The Proud Servant

by Margaret Irwin

  ‘I’ll sup with him in his own country yet,’ thought Montrose. He was getting bored with these sly little stories, mostly on adultery and never on fighting, and all in a mincing fashionable language that sounded like a lot of baby talk. He pulled out of his pocket an elf-bolt he had found that morning, a flint spear-head such as was believed to have been made by the fairies, and certainly used by witches, for Maggie Blandilands, the potter’s widow at Luss, had exhausted all her neighbours’ cattle before the fair by driving them round and round the fields, shooting at them with elf-bolts.

  But Archie Napier, who was as fond of history as of algebra, said they were the rude weapons of some incredibly early race that had lived here before the Romans came, in houses underneath the earth – but in houses so small, as Jamie had seen for himself, that only goblins could have lived in them. He had found one with Kat when they were children, playing that they were William Wallace and their ancestor, his faithful friend and ally, whose sword they possessed.

  She had crawled into the house on her hands and knees and called out to him like the woman in the fairy tale, ‘What are you doing, sitting on my house?’ For he had stayed on the grass above, and when he saw she had gone inside that green hump, he had jumped down and pulled her out by the heels, for how could he know that she would not go further and further into the earth, until there came a skirl of laughter and shrill music, and she would never come out again, but be heard sometimes under the earth like the lost piper of the Mull of Kintyre, crying:

  ‘I doubt, I doubt

  I’ll never win out!’

  As he remembered that hollow mound and Kat’s heels sticking out of it, he stopped examining his elf-bolt, and rolled over and looked at Kat, and noticed for the first time that she was wearing a jewel. It was an intricate piece of gold work, fretted in circles and pentagons in as ingenious and complicated a structure as a spider’s web; and set in it here and there, in positions that even Jamie’s unpractised taste could recognize as inevitably right for the pattern, was the burning eye of a ruby.

  ‘What is that thing?’ he asked as soon as the reading was finished, and he had seized the chance to stroll off apart with her on their way back to the house.

  ‘It fastens my dress,’ said Kat.

  ‘Your dress was fastened before, I suppose.’ His brusque reversion to schoolboy rudeness was unusual. ‘I thought you did not care for jewels,’ he said. ‘You would not wear mine, I remember.’

  Magdalen had worn his jewel instead. He bit off his corollary, ‘and I am glad.’

  Kat had been determinedly aloof, defiant of late – her attitude saying, ‘you are a married man now,’ as though it were a barrier that he had set up on purpose between them. If there were a barrier, he would break it down – he would not have this silly, unnecessary coldness; so he continued casually and reasonably. ‘But you were almost a child then. Are you beginning to like jewels?’

  ‘I like this one,’ said Kat.

  There was no continuing. She was on the other side of the bars, glaring at him. The jewel on her breast winked its sultry eyes at him.

  It grew in his mind, it became of irritating importance. It spoilt his pleasure in his visit to Rossdhu, because he found his eye caught in its circular maze, following its pattern round and round, found himself wondering who had given it her, why she would not tell him (though that indeed was only too likely to be from a wish to tease him), thinking it was undignified of him to ask, and then that he was the man of the family and it was his duty to do so.

  A dread of his own temper prevented him from again approaching Kat. He asked Lilias, who was as usual rather vague, had noticed Kat had taken to wearing that jewel, thought it pretty though too elaborate for her taste, for she did not like ornaments to look like mathematical diagrams. She and Sir John had given it her quite a long time ago.

  ‘Did you give it then?’

  ‘He suggested we should give it together – I believe it was her birthday. Did you think she had a suitor? I am sure I wish she had. I have done my best, but I am afraid she has no charm for men. We shall have to arrange a match in the ordinary way, and that is so unusual in our family.’

  She smiled in a sweet, abstracted manner at somebody behind Jamie’s head, so that he looked round, startled, and then saw that it was at a mirror. She was thinking how Sir John had demanded her hand from her parents, having fallen headlong in love with her after one glimpse of her riding through the streets of Montrose; her thoughts had rocked so comfortably away that she was bewildered for an instant to hear Jamie say – ‘Do you know where it comes from?’

  ‘Where – what – oh the jewel? How should I know? Carlippis got it, I suppose – he gets everything like that.’

  As he heard it, he realized that he had known all along that would be the answer.

  ‘I hate that fellow,’ he broke out.

  She looked at him, startled, and for that instant it seemed that his exclamation had opened a door into her mind – and what he saw there was bewildered and terrified. But in a flash it was shut again; she was telling him that though Carlippis’ appearance was repulsive, and his reputation not very savoury, yet he had always been a good and faithful servant, would do anything for any of them, was devoted to the children and so good for their modern languages – and in any case, she added rather wildly, it was no use saying a word against him to Sir John, she had discovered that, and she begged Jamie not to try, for it could only make trouble.

  This sudden flurry left her as quickly as it came. She was stitching placidly again at her embroidery picture of Queen Margaret and the Robber, seated on her Italian chair with gilded and painted carving on its back. Behind her bent head with its mass of fair curls were two old family portraits of the Colquhouns – Sir John’s grandfather in an Elizabethan ruff and pointed beard, and his grandmother’s keen face, looking out of a big white ruff of delicate lace. They gave a settled, reassuring air to the background; so, in a way, did the new portrait of Sir John that had lately been placed beside them.

  For surely that prosperous and complacent man in his rich but sober suit of black, lightly touched with dark mulberry, was not going to do anything or have anyone in his house that might endanger either his comfort or his reputation.

  But what really reassured Jamie was that the day before he rode back to Kinnaird, Kat flung her arms round his neck and told him she did not know why she had been like an ill-natured hedgehog all his visit, for there was nobody in the world she loved as much as he – but she knew that Magdalen did not like her.

  He told her not to be so foolish, to go and stay with the Napiers and Beatrix at Merchiston, and not to snub the young men she met there as unmercifully as she had done last time – all excepting young Madertie, and was that, he asked, suddenly remembering some promptings of his elder sisters, just because Madertie had been paying court to Beatrix?

  Then, feeling very wise, elder-brotherly, and relieved, he rode back to the flat pastures of Kinnaird, to Magdalen, and his young son, Johnnie.

  Chapter Fourteen

  There was no air moving by day over Loch Lomond; the hills and green islands were as clear upon the shimmering water as in the air. But at night a little breeze stirred the surface of the loch, and Kat could hear the ripples plainly from her window just above it. They curled over, sighed, sucked back the pebbles, then came again. The night was alive, never quite dark, as though it were always watching. She got into bed, she slept, she dreamed.

  Scurrying through her dreams came a host of hunched figures, black on a moonlit sea. Shrieking with laughter (and yet she could not hear them) they tossed and waved their arms, brandishing flagons of wine from which they drank, then urged each other on, nearer and nearer the shore on which she stood. Each of them was whirling round and round in a tiny circular boat – but it was not a boat, it was not even a tub, and there was something very strange in it holding anyone upon the water, for it was full of holes, and she could see them now as though she were sitting in it �
�� and she was sitting in it, looking down through the holes to the black whirling waters below, far, far below, beneath their blackness, to the still and lovely forms of flowers.

  ‘I”ll show where the white lilies grow

  In the bottom o’ the sea.’

  Suddenly she laughed, for she saw that what she was sitting in was the old sieve, the big one made of punched sheepskin that hung upon the stone wall of the kitchen at Kincardine. Round her were two hundred other sieves, and in them all were women, drinking from flagons of wine, and laughing. Now they had reached the shore, now they were dancing in a ring, and their long black hair streeled out on the night wind.

  Her bare feet tossed and scattered the sand, it rose in a cloud beneath her, and she rose on it, higher and higher, leaping as she had never leapt in a reel before, her body dancing of itself, blown by that singing wind as a dead leaf is blown, round and round on a whirlwind of sand, now backward, now forward, on, on, pursuing someone in front of her, a girl who, as she danced, played the mad tune of the reel on a tiny jew’s-harp.

  All that whirling company came dancing after, and Kat in front of them, nearest to that figure with the jew’s-harp against her lips, who led them with thin bare feet and white legs flashing in and out in the moonlight, whose short black hair blew straight up from her head, whose face Kat knew, did she turn and look back, would be the same as her own.

  This is a nightmare, she thought, I must wake up, and there she was lying in her own bed – but am I asleep or awake? she asked. The darkness inside the curtains was thick round her, but she could see a glimmer from the linen sheet where she had thrown it back. Yes, she was awake, she was here safe in bed, but where had she been a moment ago? Out on the sea-shore miles away, right across Scotland, on the east coast, dancing with a company of witches.

  It was true then; she was a witch; and she laughed softly in the darkness. It gave her an odd sense of power, as though that in itself were witchcraft, that she should be lying awake, listening to the silence of the great house all round her, and the little whispering sounds outside, to be lying there so still, yet tingling with excitement, wakefulness, the sense of adventure.

  Who else is awake in this house besides me? she thought. Someone knows that I am awake – someone is thinking of me – speaking to me – calling me.

  Out of her bed she got in her white linen smock, pushed back the curtains and saw a criss-cross pattern of dull light falling from the small, leaded panes of the window on to the boards – then stepped from those clouded squares to the window, and pushed it open, to see the flood of unearthly light outside.

  There was the world she had always known, transformed and magical. A white foxglove had grown by accident in a corner of the courtyard; it stood there like a spear of ivory; like a gallant knight in white armour; and now as the wind blew, like a swaying, feathery ghost.

  ‘I’ll show where the white lilies grow

  On the banks o’ Italie’.

  ‘That is where I will go,’ she thought, and remembered the company of story-tellers on the hillside above Florence – but they were dull to sit and tell of what they had never seen. She would do more, she would go further, she did not know what, nor where. She turned her head, as though she were listening for a sound within the house, the sound of her own name called in a voice she could not hear, and yet it was ringing in her ears.

  A dark circle whirled and wound round and round in her head; she knew that she must move round and round, up and up. She turned and went up to the door and lifted the latch and stepped into the passage, where only a grey glimmer showed in the direction of the wide staircase. But she went in the opposite direction, deeper into the darkness till her bare feet felt the shock of stone and her hand reached out for the touch of stone, and then she began to walk up a narrow winding stair, up and up, round and round.

  Until above her head she saw a thin stripe of yellow light, and her hand felt for the latch of a door, and opened it, and there, inside Carlippis’ room, all alone, stood Sir John, staring at her as though she were a ghost.

  A lighted candle stood on the table before him; its flame glinted upwards on his dark chin and the white of his eyeballs, giving his face a flickering and distorted look; he seemed even taller than usual, leaning forward over the candle, with the top of his head disappearing in shadow – as tall as the mast of a ship, she thought – and with that a giddiness swam over her, so that she felt the little round room whirling, and herself in it, as in a little round boat, and beneath her the black, whirling waters of the sea.

  ‘I am walking in my sleep,’ said Kat to herself, ‘and now I must wake up.’

  But as in a nightmare, she could do nothing. She stood there as if bound hand and foot; her tongue could not move, it clung to the roof of her mouth, which was dry and hot; and then a sudden trembling shook all her body, her hand dropped from the latch and hung by her side, powerless to fling out as she wished, to thrust away the man who was now moving towards her.

  Chapter Fifteen

  King charles I had been on the throne over seven years now; and still he had not come up to be crowned in Scotland. His loyal Scottish subjects were burning to do him homage – and still more to get the royal ear, and explain the tithes question to him. Church lands and Church tithes, the happy windfalls of the Reformation, were now sacred to the nobles’ private pockets, said the jolly Lord Rothes, with his enormous wink.

  This good-humoured man of the world, a friend of Napier’s and the Carnegies, put his fat finger on the money side of the troubles.

  ‘Says he’s restoring them to the Church – to pay their stipends out of it! Restore his grandmother! The King’s short of money like the rest of us, and that’s all there is to it. Because he can’t fill his revenue out of the stingy English pockets, he comes down on us for it.’

  ‘Small blame to him,’ said Archie Napier, ‘with money not worth one half its old value’ – and at once Lady Carnegie, her blue eyes fierce with excitement, broke in with sad recollections of her mother furnishing her whole wardrobe with a sum that she had now to give those extravagant hussies, her daughters, for a single dress and cloak.

  Napier’s economics, as befitted the son of the famous higher mathematician and inventor of logarithms, were more impersonal than hers, or yet Rothes. In his opinion, the vast influx of gold from the Indies in the last century had half ruined the world. Look at Spain. They looked surprised, for Spain was as much the El Dorado to the rest of Europe as South America was to Spain. But all her wealth and wide empire was nothing but a hollow shell, declared Napier, and it had shown but another instance of old King Jamie’s short-sighted wisdom that he had always longed to marry his son Charles to the Spanish Infanta. A good thing for England that Charles had so bungled his wooing of her.

  ‘And a bad thing for England that he chose the little French cat instead,’ said Rothes.

  What a tartar! What a termagant! They all had stories about Queen Henrietta Maria – how she had refused (at sixteen) to be crowned according to the Church of England, and even to walk in the Coronation procession; how she had chattered as loud as she could with her ladies in the hall of a country house, to show her disrespect for the Anglican prayers that her host was reading on the other side of a thin door – how she still could not talk English properly, and the poets were writing long pieces of poetry for her to say in the masques at Court, so that her vanity might be a bribe to her industry.

  But she was sure to settle down into a good, sensible little queen, the loyalists finally decided; and King Charles would settle down too, would stop all this nonsense about the tithes, and his wish to reform the churches of England and Scotland. How many more reformations were they to stand, in the name of God? and hadn’t John Knox, God rest his soul, given them as many knocks as they needed for a century at least?

  King Charles apparently was to settle down from the moment he came to Scotland. That would teach him everything. Some Englishman had been so ill-advised as to suggest that
the Scottish regalia might be sent to London, so that Charles could be crowned King of Scotland in his English capital. There was an outburst of indignation. Doubtless the King would like to keep the Scottish crown under his coronation chair at Westminster, where the Hammer of the Scots, King Edward I, had placed the immemorially ancient coronation stone of Scone.

  Did King Charles then think the Scottish crown not worth the trouble of a journey? The old king had been a Scot first and an English king afterwards – but his son must be English in every bone of his body.

  But at the time he left Scotland, Charles’ bones were so soft that the doctors doubted as to whether he had had any at birth at all.

  And softness, or lack of backbone as it is called, prevented the young king from making the effort to come to his native kingdom; though he looked forward to it with all the vague optimism of a sentimentalist who believes that in any change of scene, certainly when it be to the scene of his infancy, will lie the best way out of his difficulties.

  For England was being very difficult. Pirates from Turkey and Algiers infested her coasts, to the great harm of her trade; and she was in danger of losing her herring fishery to the Dutch, who were now the real masters of the sea. But when Charles tried to restore the Navy to its former importance, he could get no support.

  To him it seemed that the English were the sentimentalists; they sang sea-songs with the best of them; they loved to recall the great days of the Armada, when the old Queen had waved her hand from Greenwich Palace in greeting to the ships that came proudly up the Thames with sails of blue damask, and loot from Bokhara and Canada, the Russian galleys and the navy of Japan.

  ‘Ah, those were the days,’ they said, when Captain Drake was served in his cabin off silver plate, and every man of Cavendish’s crew wore a gold chain, and violins played on the decks of the Golden Hind.