A Falcon for a Queen

by Catherine Gaskin

  There was other music, and I admitted to myself, by William’s grave, that I also came for that. I was not rewarded as many times as I went, but there must have been times Gavin Campbell was there when I was not. Sometimes I could hear the organ as I drew near the church, and I would just sit by William’s grave and listen, not to the fancied music of the wind, and the birdsongs, but the thunder and the delicacy of the anthems and fugues, the cantatas and chorales which were never heard on a Sunday in that kirk. On occasions I was there some time before I heard the first notes, as if Gavin sat studying and thinking about what he would play. Then once, as I sat in the warm sunshine with my head resting against the rough granite, I must have slept as the soft notes of a piece I had never before heard had drifted into the air. There was a kind of hush that day, no wind, no sound of cattle, hardly a bird anywhere. Gavin’s fingers went back, over and over, one gentle little melodic pattern ‒ trying it at different tempos, with different emphasis. I listened, content; I didn’t mind the repetition. I could hum the notes myself by then. My eyelids dropped, and I slept.

  I woke and he was looking down at me. His face wore an amused expression. ‘I found Ailis distinctly annoyed because she has cropped all the grass within reach. Do you come here often ‒ like this?’

  I wouldn’t tell him how often. ‘Sometimes. I’ve heard you play before. I like it.’

  He squatted down beside me. ‘It puts you to sleep, though.’

  ‘Only to-day. And what’s wrong with falling asleep? For all I know, that might have been a rather special lullaby you were playing. I don’t know anything about music, you know.’

  ‘You don’t have to. It’s enough that you listen. Next time, come up into the choir loft.’

  ‘I like it out here.’

  ‘And I would like you there. I could tell you what I was playing, if it interests you. You wouldn’t have to guess …’

  Next time I heard the organ as I approached the church, and I went directly along the path to the side door. I glanced upward to Gavin’s figure in the choir loft, but I stayed in the back pew of the church where he could not see me. Within the plainness of the Scottish church the grandeur of the music was almost overpowering. No wonder they did not want him to play such things when the congregation was present; the God of that music could be felt to be a God of love as well as vengeance. It would go down ill with the sermon. It had nothing to do with cold virtue for its own sake, or the fires of damnation. It was rich and sumptuous and very human. I crept up the stairs of the organ loft, and folded myself into a corner, well behind Gavin’s vision. But when he was finished he turned to me at once.

  ‘How did you know I was here?’

  ‘I knew. The sound changes.’ He laughed. ‘I always know when I have an audience. Did you like it …?’

  ‘It was wonderful ‒ warm. It didn’t sound like church music.’

  ‘I’m trying to make my own transcription of some of the Verdi Requiem … to give the organ some of the voice parts. The minister wouldn’t approve. An Italian Catholic … Come here now, and sing something for me.’

  ‘Me? Sing with an organ? With you?’

  ‘Why not? You’ve been singing hymns and psalms all your life, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but not … oh, well … I can’t.’

  ‘Come … You know it so well …’ And his fingers moved quickly, adjusting the stops, and the sound that came was soft, like a child’s whisper. Yes, I had been singing it all my life, and perhaps he was thinking of William there in the churchyard, and I absent when he was buried; perhaps he was thinking of my father killed so far away from me, and his body carried back for burial, so that I never saw the face of either of them in death. He repeated the same introduction three times before I was able to open my mouth, but when I did the sound came surprisingly strong, as I had needed the healing grace of it.

  ‘The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want …’

  When it was finished I turned and looked directly at him, and it was then the tears started down my face. He didn’t seem shocked or perturbed; he didn’t even say anything. I just took up the plaid, and went back down the stairs, and closed the side door softly behind me. Ailis stood quietly by the gate, lifting her blunt unaristocratic face to greet me. I slipped up on to her back, and she carried me down the strath at her own unhurried pace. I had long ago stopped weeping by the time we began the steep descent to the Ballochtorra bridge. I felt fresh, like the day, but in some way, older. And just before we passed into the steepness of the glen, looking up, I thought, for a few seconds, that I glimpsed Giorsal’s soaring, gliding flight far above me, the hovering, the downward swoop on the wind. Was it Giorsal, or a strange falcon coming into her territory? Perhaps, finally, a mate for the peregrine, I thought, and Callum might lose her. And then we were too far into the glen, and she was gone.

  I never went to the kirk by arrangement; we left it as it had always been. Sometimes Gavin was there, sometimes not. I would sit in the choir loft, and he would play, explaining a little to me, occasionally coaxing me to sing one of the simple hymn tunes I knew by heart. ‘Here ‒ can you read these notes? ‒ try it!’ I tried more than I meant to, music far above my head. But I enjoyed it. I would leave when I wanted to, and not even say good-bye. But there was one other thing added to the thoughts that flowed through me as I lay waiting for sleep in the tower room, watching the reflections of the firelight on the curving ceiling. It was not so much Gavin himself, but phrases from the music he made, and the feel of it, gentle as the breeze, and then crashing like thunder. When a summer storm swept through the valley, the wind riffling through the ripening barley, I thought of Gavin’s music, and sometimes I wakened sleepily to the thought of it when the first sound of the birds began at dawn.

  And over all of this, of all the things that made up those weeks of the summer at Cluain, there was the image and the presence of Callum Sinclair. More absent than present. Even after the morning when he had shown me the flight of the falcon, when he had said I might come with him and see her leave his hand and go for her prey, still he eluded me. I still had to ride up from Cluain to seek him out, and often I thought he was not over pleased to see me ‒ civil enough, but not encouraging. Many times his cottage was as empty as the first time I saw it; I could never arrange a meeting. I always had to take my chances ‒ and luck wasn’t always with me. It was not pride that kept me from it ‒ I was beginning to believe that possibly I had no pride where Callum Sinclair was concerned; it was the fact that he seemed to sense that I was on the point of asking to meet him, even ride with him on a specific day, and he would somehow manage to cut me off, a kind of freezing static moment when the words would die on my lips. It was almost as if he was trying to stop me from breaking the bounds of pride, as if he tried to avoid for me the humiliation of a refusal. I encountered him sometimes about the distillery ‒ he would appear there without notice, and some repair or maintenance work would go ahead; my grandfather did not summon him, because that was their agreement, and it seemed that Callum filled his duties, and Angus Macdonald had no legitimate cause for complaint; at these times, crossing the yard, or at the stables, he spoke to me as if I were a virtual stranger, always polite, and apparently quite indifferent. I wondered if he knew the hurt it caused, or was he more concerned to save my face before those that watched me.

  I could not reconcile that creature with the man who sometimes consented to take me out riding with him in the hills, letting me follow where he led, Giorsal on his hand, the dog at his heels. I thought wryly at times that I was almost like the dog, happy when he would even look in my direction, and having to accept it when he would not. Like a dog I waited for him, I waited for a nod, a gesture, a word. At times I could not believe it was I, Kirsty, who acted this way; no pride, no independence ‒ no shame, even. All he had to do was lift his hand, and I was there. I had been far more easily tamed than his falcon, and perhaps he valued me that much the less because of it.

  He had promised
me long treks when he had agreed that I might watch the hawk hunting, and they were long. There were those mornings, too few, when I appeared at the cottage on Ailis, and Callum, looking at the sky, would nod and make a motion towards the stable. ‘I don’t think we’ll have much rain, if any ‒ you won’t get too wet. And the wind isn’t too high. You can ride with us, if you want.’

  I didn’t try to keep the pleasure out of my face; I would never be good at lying to Callum. ‘Yes … please. Does it matter about the wind?’

  He shrugged. ‘I suppose it doesn’t. But I get a little nervous when the wind is high. Even after all this time I can still hardly believe that Giorsal will come back to me. If the wind is strong she may not want to turn and beat back against it ‒ she may just feel like flying on and on with it ‒ letting it carry her. A free creature like that ‒ cousin to an eagle. Who can really expect her to come to a lure, to return always to the glove?’

  ‘It is the hand that feeds her.’

  ‘Giorsal can feed herself. And do we always love the hand that feeds us?’

  ‘No ‒ not always.’

  He took food with him on these treks, enough for both of us. Once, recklessly, I followed him so far on to the moors that I knew I could never be back at Cluain in time for the midday meal. I didn’t care. I would risk anything my grandfather had to say for the fierce joy of sitting beside Callum in the damp heather, and eating the rough pieces of bread, the cheese and apples and sharing the flask of ale he carried in the pouch he wore at his waist. That morning, dismounted and waiting, we had watched the supreme moment of the peregrine’s life; we had watched Callum’s setter, Dougal, among the heather, suddenly ‘on the point’, motionless. The hawk, at a great height above, ‘waiting on’, in Callum’s phrase. A step forward from Callum, a rush of wings, a shout of ‘Hoo… hoo’ Giorsal did not choose the grouse that was immediately under her, nor the youngest and weakest. The leader of the covey was her prey. She was a swift blue-black cloud across the sky; we had the brief instant glimpse of her turning upside down with the deadly talons stretched ‒ a miss, as the two birds battled for position. Then Giorsal was above, in pursuit for only seconds more. The talons struck from above now, and the spinal cord was severed in that instant. There was a small puff of feathers in the air. The grouse dropped, and on Callum’s command, his setter held back.

  ‘It is Giorsal’s kill,’ he said. ‘I do not often use Dougal to retrieve. Just to flush the game from cover.’

  I was wild with the excitement of it, and yet an innate caution made me wonder.

  ‘Aren’t we on Ballochtorra’s land?’

  He hardly bothered to look at me. ‘Of course it’s Ballochtorra’s land ‒ if that matters. What are you afraid of ‒ gamekeepers? Do you see a gun? Do you see me carrying home a grouse for my supper? It is Giorsal’s kill ‒ she will preen and eat it. Show me the gamekeeper on earth who can prevent a bird from taking its natural prey ‒ or fine it, or put it in prison. It might be Gavin Campbell’s land, but he doesn’t own Giorsal.’

  ‘No one owns Giorsal,’ I said quietly.

  Now his gaze had more awareness of me in it. ‘You are right. No one owns Giorsal.’

  She brought her prey to Callum as a kind of token signal, but they both understood the game was hers. She withdrew to clean and eat it, and afterwards, Callum said, she would be full and sleepy, and readily come back to the glove, and go home to her perch at the cottage. As we ate our bread and cheese we talked. ‘It’s when she’s failed to kill that I have to be certain to have something on hand for her to lure her back ‒ a fresh-killed pigeon or rabbit. I cannot leave her hungry, or she may leave me.’

  ‘And yet ‒ the hand that feeds us …’ I reminded him.

  ‘She is gracious enough not to mind my hand when she is hungry. She has all the charm of the wild who have been tamed. No one can ever be quite certain of them. Shakespeare says it through Petruchio as he tames his wife … “My falcon now is sharp and passing empty, And till she stoop, she must not be full-gorg’d, For then she never looks upon her lure.” ’

  ‘How well do you know Shakespeare?’ I was thinking that of all those I had known, only my father had quoted a writer with such ease.

  ‘Passingly.’ He shrugged. ‘They tried to din a bit into our thick heads in that place my mother sent me. We Scots make a fetish of grabbing at any bit of learning that comes our way. In a land so poor, all we’ve had to live on is our wits. Brain and muscle have been our largest export. So I, like most others, took what I could when it was offered. It was worth it for some things, not for others. They did not teach me, for one thing, to be a distiller ‒ nor a falconer. For that, I had to do for myself.’

  ‘You could be so many things, Callum,’ I said. ‘It should be you who sits with my grandfather in the room when he talks about the merits of each distilling, each year of the whisky. And yet you choose not to ‒ deliberately, it seems to me. You will not put yourself out to please my grandfather in the least way. And yet you might do so well for yourself if you did.’ I knew at that moment what I was urging on him, and why.

  ‘Perhaps it is the last freedom a man has left ‒ to be what he wants, and do what he wants.’

  I tried to let it go. ‘And wear what he wants?’ I said lightly. ‘You are the only man I have seen hereabouts who wears the kilt constantly, and that pouch.’

  He laughed. ‘Wait until the shooting season starts. You’ll see them all out, fancier than a lot of peacocks. So you wonder why I wear this ragged old thing? ‒ and it is called a sporran, not a pouch, if you please. Well, let me tell you. The kilt is the best and most comfortable garment ever devised for walking across terrain like this. It does not get wet from brushing the heather, or when you ford a stream, the way trousers do. Until you have felt the friction of the wool swinging against your thighs, you can’t know how warm it keeps you when the mist is rising. It is not like a long skirt on a woman ‒ it gives warmth without hampering and dragging. In the old days, when all the Highlander had was his kilt, it was a single long run of cloth, woven by his mother or his wife, and he gathered it about his waist with a belt, and draped the end over his shoulders to keep off the weather. When he lay down at night, in his nakedness, he wrapped himself in it, feet to the fire. He had to be inventive, and thrifty in all things, even the clothes he wore. There were some clans, when they were charging into battle, who even stripped off their shirts for better freedom to swing the claymores. Well that …’ He suddenly plucked savagely at the heather, ‘is all finished. We were beaten ‒ all of us, even those Highlanders who fought on Butcher Cumberland’s side, at the battle of Culloden. That was the end of the Highlander. It was the breaking of the clans. Now we are a picture postcard. If I seem to dress like some sorry remnant from a Walter Scott novel, it’s not because I admire the man’s books. It’s because the kilt is still the most practical and comfortable garment for the kind of life I live.’

  ‘And how long will you live this life, Callum? The days are passing at Cluain ‒ my grandfather’s days. Will you stay when another man is master here?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t live for the future. At times I believe I have none, and it doesn’t worry me. I let myself see nothing farther than this year, this summer ‒’

  ‘This day?’

  He was sitting with his weight balanced on one arm, staring away from me to the place where Giorsal had withdrawn to eat her kill; so he was unprepared, and he fell sideways when I jerked quickly on his arm. He fell against me, as I had intended, and we crashed down into the heather, his body against mine. I put my arms about his neck and my lips found his.

  ‘This day, Callum … this day!’

  For an instant he responded; his body relaxed against mine, and his kiss answered mine. I could feel the communication between us as a living thing. I swear it was there ‒ yes, I swear it. It was not only my longing fancy. For an instant, an unforgotten instant, he was mine. And then it was over. He straightened, and broke from my grasp, hi
s face contorted with a kind of anguished shame.

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  I was in no hurry to get up. I felt no shame for myself. I had simply offered and given what I thought his stiff pride would never allow him to take. I wanted Callum Sinclair, and he must be made to know it.

  ‘Why not? Do I have to sit beside you, ride beside you, do anything with you and pretend I don’t want to kiss you ‒ don’t want you to kiss me. Well, I do!’ I was getting to my feet now, standing to face him. ‘And I want more than that. I want you to love me. And if you think that no well-brought up young woman ever says that, then you’ve still a lot to learn, for all your learning.’

  I was looking into his face as I spoke, and in those seconds a terrible fear grew in me. There was no way to describe how I felt, or what it was that I sensed. It had no basis in reason. All at once I knew what I could not put words to. There was some kind of darkness between us, that found in me the mirror of what I saw in his features, the horrible, contorted agony of a man which had nothing to do with shame. This was something far more, and I did not know or understand it.