by Peg Kingman
“Let me hazard a guess: Nasmyth, father and son? Of course! Oh, yes, I meet them often at the lectures at the Mechanics Institute.”
“Mr Nasmyth promises to finish my portrait soon. If ever it is completed, it will have to go here in this dark corner, next to my father and my grandfather.”
“So that is your famous father. A stylish piece of painting, too. Sir Henry Raeburn’s work?”
“Yes; a good eye in your head. There on the old man’s dining table you see the notorious bits of cork representing ships of the line. Salt spilled here to represent this; walnut shells there to represent that. We never did break him of the habit. Look, here I have his Essay on Naval Tactics, all three volumes. And his original manuscript. I wonder what the old man would have made of steam navigation. Your new technology will sweep away his entire premise. We will be independent of wind.”
“That I doubt. Yet I found myself quite puffed with pride today to see the king’s yacht coming in under steam power. My thoughts were perhaps even a little disrespectful: There Royal George lies helpless but for James Watt.”
“Ha ha! A Radical notion!”
“You will not quote me, sir. Yet, you know, despite all the advantages that steam can offer the navy, it is the merchants who are showing them the way.”
“Profits have a way of illuminating matters,” said Mr Clerk. “I wish you the best of luck in this undertaking of yours for Crawford and Fleming. For the country trade between China and Calcutta, I believe? Aye. And the sooner, the better, for I am sure my sister spends far too much on our congou and our pekoe. Did you know that Mr Fleming has invited me to invest in this venture? A sixteenth share. Just between us, I am quite seriously tempted. Now, here, Mr MacDonald, is another thing which may interest you as a musician. You play the best modern Italians, no doubt, but perhaps you used to play the old Gaelic tunes as well?”
“Oh, aye, long ago.”
“In your youth? Not so terribly long ago then. And a bit of a piper, too, I believe?”
“A wee bit, then.”
“And that is more than plenty, if you ask some people. So tell me, do you know what this is?” Mr Clerk picked up a neat little black book and held it out to Hector.
Turning it over, Hector examined it and opened it to a page at random. Looking over his shoulder, Catherine saw that it was a bound manuscript of perhaps fifty or sixty pages, measuring no more than seven inches by nine. The handwriting was old-fashioned and meticulous, and the ink had faded to brown. Scattered through the text were many odd-looking musical notations.
Hector read aloud from the page where he had alighted: “‘Introductions, Graces, Cadencies and Transitions,’” he read. “‘The small compass of this instrument allows not scope enough for such graces as are peculiar to other instruments, but the abundant variety of cuttings invented for the pipe are the principal graces of it when well executed.’” He turned back to the first page and read the title: “A Compleat Theory of the Scots Highland Bagpipe…mmm, mmm, Skye and Mull, aye! By J. MacDonald. Oh, sir, what a fine thing! This is MacDonald’s original manuscript!”
“Canny lad! Do you know it, then?” asked Mr Clerk. “And I had expected to confound you. Even copies are rare, for only one small edition was ever printed, and that some years ago.”
“I do know it. I recognise it because my brother—our brother—was awarded a copy when he won the piping prize. The most improved, you know, not the chief prize. In—what was it, Catherine?—it must have been about the year ’fifteen, just about seven years ago. Aye, because Sandy was just fifteen at the time. He was already a fine piper, better than I could ever have hoped to be. But I used to borrow his prize copy from time to time and try to make it out. Even then it was considered an oddity. It is not at all the way the music is played nowadays, the Great Music. Nor the way it is written—quite old-fashioned. Making this so much the more valuable, I suppose. A very curious thing. How did you come across it?”
“It belonged to a client of mine for whom I waged an epic campaign through the Court of Session. We prevailed at last, at the Inner House, but my fees had rather mounted up by that time, and my client had grown fonder of his hard-won money than of this little manuscript—so it became mine. I believe he had it of the fellow who’d brought it back from India. But the author, this Mr J. MacDonald—I don’t suppose he was any kinsman of yours?”
“No, Joseph MacDonald was a Strathnaver man,” said Hector, “with plenty of kin of his own. It was his brother who posthumously published the two volumes of music we are fortunate enough to have from him. First was a collection of vocal airs—some genuine old specimens, as sung in the Highlands and the islands. Much later, the brother published this curious treatise you have here: A Compleat Theory, all description, instruction, and technique, how the pipes ought to be played—in MacDonald’s opinion. But he gives only a little of the music itself, just a few phrases by way of illustration here and there. Alas, the greatest treasure of all has been lost, it seems. That would have been his collection of the ceol mhor tunes themselves—the ancient Great Music of the pipes, you know—which MacDonald was supposed to have been compiling during his voyage and in India. Unless your client knew something about that?”
“He mentioned nothing of the sort to me. But other collections of that old music must exist, surely,” said Mr Clerk.
“Surprisingly little, sir; perhaps a scant two dozen tunes have ever been set down at all, and those not scientifically noted. How much is lost and forgotten already, buried with the old pipers who learned that Great Music by ear? Alas, that Joseph MacDonald was so untimely cut off!”
“A casualty of what, do you know?” asked Mr Clerk.
“Oh, that Bengal climate, I daresay—some malignant fever or other. That was back in the ’sixties; I have been reassuring my wife that India is considered much healthier nowadays.”
“I sincerely hope for your sake and hers that it is,” said Mr Clerk. “But I fear we are boring your sister. Mrs MacDonald, I beg your pardon!”
Catherine had been moving quietly about the gallery from one picture to the next. Here was a gruesome Saint Sebastian; here a bare pink Magdalene; and there a heavily forested Germanic hunting scene in which the anuses of the dogs and horses were most lovingly and attentively rendered. “Tell me, what do you think of my Indian miniatures?” asked Mr Clerk waspishly, returning to the four exquisite little paintings under which he had set a lamp.
The Indian miniatures would have made Mary blush, but Catherine resolved not to shy from them. One showed a lady standing at the edge of a garden pavilion playing a stringed instrument while storm clouds boiled up over distant hills. Her tunic was transparent and her figure as ripe and tempting as the fruit on the trees. In the next, a man with an elegantly curled mustache pushed the same lady, or one who looked like her, on a swing while in the foreground fish and ducks disported themselves among the lotuses in a tiled garden pool. In the third, the lady had been divested of her tunic and was being caressed by the man; shyness apparently made her look away from him. The two of them were entwined on a low daybed scattered with magnificent pillows and bolsters, while an ensemble of musicians played in another pavilion in the distance. The fourth picture showed servants bringing pitchers, goblets, platters of sweetmeats, and a hookah. The lady played her lute and sang while her lover gazed at her as he lounged against a large jeweled bolster.
“Do you think they are a suite?” said Catherine. “It seems to me the faces and clothing in these two do not match the others. And though these have a similar look, the colouring of this fourth one is quite different—another artist?”
“You are observant. At least two different artists, I agree, working in a well-known genre—probably ragamala—with traditional subject matter.”
“Ah…I wonder why these Hindustani painters depict the principal figures in profile, while the others, the servants and musicians, are seen full-or three-quarter face.”
“A class distinction, just so. I
t is an old tradition in eastern portraiture; the profile depiction is the most respectful. Perhaps it has to do with the indiscretion of gazing into the face of the mighty. We moderns do something similar, you know: Our coins depict our kings in profile and, oddly enough, in Roman dress.”
“Ah! Quite true, come to think of it. These are very prettily coloured. I do admire them.” And though Catherine was not blushing, she found herself moved by the paintings, by the bliss of the lovers. She could remember feeling that.
“It is a pleasure to show them to someone who really looks, and really sees,” said Mr Clerk.
They returned downstairs, Mr Clerk negotiating the steps with some difficulty and leaning heavily on Hector’s arm, so that Catherine went ahead. She waited for them halfway down, but they had stopped, on the landing above. So she reentered the ballroom alone, with a feeling that they were talking about her.
Hector came and found Catherine at last, and the two of them walked home. It was after midnight, but the pavements were far from empty. People were roaming about the city in high spirits, singing and talking, their voices ringing through the long streets. The bonfire atop Arthur’s Seat was burning higher than ever. Catherine linked her arm through Hector’s and fell into step with him, but he was not talkative; probably he was pondering a technical problem.
“What occupied you and Mr Clerk all that time on the stairs?” she ventured after a few minutes.
“What? Oh,” said Hector. “Oh, various matters.”
“I daresay you were talking about me.”
“Very self-important, my dear! Do you imagine that all your acquaintance have nothing more fascinating to discuss?”
“I can feel it, you know.”
Hector said nothing; they stepped aside as a couple of well-turned-out carriages passed, probably homeward-bound from the theater.
“What did he want to know?” said Catherine, holding Hector by the arm, though he would have set off once more.
“He asked about Sandy.”
“And you said…?”
“I said, ‘Our brother Alexander died in India last year, sir, when a dam burst during the monsoon flooding.’ And he said he was very sorry to hear it.”
“Mmm. What else?”
“Well…that I am eldest by four years. That you and Sandy are—were—twenty-two years old, and twins. About James’s wreck with that horse; and that you are left with the little daughter of his first marriage.”
“Hmm! No wonder I was feeling it. What else did he want to know?”
“Why your name was still MacDonald even though you had been married.”
“Ah! These lowlanders cannot quite understand just how thick upon the ground we are, the MacDonalds of Skye, can they?”
“I explained it to him.”
“Aye. And why these personal inquiries about us, do you suppose?”
“I daresay he is assessing the risks of that sixteenth share which Crawford and Fleming have offered him.”
When Hector knocked at his own door, no one came. After a few moments he dug in his pockets for his key, and they let themselves in and went upstairs. At first it seemed that the drawing room was empty. “Have they gone to bed and left these lamps burning?” said Hector.
But a snort issued from the deep chair drawn up before the embers of the fire, and suddenly, too loud, a man’s familiar voice said, “Splendid! Indeed! Oh, Hector! Where is Mary?” Mr Hay, Mary’s father, habitually scoffed at any suggestion that he was subject to post-prandial drowsiness. “Aye, the children. One of them, oh, teething, Mary said. She was here just a moment ago.”
Hector built up the fire, and Mary came in. “Your Grace is just an angel,” she said to Catherine. “She has been up and down the stairs all the evening, fetching and carrying for me. The baby is so fretful; it must be that tooth. He is asleep at last, and Grace is with him. What did Miss Bessie give you for a supper? I want to hear of every dish.”
“Ham—a real ham all pink and iridescent, not a mutton ham,” said Catherine, well prepared for this question. “A gigot of lamb. A saddle of venison with juniper berries. Prawn paste made with butter and parsley. Asparagus. A vast dish of little potatoes, much peppered and parsleyed. Poached salmon with a lemon sauce. A Dundee cake, generously spiced and anointed with rum. To drink, a brandy punch, and a large jug of Athole brose, I believe, for the gentlemen.”
“My mouth waters to hear of it. Hector never notices, so he is never able to tell me in any detail. But we had a good little supper of our own, had we not, Dad? Some nice slices of turkey breast with bread sauce and dripping. Oh, will that child never sleep? Now what?”
“I will go,” said Catherine, taking a candlestick to light her way, but the wailing stopped as she climbed the stairs. She went instead to the room which she and Grace shared, and laid her heavy cloak across the bed. A faint unfamiliar scent hung in the chilly room—not flowery but spicy, mossy, peppery. The flickering candlelight showed a parcel on the small table under the dark uncurtained window.
The parcel, about ten or twelve inches long and wide, was expertly wrapped in layers of oiled silk. It was tied with hemp twine, the knots and ends sealed down with wax, and the wax was stamped with a familiar signet. Written in ink across the top was her name in English, and below it in Gaelic: Catriona NicDhonaill. The handwriting was that of her twin brother, Sandy, who had been dead for more than a year.
The waxy knots would not yield to her fingernails, and her scissors were downstairs in the drawing room with her canvaswork. She could hear the voices of the others as she came down the stairs: “…and he has offered all of us a prime place on his front steps—Picardy Place, you know—for the king’s entry tomorrow morning,” Hector was saying to Mr Hay as Catherine entered. She was bearing the parcel as though it were the Honours of Scotland. Something in her face or manner made them fall silent and look at her.
“How did this come here?” she said.
No one knew. The house had been in an uproar all evening. The servants, granted a night out, came and went with their friends, suitors and acquaintances. “I have been up and down the stairs twenty times this evening,” said Mary, “and I answered the door twice—no, three times. Once it was two boys looking for their friend; wrong house. Once it was a messenger with a letter for you, Hector. I put it on the worktable in your study. Once when I finally got to the door—I thought the kitchen maid would go, but apparently she had gone out already—no one was there. I shall have to ask the girls in the morning.”
Catherine cut the twine and unwrapped the parcel, which emitted the same faint peppery scent she had first noticed in her room. The soft folds of a Kashmiri shawl fell open, revealing a sheaf of papers, rolled and tied; and a small box made of burnished ivory or bone and bound in silver.
Sandy, my dear! she thought. But how surprisingly painful, this joy—like blood coming back into frostbitten fingertips. Catherine put a hand to her heart, and buried her face in the gossamer shawl to hide her emotion.
The shawl was as light, soft, and downy as ostrich plumes, and smelled of cloves. The dizzy convoluted swirls, pieced and embroidered, were in every shade of red, green, azure and gold, swimming on a black ground.
“Oh, splendid!” Mary’s father was saying. “Very fine indeed. I have seldom seen better. That would fetch a pretty price. May I see?” He owned mills in Paisley, near Glasgow. His weavers had been busy for the last six months producing acres of tartan in anticipation of the royal visit, but they were now free again to resume copying Kashmiri shawls for the enthusiastic home market. Here was a handsome new authentic design to copy. Delicately, respectfully, he felt the fine fringe between knowing fingers.
Catherine untied the thick sheaf of papers, more than a hundred pages, and spread them flat. There was no letter; it was a musical manuscript in Sandy’s handwriting. Titles in Gaelic headed most of the pages; a few had English subtitles as well. Hector looked over her shoulder. “Why, it is piobaireachd,” he said. “Pipe music. I know this
tune, ‘The Fairy Tune’ Mr MacKay used to play it.” Hector sang the first line of it using the strange onomatopoeic syllables peculiar to pipers. “Hohiodro chehoche hee he Ihe I…That phrase along there is different from what I remember, though,” and he sang it again in his plain, true voice. Then, paging through the manuscript, he read off the archaic titles: “‘The Piper’s Warning.’ ‘A Bhoilich,’ that’s ‘The Vaunting,’ yes. ‘Is Fhada Mar So Tha Sinn’ I do not know that one. ‘Weighing From Land.’ Sandy used to play that—a fascinating tune if you are the piper, but rather tedious otherwise. I was just saying to Mr Clerk what a pity that so few of these old tunes had ever been set down. What is this? ‘Fhathast Gun a Bhith Bàthte,’ ‘Not Yet Drown’d,’” and he sang the melody aloud as he read it from the page. His voice trailed off to silence.
Catherine and Hector looked at each other. “But that is ‘Sandy’s Tune,’” she said.
“What do you mean, ‘Sandy’s Tune?’” asked Mary.
“Sandy made it himself when he was fifteen, the summer he won the piping competition,” explained Catherine. “He never played it for anyone but us. It had no name then; we called it just ‘Sandy’s Tune.’ ‘Port Alasdair.’”
“Curious,” said Hector. The page exactly resembled all the other pages of the manuscript, where it occupied an unobtrusive middle place. “Most curious, indeed.”
Not yet drown’d? wondered Catherine.
“Do open this, Catherine,” said Mary, examining the little silver-bound ivory-inlaid box. “It looks like a little treasure chest with this domed lid. What could it be? The latch is the neatest thing I ever saw; look, the hasp is engraved with this swirling design, and the pin is a splint of ivory.”
Catherine drew out the ivory pin and opened the lid. The little chest was filled to the brim with a fragrant mass of dried curled leaves, dark brown with golden tips. She stirred them with her finger, then brought them to her nose and inhaled deeply of the malty scent. “It is tea,” Catherine said. “Tea of some kind. Very fragrant, sweet. Do smell it. What type is that?” she asked Mary.
