‘Tell me,’ the constable ordered.
Partly in halting Gaelic when Torquil clearly was not following, but chiefly in the Scots of his father’s fishermen. Alec told his story, or rather that part of it that began with the killing of Robert Kenty in a tavern near Bellyns Gate on Thames and his escape on board the coal brig Sunflower.
‘I was engaged as crew on that ship,’ Alec explained. ‘I was fortunate in that she sailed upon that same day.’
‘But how came it ye were pursued into Scotland?’ the constable asked, clearly puzzled. He could not understand why a simple seaman was of such importance.
‘The man I slew was a creature of a great Scottish lord,’ Alec said. ‘It was his men sought me out to kill me. I—I dared not wait at Leith for my ship to sail again. Nor take a berth on some other vessel upon the east coast. So I took to the hills to seek the waters upon this side.’
‘Autumn, say’st?’ Torquil said thoughtfully. ‘Thou hast not made overmuch haste upon the road.’
‘I had no means,’ Alec told him. ‘I had to work for my bread. At first there were harvests to help me. I passed from farmstead to farmstead bringing in crops for my keep. Then after harvest there were byres to mend or roofs to thatch or crown with mud. But as winter drew on the work grew scarce and the homesteads fewer. As I came north and west the land grew wild and bare. The folk were jealous of their meagre stores. There were days together without food or shelter.’
‘I marvel no one of the clans took ye in,’ Torquil said smoothly, with a lift of his black eyebrows.
Alec grinned.
‘There was a time or two some tried to persuade me,’ he said. ‘But I had no mind to join them.’
The constable smiled.
‘I think there be more than one death notched on thy blade, friend,’ he said.
‘In self-defence I count it no sin,’ Alec protested. ‘Nor,’ he sighed, ‘was that other death. The man I slew came between me and my sworn enemy. Him I meant to kill but the other took my sword by accident.’
‘Sword!’ exclaimed Torquil, instantly suspicious. ‘A seaman fighting with a sword!’
‘Blade!’ Alec corrected quickly. ‘Cutlass! We seamen went ashore armed. There be evil lurkers in the shadows by the wharves on London river.’
‘I understand,’ Torquil answered, but warily. ‘So ye trod the hornets’ nests and came through to Kintail. There are few have done the like. It puts me in mind of those lads King Jamie sent to bring what he calls order to these parts and to the Isles. Adventurers, he called them.’
‘The Fife Adventurers,’ Alec agreed. ‘Aye, I have heard of them.’
‘No doubt. Since ye come from Fife? Did ye not say?’
Alec could not remember if he had said so or not. He was beginning to wonder if he had not already said too much. He had noticed a wolfish expression pass across the face of his host from time to time and he was wholly in the man’s power. Also he knew he was still far from his full strength. Even seated, this long interview was making his head ache and the room begin to swim before his eyes.
‘But ye are not yourself a Fife Adventurer?’ the constable asked with another short sharp laugh.
‘That am I not,’ Alec answered as stoutly as he could. ‘I am a seaman and fisherman. I’ve tell’t ye,’ he said, reverting to his Scots speech. ‘I ken the sea and ships. I want nothing else, so I can earn my bread by my work.’
The constable rose. He no longer looked dangerous, merely friendly. He struck Alec lightly on the shoulder.
‘We are sorely in need of seamen,’ he said. ‘Go find thy health more fully under my old Burnie’s care. She’ll give it thee. I’ll hae a use for thy skills …’
Torquil paused. Alec was on his feet now. The constable had used the Scots for his last remark and he took this for a form of dismissal. Torquil said softly, looking up into Alec’s face, for he was not a tall man, ‘I hae no heard thy name, friend.’
‘Jock Bridie, so please ye,’ Alec said, using the name he had held to since he fled from England.
‘Bridie,’ the constable repeated. He was speaking the Scots with more confidence since Alec had told his story and the latter guessed that at one time he had known it to speak, to his parents perhaps or to his equals among the chieftains, when the Gaelic would not serve.
‘Jock Bridie,’ Torquil repeated. ‘Go then, Jock. Go see my boats. There’s work there and but one old man left that understands it. Maybe thou can’st help him.
‘Aye, sir, willingly,’ Alec said.
He bowed slightly, to cover the weakness that had suddenly assailed his knees. The constable acknowledged his bow with a curt nod and turned away.
Alec moved unsteadily to the door. Mistress Biurnag MacRae was waiting for him at the turn of the passage. She took his arm to support him back to her room, where he sank upon the settle, quite exhausted.
‘Hast pleased my sometime foster-child?’ she asked, when he had his breath back.
‘Well enough,’ he answered. ‘There will be work for me at the boats in such time as I am fit to undertake it.’
It was scarcely the answer she deserved, but his interview had vastly increased his caution. Mistress MacRae showed no disappointment. She said only, ‘Nial will be pleased. He is old, his sight is leaving him. The men begin to mock him at his bench so that his tools slip and he hurts himself and spoils the wood.’
Alec nodded. He would help old Nial and keep these wild Highland wolves at bay. But first he must find his strength.
‘I need to move about more,’ he said, as much to himself as to the old woman. ‘Breathe the outside air, build up my limbs again. I hae rotted too long.’
Seeing the dismay in her old face he jumped up to lay an arm across her shoulders.
‘The rot was within,’ he said, ‘where thy good care and excellent food made no change. The fault was not thine.’
She did not answer him directly, but led him to the narrow window that looked over the water to where the distant hills of Skye stood out, snow-covered against a pale March sky. The early sunshine glittered on the water of the loch. On the opposite shore bright yellow kelp hung on the black rocks as the ebbing tide uncovered them.
‘The winter is passing,’ she said. ‘See, below there. Spring will unfold the sea pinks presently. A pretty carpet under my window.’
Chapter Two
All through March and well into April Alec worked on the boats with the old carpenter Nial MacRae. Like the rest of his clan he was conspicuous for his tall figure, which gave him a formidable appearance though his arms and legs were skinny, the muscles wasted by age. Knowing his usefulness was fast coming to an end and that he had little to expect but a grudged diet and a corner by some fire, he had struggled on through the winter patching up the boats where they leaked but never wholly curing their many defects. Alec’s arrival one morning at Nial’s working shelter nearly overcame the old man with its unexpected relief and sudden hope.
‘Did they not warn ye I would be set to help?’ Alec asked, taking hold of Nial’s arm to steady him, for the shipwright had swayed and gasped as at an apparition.
‘Mistress Biurnag did come to me some days past to warn me, but my memory serves me ill. It had passed from my mind.’
‘Then command me now,’ Alec urged him. ‘I hae been idle for too long. Show me the work; direct me to your planks and tools. I am wholly at your service.’
Nial drew a long breath, straightening himself to his full height, his pride, his pleasure too, aroused by the stranger’s polite speech. The accent was foreign but the Gaelic was fluent, the build of the young man surely MacRae.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘If thy skill matches thy intention then indeed we are fortunate.’
Old Nial was not disappointed. He soon discovered that Alec’s knowledge of boats was greater than his own and his experience of many sorts of craft far wider. Together they ripped out rotten planks, made new ones to fit, overlapping them in the way the fishermen’s shipw
rights had used in Alec’s father’s yards at Pittenweem in the East Neuk of Fife. They caulked the seams with linen waste and tarred the whole from lumps of the stuff melted on an iron plate over a brazier.
‘The laddies bring me these treasures from the vessels they take as prizes,’ Nial explained. ‘There’s great ships come sailing up the Sound of Sleat, thinking to miss the rough waters beyond Skye and so come to the Islands by an inside passage. They wot not the perils they may meet, the narrow pass at Kyle, the rocks, the swift thrust of the tide, the ambush from either hand.’
‘Where did they come from and not know of these perils?’ Alec asked, for it seemed sheer foolhardiness.
‘From Ireland, hoping to raid us as we raid them. From England when the old queen fought us. From France when they welcomed them as allies in the south, in the Lowlands. But all are prizes to us if we can take them.’
Not for the first time Alec came to the conclusion that in these barbarous parts there was neither honesty nor honour, neither loyalty nor truth, but simply an overweening lust for gain, for wealth and for all possible means to secure it; for power, no matter from whom wrested, by whatever treachery, at whoever’s expense.
But he said nothing of all this to a living soul though in imaginary conversations with his lost friend, Francis Leslie, he argued the rights and wrongs of this wild mode of living, his pleasure in the newly budding spring on the hills, the faint mist of green above the loch shore. Remembering the long journey to London in the king’s train, four years ago, he grieved as well as argued. He could guess what Francis would say to his attempted excuses. His friend lamented the hot tempers of his race, that Alec shared, the unbound rage that had ruined him, parted them, brought him to Eilan Donan and its garrison of wild men, pirates, bandits and murderers.
As they brought the boats into good repair Nial and Alec launched them to soak the new wood and take up the seams. They let the children who played about the loch shore bale out the water that seeped into the boats and then mop them dry. As children always do, the bairns began by being useful, but soon grew mischievous giving more trouble than help. In the end Alec had to chase them away.
When the hulls were mended Alec cut and fashioned waste strips of wood to make floorboards for the boats, a refinement that Nial affected to despise though secretly he admired it. As each craft passed its test in the water, the two men took it out on the loch to try it further. Sometimes they rowed across to Torig on the far side where some little bays provided shelter from the prevailing westerly wind and they could beach their boats on a steep but sandy shore safe from the attentions of the children. After one or two trips Alec suggested taking their tools over where they could work in so much more comfort than on the narrow landing strip at the castle.
By the middle of April they had the largest of the three longboats beached across the loch where they had towed it, helped by two of the stronger servants. The fighting men, though they rowed and steered when on a mission, would not demean themselves to assist their carpenter and his captive assistant, who ranked, though they never told him so, as a chattel or slave.
When the longboat was installed in the sheltered bay, Nial and Alec spent whole days there, taking bread and some form of relish with them for a midday meal and drinking from a small stream that bounded down the hillside behind the beach.
One day, feeling restless after their meal, that normally left Alec as hungry as before he started it, he waited until Nial began to doze in the sun, then climbed up the bill, following the stream from which they filled their horn cups. He found that the water fell straightly where the hillside was smooth, grass-covered apart from some low bushes of broom and gorse and blackberry. But at the first curve inward, where the incline was gentler, the stream changed course, leading Alec into a close thicket of young trees, through which he moved with difficulty.
Presently a further grassy opening appeared and he stopped, jerked suddenly to a standstill by the compact, rounded building before him, neither bothy nor hut nor cottage, as he knew such in Fife or in England, but a man-made edifice without doubt, built of smallish stones laid together and upon one another, narrowing in a kind of rough tower to an open top about twenty to thirty feet above ground level. The uneven height was due, Alec saw at once, to decay over the years. How many years, he wondered, with a shiver of awe at the unfamiliar shape. How long had this dwelling or primitive castle or long deserted shrine stood upon the hillside facing Eilan Donan? What was its history? Its former purpose?
Across the little strip of rock-strewn rough grass there was an opening in the towering side of the monument, for as such, Alec was beginning to regard it. It was a man-made opening, the stones neatly placed at the sides, one great flat piece across the top about four feet from the ground. Alec went up to it and peered inside.
A rush of wings startled him, making him leap back. As he did so a slim red body with white teeth snarling in the small mask darted by him. He saw the bushy tail whisk behind a large boulder and laughed aloud.
‘As startled as myself,’ he thought ‘But I’ll no find human foes where Renard hath his lair.’
He stooped under the doorway and found himself in a grass-covered open space with a few thistles and other weeds beginning to push through the coarse tussocks of last summer. He looked up through the open top to the pale midday April sky. That was the way the birds had gone, he decided. The place, with its rough ledges of stone, made a proper doocot for gulls, he decided. Their droppings gave evidence of its use.
He followed the worn path marked by the fox and came to another opening and looked in. Now he understood the purpose of this fort, for such it must surely be. The great circular wall was hollow. Here the family or small tribe could shelter, in time of war take refuge, hide the women and children, while the fighting men held the main opening and manned the top of the walls to throw rocks or shoot arrows at their attackers. Here now, he found, was the vixen in her lair, ready to defend her cubs though the fox had deserted her. Alec retreated before her maternal wrath and made his way back down the hill to Nial.
The old man was awake, inclined to be angry.
‘Where hae ye bin?’ he asked, using the Scots speech Alec had been teaching him at his request.
‘Up the hill yonder,’ Alec answered. ‘Following the stream.’
‘Ye mauna gang by the forest,’ Nial said in a high, cracked voice. He broke into rapid Gaelic. There’s an ill place hid behind the trees. An old, accursed, evil tower. ’ Tis haunted by the unquiet spirits of men who died there, slain by the MacDonald when he raided and burned Eilan Donan.’
‘When was this dread deed done?’ Alec asked. ‘And why was the fight here and not over the water?’
‘It was in my fairther’s time,’ Nial said, becoming calmer. ‘I dinna mind just when that would be. MacDonald drove out Mackenzie from Eilan Donan and burned it and chased the men out and took the women. He hunted our men over the hills and some he caught above there in the old broch—’
‘In the what?’ asked Alec.
‘Broch, we call them. There’s more hereabouts. Pagan churches, some say. Watch towers, say others, against the Norsemen and the Irish. I mind them not. They’ll no fright me save with the unhappy souls of those poor slaughtered men of Eilan Donan.’
‘Mackenzies?’ Alec asked, puzzled by this strange history.
‘Aye, maybe one or two. But MacRaes, chiefly. The place is accursed,’ Nial said, repeating himself. ‘No man goes near those old stones by night and scarcely by day, either. Ask Mistress Biurnag. She hath the whole story of the place, the haunting and the devilment.’
Alec did so and heard some more startling tales of savagery and many curious beliefs such as that the old hero gods had thrown the brochs up on the shores ready-made, unless it was the Devil had done it to spite the saints that brought the Christian faith to the Isles. Also that it was believed by many that the clan MacRae, by reason of the men’s exceptional stature, was descended from Ossian and the heroe
s themselves. That he, Alec, must have MacRae blood in him on account of his own great size and strength.
‘Beware ye do nought to anger the constable,’ Mistress Biurnag told him, ‘or his own particular devil may rule him to thy destruction.’
It was the first he had heard from her of Torquil’s devil, but he had no difficulty in believing in him, for he had seen the fiend peep out of the constable’s eyes upon more than one occasion when he watched a punishment he had ordered being carried out upon the body of some wretch who had failed in his duty.
By the middle of May Alec and Nial had restored the castle’s fleet to full use and had even converted one of the longboats to sail, with a mast and spars cut according to Alec’s orders from some seasoned and weathered tree trunks that had not been touched since Nial’s father had had them felled in his old age for his son’s use in due course. Alec realised as never before, when he was shown this wood after he had suggested the conversion, that Nial had been a poor successor to the former carpenter and shipwright.
In fact he had spent his days improving the woodwork of the castle itself and neglecting the boats. When Alec was brought to the castle Nial had been at first intensely grateful for the tall seaman’s help, but now he was growing jealous of the success he could not altogether claim as his own. But the idea of a sailing ship caused so much excitement all over the castle that he had to pretend to welcome it. And when he saw the finished product and heard the cheers for himself and Alec as, together with the constable, they set out for a trial run on the loch, with Alec at the tiller and himself working the sheets, he lost his jealousy for a time in the pure joy of the swift movement, no jerking, splashing oars, simply a chuckle of little waves on the waterline.
But Alec had watched and considered and had not missed any sign that must be taken as a warning. Besides, he had never intended to spend the rest of his life at Eilan Donan. He had known, during the years he had spent in London at the start of the king’s reign, what it was to be a stranger in the land. He was just as much a stranger here, disliked and suspected for his different speech and habits as well as for his unfamiliar skills. He still held to his original plan, which was to find his way by sea on these westerly waters back to England, to the west of England, perhaps to the south-west. There were fishing harbours in those parts, he had heard, with France across the Channel. He should be safe there from the law, London must believe Alec Nimmo dead long since. Jock Bridie lived. Perhaps from some Devon and Cornish port he could send word of his survival to Francis.
Over the Seas Page 2