Bonnie Dundee

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Claverhouse urged his horse forward to the very brink of the water, and shouted to them. He was a quiet-spoken man, but his war-shout was a clarion, that could carry from one end of a battlefield to the other. ‘This is an unlawful gathering! Lay down your arms in the King’s name; yield up your leaders; and the rest of you may depart quietly to your homes.’

  A kind of low angry snarl that was the voice of the crowd made him answer; and in the midst of the gathering, a tall man in black with the white flash of Geneva bands at his throat – like enough it was Renwick himself, certainly he seemed to be the leader among them – stood with arms upraised, his grey hair blowing about his face, and shouted back, ‘In the name of God be gone from us, ye sons of Belial! For we own no king save God himself and no law save His Covenant. Unbelievers! Boot-lickers and tame butchers to a papist so-called king and his hell-spawned bishops! Get you gone and leave the righteous to their peaceful prayers!’

  ‘It seems that the righteous are well armed, for these same peaceful prayers!’ Claverhouse returned. ‘I bid you once more to lay down your weapons and deliver up those who have led you into this revolt!’

  They stood and looked at us, each man with his weapon, sword or pike or pitchfork, ancient flintlock or new Dutch musket, ready in his hand. They must have outnumbered us by upward of three to one, and eh, but they looked so ugly. Then in the midst of them, close beside the leader, somebody put his musket to his shoulder, and a ball sang past my ear.

  ‘Right,’ said Claverhouse, while the puff of smoke drifted away. He gave an order to the dragoon officer behind him. Further to our right, the dragoons had already dismounted and turned their horses over to their horse-holders, and stood ready with carbines unslung. There was a barking of orders, and they dropped to their knees and fired their first volley over the heads of the crowd.

  Across the burn there was a great shouting and crying out, and the crowd scattered at the edges and gave back, while at the same instant a ragged burst of firing answered the dragoons.

  Claverhouse’s arm went up and swept forward in the gesture to advance.

  ‘This is it. This is us!’ said something within me; skirmishing I had seen before, but this was my first set-piece action, and my mouth was uncomfortably dry as, with the rest following the blue and silver standard, I urged my horse forward. The burn was nothing in the crossing; some of us jumped it, some just walked our horses through; I am not sure which I did, I seemed to have too many other things to think about, just then.

  I found myself on the far side and still close to Claverhouse, and the feeling was in me of having passed a frontier, pushed across some kind of defence line into the enemy stronghold. Aye, and I mind the whole lot of them coming in a great sudden surge towards us, and someone shouting above the tumult, ‘Death and damnation to the enemies of the Covenant! On them in the Lord’s name, and kill, brothers!’ And they came pounding on, seeming unaware of carbine fire that was no longer aimed in the air.

  I fired my right-hand pistol, and slammed it back into the holster; I had no thought for the left-hand one, there was no time; no time for dragoons or troopers to reload; and as the blood-thirsting mob, yelling ‘Kill! Kill! No quarter!’ hurled themselves upon us with their hideous mix of weapons – you have never seen the wounds that can be made by a bill hook on a pole, and you can thank God for it! – we of the troop betook us to our swords, while the dragoons for the most part reversed their carbines and used them as clubs.

  I mind the kind of surprised half-unbelief in me, at the sight of men with hate-filled yelling faces surging about my horse, and the slashing and thrusting weapons in their hands, and knowing that they were going to kill me if they could, if I did not first kill them. Raw as I was, I doubt if I killed any, for all that. I mind a man coming at me with a snickie, one of the curved blades they used to cut the bridles and make the horses unmanageable, and sending him reeling back with a hand dripping red that maybe lacked a finger or two. I mind an ancient firelock going off at close quarters, and the sight of a dragoon with his head half blown away and some of his brains spattering my knee…

  How long it lasted, I’d not be knowing. It could have been half-a-dozen heart-beats of time; it could have been from sunrise to sunset of a summer day. Now that I have seen more of fighting, I should guess that it was maybe something over a quarter of an hour. Then there began to be a change, a lessening of the thrust against us, a different note to the uproar that was made of shouts and weapon-ring and the scream of stricken horses. The Covenanters had had numbers to make up for their lack of soldierhood, and for a while it had been a near thing, but now the fine balance of the fight was tipping against them; they were beginning to give back, then to stream away, breaking from their solid mass into desperate pockets.

  But away to the right they were holding still, among the hawthorn bushes around an old sheep fold.

  Claverhouse swung his sorrel and headed that way. And I, having only the one thought, to keep close to him, went after him as close as a man’s shadow follows him into the sun.

  A short sharp struggle among the may trees broke the last of the resistance, and it crumbled into running figures making for the heather and a few fallen left behind him. Claverhouse rose in his stirrups, his arm up in the familiar signal, ‘After them! Take Renwick!’ and we were off again. And at that moment three things happened, so quick together that there was no saying which of them came first.

  Hector stumbled, and Claverhouse pitched forward in the saddle gathering him from a fall; and from the hawthorn brake on our right came the whip-crack of a pistol shot, and again something whined past my ear, and this time knicked the white plume from his hat. If his horse had not stumbled, his head would have been just there.

  He held straight on. Maybe he was not even aware of the escape he’d had. But hardly knowing what I did, I wrenched Jock’s head round and plunged into the thicket. I think it was in my mind that a pistol is most often one of a pair; or maybe there was nothing in my mind at all… I ducked low under the branches and thrust Jock forward.

  There, crouched against the trunk of an age-snarled hawthorn, was a young man in weather-stained homespun, with bright red-gold hair tumbling about his head. A pistol lay before him on the ground, a faint wisp of smoke still curling from the mouth of the barrel. My grandfather’s silver-mounted pistol. And even as I recognised it, its fellow seemed to come of its own accord from his belt into his hand.

  Time, that had been wide-spread and without shape, became suddenly slow and narrow, fragile somehow like a strand of spider’s silk. In the long-drawn stillness of it, I had a sharp awareness of things; the first creamy knots of blossom on the hawthorn sprays, aye, and the scent of them too, the milky sweetness, and the dark under-scent that one catches only with the back of the nose, a little like the smell of blood; the sun-spots dappling his figure and the rough bark behind his head; the light bright familiar devil-dance at the back of the man’s eyes. All about us, fading now, but still walling us in, rose the hideous tumult of fighting still fouling the spring noontide; but it was very quiet within the hawthorn tangle.

  ‘The De’il’s greeting to you, Hughie lad; here’s turning your coat with a vengeance!’ said Alan.

  And his pistol hand came up…

  The queer moment of stillness was over. It was him or me, and the sword was still naked in my hand. I flung forward in the saddle and used the point on him as though it had been a rapier.

  The point went in through the loose end of his neck-cloth just below the collar-bone. I felt it grate on bone. He arched back against the hawthorn trunk with a short-cut bubbling kind of cry, and his pistol hand flew wide with the pistol still in it.

  I tried to drag my point out again, but it was jammed in the shoulder-blade and would not come. No time to dismount and set my foot on his chest and drag it out that way. I abandoned it there, and swung Jock out from the thicket, and headed after the standard.

  I came up with Claverhouse again in a little, and
rode on after the fleeing Covenanters. But the country ahead was boggy, and they knew the ways of it while it was strange to us; it was clear that most of them would get away. And anyway it was only the leaders that Claverhouse wanted. We got a couple. Later, they took the oath or promised to quit the country, and were let go. James Renwick, as I heard later, got clean away.

  In a while Claverhouse called off the chase, and ordered us back to the ground we had fought over. I had learned from the older hands by that time the unwisdom of leaving the wounded too long unguarded when the women of a conventicle might be near-hand.

  So we got back to the open pasture by the clachan, weary men dropping from weary horses. There were a good few bodies lying across the level ground between the burn and the heather, red coats and dragoons’ grey among them. Women had appeared from somewhere, and were moving among their own wounded. They took little notice of us when we went in to bring off our own.

  Now it so happened that Claverhouse came in again almost over his own tracks, close beside the sheepcote and the hawthorn thicket, and drew rein there to eye the fighting-ground. And it was only then that I, sitting my weary Jock a little behind him, saw the blood-trail leading in among the may trees, for it was on the far side from where I had gone in. Two other troopers saw it in the same instant, and went in like a couple of terriers.

  They hauled out Alan’s body, with my blade still fast below his collar-bone.

  ‘Somebody’s lost his sword,’ one of them said, and set his foot on Alan’s shoulder and wrenched it out.

  Corporal Paterson stooped and twisted the pistol from the rigid grip he still had on it, broke and glanced inside. ‘Not loaded,’ he said, and snapped it shut again and thrust it into his belt. All captured weapons would be handed in later.

  One of Alan’s feet hung crooked, below the red pulp of his ankle where a carbine ball had smashed the bone. I remembered how he had been crouched against the hawthorn trunk. I had not seen his feet at all.

  ‘Must have got a hit in the ankle, and hauled himself in there to take cover while he reloaded,’ said the corporal. ‘But cover wasna quite good enough.’

  I looked from Alan’s smashed ankle to his face. A faint fierce mockery had set on it like a mask, and out of the mask he seemed to be staring up at me. But he had only two eyes to stare with, not like the drummer laddie.

  The trooper who had pulled out my sword looked doubtfully from the blooded blade to Corporal Pate, and then to Claverhouse who stilt sat on his horse looking on. ‘What shall I do with this, sir?

  I cut in before himself could answer, which was almost a hanging matter as you might say, but I was not thinking of such things just then. ‘Give it here, Alec, ’tis mine.’

  And Claverhouse looked round at me quickly, but said no word.

  Alec Geddes handed over my sword; and I took it and made to return it to its sheath. I had not felt anything when I killed Alan, just the stillness and the two of us together in it; but now suddenly I was deadly cold. I could scarcely get the point into the mouth of the scabbard for I was shaking as though with an ague, and I had to clench my teeth until the muscles of my cheeks and jaw went rigid, to keep them from chattering in my head.

  The next thing I knew, Claverhouse had sent me off with some message for the Captain of the Dragoons at the clachan end of the field. By the time I reached him, I had got myself somewhat pulled together; and for the rest of the day I was kept too busy to have much time for thinking of what had happened under the may trees that noon.

  That evening back in quarters in Douglas, the Brigadier sent for me when I was halfway through my supper of oatmeal porridge and pickled herring. I pushed the platter away thankfully, for I had small stomach for food just then, and went to answer the summons.

  Rain had come on at the daylight’s fading, and I mind looking up through the chill whisper of it on my face, and seeing the regimental colours hanging out above the inn doorway, just catching the light from within, for the door stood open for the usual comings and goings of headquarters. Inside, there was a smell of blood and hot pitch, for the place, being the largest building in Douglas save for the kirk, was also serving as a hospital. I went up the narrow stairs, to the room over the front door where Claverhouse sat writing the usual dispatch by the light of a couple of tallow dips.

  He glanced up at my coming, and made a small gesture with the hand that held the pen, acknowledging my presence and bidding me wait; and went on writing. There were but a few lines left. He finished and signed them, then looked up.

  ‘Was he a friend of yours?’ he said.

  I think I caught my breath a bit, but I’d no need to ask his meaning.

  ‘Aye,’ I said, ‘it was my cousin Alan.’ And then, ‘But ye never saw his face that night, sir? When they burned the alehouse?’

  ‘I doubt I’d have remembered it, if I had,’ he said. ‘I saw yours, today, when you claimed your sword back.’

  The rushlights guttered in the wet breeze from the window, which stood ajar to let through the shafts of the colours propped across the sill. And we looked at each other in the unsteady light.

  ‘I didna ken that he was wounded,’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘And I thought it was him or me; I didna ken his pistol was empty.’

  ‘It would not have been, if he had had time to reload.’

  Claverhouse laid down his pen, and carefully sanded the dispatch and began to fold it.

  ‘But he was wounded,’ I said, desperately, ‘and his pistol was empty – and I killed him.’ I was staring down at my own hand as though it were somebody else’s, seeing it clenched until the knuckles shone waxen yellow like bare bone.

  ‘Hugh,’ said Claverhouse, ‘look at me when I am speaking to you.’ And I looked up, and found his eyes waiting for me coolly compelling in the taper light. ‘You wear the King’s coat. Today you were in action against the King’s enemies. War is not sport, and it is not governed by the rules of fair and unfair that govern sport; and its honour, if it has any, is of another kind.’ Suddenly his face gentled into its rare swift smile. ‘Do not be adding a new nightmare to the old one that you suffer already.’

  ‘No, sir,’ I said, and unclenched my hand carefully; later I found the red marks of my nails on my own palm; and as he sealed the dispatch, I moved forward to take it.

  He shook his head, ‘No, Hugh, not this time.’

  ‘I am your galloper, sir,’ I said.

  ‘But Kerr can take this as well as you can. Word has come in that the Duke of Monmouth has landed in England – a place called Lyme – and His Grace of Argyll on his own coast. The Whigs are sending Highland irregulars into the West against him, and we are ordered down into the Borders, lest trouble come up from the South. I shall need my galloper with me.’

  Next day we marched for the Borders.

  I have wondered whether Claverhouse had any thought as we rode out from Douglas that early summer morning that he was leaving the South West that had seen so much of his soldiering and become his own kale-garth, for the last time; the last time of all.

  Eh well, there we were, waiting in the Borders with our pistols cocked; but in England the rebellion petered out in a few weeks; and even Covenanting Scotland did not rise for Argyll, as he must have thought they would. He was, after all, not a man to follow to the death, as they say that young Monmouth was. So the both of them were taken and Monmouth went to the block, and Argyll to the gallows in Edinburgh, as better men than he had gone before him.

  And we went back to Dundee.

  As the Brigadier’s galloper, I was among those of the troop to be billeted in Dudhope itself. And Caspar was the first to greet me when we rode in; Caspar with ears and tail flying, and his short legs scarce showing save as a blur beneath him as he came, almost before I was out of the saddle, to fling himself into my arms and lick my face from ear to ear, singing like a kettle, and send my hat spinning in his joy. And hard behind Caspar, Darklis came from the stillrooms, with her skirts
kilted and spread like wings in either hands, calling ‘Caspar! Caspar, ye wicked wee dog!’

  But at sight of me, she checked. ‘I might have known that it was yourself, when he ran like that.’

  Hector was being brought round from the courtyard, where Claverhouse had dismounted; and the other troopers were swinging down from their saddles, and the stable folk had enough to do without watching Darklis and Caspar and me under the broad-leaved summer branches of the old fig tree, and me with my arm still through Jock’s bridle, so that he bulked between us and the rest of the world. Darklis took my face between her hands as she had done on the night before I went away; and so her face was close to mine.

  ‘Thank you for taking such good care of Caspar,’ I said, feeling the wee dog’s forepaws scrabbling at my knee, because suddenly I could not say any of the things I was fain to say to her.

  ‘I have taken good care of your painting gear, too,’ said she, half mocking me. But then the mockery flickered out, and she held me off a little, looking at me like – it sounds daft – like somebody looking for familiar landmarks in a strange country. ‘Oh, Hugh, Hugh, you were such a laddie when you went away. I felt so much older than you – and now you’re not a laddie any more. Did the sojering do that to you?’

  ‘Aye,’ I said, ‘just the sojering.’

  But when I would have put my free arm around her, she shook her head, and took her hands away without giving me the kiss that I had looked for, and turned and ran.

  14

  Two Kings

  AFTER THE MONMOUTH and Argyll rebellion, Scotland had upward of three years of what looked on the surface like peace. The King was so relieved that the danger had come and gone that he rewarded his people with a Declaration of Indulgence, making it lawful for all men to go to conventicles. That fair infuriated everybody – the Loyalists and Moderates who had suffered at the hands of the Saints, and even the Saints themselves, for I suppose there was little point to such gatherings now that they were tamely within the law; and a kind of spice must have gone out of life.