‘I will have to try. I don’t know how to manage any other way.’
But they cut; Callum had kept the leather oiled and supple. First the bewits that held the bells ‒ a little tinkling sound as the one attached to the left leg hit the ground. The second was difficult, because it was on the leg with which Giorsal was gripping the meat. But finally I had manoeuvred the scissors between her leg and the leather, and cut through. The second bell hit the ground, and rolled among some stones. She ceased eating on hearing the noise. She stayed for a long minute, looking down and around her. Then she turned to the meat again. This time I went to the upraised leg first; if I could cut the jess off that without alarming her, the task was almost done. She stopped eating again, and looked around at me, cocking her head, and swivelling to try to understand this strange new thing that was happening. But I had reached in clean and near to the leg, and the whole jess fell away. The second one was simple. Giorsal was still holding up her leg, with claws extended, seeing its odd nakedness, without bell or jess, when I reached and cut near the second leg, the one with which she gripped my fist.
‘Good-bye, Giorsal …’ I lifted my arm with the motion I had seen Callum use when he cast her off. She lifted her wings, and momentarily hovered, the wings brushing my face, as if she did not quite know what to do with this freedom. Where were the long streamers which had been her shadow from her first year of life? ‒ where was the sound of the bells? But finally the sense of joy gained in her, and she was up, rising quite slowly, trying her wings. She circled the clearing a few times, as though making up her mind in which direction she would fly first. There would be no need for her to hunt to-day. She would soar, and float and stoop, making mock passes at the birds of passage, pretending, playing. Then she would bathe, and preen, and dry. And to-morrow, when she felt hunger, she would kill, and she would be on her own, and free.
But in case she did not kill, I would come back for three days and leave fresh pigeons for her here in the clearing, on the block. She would not so soon forget where her shelter was, where she had returned each time from hunting with Callum. By then, she would either have adapted to the wild state, or she would have failed, and she would die. But better to die out here, in the country she loved, in her own element, than live her days, hooded, in a darkened shed, on a perch. No one but Callum could have cared for her properly; none would now try.
She rose a little higher above the trees of the clearing, above the high rocks behind it, as if to take her bearings, to remind herself of the lay of her territory. She hovered a little there, and all at once she came down. Just in time, as she came at me, I raised the gloved hand. There she clung, perhaps three seconds, perhaps five, wings still outstretched, her black eyes boring into mine. And then she was off, swift and high this time, higher and higher, up and off along the wind, tearing down the glen towards the crag of Ballochtorra, where she had been born.
I dropped my hand. She was gone ‒ that most beautiful of birds in flight, that graceful, swooping creature, that shadow of death to the other birds of the strath ‒ she was gone. But she had returned, once, for those magical seconds, to my hand, bestowing the gift of her freedom upon me. I knew then, fully, the joy Callum had had in her. I was truly melded with him, for just this one time.
This, rather than his burial, was our real parting. ‘Goodbye.’
I picked up the cut jesses, the bewits, the little tinkling Indian bells. I couldn’t make myself go into the cottage to leave them, so I put them in the pouch. They would go back to Cluain with me. They would join William’s scroll in the leather trunk that had come from China ‒ one which I would seldom open.
It was then his figure came from the shadow of the trees near the burn. He did not look at all like Callum, and yet an odd resemblance was there in his figure, his bearing. I had not seemed to notice before how tall he was. He wore the green Cawdor kilt and stockings, a hazy green tweed jacket that seemed to fade into his background. But there was the blond hair, streaked lighter in parts, from going without a hat, and the strangely brilliant blue eyes. No, Gavin did not look like Callum, except in the familiarity of the way he moved about this terrain, the long easy stride of the hill walker, the economy of movement, the quietness.
‘She paid you the supreme compliment, didn’t she, Kirsty? ‒ Callum’s peregrine ‒ to come back to your hand.’
‘I have been feeding her …’
‘That is not everything. I held my breath when she came back. No jesses ‒ no bells. A free creature.’
‘She had to be j free. There is no one else who could manage her. And it is right that she be free. Callum could never bear to be tied. I know I did what he wanted.’
‘You did it magnificently.’
‘I was frightened. I was afraid I would bungle it. If the jesses had stayed on, she would have tangled in some tree, and probably hung head down until she died. I could never have forgiven myself for that.’
‘But you did it! ‒ and she is free.’ He moved closer. I noticed now his pony tethered on the other side of the burn. ‘I called at Cluain, and Mairi Sinclair told me you had come up here. It is unlike her to part with such information. She keeps such a close mouth, always.’
I drew off the glove, and I couldn’t help the sigh that came. Was it fatigue after the strain of the effort, the fear? ‒ was it the sadness in the knowledge that both Giorsal and Callum were finally gone?
‘None of us is unchanged by these last days, Gavin. Perhaps she had kept a close mouth all these years because of Callum. Now everyone knows he was my grandfather’s son. There is less reason for silence at Cluain now ‒ and yet, how silent it is. How unnervingly silent! So quiet that I hear a kind of creaking inside of me. I wonder if it is fear, or loneliness ‒ or what. There is so much to do. And so much I know I did not do in the past, so much I misjudged. Will I do it again?’
He put his hand oh my shoulder. ‘Hush, Kirsty, hush … Weep when you must, but do not weep for anything you have done.’
‘I loved him ‒ I loved Callum. And I should not have.’
‘No love is ever wasted ‒ or lost. I have to keep telling myself that too. I have to keep asking myself where I misjudged, where I failed her. But Callum loved you, Kirsty. As his falcon did ‒ in the way that a creature, a near-wild creature, sometimes does. The falcon came back to your hand, Kirsty. Never forget it. It was as if Callum, in the only way he could, was back with you ‒ for that instant. No one should forget such things. And no love should ever be forgotten, no matter what went wrong. It is precious ‒ beyond price.’
His tone was soft as he went on. ‘How does that falconer’s rule go … something about an eagle for an emperor, a falcon for a queen ‒’
‘A king,’ I corrected him.
‘A falcon for a queen, Kirsty. And a queen you are ‒ this territory is yours, just as surely as it is the falcon’s. There are those who in nature are noble ‒ you, and the falcon. Not made for mean or small things. They only know great joys and loves ‒ great griefs. When they fly, they fly high and sure and swift. When they fall, they don’t stumble, they crash. If they should fall, it is the end ‒ and they accept it. You and the falcon, Kirsty. I can never forget that sight …’
I brought Ailis from the stable, and Gavin and I started down the track. It was wild and lovely, as were the high moors and the deeply shadowed glens, and I would miss them. But the girl who had ridden Ailis through all the valley this summer was gone; she had vanished with the fire, and the flight of the falcon. What woman would come to take her place I was not quite sure; a woman of affairs, who would run Cluain as I had promised it would be run, a woman who must now grow larger in spirit, in heart, so that there was not only room for Callum, and William, and ‒ yes, Angus Macdonald ‒ but for the others who would come to join them.
I looked back at Gavin. ‘Tell Jamie I have a gift for him.’
‘What is it?’
‘I am giving him Ailis.’
I was glad he made no protest.
Instead he came forward and our two ponies stood side by side. ‘Ailis will be the most precious thing Jamie will ever possess.’ Then his hand sought mine ‒ momentarily, a touch only. ‘And me, Kirsty ‒ will there ever be anything for me?’
I looked, not at Gavin, but upwards, my eyes reaching up, searching for Giorsal; but I got no sight of her. I turned and looked back. The clouds had lifted higher with the wind, and on the highest, furthest fold of the Cairngorms that I could see, what had fallen as rain in the glen the night before, up there lay in a glistening white band, the first snow of the coming winter.
‘Who knows? Perhaps in time … in time …’
Epilogue
So it was that the lands of Cluain and Ballochtorra were joined again through Gavin and myself. That old man, dying so slowly in Edinburgh, finally lost his hold on life, and when King Edward VII was crowned, it was I, not Margaret, who had the right to be seated in Westminster Abbey and wear a marchioness’s coronet. But Gavin and I were not there; Gavin had never formally taken his seat in the House of Lords, and we had no notion to spend the money for the extravagance of the robes, and the cost of the journey. Nervously, Samuel Lachlan suggested to Gavin that he might be permitted to pay, but we did not even consider it. There was endless building going on at Cluain, and the debt to repay. There seemed not even time for such a trip, even if we allowed Samuel Lachlan to pay. I think he was disappointed; he had looked forward to the gossip we would bring back. We celebrated Coronation Day with a picnic on the moors, in a place, not high and lonely, but easily accessible to the road. We went there by trap, because Samuel Lachlan could not walk far, and because I was expecting my first child. Only Jamie talked about his memories of the time when the Prince, who was now the King, had visited Ballochtorra.
But as the children came, Jamie still retained his special place with me ‒ as much loved as they, perhaps even more. He was my link back, through Margaret, to William and to Callum. He had always been a child of grace, and he grew into a beautiful young man. We gave him the tower room at Cluain; I had moved from it into my grandmother’s room after Angus Macdonald’s death. I wanted no more of sweeping view of the strath, up to Ballochtorra, down to the river. I think Gavin himself was not unhappy that the other wing of Cluain cut off the sight of Ballochtorra. We both lived with our own ghosts, Gavin and I.
The buildings of Cluain continued, never stopping, never quite ready, it seemed, to take the new season’s production of whisky. Two Excisemen and their families came to take the place of Neil Smith, because we were growing so fast. With the loan only half paid off, Gavin and I contracted another one for a second distillery building, with four pot stills. This meant extra warehousing. ‘Have a care, Kirsty. You will become like James Ferguson,’ Samuel Lachlan said. But he advanced the money, and we continued to repay him, and to pay the interest. And he continued to come to Cluain, more and more frequently, living on to a great age, as I had predicted. He lived to drink up his own special reserve casks of Cluain’s whisky, and the new distilling was a very respectable age before he tasted it. He enjoyed it all, I thought, in his own odd way ‒ the ceaseless activity, the difficulties, the small triumphs. He seemed to enjoy seeing Gavin and me together at Cluain. It was not as peaceful a place as it had been. Young children are noisy, and need room to play, and more servants. Samuel Lachlan didn’t seem to mind. They played about him like puppies, and I never forgot the day, not long after I married, when he came to Cluain dressed in heathery tweed, because Jamie had teased him by saying that only rooks went on the moors in black suits. Samuel Lachlan never went very far on the moors, nor for very long, but he loved Jamie. And Jamie seemed to give back that love, unselfconsciously. Samuel Lachlan came into the golden age of his life, with Cluain, and love and companionship.
Mairi Sinclair remained at Cluain, but she mellowed only slightly with the years, always retaining that awesome dignity and her own austere habits, even as Cluain changed about her, becoming a hard-used, slightly untidy household of books and pictures, music and flowers. But as my children struggled to stand and take their first steps, I noticed it was her skirt they would reach for, her hand they would clutch, as readily as mine. They grew up respecting her, but without fear of her. In unguarded moments, when I saw her eyes upon each of them, it seemed to me that the anguished hunger of her expression was gone. I came to believe that she, too, lived those years with more happiness than she had ever known.
Jamie finally went to school, protestingly, in Edinburgh, and it was at Edinburgh University he got his degree in science. Samuel Lachlan wanted to pay for him to go to Cambridge, and Jamie had refused. ‘Edinburgh’s best,’ he said, with youthful chauvinism, ‘and besides, Cambridge is too far from home.’
He surprised everyone then, with his degree in his hand, by saying that he wanted to stay on at Cluain and work in the distillery. Samuel Lachlan was doubtful. ‘It looks well to have an earl’s name on the letterhead ‒ but we already have a marquis! Can an earl work in the distillery?’
‘I’m a chemist,’ Jamie said, and he went to work. And the distillery workers never called him anything but Master Jamie. ‘Whisky is becoming the world’s drink, Mr Lachlan,’ he had said, so earnestly, as if we were just discovering the brew. ‘I want to be in whisky.’ He worked his full hours in the distillery, and in his spare time he roamed the strath with the pony Samuel Lachlan had given him after Ailis had died, and he fished the river, and hunted the moors. He learned to play the organ from Gavin, competently enough, but without his father’s distinction. Samuel Lachlan paid for the organ repairs, when they became necessary. Samuel used to go to listen to Jamie’s organ lessons with Gavin, and then began to stay to hear Gavin play. It came late to him in life, that discovery of music.
And then Jamie was killed in the Somme offensive in 1916, and there was a grave in Flanders for him, and only a memorial tablet to mark his name in the kirk at Ballochtorra.
After Jamie’s death Samuel Lachlan failed quickly. He loved my children, but he loved none as he had loved Jamie. ‘I am too old,’ he said, as he had said when my grandfather had died. ‘I am too old still to be living, and Jamie was too young to die.’ Watching the grieving of that old man was worse than Gavin’s sadness. I urged him to give up the rooms he clung to in Inverness, his symbol of independence, and come to Cluain. He agreed, after argument, but he did not very long survive Jamie. It was strange to hear his will read, made out so carefully in his lawyer’s language. Gavin and I had worked so hard to repay the debt, and the interest ‒ but that was according to Samuel Lachlan’s principles, and that was what I had promised. His will, the latest one made directly after Jamie was killed, left his entire estate to me. He was buried in the kirkyard of Ballochtorra, and another granite headstone rose there.
No one ever bought Ballochtorra, though the moors were rented each year for the shooting. Gavin made no attempt to keep it in repair. ‘Shall I beggar my children to keep up a front that no one needs?’ he answered Samuel Lachlan’s criticisms of a building falling into ruin. ‘It started as a small fortress-castle. The rest is James Ferguson’s creation. Why should I try to preserve that?’
Gavin had had his own satisfaction in the reclamation of the river meadows beyond the bend of Ballochtorra ‒ meadows where cattle as sleek as any Cluain had ever had now grazed.
So the terraced garden of Ballochtorra blurred over with weeds, and young saplings took hold. The putty in the windows dried out, and the panes fell and crashed; the roof began to let in the snow and rain. The ivy crept in. The rooks nested in all the crannies of its crenellated towers, their raucous cries a part of our lives. Almost every Sunday I walked with Gavin and our children through the kirkyard of Ballochtorra, and I saw the granite headstones, and every spring, when the snows thawed, I went to cut the long grass on those graves, and let the wild flowers reach to the light. And every spring I looked for falcons bringing food to an eyrie on the crag of Ballochtorra. I cherished the thought that Giorsal had found a mate, a
nd had made her nest up there somewhere on the rock shelves near where she had been born; I made myself believe that her descendants came back there to mate and to nest. Sometimes I did see the high, hovering speck of a falcon. And I never forgot that overpowering moment of wonder when one of that kind, a peregrine named Giorsal, had clung, willingly, to my outstretched hand. Gavin was right; one does not forget.
And we did not beggar our children; we did not keep up a front. Perhaps we learned, at last, the true meaning of the Cawdor motto ‒ Be Mindful.
The Property of a Gentleman by Catherine Gaskin
The Property of a Gentleman … a poignant and thrilling tale of intrigue, mystery and romance, set in the dramatic landscape of England’s Lake District. From the internationally bestselling author Catherine Gaskin.
Shortly after her mother’s death in a Swiss plane crash, Jo Roswell is sent from the London auction house where she works to the remote and mysterious Thirlbeck – stately home of the Earl of Askew. Jo’s task is to evaluate the house’s contents for a sale, but she soon finds herself drawn into the complex lives of Thirlbeck’s past and present inhabitants, each with their own secrets and desires.
Robert Birkett, the Earl of Askew, has returned to Thirlbeck after many years abroad. A decorated war hero, he has also spent time in prison after a fatal car accident for which he was blamed. Carlota, the Spanish Condesa, is the Earl’s sophisticated yet possessive companion.
Meanwhile, Nat Birkett, a distant cousin of the earl, is the reluctant heir to Thirlbeck. A local farmer, his passion is for the land rather than titles and possessions. Following his wife’s mysterious demise at Thirlbeck, he is also the single father of two young boys.
George Tolson is Thirlbeck’s brooding keeper, who jealously guards the property from unwelcome strangers. By Tolson’s side is Jessica, his intelligent but fragile granddaughter, who must be protected from herself.
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