I slid down off the saddle, and looked at my gift horse. She returned my look, and then she slowly turned her head towards the stable, as if she knew exactly where she would be housed, and how plentiful the oats would be ‒ a broad, inelegant-looking creature whose presence here spoke for him what my grandfather would not say. She would carry me well and safely, knowing this whole countryside; there would be no repetition of what had befallen William. Ailis was to be my companion and my guide.
So I led her to her box, and the stableman, John Farquharson, came to help me unsaddle, and showed me which pegs in the tackroom would be for Ailis’s harness. He helped me rub her down, and water and feed her, and he evidently enjoyed working with that comfortable, plump little creature. ‘Aye she’s a fine wee lass,’ he said. ‘A nice change, mistress, from the big lads I’m dealing with all the time.’ He nodded towards the stalls of the huge Clydesdales that pulled the distillery drays loaded with the whisky casks to the rail-head at Ballinaclash ‒ and to the empty boxes of the farm work-horses, those that pulled the plough, and the grain wagons at the harvest. There was only one other animal in the stable at Cluain ‒ ‘The Sunday Lad’ he was jokingly called, an undistinguished-looking horse which drew the hooded trap when Angus Macdonald left his farm. The stable and smithy’s shop reflected the house. Everything that was necessary was there, all clean, oiled, painted, well-fed, well cared for. The Clydesdales were magnificent in their strength; The Sunday Lad would never be given a second glance, nor would the trap he pulled. They were decent, and more than adequate for their purpose, but they would rouse no envy in anyone’s heart. It was precisely that effect that my grandfather sought. ‘It’s a fool,’ he once said to me, ‘who shows the world all he’s got. There’s just that much more they will want to take from him.’ So in this age of display, my grandfather drove a modest horse and trap, and there was no way of telling if he could have afforded more.
The Sunday Lad did not so often come out on Sunday. The first Sunday I was there Angus Macdonald made his gesture to the curiosity of the community, and he drove me to the kirk. ‘Och; they’ll want to have their look at you, but they know fine well that your father was an Anglican bishop, and they’ll not be expecting his daughter to be a prop of the Presbyterian establishment. They hold no brief for bishops in Scotland, you know. It’s for the sake of your mother, and for your brother lying there in the kirkyard that you must occasionally show yourself. Myself, I’ve little time for the kirk. I would not say I was not a God-fearing man, but I’m not in agreement with the kind of God I get served up by this minister, and his sermons are too long, by a long way. And then, I’ve reason to remember that the ministers of the church were often on the side of the lairds during the years of the Highland clearances, when the landlords wanted the people out, and the whole country turned into a sheep-walk. Too few of them stood by their human flock, and too many instructed them that it was God’s will that they obey their lairds, and remove themselves from the straths where their families and clans had lived for hundreds of years. They sent those poor bewildered creatures off on those rotten hulks to die of cholera and typhoid on the way to Canada, and they sent them with a sermon, saying it was God’s will. And the people were meek, and obeyed, because it had always been the clan system to obey the chieftain. But I cannot forgive the men who helped make it easy for the lairds.’
‘Your father was a laird.’
‘Aye, he was that. The laird of a poor, small little island and he owed allegiance to the Clanranald chief. The people left Inishfare because the land could not support their numbers. It was not the sheep that drove them out, but the potato famines, and the poorness of the soil. It needed no minister to tell them to go. We were so small we had no minister of our own ‒ just one who was rowed to us a few times a year for marryings, and christenings, and churchings, and such. Our dead we buried ourselves, and said the prayers over them, and the minister added his bit when he chose to come. But we mostly lived without him, and were not the less godly for it.’
‘So you have one more reason not to care for my father.’
‘Aye ‒ you might say that,’ he admitted calmly, as if his judgement could not be questioned. ‘They’re all cut from the same cloth, whatever kind of God they say they represent. I never saw a starving clergyman yet.’
And I would hotly deny that, and tell him of my father’s labour in China ‒ the burning heat of summer, the bitter cold of the winters when he worked among the poor, and was ill among them, and often received no respect or thanks for his pains. But my grandfather took no notice. ‘More fool he, then. If they laughed at his Christian God, then he would have done better to expend his labours elsewhere. There’s enough lying in ignorance and want in the slums of Glasgow without wasting men among the heathen and “rice Christians”.’ And I never found an answer to that.
So I was presented for all to look at in the kirk of Ballochtorra. Mairi Sinclair, as Lady Campbell had predicted, declined to ride with us in the trap, nor had my grandfather even invited her. ‘She’s already more than half-way there,’ he said, when the trap was brought to the front door, and I murmured her name. ‘In the winter snows, and the hot summer mornings, she’s the first in kirk, and the first to leave, and no thank you to man nor beast for carrying her there. Leave it alone, Gurrl.’
We did, and I was embarrassed to find myself in the front pew, opposite Margaret Campbell and Jamie. Jamie waved, and smiled at me, and the minister frowned at him; Margaret Campbell turned at Jamie’s nudging and bowed her head, more, I thought, towards Angus Macdonald than myself. My grandfather did not appear to see her. It might have been one of the few times in her life that Margaret Campbell had had the experience of not being seen.
And Gavin Campbell was in the organ loft, playing the simple hymn tunes on the organ far too powerful for them. As I listened to the homily, I understood better why he preferred to be there, and not in the front pew. But it was over at last, and the congregation had their chance to examine me in detail. There was a rather frigid handshake from the minister, and a moment’s conversation with Margaret Campbell and Jamie as they waited for Gavin to come down from the organ loft. It seemed to me that he made an unnecessary delay. My grandfather did nothing more than remove his hat while Margaret Campbell spoke. He nodded to her, and made his way down the path to where he had tied The Sunday Lad, and I was up on the seat beside him before Gavin Campbell made his appearance.
About half a mile along the road we came abreast of Mairi Sinclair. My grandfather did not even check the pace of The Sunday Lad as he went by! By the barest tip of his fingers to his hat he acknowledged her presence, the tall slender black figure wrapped in the red Sinclair plaid. ‘Nay, Gurrl,’ he said to me, as I laid my hand upon his arm. ‘Leave it … leave it be.’
I ventured then one of my few questions. ‘Does Callum Sinclair come to kirk?’
‘Callum Sinclair?’ My grandfather flicked the reins lightly over The Sunday Lad. What should I know of what Callum Sinclair does or does not do? It is not my business ‒ nor yours, either.’
It was my grandfather’s gift of Ailis which made me much freer in the world of Cluain. The sturdy little creature carried me over the miles of ground my own legs could never have walked; she would follow without direction trails at which I had hesitated before; with her I reached mountain slopes that seemed impossibly distant, and she was sure-footed as a mule in the steep places of the glens. I cut no very fine figure on her, I knew; I wore the old serge skirt with the Clanranald plaid about my shoulders, or to cover my head when the showers passed over. But I was free ‒ wonderfully free, and the pony seemed to understand my joy in it, and even to share it. She was not quick, but she never seemed to tire, and when I went to her box in the morning she accepted my gift of sugar calmly, and showed no resentment at the sight of the saddle. Perhaps she also enjoyed the lack of routine of our days. When we set out we took whatever direction seemed to offer itself that morning; sometimes I even let her do the ch
oosing, and I think her pride was flattered by this. We became a pair, the garron and I, and it was she who led me to Callum Sinclair.
I saw him very seldom about the distillery yard, and he would pass me with a murmured greeting, tossed to me, I sometimes thought, as if I were a child; he never stopped to talk, and I never had an excuse to detain him. I would see him often on the pony, with Giorsal and the dog on the road that led past Cluain and Ballochtorra. Since I did not go to Mairi Sinclair’s kitchen, I never again encountered him there, but occasionally the pony would be tied up in the stableyard, and I would know he was inside. It was hard to imagine that Giorsal accompanied him there, and the dog, but harder to imagine him without them. Did Giorsal perch on the kitchen mantel, and the dog lie before the range? Did he come as a duty to see his mother? ‒ or to eat, as so many seemed to do, at that table? He would not be the only one to leave Cluain’s kitchen with fresh-baked bread, and slices of ham. My grandfather must have known that no one of the many who came to consult Mairi Sinclair went away empty-handed, and he did nothing to prevent it. All that would have been settled between them long ago. Mairi Sinclair scorned to hide the giving, perhaps taking quite literally the biblical injunction to heal the sick and feed the hungry. But her son did not linger very long in the kitchen of Cluain; he was like his falcon, bound by the long red streamers, but impatient to be free.
After a time I had to acknowledge to myself that I was indeed searching for Callum Sinclair on those journeys with Ailis. I knew now that it was his small house, set off by itself, that I had discovered on one of my first walks. Shamelessly now, I turned Ailis’s head in that direction. For almost two weeks I went that way, and always the door of the cottage stood closed, and I heard no movement of the pony in the stable; when I was early enough the chimney still smoked from the morning’s fire, but the silence over the place was absolute.
And then the morning came when I rode that way early enough to hear the ring of the axe right across the strath. He was engrossed enough at the work that he didn’t even hear our approach ‒ only the dog set up a fierce barking, and he turned and looked towards us as we came up the track by the burn. He stood, then, resting on the axe beside the pile of timber he was splitting, breathing heavily, and with a gesture motioning the dog to silence. I faced him across the rushing water.
‘Well ‒ aren’t you going to ask me in?’
For a moment he didn’t move. Then with a slight shrug he came and opened the gate, and Ailis moved through the water on her own accord. ‘If it amuses you.’
‘Amuses me? Why should it amuse me?’
‘Well ‒ aren’t you paying a call on the tenantry? I expect you any moment to commend my honest toil. Or have you come with a message from Angus Macdonald telling me I’ve been away from the distillery too long?’
Avoiding his outstretched hand, I slid down off the pony. ‘You know very well I don’t carry messages for my grandfather. Nor would he send me.’
‘You’re right about that ‒ he wouldn’t. Why have you come then ‒ curiosity?’
‘Probably,’ I admitted. ‘You keep to yourself, Callum Sinclair.’
‘And how else could it be? I’m hardly welcome in the front parlour of Cluain.’
‘Have you tried?’ I tossed the words over my shoulder, not giving him time to reply. ‘Well, do you invite me into your parlour? I am curious.’
‘And I’m expected to satisfy your curiosity? A man’s home is his own, you know, and he’s a right to keep to himself if he fancies it.’ Then he shrugged again. ‘Well ‒ why not? You’re here now. And I was just finishing up the wood. It’s time for a cup of tea. You can make it for us while I stack this lot.’
So I entered Callum Sinclair’s house alone. He went back to his log pile, and I was left, again like an inquisitive child, to do as I liked. On the outside it was not like the houses of other distillery workers, which were built of stone and slate, as the warehouses. This was much older. It had probably been here as long as Cluain itself. The thatch was new, and the windows seemed bigger than most ‒ I guessed that Callum had enlarged them. Also missing were the inevitable hens that scratched about the doors of other households. There was a tidy, almost painfully constrained look about the place, as if no one really lived here.
But when I opened the door the kitchen-living-room was more comfortable than I had expected. Callum Sinclair’s hard-boned austerity did not extend too far; I was surprised at the sight of the shabby but still good leather sofa before the fire, the big roll-top desk over against the opposite wall near the window, the bright red curtains and cushions, a fairly new Turkish carpet that covered most of the wooden floor. I didn’t know what I had been expecting; not the bare-earthed poverty of many Highland cottages, but, unconsciously, perhaps, a repetition of Mairi Sinclair’s painfully ordered environment. It was a relief to see an open book flung across the broad arm of the sofa, to see the untidy jumble of them that spilled from the deal shelves running along one wall. There was another open book beside the unwashed breakfast dishes on the big table, and a scatter of crumbs over its surface. I lifted the kettle and put it in place on the range.
‘I didn’t really mean it.’ I turned at the sound of his voice. ‘I am not so inhospitable as you think. I was coming to make it.’
‘You think I don’t know how to?’
He went over to the sink and pumped water to wash his hands. ‘I don’t know what to expect. One doesn’t know much about a bishop’s daughter. Here in Scotland we don’t know much about bishops ‒ we think of them living in palaces, and their families.’
‘Their families have no more money than the diocese can afford. My father’s diocese was thousands of square miles, and his converts so poor he had to try to feed them ‒ with money subscribed in England. There wasn’t much left for himself. The only luxury William ever got was the promise of an education ‒ and he didn’t even have time to finish that.’
‘And you? ‒ what were your luxuries?’ He had dried his hands, and was putting on a tweed jacket. Somehow, here in his own house, he seemed suddenly less withdrawn, less on the defensive ‒ the tweed jacket instead of the sheepskin, the buttoning of his shirt collar, the way he carried the used dishes from the table and swept off the crumbs with a flick of a cloth. He brought fresh cups on a wooden tray to a table near the range, and made the tea with swift, efficient movements. His movements were part of the attraction of the man ‒ nothing wasted, everything quite sure and unhesitating. And when there was no more to do, he was still.
‘Luxuries? I had my father and William. That is more than most have. We were a close family. We had books, and good Chinese food. We had servants ‒ but in China it is impossible not to have servants. I was probably the least fashionably dressed female among the Europeans, but it hardly mattered. My father was often shabby, but no one seemed to mind that.’
He rose and poured the tea. ‘It doesn’t matter with you, either.’ And his eyes took in the old skirt and the muddied boots, the plaid that I was coming to wear as Highland women did, serving as a garment for every purpose. His gaze was quiet and steady; I could take his words to mean what I pleased.
‘Have a scone. They come from Cluain, so I suppose they’re yours.’
I shook my head, and looked at him over the cup. ‘Can’t we stop this nonsense? You’re an educated man, Callum Sinclair. All this game about being subservient at Cluain is unbecoming ‒ worse than that, it’s foolish. Cluain isn’t mine ‒ and you are not a servant. Can we have that settled?’
He actually smiled ‒ a faint motion, like light breaking grudgingly through winter clouds, and then being covered too quickly. Like my grandfather, he didn’t seem to have had much practice in smiling. ‘And you’re no fool. Well, all right ‒ it’s settled. I’ll try to remember. Or at least I’ll try to forget that you’re Angus Macdonald’s granddaughter.’
‘If you feel that way about him, why did you come back to Cluain? There must have been other positions open to you ‒ pl
aces where you wouldn’t have had to …’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Wouldn’t have had to work with my hands? Well, I suppose I could have found something. But that’s just it. I like working with my hands. Most of all, I like being in the country ‒ this country. I’ve known it all my life, and if there’s any place I’ve loved, it’s here. The only way I could have this and my independence as well was to work for Angus Macdonald. I could have worked for another distillery, but Cluain is … different. I thought about Canada or Australia, as so many of we Highlanders are forced to do. I probably would have herded sheep in Australia, or hunted for fur in Canada. Oh, I might have escaped some of the master and servant tradition. But I would not have been in the place I wanted to be. And no man is a servant who does not feel himself to be one. So I have stayed … for one reason or another I have stayed.’
‘You didn’t just stay,’ I pointed out. ‘You came back.’
‘I came back only when Angus Macdonald asked me to. The head stillman was killed when a cask fell off a dray and crushed him. There were others here ‒ but none Angus Macdonald thought would do as well for Cluain as I. Whatever it is that whisky needs ‒ the nose, the eye, the sense ‒ apparently in your grandfather’s opinion I have it. If he could have done without me, he would have. We have no great liking for each other. But he sent for me, and we struck our bargain. I would work whatever hours the distillery required as long as it was required. In the summer I would be free of farm work ‒ I would not harvest his barley, or herd his cattle. As long as the distillery was served, I was my own man. If I choose to work past midnight when we are in production, then it is because I am needed. And I will wade through any snow to get down there by six the next morning. But here, in this house, in the hours and the months that are mine, he has no rights. I do as I please. That is what we agreed. That is how it has been for the past three years.’
‘But can’t be forever.’
A Falcon for a Queen Page 15