Bonnie Dundee

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Then they were all heading for the door.

  ‘Go forth in God’s name and do His work!’ cried my Aunt Margaret, as Willie pulled it open and they shouldered out with the minister in the lead, into the deepening dusk.

  One of the bairns began to cry. The women left behind stood and looked after them, listening to their footfalls until they were swallowed up in the gusting wind. One of the farm dogs barked, and was silent.

  And there I stood, left among the women and the bairns. And part of me wanted to accept the shame and bide there; and part of me wanted nothing to do with what was going to happen. But another part of me was filled with a rising tide of excitement, and that part would be out and away after Alan, heading with the other men through the gusty March gloaming with Grandfather’s pistol in his belt. And in my inner ear was that light quick voice of his, ‘’Tis not just for our way of worship, ’tis for the freedom of Scotland that’s crying out under the English heel!’

  And I knew that where Alan was going, I had to go too. That whatever was going to happen, I had to be a part of it. I had at least to be there… I had to see… I mumbled something about going to see did Grandfather need any help with the cow, and bolted out into the farm garth.

  No one said me nay, or seemed to notice my going. Indeed I am thinking that nobody cared much whether I went or stayed.

  Outside, darkness had taken the valley, though there was still light in the sky, and a lopsided moon caught in the swaying still-bare branches of the rowan tree by the gate was pale and insubstantial as a bubble. From the doorway of the byre dim lantern-light spilled out over the straw-wisped cobbles, where Grandfather kept company with his sick cow, and I wondered if he had heard the comings and goings. There was still time to turn aside.

  One of the dogs came padding across and thrust her muzzle into my hand. I fondled her for a moment, then pushed her away. ‘Back wi’ ye, Jess. Good lassie, get back.’

  Then I was out on the driftway and heading down towards the burn. The wind was hushing through the whitethorn trees along the edge of the out-field. I kept well among them, and took care not to get too close to the knot of dark figures I could just make out ahead of me on the track.

  They were down to the cattle-ford now, stringing out across the timber foot-bridge beside it. On the far side they clotted again, and by the cobweb light of the moon I could see a handful more figures coming down the braeside to meet them where the track forked on the far bank. Seemingly Wauprigg was not the only place to have received the word. I hung back until they had crossed the low ridge and dropped out of sight beyond it, then made for the bridge myself, and went after them, top speed.

  On the far side the track dropped to join the drove road. Left hand below me a few half-hearted flecks of light showed from the huddled cottages of the clachan; right-handwise the way climbed up towards the moors, and far up that way a single glim, lonely in the dark billows of the land, shone, I knew, from old Phemie’s alehouse.

  I turned up towards it, and again saw that flicker of dark movement way ahead of me. A sort of shadow-loping that made me think of a pack of something, wolves maybe, on the hunting trail. Then it was lost among the thorn trees that arched over the lane. But a few moments later I glimpsed it again, among the furze of the rough pasture. They were leaving the drove-way, spreading out like a hunting pack to surround the quarry.

  It came to me for the first time in that moment that there were living men where that light was, and the hunt closing in on them out of the dark. Then part of me was for shouting and making a warning uproar; part of me was for heading back to Grandfather and the cow, and hoping that it was all a dream. In an odd way it was like a dream, but suddenly I was caught up in it and I could no more have broken free than spread wings and flown to the moon.

  There was a cold clemmed sickness twisting in the pit of my belly, but still I headed on towards that nearing blink of light, and the thing that was going to happen there.

  The alehouse crouched beside the lane, its roof of heather thatch like the back of some big crouching beast against the sky. I did not dare get too close for fear of being discovered by the dark shapes – I had long since lost all thought of them as human folk I knew, and the feeling was in me that if they found me in their midst they would tear me to pieces. But I saw the smoky light leaking out through the gaps in the ill-fitting shutters. And somewhere inside I heard laughter and a snatch of drunken song.

  And then it was as though the night with its creeping shadows blew up in my face. From away to the right and left of me – I must have been closer among them than I knew – owls began to cry, and away beyond the alehouse others answered them. There was a small red glow as somebody brought out a tinder-box from under their plaid; other, sharper flecks of light from slow-match for the old-fashioned muskets. Someone dipped the corner of a bundle of rags – pitch soaked, they must have been – into the tinder-box, and as it flared up I saw faces springing clear for a moment out of the dark. And the one with the bundle of rags was Davy Meickle the blacksmith, and the one with the tinder-box was the minister.

  Then all in the same moment as it seemed Davy was kicking in the ramshackle door, flinging in the burning bundle, while someone else crouching behind him lobbed after it something in a flask. There was a whoof of flame – dry rushes there would be, on the floor. Somebody shouted, ‘What of old Phemie?’

  And somebody shouted back, ‘She can run for it with the rest! If not, let her burn for the accursed witch she is!’

  There was ragged shouting from inside the alehouse, and old Phemie screaming, shrill and high like a hare in a trap; and shadows lurched to and fro, maybe they were trying to quell the flames, but with the rush-strewn floor there was no hope of that.

  And then old Phemie came running out, skirling and beating at the flames that fringed her shawl as she ran. They let her pass. But in the same instant there came a ragged rattle of shots from the back of the alehouse. There was no door that side, but there were windows, and on that side too there would be shooting-light, for the inside was well ablaze and the shutters catching. Then there was a shout of triumph as four more figures broke from the burning building, running low after Phemie, their carbines in their hands; and firing as they came, but they could not see what they were shooting at. They must have known how small a chance they had, but they would have had none at all in any other way. And maybe they were thinking, if they had time for thinking, that a bullet is a better way out than burning, as a good many have thought before them.

  They were clear targets against the flamelight, and the men crouching among the thorn scrub dropped them in their tracks. The first two and the last went down with no more than a choking gasp or a scream that ended halfway; but the third, him with no carbine, and small in his grey coat, twitched about and cried out for his mother; and someone went over to him and finished the work. I recognised Grandfather’s pistol first; and then Alan that held it; and there was no shred of pity on his face, nothing but a kind of savage satisfaction as he turned away.

  And then, not knowing how I came there, I was out of cover and staring down at the drummer laddie. He was no more than a year or two older than myself, maybe a year or two younger than Alan; and there was a surprised sort of look on his face, and a neat round hole in his forehead where the pistol ball had gone in, and blood already spreading from the back of it – a ball makes more mess coming out than it does going in, but I did not know that at the time. Where he’d been shot in the first place I never saw.

  It was all over, and they were stripping the dead of their carbines and anything else that might come in handy. In the leaping flamelight and the confusion no one seemed to notice me. Only the drummer laddie seemed to be looking at me; him with the hole in his head, that had cried for his mother. And the cold black vomit rose in me, and I blundered away into the ditch under the thorn trees, and crouched there, throwing up all that was in me, and sobbing and shivering the while.

  I mind falling forward into
a great darkness that was more than the darkness of the ditch. And for a while there was nothing more.

  2

  Two Loyalties

  PRESENTLY THERE WAS jagged light, thrusting at me with bright, sharp fingers; and someone had a hand twisted in my hair and was forcing my head up, and, blinking against the dazzle, I saw that there were men all around me. Men in grey uniform coats, their hard and angry faces lit by the flames of the bit of burning timber that one of them held high.

  ‘Here’s one that hasna got clear,’ said the man gripping my hair.

  ‘Too busy puking in the ditch,’ said another. ‘Och, he’s naught but a laddie.’

  ‘Not so much younger than Johnnie, I reckon,’ said a third, coldly savage.

  All of what had gone before had come back to me by that time, and I knew that Johnnie would be the drummer laddie, and the sickness heaved in me again. I gagged, but I’d nothing left to throw up. I crouched there staring up at them, and waiting for them to kill me.

  ‘Looks fair daft to me. But mebbe there’s some sense to be got out of him with a pistol butt. Best have him up to the Colonel,’ said the first man.

  And him that held me by the hair gave a twisting heave that all but had me screaming. ‘Up, you.’

  Somehow, with the world and the flamelight swirling round me, I managed to clamber to my feet and out of the ditch.

  They twisted my arms behind me, and hauled me back through the thorn-brake, past a man standing by with their horses who spat at me as I staggered by. The alehouse was burned through, and the flames beginning to sink. But there was light enough to see the bodies that had been fetched round from where they fell and lay roughly side by side in what had been old Phemie’s kale plot; and light enough also to see the man who wheeled his tall sorrel horse as my captors hauled me towards him.

  ‘We’ve got one of them, sir,’ said the soldier with the torch.

  The man on the horse sat looking down at me. ‘So I see. A something small one.’ His voice was cool and clipped.

  ‘Mebbe he can tell us the who and where of the others, sir.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Memory is an odd and kittle thing. It seems to me now, looking back, that I must have seen then what I came to see and know later: the cool arrogant face well matched to the voice, that could yet kindle into eagerness and quirk swiftly into laughter, the slight, tense figure, even the thin strong hands, nervous, sensitive, horseman’s hands inside the riding gloves. But truth to tell I saw only a man on a tall red horse, whose face seemed to hover over me as a hawk hovers over some terrified small creature in the grass.

  I began to babble. ‘I didna do it! I didna do any of it! I only followed the others to see…’

  ‘What others?’ The cool voice cut me off between word and word.

  I heard the crackle of the sinking flames, and the wind hushing up over the moors in the dark, in the silence between the man and me; that and the racing drub of my own heart. In another instant it would be too late. The merciless grip on my arms tightened so that I must have yelped, but that the terror l was in was that I must have yelped, but that the terror I was in was more than the pain. And then memory came to my aid – one of the soldiers saying, ‘Looks fair daft to me.’ Maybe if I could act that way! The memory of Daft Eckie who I had seen once or twice at Lochinloch market straggled into my mind; though indeed I must have looked daft enough already with the shock and fear of that night’s doings, and I scarcely had to act at all.

  ‘What others?’ said the man again, with a kind of deadly patience that was more fearful than any spoken threat.

  And the man who held my arms began to shake me to and fro. I let my head loll sideways, indeed it felt like to part company with my shoulders, and gasped out, ‘Just folk. I saw the fire an’ I thought mebbe ’twas a wake, and there’d be food an’ drink an’ – an’ an’ a fiddler if the minister wasn’t there —’

  ‘It was a wake, sure enough,’ said the man on the red horse. And then, speaking slow and clear, to reach any understanding there might be in my addled wits, ‘These folks, who were they? Did you know any of them?’

  I swung to and fro blubbering in the hands of the man behind me. ‘I didna ken them. When I got close they was all running away – ’cept them as winna run no more. I’m thinking they was witches – and there werena any food or drink, an’ there werena any fiddler, and I was feart —’

  ‘Let me try what a pistol butt will do, sir,’ said one of the soldiers who seemed to be chief among the rest.

  But the man on the red horse shook his head. ‘There’s no sense to be got out of that one, I’m thinking, with a pistol butt or any other way. Let him go.’

  ‘But, sir —’

  ‘Let him go, Corporal.’

  ‘Sir,’ said the one he called Corporal.

  The shaking stopped, and the agonising grip on my back-twisted arms slacked off, and I was free.

  ‘Now be away home with you,’ said the man on the red horse.

  And I turned and ran, darting and swerving like a hare with the dogs after it. But I had just enough sense left to know even then that one of them would like enough to be coming after me to see where I went. I’ve never known whether or not there was, but I took no chances, and led any that might come off in the wrong direction at the start, and a fine dance through bushes and briars until I was sure that I’d shaken him off, before I turned myself back towards Wauprigg.

  I would not be knowing how far I had gone out of my way, nor how long was the road home; time and distance seemed little to do with it, as they are little to do with the hampered and confused journeys of a dream. Broom and brambles clawed at me as though with small, evil, hating hands, and once I fell headlong into a boggy patch; but I came down the driftway at last, and saw the light from the house-place windows that were unshuttered now as though to show all men that they had nothing to hide.

  And just as I reached the gate the kitchen door swung wide, and my grandfather came out, flinging his old plaid round his shoulders, and two of the farm men after him. He checked at sight of me, and called back over his shoulder, ‘All’s well. He’s back.’ He flung arm and plaid around me as I lurched near, and swept me into the firelit kitchen, slamming the door to behind me, with the farmhands outside.

  I mind I staggered back against the door, and stood there, hearing their feet go trudging off to their own lodgings, and looking about me. The neighbourhood-women and their bairns had gone and the place looked much its usual self. Aunt Margaret and Elspeth the maid were sitting at the table with their sewing, the Bible at the other side of it, open for the evening reading, in the light of the tallow dips. Alan stood in the inner doorway; maybe he had just come from putting the old horse pistol back in its usual place. And I mind that just for the one instant our eyes met. Then he turned and strolled across to the hearth and flung himself down on the bench beside it.

  Aunt Margaret was the first to break the silence, the frown-line bitten deep between her brows. ‘Where have you been?’ she demanded. ‘Through half the bogs and briars of Ayrshire by the looks of you.’

  Maybe there was just a hope in her that I had not been where she knew in her heart that I had been.

  ‘I told you,’ said Alan to the ceiling. ‘He must have come prying after us.’

  I could feel the currents washing to and fro in that room, under the surface quietness of it. Hate and fear and triumph and anger – and shame. The shame was Grandfather’s, mixed with the anger.

  ‘I did go after you,’ I said, ‘and I saw what there was to see – and then the soldiers came.’

  ‘Did they see you? Did they see you?’ Grandfather rounded on me as he slipped the old plaid from his shoulders.

  ‘Aye,’ I said, ‘they caught me and hauled me up before a man on a red horse —’

  ‘What like of man?’ demanded Grandfather.

  ‘A man wi’ a quiet way with him that was worse than shouting.’

  ‘That will be Colonel Graham of Cla
verhouse.’

  And Aunt Margaret drew the thread through her sewing, and said, ‘Bloody Claver’se.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’ said Grandfather.

  ‘Nothing. I made out I was like Daft Eckie over to Lochinloch market; and in a bit he let me go.’

  Aunt Margaret let her sewing fall and rose from the table. I saw the knuckles on her hands like bare yellow bone where they were gripped together against the dark stuff of her gown. ‘Then God help us! They’ll have followed you.’

  Elspeth was whimpering.

  ‘What matter if they have – now,’ said Alan. ‘Never fash yourself, Mother, they’ll not be finding anything that’s no’ as it should be.’

  And I said, ‘They’ll not have followed me back, either. I took care of that.’

  And Aunt Margaret’s hands slowly relaxed. ‘Get up to your bed,’ she said, and after a moment, ‘and forget what you’ve seen the night.’

  ‘I’ll go to my bed,’ I said, ‘but I doubt I’ll forget.’

  And I turned and blundered across to the inner door and up the ladder stair.

  Lying empty and sick and wakeful on my bed of piled straw in the loft, I pulled the blanket over my head to try to shut out the low terrible roaring coming up from below that was Grandfather giving rein to his anger at last. But I could not shut out the face of the drummer laddie staring at me out of the darkness, with the hole that was like a third eye in the middle of his forehead.

  It was still there when despite myself, sobbing and shivering, I dropped off into an uneasy half-sleep. And I never heard feet on the ladder and the rustle of straw; and when the blanket was pulled down from my head, I thought that it was the drummer laddie. But the hand that clamped over my mouth to cut off my scream was alive, and the voice in my ear was Alan’s.