The Sea-Harrower: A Scottish Highlander Historical Romance

by Abigail Clements

  He had not protested, but bowed quietly to the will of his host. Marsali was quite certain that had he really wished to be away, he would have gone. But he lingered with them, quietly working each day on the hill with Murdoch, peacefully comfortable with them about their poor hearth. Anyone else would see at once that it was all for her sake.

  Murdoch teased her, and Ishbel warned her, and her father watched with a kind of saddened pleasure. He did not know her reasons, but he was wise enough to see that she was not returning what Antoine offered. Marsali saw Antoine’s presence as less of a courtship than a haunting, and she knew she was not safe until the day he was gone.

  Antoine said, carefully seeking the words that would give no offence, ‘My father is a wealthy and powerful man. He sees me little, but I am his son, and he will be well pleased to have me back. And grateful to those who have helped me.’

  ‘I do not want money,’ James MacKinnon said at once. ‘Only a favour.’

  ‘How can I refuse? I am utterly in your debt.’

  ‘No, laddie. You owe me nothing, and I ask no repayment. Only a favour.’ James leaned back from the fire and carefully filled his long pipe with his precious, hoarded tobacco. He glanced to Murdoch and Ishbel, sitting side by side, Ishbel on the spinning chair, and Murdoch on the floor. They were listening carefully, but Marsali was still quietly playing upon the clarsach and seemed not to care. James said, quite loudly, ‘I have friends, in Avignon, the Chevalier Donald MacKay of Glenmoriston and his good lady, Morag. I am thinking they would like to hear from me.’

  Antoine sat straight on the low chair by the fire. He kept his long, thin hands very still on his knees and looked with honest sadness into James MacKinnon’s eyes.

  ‘And now you ask the one thing, the only thing, that I must surely refuse.’

  James MacKinnon hesitated. He could not, would not, pressure his guest. He said slowly, ‘It is but a small scrap of paper, laddie. With some names, signatures of some good friends, just promises, paper promises, and, oh, a little story about some gold.’

  ‘It is a death warrant,’ Marsali cried out, suddenly in a sharp, bitter voice. ‘Do not take it, Antoine. Do not let him be getting you into this thing as well. If they catch you with that scrap of paper, they will hang you. And hang my father as well.’

  Antoine laughed softly. She saw at once that she had pleased him by defending him and was angered. Antoine said only; ‘It is not for my sake, lassie, but my father’s that surely I must refuse. He is a Frenchman, James, and France has made his fortune. And France is no longer the friend of your prince. How can I endanger his lands and his ships, and all my family, no matter how much I might wish to help you? A man may risk his own neck all he pleases, but he has no right to risk others.’

  James puffed slowly at his pipe. He could not oppose filial loyalty. He said softly, under his breath, ‘Damn the French and their damned two-faced peace.’

  ‘But he there, he is a Frenchman too, is he not?’ Ishbel said unkindly. ‘And yet you would trust him?’

  ‘Whom I choose to trust is not the business of an old woman,’ James said sourly, and then to Antoine, ‘Forgive me, if I caused you offence. I am afraid my temper is getting the better of me.’ But Antoine only laughed and said that the business of the French king was no affair of his, and the ways men chose to make peace and war with each other were nothing but a mystery to him.

  James leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs to the fire and grinned like a satisfied cat. He said, quick and clever, ‘Surely now, though the French king may not fancy you travelling with my scrap of paper, he will scant disapprove of you travelling with a lassie. Not,’ he laughed aloud, ‘if he is a proper Frenchman and all.’

  Antoine began to laugh as well, softly, and Marsali cried out, ‘What are you meaning, father?’

  He ignored her and said to Antoine, ‘So you will bear no messages, no papers. You will only escort my daughter to old friends in Avignon. And what secrets she bears upon her person,’ he laughed softly again, ‘are surely no concern of yours, laddie.’

  Antoine looked pleased enough, but he glanced quickly to Marsali, who sat without expression, her hands still and frozen on the strings of the clarsach. He said then, ‘Somehow, I am doubting the lassie’s willingness to go.’

  ‘She will go, if I so wish. It is a daughter’s duty.’

  ‘But I will not, father.’

  Marsali laid the clarsach down and came and stood before him. ‘It is also a daughter’s duty to protect her father in his old age. I will not carry your scrap of paper. It is for Tearlach, is it not? And a pledge for another rising? And that is what they sign for, the chiefs and all. Another Rising and another Culloden. I will not ensnare you, or my country, in any more of this. And I will not go anywhere with him.’

  She flung her hand at Antoine, who sat watching her. Then she wrapped herself tighter in her plaid and went and sat on the floor on the other side of Ishbel, who seemed now to be her ally. Murdoch leaned over the old woman’s knees, as if she were not there, and said a little wearily, ‘I would think you would be glad of the chance to be away from here. Think of the places you will see. He will take you to Rome, no doubt, will you not, Antoine?’

  ‘Aye surely. To the Pope himself, if you are wanting.’ Antoine laughed quietly.

  ‘Aye well, Murdoch, then you go, if you are so eager to turn your back on Scotland.’

  ‘Gladly I would go, girl,’ Murdoch said quickly, surprising her. ‘Surely I would. Not for this nonsense of father’s. For it will not bring another rising, girl, I am knowing, though the whole passel of you go carting names and stories back and forth for a hundred years. The prince is away, and gone for good, playing with pretty ladies, not claymores, these days. And King James is old and tired of us all. So be it. But I would away to France and Rome if the chance were mine. And they will not catch you, lassie, what would they think a wee thing like you would be doing to harm King George?’

  ‘And are you afraid yourself, of what you’d have your sister do?’

  Murdoch stood up and stood over her, furious. ‘I am afraid of nothing. But who, mind, will manage with the fishing and the kelping then? Who will plough for the barley and the oats? Och lass, you cannot do these things alone, so surely I must. Go with Antoine, and have a taste of what life is meant to be. He is a gentleman, and we would be sending Ishbel with you.’ Ishbel’s eyes widened like a scared cat’s at that. ‘Your honour will be safe enough.’

  Marsali laughed coldly. ‘It is not my honour that I fear for,’ she gave Antoine a scornful look, ‘but my father’s neck.’

  ‘Let your father worry about his own neck,’ James said, leaning to caress the grey hound with long, careful strokes of his broad hand. ‘He has managed well enough these many years without your apron to hide himself behind.’

  ‘Oh, indeed. You’ve done just fine, James MacKinnon. From laird to beggar in one generation.’ She paused and added bitterly, ‘Do you not see that they have taken all they can take from you … other than your life? If you cross them again, what choice do you leave them?’

  James would have had an answer, right indignant he was at that, but there came then a knocking at the door, loud and long, like an enchantment, a fairy answering to the question she had thrown to the winds.

  The deerhound growled and then barked aloud, and by old habit they froze, all of them, tense with apprehension. Even Antoine looked sharply up to the door with a wild look in his grey eyes. Murdoch moved at once, silently, to stand unseen behind the door, and James MacKinnon’s hand went to the hilt of the sword he always wore. He nodded then, to Ishbel, and she went reluctantly forward and opened the low door and stepped out into the night.

  There was a scuffling of feet, and a low voice, and Ishbel whirled around, her skirts catching about her, and hurried in, leaving the door open to the black sky. She’d clutched her old shawl around her and her big-knuckled fingers were twining themselves in its fringe. ‘It is a stranger,’ she
said, wide-eyed. ‘And he asks, in English, for James MacKinnon!’

  ‘Then he had best come within, had he not, for James MacKinnon is not out there in the night.’ James looked sharply at Ishbel and raised one shaggy, sarcastic eyebrow.

  Ishbel crept, reluctant, to the door and beckoned to the darkness and a man’s form appeared there, dim in the dim light. He moved forward and stepped into the room. The grey dog barked until James silenced it with his broad hand on its long, bony muzzle. He stood like that, one hand holding the beast, the other his sword hilt, and said evenly, ‘Welcome to the House of MacKinnon.’

  ‘MacKinnon of Glentarvie, indeed.’ The man spoke softly, echoing James, with a cynical lilt. His eyes swept over the forbidden kilted plaid and sword, but he made no comment. He himself was wrapped around in dark highland cloth, covering even his head against the weather. But Marsali knew at once he was no highlander. He spoke English like a sassunach, true English too, not Scots, and the plaid was wrapped all wrong, so he looked like an old woman in it.

  Yet it was the plaid that had fooled Ishbel, and the reason she had not seen at once that the man was a soldier. He unwrapped it now suddenly, with a flourish, and dropped it to the floor and stood, menacing in the bright red coat and the britches and boots of the Hanoverians. He said clearly, ‘I am Lieutenant Percy of Skelton’s Horse, garrisoned at Fort Augustus. I have reason to believe that this household is sheltering a spy for the Pretender.’

  Marsali felt the room was rocking in the still, oppressed heat of the peat reek. No one moved; even the dog cringed silent. But James MacKinnon said slowly, ‘Aye, it is a good thing to cover yon pretty coatie with a highlander’s cloak. We would not be wanting the rain upon it. Mind now, though, that King Geordie does not see you. He would be most alarmed.’

  ‘There are ten men waiting without, MacKinnon; I think you’d be well advised to take me seriously.’

  ‘But I am indeed taking you seriously. Marsali, brandy for the gentleman. Ten men without and yourself within, and indeed one more within who must surely now be invisible for I have never seen him. Who is he to be, this magical Jacobite spy, who sleeps in my house and whom I have never had the honour of seeing?’

  Marsali brought brandy and offered it to the soldier. He waved her away, impatient. His eyes swept the room and settled at once on Antoine.

  ‘Who is that man there, MacKinnon?’

  ‘That man is my guest and he has a tongue of his own; if he wishes to give you his name, no doubt he will.’

  ‘He is just a sailor,’ Marsali gasped. Never had she thought suspicion could rest on Antoine, her father’s high recklessness always upmost on her mind. But she could not bear to imagine him endangered by their own guilt. ‘He was shipwrecked, cast up on our shore. He has no part … whatever we have been is not his fault. He belongs to another country, far away.’

  The soldier turned to look at her, and half smiled, faintly amused. He was a slender, pale-skinned man, with large brown eyes and thick wavy hair and a drooping, brown moustache; a gentle face he had, in truth, and she could imagine him laughing and cheerful among friends. But it was clear enough he saw himself among enemies and looked on them with nothing but scorn.

  ‘And why should I believe you, my little miss?’ he said quietly. ‘No doubt he is your sweetheart, and surely you would see fit to defend him. Is that not so?’ He said the last harshly, not to her, but to Antoine.

  ‘I am thinking she would see fit to bury me first,’ Antoine laughed. He spoke English for the first time in Marsali’s hearing, and spoke it with the Gaelic, not the French, accenting. His mother must have taught it to him. He said, ‘You will have heard then of the French ship, the White Rose?’

  ‘I have heard. The same that was wrecked off the Vaternish Point at the back of the year?’

  ‘It was myself upon her.’

  The lieutenant tugged at the hem of his bright coat with one hand and stroked his moustache with the other. ‘She carried brandy, did she not?’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘I could arrest you for that alone.’

  ‘You could.’

  ‘Then why do you tell me?’

  Antoine shrugged. ‘It is the truth. You may well arrest me for that, but I doubt I will hang for smuggling. It is a small issue these days, an innocent pastime … not precisely political.’ He said that slowly, as if the English came difficult. ‘I will take my chances with it, and be truthful. I am thinking my truth is safer than what you may imagine to find beneath my lies.’

  ‘Aye, but the same might lie beneath your truth. If I were a spy, I might arrange to look like a smuggler too.’

  ‘You might indeed. But did I then arrange the shipwreck to bring me here? An awkward way to come ashore, surely.’

  Murdoch said suddenly, honestly, ‘We did indeed find him on the shore, my sister and I, and half-drowned he was. He was ill for weeks. He is only now well enough to leave us. There are others who could testify.’

  The soldier looked around the room and said, ‘Yes, and they could all be lying, as could yourself. And do not take offence, man. I am quite accustomed to highland truth … and highland treachery. That is why I am well armed, and well armed too, those ten men with me.’ Murdoch looked blackly at him, but his father’s eyes were upon him, and held him silent, standing back, by the door.

  ‘Indeed, you could all be lying,’ the soldier said again. Then he shrugged. ‘But so too the wretched fisher who first brought the story.’

  ‘And who would that be?’ James MacKinnon asked coolly.

  ‘It does not matter. A fisher boy who had heard tell in Portree of a French stranger in Trotternish. We get these stories all the while.’

  ‘We have made no secret of our guest’s sojourn with us,’ James said pointedly. ‘One does not speak so freely when visited by spies, surely.’

  The soldier smiled slightly, again, glancing at Marsali, and looked rather young and a little tired. He said, ‘No, I suppose not. Forgive me for disturbing your household. You must understand that in these troubled times … Missie, could I have that brandy now?’

  Marsali looked to her father and he nodded and stepped back, solemnly offering the soldier the guest’s chair by the fire. The lieutenant sat down, his sword clanking against the chair leg, and wiped his eyes, tearing from the thick peat-smoke.

  ‘It is a poor house,’ James MacKinnon said mildly. ‘You may recall I had one better, once.’

  The soldier glanced up nervously at that, but accepted the glass and drank with a lopsided youthful smile to them all.

  In their relief, disguised all the while by unconcern, as it must be, there was not a one of them that stopped and really thought how very easily he had been won around.

  Surely Marsali did not think. So thankful she was that Antoine was yet free and unharmed, and her father not even suspected, that she sat on a small stool by the redcoat soldier’s feet and listened with bright eyes and shining face as he talked and even joked with them. She reckoned then that the English were really not so very unlike themselves, for all the bitterness that lay between. The English soldier sat sipping his brandy and politely talking and listening, and rather delicately plying Antoine with sideways questions. In the end he seemed quite satisfied with the Frenchman’s promise to return as soon as health and the kindness of his host would permit to the Sea-Harrower and her own black, innocent trade.

  He rose to go, saying his men were waiting and the ride in darkness to Portree would take long enough. At the door he said suddenly to Marsali, ‘Missie, would you show me the way on the Portree road? It is but a small distance that I have walked from where I left my companions and our mounts. But I found the path hellish steep and difficult. I should think I will be lucky to find my way back in one piece.’ He grinned, the boyish endearing grin he must surely have used for his own English lasses. Marsali smiled back and reached for her plaid, hanging from its peg by the door. But James MacKinnon spoke clearly from the far side of the room.

>   ‘My son will show you the way.’

  Marsali glanced quickly to Murdoch with his hard, bitter face and remembered the day he returned from Culloden. She caught up her plaid and said quickly, ‘No. The night is fine, and Murdoch has worked hard the day. I will go.’ Her father stepped to intervene, but she was already out the door, and Ishbel, suddenly again her ally, stepped coolly into the doorway and shut the thing on Marsali and the soldier and the night.

  ‘The lass will come to no harm,’ she said quietly, and went calmly to her spinning wheel. She had no more wish than had Marsali to leave Murdoch alone with the English soldier. Marsali, at least, would not be tempted to settle an old score or two and cut his throat in the night. Men were grand at tearing a country apart, but it took women’s sense and women’s mercy to put it back together, again.

  In the darkness beyond the house, the soldier took Marsali’s arm, as if he were escorting her through an Edinburgh street. But it was she who was leading, her bare hardened feet finding their way with familiar surety; here the low mossy stretch by the stream, there the hummocky turning at the rocks where the carts always foundered, beyond, the long rutted slope between the rising heather braes.

  The Ghillie’s Cot disappeared at once into the night; windowless, it let no light beyond its walls. The sea moaned faintly at their backs and the soldier said nothing, struggling in his leather boots on the frost-slippery road.

  Even the sound of him, the creaking of stiff leather, and the jingle of spurs and sword and scabbard, was alien, like the bell of some lost beast on the hill. Marsali felt sad for him so far from home and so unwelcome.

  When he gripped her arm at the tangled bend among the scratching whin bushes and said, ‘That is far enough, missie,’ she only laughed and said, ‘No surely, you’ll not find your way yet from here. I will take you further.’

  ‘You will do what you are told.’

  Marsali stopped slowly, her bare feet cautious on the rough ground, and stepped to draw back from him, uncertain. But the hand resting under her arm tightened with painful suddenness.