Rob, still half-asleep, could only gape at him. McLennan went back to his chamber with the reeling steps of a drunken man. Rob turned furiously on Fin. ‘Are ye off your head? Attacking the Master?’
Fin looked wild. He said, ‘He shut her up in that dark place. I have to get her out.’
‘How can ye get her out, ye bauby? Now I must beat ye! Oh, curse ye, come outside so your mother won’t hear!’ And he took Fin out into the ward and beat him, but not harder than he had to, because he himself thought the laird guilty of an act of mortal wickedness. Fin felt the blows and yet didn’t feel them. He had something in his pocket worth all of them.
The siege ended two days later.
McLennan realised that his messengers had miscarried. No help was coming. He sensed, with a warrior’s instinct, that McInnes was puffed up with assurance of success and might be off his guard. He also knew that he couldn’t expect his fighting men to wait much longer.
Leaving the protection of the castle, across the drawbridge, was deadly dangerous. But there was nothing else for it: they must meet the enemy in the open.
That night Bruce McLennan mustered his hungry fighters in the ward, lit dimly by a few torches, and passed the word quietly. ‘No help is coming. We canna wait longer.’ They knew it. They knew the risks, but they were ready and primed for action. McLennan looked all around them. Their faces, hollow-eyed in the torchlight, gazed back at him like hunting dogs straining at their leashes. A certain belated pride in them stirred him. He had good people.
McLennan gave them their marching orders and then said in a piercing undertone, ‘The man who brings me McInnes alive shall be my heir.’
The silence of dawn was broken by the thunderous rattle of chains as the drawbridge was swiftly lowered and the great spiked portcullis raised. McLennan’s force burst through the narrow gateway like water out of the neck of a bottle, and clattered across the bridge and down the ramp. Roaring like lions, they spread out and rushed down the hill like the hounds of hell, falling upon the soldiers of McInnes just as their lookouts were waking them with shouts of alarm. There was no time to do anything but jump to their feet and snatch up their weapons before McLennan’s furious horde was upon them.
Though fewer in number and hungry, the attackers’ outrage gave them strength. Every taunt, every sneering act of cruelty and arrogance, had to be repaid. McLennan’s men drove McInnes’s back and back till they reached the edge of the village. Against the palisade was a long rampart of earth. Many were driven up this in hand-to-hand swordfights, and shoved over the edge, or even impaled on the sharp spikes at the top of the wooden palings. Those who got through the gates were pursued, some driven off their feet and rolling backwards down the hill until spears or swords pinioned them to the ground. All through the half-ruined village there were bloody skirmishes.
And now the furious villagers, immured for days in the village hall, burst out and joined in the fray. They found pitchforks and scythes and stones and wooden clubs and laid about them with all their pent-up strength. The women who had had to submit to the enemy’s brutality were the fiercest. Five or six would attack one man and hack and beat him to the ground, screaming dementedly. McInnes’s men were prepared to face anything but the women, who rushed after them in packs like hunting wolves, waving carving knives and bunches of flaming straw. Many men ran on to their enemy’s pikes as they fled, looking not where they were going but wildly back over their shoulders.
McLennan had led his men out of the castle, but soon was struggling like them in the turmoil of battle. He had one main objective – the capture of McInnes. But in the confusion he missed him. McInnes, unseated, wounded in three places and streaming blood, managed to remount his terrified horse and lead a disorderly rout, abandoning their civilian prisoners and their wounded, who didn’t survive long to endure their injuries.
But the fleeing men and their leader did not get far.
Those of McLennan’s party who had fled the field six days before had their own scores to settle. They were waiting in ambush in the wooded and craggy hinterland between the two castles, and as the routed men straggled back to McInnes’s land, they had rough entertainment. Very few reached their homes.
As for Archibald McInnes – a young man whose house had been burned and his mother murdered – he saw his chance, as McLennan had done years before when he saved the King’s life. He knocked the weakened enemy leader from the saddle with his stave, took him prisoner, and marched him back to the castle. He hadn’t heard the proclamation, of course, and had no idea that he was destined to be the next laird. But he knew it that night, when McLennan, as good as his word, proclaimed him his heir in front of the castle gate when the struggle was over.
And while the battle raged, two children fought their own battle in a dark, silent place, out of earshot of the roars and curses and screams and clashes of the fighting beyond the castle walls.
Peony lay on the floor of the dungeon with her head in Fin’s lap. He held her tenderly and with everything that was in him, his will and his voice and his hands, urged her to live. He dared not leave her to get help; he dared not try to move her. With strips torn from his shirt, he had tied up the wound she had given herself, and successfully staunched the blood. Just the same, his instinct told him he had stolen the key and come to rescue her too late.
Peony was drifting.
Fin had snatched a torch as he ran down to open her prison door, so there was light again, wonderful, magical light, and this had changed everything for her. This, and Fin, who was with her, holding her hand. But he was pulling her back from where she so much wanted to go.
She smiled up at him. ‘I must visit my garden,’ she whispered.
He cried, ‘No, Wee Eyes, no! Don’t go to any garden, stay here with me, please stay here with me!’ He clung to her as if to stop her running away.
But Peony just smiled and closed her eyes. She was already in her garden. All was changed there. The paths were clear of leaves. Through shafts of sunlight, a fine misty rain was falling like a silver veil, making the pebble-patterns gleam. A rainbow curved over her pavilion, which was once again glossy and beautiful, with exquisite, mysterious music coming from it. And there was Fin, sitting on her verandah in one of the carved chairs under a scrolled hanging, painted with beautiful sprays of her name-flower.
‘This is gie good!’ he exclaimed approvingly. ‘I like your pond! Ye’ve some grand fishies in there!’ Peony glanced over the rail of her bridge and saw that the pond was clear of weed and that red and white carp, large and small, were once again swimming lazily among the lily pads, which shone bright as emeralds in the mixture of sunshine and soft rain.
She felt her heart soar. Her garden had forgiven her! It had healed itself! She dared to look up at the roof-corners.
They were there – her dragons were back! And this time they didn’t turn their heads. She felt as if she smiled with all of herself. She lifted her hand and waved to them. They twitched their ears and unrolled their long tongues out of their mouths and nodded their big, ugly-beautiful heads in greeting.
‘Fin, Fin!’ she called excitedly. ‘Come! See my friends!’
And Fin, his figure a misty blur, crossed the crooked bridge and stood at her side. ‘They’re fine and grand,’ he said, his voice full of admiration. ‘I never saw such a garden, never. Ye’ve made the most loveliest garden there is, Mudan.’ He put his arm round her and kissed her cheek.
She turned to him with a glad look. But now his voice came again, as if from a distant place, and there was pain in it. ‘I’ll come back for ye, I promise! I promise!’ And she echoed his words like a sigh. ‘I’ll come back, I promise.’ And he seemed to lose solidity and then to vanish.
But though she couldn’t see him any more, still he had said her name – her real name! She need not repeat ‘Wo shi mudan’ to herself or fight to hold fast to who she was, because now someone who loved her had confirmed her reality. But quite slowly, she found that who she was no
longer mattered.
She was just part of her garden.
Chapter Fourteen
McLennan was beside himself with triumph. He had him! He had his enemy at last in his power! His old foe slumped, bound hand and foot, in a wooden chair, grey-faced from defeat and fear as well as loss of blood. McLennan, standing over him, said just three words.
‘Now ye’ll pay.’
He turned on his heel. But as he reached the door, McInnes’s voice halted him.
‘What will I pay for? Raiders who exceeded their orders?’
McLennan whirled to face him. ‘Ye admit ye sent those barbarous brutes against me!’
‘Aye, I sent them, but not to slaughter your children. I sent them to pay ye back for the murder of my sister’s son. I could ha’ done no less, with her on my neck day and night crying for satisfaction.’
‘Murder ye call it? When he and the henchmen you sent with him were trying to drive my people off my land so you could claim it?’
McInnes slumped further into his chair and turned his head aside. McLennan could see now that he was old, and that the old quarrels were nothing to him but a burdensome memory that couldn’t be shaken off.
‘Och, what’s the use of bandying words about it ten years on?’
Balked of the verbal battle he now wanted, McLennan spat at the man. ‘Ye cowardly blackguard!’ he shouted.
McInnes straightened himself as well as he could.
‘Coward, am I? And what are you? When your wife was first lost to ye and brought to me, I posted every guard I had, thinking ye’d be riding against me within hours, alone if necessary – but ye never came. Why not? Did ye no’ want her, thinking that she was now spoilt goods?’
McLennan stood before him, shocked and stunned. How dared the man, helpless as he was, speak thus! But he himself had uttered the word ‘coward’ first.
‘I didna come,’ he returned in a deathly quiet voice, ‘because for two months after ye had my wee’uns butchered and stole my wife from me, I was out of my senses. Those attending on me had to tie me down and drug me with whiskey to control my raving. By the time I came to myself, word was brought to me that my wife—’ He stopped, clenching his teeth.
‘Aye,’ said McInnes, now equally hushed. ‘Aye. If I weren’t afraid ye’d think I was trying to pacify ye, I’d tell ye that I was sorry for her death. I never purposed it. I never purposed the deaths of your children.’
‘Be wary, ye liar!’ barked McLennan. ‘I have means to do worse than imprison ye—’
‘Your wife,’ McInnes went on wearily, ‘whom my men brought back to me expecting reward – I didna mean to keep her – I was going to send her back to ye but—’
McLennan stood perfectly still.
‘She was stalwart for ye. She wouldna take food or drink, and then she sickened of low fever and died.’
‘Of low fever? Liar! She died of shame!’
‘No, McLennan. I swear to ye. Not that. She suffered no more shame than confinement and some taunts from my sister.’
‘Either way, ye killed her. Ye killed all that was best of me and in me. And now I have ye and the price is to be paid.’
And the image of his dungeon rose to his mind, a dark, cruel image. For this he had had it made and now it would fulfil its purpose! He would lock this enemy in and never—
In the very act of walking from the room, McLennan stopped cold.
He remembered with a shock like a lightning strike who was there already.
He was stunned by the realisation. Six days she had been down there, without food or water, alone in the dark! His hard heart trembled, and his hand flew to his belt. But the key! The key was gone.
It took him ten full seconds to realise that the stable-boy had stolen it, that night he had tried to stab him. That meant—
The relief was what unmanned him. Pure, hot, naked relief. That was three days ago! He would have gone down there, that boy, opened that great door, and let her out. It was all right. She was alive, she was safe, the boy would have saved her.
A prayer – the first genuine prayer to have issued from him in years – left his dry lips.
‘Thank God! Thank God!’
But was it certain? What if the key had slipped his belt some other way? What if – what if she were still there?
He ran from the room and down the dungeon steps, his snatched-up torch trailing smoke. He had not felt fear all the time the enemy was at his gates. Now he was afraid – mortally afraid of what he would find.
As the torchlight touched the door, he saw it was open and the key in the lock. His hopes rocketed upwards. Yes, it was as he’d thought! She’d been freed! What he felt, he couldn’t disguise from himself – it was pure happiness. Again he cried out a prayer of gratitude, ‘Blessed Christ, be praised—’
But as he entered the dungeon and swept the torch about, letting the light flicker on the stone walls, the iron rings, the chains, his prayer died. For there she was, a little, crumpled shape, lying on the floor in the farthest corner.
He rushed towards her, and fell on his knees at her side. As he had once before, he put his hand on her throat to feel for her pulse. He started back, his fingers wet, horror running over his skin. He saw the sharp stone near her hand.
After a long moment of paralysis, he stood up slowly. His legs were unsteady. He kept staring down at her. Then he began to shout, a high note of desperation like a shrill trumpet blast ringing round the cold walls.
‘A body can live eight days without food! But ye couldna wait! Why did ye believe me? Ye should ha’ known! Ye should ha’ known I didna mean it!’
Something strange was happening to his eyes. The torchlight was glistening and he couldn’t see properly. He dropped the torch on the stones and put his face in both his hands. His big shoulders heaved and he stood there for what might have been minutes or hours, lost to all sense of himself, feeling only the most agonising regret. Then he picked up the smouldering torch and turned away. He couldn’t bear to stay there.
But as he was leaving, the torchlight showed him something scratched on the wall. It was the writing of Chi-na.
He stopped and stared at it, his breath billowing out in clouds like a terrified stag cornered in a frozen field. He hadn’t seen such writing for years. But he understood what was written as well as if the words were being spoken in his ears.
‘I am with you till you die.’
He stood there, bereft, stunned, and afraid to the marrow of his bones. Then he turned and fled, stopping only to heave the door shut. But the key would not budge, and he left it in the lock.
McLennan couldn’t chain his enemy in the dungeon. He couldn’t even think about the dungeon. Instead, he had him shut into an upper room in one of the castle turrets. But he ordered bread and water to be given him. How was it he was feeding his enemy when he had let the girl starve?
But decisions, work and responsibilities pressed in on him too heavily to allow much time for reflections. Many of his tenants were dead or hurt. Farmhouses and crops had been destroyed. The men who had been left outside the castle at the time of the siege were very angry. It was rumoured that some had deserted him and fled to other landowners, carrying news of what had happened, blackening his name. Even McLennan’s own servants were angry because he had left so many families at the enemy’s mercy. After years of caring nothing for what anyone thought of him, suddenly he was vulnerable. He felt they were against him and no longer wanted to serve him. After their brave fight for him, remorse awakened and smote him.
It wasn’t in his nature to show that he was sorry. But he gave the survivors gold to rebuild their farms and buy more animals. He buried the dead with honour, and paid the widows and orphans compensation. Then his strict duty was done. The sullen, angry looks from his household, the rumors of defection, stopped. But he had no satisfaction from it.
Once he might have eased his mind by going to gloat over his captive, to accuse him and torment him. He couldn’t, and he didn’t un
derstand why he couldn’t. McInnes was at last his prisoner, but every time the word ‘prisoner’ crossed his thoughts, McLennan twisted his mind away.
When one day news was brought to him that McInnes had died of his wounds, he felt not the smallest quiver of gladness. ‘Bury him,’ was all he said. ‘No marker. Let his name be forgotten.’ And a strange premonition came to him. I too wullna have a stone on my grave.
The death of his old enemy did nothing to restore his peace. At night he slept badly. He had terrible dreams. Over and over again, the same one – the child in chains. He heard chains rattling in his sleep. When he woke suddenly, he thought he could still hear them. He lay on his bed, staring upward into the dark, and tears, such as he had not shed since the deaths of his own children, rolled down the sides of his face and soaked his silken sheets. The red of them made him feel as if he slept in a pool of blood.
‘I didna chain her! At least I didna chain her! Why do I hear chains?’ he muttered.
Sometimes he saw her face, pale and bloodless, and sometimes he felt her cold little hands touching him. He would reach for them before he could stop himself, the impulse to rub and warm them back to life was so strong. Sometimes he heard clicking sounds, like bones knocking and scraping each other. Once he dreamed he went down to the dungeon and opened the door, and there was a little skeleton, standing upright. Peony’s slanted eyes were peering at him through the sockets in the skull. In his dream he found he wanted to embrace it – to clasp all that was left of her in his arms. But when he laid hands on the skeleton, it fell to the floor in a heap of bones.
He feared he was going mad. And yet he almost welcomed it, because madness would be an escape from his sorrow, his bewilderment. ‘She was a slave! A witch!’ he tried to tell himself. But he knew now she had been neither, that she had been his little one, his dear one, the child fate had sent him as a gift to comfort his heart which had been too hard to feel the love for her that had grown there all unrecognised.
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