The Proud Servant

by Margaret Irwin

  ‘And these are the foes,’ said Alasdair, ‘to whom you will be kind at the expense of your friends. If I had that man here who stabbed Kilpont, a Stewart as he was, but a cur with the heart of Campbell – then I would pluck that heart from his living breast, and glad I would be to do this small thing for your friend. But you no doubt would be trying him with a court of law and allow him every justice. My lord, in times like these, justice must run in a red torrent or not at all.’

  ‘Wait,’ Montrose told him.

  His face was dark and compressed these days. Johnnie did not care to stay by him. He sought out young Wat, who was suffering passionately for the death of his father. Little enough he had seen of that gay, handsome and witty young man, but he had come into his humdrum life at the pastrycook’s at Saint Andrews like a young god out of the sky, had put him into college, had had him taught the gorgeous art of drumming, and then started him on this impossibly exciting adventure. But now his father was killed, and the adventure would soon be over for himself.

  Johnnie hotly declared that his own father would look after Wat, as he had promised Kilpont; and himself and Wat would fight out the campaign together. ‘It will be up in the mountains next, you know, to beard Argyll in his own lair. We shall have such a winter as no soldiers have ever seen before. My father says we must travel light, without tents. We can make fires in the woods perhaps, and toast venison on the points of our dirks, and hear the wolves howl, while we lie snug in the heather.’

  In the shimmering dusk of an early September, the prospect seemed one of fairyland. They had been out in the wood with catapults and stones, such as the street boys were using as real weapons now in Paris, to see if they could not get a rabbit or two without wasting any ammunition. It would all be good practice.

  Now they made a fire of bracken and dead wood and flung themselves before it; they lay on their elbows in the thick leaf mould, their shoulders hunched in curves like a puppy’s, their legs stretched out in lithe repose. Johnnie had made a whistle out of an elder stem, and was playing one of the piper’s tunes upon it; for once he was the musician while Wat lay and criticized and drummed an accompaniment with one stick against the trunk of a tree.

  A wild cat ran along a branch a little way off, and crouched, glaring at them, its globed eyes magnified into green lamps in the firelight. Wat drew out his catapult, but before he could take aim, the great round head and its Chinese devil’s stare had vanished.

  The woods grew thick and dark; a stream lisped and rippled unseen below; a tiny crescent moon hung low down, caught in the branches of a tree.

  ‘Turn the silver in your pockets,’ said Johnnie, but Wat had none.

  ‘We will wish instead,’ he said, and they wished, but not aloud, for to tell would destroy the power of their wishes. Yet they must have been much the same, to judge by the talk that followed. They made plans for the future; they would continue to have adventures together, and by the side of Montrose. They would never go home until the three of them had conquered Scotland for the King, and Johnnie had killed Argyll; and Wat, the slayer of his father.

  At that, sorrow fell on him again, that he should have forgotten his father while he had hunted and talked and laughed with his friend. But Johnnie flung his arm round his shoulder and would not let him blame himself – ’Your father liked you to be happy and us to be friends, as he was with my father – and so we will be, always.’

  Soon Wat was chuckling as he told Johnnie how he had cajoled the man who had been chosen as envoy to Aberdeen tomorrow, to let him go with him.

  ‘You might have asked for me too.’

  ‘My lord would never hear of your going.’

  ‘Nor you either.’

  ‘Ah, but he need not hear of me.’

  ‘Well, he shall then.’

  Wat sat bolt upright in the firelight; his eyes, that had been wet for his father, now bright with anger.

  ‘Is my Lord Graham a sneak?’

  ‘He is not. You make me talk like the Macdonald. Sit down and stop being a fool. But I think perhaps I may be one – or worse, a coward – if I do not tell him. Look how they would have hanged my uncle Madertie.’

  ‘After their victory. And that they’ll never get. My lord of Montrose wears victory on his face.’

  ‘He has not lately,’ muttered Johnnie, but so low that Wat did not catch the words, and took them for a growl of dissent to his project.

  ‘In any case they would never trouble to hang or imprison a drummer-boy,’ he pursued, ‘and it gives an envoy importance to have one with him. Say what you like, it is the drummer-boys who give an air to the army.’

  ‘What is there to be gained by it?’

  ‘Why, I shall see the town, at peace, before we all come hurtling into it, and I shall see the fat magistrates’ faces go purple when they read my lord’s letter, and I shall get a drink, and perhaps a silver coin to turn in my pockets at the next new moon.’

  ‘You’ll never keep it till then!’

  They laughed and rolled over and talked of other things, contentedly at peace in that eternal summer evening that is only known in boyhood.

  Chapter Eleven

  Montrose sent his envoy to the citizens of Aberdeen to command their surrender. Should they defy him, he warned them to remove all old people, women and children to a distance outside the city walls, since the flight of their armies would be directly through the streets of the town, and those who remained could expect no quarter.

  The envoy returned safely but in a white fury; he told his commander that those inhuman butchers had killed a child under a flag of truce.

  Montrose’s face went grey in a sudden horrible fear.

  ‘Not my Lord Graham. He is safe, sir. It was only a little drummer-boy who would come with me, the poor little rascal, he was so eager, I hadn’t the heart to refuse him – and the magistrates were kind to him and gave him a silver coin, but then, as we came away, someone shot the boy dead – for the sake of the coin, I daresay. We had to leave the poor lad unavenged.’

  Young Wat had won his silver coin and lost it – murdered within a week of his father’s same fate.

  Had it indeed been Lord Graham who now lay dead in that treacherous town, Montrose would have sent the city up in smoke to avenge him. Should he do less for this boy, whom he had already loved, as he had loved his father – who had been needlessly, brutally smashed to death for the sake of a silver coin?

  A hot red mist swam before his eyes; there was the smell of blood in his nostrils. For the only time in his life he knew that vampire rage that can make a man long to tear his enemy to pieces, with teeth as well as hands. He turned to Alasdair, and the chieftain flinched before the look on his face. But his speech was calm.

  ‘If we win, your men shall have the sack of this city,’ was all he said.

  The magistrates had written that they understood no quarter was to be given, ‘except to old persons, women and children.’ That was not what he had written. He had told them to remove all old persons, women and children, or they could expect no quarter. They had not obeyed him; they should have no quarter.

  They had understood well enough, their heads were the hardest in Scotland – a city of granite heads, granite hearts, of a skinflint meanness that counted a coin above a boy’s life – in his rage he felt that he had always hated Aberdeen – that when he had squandered the wine in her streets for the beggars to drink, it was because he had wished to see them running red with the blood of her parsimonious citizens.

  Johnnie came running to him, crying for the death of his friend, and for vengeance – ‘Kill them, sir, kill them all, the brutes, the devils – but, oh sir, I knew he was going, and I did not tell you because he would have called me a sneak – and I let him go without me.’

  ‘Be still,’ said his father, ‘he shall have vengeance.’

  So quiet was his voice that Johnnie’s grief and rage froze together. He stared at his father’s face, and fell silent.

  Montrose ga
ve the order to march.

  *

  He avoided the fortified Bridge of Dee, which he had taken five years before, but at the cost of so much trouble. This time he had crossed the river higher up, and led his army down the north bank to where Lord Burleigh’s marched to meet him, with over two thousand infantry and five hundred horse. This was about two miles from the town. Montrose’s infantry had dwindled to fifteen hundred, but he now had far more weapons and ammunition, about seventy-five horsemen, and the nine guns he had taken at Tippermuir – these considerably smaller and lighter than Burleigh’s artillery.

  He divided his cavalry into two bodies to guard each wing of his infantry, with Nathaniel Gordon commanding the left, and Sir William Rollock the right. He and all his men, to avoid confusion with the enemy, had stuck a bunch of oats in their bonnets, plucked from the ripe cornfields near by. He was now on horseback, with his son and Lord Airlie and the younger Ogilvys by his side, and Alasdair commanding his Irish in the centre.

  The first move was to the Covenanters; under cover of their heavier artillery fire, they took some cottages and garden walls that had the ill luck to lie between the two armies, but were soon driven out from this point of vantage by Alasdair and his men who got ahead of the rest of the army.

  Young Lewis Gordon rode out from the Covenanters at the head of his eighteen horsemen on a little charge of his own, in the grand manner, all firing their pistols, then wheeling round and retiring at the caracole. It made no more impression than if it had been, as it looked, an exercise at a cavalry school; and other isolated charges followed with as little result.

  But under cover of these flourishes against Montrose’s right wing, a hundred of Burleigh’s horse and four hundred foot worked their way round to the rear of his left flank, and would have demolished it, had not Montrose got wind of their manoeuvre in time, and ordered Sir William Rollock to swing his cavalry on the right wing round to the aid of Nathaniel Gordon’s.

  This left the right wing defenceless, and now from Burleigh’s army came Forbes of Craigievar and his troopers, in no elegant caracole, but in a fierce charge to mow down the Irish infantry. They were not mown down. By order of Alasdair, who was as cool now in this desperate moment as he had been laughing mad at Tippermuir, the Irish fell back on either side and let the troops crash through, then closed on them from behind, so that now it seemed that it was the cavalry that were being mowed down. Saddle after saddle was seen to be riderless, emptied by musket fire or the thrust of the pike, or clutch of the Highlanders, who held on with one hand while they stabbed with the other. The troop was swallowed up, and scarcely one returned from that charge.

  Montrose had now had several hours of hard, uncertain fighting, with none of the sheer animal excitement and astonishment of Tippermuir, but with his brain strung taut and cold with the necessity to watch every corner at once of this confused battlefield. He had been backwards and forwards from one end of his troops to the other, now dividing, now consolidating his cavalry.

  Not till that small force was all but exhausted did he see his first real opportunity that day. The enemy’s cannon were doing heavy damage, but the Irish had learned to disprove that

  There’s not a man in Highland dress

  Can face the cannon’s roar.

  Said one of them, winking up at his Commander-General, as he helped finish the ghastly work of a cannon ball by cutting the skin that still attached him to his severed leg – ‘I am sure your Honour will be mounting me in the cavalry, now I can no longer fight in the foot.’

  ‘I will be mounting you this moment,’ Montrose answered him, and ordered one of his few horsemen to get him out of the thick of the fight; then, in the same breath, swerved, galloped down the ranks, shouting to his men to club their muskets, bring out their claymores and get to close quarters with their enemy. He swept his whole battle line forward into the centre of the Covenanters’ army, broke through, and drove it back to Aberdeen. Hundreds were slaughtered before the city was reached; through the streets of the city the pursuit and butchery continued. Now Alasdair’s men had their way, and were allowed to work their will on the conquered town, unchecked.

  Montrose left the town for his camp. Master Forrett came and pleaded with him; the wise and kindly Madertie thought it a mistake to alienate the city, which had been loyal in the past, and was Covenant probably only by compulsion.

  But Montrose would listen to neither reasoning nor pity. His ears were deafened with a loud singing noise like many waters. The hard-won contest had only intensified the red mist that swam before his eyes. For hours he had seen blood, smelled it, drawn blood spurting from men’s veins, tasted it from his own lips, which he had bitten as he fought.

  He did not stay in the town, not only because he would not call off his men, nor see what they were doing, but because he did not know what he himself might do if he were there.

  There may come a time in a man’s life when it is torn up by the roots, and reversed. Such a time had come to Montrose. All that he had cared and worked for before, justice and pity and the defence of the defenceless, were now torn up from his mind, leaving it raw and bleeding. Of what use was it to think that he could struggle on against the stream, that he could uphold what his enemies had determined to destroy?

  The price of assassination lay on his head; they had tried to murder Madertie; they had murdered Kilpont and his son. This was the world as he must now know it. The stream of life ran dark, its courses evil – bloodshed and tyranny and treachery and the cruel greed of money – these things made up the life of man.

  He had thought he could make it a splendid and a shining thing; he was wrong. Let Alasdair’s men rob and rape and tear the clothes from their victims before they killed, so that they should not be stained with blood. What did it matter how many people died, now that hope was dead, and the young lovely courage that had once leaped in the heart of a boy, mad with excitement in his first adventure, whose fair body now lay rotting in the midst of a screaming city.

  Johnnie had plunged into his tent, and there stood swaying, his eyes bloodshot and staring. His father moved heavily towards him, asked if he were hurt.

  He answered thickly, ‘Alasdair took me to see it. I thought it would be sport. I saw a woman—’ he stopped, turned a liverish brown, and collapsed at the door of the tent, where he was violently sick.

  Montrose lifted him and put him on his bed, where he moaned a little, turning his head away from his father. His eyes still wore that glazed look of horror. They would lose it, but they would never again look as they had done yesterday. Always at the back of them there would now lie the knowledge of what evil could be seen in the world.

  Looking down upon his face, Montrose knew that he had killed something in this boy, as surely as that the other had been murdered.

  He called Forrett to attend to his son, and rode out into the streets. For a few moments he sat his horse, dully looking on at what he saw.

  What had these shrieking victims to do with his dark mood, or with the death of his drummer-boy? What did it help that another scene of horror was added to the world, and by him? Was murder to beget murder for ever, until at the latter end the world was wiped out in blood? Then all he had fought for was in vain, was now made vain by him.

  He looked round him on the death, not of his enemies, but his hopes.

  A man rushed out from a doorway through a little crowd that was being horribly busy, and flung himself on his horse for protection. In his bonnet he had stuck a wisp of oats, Montrose’s own badge, in the vain hope it might prove a safeguard. Two Irish Highlanders were pursuing him, and would have dragged him back into his house to torture him to reveal his treasure, but Montrose drew his sword and laid it across the man’s shoulders towards his pursuers.

  ‘You will leave this man to the King’s Lieutenant,’ he said.

  The Highlanders stared up at the figure on the horse for the first time, then wheeled round to leave their victim, in search of other quarry. But Mon
trose called them back, and commanded them to stay by him and help stop the sack. ‘We must be out of this town at once,’ he said, ‘and at Kintore ten miles away.’

  He found Alasdair and told him his decision; he did not even think to notice what effect it had on him. He had made up his mind what should be done, and nobody and nothing should turn him from it.

  The men had got out of hand, and it was hard work to tear them off their prey. He ordered trumpets to sound and a proclamation to be given to get them out of the town. They thought Argyll was upon them, and this helped the more clear-headed to obey. Those who were more than half drunk, or maddened with lust and bloodshed, were dragged off by their fellows. In time they were all outside the city, reeling and stumbling into the line of march.

  Then came the toll of the city’s dead. Somewhere from a hundred and thirty to a hundred and sixty was the loose estimate – nothing to be compared with the sacks in the German and Swedish wars, said the old campaigners. Nor were the names of any women among those registered as murdered. On the other hand, a number of these now followed the army among the horde of Irish women and children.

  The list of the horrors might well have been worse. But the exact number of those killed was as immaterial as when Montrose had seen the whole world swim in blood because of ‘the death of ane’. Was not the death of Christ but ‘the death of ane’?

  He had allowed a sack, and a sack of what was in the main a loyal city. Worse, he had handed on the old hideous tradition of revenge that had wrecked Scotland again and again, and was wrecking it now. He had done this although he had seen it so clearly, and therefore his blood-guiltiness was blacker than Alas-dair’s.