by CL Skelton
‘I’m sorry,’ replied Maud. ‘I cannot understand your argument. I could understand a complete opposition to my presence here with my child. Naomi is, of course, a social barrier. I knew that when I decided to keep her. Yet I could not bear to part from her. Until the first moment I saw her, until I held her in my arms for the very first time, I had really hated her and dreaded the moment when she would be born. She was, until then, a living cancer within my body. Unwished for, and uninvited, and no part of me. But when she came out of my body, she became suddenly two things, a living person and a part of myself. What had gone before and the manner of her conception became remote and irrelevant, and no longer had anything to do with the infant I held in my arms. Can you possibly understand that?’
‘Of course I can understand. I am a mother myself. I agree with you. You are right in what you say, but it is not possible to judge the situation from our point of view. You and I are both women and mothers.’
‘What other way can we judge it?’
‘Tell me first about Andrew, about your feelings towards him. Please, this is not the idle curiosity of an older woman. This is a very important question and I ask it as his mother, who once held him as you held Naomi, and lived through the same emotions as you lived through in those first minutes of his life.’
‘I am very fond of Andrew.’
‘You know that that does not answer my question.’ Lady Maclaren smiled at Maud. It was a gentle smile, full of understanding. ‘I must know the whole truth, whatever it may be, in so far as you know it yourself.’
‘That is not easy, and I am not trying to evade a direct answer when I say that I cannot be sure. Of course, I am bound to him by gratitude; he did save my life.’
‘No, Maud, in that at least you are wrong. Andrew did not save you. He was a soldier, acting under the orders of his commander. The credit for your rescue belongs to the army. The army and the regiment which brought Andrew to the army. It might have been any soldier. Any soldier could, by a similar accident, have been the instrument. It might just as easily have been Willie Bruce or someone like that.’
Willie. Maud thought about Willie. Lady Maclaren had mentioned him in a tone which assumed that she would never have considered Willie in the way that she thought about Andrew. But that was not true. She thought about the man who had accompanied her to Fort William, a contented man, a man whose strength of body was matched only by his strength of mind. He was forthright, too; he had not been ashamed to be obvious in his admiration for her, sergeant and common soldier though he was. She felt a little thrill of pleasure when she thought of Willie and how much less complicated than Andrew he was. But she still had to answer Lady Maclaren, if that was possible. She tried to think: what precisely were her feelings towards Andrew?
‘I’ll try and be as honest as I can, Lady Maclaren,’ she said. ‘I had thought of your son as a husband and I believe that he had thought of me as a wife. I believe that that is past. Both of us were acutely aware of the social problem of Naomi. As a matter of fact, that was the reason that I agreed to present her here as my niece. It was not to my taste and I did not want to, but at the time, it seemed a small enough price.’
Lady Maclaren compressed her lips. ‘You do know, of course, that no one believes that Naomi is your niece. It is just a convenient device to make both of you socially acceptable, and everyone will be quite happy to continue to play out the fiction unless … unless …’ And here Lady Maclaren stopped.
‘You were about to say, unless I marry your son.’
‘Yes, I was. You see, if that were to happen, there would be talk.’
‘Does that matter?’
‘To me, personally, no. But the regiment would not stand for it. They, I fear, would never accept it. You see, unless he is very foolish, he will one day command the regiment.’
‘And he would be very foolish to marry a woman with an illegitimate daughter,’ said Maud. ‘Lady Maclaren, does it really matter?’ she repeated her question.
‘To me, as I said, no. Especially knowing the circumstances as I do.’
‘But supposing he did marry me, what then?’
What then indeed! Lady Maclaren found it difficult to answer. This girl had done no wrong. Her greatest misfortune had to be that she had been born into a stratum of society which treated innocent victims of such happenings as if they were criminals. She knew that Maud, comfortable though she was financially, would never be able to find a family who would accept her. She wanted to embrace the girl and say go ahead and marry my son, but she knew the consequences, not of her doing, but imposed by the world in which they lived. There would be forgiveness and pity, yes, but acceptance, never. Women were chattels, and if the chattel were stolen or besmirched, it was discarded. That was the way it was, and there was nothing that anyone could do about it.
‘Then he would be finished,’ she said at last. ‘He would be asked to resign his commission, and his career in the army would be over for all time.’ Lady Maclaren paused. ‘It would hurt Andrew, and it would hurt the regiment ‒ the regiment to which you owe your life. I know that it sounds hard, but we Maclarens, because it is our regiment, must always be above suspicion, and any form of scandalous gossip. Don’t ask me why. It is just the system under which we live.’
‘Lady Maclaren.’ Maud took a deep breath. ‘For considerable time, I corresponded with your son. It is now over three months since I heard from him last. Ours were not lovers’ letters, but they were warm and friendly. I have kept all of his letters; there is nothing in any of them which could give you cause for concern. I would be quite willing to allow you to read them if you wished to do so.’
‘No, thank you,’ said Lady Maclaren, and she coloured slightly at the mention of the letters.
‘So be it,’ said Maud. ‘Nevertheless, it is apparent to me that I should be very wrong to allow matters to continue the way they are, especially as I am living under your roof. I shall not promise never to write to Andrew again, for if he should write to me, I shall reply. I have not written to him since I received his last letter, and I shall not write unless I hear from him again.
‘As for the rest, I feel that it might prove easier for us all if I were to find a place of my own.’ And then, as Lady Maclaren started to protest, ‘No, I mean it. I will not be leaving Culbrech with any thoughts other than those of gratitude for all the kindness that has been shown me. But if I am to live my own life in my own way, then it is only right that I should live it in my own house where I should be answerable only to myself.’
Maud was as aware as her ladyship of her own circumstances. She bridled at the unfairness of it all. She had made up her mind that she was not going to spend the rest of her life a slave to the system, end up a pathetic old maid with nothing but the memory of one terrifying incident that was already becoming remote. She knew that she ought to feel grateful to the Maclarens, but her feelings belied her words. She was not grateful, because they were holding her within the ironclad conventions which, if she allowed them, would ruin her life. So when she said this, her mind was already made up. She did not give a damn about social life or position, but she gave a damn about having the right to live her own life, and that was what she intended to do.
Lady Maclaren protested. She really did want Maud to stay, but she was aware that after the business of the intercepted letters, she would always feel guilty in the girl’s presence. So it was that with genuine sorrow she agreed that this might be the best thing to do.
It took some little time, but eventually Maud found what she was looking for: a delightful little house called Cluny lying in the Glen near the river. Her two acres marched with Culbrech’s twenty thousand, so she was near enough to call and to be called on.
She moved in about a month after her long talk with Lady Maclaren. Her ladyship had been most helpful with bits of furniture and carpets and even in finding a girl whose husband was in the regiment. The girl moved into Cluny, having left her children with her parents, a couple
of days before Maud arrived with Naomi. She had spent those two days getting the house ready for her new mistress. Her name was Maggie, Maggie Buchannan, and her husband was, much to her annoyance, serving in Andrew’s company.
Chapter Eleven
In London, at the War Office, men in bright cavalry uniforms gaudy with the scarlets and blues of the crack regiments, faceless ones who had never seen a shot fired in anger, decided the fate of the common soldier. These were men who by power of birth or influence of social position ‒ sons of the elite aristocracy of the home counties ‒ treated the army as a social occasion. They served their few years by warming their backsides at a fire in one of the high-ceilinged rooms in the massive grey buildings of Whitehall, dining in superb messes, escorting debutantes through the season, and spending a minute proportion of their time gazing at maps of the world in which various-coloured pins denoted the locations of units throughout the ever-expanding British Empire.
One of these pins, a yellow one, represented the 148th Foot. After Taku, referred to by one scion of London society as a ‘jolly good show’, one of this nameless number took out the pin, wondering what to do with it, and then found an empty troopship lying off the China coast. So, as he had an urgent luncheon appointment, he stuck the yellow pin into the ship, Her Majesty’s Troopship Himalaya.
When the repercussions of this casual act reached them in China, there was much rejoicing among the men.
‘We’re awa’ hame,’ said Frankie Gibson, for what else could a trooper mean? And he thought of his wee house up in the hills of Strathglass, close to the deer forest, secluded in a little valley seven miles from Culbrech House. The wee burn which ran from the lochen at the top down to the Glass was where the salmon came to spawn, and Frankie came to the salmon. He thought, too, of his wife Betty and the bairns, five of them, one for each campaign. And he dreamed of the nights at home sitting in his chair by the fire puffing at his clay pipe, with a bottle of whisky, a hundred proof or more, which would make your back hair curl, illicitly distilled by Peter ‘Mannie’ somewhere on the other side of the hill. It was a wonderful thought, and his spirit was high as the ship put out to sea, the land slipped away below the horizon, and the men fell to their tasks.
Sir Henry had spoken to the master of the vessel and demanded that they be given work and plenty of it, that the ship should be kept scrupulously clean, and that no effort should be spared in the fight against the disease and boredom which were the paramount threats against the successful conclusion of any long voyage with an overcrowded vessel.
Many days out from China, they were still heading south, though it had taken some considerable time for this fact to filter through to the soldiers in their unfamiliar environment. For one thing, they had been kept busy. They had been divided into messes and watches; they scrubbed the ship from stern to stern every day, learned to haul and slacken lead ropes at sail drill, and of course grumbled, as soldiers will, as they paraded every afternoon for kit inspection. Sleeping, too, was a communal affair. There were half as many hammocks as there were men, slung between decks and seldom unoccupied. They were hot and uncomfortable in the equatorial sun, and many a man dreamed of sleeping on deck. But this was forbidden, and the one or two who tried were summarily dealt with. The lash was an ever present threat.
It was Jamie Patterson who first brought the matter up ‒ the taciturn alcoholic whom Willie had recruited on the same day that he had recruited wee Alex.
‘Serge,’ said Jamie.
‘Aye,’ said Willie. ‘What is it?’
‘We’re not going home.’
Willie looked at Jamie, puzzled. The man was a gentleman, there could be no doubt about that. He did not fit, not with the common soldiery who were his comrades. Yet he tried to be one of them. He kept a diary and wrote it up every day. But in the tightly knit group that was C Company, Jamie was the enigma. Nobody knew where Jamie came from. Nobody knew anything about his background. He did not come from the estate; in fact, it was whispered that he was an Englishman. His speech was cultured, he was obviously well read, and almost certainly Jamie Patterson was not his real name. All of this was of no concern to Willie Bruce. Jamie was turning into a fine soldier and that was all that mattered.
That morning, Jamie had written in his diary:
The lads are all convinced that we are going home. I now have grave doubts, for if we were, we would now be sailing southwest across the Indian Ocean. But as far as I can ascertain, our course is still due south. Before us lie only Australia and New Zealand, and I cannot but feel that our destination is one of these lands.
‘We’re not going home, are we, sergeant?’ he repeated.
‘Do ye think that they would tell me?’ Willie Bruce replied, brushing the question aside.
‘That I do not know,’ said Jamie. ‘I only know that we are sailing south.’
‘Aye,’ said Willie, who was as aware of this fact as Jamie. ‘You may be right.’
‘Don’t you think that the men ought to be told?’
‘They will be told when the colonel decides that it is time to tell them, and not before. Have you no got a job to do?’ Willie was getting fed up with this conversation.
‘Not before we muster on deck in half an hour,’ was the reply.
‘All right, then awa’ wi’ ye. And don’t talk about this,’ said Willie.
What had in fact happened was that the faceless ones had stuck another pin in the map and the 148th was on its way, as Jamie had so rightly guessed, to New Zealand. Historians delighted in dividing the Maori Wars into the First, the Second, and so on. But during that period, the Maoris were fighting a guerilla war almost without ceasing. They were defending their homeland against the incursions of the white man who had found, in that beautiful country, that he could grow sheep quickly and efficiently. And as more and more settled there, they wanted more and more land, and more and more the Maori resented it.
Their destination was Wellington. There they disembarked and did nothing but receive another directive. Someone had moved that yellow pin again. So they re-embarked and there they sat for long, hot days, cooped up in the ship lying within sight of land awaiting orders which finally came; though what those orders were, no one but the master and Sir Henry knew.
Again they put to sea, and some two days later, Her Majesty’s Troopship Himalaya lay wallowing in an ocean swell some hundred miles north of the Cook Strait which separates the North and South Islands of the New Zealand colony. When the ship had finally stood out to sea, leaving Wellington behind, rumour and speculation began all over again. Surely this time, at last, they were really going home.
It was ‘make and mend,’ and young Murdoe Campbell, son of Sir Henry’s head gamekeeper, was darning a pair of thick woollen stockings and thinking about the glen and his father and home. It was just another little house, like so many of the houses on the estate, a little bigger than most, as befitted his father’s position. They had four rooms, twice the norm, and Murdoe even had a room all to himself with a brass bedstead and a hair mattress; but it was home. Murdoe’s father was proud of his son who, only twenty-four years old, was already a corporal, and still in the family, the regiment, the clan ‒ call it what you will, but it was theirs and it belonged to all of them. And Ghillie Campbell would welcome his son home and show him off in his fine uniform, much to the boy’s embarrassment. And the ghillie would think of Frankie Gibson up the hill, the old and much-loved enemy, and all the extra vigilance that Frankie’s return would entail. Anyhow, for Murdoe, you were never really away from home when you were with the battalion. The laird himself was there, and there were cousins and second cousins scattered throughout the regiment. But it would be so nice to see Scotland again.
Taku, sickness and all the rest, had taken its toll, so many of them would not be going back. But the regiment itself had survived, though it needed respite; needed to pause and lick its wounds, and to rise again from what was left of it, re-recruited, re-equipped, and revitalized. The voya
ge itself they knew would not be pleasant, with its diet of rotting biscuits and stagnant water, and the limes which the colonel insisted that each man consume every day to ward off the chance of scurvy. But the breath of home was once again in the air, and perhaps, just perhaps, all that were left would get back to see Scotland again.
Familiar faces were missing, never again to be seen in barrack room or mess, and C Company with only thirty of their men left had suffered more than most. It had been necessary to reorganize the regiment into two companies only. A and B Companies had disappeared. C Company had been permitted to retain its identity as a mark of approbation for its historic storming of the breach at Taku. Andrew had been given a Lieutenant Farquhar and two ensigns to replace the officers he had lost. The surviving members of B Company and a dozen men from A Company had brought him up to establishment, and he now had one hundred and twenty men under his command.
This did not altogether please Willie Bruce, however. He was not happy to have men thrust upon him whom he had not trained himself, and whom he had little opportunity of licking into what he considered satisfactory shape. Ever since they had re-formed and left China, they seemed to have been at sea with absolutely no chance of field training and drill. True, they had had strenuous physical exercise on deck when the weather was calm, but that was no real substitute for the barrack square. Until they had sailed from Wellington, it had looked as if there was some other task for them, and Willie did not relish having to go into action with a group of men who had not been properly moulded into an efficient fighting unit. Willie hoped that the rumour was right ‒ that they were going home and that he would not have to put that rag-tag of a company to the test.
The whole operation was a boredom of being shunted around the oceans, not knowing what they were going to do next, and even when they did arrive in port either for coaling or disembarkation, finding that it was not the end, but just a pause until they were back on board and out to sea again. It would all have been a terrible disaster as far as morale was concerned, but for one man: Regimental Sergeant Major Mackintosh. As a boy, he had walked from Glasgow to the barracks at Fort Bruce in Perth and presented himself to the 148th and told them that he wanted to be a soldier. He had come from a slum home, where his mother, a prostitute, had thrown him out of their room whenever she had a customer to entertain. As to the identity of his father, he had no idea; it could have been any one of a hundred. In spite of his background, he was a neat and tidy lad, almost fastidious, and the squalor and the filth and smells finally drove him away from that city and into the army. He took to the service with a dedication and a will until it became his whole life, his whole reason for existence. He had never married, he had no family, but he was complete in himself. Now, second only to the colonel, the most important man in the regiment, he had fulfilled his every ambition. Like all of his breed, he was feared and he was respected, and secretly loved, by every man in the battalion, not one of whom did not envy the man who stood next to him in battle.