The Sea-Harrower: A Scottish Highlander Historical Romance

by Abigail Clements

  ‘Contraband,’ said Murdoch shrewdly. ‘Brandy. Or silk.’

  ‘You are not thinking I will be answering that.’

  Murdoch shrugged then, but James laughed aloud and made a playful swipe at the sea man’s head with the flat of his big hand. ‘Aye well, we will not be asking then. And I think we will understand each other, now. No worry, ’tis no skin off my nose who steals from King Georgie. But tell me this, for on this there is surely no law; you are not a Barra man.’

  ‘No. I am not. But my mother was a Barra woman, and I knew the island in my youth.’

  James laughed again. ‘You are not so far from your youth yet, I would judge.’

  ‘Farther than you might think.’

  ‘And this Barra woman, your mother. What will be her name?’ Ishbel asked suddenly. She was standing alone by the spinning chair at the door. She would approach no further, and her voice was subtly nervous.

  ‘Anna-Mairi Ross, she was then,’ he said at once. ‘Anna-Mairi Ross of TighnaMara.’ The name slipped velvety over his tongue, and Marsali shivered.

  Ishbel said only, ‘I do not know the name.’ Her toothless mouth tucked up tight, and she drew her breath coolly, as in disapproval.

  ‘And your father then?’ said James, with a wry twist. ‘From Islay or Coll no doubt, where I am told they speak nothing but French.’

  ‘Aye. French indeed. Nothing but French for the courting.’ He smiled again at Marsali, appraisingly. Then switching suddenly to French, he said, ‘He is a Frenchman, my father. And once long ago his own ship was wrecked, there, on the skerries of Barra. And a girl, a lovely girl, was kind to him there. Is it not odd how the winds of time circle?’

  ‘Aye, aye,’ said James, ‘I think we will stay with the Gaelic and I will keep my daughter and all.’ But his voice was soft under the gruffness, and Marsali could see how much he liked the stranger. For he’d dared to challenge the king by smuggling, and the sea by sailing it, and proved himself by surviving. James was enchanted by defiance and charmed by courage, and, like all rogues, he loved another. He stood up and said formally, ‘I am James MacKinnon of Glentarvie House in Glen Arkaig. That I am here and not in that house is another story I do not propose discussing. But being here, I welcome you to what passes for my home. This is Murdoch my son, and Marsali my daughter, and that creature at the door is Ishbel MacLean, who lurks like yon glaistig in the rain. Ishbel, you will be coming here and letting us see your good manners.’ His voice ground suddenly hard, and his eyes met Ishbel’s with menace.

  She was not afraid of him one whit. She stood her ground at the door and said only, ‘Ishbel MacLean … of Barra. In my youth. Perhaps the gentleman’s mother might be knowing my name, though certainly I’ve never heard hers. And it is an uncommon small island.’ Marsali heard sarcasm flicker quick across her words; a common device with Ishbel when she was distrustful.

  The sea man said, ‘Oh, but she was an uncommon quiet girl. A poor, wee, home-loving soul, scant over her own threshold. No doubt you overlooked her.’ He smiled rather sweetly at Ishbel, as befitted a well-bred young man to a woman of age. Then he answered James with an equal formality, and a calm dignity that reminded Marsali of the proud young prince in his rags. ‘My father is the Comte de Sainte Marie, and makes his home in the Château Saint Marie in Provence. I am Antoine Sainte Marie-Ross, and I make my home on the sea.’

  ‘You are a sailor,’ Marsali asked, ‘the son of a count?’

  ‘There are many counts in my country, with many sons.’ He smiled wryly. Then he said again, ‘I make my home on the sea.’

  ‘And where then is Provence?’ Murdoch said from the scullery, where he was pretending disinterest, gutting fish, but was listening anyhow.

  ‘And where is your education and the time I wasted on you?’ growled James. ‘It were best you were a sailor.’

  ‘I would have more sense,’ said Murdoch.

  James cast him another dangerous look, but the sea man, Antoine, said gently, ‘Och, ’tis a long way away, why should he know? Or care?’ He rested his head back, tired now, and looked up at Marsali and said, ‘And do you know of Provence, Marsali of the waterfall hair?’

  She laughed and turned away and said, yes, she knew of Provence, a southern land, full of flowers, she was told. She said then, quickly, ‘You keep your mother’s name. Was she then nobility as well?’

  He had closed his eyes and seemed not to be listening. But he said after a while, ‘Yes. She was nobility.’

  At that Ishbel laughed aloud, a raucous old woman’s laugh, and said rudely, ‘Oh, Barra nobility indeed.’

  He said again, ‘She was nobility, in her own land.’ And then he took Marsali’s hand and slept again, still weak from his illness.

  But Ishbel would not come one step closer from the door.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Och, the silkie-folk, lass. Why are you asking of them?’ James MacKinnon sat smoking his long pipe on the turf seat at the door. It was November and the days were short, but the wind was in the west and the sun shone, smokey-grey, on the sea. It was the last warmth before winter, and James and Marsali would make the best of it. She turned on the spinning chair that she’d set on the grass in the sun. Her hands were busy carding wool.

  ‘I am just asking,’ she said.

  ‘Indeed,’ said James with a smile. He leaned back against the stone of the house, his beard glistening grey against his silver-buttoned coat. ‘Well then, I will just be answering.’ His eyes were not on her, though, but far off on the two figures with their forks and creels on the hillside among the frost-blackened potato stalks. ‘That laddie should not be doing that,’ he said, suddenly. ‘’Tis heavy work.’

  ‘He is saying he is surely well, now.’

  ‘Young men will always say that before it is true. It is pride. Besides, he is our guest.’

  ‘I am thinking he feels himself in our debt. He is wishing to repay that little bit.’

  ‘There is no debt.’

  Marsali leaned against the sun-warmed wall, closing her eyes and letting the sun soak into her skin. ‘Och, father. It is a mystery to me. When Murdoch and I brought him here you scarce gave him a glance. All the days he was ill, you thought no more of him than of a sick beast in the byre. Why are you caring so, now?’

  ‘I know the man, now. He was nothing to me then. A stranger.’

  ‘But he was yet a man, a human creature,’ she cried out angrily. She paused and sat straight and quiet, then bent over her wool and the carding combs and said softly, ‘You have not answered my question.’

  ‘A man, a human creature,’ James echoed gently. ‘And does a man, a human creature, ever wed with the seals, the silkie-folk of the sea … that is what you are asking, is it not?’

  Marsali kept her eyes down on her busy hands.

  ‘Is that what Ishbel has been telling you?’ James said then.

  ‘Och, Ishbel is forever … she had told me all manner of things. All nonsense.’

  ‘Why then do you ask me about this … nonsense?’

  Marsali was quiet in the sun for a long moment, her fingers still. She said then, ‘I want you to tell me it is not so.’

  ‘But I will not tell you it is not so, lass. I am not knowing that.’

  ‘But surely, father …’ She shook her head with annoyance.

  ‘Why ask, if you are sure?’ James stretched his long, bare legs in the sun and tightened his plaid about his shoulders over the frayed collar of his once-fine coat. He puffed on the pipe, still watching the two bent figures in the potato field. He said to himself, ‘In just one moment, I will away up there and tell that laddie what a fool I am thinking him.’ Then to Marsali he said, ‘I have heard of such things. In the older days, mind.’ He ruffled his white hair with one great hand, musing.

  ‘I am thinking the story came from the North, somewhere. Or was it a Lewisman they said it of … no matter. There was a man, there, my grandfather knew of it. They said of him that he married a seal-wife. A beau
tiful creature she was said to be. I am not recalling now the details, where it was he found the creature, indeed, or she found him.

  ‘But being a fisherman, I think it was not unlikely that he would find such a wife. So then, he married the creature, oh not a Christian marriage, to be sure, but a marriage, in the old style, handfasted. And as the story goes she bore his children, and a grand seafaring lot they were, her sons, in after days. Aye now, there are men along all the coast, and on the islands, who will swear to you they have silkie-folk in their ancestry so it was not thought uncommon, you see.’

  ‘But what of that man, and his seal-wife?’ Marsali said urgently. ‘What was the ending of it?’

  ‘Och, the ending. Well there could be of course but one ending.’ He stood up suddenly, and waved his arm, for the two figures on the hill were standing still, leaning on their iron forks, and resting. He beckoned them down off the hill and waited until he saw them take up their creels and turn their backs on their work. Then he sat again, and said, ‘They are not, of course, human, the silkie-folk. Though they can take human form and look, and act, just as we do, they are yet seals as well. They do not belong to the land, and they long always for the sea. The fisherman, knowing that, had taken a precaution.’

  James paused again, lighting his pipe, glancing up to the hill to see that the two there were obeying him yet. ‘You see, lass,’ he said, smiling slightly, ‘the silkie-folk, they are not at all as we are. They are not Christian folk nor have they even a soul. Mind, they live a long, long while, but only once, and then, och, some say they become sea-foam, some, simply nothing; Dear knows. But while they live, they are free to be as us, or as the seals. They may come and go from land to sea as they wish. I suppose that is their exchange for immortality.

  ‘But though they may come, at will, on land, they must always keep with them their silkie-skin, from their seal-life. Otherwise, they can not return! So the fisherman, wise enough, stole the thing from his wife, and hid it in the rafters of the byre. But then the day came she was seeking something there and found the sealskin, and, of course, was away at once, into the sea. And never did he see her again, from that day. It was not that she did not love him, or her bairns. Only she loved the sea more.’

  ‘I think he was cruel.’

  ‘Why then, for keeping her? Men will do any manner of thing in the name of love, lass.’ He turned to her then, as she bent over her work once more. ‘And what are you thinking, now?’

  ‘I am thinking it is a pretty story, that.’

  ‘You are not thinking, then, that he there, yon laddie, is a seal-man, a changeling? Because the sea gave him up, and he wears that bit of nonsense about his neck?’

  ‘Ishbel is saying that he is.’

  ‘Och, Ishbel. Ishbel will say anything.’ James MacKinnon knocked ash from his pipe against the stone wall of the house. ‘It is not, I am thinking, that thing about his neck that is worrying her, in truth, lassie. Not that. There are other parts of the creature that are perhaps more relevant, now, where you are concerned. And a man need not be a sea-changeling to wreak havoc with a lassie.’

  He looked hard at her with his pale, wise eyes. ‘But I am knowing you well, girl, and I know you have sense in such matters.’ Then he smiled his slow, rare, loving smile. ‘Lassie, if you choose to love him, love him. You are not to be bound forever to Rory MacLeod. It would not be fair on you. That was an old bond, in an older day, it is done.’

  Marsali stood up, before Murdoch and Antoine would reach them, shy now of a sudden. She gathered her wool and the carders quickly and made for the door.

  ‘And that tale I told you, lass,’ James said, without turning, ‘that is of another day as well. An old bond between the sea and the land. In an older Scotland. That country, also, is done. I do not think such days will come again.’

  ‘The day will come again.’ Duncan MacLeod tucked the folded letter back into his shirt with a soft triumphant smile. He stood just outside the door in the darkness, where he and James MacKinnon had gone for privacy. Marsali and Ishbel were within, clearing the remnants of the meal. Murdoch was within, as well, sitting on a low chair by the fire; and with him was Antoine.

  Friend now, and welcome guest, he was yet the reason James MacKinnon did his talking in the dark. He was still an unknown quantity. Not all the French were Jacobite, the French king himself uncertain since these days of the English peace. Before strangers one did not read a letter from Avignon. Not today.

  Still, when they went within, they called for brandy, which Ishbel brought, silently, watchful eyes forever on Antoine like the eyes of a mouse on a cat. She withdrew to the scullery, and Duncan raised his glass and said with a subtle smile, ‘To him that is away.’

  James raised his own glass and drank. Wiping his lips on the back of his hand, he said, as softly, ‘And to the son of him as well.’ Then they drained their glasses and filled them again and laughed quietly in the smokey light.

  Antoine never looked up, and one would have thought he had not heard. Murdoch had swallowed his pride, on the matter of the sea man, and swallowed his jealousy as well. Not for himself, but for Rory, did he resent the light in his sister’s eyes. Still, he forgave her now, and forgave Antoine. They had worked together at the fish cairidh and the potato field, and down in the sheep pen. Antoine had been tough and game and willing, even when his yet fragile strength was failing him. Murdoch liked that; it was his own kind of courage, that worker’s courage, a thing that even he could respect.

  So they talked now, like brothers, by the fluttering light of the oil-filled, black iron cruisie lamp, about that mutual enemy, the land, upon which they all depended. When Antoine spoke about the sea, and his father’s fleet of ships, far away in southern waters, Murdoch listened gravely, without comprehension. He could not fathom that life, nor those lands where the ships went, where rain never fell and the faces of men were black from the sun. He grinned and touched Antoine’s arm, and said, ‘Och, truly, you’ve not seen such things.’ It was not easily believed that a thin young man dressed in his own, borrowed ragged clothes could have sailed to such places and set foot on such ground. And yet now be sitting here by Murdoch’s glowering hearth.

  ‘Aye, but I have. And the bright seas of the south, where the marlin fish come flashing in the wake of the ship, and the water is the colour of summer skies.’ Murdoch thought of the grey beast beyond their door, clawing at the shores of Trotternish, and thought it strange that anywhere the sea could be beautiful. Stranger too that a man could talk of it with a light, like Marsali’s lovelight, in his eyes.

  Murdoch shook his head and stretched his bare feet to the fire. He had given the Frenchman his only boots, to replace those ruined by the sea. With mockery, he had done it, saying northern men had no need of the things, like weaklings from the south.

  Marsali worked the while half in the scullery door, one eye on the black pots and the crockery, the other on the Frenchman, handsome and vibrantly alive in the glow of the fire and the oil lamps. She felt a triumph, like James MacKinnon’s triumph in his plotting: that creature there with his strong, young face and shining black hair was her creation. She had saved him, fought for him, dragged him only half-willing from the sea and from death. He might never love her, but she knew he would never forget her.

  Ishbel, with annoyance, smacked her hand against Marsali’s skirt, as if she were a disobeying child. ‘Away you, what use are you to me with your dreaming?’

  But then James called, ‘You there, lass, some music for our guests.’ She came then, bending to wipe her wet hands on her petticoat. Then she dropped her skirt over it and said sharply to Antoine, who watched, laughing, ‘And what would you have me do, sir; there is not so much of fine linen in Trotternish.’ But she was good-humoured even as she said it and touched his shining hair as she passed him.

  She took her clarsach from its place by the dairy things below the wicker cupboard and sat then with the small harp on the earth floor by her father’s knees. Many a
night she had sat thus, long since, in a finer house, before finer guests. But she was happier this night than in any at lost Glentarvie.

  She played and sang then, gently, for her father’s sake.

  My bonnie moorhen, my bonnie moorhen,

  Up in the grey hill, down in the glen;

  It’s when ye gang butt the house, when ye gang ben,

  Aye drink a health to my bonnie moorhen.

  My bonnie moorhen’s gane over the main.

  And it will be simmer or she come again;

  But when she comes back again, some folk will ken;

  Joy be wi’ thee, my bonnie moorhen.

  While she was singing, Antoine rose and walked quietly across the room, looking at no one, his eyes on the glass-fronted bookcase, and on something he had been studying from afar. He opened the case with deliberate slow care, and when Marsali saw the thing he reached for she ceased to sing.

  James turned, and Duncan. Antoine, without a word, took two things from separate places on the shelves. One was a smooth, shining metal cylinder with a turned, fancy top and a plain base. The other he had to search for; but quickly, as if he knew what he sought. When he found it, the folded bit of cloth, he carried both to the table.

  Marsali looked up from her harp and saw, with a sick chill, that her father’s hand was on the hilt of his broadsword.

  Antoine laid the cloth on the table, smiling slightly at its random pattern of colour, like paint spilled in circles. Then he reached quickly for the cylinder, spun it in his hand and set it perfectly in the centre of the circled cloth. At once a face sprang, mirrored, on the silver shape, the face of King James, the exile Stuart whose portrait alone was treason.

  Antoine stood back, impassive, watching them. The room was utterly without sound.

  ‘Och, laddie,’ James said sadly, ‘are you not the wise one?’ His hand was yet on his sword.

  Antoine laughed suddenly, his soft, beautiful laugh, and said in ringing French, ‘And to him who will yet return.’