‘Then have a care. We’ll not want to send men to be pulling you from the bog.’
‘Will you trust me not to go into a bog? I do not carry a gun, Grandfather, and I cannot be kept on a rein.’
‘I thought women had other things …’
I held out my empty hands. ‘What does Mairi Sinclair leave to me? Would you have me disturb ‒’
‘No ‒ no,’ he said quickly. ‘Do not disturb anything. Go ‒ but go safely.’
He handed me my dram of whisky without question. How good it tasted as it was meant to be drunk, with my stomach rumbling with hunger, and my cheeks flushed from the sharp air and the long walk. I looked up from the fire and found Angus Macdonald’s gaze on me, as if he also knew that I was beginning to feel Cluain’s world. But he said nothing. I knew for a long time it would be something felt, not spoken.
We played chess again. I was tired, and yet stimulated. We played two games, and with the second, I won.
The big eyebrows came closer. ‘Are you fighting, then?’
‘Does one always have to fight?’ The tiredness was swamping in. I didn’t want to have to fence with him.
‘Always,’ he answered. ‘Always.’
The white cat was on the bench before the fire when I went up to the tower room. She raised her pale eyes to me, and then lay blinking in somnolence. Before I was ready for bed, she went and sat by the door, appealing with nothing but her gesture to be let out. The white shape slipped down the stairs. That night I did not even glance up towards Ballochtorra, nor look down into the garden to see if my grandfather’s candle burned. I did not wait for darkness, or the sound of the pony’s hooves on the road. I simply slept.
Chapter Five
The life of Cluain flowed about me, and like a stone in its stream I felt myself rubbed and harried by it, soothed and lulled. The rocks were there, bigger than I, immovable, the weights and counterweights of its whole structure were the customs and habits established over my grandfather’s lifetime, a part of Cluain as he had fashioned it, and as the years had fashioned him. Against these rocks I was sometimes dashed and bruised, but I was part, then, of the flow of its life, and such things were accepted. But I also accepted, gratefully, the soothing regularity of its ways, the sense that I was becoming part of the established pattern. I, too, was being accepted. Not in all ways, not by all those here, not always without reservation, but I began to see, in the manner and the gestures of those about me that perhaps ‒ just perhaps ‒ the time would come when I too would be one of the rocks of Cluain.
The tower room both held me remote from it, and yet let me learn its world. From there I saw much and learned much, and a kind of humility came to me at times, because, in fact, it was all so much more complex than the first superficial glance would have revealed. Slowly, I began to forgive William for what he had not written to me. As I grew more absorbed, the details became more intricate, and how did one write to far-off China of a life like this? ‒ especially if he had begun, as I did, to experience its fascination, and if he had not wanted to tell a waiting father and sister that he might never return to the dream of his Chinese railways. How could we have been told that the focus could have shifted from that huge, still mechanically unconquered land, to this green strath, to the lonely glens, to this seemingly narrow world, where all was already settled in its seasonally rhythmical pattern? No, we would not have understood. We would have thought his vision had shrunk, and been disappointed. And then, perhaps he had never meant it to be so. Perhaps he had not cared even to speak to himself of capitulation, lest it make it too irrevocable. It could not have been easy for a young man to allow his dreams to change shape, to alter, and to admit the dominance of Angus Macdonald. And the predominance of Angus Macdonald was the biggest rock of Cluain’s world.
So I looked from the tower room, and I saw the ways of Cluain. I saw the passage of the days, the times and the events. I saw the milking herd brought in in the early morning, and again in the evening, I saw the changeless, routine work of the farm go on, I saw Mairi Sinclair’s lean body at work in her garden, the white cat skipping beside her, or playing its own game of hide and seek with the butterflies among the herbs. I saw, too, and respected, the thin but never-ending procession of people, mostly women, but with a number of men among them, who came along the back path to the kitchen passage door. I saw them come, the women in plaids, often with babies wrapped within the folds, and I saw them leave. It was a silent procession, hardly in evidence if one went downstairs, but almost always, I saw, there was someone about the place patiently waiting to consult Mairi Sinclair about some ailment, asking for some salve or herbal medicine. There was a special room in which she made these things. Often at night I saw the light from her lamp cast out on the path beside the window. At times I would pass people seated on the bench in the kitchen passage, waiting; we would pass words of greeting, but it was understood that I never asked the reason for the visit. I saw some of them leave, faces lighted a little with relief, or at least a sense of hope imparted. And then I would look at that black-clad figure with new respect, but looking was as far as it went. Never again was there a repetition of that first night’s encounter on the stairs; never again did she unveil the emotions that had distorted her features, nor give that anguished cry. We were acutely aware of each other, and yet our lives hardly seemed to touch. I left her domain entirely to her, did not question or interfere with her routine; I behaved, in that way, entirely as if I were a guest with the freedom of the house, and still respecting the fact that there were places to which I would not presume. And she ‒ she left me strictly alone. We passed no words that were not necessary. I never went to her kitchen; the room where she prepared and stored her herbs was kept locked. I rarely even went to sit in the garden ‒ ‘her garden’ I thought of it as being. Certainly, the few times I was there, she never ventured out. A line of neutrality had been drawn. Some day, if I stayed at Cluain, I knew it must be crossed, but the time was not now.
Morag was our messenger between the two territories. It was she who brought the hot water, the clean towels, my freshly laundered clothes, she who turned down the bed at night, and warmed it with a hot jar; she who fussed over me a little, and asked me questions about China, insatiable to learn of a world she did not know. She had no inhibitions, like Mairi Sinclair, no bitternesses, like my grandfather. She wanted both to learn and to tell. Her tongue rattled on regardless of what her hands did. Without Morag, there was so much of Cluain I might never have known, which would have come to me more slowly. Once as we made my bed together, I commented on the lack of pictures in the house, the absence of ornaments, the little touches that a woman might leave on a house. My mother had grown up here, my grandmother was not so many years dead. Had they lived with this starkness all their lives? And where had the mirror come from that Morag had produced so swiftly that first evening? So far, it was the only one I had seen at Cluain.
‘Och, mistress, come now ‒ I’ll show you. Mistress Sinclair is in the dairy, and will be busy there this next hour. She does not leave it to the woman who comes to help to see that the churns are properly scalded, ready for the new milk …’ And I was following her down the tower steps, unable to resist her beckoning voice.
‘Wait there, mistress ‒ first I must get the keys.’ She was gone before I could stop her, and back again in half a minute. ‘Quickly, now, mistress ‒ I’ll just unlock, and then I must put the keys back. I will lock up again later. Keys have always to be in their place at Cluain.’ She unlocked the door of a room I had never before entered, and rushed down again to replace the keys on the board outside the kitchen door. It was a strange part of the simplicity of the ways of this country. Everything was locked, and yet all keys were displayed where any of those passing could have them to hand. The order was in locking; the trust was in leaving the keys on full view. It was the same with my grandfather, who made a ritual of unlocking the cupboard which contained the whisky each evening with the key from his chain,
and yet he had shown me where the second key lay in an unlocked drawer directly above.
While Morag was gone I opened the door, and it revealed the most unexpected room of all at Cluain. Here was all that I had missed. Here were the pictures, many of them stacked against the walls, here were the little ornaments, some of them valuable, that might have graced the mantels of the rooms below, here were the family portraits, and the little painted miniatures of years ago.
‘It was your grandmother’s bedroom,’ Morag said, coming close behind me. ‘I almost grew up here. She was often ailing ‒ always delicate. She needed things brought to her, and a child is good at fetching and carrying. Och ‒ not that I minded. She was so good to me. Always sweets for me, and explaining whatever it was she was doing. She gave me most of my lessons here. She was a book-reader, your grandmother. The long winter days, when it was too harsh for her to be about, she would be here in bed, with a big fire going, and her books about her, and always an hour or two to spare of teaching me something from them. See, mistress, even the bookcases were brought up here because she did not, in the last years, very often go downstairs.’
Unspeaking, I wandered about. It was a confusion such as no other room at Cluain displayed. The books, yes ‒ the pictures upon the walls. These I understood. But what of this indiscriminate jumbling of ornaments ‒ Meissen bowls and plates, a Prunus vase my mother must have sent from China, silver vases, delft pitchers, engraved glass goblets. So much of this must have been part of the furnishings of Cluain the day Angus Macdonald took title to it. Laid face-down on the writing table were some framed daguerreotypes; when I turned them over I saw faces more familiar than my own was now. These same likenesses had been the only adornments of my father’s study in Peking ‒ the likeness of my mother, with myself as an infant on her knee, William standing by her side; my father as he held his first-born child after the christening, the four of us together after I had been able to stand on my own feet to face the camera. My grandmother must have looked at them often. They had not always lain face-downwards on the table.
I moved along, stopping to lift away from the walls some of the pictures stacked against them. Nothing distinguished, that I could judge, but the ordinary rural scenes that might once have hung on the walls of the rooms below ‒ a portrait or two ‒ which ancestor I didn’t know. There were rolled-up carpets and rugs. There were four mirrors, of various sizes, one of them exquisitely framed in silver-gilt, valuable, and I guessed rare.
I went to one of the two big gable windows. The room was on the south-facing wing of the house, overlooking the herb-garden, and giving a lower, not so awesome view of the Cairngorms as the tower room. It was large and lofty ‒ with the four-poster bed it was quite a grand room, but without the intimidating quality that the tower room could sometimes possess. From here, the sight of Ballochtorra was blotted out.
I turned back from the window. ‘Why this, Morag? Why are all these things here?’
‘It is not so easy to understand, mistress. When Mistress Macdonald died, gradually the things were brought here ‒ the ornaments and pictures and such. Mistress Sinclair said it was for safekeeping. She did not want them broken, or worn out. And the Master, he did not seem to notice, or care. He never comes in here. Mistress Sinclair seems to think it is sinful to have ornaments about ‒ though I think myself there cannot be much sin in a picture or a carpet. But she thinks life should not be too easy. She has her ways, mistress, and a body gets used to them. I tell you, though, I missed your grandmother sorely when she was gone. More than my own mother she was to me. I was ten then ‒ almost eight years ago, it was. But Mistress Sinclair has not been unkind, you understand. She let me have a few little things for my room ‒ a small mirror, some flower pictures. She lets me take one book at a time from the bookcases. But I have read them all now, and I am going through a second time. I have to come here to dust every week, and I think of your grandmother very often … a good lady, she was, Mistress Kirsty, and sad that she never saw Master William or yourself …’
So Morag’s voice ran on, as constant a sound of Cluain as the river, explaining and telling. I stood before the window again, thinking of a different Cluain that my grandmother had presided over, a softer, gentler house. Yes, Morag must miss her, as I would have done. I turned back, and Morag was gone, leaving me alone to look once again at the pictures, to read the titles of the books ‒ the Brontës, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Coleridge. The idealised porcelain figurines of the shepherdesses on the mantel did not represent the real world as Mairi Sinclair had experienced it. And Morag, with her innate sense of tact and discretion, was leaving me to discover this other side of Cluain for myself. After that, I went back to the tower room and unpacked the pictures I had taken from my father’s study ‒ the same ones that lay in my grandmother’s room, and I set them up on the desk. I knew I was staking my first claim on Cluain with that action, and Mairi Sinclair could make what she liked of it.
I continued to walk Cluain’s world, and beyond it. I would follow the tracks wherever they led, sometimes through the gently sloping barley fields, sometimes to the higher meadows where the cattle cropped the summer grass, sometimes going farther into difficult country, rough and steep, where the tracks led to the moors on the slopes of the mountains, and would end in the peat diggings. The rich brown sediment was cut to the depth of several spades, and the water ran from the bog into the channels left by the cuttings; at intervals the peat was stacked to dry, piled neatly on end, waiting to be carted down to Cluain ‒ or to whomever owned the bog. I was not always sure when I went beyond Cluain’s land. Much of the moors, I knew, belonged to Ballochtorra, and so did the belts of forest. I wandered there, and sat on the film of pine needles, listening to the wind in the high branches; occasionally, then, I would catch sight of the red deer which roamed the moors and forests, some of them with their fawns, peacefully grazing, living through the days of their respite, their growing days, before the guns of the autumn would come. And finally I found the courage to explore the craggy area beyond Ballochtorra, the place where my grandfather said William had lain. There were massive outcroppings of granite, and some tall trees clinging precariously to the thin soil, oaks and beeches that had survived the feeling of poorer times when fuel had been short; but mostly here it was slender, dense, second growth, birch and larch and fir which must have seeded themselves, the cover lavish and beautiful in the summer months. And there were places where the rock was so sheer that no cover at all could find a hold there, and birds were its only inhabitants. It would have been from some such ledge that Callum Sinclair had brought down the eyas peregrine he had called Giorsal. There were many places among these rocks where William might have fallen, many places where he might have dragged himself to find a little shelter. I thought of these places whipped by wind and flying snow, as they had been at that time. I did not ask my grandfather the precise place where William had been found; that much I did not want to know.
But Angus Macdonald himself was not unaware of my wanderings. Sometimes I was back to the midday meal after he himself had come in. He never waited the meal for me, nor got up to serve me if I were late.
‘I’m sorry,’ I would apologise. ‘I went farther than I intended.’
‘One day you’ll go too far.’ He nodded towards the sideboard. ‘Your meal is there.’
And the day came when Morag brought the summons from him to come to the stableyard. I found him there, and a man I had never seen before ‒ not one of the farm or distillery workers ‒ who jerked his bonnet towards me. He was holding the bridle of a Highland pony, a grey, plump creature, who looked at me with sure, calm eyes.
‘Think you can ride her, Gurrl?’ my grandfather asked.
‘I can try.’
‘Try her about the yard. See how you suit her.’ It was obvious that he intended the pony to be suited by me, not me by the pony. She was short, and I swung myself up to the side-saddle before either man could extend a hand.
My legs seemed to trail, but she had such a broad back, I felt as if I couldn’t be shaken off my perch. And that awkward-seeming animal had a surprisingly even gait, and a good mouth. She was not nervous, not tense, just knowing. I felt, as I rode about the stableyard, that she would tolerate me, and do her duty by me as long as I treated her with equal respect.
‘She’ll carry you well, mistress,’ the man said. ‘She’s not young, but she’s stronger than many I’ve known, and sure-footed as a goat. She’ll not lead you into any mischief.’
‘What do you call her?’
‘She is called Ailis. But if you ‒ if Mr Macdonald ‒ well, you may call her what you please. She’ll not mind.’
‘She should be called what she’s always been called ‒ Ailis.’ I stroked the grey mane; she stood, quiet and patient, tolerating my long legs, my stranger’s hand. ‘Are you selling her, then?’
‘I must, mistress. My wife and I, we’re bound to Canada ‒ to relatives. Ailis has been with us these thirteen years. We would leave her with a good master in a place she’s used to.’
‘Used to it, she is,’ my grandfather said. ‘She must know every road and track and path in this county ‒ eh, Mr Ross.’
‘All of it, Mr Macdonald. The garron of an exciseman goes everywhere. She’s carried me safe and sound since she was a three-year-old, over every kind of country, and never put a foot wrong. You’ll get no speed from her, mind, but she’s the stamina of a dray-horse, and six times the sense.’
‘Well, then, it’s settled. You’ll take her to the end box, Kirsty, and rub her down, and water and feed her. She’ll be yours to take care of, mind, and I’ll tolerate no neglect … Now, Mr Ross, if you’ll kindly come to the office we’ll finish our business, and you’ll take a dram with me. Duty paid, of course,’ he added, a rare attempt at a joke. The exciseman paused for a moment, laid a hand lingeringly on Ailis, and then moved off.
A Falcon for a Queen Page 14