A Falcon for a Queen
Catherine Gaskin
Copyright © The Estate of Catherine Gaskin 2016
This edition first published 2016 by Corazon Books
(Wyndham Media Ltd)
27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX
First published 1972
www.greatstorieswithheart.com
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Other titles available by Catherine Gaskin
The Property of a Gentleman
Sara Dane
The Lynmara Legacy
The Summer of the Spanish Woman
Coming in 2016
Promises
Corporation Wife
Edge of Glass
and more …
Visit www.catherinegaskin.com
to be among the first to know when
the next Catherine Gaskin ebook is released
For Terry and Tom with love
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Epilogue
Preview: The Property of A Gentleman
Preview: Sara Dane
Preview: The Lynmara Legacy
Preview: The Summer of the Spanish Woman
Preview: Lily’s Daughter
Preview: Hardacre
THE CLANS ‒ THE MOTTOS
MACDONALD OF CLANRANALD
My hope is constant in thee
CAMPBELL OF CAWDOR
Be mindful
SINCLAIR
Commit thy work to God
MACPHERSON
Touch not the cat bot a glove
(MAC)LACHLAN
Brave and Trusty
FERGUSON
Sweeter after difficulties
Prologue
There are places in the valley where I will never go again; there are paths up its glens where I will never direct my pony’s steps. The faces, the voices, the names meet me there, and they do not go away. Regularly, of course, I must cross the path through the graveyard to the kirk, where those names are chiselled into the stone. But the spirits do not lie there; for me, they do not lie there. They are the restless ghosts ‒ those who loved ‒ wrongly, wilfully, with passion, without reason. They all wait for me, everywhere in that valley, but especially in some places, to which I do not go. Ballochtorra begins to crumble on its height; the rains and the snows take their toll of the roof, the ice creeps in to break chinks in the walls. The ivy is taking possession; very soon it will need the knowing eye to distinguish what was newly built, in the pride of wealth and ambition, from the very old. The rooks gather in the ivy-grown trees and on the battlements. And forever, ceaselessly, my eyes search the skies for the sight of a falcon.
Chapter One
I
It is a long way to come from China to the depths of the Scottish Highlands, for the sake of a few words splashed in confused Mandarin script, down the side of a scroll, with a drawing of a bird perched on a bare willow bough. But I had come, unbidden, unexpected, and for all I knew, unwelcome. I had come because my brother, William, lay buried in a churchyard in the heart of the Highlands, and before he had died had scratched those few words. Yes, a long way to come.
I had sent no message, no telegram, perhaps for fear that I could be turned back ‒ from what I knew of Angus Macdonald he was capable of doing that. So I stood with my trunk and my father’s leather bag on the tiny station of Ballinaclash, and there was no one to meet me, and, so far as I could judge, no way to get where I wanted to go.
The stationmaster shook his head. ‘Cluain, is it? Well, that will be a good six miles and more. They are not expecting you … they did not send the gig.’ The curiosity was evident; only an innate kind of courtesy held back the open questions the man longed to ask. ‘I’m very sorry, mistress, there will be no conveyance for hire about here. As you can see, it is not even a village. Just a halt when there’s a passenger, and to collect the post, and such.’
‘There has to be some way …’ I shivered; it was chill, and it was going to rain. Who would have expected to be dropped here in the middle of a seeming wilderness, pine and larch lining the steep railway cutting, and the sound of the train already lost in the distance as it had rounded the bend? There were no houses, no smoke curling from chimneys; there was nothing but the promise of rain, and the anxious, bewildered stare of the stationmaster. Clearly, no one came to Ballinaclash unheralded ‒ not even from Inverness, much less from China. Clearly, also, I must be mad to have done it.
But there was something, beside the sigh of the wind through the pines, and the automatic clicking of the railway telegraph in the little office, there was the sound of footsteps behind me, and out in front of the station, tucked in to the shelter of the building, was a small, one-horse landau, the horse’s head held by a man in a long tweed cape. He too was staring at me, and past me, and at that moment he took off his hat; but the action wasn’t for me.
‘I see your bags there.’ I turned; the man who had evidently got off one of the end carriages of the train and walked along the track with his single bag in his hand, had also raised his hat, but he put it back on. A long, quizzical face, under blond-streaked hair; his eyes were an intense, light blue which might have seemed innocent and even childlike if it hadn’t been for the lines cut deeply at the corners, lines that almost exactly paralleled those at the corners of his mouth. It was a youngish face, and yet weary ‒ or was it the face of a young man, disenchanted.
He continued, with no trace of shyness. ‘No one has come to meet you? My name is Campbell.’
He was so cool, so matter-of-fact, that he would have flustered me if I hadn’t been so tired, and had so much else to think of.
‘How do you do,’ I said automatically. Didn’t one say that in polite society, however absurd the place and the meeting? The forms were always observed. ‘No ‒ no one has come to meet me. I’m not expected. I thought I could perhaps hire …’
He was already shaking his head, and I thought I detected a half shrug of the shoulders, as if in wonderment at the foolishness of some people. ‘Well, now you see you can’t, Miss …? Is it miss?’
‘Howard,’ I said.
For a second the detachment fell away. ‘Howard? You’re William Howard’s sister! Yes ‒ yes, I should have known. You look like him.’
The sound of the name was comfort. It was so long since anyone had spoken it. No one, since I had left China, had spoken William’s name. ‘You knew William?’ I clutched at the thought.
‘Yes … yes, I knew him. Not well, but then he wasn’t here that long.’
‘No ‒ not long. Just those visits from Edinburgh, and then last summer …’
He did not let me dwell on it. Already he had taken my arm, and at the same time was beckoning the man who stood by the horse. ‘Stevens, give Mr McBane here a hand with the luggage. All of it. We’ll be taking Miss Howard to Cluain.’
‘I like to drive,’ the man said. ‘Do you mind coming up front with me, or will the wind be too much for you? Stevens can sit with the baggage.’
I nodded; what was a little wind? The man had spoken William’s name, and seemed to call him back to life. I let myself be helped up on to the seat, and then the man swung himself up beside me, taking the reins from Stevens. Then we waited as the bags were brought, carried by the stationmaster and Stevens, and stowed in the passenger space. Everyone seemed to move swiftly to Campbell’s orders, yet there was an odd comradeship between them all; there was no sign of servility cloaking resentment. The stationmaster was relieved to have me off his hands ‒ but yet he had shown a concern for me. He raised his cap as we prepared to move off.
‘Well, then now, mistress. You’ll be grand now, and like as not there’ll be no rain before you reach Cluain …’
Campbell made a vague salute of thanks with the whip, and we were off. The vehicle was well sprung, the horse strong and good, even the road between the pines and larches seemed smooth. It didn’t even seem cold any longer.
‘I hope I’m not ‒’ I began.
‘Oh, now,’ he cut me short. ‘Please, I beg you, don’t start all those politenesses. Would I have left you standing there on Ballinaclash station? If you’re silly enough not to have warned them that you were coming, then the least I can do is save you from some of the consequences of your folly. I don’t think,’ he added, without emphasis, ‘that Angus Macdonald likes surprises.’
‘Perhaps not. We’ll see. All he can do is turn me away.’
‘He’ll not turn you away. The world may think us barbarians here in the Highlands ‒ oh, romantic barbarians, perhaps, but still barbarians. But somehow, in all our poverty we still have our traditions of hospitality, which we keep. And I suspect that Angus Macdonald is a believer in blood’s being thicker than water. You’re the only grandchild he has left.’ Then, with devastating candour came the thrust. ‘It was William he wanted, of course, A girl will hardly be of much use to him.’
‘No,’ I answered flatly. ‘I hardly expect to be of much use.’
He glanced at me quickly, and then back to the road, his rather austere face softening a little, as if he regretted his words. ‘So … you decided to come here, after your father died?’
‘You knew that my father was killed?’
‘The whole kingdom knew it. Perhaps you don’t realise how good the British newspapers are at whipping themselves into a frenzy over a tragic and bloody happening far away ‒ most especially when it concerns a bishop of the Established Church. For a couple of days they were in a fever over it. There was talk of sending gun-boats. Imperial dignity had been gravely insulted. I wonder if anyone thought of what you must have suffered then ‒ with William so recently dead.’
‘Perhaps it was merciful that I didn’t know William was dead at the time. My grandfather’s letter had not reached me. He doesn’t seem to believe in telegrams, either.’
‘Good God!’ He looked at me again, for longer this time. ‘You were quite alone, then, when the news of William came. I’m very sorry, Miss Howard. You’ve had …’ Now his voice dropped so that it was hard to hear above the sound of the hooves, the rush of the wind through the trees. ‘You’ve had a very bad time.’
‘My father had many friends … they helped very much. Yes, we knew about the talk of gun-boats, but no one in England seemed to realise that my father was killed in a local uprising two hundred miles from the point at which the Great River ‒ the Yangtse ‒ is navigable by a gun-boat. And what use would it have been? I knew it was the last thing my father would have wished. It was senseless, hysterical talk. These things are dealt with in their own way in China. But people in England seem to have some very odd ideas about China. When I prayed in those days, I prayed that the Foreign Secretary was better informed than the journalists.’
They were plain, sensible words, calm words, ones I had long ago reasoned myself into, to try to stop the hurt. But yes, he was right, it had been a bad time. Very bad. But China was often cruel, and violent death was common. The hardest thing to bear had been the thought that it need not have been my father; there were many others he could have sent on that journey. But he never excused himself from what he conceived to be his duties ‒ never sought to, because he loved them. Even when visitation literally meant journeys of a thousand miles, and he would often be cold and hungry, his clothes sodden, or his skin burned with the fierce heat of those summers. No, the progress of a bishop in China had little in common with the stately procession from one parish to another he had described to me, with a kind of a laugh, as being the custom in England. To be fair, the Church paid for a greater dignity than my father ever maintained, he saying that there was so much else to spend the money on in China than keeping up episcopal state. He travelled usually only with one curate, who acted as his secretary. There could have been few bishops who had the frightful distinction of ending their lives with their heads on one of the ever-present bamboo poles of the Chinese. He had been unlucky. He could hardly even have consoled himself in those last horrible moments that he was dying in the cause of bringing the light of the faith to the heathen hordes. He had been unfortunate enough to have been caught unwittingly in a rising against a local war-lord in the remote Szechwan province ‒ he and the curate and two engineers travelling with him to prospect the route of a future railway into the interior. The forces of the war-lord had not come quickly enough to save the foreign devils. It was all the more sport for the faceless mass of peasants that one of their victims had been a high priest serving the foreign god. Some of the leaders of the rising had been punished with the usual refinements of public torture and execution by the war-lord. We had all known in Peking that no gun-boats or expedition would be necessary. And my father’s body had been sent back for burial. They had tried not to let me know now brutally he had died. But I did know; one always knew these things in China.
It had not been enough. Their gods, or my God, had decided it had not been enough. Less than a month after that burial came a letter and a chest which buried the last I had in the world. There was a letter, addressed to my father, in Angus Macdonald’s formal script and phrases. ‘Your son, my grandson, William Howard, has died as the result of a hunting accident in the lands above Cluain. He is buried among his forebears in the kirkyard of St Andrew in the parish of Ballochtorra, according to the rites of the Established Church of Scotland. Should you wish …’ My father had no more wishes; he too was buried, according to the rites of the Anglican Church, in the British Legation compound in Peking. And I was in possession of William’s personal effects, dispatched to Peking along with the letter. And they included the scroll, the line drawing of the bird on the bare branch, with the confused, inaccurate characters in Mandarin splashed down its edge.
And to what, and for what, had I journeyed? From Peking to Tientsin, by river to the coast, by larger boat to Hong Kong, then by British steamer through the Red Sea and Suez to the smoke and soot of London. Then by train on to Scotland, heading towards the heart of the Highlands, to Inverness, and then, by branch line to Ballinaclash, and from there … well, this man, Campbell, was taking me where I had decided to go ‒ to Cluain.
How little I knew of it. How little I had cared to ask. Of course, all the English-speaking world had some fanciful notion of the Highlands. Hadn’t we all seen those formalised sketches of the Queen and her Consort, and the castle they had built at Balmoral? ‒ and from a later date there were those sad daguerreotypes of the dumpy little Queen in her widow’s weeds seated on a pony held by her gillie in his Highland dress. Pictures of stags and misty glens, tales of feuds and rebellions, and brave, hardy men ‒ the novels of Walter Scott
. But the Diamond Jubilee had been celebrated the year before, and Victoria was now very old, and had to be in the last years of her reign; Edward, the Prince of Wales, had waited almost beyond a man’s patience to assume the responsibilities for which he had been a figurehead so long. The century was dying, as the old Queen was; and I knew very well that the reality of the Highlands must be quite different from those misty pictures. There had to be winter here, and people who did not live in castles. Why hadn’t I asked more about Cluain? In the letters written in answer to William’s I had hardly mentioned it, much less questioned him about it. Had I resented his inexplicable attachment to it, the place he had not even wanted to visit? He had gone to Edinburgh University to study engineering, and he had been expecting, in time, that he too would be planning and building China’s railways, competing, as all the foreign interests did, for the concessions of its rich trade. But Angus Macdonald had known he was in Edinburgh, and letters had passed between them. William had at first gone to Cluain unwillingly. ‘I suspect this old man is possessive,’ he had written to me before the first visit, ‘and I have to be free to do what I have always dreamed of doing. I have to belong to myself.’ There had not been any more written about being free. He had returned to Cluain at Christmas, and at Easter, and then the whole of the following summer. But it had been the onset of winter at Cluain again when he had died, and now it was the early days of June. My father had died in the middle of a Chinese winter without knowing his son was already dead. It had been the frozen earth for both of them, so far apart. I wondered now why, since I had not asked William, I had not thought to ask my father about Cluain; was it because I sensed that he felt a guilt about it, and it was cruel to probe it? I knew it was a breach that had never mended. He had married the only child of Cluain, and had taken her far away; she too lay in the Legation compound in Peking. He had known Cluain only for one summer ‒ one summer’s idyll in the Highlands, and he had been deeply in love. So I asked nothing, did not care to remind him, and he did not speak of it. I had let myself be absorbed in the life of China ‒ the life that foreigners knew, that is, because no outsider could truthfully claim to know it fully. I had thought I would probably marry there ‒ and yet I had fixed my thoughts on none of the young men who came and went at the Legations. I had wanted someone who would stay in China. Unconsciously, perhaps, I had waited for William’s return. I would have wanted his good opinion of any man I would marry. I had thought to make China my life, as it was my father’s and would be William’s. But now it was all behind me, the silken luxuries and savage cruelties, and I was headed towards Cluain, forearmed with so little knowledge, open to the wind. Perhaps, then, I shivered.
A Falcon for a Queen Page 1