The Sea-Harrower: A Scottish Highlander Historical Romance

by Abigail Clements

  He had been Marsali’s favourite brother. They were close as brambles are close, tangled up with love, fighting and teasing, full of wild fire. Murdoch was to them both a solemn stranger, who had spent his childhood apart from them, far from Glen Arkaig and Glentarvie House in the remote sea-fastness of Skye. He had been sent, at seven years, to the house of a kinsman, Duncan MacLeod of Portree, as a foster son.

  It was a custom among them, a levelling, leavening custom, that spread strength through the clan. Murdoch grew thus with twin loyalties, more brother to MacLeod’s son Rory than to his own flesh in Glentarvie. Out of that loyalty to his second home had come their meagre salvation, for now his West Coast abilities served them well, and the land itself that they lived on was MacLeod land; it, and the old Ghillie’s Cot where the huntsmen had slept in the old days and where now they sheltered, by the grace of Murdoch’s foster father. Oh, he was as poor as they, all his cattle and finery forfeit for his own part in the Rising. But he gave them all he could.

  It was soon to Murdoch’s foster family that they would turn to beg a cow to hold them in milk till the black heifer calved. James MacKinnon of Glentarvie, begging a cow. Marsali took the wooden plates from her father and her brother and scrubbed them in the scullery with vengeance. She said in her heart that which she had said a thousand thousand times … would God we were in Glentarvie with the river running by, and the hills black with cattle once more. And Rory, Rory, her betrothed, come with the drovers, stalking with his fine kilted stride. She cried then, under the strung herrings, dripping salt water onto her hair.

  Ishbel came in then, with eggs from the hens, and Marsali whirled away from her, wiping her face on her plaid lest the tears show. She hurried from the scullery, hoping to get away, out into the air, and down to the kelping pits where she could cry for Rory in the peace of the salt wind.

  But her father called to her, and she turned, reluctant. He was standing by the incongruous, glass-fronted walnut-wood bookcase, jammed into the tiny room, with its carved top right up to the roof. It, and the books it held, had belonged to Glentarvie, and although it took room they needed, and was mouldering to ruin from the damp, James MacKinnon would not part with it. Marsali had a moment’s vision of it standing in the drawing room of Glentarvie, and her father reading aloud his French verses, while her mother sat writing at the delicate escritoire in the corner. That went last year, for a barrel of salt herring.

  James MacKinnon lifted a book down from the open case and said casually, ‘There will be a guest today, girl. See that there be luncheon for him.’

  Murdoch looked up sharply from the fire, but said nothing. Ishbel in the doorway was silent. Marsali turned her face away, and then her gentleness failed her. ‘For the love of the Holy Mother, James MacKinnon, there is scant fish or fowl about the place, and the cow is without milk … and you would be having luncheon. Luncheon, for a guest!’ She mocked his tone with one of false gentility. ‘And who is it that is coming?’ she added with sudden fierceness.

  ‘Duncan MacLeod of Portree.’

  Marsali sighed and sat down on the wicker stool by the fire. She looked up to Murdoch, who still had said nothing, and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ Then to her father she said, ‘Yes. Of course. There is the herring that Murdoch caught this morning. And we will have some of the potatoes. I will lift some later.’

  James MacKinnon narrowed his blue eyes to slits, and she knew what he was thinking. Potatoes were a new thing in their lives, and he, like others, looked down on them, scorning the eating of roots from the ground. But he was in no position for pride. He nodded to his daughter and went back to his book as if nothing around him had ever changed and he was indeed yet in that splendid house by Loch Arkaig.

  ‘That is fine, then,’ he said, not looking up. But he turned as Murdoch rose to leave. ‘See now that you are not late. There is a matter for discussion, and I wish you to be here.’

  Murdoch half smiled, his grim smile, and went out, but Marsali whirled and said angrily, ‘What matter, what matter is this?’

  ‘Och, nothing, nothing.’

  ‘Nothing indeed. What is it?’ she demanded, fearing already she knew. There was always only one matter between them all, old men fighting with their defeat like a dog with a rat in its teeth.

  ‘I am not knowing precisely,’ James said, turning to the fire, and crouching there and poking slying at the peats. He was a little afraid of his strong, defiant daughter. ‘But there is talk of a letter … a letter from France.’

  ‘May the Dear Lord forgive you.’

  ‘Enough, girl, it is not woman’s business.’

  ‘Is not one son enough to lose, James MacKinnon? One son and all your land, and my mother dying in this filthy cave of a house? Must you lose yet another son, and perhaps your own fine neck, and this … this splendid holding as well?’ She flung a wide sarcastic arm about the peat-smoke-blackened walls; the riggantree, the low gnarled roofbeam, was scant feet above her head.

  ‘You will not talk that way of the gift of Duncan MacLeod.’ He was suddenly harsh and coldly serious. To risk life and limb and throw riches away for a hopeless Cause … that was honour. But never ever must one break those delicate rules by which they graced their wild lives. To mock a gift, to refuse hospitality, these were real crimes.

  Marsali sighed, and sat again on the stool and poked idly at the fire with the peat tongs. She said then, ‘I am sorry, father. I meant no offence to Duncan MacLeod, and well you know it. I love him well. Would I not indeed have married his son, in the days … in the days before your fine prince came?’

  James MacKinnon turned away then, rubbing his wild white hair. He said roughly, ‘Och, and yet you might, lass. I am thinking he will come yet again for you.’

  ‘He will not come from the grave, father,’ she said evenly.

  ‘And where is your faith, lass? How are you to be knowing him dead?’

  ‘Do not ask faith in dreams, father. He is dead, and you and I know, and Murdoch knows, and Duncan MacLeod knows too.’

  ‘We would have heard.’

  ‘Would we? Would the English tell us, if he was dead in one of their black jails? Or their prison ships? Or indeed dead at Culloden where last Murdoch saw him? Like as not he is bones and dust, in the wind and rain of Drumossie Moor. There’s many a man lost those days who has never been heard of since. And never will be.’

  ‘Rory is not dead,’ James MacKinnon said stubbornly.

  ‘And have you the Sight then, or has the glaistig or the gruagach or the old Blue Hag been telling you? Och, you fool, you superstitious, old-mannered fool.’

  ‘You will not talk thus to your father.’ James MacKinnon stood up and she stood too, but he towered over her, and she was afraid. ‘No, I do not have the Sight. But still, I am knowing. I am just knowing. He is not dead.’

  Marsali laughed then, coldly. ‘Then he is married with a houseful of lowland bairns, and never will I see him, most certain.’

  James MacKinnon said sadly, ‘Do not mock love, lass. For surely the day was you loved him.’

  She turned then, and straightened her back with a long stretch and pretended not to care and said, ‘Surely I did once. Surely once I was the daughter of the Laird of Glentarvie.’ She laughed then, sharply, as Murdoch would. ‘But today I am something else. I am away to the kelping, father.’

  ‘A weary thing, a woman’s tongue,’ said James MacKinnon.

  ‘And weary a man who will never learn.’

  She went out then from the house and went behind to the place used by beasts and folk alike and lifted her skirts and squatted to make her water on the ground. When she rose up and brushed her skirts down and clambered back through the wet bracken, she thought, well, that at least was the same. Even in Glentarvie with their three-floored house with its slate roof and tapestries from Italy, they had done the same for the needs of the body. That was the North, today even, in 1751.

  Glad enough she would turn her back on it: the Old North, barbarism w
rapped up in gentility, like the cold hills in mist. She had been taught to sing and play the clarsach, the old highland harp, to read in French and Scots and English, and had gone barefoot all the summer to the hills to tend the cows.

  Small wonder that strange foreigner, the prince, had laughed at the sight of them, half-amused, half-bewildered. The wonder of it was he had not taken but the one look and returned in a hurry to France. Would God he had. But he was a queer soul himself, with his army of cattle drovers to win back a kingdom.

  Marsali bent by the door of the byre and lifted her kelping fork and took down the creel from its hook at the door. She slung the damp bent-grass thing up on her back, holding it in place with her plaid wrapped around it, and walked down the twisting path to the sea.

  A queer soul. Charlie, the English called him, mishearing their Gaelic for his name. Bonnie Prince Charlie, half in mockery. But Tearlach, to his highlanders, Charles, their prince, the Stuart prince. They made no mockery, took no liberties with his name. He was all that remained of their nationhood. Even she had been beguiled and had laughed at her mother’s foreboding. Murdoch and Norman had shouted to her, that day, up on the hill where she watched the milk cows, to run, forget all, even the beasts and run. And she had run, down the long way, through the heather hummocks and the scratching gorse, with her skirts hiked up and her hair flying loose. And suddenly, through a crowd of strangers, he was there.

  He had smiled at her, almost shyly, the red-headed boy on a white horse, in his foreign fine clothes and a borrowed plaid. That was him then, the Stuart prince, the son of King James at the doorstep of Glentarvie.

  All that night she had sat without words, on a stool at her mother’s feet, in the great banqueting hall, while the men talked and laughed and sang songs, and drank with the red-headed boy in their centre. Such fine wild excitement, such a grand adventure just begun; he was on the way to Glenfinnan, to raise the standard and proclaim his father king. Their king, the Stuart king, the true king of Scots.

  Only at night, in the dark of her bed, with Ishbel snoring beside her, did she really think with any care at all. And she saw then it was madness, the thing they planned, their great adventure that they spoke of like some stag hunt. That red-headed boy and his clansmen were after the English throne.

  He rode away in the morning with her father and Norman at his side. Her mother turned away from the door, with wet eyes, and said, ‘We will see him in rags, that fine prince, and in rags will we bid him farewell.’

  But a full year passed before they saw him again. He had taken Edinburgh and stormed into England and set the whole world afire with his daring. And then he had turned, as the year turned, and everything turned as well. News came in scraps to the far North, a word from one deserter, and then another, a rare hurried letter from her father. The news that Carlisle had fallen and Norman was a prisoner came so late that he was dead and in his grave before they even heard. James MacKinnon came home at last in April of ’46 from Drumossie Moor. It was all over then; the prince a fugitive, hunted throughout the North, but it was not until July that Glentarvie saw him again.

  Glentarvie was theirs yet, though Cumberland’s soldiers, brutal and ill controlled, were everywhere, and many a house had been burned, its owners in exile, cattle and lands forfeit, for their loyalty to the Jacobite cause.

  There had come a scuffling outside, as if some wild beast were about, and a tap, a wee tap, like a child’s hand at the door. James MacKinnon had opened it to the summer twilight with a pistol beneath his plaid. But there was no need of that. Just three men, all filthy and all in rags. The tall one, with the red, tangled beard and the bewildered smile, asked might they have shelter.

  He smiled at Marsali, as he had done a year before, and asked could she mend his shirt. He sat watching her sew, in the firelight, and she liked him more then for his tattered courage than she ever had in his princely glory. Tearlach MacSheumais, the songs called him now; they had claimed him, Charles the son of James, with their own tongue.

  There was no singing that night.

  He slept beneath their roof and left before the light. In rags, Marsali remembered, just as her mother had said. But James MacKinnon yet bowed to him, as befitted the son of a king. In two days, the soldiers came, and for that brief hospitality, they burned Glentarvie to the ground.

  The word that came, but rarely now, from France, said he lived these days in grand style again, that prince who’d come tapping at their door. He went to the opera, and courted fine ladies, and dressed in velvets and laces once more. They said he would return, that he plotted every day, and soon there would be help, from France or Spain. Oh surely, surely. Did not James MacKinnon await some word, even today, from Duncan MacLeod of Portree?

  Marsali stopped at the glaistig’s stone, at the edge of the sea path. The milk was yet there, a small white puddle, thinning now with the rain splashing in it. She laughed softly, aloud. Fools they were to believe such a thing. Surely now, he would stay happy enough with his fine ladies and his opera. He’d taken the cream of their land, and left them the skim. What more would he want of them? She laughed again, and then stopped, suddenly afraid, and touched the thin milk in the stone.

  Away towards the shore the sea mist and the land mist were one, and the sea sound drifted through it, like the moaning of a bewitched thing. She said fiercely, sadly, to the glaistig, ‘Och, strange thing, do not leave us. Do not leave us. All else has.’

  She left her creel on a rock on the shore and walked down to the very edge of the grey sea. Her legs were clad in mogans, fabric stockings, but they left her feet bare, and the water was icy. The sea was sullen, breaking in low waves. There had been a storm in the night, and even the sheltered sea-loch yet echoed it. She looked out to the west, the horizon. It seemed without end.

  She stood in the sea, gathering the kelp weed with her fork, thinking on the vastness of the sea, and those who had gone into that furthest exile, sent away from Scotland forever, in ships to the far New World. Were Rory one of them, she would surely not see him again. And yet, if she could only know that he lived, she could have some peace. It was not knowing that she could not bear, not ever knowing if she prayed for the living or the dead.

  She said over the sound of the cold sea, ‘Holy Mother, give me a sign, just a sign that he lives, or that he is dead. Let me see his wraith, like Ishbel says I would. Then I can pray for him, and let him sleep.’ A sea gull screamed and flew by, but there was no wraith. She half filled the creel, and lifted it, wet and dripping, and carried the kelp to the pit Murdoch had dug. He would work at burning it, stirring it carefully, day after day, until at last there remained just the precious alkali ash, so vital to the soap- and glass-makers of England. It was hard work, killing work, but it brought them, each month, a few precious coins.

  The thought of the coins stirred in her another, wilder thought, of those other coins, the gold coins hid in the hill cave at Loch Arkaig. A wild thought. She shut her mind to it. That gold was not theirs, though they alone knew its hiding place. It belonged to Prince Tearlach. And even she, loving him scantly, would not steal from him. She was indeed yet the daughter of MacKinnon of Glentarvie, and the MacKinnons did not steal from their own.

  Marsali emptied the creel and returned to the sea-edge and the kelp-slippery rocks. She saw, over her shoulder, Murdoch coming down the hill path with his own fork in his hands. Then she bent to her work again, scraping the weed up from the tide pools.

  The gull returned, dipped to the rocks, and then shrieked and flapped wildly and flew off, and she looked to what had sent it fleeing. Black weed, on green, with the salt foam splashing over it. A simple sight. Then she looked closer, clutched the fork to her and cried softly, ‘Holy Mary, what is this?’

  But she knew what, and though she shrank from it, she must approach. Laying her kelping fork aside, she stepped closer and knelt on the rocks. It was hair. Black hair, not weed, dead drowned hair in the sea. She leaned forward sadly, not afraid anymore.
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  He had been a youngish man, and foreign, his salt-stiff soaking clothes told her that, and fine looking, even now with his black hair trailing long over the strong still face and onto the sand. One hand reached yet into the sea, strangely as if it were not the land that he reached for in his drowning, but the failing tide.

  Somewhere, no doubt, a woman waited for him, like she for Rory.

  She found suddenly that she was crying, of sheer sadness. She knew she must call Murdoch, and see that they find somehow a priest, or even a minister of the new kirk; for though foreign, and no doubt a smuggler, he yet had been, most like, a Christian.

  She leaned over him, in the sea spray, and then, very gently, reached to stroke the sea-drenched hair from his face. As she touched him, the grey dog howled far away, and then the dark lashes fluttered, quick, like the fins of a fish.

  Chapter Two

  Marsali leapt back as if death itself had stirred. Never, never did the sea give the living back to the land. Not the north icy sea of Trotternish. But today it had. The black lashes fluttered again, and for a moment it seemed that the man woke and looked up at Marsali, with eyes that were pale grey, like the tide pools. But they were unseeing, like those of a dreamer, and closed again, weary.

  Marsali touched the wet face again, gently, for comfort and said carefully that all was well, all would be well, he was safe. He whispered something, soft, that she heard as a woman’s name.

  She hesitated, caught her breath at that, but then she whirled and stood up and waved to Murdoch far off at the kelping pit, and he looked up and peered uncertainly. She shouted, again and again, until he flung his fork down and came running along the wet shore.

  Murdoch, as always, would know what to do.

  He came stomping up, with annoyance, thinking it some trivial silly thing, interrupting his vital work. But when he reached her and saw, both herself there, and the one beside her, a dark wet thing on the rocks, his whole manner changed and his face gentled. He knelt beside her.