The Secret Vanguard

by Michael Innes

  You could not brake these trucks: or only from the line and when they were almost at a standstill. If a train was advancing upon her on this lonely single line it was just bad luck: there seemed nothing whatever to be done. Except jump – in which case she might survive long enough to tell her story: a pretty delirious story it would be taken to be. She might even survive indefinitely in a maimed sort of way. Sheila scrambled to the door and looked out.

  The train was on another line, the main line presumably of which this was a branch. It was a passenger train, travelling in the same direction, faster. And although the lines appeared to converge there was no danger of a collision; the train would always be some way ahead. But it was slowing down; it had stopped; and in the same moment the line on which the truck ran curved, and Sheila saw a station ahead. The train stood puffing by a little platform. Her truck was lolloping up to join it or to trundle alongside. A bit of a bump perhaps, but luck unspeakable nevertheless. She was going to contact the outer world.

  But the train had lingered only seconds in the station; now it was pulling out again. Incredible that the roving truck had been spotted by neither guard nor driver. Incredible that nothing was going to be done. Sheila took the pistol from her pocket, held it out of the door and pulled the trigger. It jerked in her hand, made a sharp report of sorts – but nothing to the point. The train was beyond her reach.

  But there was the little station: a stationmaster perhaps, or people who had got off. And the truck was slowing down again. With luck it would run into a siding. Sheila debated the best way of coping with a severe jolt; she decided to keep away from the sides of the truck, to lie prone and relaxed in the middle.

  The jolt when it came was a splintering crash, but she felt no more than unpleasantly shaken. She was out and on the single platform, looking at a single shed. Again it was no more than a little halt, and it appeared wholly deserted. But a well-made road led away from it and at a quarter of a mile’s distance rose the roofs of a tiny hamlet. She had come out of it all not badly – with unbroken bones and with her enemies miles behind on the other side of that precipitous gorge. Sheila looked in the direction whence she had come. She looked – and felt invisible hands close round her heart. For trundling towards her down the gradient was another truck, the second of the two that had stood in the station up the line. She hadn’t thought of that.

  If possible she must make the hamlet. But what would a Scottish hamlet be against some half dozen armed men? It was something like Edinburgh Castle she wanted now. Or a platoon of Scots Guards.

  Even the hamlet she might not have the chance of gaining. Sheila’s eye went back to her truck and she debated making a stand in it. Surely such trucks – Groping in her pocket, she dropped once more to the line. What she had to do took under a minute; she climbed up again, ran down the platform and round the shed.

  She was not quite alone. Somebody had after all got off the train and was sitting damp and steaming in the fitful sunshine. It was a shabby old man in a Glengarry bonnet, with a fiddle across his knees and a little pile of paper-covered books beside him.

  And Sheila saw that he was blind.

  14: ‘Johnny Cope’

  The old man rose as Sheila ran towards him; he rose and held out the topmost of the pile of books. ‘Poems,’ he cried. ‘The poems of a Moray loon.’ He held the book higher in a trembling hand. ‘A fiddler’s philosophy. One shilling.’

  In less than a minute the pursuing truck would be in the station, and the words were fantastic and remote enough. Nevertheless, Sheila stopped as if conjured: it was like a sudden immemorial spell. Employed to halt and coax amid a bustle of trains and travellers, the voice was vibrant with the skill of the minstrel in arresting the mere violent tumult of the hour: Barons, écoutez-moi, et cessez vos querelles… The spell lasted a second only, but it drove her to speech. ‘I’m hunted by men coming down the line,’ she said rapidly. ‘They mustn’t get me. How big is the village – will there be help there?’

  There was an instant’s silence. The blind fiddler’s head and hands moved irresolutely. It was as if he were feeling his way through some impalpable barrier. He spoke in a new voice. ‘Is it the redcoats?’ he asked. ‘Is it the redcoats that are out and after you, lassie?’

  ‘It’s Germans, fiddler – German spies.’

  His head moved again. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘the redcoats and they of Hanover.’

  The man was crazed. Sheila turned to run on, but as she did so his hand closed fiercely on her arm. ‘Redcoats and Hessians,’ he said: ‘they may go beating wi’ their drums and fifes up an’ doon the Royal Mile, but they’ve sma’ skill on the heather. Dinna gang to the clachan, lassie; keep to the braes.’ He swung her round with a strength that added to the impression of something preternatural in his character; his other hand, wavering and still holding the book, went out before him. ‘Or gang lounlie through the wood.’ His face took on a look of simple cunning. ‘Haud to the wood, lassie, and when they come speiring I’ll gie them merryhyne.’

  She broke away, only half-comprehending his words. But her glance had followed his extended arm and she saw that to the right of the road the country fell through clumps and skirts of pine trees to pine woods of considerable extent in a shallow valley below. Gang lounlie through the wood. Go softly through. A better course perhaps than to seek shelter with a few old wives in the cottages ahead. And too far ahead – whereas the outskirts of the wood she could gain. Sheila ran out of the station yard and made for the nearest clump of trees. It would have been useful if she could have asked the old man where they were. But at present life was a matter of split seconds. And as she ran she felt that it had been this for a very long time. She was tiring.

  But the skirts of the wood received her. She swung round a line of trees and caught a last glimpse of the station. She could see the roof of the second truck, just rattling in; she could see, beyond the shed, the blind fiddler fallen to pacing the platform. Harry McQueen: suddenly she remembered his name. An old man, no older seemingly now than then, fiddling on Kingussie station when she was a child…

  The picture vanished; increasingly the silent trees were moving to their stations like a rearguard behind her. She heard a crash and hard upon that a single voice calling orders. And then, bizarre and thrilling even as she ran, there came the sound of the fiddle. A single note, a faltering bar, and then a tune. Johnny Cope. Blind Harry was meeting his redcoats boldly indeed.

  She ran on into silence. A carpet of pine needles; here on the fringes of the wood brightened almost to orange with the rain, lent her steps the noiselessness of one of nature’s creatures; the earth as if stripped of its envelope of air seemed incapable of sound. She stopped – and heard only her own heart. It was a world of sight and scent only: the straight and soaring stems of the pines, abstract as a cathedral; the scents – aromatic, pungent, sodden, subtle, multitudinous – like a stirring at the roots of life. Sheila felt herself trembling. She was tired and famished and in fear; for a moment she felt all the wood as waiting for some horrible command. Enter these enchanted woods, you who dare. Automatically she took Dick Evans’ compass from her pocket once more. Fear and be slain. She must go lounlie through and keep her nerve the while. Lose your nerve in a wood, she said to herself, and the result is called panic. Which wouldn’t do. She would go south-east and drop into the valley. Behind her was a village and a metalled road; she was no longer in uninhabited country; she had only to go on and she would come to habitation on a scale before which the enemy must fall back. She had only to go on…

  It was not like the moor. There was no horizon on which to set a mark, no less leaden grey above to hint the position of the sun. All around her was the single struggle of the pines for light, and the concentrated upthrust of the endless indistinguishable stems mocked and negated her stumbling horizontal progress beneath. An unending concentration where her own was failing. The people in the bal
let who went round and round. A drawing by Daumier of a prison yard. Round and round… Sheila stopped. The unending irregular colonnades were no longer all about her. She was looking out into open space. She had stumbled out upon a long straight ride.

  Danger. A story about a man who couldn’t cross a road, who was hunted down at last because he dare not cross a long white ribbon of road… There was a man on the ride.

  She drew back into shelter, too tired to move instantly away. The fiddle of Harry McQueen sang faintly in her head, like music to which one has carefully listened in the recent past. It sounded again. She thrust out her head and saw that the man had disappeared. But once more the fiddle sounded. She waited and he was visible again: the blind fiddler himself, stumbling from amid the trees, moving uncertainly up the ride towards her. He stopped and she saw him raise the fiddle to his chin, draw the bow across it, stumble on. And now he was near enough for her to call softly, ‘Mr McQueen! Harry McQueen!’

  He turned his face directly towards her and moved forward with strange confidence. She ran out, took him by the arm, and led him into the shelter of the pines. ‘Not in the ride,’ she said. ‘They could rake it with their glasses from end to end.’

  ‘I thocht to find you, lassie – but I canna haud through the forest alane.’ He held out the fiddle. ‘But I can haud to the clearin’ by the soon of this.’ He unhitched from his back a bundle wrapped in an ancient plaid and laid it on the ground beside him. ‘It’s a lang road for an auld filjit. But, lassie, are they after ye yet, the Butcher and his meinzie? I sent them to the toon.’

  The Duke of Cumberland, thought Sheila – or was it the noble Duke of York? ‘Fiddler,’ she asked, ‘what part of Scotland’s this?’

  ‘The land of Clan Vurich’s before ye, lassie, and ahin are the Macdonalds of Keppoch and Clanranald.’ He paused. ‘Clanranald,’ he repeated, and made the word sound like a rude tune; ‘Clanranald that’s laird of Moidart and Arisaig and Morar.’ He paused again. ‘Aye – and of Benbecula and Eriskay.’

  Harry McQueen had perhaps his character to keep up as a minstrel; the place was surely not as remote as he made it sound. Eriskay was an island; they could hardly be on that. But meanwhile the pine forest was around them and Sheila little the wiser. She tried again. ‘This forest,’ she said; ‘what’s on the other side?’

  ‘The redcoats, lassie.’

  ‘But, Harry McQueen–’

  ‘Or Frasers, maybe wi’ their traitorous chief. Simon Lovat, lassie – he that’s a Jesuit too and a right subtle preacher forbye; he that would have carried off Mistress Mackenzie of Fraserdale to marry her, and that syne when he was thwarted carried off and married the mither instead.’

  Sheila suspected that she was being treated to a variety of craziness deliberately developed for foolish tourists long ago. But it looked like second nature – like the real thing – by this time. ‘Never mind Lord Lovat,’ she said. ‘He’s been beheaded, Harry McQueen, and can’t hunt us now. What’s through these woods? Where’s the nearest village with a telephone line?’

  ‘Whisht!’

  Sheila could hear nothing. But the fiddler had raised his head and stood with the strangely sentient expression of blind people who listen.

  ‘They’re in the wood, lassie. We’ll be away to the Cage of the Wolf. It won’t be there they’ll find you.’ He picked up his bundle. ‘Bide skirting the clearing, lass, and tak’ me a mile forward.’

  Sheila looked at Harry McQueen and saw him curiously erect and alert, like a man who turns from reverie to the substance of things. She found it possible to believe in the Cage of the Wolf: found it possible perhaps because exhaustion was upon her. ‘Give me your arm, then, Harry,’ she said, and led him slowly forward.

  Silence was about them: the late summer silence of birds, the perennial silence of this carpeted and canopied place. Sheila strained her ears and could hear nothing behind – and nothing before. Two miles, she thought – when I’m certain it’s two miles we’ve gone it may be we’ll have gone Harry’s one. To the Cage of the Wolf. For a second her intelligence revolted; her head swam at the fantasy into which she had been plunged. But the men behind were something more than fantasy. And so perhaps – formidably so – were the last lonely fountain and the dead garden beyond… She walked on endlessly, steering the blind man over roots, round trees. ‘Harry,’ she said, ‘I think it will be a mile now.’

  ‘Turn ye frae the clearing then, my lass, and straight into the wood.’

  Moving parallel with the ride, they had dropped into the valley; now as they changed their course the ground rose steeply before them. From somewhere ahead came the bubble and murmur of a burn, but still the pines pressed all about them, canted in their undeviating perpendicular against the increasing slope of the hill. They trudged on. The sound of the burn grew, rose to a little babble close on the right, faded behind them. The ride was perhaps half a mile behind. ‘Fiddler,’ Sheila said, ‘I’ve got a compass here, but I can’t promise to take you farther on a straight line.’

  ‘Dinna fash, lassie; you’ve done grandly.’ The blind man halted, put down the bundle, and set the fiddle to his chin.

  ‘But, Harry, the spies – the redcoats may hear if you start playing now.’

  ‘Maybe they will, lassie – and welcome, say I.’ The bow passed slowly across the strings and back. And the sound was like the call of some desolate creature high in air.

  ‘But, Harry–’ Sheila checked herself: the fiddler was listening intently, as if waiting for the answer of some crazier confederate far away. And then he smiled, pointed with the bow. ‘Straight that road, and never mind if it’s a sair climb.’

  They went on for some two hundred yards, and it seemed to Sheila that the trees were thinning slightly about them. Then once more Harry McQueen stopped, fiddled, listened. And again they changed course. ‘Lassie,’ he asked curiously as they walked, ‘can ye no hear it?’

  ‘I can hear nothing, Harry.’

  He laughed, and the laugh was touchingly young and gay; he patted her arm with a sudden quick grace. ‘There are things the old can hear that the young hae no ear for. And some of them mair important than this. But listen again.’

  And again the two strange notes rose in air, a cry at once alien and piercing home, like some essence of the calls of many birds. Sheila strained her ears and heard far off the same sound recreate itself. ‘An echo, Harry.’

  ‘Aye. An echo frae the Cage of the Wolf. And there’s our road.’

  ‘What is it, Harry – and why is it called that?’

  ‘It’s a lookout, lass, that whiles the Wolf of Badenoch had – him that was a right wicked earl of Buchan long ago, Alexander Stewart, that burnt one cathedral and lies buried in another wi’ a grand stone over his banes. And this is but one of the holes he called his cages to lurk in. But we’ll keep our breath, my quean, for what’s afore us.’

  And what was before them needed such breath as was left to Sheila. The forest had thinned about them; they were on high ground where outcrops of stone broke through the carpet of pine needles, and where there were glades of brown bracken between the clumps and spurs of pine. Their progress became a scramble. Harry McQueen stopped; he was panting deeply, so that Sheila feared that she and the redcoats might well be the death of him between them. ‘Lassie,’ he said, ‘look up and see if you can spie the rodden trees.’

  ‘There’s mountain ash, Harry, and then pines again beyond.’

  ‘We’re there, my dear. They canna touch us now.’

  They climbed past the ash trees and entered a narrow and rocky cleft on the hillside. It rose and wound, its sides growing increasingly precipitous; they could move only one behind the other and the blind man’s progress was slow. Presently Sheila, who was in front, came to a halt. ‘There’s no further road, Harry. Nothing but solid rock.’

  The blind man laughed so
ftly and breathlessly behind her. ‘Nothing but rock? Nothing but rock underfoot maybe?’

  ‘There’s bracken underfoot, fiddler.’

  ‘Part it, lass.’

  And Sheila parted the bracken. It concealed a tunnel-like aperture. They crawled through. The narrow cleft continued to wind upwards, but presently on one side it fell away. They emerged on a sort of rocky platform that looked over pine tops at the whole extent of the woods they had traversed. Across the platform a runnel of water trickled from an invisible spring above. And behind was a small dry cave.

  Sheila sat down breathless on a boulder. She saw that the nearer pines were higher than the platform, so that the place was perfectly screened. Alexander Stewart, had he ever been here, chose his eyries well. From any hasty hunt that the enemy could make of all this wood and hill the place was utterly secure. But she was not a criminal who required a hiding place; she needed rest only and then it was her business to get away and tell her story. Harry McQueen had his lucid moments; could he be weaned from Simon Lord Lovat and the bad Earl of Buchan he might tell her accurately enough where they stood. Meanwhile she scanned the horizon. To the north-west it was possible to distinguish the moorland country where the railway ran. Across the valley and on the farther fringe of woodland rose the smoke of the hamlet to which Harry had misdirected her pursuers. And to the south-west, and where the pine-clad hills in which this retreat was quarried broke down into a plain, there was what appeared to be a main road. Pine woods skirted it; it should be possible to reach it and to break over only when some likely assistance came by.