The Sea-Harrower: A Scottish Highlander Historical Romance

by Abigail Clements

  Marsali said only, in a trembling, careful voice, ‘And where will he be, Prince Tearlach, the now?’

  Douglas Annandale shrugged. ‘Who kens? Canny as a weasel he’s grown.’

  ‘Aye, and just as trustworthy,’ said Murdoch sourly as he stood up. ‘I wish to sleep.’ And in that blunt northern manner was ended the Glasgow dinner. Douglas Annandale bade them goodnight, and Jean fussed about arranging the beds and shakedowns that would serve their guests: her husband was certainly wealthy, their accommodation luxurious by the current standard, but living space in those tiered warrens was precious. Beds were tucked everywhere, even in the parlour, and servants slept on the floor.

  Jean ran out of things she must do and found it time to bid Antoine goodnight, which she did with a genteel kiss on each of his cheeks, and then Douglas Annandale took his pretty young wife, willing or unwilling, away to his bed.

  Murdoch went off to the kitchens with the servants, and Antoine and Ishbel and Marsali were left to make the best of the parlour. Ishbel burrowed into the box bed behind the door, like a grey rat, and pulled the curtains. Marsali and Antoine undressed on opposite sides of the draught screen and turned their backs on one another until well hidden by bedclothes on the floor.

  Antoine blew the candle out, and Marsali closed her eyes against the flicker of the dying fire in the grate.

  ‘Marsali?’

  ‘Aye?’

  ‘Are you liking my friends?’ Antoine said in the darkness.

  ‘They are very fine,’ she said stiffly.

  ‘She is pretty, Mistress Annandale, would you not say?’

  ‘I would say.’

  ‘Shall I tell you something?’

  ‘If it is about Mistress Annandale, I think not.’

  ‘It is about Marsali MacKinnon.’

  ‘I think not anyhow.’

  ‘She is prettier than Mistress Annandale.’

  ‘Away with your flattery,’ Marsali said sharply to cover a surprising relief.

  ‘And she is prouder.’

  ‘You are like a cat-thing, Antoine. There is not a thing about you that is not sleek and beautiful and delightful to the hand and the eye. And always there is the sting of the claws beneath each thing you say, each thing you do.’

  He laughed in the darkness and reached to touch her hand, with his.

  ‘Away,’ she said. ‘Ishbel is here.’

  ‘Ishbel is snoring.’

  ‘Away with you,’ she said again, and he took his hand away.

  ‘’Tis yourself the cat-beast, Marsali. Playing with some creature you have no hunger for.’ He turned in the darkness away from her and sat up in his blankets so they fell away from his shoulders. She turned also and looked at him, gentle and frail-looking in his loose white shirt in the firelight. She could see the glisten of the silver sealskin talisman at his throat. His restless fingers twisted it. ‘Och lassie, you’ll never be knowing how lonesome it is to be always a stranger among strangers.’

  She was saddened and turned away from him and said quietly, ‘You’ll soon be home, laddie, and I will be the stranger in your land.’

  ‘I will die of loneliness, I am sure,’ he said solemnly, as if she had not spoken. She crept from her blankets then, in her simple shift, brazen she thought herself, with her loose hair falling about her in the firelight. She knelt beside him, where he sat leaning on one arm and staring lostly into the fire. She turned his thin, brown face to hers with one hand, the other behind his head smoothing the long black hair, and she put her mouth over his and kissed him.

  He made no response, which angered her and made her hungry. She grew bold and slipped her hands about his neck, her fingers brushing the silky sealskin. She slid them beneath his shirt and onto his shoulders and felt the cool skin, silky as the talisman, grow tense. He raised his arms and reached around her and caught up and lifted her shift.

  ‘Away,’ she cried, leaping back. ‘What are you doing, the devil?’

  ‘The same that you do yourself, pretty cat. So you’re playing yet?’ He was not angry at all, but laughing.

  She leapt away to her own blankets. But she turned and said to him, quite calmly, like a sister to a brother, ‘Antoine, tell me, why do you make me always court yourself when I am knowing surely you would fain be courting me?’

  ‘Och little cat, I am under a magic spell, did you not know? As Ishbel has been telling you. Lest a lassie kiss me, I will turn into something fair dreadful.’

  ‘I have kissed you.’

  ‘Indeed. I am thinking we are safe the night. Mind now, these spells have a progressive way about them. A day again we may need something stronger.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Marsali said closing her eyes. ‘Well perhaps you’d best get it from pretty Mistress Annandale.’

  ‘Marsali, my love,’ he laughed sweetly, ‘from Mistress Annandale I have already had it.’

  Chapter Seven

  Marsali pressed her cheek against the window’s wooden frame. Rain ran down its many panes, and tears streaked her face. Over the slate and thatched roof across the narrow Port Glasgow street, the tall masts of ships, black against the wet sky, rocked gently, stirred by the waters of the Clyde. One of them surely, with its black web of rigging, was the Sea-Harrower, which tomorrow would take her away to the land of flowers. She cried openly, not hiding her tears from Ishbel.

  ‘You’d be thinking, girl, he was your lover, and not one with whom you’ve done little but tease and struggle all your years.’

  ‘He is my brother.’

  ‘Aye. And surely you will see him again. It is to Trotternish he is going, not the gates of hell.’

  Marsali laughed and wiped tears away, but did not take her face from the glass, where she could yet glimpse him. ‘I am thinking he would not see the difference. If only he could have come away with us.’

  ‘Could he have come, he would have, and you’d be away home barefoot in the byre, in your proper place, not dancing about the world in all that finery with a pretty Frenchman at your side.’

  ‘And an old wifie with a sharp tongue making sure I do not enjoy it,’ Marsali said. Ishbel sniffed and returned to the mirror hung on the door of the room. She carefully tucked grey hairs under her new linen cap and rearranged the muslin kerchief of her dress. Marsali paid no attention, leaning against the window frame. Murdoch was just a dark figure among many, his broad, sturdy shoulders brushing the shoulders of sailors and merchants as he strode in his homemade boots down the muddy street.

  Then he vanished around the corner of a low stone building with a thatched roof. In her mind she pictured him going on to the hostler’s where they had left Duncan MacLeod’s ponies while they searched for lodgings. He would gather them in a long string and ride out northwards under a darkening sky. In a week he would be ploughing for barley above the sea at Trotternish.

  The sky had turned to night, and the many-paned, wet window showed her only herself then, as she stepped back, reflected dimly there by the oil lamp’s light, unfamiliar in her new clothing, like a faintly remembered stranger.

  ‘’Tis like your own mother you are now,’ Ishbel said solemnly.

  Marsali shrugged. ‘I do not recall her that way,’ she said. ‘Only the last days, with her raw red feet, and wrapped in my father’s plaid, shivering by the fire.’

  Ishbel turned away and said, ‘When you are as old a woman as I, you will learn to remember the grand days and forget the rest. I recall her dancing, at Glentarvie.’

  ‘Murdoch said he did not know me, dressed so. He said I was not one of them any longer. I wished him to kiss me for a farewell, and he would not. Nor would he drink to the day we meet again.’

  ‘Murdoch has no time for such things,’ Ishbel said softly. ‘Norman would have understood.’

  ‘And Norman is dead. Are you not thinking it odd, wifie, that all the folk who will understand, all who believe in the life we led, are old, or dead?’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Ishbel said sharply. ‘What of yon Frenchman,
then? Has he not taken you along with him, and dressed us both in finery, for the sake of your father’s cause?’

  Marsali smiled slightly and whirled about in front of the mirror, so the skirt of her new blue dress lifted and showed the frill of her white linen petticoat. Had Antoine been here, she would never have done that, never have allowed him a glimpse of her vanity, or her child’s pleasure in the simple finery he’d given her. ‘For the sake of something,’ she said softly, ‘I am sure. But little enough to do with my father’s Cause.’

  True enough, in the nine days they stayed at the home of Douglas Annandale, Antoine had flung money about upon them as if the use of the stuff was soon to be forsaken. He had dragged them from dressmakers to hatters, to glovemakers to shoemakers and through all the great merchant’s warehouses of Glasgow. When they were done, they had so much new gear that there was the need of the purchase of a grand new chest with brass locks and leather straps. And that too came from the funds made free to him by his father’s friends at the Exchange.

  Marsali protested, and accepted what she must out of solemn duty, but he would not stop at that, and added to the good wool dresses and linen petticoats a gown of green silk and a capuchin cloak and the like as well for Ishbel.

  ‘Aye, I will look fine in this, when I am home again in Trotternish, with the two dun cows,’ she said laughing, but it was just to scorn him, because she would never be home again in Trotternish, surely, and she knew that, if not he. And she scorned him only because she knew he was showing her his power over her by dressing her to his taste on the way to his country. Like a young bird, flexing his wings, he was; each step away from the north, and nearer his southland, making him that much the stronger. And now Murdoch was gone, and Ishbel, primping vainly in front of the mirror for all her years, was for the sake of shoes and stockings and a saxony shawl, halfway won over to the sea man s side.

  He will not win me so easy, Marsali thought. She saw herself, reflected twice, once in the misty glass, and once in the poor stained mirror of the inn. Her thick hair was braided up and smoothed over with the frilled linen cap, and two curls of it hung down, gold-tinged in the lamplight in the manner of Mistress Annandale. She had not forgotten how to dress herself, nor the good pleasure of linen and muslin against bare skin, and the luxury of warm clad feet. And she thought, with some pride, she had not grown uglier in her years on Skye. She was fifteen when last she dressed so, with a low pretty bodice and muslin kerchief and the soft white wool about her shoulders. She had now that bit more to show off with such a dress, and that bit more knowledge of where it might get her. Rory had called her bonnie when they’d played like children in the river at Glentarvie.

  This morning in the house of Douglas Annandale, when first he saw her dressed for their journey, Antoine had called her no pretty thing at all. But he had snatched up her old plaid, when Jean Annandale made to toss the thing like rubbish, away to the corner of the room. He cried out, no, he would keep it, for he had grown fond of the sight of her in it. He folded it carefully, as if it were fine silk, and said solemnly, ‘It warmed me once when well I needed it; perhaps I will need it again.’

  Marsali said nothing then, herself, and knew she had power over him yet.

  The rest of her homespun things, so carefully patched and salvaged at home, were now flung aside, but not before James MacKinnon’s ink-scrawled parchment was carefully cut free of her old petticoat and as carefully restitched into the folds of the Glasgow dressmaker’s linen. That she did free enough in front of them all; Douglas Annandale knew their purpose. But she rose in the middle of the night, with all the house asleep, Ishbel in the box bed and Antoine like a languorous beast on the floor, and sought out the Italian pistol from the old chest and hid it, well wrapped in her underthings, at the bottom of the new.

  When they arrived in Port Glasgow and found their lodgings in a small steep-roofed two-storey inn between a ropemaster’s and a fish merchant’s, Antoine had left them at once. He bade a formal farewell to Murdoch and strode off down the street towards the harbour. He said he must find his ship and see to their accommodation, but Marsali knew that was not his purpose at all. He had been in frequent contact with the crew of the Sea-Harrower from the day but one day after their arrival in Glasgow. He had come joyously back from a linen merchant’s coffeehouse with a great black-bearded French sailor, a pirate of a man, who spoke no English, and had just arrived upon her from Carolina. They soon learned when she was sailing, and where: Marseilles it was, with a cargo of linen and salt fish.

  They had all found the sailor ominous and wished no further contact with him, but Antoine was delighted with him and the news of home he carried. He was restless in Glasgow and roamed about the reading rooms and coffeehouses in the Tron Gait and came back now and again with scraps of information about ships and the sea. He was all for leaving Glasgow at once and spending the week fourteen miles downriver in the Port. But Murdoch and Douglas Annandale thought it nonsense to pay for lodgings there when lodgings in the city were free. So French impulse gave way to Scots good sense, and they remained among the tenements and sodden streets, while Antoine paced the week away, like a caged thing. Now, he was free, and Marsali knew where he would be; oh down at the harbour to be sure, with his ship, but for no better reason than the being there. Just to stand, as he stood on the cold shore of Trotternish many a morning, pausing at the kelping with Murdoch, with his back to the land, and his eyes on the grey water, like a man who dreams of a lover.

  When he returned and knocked at the door of their room in the inn, it was as a man returned from a tryst. As soon as she opened the door to him, he sprang in and caught her up and swung her around and said, quick, she must come and see his bonnie ship, now, before another moment passed.

  ‘Away,’ she cried. ‘It is night and raining, I will surely see it in the morning, will I not?’ But he looked so saddened, as if she had mocked a true gift, that she said quickly, ‘Of course. I have my good cloak the now, and fine shoes, surely I will be warm enough.’ She went out with him quickly, lest Ishbel stop her, because she could not bear the lonely sadness that somehow only she could cause in him.

  As they walked through the rain down the narrow dark streets, she leaning on his arm, her cloak wrapped tight about her, she said softly, ‘Antoine, why should it matter? Why should you care what I think of your ship? I know nothing of ships.’

  He did not answer, but took her hand, and led her down a narrow close that was only stone steps, no roadway at all. At the bottom was darkness and the sound of water lapping and the rich salt tang of the sea. She felt she was home again, in the black night beyond her father’s rough house out at the glaistig’s stone or some such haunted place.

  ‘Close your eyes, pretty cat,’ he said softly.

  ‘And for what purpose, you fool, I cannot see my own hand, even now.’ But he would have it no other way and put his own slender fingers across her face, the lace of his new cuffs trailing her cheeks, and walked with her through the darkness. The stones beneath her feet were uneven and wet with spray. She stumbled and gasped, ‘Antoine, don’t, the sea is here and I am frightened.’

  ‘Och, cats do not like water, I have forgotten. Do not be worrying yourself, I’ll not throw you in.’ He was laughing but yet leading her closer, and she knew at once that she did not trust him and was terrified of him and could well believe him to do something insane.

  ‘Oh let me go, please,’ she cried, ‘’Tis the very devil you are, and you’ve bewitched us all.’

  He laughed aloud. ‘Oh indeed, have I not. Never have I known such pagans. You’re but inches from barbarism, every one. Look, lassie, my bonnie ship.’ And still laughing, he flung his hands free of her and stood aside.

  They were at the very edge of the quay, and the hull of a great bark hung over them, a black wall. She was as tall as the clouds above, and the moon rode in her masts and spars. Marsali cried out, ‘But it was raining, where did the moon come from?’

  Antoine flun
g his hands up as in despair and cried, ‘Have I not just conjured it out of the sky? Lassie, you grant me powers that even I have not. The rain has stopped this moment and will no doubt start again as is more than common in this northland of yours and mine. Away for once with your fears and your demons, and will you not tell me she is beautiful?’

  Marsali drew a long breath and glanced sideways at him, the fine handsome thing in his black coat and white ruffled shirt, and she said with another slow breath, ‘Yes, she is very beautiful,’ for she was, with her three tall masts, strung with rigging, wet and shining like jewels in the moonlight. The long hull was black and sleek, and the bowsprit arched high over her head. The figurehead upon it was neither sea-god nor merwoman, as was common, but a unicorn, white and beautiful with lustrous black eyes. Below it, along the bow, the name Sea-Harrower was carved intricately upon a curved board and painted with gilt.

  ‘Why the unicorn?’ Marsali asked, holding Antoine’s hand once more.

  ‘Och himself,’ Antoine said lightly, looking up with his grey dreamy eyes not unlike those of the painted beast. ‘He now is a strange creature, you see, for no one will believe him to exist, although wise men wrote about him in older days. It is an uncanny lonely thing to be, I am thinking, a beastie that does not exist. So I set him roaming the sea, what better place for a lonely thing? Who shall know, perhaps he will find a friend.’ He laughed softly to himself. ‘Come, will you see my home, pretty cat, or do you fear yet the wetting of your feet?’

  ‘I will come,’ Marsali said. Smiling, and still holding his hand, she allowed herself to be led aboard. The unicorn with its sad painted eyes had beguiled all the fear from her.

  He led her up the gangplank and onto the wet wooden deck and then up and down about the darkened ship, being greeted everywhere with a word in French and a small respectful bow from each seaman he passed, as if he were a lord in his manor house. He found an oil lamp and took her to a small cabin on the afterdeck. In the dim light she could see the glow of mahogany tables and bunks and the deep red of velvet curtainings along the ports. It was rich and luxurious in a way she had not expected. He told her the room was for herself.