Bonnie Dundee
Page 25
And then Darklis was on her knees beside us, with a little half-quenched sound as though for some pain deep within herself. I suppose she had seen from the way I took Caspar’s muzzle that I had but the one hand to take it in; and she put her hand on my left shoulder, and felt downward. I’d not have let anyone else in the world do that, unless it were himself. Even with Darklis I am thinking I stiffened a little.
‘Was that in King James’s war?’ she asked softly.
‘In a way,’ I said.
‘Oh Hugh,’ she said. ‘Did they hurt ye sore?’
‘Aye,’ I said, ‘but ’tis rising four years gone by.’
For a while we bided, crouched against the balustrade of the bridge with Caspar between us, seeing nothing of the folk that went by save once or twice when someone all but fell over us. Darklis asked me how did I come to be in Utrecht, and I told her. ‘D’ye mind Mynheer van Meere that painted my lady’s wedding portrait? I’m back to the craft he would have had me follow. I’m his journeyman now, but I’ll be my own man in not much over a year.’
‘Oh, Hugh!’ she said. ‘Ye’ll mind I always said ye’d make a better painter than ye would a sojer laddie.’
‘’Tis to be hoped so,’ I said, playing with Caspar’s ears. ‘But I made none so bad a sojer laddie, a’ the same.’
I knew that, at least in part, we were only talking of surface things, in the way that we had so often done before, held back from talking of things that went deeper by the old barrier that was still there. And suddenly the fear came on me that at any moment she would be gone again; and I left off playing with Caspar’s ears, in a panic, and reached to find her hand under her cloak. ‘Oh, Darklis, I was thinking of you as I came along the way – I felt ye so near that it was as though I could call ye up out of the shadows – I havena done that, have I?’
She laughed softly, and left her hand lying in mine. ‘I’m no shadow, my dearie.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘and you’re with my lady Jean – we heard that she and Colonel Livingstone were somewhere in the Low Countries; but I was not knowing where.’
‘Moving about… We only arrived here the day. We’re lodged at the Castle of Antwerp, back yonder.’ She gave herself a little shake inside her cloak and began to draw her feet under her. ‘Hugh, I must be getting back to see to the bairn.’
‘The bairn?’ I said stupidly. ‘The bairn died, long syne.’
‘Not Jamie. Colonel Livingstone’s bairn.’
That brought the marriage home to me as it had not quite come home before. ‘Oh, Darklis,’ I said after a wee while, ‘how could she? She that had had Claverhouse for her man!’
Darklis was looking down through the balustrade, and I mind the last reflected light from the water on her face, mingling with the glow of a street lantern that someone had just hung out close by. The voice of the town seemed to have gone very far away. ‘Mind ye, he’d always been there, before ever she knew Claverhouse,’ she said. ‘And when they let him out of gaol he was awfu’ sick, and she tended him – she and I together, and after – he was there, and he was kind, and he’d always loved her. And she was so lonely, Hugh.’
‘Is she happy?’
‘Happy is a chancy word. She’s content.’
A poplar leaf, still green at the heart but edged with gold, came eddying down in the quiet air and landed on my shoulder and clung there. Darklis picked it off and put it into my hand. ‘Keep it,’ she said. ‘When a leaf comes to you like that, ’tis a gift from the People of Peace.’
She got up and shook out her skirts. ‘I must go. Come you and see her, Hugh. Not tonight, she is tired; but come.’
‘If it willna make her sad,’ I said, getting up also.
‘Not the kind of sad that will harm her. Did I no’ tell ye, she has her contentment,’ and then she said, very low, ‘Which of us keeps Caspar?’
‘He’s yours,’ I said; and the heart was sore within me, not only for Caspar’s cold nose in the hollow of my hand, but because still it seemed that there was no way in her mind that we might both be keeping Caspar. ‘I gave him to you, as you gave me your bonnie siller pin.’
But in that moment there came a kind of dull roar, a rumbling and booming sound. Once in the Pyrenees, I heard a landslip after heavy rain. It was like that, maybe, but smaller and with the cracking and tearing of timbers in it, and not lasting so long. There was shouting and screaming horribly mingled with it, too; and looking back the way I had come, I saw a cloud of dust in the light of the street lanterns engulfing the Castle of Antwerp.
And Darklis and I were running, it seemed all Utrecht was running, in the direction from which the shouts and cries and the cracking and subsiding of timbers still came. ‘It’s the Castle of Antwerp,’ somebody was shouting. ‘I told them last year the turf-floor needed shoring up – and with all this rain to make the peats heavy…’
Darklis was crying out as she ran, ‘Jean! Jean! I am coming!’
There were torches, and beyond the torches only darkness – we must have been longer on the bridge than we knew – and the whole front of the inn bulging outwards and dragged askew; and we were through the gaping doorway into choking clouds of dust. Timbers were still falling, and for a splinter of time I was back beside the burn in Glenogilvie on Midsummer’s Eve, and Darklis clinging to me and crying of death-darkness and torches, and the world falling; and a fierce faery wind blowing out of nowhere; and the tune of a pipe lament somehow caught up in it all, as things are mingled and caught up together in the tangles of a nightmare. Then I was back in the ruins of the Castle of Antwerp, and the torchlight flaring on Colonel Livingstone’s unconscious face with a great broken place on his temple, as we dragged him out from under the wreckage of an inner doorway; and a serving-man was shouting over and over again to anyone within earshot. ‘He’d come out to speak with me in the doorway, or he’d have been under that lot, too!’
And all beyond was fallen beams and broken plaster and a mountain of sullen black peat.
People were fetching spades and crowbars, and meanwhile we all began to dig with our bare hands, like terriers at a rat hole – like Caspar.
But we knew that it was no use. No use at all.
A few days later, my lady Jean and the bairn with her were buried in the shadow of the Buurkirk at the heart of Utrecht. It was a very gentle day, though there had been rain earlier, with a sky of watered blue and dove and silver arching above the town, and the leaves drifting down from the poplars and the linden trees around the kirkyard.
There were not many folk to see her laid in her grave. Colonel Livingstone stood at the graveside, a bandage round his head; and with him Sir Andrew Kennedy, the Conservitor of Scottish Trade in the Netherlands, who was an old friend and had come over from Rotterdam to take charge of all things; a few more; and Darklis and myself standing back a little from the rest because we had Caspar with us. But Darklis went forward at the last, and knelt to scatter a handful of rain-wet autumn crocuses and late Four Seasons roses on the kist before the grave was filled in.
When all was over we set out to walk home together. I looked back once from the kirkyard gate, and saw the dark figure of Colonel Livingstone standing as though he had taken root in the rank graveside grass; and for all that Sir Andrew was still with him, I never saw a man look so utterly alone before, nor have I ever seen one since. I turned away to where Darklis had checked and stood waiting for me, and we started to walk back to Silver Spur Street and the house with the carved swans on the gable, which was the nearest thing to home that either of us had since I had taken her back there to Mevrow van Meere on the night that the Castle of Antwerp fell in.
At the first, we walked a little apart, but in a while she moved in towards me. ‘If I had not been taking Caspar for his evening walk, I would have been with her,’ she said in a small hushed voice.
I put my arm around her and felt that she was shivering; and that was not from cold, for have I not said it was a gentle day? There was another thing that I fe
lt, too. In all the days since Jean’s death, she had been frozen, like the creature that the People of Peace leave behind in the place of a stolen human being; but now the ice was melting, and with it something else, the strangeness, the holding back, that had always been like a defence-wall around her. Whether it was because Jean was dead and had left her free and lonely as Claverhouse had left me; whether it had to with that terrible flash of the Sight, that had come to its last cruel flowering, and dropped away into the past, leaving her like other lassies…
‘Not that it matters either way,’ she was saying in the same small desolate voice. ‘She doesna need me now. Nobody needs me now.’
I stopped, and turned her towards me. Her face was curd-white in the shadow of her hood, and her eyes huge in it, and darker than I had ever seen them.
‘I need you,’ I said. ‘I’ve always needed you, my bonnie love.’
We did not even kiss each other, not then; but I held her close, and she refuged her face in the hollow of my neck. And we did not care that all the good burghers of Utrecht could be seeing us as they went by; and all the while, Caspar was weaving himself in and out around our feet; and the poplar leaves drifting golden all about us in the quiet autumn air.
Aye, that was your grandmother when she was young. You will have known it all the while, of course; no need to guess. But I did not write all this down to keep you wondering and spring surprises on you in the end. I wrote it that you might know, and pass the knowing on to your grandchildren after you, what manner of man was General John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee; him they called Bloody Claver’se; him they called Black John of the Battles; and what it was like to be one of those that followed him.
A little also, maybe, what it was like to be young Hugh Herriot. But that is by the way.
I have always had the knack of catching a likeness from memory.
About the Author
Rosemary Sutcliff was born in 1920 in West Clanden, Surrey.
With over 40 books to her credit, Rosemary Sutcliff is now universally considered one of the finest writers of historical novels for children. Her first novel, The Queen Elizabeth Story was published in 1950. In 1972 her book Tristan and Iseult was runner-up for the Carnegie Medal. In 1974 she was highly commended for the Hans Christian Andersen Award and in 1978 her book, Song for a Dark Queen was commended for the Other Award.
Rosemary lived for a long time in Arundel, Sussex with her dogs and in 1975, she was awarded the OBE for services to Children’s Literature. Unfortunately Rosemary passed away in July 1992 and will be much missed by her many fans.
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF BOOKS
PUBLISHED BY RED FOX
Beowulf: Dragonslayer
The Hound of Ulster
The High Deeds of Finn MacCool
Tristan and Iseult
Sun Horse, Moon Horse
The Light Beyond the Forest
The Sword and the Circle
The Road to Camlann
The Witch’s Brat
The Armourer’s House
The Shining Company
Knight’s Fee
The Capricorn Bracelet
BONNIE DUNDEE
AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 448 17288 7
Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK
A Random House Group Company
This ebook edition published 2013
Copyright © Rosemary Sutcliff, 1983
First Published in Great Britain
Red Fox Classics 9781782950875 1983
The right of Rosemary Sutcliff to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
RANDOM HOUSE CHILDREN’S PUBLISHERS UK
61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA
www.randomhousechildrens.co.uk
www.totallyrandombooks.co.uk
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at:
www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm
THE RANDOM HOUSE GROUP Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.