abroad. Then we’ll have money for the estate.’
‘Certainly not.’ Hercules dismissed the idea. ‘You will continue with your studies and go to university like a gentleman.’
‘But you went soldiering, Father.’
‘That was different. We were at war with the French.’
Morag consoled a frustrated John when he visited. She was now the mother of a lively dark-eyed five-year-old son, Iskandar, on whom Azlan doted. Iskandar followed his cousin John around like an eager puppy.
‘The chief has your best interests at heart and he doesn’t want to lose you to the army,’ said his aunt, giving him one of her wistful smiles that reminded him of his long-dead mother. ‘And Iskandar and I don’t want you going to foreign places where we won’t see you again for years either.’
So John agreed to go to Aberdeen University to study classics and law, setting off in the spring on horseback with a bag of meal to help pay for his lodgings. At first he was overawed by the granite-grey city with its prestigious buildings and bustling commerce as well as a noisy harbour full of trading ships and fishing boats. The raw east winds brought the shriek of gulls and the people spoke a dialect of English that was alien to his ear. But he soon found fellow Gaelic speakers among the students and, to please his patron, he knuckled down to his studies. If he became a well-paid lawyer, he could help reverse the fortunes at Ramanish and in time take on the role of running the estate when Falkner retired.
Yet, as the summer came, John’s restlessness returned and his desire to be out in the fresh air rather than labouring over books was overwhelming. He longed for the mountains of Skye and to go hunting with Azlan. The fertile farmlands of the east were monotonous to his eye, and he gazed out of his lodgings at the sea and thought how it stretched away to Norway and beyond it to the Baltic and Russia, as he had seen on his foster father’s maps. He hankered to be anywhere but where he was.
Returning home for the summer only added to John’s impatience with his studies. That autumn, back in Aberdeen, he fell in with a wilder group of students who spent the shortening days drinking in the city’s inns and discussing politics and adventure rather than attending lectures. That year, John failed his examinations and was sent home to face a dismayed and angry Hercules.
‘What am I to do with you?’ his chief despaired. ‘I have put myself in debt to further your education and this is how you repay me!’
‘I’m sorry, sir, but it’s not what I wanted,’ John protested. ‘The life of a lawyer is too dry and tedious.’
‘Your life in Aberdeen has been anything but dry from what I am told! Drinking and carousing with the sons of Whigs and ne’er-do-wells.’
John beat a retreat to his aunt’s house and the uncomplicated adoration of his cousin Iskandar. To add to John’s unhappiness, while he’d been absent, Peigi had given her heart to Duncan, son of Willie the Piper, and a piper-in-training himself. They had been joined in a hand-fast marriage – one that bound the two lovers for a year to see if they were compatible. Rumour had it that Peigi was pregnant. Azlan swiftly took John into the mountains to hunt. Tracking deer by day with Wolf at their heels and camping under the stars at night, John unburdened himself to the wise Afridi.
‘I want to go abroad and seek my fortune – make my chief proud of me as a man and not as someone who amasses money. I want to help him save the estate but I can’t do it confined to books and ledgers – and there is nothing for me here.’
‘I understand the hunger in you, my friend,’ Azlan replied, ‘and so does Hercules. He knows that he will have to let you go sooner or later.’
‘Then help me persuade him to find me a commission,’ John urged. ‘Please, Azlan! I want to join the East India Company army and go east just like he did.’
‘It is not an easy life,’ Azlan cautioned, ‘but one full of dangers. Many young men have died violent deaths or perished to disease before the age of thirty pursuing it.’
‘My chief survived.’
Azlan gave a flash of a smile. ‘He had me to watch his back.’
‘Then I will find a comrade-in-arms as good as you, Azlan – one of your Afridi tribe.’
The Afghan clapped him on the back. ‘If I was your age again I would go with you.’
‘Do you miss your homeland?’ John asked.
Azlan stared up at the stars while he stroked the back of Wolf’s ears. ‘This is my home now and will be till I die – inshallah.’
John felt a stab of envy for his chief’s closest friend and companion; Azlan had proved himself a great warrior and huntsman but had now found happiness and love with Morag and Iskandar. John could not imagine being that content anywhere. Ever since he had been uprooted from Foxton as a small boy he had never felt completely settled – he would always be an outsider yearning for something just over the horizon.
It took many months of letter-writing and petitioning from Hercules to his contacts in the south – old comrades and former East India Company merchants who had grown rich on eastern trade – before the chief found a sponsor for John. It was halfway through 1827 when abruptly patronage came from a surprising source: Jeremiah Fox of Foxton Hall, who had once employed John’s father as his head gardener. Perhaps Hercules had impressed on him his obligation to the orphaned John or maybe the chief had offered him some adjoining land; no one would say. But John was overjoyed at the news.
‘Come September, you’ll be going to the south of England to train for the Company,’ Hercules told him.
John threw his arms around his foster father. ‘Thank you, sir! I’ll make you proud, I promise.’
‘Just return to me one day,’ said Hercules fondly. ‘That’s the only promise I ask.’
The whole village turned out to wave John off. Hercules and Azlan were to ride with him to Kyleakin where he would cross to the mainland and make his way on by coach to Inverness and then Edinburgh. From there he would sail to London.
Morag held back her tears with difficulty but Iskandar howled to see
his father and beloved cousin preparing to leave. John caught sight of Peigi standing in the doorway of her house, rocking her newborn baby in her arms, and gave her a nod. She returned an embarrassed smile. It struck him how he was glad for Peigi and yet relieved not to be tied down in marriage or burdened with a child. At twenty-two he rejoiced at being without romantic ties – he had not proved himself good at judging women or keeping them happy – and perhaps he was destined to be one of those men who lived a bachelor life unwilling to commit wholeheartedly to any other.
As the three men set off along the track that skirted the lower slopes of the Cuillins, John heard a voice – his beloved Aunt Morag’s – begin a tremulous chant. It was taken up by those around her, spreading among the people like flames along corn stubble until the air was ringing with their song of farewell. John’s eyes stung with emotion at the tender tribute from his mother’s people, who had taken him to their hearts when he had been so young and bereft. He turned at the corner, just before Ramanish disappeared from view, and raised his bonnet in a salute.
Their singing rang in his ears until he was far away – even following the tearful embraces with Hercules and Azlan – and the memory stayed with him long after the sight of his beloved Skye hills had vanished into the distance.
CHAPTER 7
Black Harbour Lighthouse, 1827
You’ve ruined the lace on my dress!’ Thomasina wailed. ‘It’s in shreds. Have you been bashing the washing on stones again?’
Alice looked up from her book. She had sought refuge with Sam in the lamp-room, but her sister-in-law’s voice was echoing up the iron staircase. Any moment now, Thomasina’s flushed and indignant face would appear from below and she would harangue her further. Alice could hear her mother trying to placate a whining William – Danny and Thomasina’s demanding and spoilt son – and stop him climbing after his mother. Alice knew that Effie was worn out with running up and down stairs after the boy while Thomasina rested, heavily pregnant with her second baby. Not so immobile though, thought Alice, that Thomasina couldn’t stir herself to berate her over the washing.
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