by CL Skelton
The men right-turned, saluted, and broke ranks. Andrew returned their salute, then headed off in the direction of the mess. It was all so familiar, and so right, he thought. Back to the old routine of parades, marches, musketry. He wondered if they would change the name, now that they were equipped with rifles. ‘Riflery’ ‒ that didn’t sound too good. He went into the mess and sat down to a huge platter of ham and eggs, and started to wonder again.
It was his father’s remarks last night which had set his mind buzzing. There were so many people in the glen, back home, who looked like Maclarens; some of them, quite a lot, bore the same name. But then it was not really surprising. For hundreds of years, the clan had inhabited the glen with little or no communication with the outside world. In such an enclosed society, it would have been remarkable if many of them had not looked a bit alike, just as he and Willie did. They not only looked alike, they felt the same about the army and the regiment. Andrew was happy to have Willie to rely on. He was a damned fine soldier, one of the best. He would be R.S.M. one day. They had been friends all their lives, and Andrew was glad it had worked out this way. Childhood friendships did not always mean the best for army discipline, but that would not apply to Willie and himself. No, it was going to be all right. He felt warm towards Willie. After all, he had no brother, and if he had, he could think of none that he would prefer to Colour Sergeant Willie Bruce.
Chapter Five
Maud Westburn walked out of the entrance of Culbrech House. The ancestral home of the Maclarens stood in a small glen near the Crasks of Agais, that beautiful valley which followed the River Glass from Cannich to Beauly. She walked along the green lawns towards the drive that ran straight as a die for nearly a mile from the main door of the south front to the huge wrought-iron gates on the Cannich-Beauly road. The east wind which brought with it the chill of autumn had left the sky clear and bright in that cold, damp, alien land. The lawn was a vast expanse of bright green grass, dotted here and there with an ancient oak or elm.
She looked back at the great pile of pink Moray sandstone that the local people called the castle, though castle it was not. Culbrech House was a fortified house, a creature that had evolved in the fourteenth or early fifteenth century and through the generations to protect those who dwelt within its walls. It was a minor fortress, alone. Not a community surrounded by walls and battlements, but a family dwelling, structurally guarded against the intruder, and it had fulfilled its purpose. A Maclaren had built it and the Maclarens still occupied it and called it home.
Maud had been left in little doubt as to the antiquity and nobility of the Clan Maclaren; the whole domain breathed its history. They were descended from those warlike chieftains who until not so very long ago had ruled the Highlands of Scotland for hundreds of years. But though there had been change, perhaps it was not for the better, at least not all of the time. They were a proud strong people, more alien to Maud than the Indian native society into which she had been born. They were kings, safe in their mountain fastness ‒ men who feared God, but the Deity apart, acknowledged no master who did not wield a stronger sword. They were hard men and women, too, even now, not given to sentiment or pity, and still marked by the genteel savagery of their forebears.
The society in which the Maclarens lived had in it the remnants of the feudal culture that it once was. It could not have existed in her aunt’s village in Surrey; Maud was sure of that, though she had never been there. It was not like India either, where everything was governed by class or estate. Maud knew that she could not fit into either of those, the middle-class gentility of Southern England, or the pomp and circumstance of upper-class India.
Here the family who inhabited the big house were supposed to be the first among equals. Once upon a time they probably had been; but not any more ‒ if for no other reason, the clearances on the neighbouring estates had developed a sense of insecurity reflected in the attitude of the ordinary folk. They knew now that theirs was no longer an interdependent society. All who lived and worked on the estate knew that they were utterly dependent on the will of the Laird. They were slaves to their chief.
Maud understood this, the vulnerability of being at the mercy of other people. If you broke the rules, even innocently as she had done, you were either discarded or imprisoned in a vacuum.
She had accepted Andrew’s offer of hospitality because at the time she had felt that there was nothing else that she could do. But she was still trapped, a slave to her condition. No normal life was open to her. She was a lady, with all the restrictions and privileges that name implied. Worse than that, she had been brought up in India, where she never had had to do a single thing for herself, not even to lift anything heavier than a teacup. Unequipped for anything other than marriage to one of her own station in life, now here she was, alone in a strange, cold, alien land, wearing heavy clothes to guard against the elements which had bred people like the Maclarens. She looked back on the house with distaste.
It was the wrong shape for a start, higher than it was wide. The huge iron-studded oak door wasn’t the entrance at all. That led to the kitchen and the servants’ quarters which occupied the whole of the ground floor, ill-lit by slit windows through walls six feet thick. The entrance to the house was in the west wall, a much less distinguished portal. This led up a flight of stairs to the first floor which contained the dining room, the library that also served as Sir Henry’s study, the gunroom, and in the southeast tower, the morning room.
There were two towers, the one on the southeast corner and another on the southwest corner. Each contained a narrow stone spiral staircase which wound its way to the floors above, right up to the top, where the entire area of the main building was taken up by the banqueting hall. Maud had never been present at a banquet; not yet, anyway. But how on earth, she wondered, did they manage to get hot food up to that height? The room was certainly magnificent, there was no doubt about that, with its huge black oak rafters and beams sweeping away to the gabled roof above. But in spite of its magnificence, Maud thought of it as an attic.
The towers themselves were occupied by the bedrooms, most of them not very large but each with its coal fire and little alcove containing a polished copper bathtub. And when you wanted a bath, it threw the whole house into turmoil as relays of solemn, grey-faced servants carried up the hot water in buckets to fill the tub.
Below the banqueting hall were the two master bedrooms with their adjacent dressing rooms, and the floor between them and the dining room was occupied mainly by a spacious withdrawing room.
Everywhere throughout the house there was militaria, even in her own bedroom at the top of the southeast tower, where the fireplace was dominated by crossed lances and a polished targe. This room had, jutting out from it, two little baby turrets which hung on to the walls under conical slate roofs. She discovered these when she moved a heavy velvet curtain and found a gap about eighteen inches wide. She squeezed through and found herself in a dimly lit circle some five feet in diameter. She stayed but a moment; the dim light and the cold stone walls were too reminiscent of the cellar thousands of miles away across the oceans.
Had she stayed a little longer and looked out of the narrow windows, she would have seen a sight so beautiful it could easily have changed her feelings towards this land. To the right, she would have looked up Glen Cannich and Glen Afric with its island-dotted lochs and high mountains beyond. Nearer she would have seen the Crasks of Agais, where the Glass had cut itself a deep gorge, and where the water rushed and tumbled through while the salmon fought against its flow, leaping their way to the spawning grounds. But she did not look.
The last few generations of Maclarens had tried to convert what had been a fortress into a stately home. The furniture was all massive. Most of the beds were four-posters. Oak panelling was everywhere, hiding the pink stone beneath. The ceilings were high and recently adorned with ornate plasterwork, and carpets and rugs lay in profusion over the floors.
Whatever else, it seemed th
at the Maclarens were determined to achieve at least one form of immortality, for wherever she turned, there she would be confronted by the portrait of an ancestor frowning or simpering at her from its heavy gilt frame. The line ran true, if the pictures were anything to go by. They all had the thin Maclaren nose and the red hair. One could have been Andrew dressed in the fashion of a hundred years ago and sitting astride a white charger with dilating nostrils. Another, a demure creature, looked like Jean, the older of the Maclaren girls, sad and wistful. But it wasn’t her; the oil paint was already beginning to show the cracks of age. Targes, claymores, suits of armour seemed to be everywhere. The gunroom contained a small arsenal of comparatively modern weapons, clean and lovingly cared for. But the library, dominated by a large oak desk, seemed to be filled with leather-bound volumes which Maud suspected had not been moved for many years.
Maud looked back again at the house. She did not belong there, she felt it. But then she did not belong anywhere. And it was not fair, or even just, to think like that.
She had been made welcome. Almost too welcome. On their arrival in Perth, Andrew had taken her straight to their town house, where she had been handed over to his mother, Lady Maclaren, who had given no indication of surprise at having Maud thrust upon her without warning. Within forty-eight hours of her arrival, she was on the train with Lady Maclaren heading northward along the Tay Valley and towards Dundee and Aberdeen, that city of grey granite with its harbour cluttered with the masts of the fishing fleet. There they had changed trains and carried on along the coast of Elgin on the Moray Firth. It was harvest time and they had passed through field after field of golden barley and oats, watched the farm workers as they scythed and stacked their crops, and here and there a couple of heavy horses already ploughing to open the ground to the coming winter frosts. At Elgin, the railhead, Lady Maclaren had made a point of the tediousness of the journey and how much easier it would be when the railway came through Inverness. They were taken by carriage to Inverness, where they spent the night at the new Station Hotel that had been opened in anticipation of the railway’s imminent arrival.
The drive from Inverness had opened a whole new vista. Here the cornfields and the arable farms gave way to mountains and glens, hillsides dotted with sheep. Little houses with roofs of peat, with an eternal wisp of smoke rising from the centre. A hard country, though Maud was seeing it at its best, populated by a hardy people, solemn-faced and stern in their outlook, who scratched an existence from the hills.
She had been welcomed into their home as if she had been a member of the family. Even when all the circumstances of her situation had been made clear, her ladyship had shown no sign of shock or disapproval, and had been all sympathy and kindness. This had been backed by a series of assurances that she was not to worry, as everything would be taken care of. In fact, the generous acceptance of her situation was one of the things she found most galling.
Jean and Margaret, Andrew’s elder sisters, had both accepted her in their different ways. Margaret, of whom Maud saw very little, had shrugged the matter off as no concern of hers. Her only interest in life was the running of the estate, at which she was most competent. She spent most of her time in the company of Richard Simpson, Sir Henry’s English factor, and out on the hill. Jean, on the other hand, was quite different. She welcomed Maud as a confidante. In the man’s world in which she lived, and lacking the mannish abilities of her sister, she was a lonely person. There had been one great event in her life. She had fallen in love. He was a banker from the south, a personable and pleasantly spoken man who had looked enviously upon the obvious wealth of the Maclarens and decided to carve out a slice for himself in the form of plain, simple Jean. It had not worked. Sir Henry had had enquiries made into his background and discovered that he had amassed considerable debts through various unsavoury dealings, and when he had asked for his daughter’s hand, had booted him out of the house. Poor Jean felt that her entire life had been ruined; at the first opportunity she blurted out the story to Maud, feeling that in Maud she had found a kindred spirit. Maud for her part warmed to Jean. Here at least was someone whom she could feel sorry for; this plain, lanky, honest girl who had resigned herself to permanent spinsterhood.
Lady Maclaren must have been in her youth a neatly rounded beauty. She was small, not above five feet two inches in height, and towered over by her menfolk and even her daughters. The years had, however, added somewhat to her figure, and with her shiny round face and plump little body, she exuded an aura of happiness and good living. In Perth she had looked out of place. She had worn the fashionable crinoline, which did not suit her at all, but here in the Highlands, in homely tweeds and woollens, she seemed to fit into the country. Her skin was clear and bore hardly a wrinkle. But her hair, always worn in a large bun at the back of her neck, was now quite grey. She had a habit of gently twisting the broad gold wedding ring on her finger whenever she had something important to say. Her voice was soft, but cultured and precise. When she spoke, she always knew exactly what she was going to say. She was a practical woman, warm and gentle by nature, but always ready to face the realities. Separated for quite long periods from her men, she had had to be able to run her own household.
She showed her practicality and her grasp of the situation when, on the journey north from Perth, she turned to Maud and said, ‘Now my dear, we have to decide just what we are going to do with you.’ The question was, of course, rhetorical. Lady Maclaren had already made her decision.
‘How do you mean?’ asked Maud.
‘You must excuse an old woman for being frank’ ‒ and she started turning her wedding ring ‒ ‘but the situation is such that it must be faced immediately. You are carrying an unwanted child. Now there is nothing we can do about that, other than an act even more barbarous than the one by which it was conceived.’ She patted Maud on the knee. ‘I know that you are completely blameless in this whole sorry business, but you must also be aware, as aware as I am, that it will carry a social stigma. If you had had the good fortune to be a crofter’s daughter, it would not have mattered. Your baby would be born and taken into your family without so much as a raised eyebrow. But,’ she said firmly, ‘you are not a crofter’s daughter. You are a lady. You have social standing and position, and we ‒ I include myself ‒ we are not nearly as broad-minded and sensible in these matters.’
‘But there’s nothing we can do.’
‘Of course there is. In fact, I have already decided. You will give birth to your child in a convent in Ireland, away from tittle-tattle and local gossip. Don’t worry. I can arrange that quite easily, though it will have to be without my husband’s knowledge. He does not approve of the Roman Catholic Church. Then, as soon as the baby is born, we will set the necessary wheels in motion to have it adopted.’
Maud had received this with strange emotions. True, she hated the manner in which the child had been conceived, and loathed the creature who had violated her body. But did she hate this infant in her womb? She thought she did. She felt that she ought to, but … and it was not a small but. Doubting apart, she had found some comfort in the fact that the practical details pertaining to her position should be dealt with by another, and by now she was finding the beginnings of resignation in accepting what appeared to be inevitable.
She continued her stroll across the lawn in the soft autumn air, delighting in the spring of the close short-cropped turf. The lawn was that type of carpet which can only be produced by planting good seed and rolling and mowing and rolling for hundreds of years. Its permanency matched the permanency of the house itself. Even so, it still bore the hallmark of the martial environment. The drive so straight, the edges so precise, each tree standing in its own little circle of black earth surrounded by a nine-inch wrought-iron fence. It was all straight lines and perfect circles. She wrinkled her nose in slight distaste; yes, the lawn was perfect, too perfect.
She looked up towards the wrought-iron gates and saw a figure of a man on horseback just turning int
o the drive. Even at that distance she was sure that it must be Andrew. She had been told that he would be coming home on leave at any time now. Strangely, she felt a little frightened at the sight of him. Not that she was really afraid; she was just a little worried at the thought of meeting him again. She had no way of knowing how she really felt about him, though there would always be gratitude towards the man who saved her life.
The man was in army uniform, with red dress doublet and feather bonnet nodding in the slight breeze. He was tall and fair, and he presented a magnificent sight against the grey background of the craggy cliffs on the other side of the River Glass.
She smiled and half-waved a greeting as her pace quickened and she hurried across the lawn towards the drive to meet him. The closer she got, the more sure she was. Twenty yards away from him she stopped and waved again. He had certainly seen her and he reined in his horse and tilted his head on each side, looking at her quizzically. He returned her wave and broke into a broad grin that creased and wrinkled his face with mocking good humour. Suddenly she blushed violently. It was not Andrew.
‘Guid day tae ye, ma’am.’
‘Oh!’ she gasped. He did not sound like Andrew, either; his voice was deeper, there was a relaxation about him, a casualness of manner which she had never seen in Andrew. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she continued, ‘I thought that you were somebody else.’
‘You thought I was Master Andrew, did ye no?’ He slipped easily out of the saddle and saluted her. ‘Well, ye need na fash aboot that. You are no the first to make that mistake, and you will no be the last.’
She smiled at him. She liked the deep, soft, precise English of the Highland burr of his voice. ‘Then who are you?’
‘Sergeant Bruce. Willie by name, C Company, the 148th Regiment of Foot, and at your service, ma’am.’ He grinned and saluted again. ‘I apologize for wearing the kilt on a horse but I’m recruiting, and for not being Captain Maclaren.’