The Proud Servant

by Margaret Irwin

  ‘Let this help you find your company again. Do not speak of meeting me until a month has passed.’

  The soldier held out his hand, took the coin, struggled to rise,

  but collapsed among the foxgloves. A bumble-bee, drunk as himself, fell out of the topmost bell of one of them, and spun buzzing and booming upside down on his sleeve, with all its pollen-yellowed legs waving helplessly in the air. Its fellow boozer squinted solemnly at it in his attempt to focus his blurred vision; then, with a regal gesture, flicked it from him.

  ‘It’s in my legs,’ he said confidentially, smiling up at Montrose – ‘I can hold my tongue. Good luck ride on with your honour.’

  They rode on, while behind them in fading accompaniment to the thud of their horses’ hoofs on the dried mud, there trailed the voice of the fastidious moralist, rejecting yet another lady:

  ‘In a corner I met Biddy,

  Her heels were light, her head was giddy;

  She fell down and somewhat did I,

  Therefore I’ll have none of Biddy—

  No, no, no, no, no, no,

  I’ll have none of Biddy, no, no, no.’

  They rode by night after that, and over moorland, away from the highroads. The shapes of hills surged up before them, black as soot, or grey when the moonlight fell on them. Smells struck sharp on their nostrils in the night air, the honey smell of heather, the cool smell of dew, the rank smell of their horses’ manes, damp with sweat, and of their tanned leather saddles, creaking under them as they rode. There was no other sound but the sighing of trees in the wind or the waking cry of a curlew, startled by their horses, winging, shrill and complaining, through the night.

  Here in this silent world of black and white their adventure assumed fantastic and dreamlike proportions. They had left the world they knew behind. As if in token that they did well to do so, they heard that all their company had been captured by Fairfax, the Parliamentary leader, only two or three days after they had left them.

  Of the expedition that had set out from Oxford that spring, only their leader and his two friends could now still strike a blow for Scotland.

  To those friends it was a portent that they would succeed where their army had failed. They spoke too of other portents; of battles that the country people had seen waged by cloudy armies in the sky at dawn; of a dark and empty church they rode past at night, where they heard the sound of voices rising and falling in the forbidden music of the old religion.

  Montrose did not need these signs and wonders; nor was he ‘discouraged by the reports that all Scotland had accepted the new ‘Solemn League and Covenant’, in alliance with the English Parliament; and all the nobles, with Traquair at their head, had declared themselves for Argyll. Each piece of news they got was worse than the last.

  Huntly had strutted and flapped his wings for the King, ‘but the old Cock o’ the North crows better than he pecks,’ said Sib-bald for his attempt was quickly smashed; Argyll had taken charge of Huntly’s sons (his nephews), and the Gordons now had no leader.

  Yet Montrose knew that in this step into the dark, into a country united against him, good luck would ride with his honour.

  They were making their way up towards his cousin of Inch-brakie, at Tullybelton, near Perth, for Montrose was certain that if anyone could help him in this madly adventurous escapade, it would be his guide and adviser of college days, Black Pate. He would hide in Methven Wood near his cousin’s place, where they had so often hunted together as boys; and could there wait for his opportunity. They were not so very far from Kinnaird, and his heart leaped at the chance to see Magdalen again, if only for a couple of hours. He sent a message to her by Colonel Sibbald, who would not be known at Kinnaird.

  That night he waited for her on the little hill beyond the deer-park. In that flat country it passed as a hill, but it was scarcely more than a rise in the ground above the surrounding marsh; a few firs and thorn trees, twisted into wild shapes by the wind, rose above the scrubby bushes, looking as though they had retreated there from the bog.

  As a boy, he had often paused here on his way from Old Montrose to fly his hawks over the uplands, and waved his scarf in signal in case any from Kinnaird should see it and join his party. Now he waited concealed among the bushes, for he could not go to meet her by the way they both knew through the bog; he must not show himself to any who might be abroad.

  He looked down on the black jagged shape of the castle, on the gardens like a grey mist, and rising from them here and there the black spires of trees that old Southesk had planted in his youth, trees which would, he said, outlast even the castle.

  Peace lay below, and the home life with his wife and children for which he ached after a year of separation. A fourth child

  had been born to them last spring, and he had not seen it, a daughter this time, so Magdalen had had her way at last. She had written to him in Italy hoping James would be a daughter – young and carelessly selfish as he had then been, he had guessed why. He had left her then for three years, of his own choice, merely because it was in the usual course of education. Nothing, he now thought, even if he lived to be as old as Southesk, could ever give him again those three years when he might have been young with Magdalen. He would tell her so tonight – and he added to it – ‘We have always been going to do things together, and never have.’

  Above his head the trees rustled like a sigh, or a laugh – her laugh. He could hear her answer, ‘What odds does it make?’ They could thank heaven like the glutton that it could not take away the dinners they had eaten – still less could it take away those they had only dreamed of.

  ‘Yes, the wish is all,’ he assented in a whisper.

  What fancy held him talking here to himself, no, to herself, in the dark? Was it that when he saw her, all words and thoughts would be driven out by her still presence, and all regrets, and even hopes? – for the future would signify no more than the past.

  Then the first breath of that peace she brought fell on him, quieting his mind in a tense hush of expectation. The trees were quiet now above him, and all the night, like himself, seemed to hold its breath at the first whisper of her approach – a faint swishing sound through the long grasses – and then a grey movement rather than a form in that still grey scene. There at last she was before him, with her face like a ghost’s beneath her hood, and her eyes black hollows in its shadow.

  He sprang to her, and for an instant saw her as her hood fell back and the moonlight flowed over her, lighting her eyes, that shone as if with their own light. Then that white face was hidden against his; there fell over them the darkness of the trees, of their own bliss, deep, silent, and forgetful as sleep.

  Chapter Three

  OF ALL THE personal qualities necessary in warfare, luck is the most important. Mazarin, the Italian cardinal who was beginning to rule France, put it above any other quality, even greatness; his first question concerning any general was, ‘Est-il heureux?’

  The fairy-tales agree with that cold-blooded cynic; they acknowledge no man as hero without his magic sword and flying shoes and cap of darkness and above all the favour of old, silly and contemptible folk, whom a worldly-wise man will despise.

  Montrose had had no luck so far in his venture, until he was wished it by a drunken old deserter.

  Unknown to him, in the heart of Scotland another man was wandering, beset by enemies, from whom he could only escape by such luck than when it came it seemed like a miracle and a sign from heaven. This was his long-expected ally, Alasdair Macdonald, at the head of fifteen hundred of the Macdonald clan from both sides of the sea, for most of them had been driven out of Scotland by their hereditary foes, the Campbells, to islands yet further and further west, until they reached the Irish coast. These were the ‘Irishes’ from Antrim, whose aid Montrose had asked for from King Charles, but of whom he could hear no word during all the spring campaign.

  They had landed on the west coast of Scotland at last, however, in three ships, two of them hire
d mercenaries from Flanders with their Flemish captains, the third, Irish, under an Irish adventurer. Alasdair collected together as many as he could of the Macdonalds on the Scottish side; but had no news of the King’s Lieutenant, the Marquis of Montrose, and no notion where to find him. He too was trusting blindly to luck in flinging his army into a hostile country to look for a leader.

  He was the son of Coll of Colonsay, who could fight as well with his left hand as with his right. That was the reason, it was held, that Alasdair could fight twice as hard as any ordinary man, run twice as fast, drink twice as much, and was half a head taller than other men. He was descended from Conn of the Hundred Fights, who had ruled all Ireland from the halls of Tara in the days when the Romans ruled over conquered Britain. There ran too in his veins the blood of the Vikings who had harried the islands of Scotland; and it was family tradition that a certain rusty old shirt of chain mail hanging up in one of his castles had been worn by no knight nor crusader but by one of those terrible ‘summer sailors’, as the sea robbers were still called along the coast.

  Legends had already sprung up about Alasdair himself. His hereditary poet, MacVurich, whose family had also come from

  Ireland but as late as the thirteenth century, was learned, like all who had held his post, in English and Latin; but he could show a more practical cleverness than the study of those remote languages. He knew just how to advertise Alasdair’s reputation, in touches sufficiently extravagant to be popular.

  Alasdair would in fact have been the perfect Highland leader of men in this expedition, if only he had known where to lead them. He promptly marched off to harry the Campbells, that being the accepted course of warfare; then found he had stirred up an army of Argyll’s in pursuit of him, went back to his ships, and found that Argyll had sent two warships of the English Parliament to surprise them as they lay in the harbour. The two Dutch mercenaries had yielded at once; the Irish had fought till all were killed, and the ship fired.

  So there was Alasdair with his boats burned, and all hope of retreat cut off. He marched boldly into the interior, and tried to summon the country to the service of the King. But too many of the clans had ancient grievances against the Macdonalds, and those near the Lowlands looked on these ragged, hungry, fierce-looking men, attended by their rabble of women and children, as a tribe of savages as alien to themselves as the redskins of America.

  Terror heralded their approach, people fled, the city gates were closed and guarded; while stories, growing ever wilder and more horrible, were told of the atrocities in the Irish massacre nearly three years ago.

  Alasdair had heard of Huntly’s rising in the north, and hoped to join him, but it was squashed by Argyll’s armies before he could do so. About five hundred of the Gordon clan would not submit to the Campbells, and joined the Macdonalds; otherwise they were without allies, provisions or base, in a generally hostile country. Their leader had written for instructions to the Marquis of Montrose at Carlisle, but had heard nothing beyond a fantastic rumour that he had disappeared – he had not been with his bodyguard when it was captured by the Parliamentarians, and no man knew whether he were alive or dead.

  Then came a mysterious message from him, saying he would meet Alasdair at Blair.

  The Macdonalds marched on Blair and took the castle; but the surrounding clans of Atholl held aloof. They were hostile to Argyll and the Covenant, but still more to these outlandish intrudes, and only waited to concentrate their forces before they should fall on them and cut them to pieces.

  Alasdair had led his men into an impasse; it would be weeks before the King’s Lieutenant could join them; and at any moment now the surrounding countryside might rise and annihilate them. He could do nothing but exhort his followers to patience with their sullen neighbours – the thing most difficult in the world to himself and them.

  Now his belief in the older, primitive religion of fate began to fail him; and he fell to telling his beads and praying to the saints in that despair which demands the consolations of Christianity.

  ‘For some sign that God has not utterly forsaken me,’ he prayed, as he walked on the wide moor where the Macdonalds and the Gordons were gathered together in gloomy inaction.

  He heard shouts in the distance; a ripple of noise and excitement was running through the Gordon troops, then a shot was fired into the air, and then a scattered volley. He hurried in that direction, thinking an attack; on all sides he saw men springing up, but their cries were of joy, not alarm. Some good news was crackling like running fire through the heather, and now it reached him—

  ‘The King’s Lieutenant has come!’

  ‘My lord of Montrose is here himself!’

  At the same moment, the whole hillside burst into a roar of welcome, a thunder of cheers, and guns fired in salute.

  And now Alasdair saw, walking towards him, a slight young man in Highland dress, with trews and plaid and small round targe and short broadsword, and a bunch of oats in his blue bonnet – attended by only one man. This then was the King’s Lieutenant, who had contrived to drop from the sky into this remote place at the moment when he was most desperately needed.

  But where were his bodyguard, his troops, his cavalry, and how had he contrived to fly here from Carlisle, when Alasdair could not expect him to arrive for weeks? The Macdonald poured out his questions as he embraced him and showed him to his men as their promised leader.

  They made a strange pair.

  The shaggy red hair and beard of the excited Irish giant towered over the King’s Lieutenant. Alasdair carried the mighty two-handed sword which only he could wield. His kilt, which he wore always like his men to fight and march in, was faded and had been hastily darned, but his weather-worn coat was covered with gold scroll-work, and his plaid was fastened by an enormous round brooch of elaborately fretted gold, with a pin so long as to stick out beyond his shoulder in perpetual menace to the eyes of ordinary mortals. Ornaments of white bronze tipped the laces to his leggings of soft doeskin that had once been white.

  By his side stood an Irish wolf-hound as much bigger than any other breed of hound as his master was bigger than other men. A heraldic-looking beast, narrow-waisted, deep-chested, rough-coated, with magnificent gallant head, he had to be introduced to Montrose together with his pedigree, like all the other tribal chieftains.

  For ‘my great dog, Bran’ was descended from one of the seven Irish wolf-dogs sent out for the Roman games, when ‘all Rome viewed them with wonder, and thought they must have been brought thither in iron cages’ – so the Roman consul had written, in a letter which Alasdair now quoted as though it had been addressed to himself; and Bran looked up, wagging his long whippy tail, his great jaws smiling open at the familiar words.

  Beside the two walked the oddly young-looking man, quiet and collected, taking it all as the most simple and natural thing in the world that he should walk twenty miles across the heather to find his army and take his place at the head of it, without any more pomp or show of power than if he had been a country gentleman taking a friend for a stroll round his estate.

  He introduced the friend – his cousin, Patrick Graham of Inchbrakie, a man with a scarred but pleasant face; and he told a strange story. Two more friends he had, he said, who were following with three horses, slowly, for one had gone dead lame – and this was the extent of his forces.

  ‘Howsoever you have come,’ said Alasdair, ‘you have come in answer to my prayer, when I despaired. Now I know that you will be bringing us victory.’

  ‘So I despaired,’ replied Montrose, ‘when I was hiding in Methven Wood – and then heard of your coming.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Alasdair, ‘for you and I are friends as well as allies from this time on.’

  He was looking at his new friend in a kind of awe, for surely there was something miraculous, not only in their meeting thus at last in spite of all the efforts of their enemies, but in the nature of this man. He took on himself none of the airs of command, yet Alasdair had at once felt
he could accept him as his leader.

  He listened to Montrose’s low voice telling him how he had sat in Methven Wood, thinking of the miserable bondage and slavery brought on this country – ‘and as I sat there alone I prayed to God that He would remove the curse from the land, and make me His humble instrument to do so. I looked up and saw a man running towards Perth, with a fiery cross in his hand. I went up to him and asked what this was for, and he told me that he had been sent to warn the city of Perth to raise all the countryside against the Macdonalds, who were even now in Atholl. My prayer was answered – and now I have come in answer to yours.’

  If he had come at the head of all the King’s horses and all the King’s men, his effect could not have been more extraordinary. The King’s standard was raised on the mountain side and saluted by a flourish of trumpets, a strange thing to hear in that lonely place as though at some high ceremonial.

  But Montrose knew the value of ceremony. Those who would not join with wild Irishes would follow the King’s Lieutenant and the Royal Standard; and he was soon proved right by the sound of pipes and the tramp of those very men who had only been waiting for their opportunity to attack the Macdonalds, and now marched instead to serve beside them under the Graham.

  Montrose belonged to none of these Highland clans, and could command any of them. He told them of the Stuart; and men who had never seen an Englishman, burned to defend their kinsman and countryman from his treacherous English servants. Loyalty here was still a simple, almost a primaeval thing; it was a far cry from the philosophies of Oxford, and lawyer Hyde’s ratiocinations on the necessity for a personal embodiment of the law. What Highlander would recognize his king by such a name?

  It was a far cry from Oxford in every respect, from the most sophisticated modern culture of court and college to the leadership of this tribal host. Time, where it brings no change, stands still; and life in the Macdonald clan had been the same for at least sixteen centuries.

  ‘Your Honour’s noble great-uncle, Ranald Macdonald,’ so sang MacVurich to his chieftain, had taken a dislike to his fellow guests, or objected to their number, since he made the thirteenth, so had risen early one morning and slain the other twelve, then propped their bodies against the wall, where their hostess would see them from her window when she rose.