The Sea-Harrower: A Scottish Highlander Historical Romance

by Abigail Clements

  Chapter Fifteen

  They made the last encampment of their journey in an oak wood near the banks of the river Leie just beyond the boundaries of Ghent. Murdoch went off in the twilight to a small farm and crept boldly into the courtyard and snatched a white hen. He was back in the oak shaw with the thing yet warm. Marsali sat cross-legged, her now ragged skirt hiked up about her knees, at the fire Rory had built. She had tied her hair back with one of Antoine’s handkerchiefs, and the silken thing made a bold incongruity upon the matted hair. She plucked the chicken, carefully at first, and then with a surety, her fingers remembering a once familiar work. In the end she was covered with down and feathers; and, while Murdoch set to the cooking of the thing over the fire, she scuffled with Rory, stuffing feathers down his shirt, and he, shameless as in their childhood, returning in kind.

  Murdoch watched with a wise, cynical smile, and this night when he took the horse blanket that was his bed, he went far, far into the wood, saying he had found the most comfortable of banks of moss. They were alone, with the fire, and the thin, ever-grazing ponies. The air was chill now; it was late autumn, near winter, and they had weeks ago left behind the winterless south.

  Marsali wrapped herself in her blanket, and Rory tucked the corners in about her. He sat up yet, leaning against the great roots of a tree. ‘Do you think now, he will welcome us, our prince in the town beyond?’

  ‘Why should he not?’ she said sleepily. ‘Are we not sworn to his service?’

  ‘Even so. It is a ragged lot of beggars we look now.’

  ‘When last I saw him,’ Marsali said, ‘he looked much the same. Worse, I daresay.’

  ‘Ah, but will he remember?’ Rory said, slipping down to lie beside her. ‘Or will all that, the Rising, and Culloden and those brave days of wandering have drifted away from his mind?’

  ‘You’ve not forgotten, and the time has been as long for you.’

  ‘I daresay longer. But it was a time of hardship. Hardship inks memory in the mind. I am thinking, a man who lives in comfort might find it easier to forget.’

  Marsali stretched out her hand so it touched his shoulder, companionably. She was thinking of the summer at the Château Sainte Marie, where the sea moaned always, and all was richness and splendour. Those weeks there she had forgotten everything. ‘I am thinking maybe you are right,’ she said softly. ‘Och, Rory, supposing it is true? Supposing he but shuts the door in our face, for all our journeying? What will we do then, and where will we go?’

  ‘I do not care, lass, if you’ll but come with me,’ he said honestly. ‘It is a wide old world. I am seeing, now. Once, in that swamp where I lived those long years, I thought there was no nation but Scotland, no other land at all. But it is not so. We will run away and be gypsies, lass, you and I.’ He laughed. ‘Indeed, ’tis gypsies we are already, I am thinking. Surely a gypsy you look, with yon kerchief o’er your head. Come let me have it free, and see your bonnie hair.’

  She laughed back, in the firelight, and let him reach around her, to unfasten the knot of it at the nape of her neck. He shook it free, and said softly, ‘Aye, ’tis silk, this, lass, and fine, how came you by it? Did I steal this somewhere along the road, I cannot recall.’ He shook it out, bemused, Antoine and Rome so far behind him as to be for a moment forgotten. He studied the thin delicate white square. ‘No, it has letters, aye, and look yon, lass, there’s a beast upon it, with a horse’s head and a horn. Where came you by such a bonnie thing?’ Then he remembered, too late.

  She had turned from him, with her face in the rank horse blanket, and when he pulled the hair from her eyes, he saw them wet with tears.

  In the dawn, Marsali woke with the handkerchief clutched in her hand. A blackbird was singing, dimly outlined in the-tree above her head. Rory was yet asleep, a distance from her, and Murdoch had come, seen them thus separated by lonely turf, shrugged, and led his ponies away to the river for water.

  Marsali stretched slowly, stiff from the damp ground, and unwound the handkerchief from her fingers; in the grey-blue light, the embossed beast dreamed dimly. She thought on Antoine and counted the weeks since last she had seen him. Too many weeks she concluded uneasily, too many, in more ways than one. She sat up slowly. The sickness was yet with her. She had felt it, four mornings ago, upon waking, and each morning since. If only Ishbel was here, with comforting hands and gentle wisdom. But Ishbel was gone.

  She stood up, brushing her tattered skirt down over her petticoat. There was moss, curling in bits, upon it, and as she picked them off, the sickness passed. Murdoch came up with the ponies, wet-mouthed and dripping river slime.

  ‘Will you wake his noble lairdship,’ he said sharply, somehow annoyed with them both. ‘There is smoke in the west over a way; the good burghers of Ghent are about their fires.’

  The smoke had thickened to a rich pall when they reached the borders of the city. Neat farms surrounded it, with small patched fields hemmed in dikes and cut by the canals that were more common through the flat, misty land than roads. They followed one, the horse plodding comfortably on the trodden mud towpath, until they were in the centre of the old city itself.

  It was a hazy autumn morning, with wisps of grey fog rising off the canal, and a wet sun burning through. The cobbles of the street were pearly with dampness, and the slate roofs dripping. In the marketplace where they found themselves, wagons of produce were shrouded with wet canvas. One by one, the canvases were stripped, and the market came awake, with buyers and sellers haggling in the Flemish tongue.

  ‘If we do not find our prince,’ Murdoch said, ‘no doubt we can steal our supper well enough, and the day will not be a total loss.’

  ‘We will find him,’ Rory said. ‘I will away down yon narrow street,’ he pointed to the far side of the great market square, where between two of the tall, narrow buildings of painted brick, a small alleyway curved into the heart of the town. ‘Surely I will find some inn or a coffeehouse, where folk will talk freely. They may not know him for a prince, but a Scottish stranger will have drawn note. I will ask for the Chevalier Douglas, and see where it gets me.’

  ‘In trouble, I will bargain,’ Murdoch said. ‘And while you’re at it, you’d be wise to ask for an Italian stranger as well. ‘’Tis more like how they’ll see him.’

  Rory shrugged, and said either would do, and rode across the square and beneath the steep, craggy shadow of the stepped, triangular roofs. Marsali and Murdoch waited, sitting on their ponies, while the sun rose high. Eventually Marsali slipped down from her horse and led it to the water trough, by the well, where women in yellow and red striped skirts were drawing water amongst a crowd of children. A baby wailed at the sight of a huge glossy hen, and goats maa-ed, restless on their tethers. Beneath her feet, the cobbles were slimy with cabbage leaves dropped from a passing cart. She picked her way through them, barefooted, feeling faint again, and hungry.

  Murdoch sat yet on his horse, his feet free of the stirrups, stretching and yawning. He did not follow her, and it was only she then who saw the man by the vegetable stall.

  It was a long, lavish wooden structure, with even an awning of faded blue canvas over it. The farmer himself, a big man with a bush of brown whiskers and a flat black beret, stood behind his trays of apples, nuts, beans, and cabbages and eggs. Over his head hung bloody rabbits and ducks with dead, twisted necks, and drooping orange bills. The farmer’s wife stood beside him, with her back to the canal that bordered the market and her face wrinkled against the sun. She was arguing with the man who had caught Marsali’s glance, and not in Flemish, but in French.

  It was the voice that had first drawn her attention, that French-speaking voice, with the clear hollow tones of aristocracy. But he did not look an aristocrat at all. Though his coat was of quality, dark blue velvet, and beneath it a waistcoat, long in the French style, with the traditional gilding of the buttons, it was so worn a coat, with its fraying at the sleeves and collar, that one would think it a gentleman’s hand-down gracing a serv
ant’s back. She studied that tall back with an odd curiosity, compelled yet by the voice.

  The shoes were good shoes, but scuffed over with the muck of the market cobbles, and long awaiting polish. But the buckles were heavy silver, and ornate. She dropped the reins of the tired pony which dozed in the sun beside her, and stepped closer. There was a woman with the man; a slim woman of good height, with dark hair. She had draped her shawl over her head though, with one long end hanging down and the other looped up over her arm. Like a highland plaid, she wore that shawl, Marsali thought, and how strange.

  The woman turned briefly and she saw the face, thin, pale-skinned with pale blue eyes under thin brows, and a long thin nose. The mouth was small and narrow-lipped, with none of the generosity of the Flemish folk about her.

  Marsali saw her touch her small chin with her hand, and shake her head. The tall man was arguing loudly with the shop-wife, she replying in shrill French and the blue-eyed woman was embarrassed, tugging restlessly at the frayed coat sleeve.

  The man shook her off, with an angry impatience, and lifted two cabbages at last from the farm-wife’s hands, flung a small coin on the wooden table and whirled about, face to face with Marsali standing there. She saw then the face, narrow and long, grown heavier about the jowls than she recalled, and the fair hair, fair as her brother Norman’s, in the wild tangle of one accustomed, but not presently bothering, to wear a wig. The eyes were brown and fine, and narrow with suspicion at her staring so upon him. But she stared yet, with an astounded certainty, and when he asked in petulant sudden French, ‘What are you wanting woman? Why do you stare?’ she only smiled slowly and answered carefully, in French as well.

  ‘Your coat is worn, sir, and the collar frayed. Might I mend it?’

  He shook his red-tawny head, disbelieving. ‘Mend my coat? What nonsense, woman, are you a seamstress, now touting your wares, like a fish-wife? I have never heard.’

  Marsali shook her own head and smiled again. ‘I would be of your service sir, and my sewing hand is good. Have you yet the shirt I stitched for you, that night, long past, in Glentarvie?’

  The brown eyes narrowed yet further, with a furtive glance to the woman at his side. The woman looked to Marsali and to the gentleman with an uneasy curiosity. She repeated, ‘Glentarvie?’ and there was not the trace of an accent when she spoke. The tall man straightened, and as Murdoch came behind, saying, ‘What is this?’ he flung his hat upon his head, with the tired plume flopping and said aloud, ‘I know no Glentarvie.’ He turned his back and strode away, but the woman, half-stumbling after him, looked once over her shoulder and raised a hand in a gesture of despair.

  ‘Are you mad, girl, assaulting strangers on the street with a foolishness of Glentarvie? Did none ever tell you to hold your tongue when you’ve no notion to whom you speak?’

  ‘I know well enough to whom I spoke,’ she said slowly, straining her eyes to watch the tall figure disappearing in the market crowds. ‘You were not there, Murdoch, that night, yet skulking in the hills you were.’

  ‘What night?’ Murdoch cried exasperated, and not really listening, because he’d seen Rory reappear at the mouth of the narrow shadowed street.

  ‘The night he came to Glentarvie, in rags.’

  ‘Who came? Look yon, ’tis Rory, and he looks no happier than before.’

  ‘He came.’ She gestured angrily to the distant dark back of the stranger. ‘’Tis himself, Murdoch. It is Tearlach with his poor, scared mistress, and two cabbages on his arm.’ She laughed suddenly, a tired, half-hysterical giggling. ‘Look at him, does nobility not hang about his very head? Or is it cabbage leaves?’

  ‘Lassie, you’ve gone mad.’ Murdoch reached to touch her face, but the thing was dawning on him, and he was following the distant figure with his own eyes. ‘It cannot be,’ he said at last, with doubt creeping under the words.

  ‘Och what cannot be, now,’ cried Rory, joining them with a weary step. He rested his hand against the flank of Marsali’s dusty pony and said, ‘Everyone has heard, everyone has seen, no damn one of them ever remembers where or when. The Chevalier Douglas is the toast of Ghent, and they all know damned well who he really is, and there’s not a soul will reveal a word, so much are they all enjoying his masquerade. You’d think the fool could just stand up and show himself, like princes the whole world over.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Murdoch. ‘And would you know him if he did?’

  ‘Of course, fool.’

  ‘Fine, fine. Only I did not, and I’ve just been looking him in the face.’

  Rory glowered, finding that unfunny, until Marsali said lightly, ‘’Tis quite true. He was here buying two fat cabbages for the royal cook-pot. He did not care to chat.’

  ‘He was here, and you let him go?’

  ‘He was here,’ Marsali said. ‘He has but lately gone, and no,’ she said, for Rory was wild to know where, and to follow. ‘There is no point. I spoke to him, Rory, and he knew well who I was. His eyes were like coals when I mentioned Glentarvie, and the lady, poor frightened soul, knew too. But he turned his back and denied ever the seeing or hearing of us, or our home. He knew me, Rory. I saw it in his eyes. And he does not want to know.’

  ‘Impossible. He’ll not have remembered.’

  ‘She is right, Rory,’ Murdoch said. ‘I saw it too, and though I did not know him, his knowing of her was written in his face. Look, lad, you remembered her long enough, and Tearlach has always been a one for a bonnie face.’ He paused and added, ‘But not today.’

  ‘We will seek him out, and jog his memory that bit,’ said Rory with a dangerous levity.

  ‘It is no use,’ Marsali cried, at once. ‘Do you not see, lad, he is telling us it is done? He wants no part of our poor north land, and who can blame him? Has he not taken all we had to offer, once, and failed?’

  Then Murdoch said wisely, ‘An exile prince will oft enough meet exiles; all in rags, all in need. He will be thinking us come to beg money and want nothing of that.’

  ‘He will be quite right,’ Rory said. ‘He at least has the odd penny for a cabbage, ’tis more than we. I am telling you, we will track the bugger down, and he can share his cook-pot with his loyal highland clans. We all shared ours with him. And then we will be seeing if he is more swift to know us, once he sees we are here to give, as well as to take. I am sorry you let him go, though, for the task of finding where it is he lays his royal head will not be sweet.’

  It was not sweet, nor was it soon. Three days passed before they saw him again. Penniless in the Flemish city, they had found themselves in unaccustomed difficulty. It was not like the rich autumn countryside that laid food at their feet, and made their beds under every tree. Nor was thievery in the market, before sharp-eyed urban shopkeepers, the simple task it had been in guileless provincial towns.

  But the city had its own free bounty, a gift of a different grace. There were churches everywhere, and of more than one faith. And in the end they found the Convent of Saint-Bavon where lodgings and food were offered them without question. It was to that place, where Marsali sat in a cobbled courtyard thick with fallen beech leaves, that Rory came, three days later, with the uneasy word that they were being watched.

  ‘A small man, a dark hat over his eyes, I would not have noticed him at all if he had not tripped over my foot in the tavern in his anxiety to sit near us. Murdoch and I were talking, of home, and he was curious, that one in the hat, as if he were about to set upon a tour of our bonnie north, and wished to learn all he might. We ceased our talk at once, and made our way to the street.’

  Murdoch said, ‘What the lad is saying is, the innkeeper, grown wise to the knowledge we were neither eating nor drinking, and had not a ha’-penny in our pockets, obliged us to leave.’

  Rory growled, ‘No matter. It was only when we had turned two corners, in the maze of wee houses by the canal, that we saw he was always but a street behind. We ducked away under a bridge, where they tether the longboats, and I am sure he did not follow. B
ut I’d like fine to know his purpose, and all.’

  Marsali shook her head. She had grown oddly weary, of late, and dreamily disinterested, as if none of it mattered, not Tearlach, nor Scotland, nor their brave hopeless quest. She could think only on Antoine, and dreamed in the dreamy autumn sunlight, wondering on where he might be gone.

  It was the evening of the same day, when Sister Marietta, the Irish nun who tended her in her room, shook her awake from an early sleep.

  ‘Mistress MacKinnon, there is a man, at the gates, and he asks for the lady, MacKinnon.’

  She sat up hurriedly, shaking the dizziness from her head and rose at once, thanking the nun in a whisper, and went quickly to the shed where Rory and Murdoch slept, and now sat alone, playing cards in the hay.

  ‘He has come,’ she said at once. ‘Yon fool who fell over your feet. He has trailed you now to the Convent door.’ Rory went to the convent gate with his hand on the hilt of his sword, and Murdoch, as belligerently ready, at his shoulder.

  In the dimness of the November evening, a small, modestly hunched figure, with too large a dark hat, awaited. Marsali stood behind Murdoch, and held the Italian pistol which to Sister Marietta’s consternation she had hastily retrieved from beneath her pillow.

  ‘Sir, it is a house of peace,’ the nun protested, tugging at Rory’s sleeve. ‘There must be no swordplay. Reverend Mother will be most displeased.’ Marsali felt she was more afraid of Reverend Mother than of swords.

  ‘I am not so happy about it myself,’ Rory whispered, but then the gentleman, peering at them in the shelter of the stone arch of the doorway whispered, ‘Mistress MacKinnon?’

  ‘That is myself,’ Marsali said innocently, and made to step forward.

  Murdoch at once pushed her back with a brusque hand, and said, ‘And if it is?’

  The gentleman in the hat sighed and then, seemingly resigned to needing to trust them said, in English, ‘I am quite certain of you all, having tracked you about for days. If the daughter of MacKinnon of Glentarvie bides here, will you be telling her that the Chevalier Douglas wishes dearly to see her, and summons her now to his house.’