‘How so?’
‘When she was widowed out there on her island, she grew desperate for something to employ the people. The land was very poor, and the salt spray from the Atlantic would hardly let a seed stay in the ground, much less grow and flourish. Sheep had been introduced in a last attempt to make the land pay. And, of course, where you have sheep, the people must make way for them. But the sheep were in too small numbers to pay, and a few crofters still survived ‒ her tenants, her family, now her clan. She thought of what had gone on here as she grew up, and she built herself a small distillery. But it was the sea that defeated her. She couldn’t grow the right quality of barley, so it had to be brought from the mainland, and then the finished product had to be shipped back ‒ all at much more cost than those closer to the cities and the new railways that were just starting to come. It was a very small distillery, mind you, and her output was tiny. And then one year the entire product of her warehouses ‒ that is, all that was legally old enough to be sold as whisky, went down when a vessel foundered. It was the end of the distillery. She couldn’t borrow any more, she couldn’t hold out any longer. It was then, they say, that she sent Angus to Islay to work in a distillery. She couldn’t give him the life of a gentleman, nor could she pay for a commission in a regiment ‒ and she must have seen too many leave the Highlands to go off and die in England’s wars. So she sent him to learn a craft and a trade, one that she believed in. When Angus Macdonald inherited Cluain, he inherited the perfect place to make malt whisky. There were his barley fields, his streams, the peat, the climate. There were literally dozens of distilleries within a very few miles of his door. He was not an innovator ‒ just carrying on with an ancient skill that had always been carried on in these glens. He believed, like Christina Campbell, that there was money in whisky, and he wasn’t too much of a gentleman to soil his hands in the trade. Those men of the Western Isles are a tough lot ‒ they have had to be to survive over the centuries. There’s no softness in the living there. What poor soil and sheep haven’t taken, the sea has. So Angus Macdonald came here afraid of nothing ‒ least of all hard work. When he was secure in the title to Cluain, he went back and married one of his kinswomen, and he gathered together a few distillery workers and their families from Islay. He was making his own island race here among us. The farm was run on a shoestring, and the distillery built on money borrowed from Samuel Lachlan. It was a huge gamble that paid off. Angus Macdonald has taken in about forty harvests at Cluain, but his golden harvest is maturing now in those warehouses. He looked down at the granite marker. ‘I don’t know if he’s ever come to admitting to himself that he loved William. But one thing I’m certain of ‒ he wanted him.’
‘You know a lot about my grandfather.’
‘I’ve made it my business to find out. I’ve pieced together the story of Christina and her father, and Angus Macdonald bringing her home here. No doubt your grandfather would tell it much better and I would have liked to have heard it in his words. But he and I have never been on those kind of terms. The barest civility passes between us. I’m sorry for it, but he’s not to be moved. He can’t forget that the Campbells tried to dispossess him of Cluain, and every time I look down on that place I know why they tried so hard. I’ve seen what he’s built, and I admire him. But he’s a man like that granite there ‒ hard and enduring. You’ll find very few chinks in that face he turns to the world.
‘It was William who began to build a bridge between Cluain and Ballochtorra. He came quite often ‒ and why not? It is the only place around here to visit, and he wasn’t much occupied at Cluain. Angus Macdonald didn’t approve, but William kept coming.’ Then his voice dropped until it was almost a whisper, words forcing their way out that he may have tried too long to keep buried in his own mind, words like the swift rush of the wind past my ears. ‘And again ‒ why would he stay away? He was more than half in love with my wife.’
I wasn’t really aware of when he left me. I suppose I stood there for a long time, staring down at the grass waving on the graves of William and Christina, side by side. When I looked up, Gavin Campbell was gone, as I hoped he would be. There was only the gentle tugging sound of the cattle grazing near the kirkyard wall, and far above, the same lark. I lifted my face and scanned the whole wide sky; there was no far, high-flying speck that I could see. If Giorsal, the falcon, hovered up there somewhere, she was beyond my gaze and reach.
My eyes went back to the grave, to the freshly chiselled name in the granite. ‘Did you love her, William? Did you love her ‒ and not tell me of it? Was she the enchantress you found here?’
The breeze that blew through the small plantation of larches in the corner of the kirkyard was my answer.
II
My grandfather was waiting, and terse. He had his stance, as before, in front of the fire in the dining-room, but this evening a long shaft of sunlight struck across his face, and he seemed older than in the greyer light of last evening.
‘I hear you’ve been through the distillery with Callum Sinclair.’ The words greeted me as I came through the door; I jerked around to face him, and the door slammed.
‘Yes. Have you some objection, Grandfather?’
‘I do. I’ll not have you being familiar with the distillery workers.’
‘Familiar!’ I came towards him, feeling my face flush with anger. ‘Familiar! That is the last thing I can imagine anyone being with Callum Sinclair. It was hardly my choice, though. He simply doesn’t permit familiarity.’
‘He kept his place, then?’
‘What is his place, Grandfather? He seemed to be everything ‒ to know everything. And if he hasn’t a place at Cluain ‒ a real place, then I don’t know who could.’
‘He’s too independent ‒ and he does not know everything, in spite of what he may claim. He’s bad for discipline among the other men. He goes off on his own while they work …’
‘But he works for Cluain as no other man does, isn’t that so? And they all know it? ‒ and accept it? So what might be a privilege for them is a right for him. After all, you keep him on at Cluain.’
I seemed to have won my small argument, and rather wished I had not. My grandfather moved with irritated haste to the sideboard. Would it always be like this between us, I wondered? But then he turned back, and the two glasses were in his hands; he held one towards me. ‘There ‒ there’s your dram. Health to you.’ And he tipped back his glass without another look at me, as if we had been doing this for a long time, and there was no need for ceremony. Perhaps the arguing and the confrontation was to be part of our life together, a signal of acceptance. I sipped slowly, and now the whisky was familiar, and rather pleasing.
I sat down on the settle. ‘Well, then, if you had given me time I would have told you that I was looking for you to take me through the distillery ‒ I’d just heard Callum Sinclair telling his mother he wasn’t going near the place to-day. And as I was crossing the yard that gander, Big Billy, came chasing me. I have his bite to prove it. I just ran in the nearest door, and Callum Sinclair was there. Perhaps he spends more time working than you think.’
‘Perhaps. So you’ve met Big Billy, have you?’ His face creased in a near-smile. ‘Well, he’s the real boss of Cluain. Once you know Big Billy you can fairly claim to be on your way at Cluain. I suppose you know all about distilling now?’
‘No. I don’t think I ever will. Callum Sinclair told me it takes years ‒ it was all the chemical things I didn’t understand. I’ll never remember which part of the process follows the next.’
‘Perhaps you shouldn’t bother. William was more confused than he pretended to be. You don’t become a distiller overnight by studying the textbooks.’
I sighed. ‘That was rather heavily impressed on me. Perhaps I won’t bother.’
The big eyebrows lowered. ‘Please yourself.’ I watched his body sag into his chair. What a cross-grained pair we were. And I should be for his comfort, not his irritation.
So I said, in a softe
r tone, ‘I went to William’s grave.’
He nodded. ‘So they told me.’
‘They tell you everything.’
‘The Master expects to be told. Morag knows most things that happen here, and she is a good wee gurrl. A level head on her for all her chatter. It would have been well for us all if she had known where William was bound that day …’ His voice trailed off, the regret and pain blurring to silence.
‘I liked the granite stone,’ I said. ‘I was glad you gave William the same kind as your mother’s ‒ and laid him beside her.’
‘How did you know it is my mother’s grave?’ The words were sharp again, suspicious.
‘I read the headstone ‒ Sir Gavin Campbell pointed it out to me. He was there at the kirk ‒ practising the organ.’ I finished lamely. Perhaps I should not be telling this part of it. Gavin Campbell might cherish the privacy of those organ sessions, not wanting them talked of through the countryside.
‘Campbell was there, was he? And fine well he knows where Christina Campbell is buried. It was she who brought Cluain to me.’
‘He told me so. He told me as much as he knew about the story.’ I suddenly burst out, wishing for once I could cut through this man’s prejudice and layers of remembered enmities, ‘He admires you, Grandfather.’
‘Let him admire,’ he answered, as if admiration was his right. ‘Let him envy, too. The Campbells lost Cluain, and they’ve never forgiven that. Justice was done.’
‘Oh,’ I gestured wearily with my glass. ‘How does it affect him? He was only a second cousin, or something of the sort. He never expected to inherit Ballochtorra. Cluain had been in your hands for a long time before he ever laid eyes on the place.’
‘The Campbells were always greedy.’
‘What need does he have to be greedy? Ballochtorra doesn’t appear to need money.’
‘No. His lady wife has enough of it. Or rather her slum-bred father. Out of the Glasgow slums James Ferguson came, and made a fortune on cheap whisky. He spends like a madman. And Campbell lets him spend. But Ferguson hangs on to his daughter’s skirts, and is a noose around Campbell’s neck. Where’s the sense in being a gentleman, and having fine horses, and playing the organ, when your father-in-law can scarcely speak the Queen’s English?’
‘Is that Gavin Campbell’s fault … he seems to love his wife.’
‘Seems to!’ He tossed his huge head back. ‘Och, once they were young fools together, and it appeared the genuine thing. But tell me how a man can stand by and watch his wife change from a nice, simple, well-enough educated young gurrl ‒ aye, James Ferguson is aware of his own deficiencies in that direction, and he bought the best teachers for his daughter. And she changed from being the simple wife of a local baronet into a London social butterfly. There’s been a house rented for them in London these past five years, and I hear now that Ferguson has bought a grand big affair there, and is refurbishing it from top to bottom. There is always a room ready for James Ferguson wherever his daughter is. She knows who has the purse strings.’
‘You seem to know a lot about James Ferguson’s doings, Grandfather.’
‘Och, Morag chatters …’ He seemed not to realise what he revealed of himself. ‘They say he is getting the London house ready in time for the Coronation. And that can’t be too far off.’
‘The Queen is not dead yet.’
‘She hasn’t many more years … But before she is dead, Ferguson is hoping that the old Marquis of Rossmuir will be dead, and Campbell will have the title. It would be his greatest dream realised if his daughter were to sit with all the other peeresses in the Abbey wearing a marchioness’s coronet when the new King is crowned. I think he would like it almost as much as a knighthood for himself. Who knows ‒ he might even get that. Whisky has created more than one baron … Money talks.
‘But still and all,’ he added as he went again to the sideboard to refill his glass. ‘Ferguson has yet only one grandson. She has given him only one grandchild.’
After supper he brought out the chessboard. ‘A game?’ he said, and I knew it was not a game, but a challenge. I nodded, and we sat opposite each other, as we had the night before. Mairi Sinclair came in to ask if there was anything else needed. Her features worked strangely as she took in the scene, but when she met my eyes, her own at once became blank, as if she had determined that never again should I glimpse what had been uncovered by that wild, unrecognisable creature on the stairs. That woman, she seemed to be telling me, did not exist. I had imagined her.
But this day, like yesterday, had contained too much, had had too many encounters. Angus Macdonald’s eyes were on me sharply, and each move I made on the board scrutinised for what it told him. Did I play an attacking game, or a defensive one? Would I attempt to lure him into a gambit, sacrificing a Pawn or even a more important piece to trap him? Had I got the nerve for it? That night, I had not. I played badly, weakly, not anticipating even the ordinary moves I knew by heart, letting myself fall into too obvious traps he set for me. But there was too much else in my head, and emotions do not make good pieces on a chessboard. The old man won too easily; I thought I saw a dawning contempt in his eyes, disappointment, too. He was not even suspicious that I might have allowed him to win in order to flatter him. If I had, I would have been more skilful about it.
After he had won the second game I didn’t wait for him to dismiss me. ‘I’ll go up now, Grandfather. I’m tired.’ If it sounded like an excuse, I didn’t care.
It was not chill as it had been the night before, but I set a match to the fire laid ready in my room, just for the pleasure of seeing that room glow with its light as the light outside began to fade. I sat for a while beside it, slumped on the bench, unwilling to begin the effort of washing and making ready for bed. My thoughts flickered erratically like the flames; the names I spoke to myself were William’s, and Gavin Campbell’s ‒ and Callum Sinclair’s.
Then I heard it, clearer this night because it was unmuffled by rain or mist. I went to the window at once, and they were there again, that odd quartet ‒ the pony too short for the man’s long legs, the dog, sleek to-day, his coat free of mud, the unblinking falcon on the raised gloved hand. The man must have seen the smoke rise from this tower chimney, but not by the slightest movement that I could detect did he acknowledge my presence at the window. Pride could not keep me from standing there, hoping, waiting for a turn of his head, the faintest nod. Callum Sinclair gave none. I watched him out of sight. To-night there was a difference. I had believed, yesterday, that he shared my sense of loneliness, and I had experienced a kindred feeling with him. Now I knew that Callum Sinclair would admit to no such thing. If he were lonely he would not recognise such an emotion. If he were lonely it was a state he had dwelt in so long that he would not be aware of its existence. He seemed to want nothing ‒ and no one.
I went then, back to look at the scroll again. I would not forget it, must not. I would not let them lull me here into forgetting why I had come. That strange woman, Mairi Sinclair, was the mother of a strange son, and the fevered words on William’s scroll might well have truth in them. The slow fire of my anger and grief was kindled again, and now there was a kind of jealousy as well ‒ of Gavin Campbell’s wife. William had not told me. Of all the omissions of his letters, it was this I found hardest to accept.
III
When Morag came to tell me that she had come, I could see the curiosity alive in the girl’s face, the faint apricot blush staining her cheeks, and the shining red curls almost crackling with excitement at the uniqueness of the happening.
‘It’s herself! Lady Campbell has come to call!’
I rose from the desk in the tower room where I had been trying to write a letter to Peking. It was a morning of discontent ‒ the sun strong and golden, but in this whole lovely world I surveyed from these windows there seemed no place I could say was my own to venture. The distillery was my grandfather’s and Callum Sinclair’s, the garden belonged to his mother ‒ beyond was Bal
lochtorra and the kirkyard, but that was where I did not want to go again so soon. The fields and the pastures were beautiful in the morning light, but a kind of tiredness of spirit was on me. They would all wait.
A Falcon for a Queen Page 12