A Falcon for a Queen

by Catherine Gaskin

  This I heard, and was told, but the rest was my own, and shared with no one but Mairi Sinclair.

  She came to me as I lingered over my tea at the breakfast table the next morning. Morag had cleared away all the rest of the dishes, poked the fire and laid more peat on it against the dampness of the day, and had retired, unusually silent. I stayed on, wondering how I would fill the hours of this day, and hoping they would be easier than the sleepless hours of the night before. Would I ride to Ballochtorra and see Gavin? I shrank from it. Would I just ride, and hope to weary myself to the point of sleep? But Ailis was not yet well enough. I felt the dry prickle of my eyelids, and longed for them to close, but they would not. I thought of the one person who had locked in her herb room that which could give me sleep, and give me a little surcease from the pain and yet she was the one person I could not bring myself to ask it of.

  But she came herself. She came quietly, and closed the door of the dining-room behind her. Then she moved close to the table, so that her voice was very low when she spoke. I knew where she had been the whole of the night before ‒ Morag had spoken at supper of her having been called to the delivery. The only words I had had from Morag that morning was that the mother was well, and the child strong and healthy, and that Mistress Sinclair had returned just before breakfast and had gone immediately to her tasks at the range. Now I looked at this woman, and wondered if the gauntness of her features was in part due to the many nights she must have spent so, without sleep, and returning at once to her usual tasks. The seamed and cracked hands all at once became a badge of honour.

  ‘Mistress, may I speak with you?’

  Involuntarily, I rose to my feet. The occasion seemed to demand it. ‘What is it, Mistress Sinclair?’

  ‘I spoke with my son this morning, very early. He left this with me.’ She now lifted her hand and held out the leather pouch that I recognised as the one Callum used to carry the meat for Giorsal, ready against the time when the peregrine had failed to kill, and must be lured back to feed.

  ‘Left it? He has gone? Where …?’

  ‘I did not ask. It is his own business. He will be back … naturally, he will come back.’ There was no need for her to say anything else; it seemed inevitable that there must be an Enquiry.

  She fumbled with the pouch nervously, and I knew how she must have hated having to come to speak to me this way. ‘He asks of you, mistress …’

  ‘Yes …?’ I knew I was too eager.

  ‘He asks if you would have the goodness to go and feed the bird. He says the bird knows you, and will take food if you offer it. But you must be careful to wear the gauntlet ‒ there is a second one for the right hand in the shed. And you must not take off the hood.’

  She put the pouch upon the table. ‘It should be fed every day until he returns. But you know this, too. There is no one else, I think, he could ask. No one knows the bird so well ‒ now.’ We both thought of Margaret then, and both recognised the thought. I nodded, and looked away from her, so that she was spared any gesture of thanks. All I heard was the door closing again softly behind her. And then I went and touched the pouch. How well, how cruelly well, Callum knew me, his servant in all but the way I wanted to be.

  The second I opened the door to the hut where Giorsal sat on her long perch she bated off ‒ flying up on the jesses, and screaming at me. I stood very still by the doorway until she calmed down and found her position back on the perch again. It seemed miraculous that she did; if she had not, and had hung upside down on the jesses, I would have had to have taken her in my own hands and lifted her back. When she had ceased screaming, I talked softly to her; she seemed almost to know my voice, though I could hardly believe that. What did I say? ‒ I used her name a great deal, but I know I talked about Callum, about Callum and Margaret. I told her about the baby being born the night before, about Margaret being dead of a broken neck. Mostly I talked about what it is like to love when it is not returned. What does one say to a hawk? ‒ I told her that loving like that was as if she herself could never fly again, as if her beautiful wing feathers, stretching and spreading in confidence were suddenly damaged, and she would plunge to earth. After a while, the hooded head bobbed and nodded to the rhythm of my voice, and I stepped nearer her, and took up the long feather Callum used to stroke her with. I kept on talking as I stroked, and at last she stopped pacing the length of the perch, and stood still, soothed and slightly hypnotised.

  Wearing Callum’s gauntlet was like plunging myself into his being; but it was necessary. I took out pieces of the cut-up meat. At first Giorsal would not leave the perch, but pulled at the meat from her stand there; at last hunger and her sense of confidence overcame the reluctance. She stepped on to the glove, and perched there, tearing away at the meat greedily, waiting impatiently until the next piece was offered between my gloved fingers. It was almost more than my strength to do this ‒ to take the weight of the bird, and the fierce tugging as she tore at her food. The hardest time came when I had to offer her the breast of the grouse which was included in the bag ‒ hawks, I remember Callum saying, had to have some feathers in their diet for cleansing their stomachs. As often as I had watched Callum feed her a plump pigeon on days when it was too windy or wet to fly her, still I never expected to have to make the offering myself. Once through the glove I felt the fierce sharpness of her beak, and the terrible strength of her claws as she sought a tighter grip in order to tear at the bird. Hooded, she seemed frustrated in the business of preening and eating the bird, but I could not remove the hood. She had been trained to eat hooded, and I dared not remove it because I would never have the skill to get it back on. Callum, as always, expected a great deal. Thankfully, at last she finished what was in the bag. When no more food was forthcoming, she reluctantly went back on the perch; I lowered my aching arm.

  I was glad it still rained, and wondered, had it been fine, if Callum would have expected me to attach the jesses to my own fist and carry her to the block by the burn, so that she could bathe and dry off. He would expect anything, I thought ‒ anything but that I lose his falcon. No, I could not risk the block at all, even if Giorsal did without her bathing until Callum returned. I did not know the falconer’s knots. She could be gone in one swift rise, and hooded, dash herself to death against a tree or a rock. No, he could not have meant that. She must stay safely in the hut, and I must go every day to feed her, and clean the tray under the perch. She must stay safely in her calm, dull darkness, and Callum would come back, because, even more than Margaret, who had been his passion and his madness, he loved this bird.

  When it was all over and the door to the hut closed, I leaned against it and found myself trembling with fatigue and fear. But I had held Callum’s falcon upon my hand. The smallest welling of improbable pleasure and hope rose in me.

  II

  It still rained the next day, and when Margaret Campbell was buried those who attended manoeuvred awkwardly with umbrellas, and the slope of the kirkyard was slippery with mud as we made our way from the kirk to the open grave. It was just across the path from where Christina and William lay; it would be the next in the row of shiny marble stones bearing the Campbell name. During the service, at which Gavin had forbidden any music, and for the time he stood by the open grave, almost no one dared to look directly into his face. All the time, in the kirk and in the graveyard, he held Jamie tightly by the hand, even at that grim moment when he had to scatter the customary earth upon the coffin. There were no flowers, except those that Jamie himself carried, the September roses from the garden of Ballochtorra, all of them golden, Margaret’s colour. He simply laid them by the side of the grave, ready to be put in place when the grave should be filled. It was then, for the first time, that he turned his face against his father’s side, and wept. They hurried down the path to the waiting carriage.

  And all the time Gavin did not look right or left, did not seem to see any of the hands of condolence outstretched to him. Neither he nor Jamie wore the customary black, nor
were there black bands on hats or sleeves. He had refused to plume the horses of the hearse in black. There were reports of a terrible explosive scene between Gavin and James Ferguson at this lack of conformity to the ritual that death then demanded. Gavin had refused to see those who came to call at Ballochtorra, and James Ferguson had received them alone in the darkened drawing-room. The day before Margaret was buried the talk was that Gavin had taken Jamie riding all day on the moors, and so had been absent when the carriage had arrived at Ballochtorra bearing the hereditary chief of his clan, the Thane of Cawdor, who had come to offer condolences. It seemed that even James Ferguson was not quite unshaken by this meeting. The scandal of Gavin’s odd behaviour spread.

  I watched those two, Gavin and Jamie, hurry down the path. They went immediately into the carriage, and so had to wait for the unhurrying James Ferguson to join them. It was he who lingered for the handshakes, who replied to the formal phrases. He seemed a curiously shrunken figure, the lines newly graven in the red puffiness of his face. He appeared more nervous than sorrowing, his tongue licking his lips. He tarried too long, and suddenly, to everyone’s shock, Gavin slammed the door of the carriage, and ordered the coachman to start on. This left Ferguson to ride back in the second carriage with his solicitor. It was known that Gavin had issued no invitations to anyone to return to Ballochtorra with him. But James Ferguson flung them about him like seed; anyone of any consequence was welcome at Ballochtorra to eat and have a dram. He could not stop being James Ferguson.

  ‘Let us away then, Kirsty,’ my grandfather murmured close to my ear. We tried to slip past the knot of people at the gate of the kirkyard, but James Ferguson had seen us.

  ‘You’ll come, Macdonald. You’ll come to Ballochtorra.’

  ‘Not this day, Mr Ferguson. My own hearth is close by. I have sent a message to the Master of Ballochtorra of my own and my granddaughter’s sympathy. You have it also.’

  Ferguson turned oddly pale. He came very close to us and his words were intended for my grandfather only, but I heard them.

  ‘Telegraph for Lachlan to come. I will be at Cluain tomorrow morning.’

  My grandfather frowned. ‘This is a strange time for you to be discussing business matters. It should wait …’

  Ferguson licked his lips again. ‘The matter will not wait. It will not wait on anything now.’

  We were silent all the way back to Cluain, the depression of the kirkyard settled on us like the misty rain; it was not a full year yet since my grandfather had stood there by William’s open grave. I shook off my wet coat and hung it in the kitchen passage before I went to the tower room to change into my slippers. The fire was laid, but not lighted. I was tired and cold. I had been up very early to collect the leather pouch which Mairi Sinclair had left ready in the pantry. The walk to Callum’s cottage to feed Giorsal had been hard going in the soft ground. But she had greeted me this time almost without fuss, reacting at once to my voice, eagerly looking for the meat, eating her fill from the pieces held between my gloved fingers with greedy ferocity. I wondered how long she would bear with the silent boredom of the hut, how long she would listen to the cries of other birds about her before she began to scream for the freedom of her own flight, for the joy of her own kill, the function for which she had been created. I almost began to envy the simplicity of the instinct of creatures so sure of what they are intended to be. To have no doubts, no choices … But my father would have rejected such a doctrine, and have opted, always, for the freedom of the soul to bestow love, even to have it rejected, to suffer if one must. Anything, he would have said, than not to feel; and somehow he and Callum would have made strange agreement on this point. And, to grant her the last justice, so must Margaret Campbell.

  My grandfather was waiting in the dining-room for the midday meal, still wearing his Sunday clothes. He looked fidgety, and turned to me with an air of relief when I entered. ‘Well, then ‒ have a dram. It will take the chill off.’

  I accepted it; but the chill of death was something even whisky couldn’t touch, the chill of the look on Gavin’s face, the shiver that had wracked me at the sight of the golden roses lying in the mud and rain. The Inverness paper had arrived. My grandfather did not try to keep it from me. There was a picture of Margaret, blurred, though nothing could really blur those lines of beauty. Baronet’s wife killed in fall from horse. Daughter of James Ferguson … The item was small, and brief and discreet, mentioning that Gavin was the heir to the Marquis of Rossmuir, telling again the story the paper had so recently used of the visit of the Prince of Wales. It said nothing of the scandal or surmise that was already raging in the whole district, and reaching the London papers. How she had died, and where, and who had brought her back to her husband was not mentioned.

  ‘There will be a Fatal Accident Enquiry,’ my grandfather said.

  ‘Yes.’ I did not want to talk about it, but he persisted.

  ‘The post-mortem certificate was that she died of a broken neck from the fall. That much is simple. But I hear that the police have been making enquiries. It seems probable that they will want an Enquiry before a Sheriff … Callum Sinclair will have to appear.’

  ‘Yes.’ He spoke as if he had to be sure I was prepared. It would only become more ugly; they would make it more ugly. They would defile that mountain croft that Callum had kept so clean because he had loved Margaret ‒ and they would defile it with words that must come from Callum’s own lips.

  Chapter Ten

  The next day the clouds scudded past on the rising wind, and after the rain and the mist, I noticed, as I walked up to feed Giorsal, that some of the birches had turned golden, as their leaves shook dry of their moisture. An autumn look had come on the land. Sometimes the sun broke through, reaching into, and suddenly illuminating a deep fold in the mountains, outlining a ridge I had never noticed before. There seemed to be no more guns on the moors; the land was silent, save for the wind.

  And when I came back to Cluain it was almost time for the midday meal, and John was rubbing down The Sunday Lad after the trip to Ballinaclash to fetch Samuel Lachlan; the door of the room he always used at Cluain was open, and, as I passed on the way to the tower room, I saw Morag making up the bed. They anticipated a long session with James Ferguson. And it was a trap from Ballochtorra that I saw tucked away at the side of the stables, out of view of the road. James Ferguson was already with them, then, and did not want his presence advertised to those who might pass.

  And the usual procedure of James Ferguson leaving while my grandfather and Samuel Lachlan ate together was upset. As I was getting ready to go down to the meal Morag appeared in the doorway, with that silent way she had of suddenly being where one did not expect her.

  ‘Excuse me, mistress. The Master is taking his meal with Mr Lachlan and Mr Ferguson, and there is business they have to discuss. Mistress Sinclair has sent me to tell you that there is a tray ready for you in the parlour.’

  ‘The parlour ‒ but I could have eaten in the kitchen.’

  I was following Morag down the stairs, and she turned swiftly and shot a look back at me that seemed almost to pity my simplicity. ‘That would never do, mistress. Mistress Sinclair would never permit it ‒ and the Master would not be pleased.’ And so I was put back in my place, perhaps an unnecessarily exalted place in Morag’s eyes, but nevertheless, my place. And there was the big silver tray laid on the long table in the drawing-room, immaculately set with a snowy linen cloth. I sat in one of the straight-backed Jacobean chairs, and ate mechanically, aware that the walk had made me hungry, but that food, since that moment when Callum had appeared at the door with Margaret’s body cradled in his arms, had seemed to have no taste. This room had a window that looked up the road towards Ballochtorra. I thought about Gavin and Jamie, and I thought about James Ferguson’s presence at Cluain’s table at this time. Something was stirring, and I would only know the nature of it when my grandfather chose to tell me. But it came to me then that, with Margaret dead, Gavin would not
leave the strath. I suddenly knew how it would be. He would take no more money from James Ferguson. If Margaret’s dowry reverted all to her father, or was placed in trust for her son, I knew that it would matter nothing to Gavin. If he had to walk out of Ballochtorra, with Jamie, and toss the keys to James Ferguson, he would do it. I thought of that poor bit of farmland, still undrained, that he had dreamed of that day with me. This might be the way the tenth baronet of Ballochtorra, and heir to the Marquis of Rossmuir, would choose to live, eccentric, and out of his time, but his own man at last, and his son his own.

  The meeting between the three men continued all afternoon. Twice I saw Morag cross the yard to the office with the loaded tea tray, but finally, as the hour for supper drew near, I heard the trap from Ballochtorra being made ready. My grandfather and Samuel Lachlan accompanied Ferguson to the trap; there was still some talk among them, but no handshakes. Ferguson gave an odd backward glance as the trap drove off, but the two men were already deep in talk again, and didn’t even seem to mark his going. There was late sunlight for the few moments it took them to cross the yard to the house; my grandfather’s mane of hair was silvered in it, and stood almost upright in the wind. I noticed then that little piles of leaves had collected in the corners of the usually immaculate yard.

  Downstairs the two men gave me the sudden impression of old age at the end of a long day. They had almost finished their first whisky when I came in, and I thought that it had been mostly drunk in silence, as if each needed the respite. Samuel Lachlan’s black clothes were greenish in the lengthening rays of sun that streamed in the windows; he got to his feet momentarily, and adjusted his glasses on his nose, which, I suppose, was the only sign of pleasure he ever permitted himself. But he said to me what I might have said of him, ‘You look tired, Kirsty.’