He was awakened next morning by hearing the great bolts drawn back, and the heavy door creaked open. Hamish stood there alone, there were no guards with him, and both men scrambled to their feet in the wild hope that Macleod might after all be contriving their escape. The servant came in, the faint light pouring in after him through the doorway, and laid a bundle at Montrose’s feet.
In a low, shamefaced gabble of Gaelic, he said, ‘These are Your Honour’s clothes, and Herself is asking you to put them on again that you may return those that were lent.’
Montrose saw again the torn old dark-reddish plaid and ragged homespuns that he had worn on the moor. Major Sinclair jerked back his head and, for the first time since they had met again, uttered his sharp angry bark of laughter. Hamish’s face went redder even than his beard.
‘Herself is not of our house,’ was all he said, as with clumsily deferential movements he helped Montrose to change Macleod’s clothes for those miserable rags.
A little later their guards brought them a breakfast of oatmeal and water, and then their journey began.
They saw no sign of Macleod as they left Assynt, but his wife stood on the steps of the castle and said goodbye assiduously to General Holbourn. If her family’s credit had been somewhat impaired with those in power by waiting to see the issue of the battle at Corbiesdale before they joined the victors, she at any rate had patched it up with all the ‘earnestness’ that her brother Andrew Monro had besought of her.
They rode along that spit of land between the little green peninsula and the mainland, and Montrose looked down on those low white rocks and the white starry flowers that grew down to their edge, sparkling now in the quick fleeting sunshine of early May. The clouds were gathering big and white and golden in the blue sky, throwing great coloured reflections that went flying over the ruffled water; the hills were purple shadows round the loch and the narrow strip of low fertile green land along its shores. A smiling and lovely valley it seemed as he looked back on it, with its little castle watching over it from the water, before it disappeared among the enfolding hills,
As they rode past Invershin the clouds that had been piling up heavier and blacker over the mountains broke and fell, and it was raining fast by the evening. They rode along the north side of the Kyle of Sutherland and looked across yet again at the crag of Craigcoinichean and Corbiesdale where they had fought. Holbourn decided to rest his men at the Castle of Skibo for a couple of nights after the continuous forced marches of the last few days, before delivering his charge to his Commander-in-Chief, David Leslie, at Tain on the opposite side of the water.
They came out of the dark rain into Skibo Castle, the glow of firelight and torches and the sound of pipes and fiddles playing up in the little musicians’ gallery above the great hall. Robert Gray of Skibo was away from home, but his mother the Dowager came forward to receive General Holbourn, a small wiry old lady with, white hair piled high above a wrinkled white face, an enormous beak of a nose, a bright black eye, and a preposterous dress which seemed to be made out of a patchwork quilt, for there was every colour of the rainbow in its composition.
Her manner to Holbourn was full of an exaggerated affectation of courtesy which thinly disguised her annoyance at having to put up these rough soldiers in her house and entertain the officers to dinner. As she spoke to them in her ironic mincing voice, her wide mouth pursed up whenever it did not break into a dangerously gleaming smile, her black eyes under their white lashes glancing here and there among the little awkward group of weary soldiers, she looked like a very old, gay, and probably malicious fairy.
‘You will find my fare simple,’ she said, ‘mutton, mutton, do we ever get anything else to eat in this country? But at least I have had the prescience’ – she shot a glance like an arrow at Holbourn to see how he took that word; he did not take it, and she went on in still more arrogantly courtly tones – ‘the prescience, I say, of your visit to provide you with music. I hire the pipes and fiddlers whenever I get the chance, for music is the only consolation I can find for mutton.’
Suddenly her eyes fell on the prisoners at the back of the group, her mouth widened to an alarming narrow slit across her face, and ‘Who are those men?’ she demanded.
‘The rebel prisoners, madam, that we took after the battle of Corbiesdale. They can be lodged in your cellars or dungeon.’
‘You have not said who they are.’
‘James Graham and Major Sinclair.’
‘James Gra—my Lord Marquis of Montrose! Mr Holbourn – or whatever military title this upstart Government may have been pleased to confer upon you – while you are here, His Excellency the Marquis of Montrose lodges in my best guest-room and dines at my table, and so does Major Sinclair.’
And, turning, she screamed a command to the gallery to play the battle-march of the Gallant Grahams.
It was a fantastic evening. Montrose could scarcely believe he was not dreaming it as he came up to the long Spanish table set in the hall and spread with fine-spun linen, with Venetian glasses and polished silver sconces to hold the candles of scented wax, while the musicians played the very tunes he used to order whenever he gave a supper-party at St Andrews or came home for the holidays, and his first thought always was to send for the pipers and fiddlers.
The Dowager appeared as suddenly as at the stroke of a wand, attired in a silver brocade that had been made fifty years ago to spread over a farthingale. Lacking that support, it lay all round her for yards upon the floor and she had to hold it up with both hands as she advanced with the high stepping walk of a peacock towards the table. A high comb studded with rubies burned red in her white hair, and as she seated herself her eyes roved round the table and flashed with an angry fire as red as they.
For General Holbourn had placed himself on her right hand, with Montrose on his other side.
‘Do you consider yourself my guest of honour, sir?’ she demanded in a voice that rose shrill above the skirling of the pipes.
The unfortunate man began to stammer out that he was only observing the military order of positions that had been carried out on the march.
But he only got out a few words before there was an uprush of swishing gleaming brocade like the soaring wings of an avenging angel. His hostess seized the leg of mutton before her by the knuckle-bone and swung it down on to his head with such force that it knocked him off his seat on to the floor, where she gave him another blow in the chest that covered with grease the fine velvet coat into which he had changed.
His officers sprang to their feet, thinking this was the signal for a surprise attack from her servants to rescue the prisoners, but no one else advanced. The dauntless white figure stood there alone, brandishing the leg of mutton as though it were a battle-axe.
‘I would beg you gentlemen to remember,’ she screamed, with such a world of scorn in her stress on that word that it was a worse insult than any term of abuse, ‘that this is my house and I alone have the right to arrange the order of my table or the conditions of my hospitality. My Lord Marquis, I beg that you will do me the highest honour I have ever received in my long life, and sit at my right hand.’
She replaced the mutton in the dish, wiped her hands on a napkin, and swept a deep curtsy to the ragged figure in the wet shepherd’s plaid that came slowly forward to take the place of honour beside her. Then she beckoned a servant forward.
Take away the mutton,’ she said, ‘and scrape off the outer portions where they may have made any contact with Mr – with General Holbourn’s hair-oil.’
Holbourn clambered to his legs and took his place on the other side of Montrose, squinting ruefully down at his ruined coat. From time to time the Dowager shot a smiling remark at him across Montrose as if to remind herself that she was still his hostess, but he scarcely dared reply, nor did she seem to expect it. She talked all through the dinner and through the music, which was much too loud, to Montrose.
The habit of polite conversation that he had had to endure through the last
four years, however anxious and hard-driven, now stood him in good stead. His limbs were aching as though they had been racked, his head was throbbing, his eyeballs burning, his throat so parched that he longed only to drink water, which she would not permit but kept plying him with sweet red wine from Oporto; the shrill music thrummed in his ears, making him at times lose consciousness of where he was and imagine that he was really back at home in Kinnaird or Kincardine and that these last few days had been only the nightmare of a delirium, – and then with a jerk of his mind he would force himself to realize that there was nothing left of Kincardine but a heap of charred stones, that the stout man who sat so still and meek on his right was indeed his jailer, and that this fantastic old lady on his left was not one of the several eccentric and despotic old Scots ladies he had known in his youth, but only a momentary interruption in his journey to Edinburgh, where he had been already condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered.
Yet he could still talk and appear to listen, answering whenever she gave him time, for she rushed from one thing to another until she fastened on the attractions of young King Charles and the prospects of his marriage. Was it to be his cousin the Princess Sophia? (‘but her tocher is no bigger than a dairymaid’s’), or his other cousin the French heiress? (‘but she is a Roman Catholic, that would never do’), or that queer little creature Christina of Sweden? (‘but one hears odd stories of her – I don’t trust these learned women, they find out too much from the Greek and Latin authors, as I know, having read ‘em myself,’ and a laugh like a screech-owl’s pierced her royal gossip).
All the Kirk and Covenant folk here were backing the Calvinist Orange girl of the Dowager Princess Amelia’s, ‘but I’ll tell you a newer starter than that, my lord’, and her voice hissed into a whisper more harshly audible even than her cries, ‘and that is that squinting red-haired girl of Argyll’s. “King Campbell” has set his heart on being a King’s father-in-law, and if he once gets the poor young fellow into his clutches that’s what he’ll wish on him, mark my words, and Your Excellency may take my bet on it if you will, at odds of five to one.’
‘It would scarcely be fair to take you on, madam, since in any case you could not win from me,’ said Montrose, smiling, and went on quickly, before she should realize she had laid a bet with a man under immediate sentence of death, to answer her previous questions as to the dress of the women in Prague and the atrocities of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany.
Yes, he could still talk and appear to listen, he could still rise and escort her to the door and bow his goodnight to her and thanks for his delightful entertainment. After which he turned to face Holbourn, who was goggling at their hostess’ departure and softly damning his own eyes, the grease on his coat, and all old women.
But for the two days they were at Skibo her effect was such that in her absence, as in her presence, Holbourn and all his officers treated Montrose with as much ceremonial politeness as she had demanded for him.
And he was able to rest, while outside the castle the rain sheeted down.
Sir John Hurry had been sent on with the first draft of prisoners, taken during or just after the battle of Corbiesdale and despatched independently of Leslie’s force to Inverness. The Provost of Inverness, Duncan Forbes of Culloden, was a sound man, a grand man, for he had ordered the magistrates to put out tables by the market-cross with refreshments for the troops and for the prisoners, and, for the first time since he had been taken, Jack Hurry could drink as much wine as he wanted. With that new long cut on his forehead and cheek opening up the dangerous bullet-wound he had got years ago on the left side of his head, he wanted a good deal.
Amid a group of his comrades in misfortune from Corbiesdale – or Carbisdale, as he had found people calling it – he stood by the fore-stair of one of the big houses looking on to the market-square below the castle, and filled up his pewter mug again and again from the big jug beside them.
Very lean and spare his tall figure looked, its great shoulders squaring out at the top of it as he lounged back with his mug in his hand against the fore-stair, his long legs straddling on either side of the jug like a dog guarding a bone, his belt drawn in to its narrowest hole, his big nose and bristling chin stuck out like promontories, his light grizzled hair cut away at the side of his head where the new jagged scar ran fiery red down to his cheek beside the old dull purplish mark. Yet to look at him he might have been an officer home from the wars, casually taking his ease and his drink as he stared in good humour at the scene before him.
A thin drizzle of bright mist had come up from the sea and spun itself over the sunshine so that the grey stone houses and little gardens, pink and white with blossoming fruit trees, the shining silver fish on the stalls in the market-place, the hilly slopes beyond the town, splashed with deep and pale gold from the whin and broom, the broad glittering river merging into the sea, were all painted in clear flat colours without any shadow.
Some girls had been to fill their buckets with water from the town pump in the middle of the square and stayed there as usual to gossip, with a shrill screech of coy laughter every now and then. They looked across at the prisoners and pretended not to notice two or three self-conscious youths who were gradually edging nearer to them and addressing loud remarks to each other which were really intended for the girls. The girls’ white headcloths flapped as they turned and tossed their heads like pigeons coquetting before their possible mates. One of them was a fine buxom lass with breasts swelling up in firm curves under her tight blue bodice; she looked sideways at Hurry and then away as his bold glance swept her from top to toe, then presently looked back again and smiled. No doubt it was a new piece of fun to prink at a man who was condemned to die.
Anyway, it was a good day to be alive, even if you were only going to be alive for a few days longer.
He whistled the chorus to a German drinking-song, and a boy who was squatting by him on an upturned fish-basket to stare at the prisoners took up the tune on a reed whistle, cocking up an eye at that tall tigerish fellow with the raw scar, to see if he were getting it right.
‘That’s the lad!’ said Hurry, throwing him a penny.
A little girl near by hopped up and down in time to the tune, a mongrel dog chased a lean white bitch in and out under the tables by the cross, a blackbird shrilled out a river of clear notes from a tree where the buds were bursting into points of green life.
It was impossible that he, Jack Hurry, should swing out of all this on the end of a rope before the month was over and all the cherry blossom blown from the trees. He had seen the new moon for this month clear in the sky, and not through the cottage window of bottled glass as he might so easily have done – didn’t that mean luck? And was it luck to swing at the end of a hangman’s rope? It was not. Anything might happen to prevent it. Even if the King were really signing the Treaty of Breda, as was already being rumoured, well, that would only bring him to Scotland the sooner, in time very likely to stop the execution of his most loyal and devoted servants – and then those swine the Covenanters would see!
‘Rise, Sir John Urré of Pitfichie, knight.’ King Charles I had already said that to him, striking him lightly on the shoulder with his sword. Who knew what King Charles II might say? Earl of Inverurie would have a good sound, or the Lord of Dyce would carry a pleasant double meaning.
In any case, it was a very fine day, the first after three days of solid rain, and the Provost of Inverness was a good fellow, and this was excellent wine and plenty of it, enough of it even for him.
The boy with the reed whistle suddenly stopped playing, the little girl hop-hopping on one bare red leg. They were running, everyone was running, calling to each other in shrill excited cries. There was a thick crowd now, gathering fast and faster about the further end of the market-place where the measured thud of horses’ hooves and a loud formal shouting could be heard.
‘What is happening over there?’ Hurry demanded, and the answer shuttled down to them from the stragglers abo
ut that crowd.
‘It is the Marquis! It’s Montrose himself.”
Hurry sprang to his feet and looked over the heads of the crowd. He saw the Covenant General, David Leslie, riding down one of the streets at the head of his troops, but nobody was paying any attention to him.
They were all flocking towards a figure behind him, the figure of a man wrapped in a ragged dark red plaid with a shepherd’s cap of rough wool on his head, mounted on a shaggy little horse with no saddle nor bridle but only a mat of rags and straw on its back, and loops of rope for stirrups, and a tether and bit of halter for a bridle. His feet were tied together with cords under his horse’s belly. In front of him marched a herald who proclaimed in that loud formal shout that Hurry had heard:
‘Here comes James Graham, a traitor to his country.’
‘Christ’s blood!’ exclaimed Hurry. ‘Why are they doing this?’
A townsman who had mounted the stair beside him answered, ‘Argyll’s orders – that the people should jeer and throw stones at him.’
‘They don’t seem to be doing it.’
‘Here come two of the ministers, though. I swear they’ll ginger ‘em up. No one so hot as your men of God.’
The procession had stopped at the far end of the marketplace. The Provost came forward to greet General David Leslie, the Commander-in-Chief of his Government’s armies; he bowed low to him, but lower still to his prisoner, then turned back to David Leslie, and after a short colloquy two of the troopers came forward and untied Montrose’s feet from under his horse’s belly and helped him to alight.
Hurry saw an old woman come scurrying along like a bat with her black cloak flapping out behind her, hobbling down from the end of the bridge. She shrieked curses at Montrose for the houses on her property which had been burned when he besieged Inverness.
The Bride Page 35