The Sea-Harrower: A Scottish Highlander Historical Romance

by Abigail Clements

  Rory listened numbly and said only, ‘A month. You’d have thought, for a month, I could have been lucky.’

  Murdoch pushed past him grimly, into the wet spring wind. ‘Och well, lad, you’re luckier than some. The fate of your father is better far than that of mine.’ He led Rory out beyond the house and up on the hill to a place where a small hollow-topped stone sat above the sea. A long patch of turf was fresh-turned there, and in the bleak fruitless days of early spring, little had grown again upon it. A goat nuzzled curious at the wooden slab thrust into the ground. Murdoch kicked the beast away with a Gaelic curse.

  Rory read the name scrawled there and knelt down very slowly then, and laid his scarred face on his hands. Murdoch stood patiently in the wet salt wind and said, prodding the turf with his boot, ‘I will be chipping the name into yon stone, you see. When the harvest is in. There is no time, now, for such idle work.’

  Rory dropped his hands to the stained knees of his britches and leaned back so the wind was on his wet face. He did not mind Murdoch seeing him; Murdoch his foster-brother, closer than blood to him. He said, ‘Within the week I have seen the graves of both her parents. Will you tell me now, where is the one I loved?’

  He kept his eyes closed, in terror of the answer. But Murdoch began to laugh, a hollow, weary laugh. In the end, with Rory looking on him as on one gone mad, he said very slowly, ‘Your father is in exile and mine in his grave. My mother died in poverty, and my brother on the gallows. But the one you loved, the one you ask for, aye, she fares well enough.’ He laughed again, sour and sad and cynical, and Rory became uneasy.

  ‘I am not understanding, for among all your sorrows, should it not be a true joy that your sister is well?’

  ‘Very well, very well. Let me see if it is a true joy to you … She is away south, Rory, to Provence, with gold in her purse, and rich cloth on her back, and a bonnie young Frenchman at her side.’ Murdoch’s eyes were murderous with subtle shame.

  Rory stood long and silent in the salt wind, looking down on James MacKinnon’s grave. He said at last, ‘It is a true joy, Murdoch, that she is well.’

  Murdoch sat by the smouldering fire in the kiln. It was a place for drying grain and smoking fish, but though smokey, it was warm, and kilns were often used for shelters when all else failed.

  ‘Are you liking the mansion house of MacKinnon of Glentarvie?’ he demanded. Rory laughed and settled himself on the floor, taking with surprise the strange fact that Murdoch, with his fish-stained trousers and bare feet, was now the last of his line, and a chief of his clan.

  ‘Aye well, no doubt I should bow and scrape that wee bit to his lairdship, but there’s scant the space to swing a cat.’

  ‘No matter. His lairdship has no cat, and had he one, he’d skin it and have it for his dinner. As no doubt he’d do to yon wailing banshee of a beast beyond, if ever he could catch it.’ He gestured out the open end of the slant-roofed structure, where the grey dog lurked like a wild thing. He carefully drew out from a corner a dusty bottle, the last of James MacKinnon’s brandy. ‘We will have this, as I tell my tale. It is the last, and after I will have to take to the whiskey like ordinary folk.’

  He poured brandy into a wooden cuach, the flat, two-handled dish, and handed it to Rory. ‘We will drink in the old way, for an old tale of the past.’ Rory sipped from it and passed it back, and Murdoch drank from the other side.

  ‘Aye now. Slainte mhath and slainte mhor, and health to him that is away.’ He threw back his shaggy brown head, rubbing his dirty hand against his broad nose, laughing, and he raised the cuach to the smoke-ridden, herring-hung roof. ‘Are you hearing me, Tearlach, up there among the fishies?’

  He told Rory about the day the Frenchman came and how they found him on the bleak shore of Trotternish, and how Marsali, kind and gentle, and against all their dire forecasts, had saved him from death. At the end he said quietly, ‘And all the while, there is a thing I am wondering, and pondering upon. Surely we are taught, Rory, that charity is the greatest of the graces, and a charitable act is of all things most pleasing to the Lord. Will you be telling me now, can one in justice be punished and brought to ruin, for the sake of such an act?’

  ‘Is he not a good man, this Frenchman?’ said Rory quietly.

  Murdoch stirred the fire with a twig of driftwood. ‘He is very rich, and very handsome too, as bonnie a face as you’d want on a lass, but a man for all that, wise in an odd way, and charming and by no means without courage …’

  ‘What more can you ask?’ said Rory bitterly.

  ‘Och indeed. What can I say, Rory, we all thought you dead. She waited long, long for a letter, a sign, a word, any word at all.’

  ‘I was forty miles from any place at all, in the midst of a swamp in the midst of a wilderness. And I tried, Murdoch, I did try. There were two letters I sent on their way; one with a trapper from the north, another, a merchant who swore he would see them delivered.’

  ‘None came.’

  ‘Aye. I am seeing that. They are cautious folk in Carolina, each with some wrong reason for being there. They knew what I was, and I doubt they trusted what I wrote. There’s nothing like a Scots exile when he wants to go canny. And those Huguenot French are no better. My letters no doubt went over the side of some ship, and their promises, thought better of, went with them.’

  ‘She was long faithful, Rory.’

  ‘She has found no doubt a fine companion, and if he will be kind to her, I can wish her no other.’

  ‘For myself alone,’ Murdoch said at once, ‘I found his company grand and sorry I was to bid him farewell. But for Mairsali … och Rory, I would it were you, even now, with your rags and yon scar on your face, and all your old angers and foolish poetry, and all your flaws.’

  ‘I am thanking you, kindly,’ Rory said, with a sour wince. ‘’Tis most honoured I am, to be sure.’

  Murdoch shook his head. ‘You do not take my meaning, man,’ he said slowly, and then with impulse, ‘He had the coldest eyes I’d ever seen on a living thing … from the day he came first beneath our roof, was like there was a spirit among us … Ishbel thought him bewitched. But for all that, I liked the creature.’

  ‘And where is Ishbel? I was not knowing she yet lived.’

  ‘Och aye. No doubt she will live forever, she is that perverse. She is away, with Marsali and Antoine, on the trail of our bonnie prince.’ So then he told the rest of that long story and how he had taken them away to Glasgow and the Port and bid them farewell.

  ‘’Twas his own ship,’ said Murdoch. ‘He was not lacking in worldly goods, I can assure you; and so they sailed on the Sea-Harrower, and I came home.’

  ‘I mind on that name,’ Rory said softly. ‘Surely I do.’ But Murdoch went on then in a still harsh voice, ‘And I rode the long miles, with the ponies restless and unmanageable at my side. And in Portree, your father was nowhere to be found, and the servants told me he was skulking off in the hills, as in the days of forty-five. I knew then there was much wrong, but not then, how much.

  ‘When I reached the sea, and the Ghillie’s Cot where we had stayed these six years, I found the roof yet smouldering. I went within. They’d hung my father from the roofbeam, the mean low riggantree.’

  He paused and drank the brandy from the cuach and said calmly, ‘I wondered on that, and then I was knowing … you see, it was scarce high enough to hang a man … but surely then, there’s scant a decent tree about the place. Och, they’d have been wise to have hung him at Glentarvie. There, any road, we were never short of trees.’ He laughed shortly, a sick laugh.

  ‘But why?’ Rory whispered. ‘After so many years?’

  Murdoch shrugged. ‘To tell the truth, no doubt he earned it and your own father, his exile. They never ceased with their plotting and scheming, all these many years since Culloden. But why they should come then, I do not know. Perhaps they saw me off to Glasgow and knew he would be alone, ’tis like them. I am minding now, there was an English soldier come to our door,
but a week before we left for the south. He said it was Antoine, the Frenchman, he was wanting, but I am thinking now it was something else.’

  Murdoch drank calmly again from the brandy and then poured more into the cuach and handed it to Rory. ‘I am knowing yet his face, Rory. I keep him in my mind. The day will come again, Rory. The day will come again.’

  ‘But Marsali?’ Rory said quickly. ‘You’ve told me she carried word of a Rising, for James. Surely now, if Geordie’s men are knowing that, she will be in the same danger as he.’

  ‘If she returns.’

  ‘Was that not the plan?’

  ‘That was James MacKinnon’s plan, lad. But I am thinking, it was not the Frenchman’s.’

  ‘And Marsali’s?’

  ‘Och you are the fool. Why do you ask, so I must hurt you? Will I be telling you now, of the look she carried in her eyes?’

  Rory emptied the cuach and stood up and flung it down in that dramatic poetic way of his. ‘I will find her,’ he said. ‘I will away after her, to Avignon, and find her. She may tell me, herself, if our vows are all forsaken.’

  Murdoch looked long and slow up from the reeking peat fire. He said at last, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, ‘Aye, fine. But first, will you duck your noble head, sir? You’ve a string of my fine salt herrings in your hair.’

  Murdoch shifted the grim iron fork, stirring the smouldering mass in the kelping pit. His hair and face and clothing were grey-stained with the reek of it.

  ‘Why, Rory?’ he said bleakly. ‘Why came you back? Carolina, the Colonies, the tobacco lands and all, surely now, there is the place to be, where all the world is going.’

  ‘’Tis not my home,’ Rory said stubbornly. He was turning the burning kelp with the broken end of a second fork, a wreck of a thing. ‘Scotland is my home.’

  ‘Scotland is dead,’ Murdoch said plainly. ‘It is over, that Scotland you knew.’

  Rory bent over his work, hearing unwillingly the echo of Jean Dubois. ‘Never,’ he said.

  Murdoch stopped work and lifted the fork from the pit. He looked out to the sea, with its low mourning veil of mist. ‘The country you left is gone, Rory, as well you’ve seen. And the one you remember never was at all. ’Tis a place of your dreams. That was your Tir Nan Og.’

  ‘Never,’ Rory said again. ‘Our day will come again.’

  Murdoch smiled. He said quietly, ‘If you were knowing man, on how many lips, now dead, I’ve heard those words.’

  ‘I’ve heard them on your own,’ said Rory.

  ‘Aye. Aye you have. ’Twas a moment’s weakness, a softening of the brain. I assure you it will not happen again.’

  ‘Come with me,’ said Rory.

  Murdoch laughed. ‘Och aye, between the ploughing and the hay, I’ll be off to Avignon. Mind now, I’ll have to be fleeing away home, meantime, to cut the peats, and salt fish, but if I’ve time to spare among all that, I’ll make the tryst with Tearlach and win Scotland back for King James. You’ll just be letting me know when you’ll be needing me.’

  ‘For the love of God man, you’ve grown timid as a lass-bairn, all busy as a hen-wife about your chores. You were never thus in the old days.’

  ‘Was I not?’ Murdoch said with his father’s dangerous quiet. Then he sighed and said, ‘In the old days I was a child.’ He smiled. ‘A child among children, playing children’s games.’

  ‘And now you are but an old man,’ Rory cried scornfully. ‘A bodachan. A little old man.’

  Murdoch would not be moved by that, but stirred away at the kelp-fire, like one in a private dream. Rory grew angry, as once Jean Dubois had grown angry at himself and his own cool calm. Then Murdoch said, ‘If you had seen what I have seen, you’d be as old as I.’

  Rory stalked off impatient and watched the grey sea toying insolently with the kelp-ridden rocks. He bent to lift a forkful of the weed and slipped, near splashing into the tide, and cursed softly. He looked up behind him to the roofless house and the small green and brown patches of wet fields. The ponies grazed with the milk cows, all with quick restless steps, seeking the thin, cowering grass. By the hollow stone at the side of James MacKinnon’s grave, the grey dog sat watching them, like a ghost.

  ‘Will you be telling me, man,’ Rory said, surveying that harsh domain, ‘what it is you’re so fearful to lose?’

  Murdoch kept working, but began to speak, evenly, in the constant rhythm of his fork, like a litany: ‘Two riggs of barley, one of oats; yon low strip where I’ll be setting in potatoes in the week; a wee bit house which I will roof again when I find wood and time; two rows of kale and one of turnips. Two cows, one thin as a rake and like to die; four ponies, three your father’s and one my own; two kelping forks; the good iron plough; the dairy gear and the cook-pot; and the smoked fish in the kiln. Och, yes, the cas chrom, the foot plough, for the kaleyard, I’ll not be forgetting that. Aye. And a devil-begotten, contrary scoundrel of a dog. Unthrottled.’

  ‘’Tis rubbish, the lot of it,’ said Rory.

  ‘From such rubbish, a man makes his life.’ Murdoch crouched down low and reached with his rough, calloused hand into the kelp-pit, at the edge, where the smouldering ash was wet and cool. He clutched up a fistful of the stuff and drew it up and held it, charred and black, before Rory’s face. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is what we fought for, when all’s done. Yon rubbish on the hill, and this smouldering shit-heap that earns my bread. Are you thinking now it was worth it? Or will you be having me now, away to Avignon, to double the price?’

  Rory did not answer, and Murdoch turned back to his work and said over his shoulder, ‘And I’ll be telling you, my brave Jacobite brother, I’d rather have a black cook-pot full of barley broth than King James’s crown, when I’m as hungry as I’ve been in my time.’

  Rory went away again from the pit and said, ‘So the day has come at last when the Laird of Glentarvie thinks higher of his stomach than his king. I will away, now, Murdoch, and alone. I’ll not dwell a beggar on my own land. We’ll win it all, or win a grave, I swear.’

  ‘Aye poet, no doubt you will.’

  ‘And I’ll win my lass as well.’

  Murdoch did not look at him. Rory walked slowly away with the sea wind at his back, and his arms wrapped about himself against the cold. It had begun to rain out of the grey ever-hanging mist.

  He turned, once, beyond the kelping pits, and the two blood brothers stood on either side, with the smoke hanging between, as if the whole land were yet burning between them.

  Then Murdoch whirled around with a great angry shout, spun on his heels on the wet rock and raised the iron fork high above his head. With a cry, like despair, he flung it far out into the grey dreamy sea. There was a great white splash, in the rain, and then nothing but the circling rings.

  ‘Damn you,’ he cried, stalking up the hill, ‘damn you all.’

  Rory watched, awed at the fierceness of Murdoch, who strode silently past him and to the ruined house. He worked solemnly, all the afternoon, with the gathering in and tidying of all his meagre gear. He weighted again his cornstack, and put his plough safe behind the house wall. He went up on the hill and turned two of his ponies free, and the cows, so they’d fend for themselves. The two best ponies he led down to the pen by the house. Last of all he drowned the ever-smoking fire in the kiln and gathered his few ragged clothes.

  Then he dragged the old linen chest from a corner of the kiln and dug down in the soot-blackened thing. He gave a grunt of satisfaction as his hand found the old highland pistol he’d so carefully wrapped and put back there. He drew it out, and the powder horn with the silver top, and the leather sack of shot. He loaded the pistol, ramming the shot home fiercely, as he walked, calm and cool, down the hill. He passed the ruined house, and went off up the sea path, with Rory on his heels, mystified, till he came to the glaistig’s hollow stone.

  The grey dog lay yet on James MacKinnon’s grave. He called it, softly, and it seemed to sense change, for the once it neither howled nor ran. Murdoch
knelt down on the sodden earth of his father’s grave. He put his arms around the sour, coarse grey neck of the beast, and it laid its noble insane head on his shoulder. He held it, silently, for a long eerie time, with the sea wind moaning across the stone.

  Then he stood, turned once around, raised the pistol in two steady hands, and shot it dead. He thrust the pistol through his belt, and walked away. Rory stood behind, looking at the grey dead thing on James MacKinnon’s grave, and the dark blood in the dim evening staining the sodden fur. Then he ran to join Murdoch, awaiting silently, by the ponies in the pen.

  ‘I’m glad you saved your aim for the beast,’ he said. ‘It might have been myself.’

  Murdoch looked long and cool at him across the pony’s wet back. ‘Aye, man. It might, but it was not. Now you prove me that I’ll not one day wish it were.’

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘’Tis a castle, Antoine,’ Marsali said in a soft, scared voice. ‘Why were you not telling me?’

  He laughed and said, ‘No, lass, ’tis only a house. Do not be paying any mind to all its towers and walls and wee curly bits. ’Tis just a house; but the folk that made the building of it were not exactly modest. Next to the gods they thought themselves, and well nigh built their way to the heavens.’

  ‘It was not your father building it?’

  ‘Never. ’Tis old, lass. None that you would know were at the building of it. Long, long past, and how we came upon it, I could not be saying. Most like we stole it.’

  ‘Surely not.’

  ‘And why not? All the rich were rogues once, afore they grew old and dull. All like that lion of the north you call father.’ He grinned across at her, leaning back in his saddle and stretching his legs, free of the stirrups. ‘I am tired of this riding and it is good to be at an end.’