‘There is something wrong with a good suit?’ Samuel Lachlan chided me.
‘No ‒ nothing. But everything ‒’ I closed my eyes and there was the vision of a man in a kilt growing frayed at the edge, and sheepskin dark with rain. ‘No, nothing wrong with a good suit ‒ but I cannot marry a good suit.’
‘You’re hasty, lass. You need time to think.’
‘And is there time to think?’ I flung back at him. ‘You tell me it is a matter of days before Ferguson’s position will be known to the shareholders. And in a matter of days I am expected to say I will marry someone I’ve never seen ‒ who has never seen me? Grandfather, did you set me down in the balance sheet of Cluain? I wonder what price I was valued at? Was my stock high or low?’
‘It was never a precise condition … just a suggestion. The young Cameron had heard of you ‒ from others, it seems. Husbands like that are not picked up for the asking. You would show good sense to consider ‒’
‘I’m showing the best sense I’ve ever done in my life. You remember your mother, Christina? Did she marry where she was bidden? Did she found a family, and carry on after her husband was dead? Did she begin a distillery out of nothing, and lose it for no fault of her own? Would you say she lacked the courage of a man ‒ or three men? Did she breed you ‒ from a husband of her own choosing? I tell you I will not be part of the balance sheet. If you make your arrangement with Cameron’s and Macquarie’s, then do it. But count me no part of it. If I have to leave Cluain to-morrow, then I’ll leave. I will not be sold as part of the furnishings. On these terms, I do not want it. I can’t lose what I never had. You can’t take it away from me.’
‘Truly spoken, mistress. Who would have supposed you had such fire in your guts?’
We all turned. As we had talked together the room had grown darker, and there was only the light from the peat logs to glow upon our faces. It had been sufficient; in these last minutes we had not really wanted to look at one another. But now we turned. Morag stood with a candle by the open door, and in silence she moved forward with her graceful gestures, and laid the candle down on the sideboard. Her cap was off. The red hair streamed in its wonderful abundance on her shoulders.
‘How right you are, mistress, to know you cannot lose what was never yours.’
For a moment longer my grandfather was shocked into silence. Then his voice rose with a growl of fury. ‘What do you think you’re about, miss? What kind of business is this?’
‘The business of Cluain, Master. The business of Callum Sinclair.’
‘And how so his business? And what do you know of it?’
‘How would I not know of it? Do you think I am blind and deaf? Have I carried trays to you these past weeks in the office, have I served you here all day with Mr James Ferguson, and not known what was discussed, what was going on? Because women wait on men, Master, it does not mean that they must be stupid. And I would have had to be deaf indeed not to have heard Mistress Kirsty’s fine speech of what she would not do for you. Women continue to surprise you, do they not, Master?’
‘Impertinence, miss! You get above yourself. Where is Mistress Sinclair? Does she not know how to keep order in her kitchen?’
‘Mistress Sinclair has retired to her room, Master. She has had long nights recently, and has need of rest. But she does keep order in her kitchen. I have learned very much from Mistress Sinclair. At this moment I should be washing the dishes in the scullery. There are times, though, that the dishes must wait on other things, and Mistress Sinclair disobeyed. She does not own me, no more than you do.’
My grandfather took a deep breath, as if struggling for patience. It would not have surprised me to see him rise and give Morag a smart clip on the ear. For a second he glanced at me, and then back to Morag. Did he think that some spirit of perverse madness had suddenly possessed all the females of Cluain? What had happened to this well-ordered world? Samuel Lachlan was leaning forward in astonished wonder.
‘You are bold, miss, and you try my temper. What have you come to say ‒ what is all this nonsense about women? And again, what business is it of yours what we discuss here, or in the office? What business?’
‘If you had listened, Master, you would have heard my answer. It is the business of Cluain. And the business of Cluain is Callum Sinclair’s business. Must I say more, Master? Will you put right what should have been put right years ago, or will you have me force your conscience further? Will you open the book yourself, Master? I have waited for this time ‒ for years I have waited. But there was always the grandson. And then he was dead, and there was this girl, your granddaughter. And there is also Callum Sinclair. Will you speak now, Master?’
In the candlelight my grandfather’s face had turned a yellowish colour; it was not fury that he struggled to control now, but an emotion that threatened to make him incoherent. A garbled sound came from his throat. For an instant he clutched at his chest, as if in pain, and then his hand went back to grip the side of the settle. There was no question now that he might rise to strike Morag. I did not think he was capable of moving.
At last his words came, in a kind of gasp.
‘Kirsty ‒ Kirsty, fetch Mistress Sinclair!’
I ran. He seemed to be ill ‒ and yet it was more than that. I had forgotten to bring a candle ‒ the light from the open door reached only half-way up the curve of the staircase. From there I groped and fumbled; in the passage at the top the faint light from the sky helped me. I counted the doors to reach Mairi Sinclair’s and I pounded loudly to waken her.
‘Mistress Sinclair ‒ will you come? My grandfather asks for you to come!’
But she had not been asleep. Almost immediately she flung open the door, and I had a glimpse of a bare, stark room, without comfort. There was a fireplace, but she did not permit herself a fire. A candle burned on a small table, and a single, straight-backed chair was before it. The familiar black book lay open. She wore the same long white nightgown and the plaid in which I had seen her on my first night at Cluain. Her black, silver-streaked hair was loosed, straight, and as shining as Morag’s.
‘The Master is ill?’
‘I ‒ no, I don’t think he’s ill. But he asks you to come ‒ at once.’
Without a word she went to the table and picked up the candle. Shielding it against the draught of her movements she lighted me down the stairs. Then she stood with her plaid tightly drawn across her in the door of the dining-room, unwilling to come farther.
‘Come in, Mistress Sinclair. Sit down.’ She moved farther into the room, but she ignored my grandfather’s motion towards a chair.
‘There is something wrong?’
He gestured helplessly. ‘It concerns you.’
‘It concerns Cluain, Master,’ Morag interjected. ‘And it concerns Callum Sinclair.’ She stood exactly as she had been when I left, facing the two men with no sign of faltering in whatever she had come to do. I had never seen such beauty upon her ‒ the apricot-stained skin, and the glowing eyes. In the deep quiet that attended her words she turned and went then to the table where the big Bible had its place. It had always seemed to me a part of the furnishings of the room, built like the walls themselves, immovable. But Morag lifted it, heavy even for her strong arms, and brought it to the exact centre of the dining table on my side, placing the brassbound edge precisely parallel to the line of the table.
Mairi Sinclair’s face clenched in anger as she observed all this. She made an instinctive movement, which she checked, as if she too longed to strike Morag. ‘How do you dare?’ she demanded of the girl. ‘No one touches that Book!’
‘I dare because you do not dare, Mistress Sinclair. I would dare very much for the sake of Callum Sinclair.’
‘And what have you to do with my son? What has this to do with him?’
‘I make your son my business, mistress, because that is the way I would have it. I must do for him what you have so far failed to do. Have you not waited, also, mistress? Or have the years made you fearful
? Have you stayed silent all this time only to find now that you have no tongue in your head? Have you believed that Cluain must come to him because it is his due ‒ his right? Did you trust the final decency of this old man? ‒ his honesty? Well, I have to tell you, mistress, that there is no honesty in him. He and Mr Lachlan between them are settling the future of Cluain, and your son’s name is not even mentioned.’
Mairi Sinclair looked around all of us slowly. ‘What the Master does is his own affair. It has nothing to do with my son.’
Morag threw back her head with a gesture that set the candle-flames flickering. ‘Fool! You are a fool! This is the time. If you do not speak now it will be gone forever. Demand! It is his! ‒ and they are giving it away! You have allowed yourself to be a servant all your life. But you cannot let that happen to your son, cannot let him be so cheated. How can you have that Heaven you pray for if you have done so ill by your own flesh? I tell you, if Callum Sinclair were not from home I would have him here this moment, and then see if any of you would dare to pass him by! Well, Master, will you speak? Will you open that Book and let all here read, or shall I tell them what I have seen written?’
‘Bitch!’ he said. ‘Trying, deceitful little bitch! How have you read from that Book?’
‘The keys, Master ‒ the precious keys of Cluain. Always kept about your person, and yet trusted to Mistress Sinclair and then to myself because it never seemed to enter your head that I could be other than she. Do you not understand that what is locked must always arouse curiosity? While the Mistress was alive it was never locked. Often in this room, when I was a wee girl, I can remember her opening it. In her failing years she read from it often. I learned some of my letters from that Book. She was very patient with me. I can remember her pointing out where the names of your two grandchildren were recorded. I saw your daughter’s name ‒ the day she was born, the day she married, the day she died. All written there. I could barely understand all those names, but I learned to read them ‒ William and Christina. And then the Mistress died, and the Book was locked. And never opened ‒ never! You do not remember the times, Master, when you were ill, and you sent me to fetch a dram of whisky? And gave me the keys, to be returned to your bedside at once. Did you think I would not remember the brass key with the fancy end to it ‒ I had thought it so beautiful when I was a wee girl, and the Mistress had shown me how cunningly it locked the big Book. Children do not forget secret things. I was fourteen years old when you first trusted me with the keys. No doubt you thought of me as just such another as Mairi Sinclair. But I am not. I saw the little brass key, and I opened the Book, and I looked at the back where the names are written. I held the knowledge to myself, and I waited. Shall I speak now, Master? Is there need to?’
‘No!’ Mairi Sinclair gestured violently towards my grandfather. ‘What have you done? What wrong, foolish thing have you done! I said never ‒ never!’
But he was shaking his head. ‘It was done long ago. The night my wife died and I sat down to record her death, I knew that since I could no longer hurt her, there was something else to be recorded. What I hoped for then, I do not know. I could see the names of my two grandchildren there ‒ but they were far away in China, unknown, perhaps never to be known.’ Before he put his hand in his pocket to bring out the bunch of keys, I saw him again hold his chest. Then he extended the keys to me. There was infinite weariness in the gesture.
‘Here, Kirsty. Open it and read for yourself. We need no more talk from this meddlesome piece here.’
‘Angus …’ Lachlan said.
‘It is done, Samuel. What has been will never be undone. Kirsty will open it.’
I sat down where Morag had placed the Bible. The key was small but easily recognisable by its elaborate design. But the whole bunch was cumbersome, and I fumbled as I tried to insert the small key in the lock. As if she were performing any other service, Morag calmly lighted another candle, and brought it to the other side of the Bible. Then, with a turn, the locked clasp was free.
Morag could not restrain herself. She leaned across me. ‘There, at the end!’ It was her hand that turned the printed pages until the plain ones were reached. ‘You see, it goes far back in the family. It is the Macdonald family Bible, not the Campbells’.’ Her finger traced eagerly the history of a family, written in many hands, over many generations. ‘You see here, how it traces back to Ranald, younger son of John, First Lord of the Isles. The Mistress taught me it all ‒ she was proud of it. How it goes, splitting and splitting, and it grows too wide and far-placed for any to keep account of. So it becomes just this family ‒ the Master’s own family of Macdonald, on Inishfare. It is all set out. Here ‒ his great-grandfather, his grandfather, his own father, his brother ‒ himself. When they were born, when they died. His daughter, born here at Cluain, and her death. Your brother’s birth, in China, and your own, and then recorded last of all, long beyond its time, his own son, the date and birthplace … Cluain.’
The last entry was in my grandfather’s hand. Callum Sinclair Macdonald. And the date of birth given was nearly thirty years ago.
I took my hands slowly off the Book, and looked at my grandfather.
‘It is true?’
He inclined his head. ‘It is true.’
The sickness and the pain were almost beyond bearing. I clamped my lips together so that I would not cry out, but there was no controlling the cold trembling that took possession. I wanted to run from here, and yet my legs would not lift me from the chair. Where could I hide from the gaze of them all? I turned my head from side to side, shaking it like a bewildered animal. The truth of all that I had ever sensed between myself and Callum was now laid cruelly bare, the feeling of something forbidden and dark that had not, could not be, fully comprehended. A blood relationship so close, and yet when I had pulled him down against me in the heather, he had been the sum of all my desires. I had hunted and followed him through the strath all summer. He had tried to shake me away, and he had not succeeded. What perverse blackness had possessed me, like an evil, rank growth. Half-brother to my own mother, and yet I had longed for him as a lover, had schemed and planned for him as a husband. How twisted and perverted could natural desires grow? ‒ and grow from innocence? I had told myself that I could outwait all other loves that possessed him, and I had endured even the knowledge of his love for Margaret. I had said I would be stronger than that knowledge, overlook it, forget it; I knew how to wait. Well, now I knew that the waiting was over ‒ and still it went on. The hunger was there, and must be denied. It would be forever. I had lost, not only my hope of love, but the very right to feel it. It must not be offered; it could never be accepted.
Dumbly I read again those words. Callum Sinclair Macdonald. There was no wiping them out Why was I even surprised to see them? The truth, revealed now, was startlingly plain. Why had I not seen it? I had been blinded because Callum so much resembled Mairi Sinclair. But were not the eyes, and the skin and the hair as much my grandfather’s ‒ and William’s, and my own? When I had looked in the mirror, why had I only seen William’s face, never Callum’s? The blindness of love was infinite.
I found the strength to get to my feet. I could even face them all, and when I looked around I wondered why I should have been so concerned only for myself. Others felt, and they suffered. The impact of those words was visible about me; in those moments Samuel Lachlan had risen and had come to look for himself, because, in fact, no one had actually spoken that name. Now he shuffled back to the settle, and he showed his trembling, as much as I.
For me, then, Samuel spoke. ‘Why did not you tell us, Angus? It would have made a difference.’
‘Would have.’ My grandfather looked about us all. ‘Aye, it might have made a difference if it had been right at the start. But I was a coward then, and I let myself listen to Mairi Sinclair’s words. She would have none of it. She would not have the scandal settle about my wife and daughter. I might never have known, even, that she was with child, if her father had not b
eaten her to the point where the whole strath knew of it, and knew why he had beaten her. She was bent on going away, but my wife insisted on taking in this young girl, and I had not the courage to say what was the truth. Mairi Sinclair threatened then that if I spoke to my wife she would go ‒ she would be off to Glasgow, or some place else, and get work there, and no one would ever hear of her again. Thinking what wrong I had already done her, did I have the right to bring more hardship on her and the child? At least they would be safe and sheltered at Cluain. Then all I could hope for was that the child would be a girl. A girl would have been easier to provide for. But it was a son ‒ my only son ‒ and I could make no claim to him then. Cowardice denied me what I had most wanted in the world.’
For a moment he leaned back and closed his eyes, and there was remembrance of times long past, but always lived with. ‘It happened because I stayed some nights up on the shielings in those years. I could afford less farm help then, and I used to take my turn up there to let one of the older ones come down to his family. Mairi Sinclair was there also. It is to my shame that I allowed myself to do what I did, but I feel no shame, and have never felt shame, in having loved her. It was the only time we were together ‒ that one summer. Since she has been in this house she has lived alone. When my wife died, I asked her to marry me, and thus her son could, by adoption, become my own. But she would have none of it. Some rubbish about refusing to profit from her sin. As if it could be counted profit … So many years had passed. It would have been a marriage in name only, and she refused the falsehood of it, and I had to respect that. And as for sin … she was not guilty, that girl of long ago. Seventeen, she was, and innocent. Intelligent and knowing, far beyond her schooling. Long black hair … She said I had no rights in her life, or her son’s. And I had not. The man who acts as I did, has no rights. He can ask, but he cannot demand.’
A Falcon for a Queen Page 31