‘Aye. It’s in a sorry state, but my brother . . .’
Sybilla intercepted the prompting glance that Lady Glencairn shot at her husband.
‘You cannot have too many hands for work such as that. When the lambing is over there will be help and to spare here also.’
Lady Glencairn continued to stare.
‘And I daresay some materials can be found. It is but small thanks for the life of the bairn.’
Sybilla felt her tension draining as she moved towards Archie.
William had turned, ‘Why not Rough? It’s closer to Orchardton than Dunisle and though smaller, is a finer tower in better fettle and so will be less effort to right, less expense.’
Sybilla, searching for understanding and finding none, gnawed at her lip. Glencairn narrowed his eyes, stared at the square of window behind William, who continued, yawning as if it was but a passing thought,
‘The island it sits on is well placed to guard the firth and is easy reached, on horseback and on foot, though only at low tide.’
‘Rough Island . . . hmm . . .’ Glencairn nodded to Archie. When the lambing is past, I’d like fine for you to take a look at the tower on Rough.
Chapter Twelve
Munro picked his way through the narrow defile, following the course of a burn, the hills rising steeply on either side. He was thankful, not only that the weather held, but that this chilly section of his journey would soon be past. The ride down the eastern side of Loch Ken had been pleasant enough, the sun turning the water into a mirror, on which the untidy outline of the farther shore rode like a series of ships at anchor, tall pines the masts. Points curved out from the near side also, like hooks, enclosing bays fringed with shingle. He had counted eight islands in the lower loch, though some had been little more than a bare outcrop breaking the surface of the water. On one of those, he saw a heron, statue-still, his grey wings folded back, his white neck and head stretched upwards, the black crest a feathered quill behind him. Munro stopped and drinking deeply from the water bag at his side, looked back. From this angle he saw the yellow dagger-bill and the streaks of black trailing down to the soft underbelly. There was a flash as its head arrowed into the water, emerging with a fish, the scales iridescent. Deftly the heron turned and swallowed it in one swift movement, before freezing once more.
At the foot of the loch he followed the Dee southwards, then struck east towards Carlingwark, where he stopped for a bite to sup, and hay and respite for Sweet Briar also. It was there they gave warning of this narrow valley where the sun never penetrated and the silence oppressed.
‘A two-mile stretch, dreich as winter whatever the season, and like to spook you and horse both, but once through, strike directly south and you will need but half an hour to the firth.’
They were now, he guessed, perhaps half-way, caught in the clamp of the hillside, the stream-bed providing the only possible passage. High above him on each side, where the ground met the sky, the remains of ancient forts, far enough apart to be outside arrow range, rendering them safe from each other at least. He thought on Broomelaw, likewise poised against the horizon and also built more for protection than for comfort, and of Archie’s revised plans, made at Glencairn’s behest, to repair the tower on Rough Island rather than that of Dunisle. He patted Sweet Briar. ‘However old these ruins, lass, folk haven’t made much progress.’
The valley walls beside him began to recede, to tilt, the bare stone softened by creeping vegetation and then he was in the open, the burn swinging away to his right, the sun full on his face, his tension eased. Ahead of him the ground sprung, moss-green, tufted with spikes of bog cotton, the stream became a river, flowing in wide meandering loops towards the distant sea.
Munro reined in Sweet Briar where the river met the shore. The bay was scooped from the surrounding land, broken in two by a promontory jutting out into the sands. It was, he estimated, perhaps a mile across the sands to where Rough Island stood sentinel. He narrowed his eyes, shading them with his hand against the sun. Beyond the island the expanse of sea was a silver glint on the horizon, the tide far out. And curving from behind the wooded promontory on his left, a single line of posts swung out to touch the island’s edge.
On his right, topping a small rise, Orchardton Tower. Wondering in passing what like the hospitality of these Maxwells would be, he looked up at the sun: several hours yet till supper, ample time to reconnoitre. He encouraged Sweet Briar into a trot. As they crossed the rough grass, the ground soft, he remembered the last injunction given him as he left Carlingwark to make for Orchardton and the coast.
‘Don’t try to make straight for Rough Island without checking the tide poles, for the Solway is gey treacherous and there are aye folk who take a risk and pay the penalty.’ And as an afterthought, ‘And don’t be fool enough to make your own way. The marker posts are there for a reason, for the sands likewise aren’t kind.’
He threaded through the trees that hugged the landward end of the point, following a rutted track. Through the mass of foliage a small hill protruded, a bony knuckle on the finger of land. He was half-way along when the trees gave way to open ground: rocky outcrops punctuated by pockets of grass and clumps of stunted gorse, straggled with bramble. From this vantage point Munro again saw the line of posts marching across the sands and beside them two slow-moving specks.
‘No doubt it was the linking of arms they wanted, and that can’t be done on horseback. But it’ll give us a chance to catch up with them.’
Sweet Briar’s ears pricked.
The track skirted an area of swamp and dropped down to a sheltered cove that signalled the start of the waymarked crossing. Sweet Briar halted, nickering to the two horses that cropped the tough grass, their reins looped around a stump of gorse.
‘No time to be social the now, lass. We have a tower to see.’
A slithering behind him and the rattle of shingle. The man sliding down from the lip of the cove was squat, bow-chested and with the distinctive square face and jutting forehead of a man with less than average capabilities. His agitation was clear in the fluttering of his hands and in the way he choked on a rush of half sounds, his repeated ‘Na, na’ all that Munro could decipher.
He acknowledged the man and gestured towards the sands. ‘My brother and his betrothed. I go to meet them, to visit the island.’ As he began to swing Sweet Briar round the man grabbed hold of the bridle, his jabbering more intense, his head shaking.
‘Not the horse?’
‘Na, na.’
Munro dismounted, tossing Sweet Briar’s reins to snag on the overhanging gorse. ‘It seems you are to get a rest after all.’ And to the man, ‘Thank you, I’ll have to walk then.’ He took a step forward but the man leapt at him again, hanging on his arm, his mouth working, the sounds more strangled than before. He was trying to pull Munro towards a large clump of gorse, his feet scrabbling on the shingle.
With a shrug, Munro allowed himself to be led. ‘You have something to show me? All right; then I must go.’
The man dropped to his knees and tugged at the twisted stems, a bundle of dead twigs coming away in his hands. He drew aside the living branches. Munro bent down beside him and stared into the gap. It took him barely a moment to register the significance of the bundle of marker posts, their bottom ten inches or so smeared with sand. They were undamaged, the paint rings which served to indicate tide levels unmistakeable, so that Munro knew of a certainty that their removal had been deliberate, the murderous intention clear – dear God . . . He plunged back down the slope, grabbing Sweet Briar’s reins and swinging up into the saddle, shaking off the man who still clung to him.
At his urging Sweet Briar pounded along the waymarked track, damp sand flying with every hoofbeat. Munro’s eyes were fixed on Archie and Sybilla and on the line of silver sweeping towards them. They halted, hesitated, began to run.
Munro was pushing Sweet Briar to the limit, screaming at Archie and Sybilla and he saw them turn at his call, as if uncertain
which way to go. And in that instant he saw them fall, stumble to their feet, fall again under the weight of water. Twice more he saw their heads rise like seals, then nothing, bar the quiet blue of the tide, swallowing the posts one by one. He pressed Sweet Briar onwards, fixing the point of their disappearance in his mind, until the water swirled around her fetlocks, inched up the cannon bone, reached her knee. She faltered. For a moment he considered keeping going, however futile, but the suck of the tide increased and he felt the sand underneath begin to shift. An image of Kate and the bairns, and then it was his own race back to the shore, Sweet Briar infected with his fear, with the storm gathering in his chest.
They slid to a halt on the shingle. Munro slipped to the ground and for a moment laid his cheek against Sweet Briar’s face, running his hand down her neck He had no words. Behind him an uneven shuffle and another hand matching him stroke for stroke. Munro lifted his head, acknowledging the offered sympathy, and though he knew it was fruitless, turned again to scan the surface of the water, unbroken save for the marker posts nearest the shore. The pain of failure, his inability to save Archie and Sybilla, gave way to anger, lending a harshness to his voice.
‘You know who did this.’ It came out as an accusation, its effect to make the man step back, rocking on his heels, holding his hands out in front of himself as if to ward Munro off.
Munro tried again, more quietly, ‘Come with me. To Orchardton.’ He placed a hand on the man’s arm as an encouragement, but he shook his head, his eyes wide.
His whole body was shaking, matted trails of hair slapping against his cheeks, his repeated ‘Na, na,’ increasingly desperate. Munro released his grip – whoever had done this would make mincemeat of him, and with an effort managed,
‘Thank you; for showing me.’ He gestured towards the clump of gorse, his voice hardening afresh, ‘I’ll find the man responsible.’
He rode Archie’s horse to Orchardton, leading the others, and it was gone six when he entered the courtyard. A lass, crossing from the kitchen to the tower, saw the three horses and dropped the board she carried, loaves flying.
‘Fetch your master.’
She picked up her skirts and ran, the door banging behind her. Munro dismounted, busied himself with sorting the reins, soothing the horses.
‘Munro?’
It was John Cunninghame.
‘I didn’t expect . . .’
‘I came with them, to see to materials, William also, though,’ there was an odd inflexion in John’s voice, ‘More for the jaunt, I presume, than for any help he has been.’ He was picking up and dusting down the loaves the girl had dropped. ‘Where are Archie and Sybilla?” The beginnings of a smile curved his lips. ‘Don’t say they marooned themselves?’
Munro met his eye, killed the smile. He pressed his fingers against his forehead, forced speech. ‘I saw them . . . tried to reach them . . . but the tide . . . it had me beat.’ An argument hammered in his head, one voice prompting: Go on, say it, tell the whole. Another, more demanding: Wait, wait for proof. He managed, ‘I brought back the horses.’
John uncurled Munro’s fist, released the reins, called for a stable lad. Retaining his hold on Munro’s arm, said, ‘Come inside. You need a drink.’
They climbed to the hall, Munro moving like a mechanical toy. A woman rose from the settle, mouse-haired, the welcome in her green eyes become, in a glance, fear. Automatically he took her hand, bowed over it, silent. She drew him to the fireside, pressed him down. John was there, holding out a glass. Munro tossed it back, coughed.
‘Steady.’ The voice came from far way.
The glass was removed, refilled, and he drank again. A third drink and his head began to clear, to harden into resolve. He stared at the floor, seeing not wood, but sand. ‘I intended to reconnoitre. When I came on the cove, they were three-quarters of the way to the island, maybe more.’ He thought how to tell only what he had decided. ‘I went to follow . . . I didn’t think a tide could come so fast . . . I saw them stop, as if to turn back, then run for the island. The water . . .’ He shut his eyes against the memory. ‘One minute they were there, the next . . . there was only the tide, engulfing them.’
He felt the light pressure of cool fingers on his forehead.
‘I don’t think I would have made it back but for Sweet Briar. At low tide,’ he looked sideways at the woman, ‘Will we find the bodies?’
She didn’t meet his eye, but he heard her whispered ‘Oh dear God.’
‘No bodies?’ The voice was someone else’s entirely, though it inhabited his own mouth.
Dawn crept on Munro as he lay hunched against the rock, sheltered from the landward breeze by the bushes that surrounded him. He flexed his stiffened muscles as his eyes, adjusting to the pale light, roamed the shoreline, the rocky promontory, the gorse with the cache of posts. The clutter of dead wood still sealed the gap. He stood up cautiously, his ears straining for any sound. Nothing. Yet.
Despite that he had shut himself away so soon as a chamber had been prepared for him, it had been gone one o’clock in the morning when he collapsed, fully dressed onto the box bed. He should by rights have shared a chamber, but Mistress Maxwell, her eyes dark and damp, like fresh moss, had displaced her older boys to give him privacy. He had expressed himself grateful, and craving her understanding, had declined either to join the company for supper, or to have food brought to him, insisting that he could not eat. John had made one attempt at persuasion, but mindful of William’s presence among the party, refrained from pressing.
When the tower was quiet, save for the scratchings and scufflings of mice and the occasional groan as the fabric of the building re-adjusted to the cool night air, Munro had eased himself from the straw mattress, pausing at every creak of the planks beneath. As he set his feet on the floor, the cold from the bare flags seeped up through his woollen hose. He carried his boots down the stair to the main door, careful not to slip on the polished hollow of the steps, and across the courtyard to the stall where Sweet Briar drowsed. She blew a puff of warm breath into the hand that he placed over her nose and dipped her head to nudge his chest, lifting her hooves at his touch while he swathed them in sacking. Danger lay in the crossing of the barmkin, but no lights flickered in the tower above and Munro exhaled softly. He kept Sweet Briar to a walk until they made the foot of the rise, then removed the sacking and bundled it into his saddlebag, before mounting and making for the woods.
The slip-slap of the waves as they washed the cove had drifted him into an uneasy sleep, in which a swirling tide flowed, sucking and surging around his ankles, his waist, his neck. He woke, gagging on saliva, the tang of salt sharp in his mouth and nose, but when he looked towards Rough, the sea was a broken line of white receding beyond the outline of the island. The flats stretched undisturbed, so that he could have thought he imagined the events of the previous day, were it not for the knowledge of the two rider-less horses in the stable at Orchardton and the anger that hardened in a lump below his breastbone.
There was a jingle of harness and a muffled oath. Munro slid back into the shadow of the rock. For this he had crouched, uncomfortable, in the cold hours before dawn, sure of who he would see, less clear what he would do. He fingered the pistols, ready-loaded at his side. A shot to the belly was too easy. He wanted William to crawl on his hands and knees at his feet, to taste the wet sand in his mouth, as perhaps Archie and Sybilla had as they were overturned by the tide. He wanted William to beg for his life before he killed him. For it would be William who came to replace the posts – of that he had no doubt.
He could hear the soft sound of the horse’s hooves brushing the marram grass, and traced the movement towards him so that he gauged almost to the second the moment when the horse halted on the other side of the gorse. There was a thump and a fissling and the scrape of thorn on leather, followed by the light footfall of someone who walked with a spring in his step. A low whistling as Munro waited deep in the shadows. Waited until the man parted the gorse, bent do
wn to retrieve the posts, re-emerged still whistling, cradling the bundle in his arms.
‘So it was you.’ Munro severed the silence.
William swung around, fear flickering in his eyes as he stared at the pistols Munro held in each hand.
‘You wouldn’t be so foolish.’
‘No?’ Munro held both guns steady.
William’s left hand strayed.
Munro shifted his aim downwards and fired, the ball raising a puff of sand no more than an inch from William’s boot. ‘No?’ he said again, the second gun once more trained on William’s face.
‘What do you want?’
‘Apart from killing you? – The truth.’
The fear in William’s eyes was joined by calculation.
‘To know what it is you gain by the death of my brother, of Sybilla.’
‘She slighted me.’ William was dismissive. ‘And Archie had more of you in him than I cared for. They were of little importance.’ Then, as if seeking the advantage, ‘What would you gain by killing me? My father . . .’
‘Has another son, and he, though young yet, will grow. If . . .’ Munro’s voice was deceptively calm, ‘. . . When I kill you, it will be no great loss.’
William allowed the posts to drop, ‘Would you risk your own life for that trollop of your brother’s?’
Munro cast aside the pistols and drew sword and dirk both, advancing on William, driving him towards the gorse. Then he too had drawn and they circled, feinting and parrying, clashing the blades, each taking the measure of the other, watching for the fractional flinch that would indicate a weakness. Munro thought of nothing save cut and thrust, movement and balance, distance and speed. Seizing the initiative he swung his sword in a full arm upward cut. William parried with the flat of his sword and Munro allowed his own blade to slide downwards, then back and left, in a wide, horizontal slice. William raised his dirk as guard, and Munro stepped back, then attacked with a series of rapid slashes, the momentum carrying him forwards; his breathing short, in time with his swordplay. Attack . . . attack . . . redouble . . . redoublement . . . closing in.
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