‘And for your damned inpudence, passing ‘em off as a force of Gordon recruits! You had us fairly hoodwinked.’
His former victor was laughing at the magnificent audacity of Hurry’s ruse, coming at a moment when most men would have despaired. It was a manoeuvre after Montrose’s own heart. He too was back in the flooding rain after that day of mighty fighting, heard it thudding on the roof as he saw again the feast among that camp of heroes for supper (some boiled beef, wasn’t there, and turnips? Mere cattle fodder, but washed down with plenty of good home-brewed ale) in the big raftered room of that farmhouse at Auldearn. He had excused his lie to Gordon and his raw recruits with the question, ‘Even you yourself, my lord Gordon, would you have fought singing as I heard you, if you had believed the day lost?’
And young Gordon, leaning across the table towards him had answered, ‘I might indeed, for loss or victory would make little odds as long as I fought with you.’ What else had he said, his dark eyes glowing with the fire that shone so rarely in them compared with those of his passionate, headstrong brothers? ‘If all your plans should fail, and you had to wander as an outlaw on the mountains, I would be happier to share that with you than any fortune with another.’
That was a friend. And in a few weeks he was lying dead among the young tender green of the uncrumpling fronds of the bracken, the gold and purple patches of broom and wild geranium on the hillside, those glowing eyes shut fast for ever. His friend was dead; his enemy, this time-server, now walked by his side.
But as he glanced at Hurry he saw in his eyes that same look that he had seen in Gordon’s, in Alasdair’s, in the young King’s, in his own son’s: that look that he had seen in the eyes of countless men whose names he never even knew, the look of devotion and desire that he should ‘lead them in a chain to follow him with cheerfulness in all his enterprises’.
II
Devotion is all very well in action, but what the hell is the use of it idle and bone-dry and no chance to show it? And yet it was he, Jack Hurry, despite his name, who had urged his Commander to hang on here instead of striking straight away for the accustomed and beloved hills that Montrose had always used as his base. But now, when so much time had been lost through one infernal delay after another, storms and icebound harbours, the broken promises of foreign princes, their companion leaders’ deaths, the King’s damnable letters, what could a day or two more or less really matter, except in as far as it should almost certainly bring in the Mackenzies to their side?
Seaforth’s brother, Pluscardine, who had already headed a Royalist rising, must have had his marching-orders from ‘my Highlander’ (Hurry could never think of Elizabeth’s nickname for him without the snort of ‘the war-horse when he sayeth ha ha!’). Unless Seaforth was still waiting for his marching-orders from Charles and did not care to show his hand openly until his royal master should do so. It was what they were all doing, doubtless, and why should ‘my Highlander’ be any different?
Was that then the explanation of this strange lull, as though Fate herself could not draw a breath to decide on which side to cast the die for Montrose?
Was the King’s policy stultifying their enterprise before it even began? Had it got abroad that he was considering a treaty with the Covenanters? Was that why the men did not come in? Why didn’t the ‘magic of Montrose’ work as it had done before?
A man might make himself sick asking such questions, and what was the use of it? The magic would work fast enough once it came to a fight. It had always done so in every battle Montrose had fought – all but one, and that had been no battle, but a surprise of 600 men by 6,000. Even those odds of ten to one he had surmounted at other times, but that one time at Philiphaugh the men had been taken utterly unawares, surrounded in a dense fog and massacred.
Still, it would not have been lucky to have had no single event against him, Hurry decided; it might have argued that he still had a defeat coming to him.
He stepped outside into the sharp air of the spring evening that he might not see that ‘envious sliver’ of the new moon through the green bottle-paned window of the small farmhouse where he had taken his billet, turned the money in his pocket, bowed his head three times, and wished for victory. He must propitiate the goddess of luck, for he was the almighty gambler who put his shirt on kings and commanders instead of horses. He was backing his last fancy, for now that he followed Montrose he would change no more.
But it was a damned dull chilly business standing here, staring at a thin moon in a cold sky above the black jagged spears of the pinewood on the hill above, and the little black tarn of Corbiesdale set in its shelter like a dark mirror that a witch might peer into, to see what Fate had been writing for them.
He turned and looked downhill at the long valley of the Kyle of Sutherland where they had turned inland from the sea two days ago, in order to cross it at its head. They had not marched on immediately, but dug trenches and breastworks to defend their front towards the Carron, a brawling frothing little Highland river that dashed through rocks and pools but would make no serious obstacle in itself to an advancing enemy. This was the best possible defensive position, with the steep hill of Craigcoinichean, the Hill of the Scroggy Wood, behind him to guard his rear, the burn of the Culvain on the one flank, the Kyle of Sutherland on the other, and their entrenchments towards the Carron. Here Montrose could wait at any rate for a couple of days and collect those tardy reinforcements, not only of the Mackenzies but of the neighbouring clans, the Monroes and Rosses, who, they had sent word, were marching to join forces with him.
‘Give them two days,’ he and Hurry were agreed, ‘and then if nothing happens we’ll play for safety and march south for Badenoch.’
It would be essential, for they had only forty horses, gentlemen volunteers whom Montrose had collected up north, under the command of Major Lisle, an English Royalist, and only three or four hundred Danish and German pikemen and musketeers who were trying to instil some idea of soldiering into the raw shepherd and fisher lads recruited in Orkney. The Orcadians were descended from the Northmen, but a long time ago, and mighty little soldiering they had done since; for the last two centuries the kings of Scotland had recruited no levies from them, having found them so simply rustic and unused to war. Since then all raw levies of infantry had become practically useless, for the development of the musket and the pike to guard it required long and hard professional training; nor were even professional musketeers and pikemen any real good, when unsupported, against cavalry.
‘A damned schoolroom party of louts and lubbers, that’s the stuff we’ve got to nurse up for this campaign,’ Hurry grumbled to Robert Monro of Achnes, who had checked his horse at the door of Hurry’s billet on his return from a reconnoitre of the countryside. ‘Even the foreigners are not much good, for what use is infantry in this country?’
‘None, if it isn’t Highland,’ answered Monro, leaning forward to stroke and pat his mare’s ears as she champed shivering in that raw dusk of the end of April, a little cloud of steam rising from her sweating flanks. ‘Now I,’ he went on in his rich assertive voice, ‘have seen those mountainy men catch up with a horse and tear its rider from the saddle when he was galloping from the field of battle. The Macdonalds did that when Montrose led them against Perth with only three broken-winded hacks for his entire cavalry.’
‘If you mention the Macdonalds to me again,’ said Hurry softly, ‘I’ll tear you from the saddle yourself and stick the butt of your pistol in your mouth to gag you. Or will you take a drink to do the job more pleasantly? You’ve found and heard nothing on your reconnoitre to put us on our guard, I take it?’
‘It’s sheer waste of time to ride out and look for it.’
‘You’re mighty certain, man. They say Davie Leslie is pushing up north as fast as he can, and Frendraught’s precious uncle the Earl of Sutherland with him. If Strachan is Leslie’s second-in-command he’s a sound fellow as a soldier, though a ranting, canting, recanting hypocrite of a Covenant cur. He
should be sent on in advance to check us if Leslie’s worth his salt.’
‘Strachan’s no farther north than Brechin, I know.’
‘Oo-ay. Ye know a deal.’
Monro became more consequential than ever. ‘Not a thing could happen in these parts without my knowing it. Don’t I and my three sons know every inch of the ground and every crofter and shepherd for forty miles round, born and bred here as we are?’
‘That is naturally the reason for your being appointed chief scoutmaster,’ said Hurry, with the faintest hint of sarcasm in the upward twist of that light tufted eyebrow. He had no opinion of gentlemen volunteers, though he had had to admit that it was a great acquisition to have got in a local laird like Robert Monro of Achnes. But he would have thought it a greater acquisition if the local laird had not been like Robert Monro – a big loud domineering fellow with his large nose and large soft chin, and bulk that was by no means all muscle, and the slightly uncertain look in his eyes as he blew out some important-sounding nonsense and then looked to see how you were taking it. When had Robert Monro ever seen the Mac- donalds tear a man from his saddle? He had lived safe here in Ross-shire all through those campaigns five years ago, and thanked his stars they’d never turned far enough north to catch him and his sons.
Not that that need spoil good fellowship.
‘It would be still better news if you could tell me that in forty miles round there was a brothel or a tavern,’ Hurry said in his dry clipped voice, spitting expertly between the legs of Monro’s mare. ‘The women in these parts are bred out of bits of granite crossed with unbaked dough, and the only drink I’ve been able to lay my hands on is the raw whisky they brew in the hills that tastes of nothing but peat-smoke and pepper, but at least it can make one drunk.’
‘What’s wrong with the home-brewed whisky here? I’ve supped it in with my mother’s milk. I’ll show you how it should be drunk. Hi you, Johnny,’ Monro shouted to one of the crofter’s sons, a dark heavy form that was plodding through the farmyard in the dusk, with a couple of milk-pails slung from his shoulders. ‘Take my horse and rub her down till you can see your grinning face in her flanks, and then cover her with your thickest blanket, d’ye hear? Set down those pails now and be quick about it.’
‘The blankets are all commandeered, your honour, for the soldier gentleman’s bed,’ demurred Johnny, setting down his pails nevertheless.
‘They’ll not be wanted yet,’ said Hurry pleasantly. ‘We’ll make a night of it, hey, Monro? One must do something while one’s hanging about like this’ (‘even if it’s drinking with a fool,’ he supplemented to himself). ‘Come inside.’
The two men sat by a fire of smouldering peat that made their eyes smart almost as much as the fiery whisky did their tongues. There was plenty of it, that was all you could say for it, in a big black leather jack. ‘The Germans say we drink out of our boots,’ said Hurry, squinting at it as it stood on the rough stone flags of the little kitchen between them, ‘and by God they’re right, for if we’d nothing else left to drink out of, we’d go barefoot and keep our boots for our mouths, wouldn’t we, hey, my lads?’
The ‘lads’ were the crofter and his six sturdy sons who owned this small farmhouse and sat at a respectful distance from their own fireside to listen to the Major-General talking so grandly of the foreign wars, and the laird of Achnes talking still more grandly of their own country.
‘All your General has got to do is to walk over it,’ he trumpeted: ‘Do you know that his enemies have been crying all this past winter that Montrose is “a prodigious meteor” hanging over their heads? And no wonder they are quaking in their shoes, for they’re turning their own side against them as fast as they can, shoving all the best ministers out of office, saying they’re not sound enough on hell-fire and “Down-with-the-Pope” when they’ve been preaching nothing else all their lives, even old Andrew Ramsay after fifty-three years in the ministry and the most popular man in it, and yet they’ve sent him spinning like a horse-boy kicked out for stealing oats. Little Archie Warriston is behind it all, that starved white rat who got his taste of blood preaching fire and slaughter after Philiphaugh. Ever heard him spout on those blessed words of holy Scripture – “Their women with child shall be ripped up”? It was he egged ‘em on to do that to the Irishwomen after Philiphaugh.’
‘Nothing to what I saw at Magdeburg,’ began Hurry hopefully, but Monro gave him no chance.
‘Magdeburg is not Scotland,’ he said profoundly, ‘and a Scots minister is not a Papist soldier and oughtn’t to behave as such. Warriston has gone drunk with blood and with power, and is driving them all the same way. They’re so busy cutting their own throats that there’ll be precious little left for your General to do, once the country gets the chance to come in to him.’
‘They’ve got their chance. Why the hell don’t they take it? What the devil are your precious cousins the Monroes doing, and the Rosses, and the Mackenzies, and all the rest of those God’s own heroes the Highlanders who came flocking to him before when he only had to stroll across the heather by himself without even a horse under him? Answer me that,’ urged Hurry truculently, ‘why don’t the men come in? Are they waiting to see which way the cat jumps?’
‘Which cat?’ inquired Monro portentously. ‘A cat may look at a king, mayn’t it?’
‘Which king?’ reiterated Hurry with equal solemnity.
Monro wielded his pipe like a Field-Marshal’s baton, and boomed out, ‘Aha! Now you’ve hit it. A king may look like a cat when he’s being used as a cat’s paw to pull Argyll’s chestnuts out of the fire. Doesn’t the King write to Montrose with one hand and to Argyll with the other, all on the same day? These things get round.’
‘Like your belly.’
‘Hey, what’s that?’ A large glazed eye swivelled round on the man from Aberdeen. ‘Yes, I have a belly, thank God, and not a cavity between two haunch-bones. You’ve grown thin on your name, my friend; hurrying to and fro upon the earth never did anyone any good – even when it’s from one side to the other.’
It was very nearly the end of a pleasant evening. Fortunately Hurry recollected in time that if he ran this stout piece of bombast through the guts he’d only be hanged himself by his General the next morning.
They drowned their incipient quarrel in more whisky, and Monro good-naturedly remarked that all the best men ratted these days – hadn’t their General himself ratted years ago when he first marched against Charles I’s army and then afterwards went over to the King?
But that nearly caused another quarrel. Hurry’s eyes were like white pebbles as he pointed out that Montrose had fought for the liberty of his country’s Church until that Church had denied liberty to all else, including the King. ‘He went over to the King when the King was the weaker. D’you call that ratting? Rats don’t desert to a sinking ship.’
‘Hope not, anyway,’ muttered Monro, eyeing Sir John dubiously.
They drank in silence after that, Monro dozing a bit and Hurry listening to the crofter and his sons climbing up the ladder to bed in the hayloft.
The woman of the house, whose large pale plain face and scrawny body had inspired his unkind comments on the women of these parts, continued for some time to flump noisily about a hundred mysterious occupations in the background while he eyed her resentfully out of the corner of his eye, wondering why she could not have managed to throw in a plump, tolerably pleasant daughter or two among all these lumps of sons.
Of course it was grand to be in Scotland again, better still when he got the chance to dash south to Aberdeen and visit his little place at Pitfichie and see what was happening to the apple trees he had planted and that breed of small shaggy cattle he had reared in the policies; yes, and to his five brats, all girls worse luck – what were all their names? – Margery and Bessie and Annie and Jeannie and Clare – all growing leggy and longhaired by now he’d be bound, with straw-coloured plaits round their funny little heads, for they all had his colouring, he was glad of that;
yes, and to Maggie too, though she’d be getting on and was no longer much to look at, nor to dandle on a knee either – too much, in fact, since she’d gone heavy and flaccid and sallow in the way these foreign women did.
Still, he’d be glad even of Maggie this raw comfortless night with the east wind howling in the chimney and searching out that aching spot under his left shoulder-blade where one of Tilly’s confounded pikemen had stuck his point into him more than a dozen years ago. A lot of knocks he’d had one way and another, and some fun, but damned little luck considering.
Here he was, Major-General to the finest commander this age could show, and all he had got waiting for him was the same Pitfichie and Maggie that he’d had for more than a dozen years – while his Commander had a lovely princess waiting for him, seeking him out too – would he ever forget the sight of her that night in the doorway of Montrose’s room, her white face shining out from her black cloak like the slip of the new moon he had just seen over the black wood of Craigcoinichean? ‘You idiot!’ she had snapped at himself when his look and tone had insulted her more than his question.
There was a girl worth taming!
Well, he’d had his fun out of his own marriage when he had carried off a Spanish-Dutch heiress by force from Holland and found her to be a pretty woman into the bargain, so there was a bit of luck. They couldn’t speak a word of each other’s languages then; it had made an odd wooing, but there had been no mistaking his intentions!
She had been glad enough to marry him after that, glad too to escape from the stodgy Dutch burgher, to whom she had been promised, with a gay adventurer like himself, for there had been fire and laughter in Maria Magdalena van Jaxheim. But now she was his plain stout Maggie and all her money spent; and here he sat drinking this rough stinking fire-and- water that rasped your throat like iron scrapings, and puffing at a long foul old pipe that had gone as yellow in the tooth as an old hag, and talking with a big blowing blustering fellow that gave himself all the airs in the world as the General’s chief scoutmaster, when he had never seen a campaign in his life.
The Bride Page 29