It made a convenient excuse that did not involve loss of face, to forgive Birch on Matt's plea. Clover did not wear mourning; Clovis took over the management of her estate, making another burden to add to his already considerable responsibilities, not the least of which was governing Annunciata's affairs, and ensuring an income from her estates was paid to her abroad. He wished that she would come back to England and take over some part of the burden, but there seemed little chance of this happening. In the spring a letter came from her, addressed from the Court of Hanover, where she had gone with Maurice to try to get him a position.
‘I intended to make only a short stay,' she wrote, 'but I am received with such kindness by my aunt that I find it hard to leave, and I have been here four months already. She wants me to make my permanent home here, but my duty lies with the King and Queen - I cannot desert them. But the duchess - or Electress as we must now call her, her husband having been made Elector at last, after a lifetime of effort in that direction - was delighted with Maurice, and has made him her Kapelmeister, which is a wonderful beginning for him. He is to teach the children in the royal nursery, arrange the state music, and write pieces for special occasions, and his wages are most generous.
‘But though I am sure Maurice will be happy here, it is not a place where I could feel at home, for though my aunt is a lively, intelligent, generous woman, the rest of the Court is not like her. Her husband, and her eldest son George Lewis, are dull and sullen, having no interests beyond hunting and eating and drinking. I met George Lewis at Windsor when he was a young man, and was not impressed with him then, and he has not improved with age. He is married to a pretty, silly young woman, his cousin Sophia Dorothea, and they have two children. He loathes her so much he will hardly stay in the same room with her, and disports himself openly with mistresses, the chief of whom are two women of startling plainness, one very thin, one very stout, and both as dull as slugs. Sophia Dorothea retaliates by flirting with a handsome Swedish mercenary officer called Konigsmark, despite anything Aunt Sofie can do to make her behave more discreetly.
‘The rest of Aunt Sofie's children are no more like her than her eldest son. Two of the older boys, Frederick and Charles, were killed a couple of years ago fighting against the Turks, and the youngest, a girl, was married at sixteen to the King of Prussia. The three left at home, Maximillian, Christian, and Ernest Augustus, are like their father in looks and temperament. The eldest has not even the wit to get himself married, though he is twenty-six.
‘So you see I shall not be sorry to go back to St Germain, where there is at least witty conversation, and where the younger generation fills one with hope and not despair.’
Clovis read this letter with resignation. No, there was no chance that the Countess would come back to England, even though he thought that the Usurper now felt so secure on his throne he would have ignored the return of the exile, provided she made no trouble for him. He must continue to carry the burden alone; and so he did not see that anyone could blame him for taking innocent comfort from the company and adoration of pretty little Clover.
*
In the late summer of each year, Cathy Morland had a party of guests to stay at Birnie Castle in Stirlingshire for the hunting and shooting. It was one of the things that was expected of her, but she did it largely for her son's sake, for she would do nothing that would jeopardize his future. She still hoped that one day he would be Lord Hamilton, the title his father had fought to have restored to his branch of the family, and which would surely be his when the true King was restored to his throne. And if James was to be Lord Hamilton, he must have the right background and the right friends.
In the summer of 1695 her chief guests were her neighbours, the Macallans of Braco, who brought with them their son Allan and their ward, an orphaned heiress from the far north, named Mavis D'Atheson. Mindful that family connections were important too, she sent an invitation to Sabine to send her daughter Frances, and to Morland Place for Matt and Clover. She did not include the McNeill children, Arthur and John, in the invitation. Titles they may have, but they had no land and no fortune, unless Annunciata left them her estates, and Cathy knew Annunciata too well to suppose that she would ever let anything of hers fall into the hands of her first husband's descendants.
Matt was pleased with the invitation. He had not been away from Morland Place before, and the thought of travelling so far was exciting. He had met his aunt Cathy and his cousin James - they had visited Morland Place two years ago. Aunt Cathy was so sharp she made Birch seem like sugar-syrup by comparison; but she was intelligent, and treated Matt like an adult, which made it very different. Matt had heard the servants talking about her, how when she was a girl she had been very plain and had grown up in grandmother Annunciata's shadow, and so had come to hate her; that she had made a bad marriage at first, but when her first husband died she married her cousin Kit who was the love of her life and had gone to live in Scotland to be as far from Annunciata as possible.
Matt knew enough of servants' stories to dismiss much of this, but he had heard Uncle Clovis say that as Cathy had come to look forty when she was but twenty, she had the benefit of it now, for at fifty she still only looked forty. To Matt she seemed like weathered rock, worn away until only a solid core remained, and that core untouchable and unchangeable, and like rock, her beauty was her own and not to be compared with the beauty of flowers or birds.
Clovis was at first inclined to refuse the invitation, but Matt begged so hard to go that in the end he agreed, though he would not let Clover leave him for so long. Clover was indifferent, and in fact rather hoped that with Matt gone she might have even more of Clovis's attention, and so it was decided in the end that servants should be sent from Northumberland to collect Matt, and take him to Edinburgh, collecting Frances on the way. Aunt Cathy's servants from Aberlady House would then accompany the children the rest of the way to Birnie. Old Conn, when Matt told him, said that when he was a lad, the far north was so wild that you could not travel in it without an army, and Matt was impressed and rather excited until he discovered that Conn, despite his wanderings in the south, had never gone farther north than Yorkshire.
They reached Birnie Castle by August. Three of the four wings of the castle were ruined, and wild wallflowers gilded the heaps of stones, and ferns grew from empty windows. Jackdaws nested in the north-west tower, and chacked and chattered amongst the crenellations, where once guards had stood surveying the horizon for marauders; pigeons nested in the gatehouse tower, and flew up with a rattle of wings when the children entered it at the bottom on their tour of inspection.
‘These were the guard rooms,' James explained importantly, doing his duty as host, 'and there was a portcullis here - you can see the grooves, and up there are the remains of the chains.’
The visitors craned their necks obediently, but six-year old Sabina had heard it all before, and looked bored.
‘Wouldn't it have been fun, to stand guard up there, and throw stones and pour boiling oil on your enemies,' said Allan Macallan. He was ten, and well-grown for his age, a stocky, wiry boy with red hair.
Sabina didn't like his sandy eyelashes or his freckles, both of which made her shudder, and reminded her of a ginger cat that had lived in the cellar at Aberlady House and had the most horrible sore on its back. She was deeply in love with James Matthias, whom she thought the most beautiful boy she had ever seen, so she said contemptuously, 'I don't believe anyone ever poured boiling oil on anyone. It's just a stupid story.'
‘But I've read it in a book,' Allan said - politely, because when one is a guest one must be polite, even to rude little girls.
‘But it's miles from the kitchens,' Sabina said stoutly. ‘It would be cold by the time they got it all the way to the top of the tower.'
‘Oh Sabina, what does it matter?' James said impatiently.
‘Perhaps they carried the oil cold, and had a fire up there to heat it,' said Mavis D'Atheson, in an effort to propitiate, and Matt ha
stened to agree with her. She was a few months older than him, nearly twelve, and already a lady. She had soft, mouse-fair hair which she wore ringleted, creamy skin, large violet eyes, and she wore fine dresses without pinafores or caps, which impressed Matt so much that he had already decided he wanted to marry her as soon as they were both old enough. He had never met a young lady of his own age before - only servants and commoners - and was therefore very vulnerable to her charm.
‘Of course that's what they did - how clever of you to think of it. They could have had a brazier up on the roof,' he said. Sabina was annoyed that he had sided with Mavis.
‘Well even if they had a brazier, it still wouldn't have been boiling by the time they poured it over the wall,' she said stubbornly. Her brother stepped in firmly.
‘Now hush, Sabina. Let's go up here. The steps go nearly all the way to the top.’
They climbed the stone spiral. 'It does smell horrid,' Mavis said, drawing her skirts up fastidiously. Matt kept close behind her.
‘Be careful. The steps are slippery,' he said. He hoped she might slip a little and he would be able to save her from a nasty fall. At the top they came out into the open, for the roof was missing entirely.
‘This was the chapel,' James said. Above them arched a blue and windy sky, and through the windows in the half-ruined walls they could see the great spread of the moors, brown and purple and pierced with little glinting burns, stretching to the glowering hills, Ben Clach and Creag Beinn Nan Eun. Away to the north was the little town of Braco, where once the Roman legionaries had built a fort at the place where the Roman road ran away northeastwards to Perth. From the windows on the other side they could see the soft greenness of Strathallan, and the Allan Water writhing this way and that like a silver worm, and beyond the low moor of Sherrifmuir, and more hills, plum-purple and riven with deep blue shadows in the strong sunshine.
Matt stood beside Mavis, where she stationed herself at a low place in the wall and gazed eagerly towards the northwest. The bright air made her cheeks pink, and blew soft fronds of her hair loose, and her eyes were brilliant with more than just the wind's teasing.
‘Can you see your home?' he asked.
‘I can see where we live,' she said, as if it were not the same thing. 'Over there, look. The windows catch the sun just.' Her accent was strange and lovely to him, making her voice sound slow and careful, as if each word were important and worth the choosing.
‘You don't call it home?' he asked. She looked at him, and away again.
‘I have no home. My home was far away, beyond those hills.'
‘Tell me it,' Matt said eagerly. 'Tell me about your family.'
‘My parents both are dead,' she said slowly. 'My mother was a Macallan, and so the Macallans are my cousins. That is why I live with them.'
‘But your surname is not Scottish, is it?' he asked. She looked around for somewhere to sit, and he hastened to brush a convenient block of stone with his hands to make sure it was clean enough for her before she sat down. She had a slow way of moving, and a high way of carrying her head, which made her seem queenly.
‘My grandmother was a Breadalbane from the far north, and she married a Frenchman named D'Ath, who died in exile with King Charles II. But she brought her son, my father, back to Scotland, and gave him the name D'Atheson so that her people would understand who he was. I am my father's heir, and all his fortune will be mine one day, when I am grown.'
‘Well, then, you will be able to go home,' Matt said. She shook her head.
‘My fortune is all in gold. They sold my father's land when my mother died, because there was no one to keep it.'
‘What is it like, in the far north?' Matt asked, enchanted. She was so romantic and sad, an exiled princess, that she stirred his imagination as well as his senses.
‘Dark, and silver,' she said. 'The tall hills cut out the sky, until you come to the sea, and then the sea and sky are like a silver shield.' They were silent for a moment, and then she said, 'Tell me about your home. It must be so different.’
But at that moment Sabina came running up and grabbed Matt's hand. 'Matt, come and see - you can go up these stairs where the tower was, and then it just stops, and there's a tiny room, with a bench and a sink, where the priests used to retreat, so small you can't imagine how they lived in there for a day, leave alone a month. Do come!' She flicked a glance at Mavis and said, 'Mavis had better stay here. It's too steep and dangerous for her, and she might get her dress dirty.’
To which Mavis merely assented with a serene smile, and Matt, for politeness, was obliged to scramble up the tower with his cousin, though he would much rather have remained and talked. He consoled himself with the thought that there would be plenty of time to talk in the weeks to come.
Time there was, but not so many opportunities. The children had a degree of latitude in the safeness of Birnie that they all enjoyed as a contrast to their normal lives, and provided they remained on Birnie land, they were not required to be accompanied by nurses. The ruins of the castle were theirs to run and play in, and the old nursery wing was huge, and they could make as much noise as they liked without being reprimanded, and the moors were open for them to ride and walk. But Matt found it difficult to be with Mavis, for often James wanted to bathe, which meant the boys going off without the girls, or Allan wanted to hunt, which meant leaving Mavis and Frances behind, since Mavis did not care to hunt and Frances was too young. And whenever they were all together in the castle or the gardens, Sabina would be sure to seize Matt's hand and drag him away to see something or explore something or play at something with her. She simply did not seem to understand Matt's grimaces and hints that he would sooner stay where he was and talk to Mavis. Only in the evenings when they would sit around the great nursery fire - the castle was so chill and damp that even in the summer fires were necessary after dark - and tell stories, was he able to seat himself beside the object of his choice, and even then he could not talk privately to her, for Sabina was always at his other side, interrupting. He sometimes spoke a few sentences to Mavis in French, which Sabina did not understand, and that constituted the only privacy that Birnie afforded him. It made him all the more determined to marry Mavis when he was old enough, so that he could spend the rest of his life talking to her without anyone listening on his other side .. .
CHAPTER FOUR
Lessons at St Edward's school finished at six o'clock in the summer, and James Matt was one of the first to emerge into the sunny, dusty street. He was alone: his fellow pupil Davey, with whom he had kept up a constant friendship over the years, had not been at school that day, or for several days before it. Arthur, who was now fifteen, had been sent to Christ Church College in Oxford, though he was a little young for it, because it had become beyond either the school's ushers, or Father St Maur at home, to control him. Matt was not entirely sorry that Arthur was thus removed from the scene. Arthur had grown bigger and heavier since his voice broke, while Matt at thirteen was still small and slight, as his father had been, and until Arthur had gone away, no day had passed that Matt did not find another new bruise somewhere on his body.
But it made it lonely at home, for John and Clover were both away too. They had had the chicken-pox, which had somehow, miraculously, missed Matt, and Clovis had sent them to Sabine at Emblehope where the air was said to be very good for invalids. Flora missed them very much, and often sighed to Matt that she longed for the time when he would be old enough to marry and give her some more babies in her nursery; and Matt, glad to have someone to talk to about it, had told her about Mavis D'Atheson, and his plan to marry her as soon as ever he was old enough, which would be in two more years.
Flora had listened kindly, and at the end had said, 'Well, Master Matt, she sounds a very nice kind of young lady altogether.'
‘Do you really think so? Do you think she's suitable?' Matt asked anxiously. He had never forgotten what Old Conn said, that men always choose amiss when they choose their own wives. Flora had said s
he sounded very suitable, but the answer had not entirely satisfied Matt. His quick ear had detected something lacking in her tone of voice, as if she were not taking the question seriously.
On school days, Matt left his pony, Goldfinch, in the stables of the Hare and Heather, which was just across the road from the school. The inn belonged to Matthew Morland, known to Matt as Cousin Matthew, though the family connection was so far back that it was impossible to gauge the exact degree of cousinship between them. Matthew had married the innkeeper's daughter of the Starre Inn in Stonegate in the city, a sweet-tempered, buxom girl named Mary Handy, and they now had two children, Ambrose, who was nearly seven, and Mary, or Polly, who was a year old. Ambrose, who was becoming very good at various jobs about the place, had Goldfinch all ready saddled and bridled when Matt came into the yard, and held his stirrup for him to mount like a proper little groom. Matt thanked him gravely, and asked after his parents, but Ambrose became tongue-tied and merely went silent and scarlet. He was all dressed in black, for his father's brother, Jacob, had recently died, falling from his horse in a race on Clifton Ings and breaking something inside. Matt thought it looked strange to see such a small child as Ambrose dressed in black, and remembered the . quarrel with Mrs Birch over the question of black clothes for Clover. Uncle Clovis had been right in that, Matt thought.
Matt rode home over Micklegate Stray, across Hob Moor and through the gap in the sedges that people called Hobgate, crossing the Akburn at the shallow place where the three willows grew, where Goldfinch always liked to stop and drink. Matt sat idly, watching the clear running water dimple around Goldfinch's round hooves, and then a slight veering of the wind brought to his nostrils a terrible smell. Even Goldfinch lifted his head for a moment and wrinkled his nose, making the silvery drops dance and spring from his long whiskers. Soap-boiling! Of course, it had quite escaped Matt's memory that today was the beginning of washing-week.
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