‘What had you said to him?’ asked George Gordon.
But the initial stages of a quarrel did not interest Lewis; he had been insulted – that was enough. He might possibly have told Lord Graham that he was a pampered puppy and an un-licked cub – ‘and what the devil are you smiling at?’
Said his elder brother, ‘It’s so short a time since you complained that people had called you that. Well, now you have passed it on to Lord Graham, you should be satisfied.’
Lewis hunched his shoulders and thrust a face white with fury almost under George Gordon’s chin. ‘Satisfied? Yes, I’ll get satisfaction. It’s doing him too much honour when he ought to have his head smacked, but I have consented to cross swords with him.’
It was Lewis who very nearly had his head smacked, but Gordon was just able to restrain himself. Not only must this preposterous duel with his Commander’s son be stopped, but Lewis must be prevented from flying off in a huff, and half the Gordon Highlanders with him. But Lewis would only consent to make up the quarrel if Lord Graham apologized. After a long pause, he added – ‘In writing.’
‘Had you not better write out a list of your grievances, like our uncle Argyll before his duel?’ suggested Gordon.
Lewis laughed involuntarily at the memory, and then found he could not get back to his pedestal of offended dignity. Gordon drew a breath of relief that he need not after all trouble his hero with these schoolboy quarrels. But there was in any case no need, for Lord Graham had fallen ill.
Chapter Twenty
They had all moved on to the Bog of Gight, where Gordon glowed with pride to do the honours of his home, now a fortified royalist camp again, as it had been when Huntly had made his isolated and therefore frustrated campaign on the King’s behalf last spring. It was now the first blustering days of March, and Montrose was thankful to have his son in the comfort of Gordon Castle, for he had been worn out by the terrific strain of the mountain campaign that winter.
Now he lay deep and snug in a goosefeather bed, with curtains round him of white and scarlet silk from China, and need not care how deep the snow fell. He could hear the fretful cry of new-born lambs through the gusts of east wind, and the cawing of rooks as they built their nests in the high trees that Huntly’s magnificent father had planted when he was a young man.
There were women enough in the Bog of Gight to nurse him, but they were all driven out by the Irish wife of one of Mac-donald’s captains, who had great knowledge of medicine and was nick-named Bebinn after a famous lady doctor in her country.
The women who followed the Macdonalds were of all kinds, from the wives and concubines of the kerns who were as wild and fierce as their men, to this quietly adventurous lady who took it for granted that she should follow her lord to the wars and place her powers of nursing and the dressing of wounds at the service of his comrades.
And when it came to his commander’s son – would it be herself that would leave him to be stifled and bled to death by the barbarous doctors of this uncivilized country? For would they believe it, there was no such thing as a sweating-house in the whole land, or she might have got the rheumatic aches and the fever together out of the poor lad in a vapour bath, the way she need not bleed him, for that she would not risk, his heart had not the strength for it.
She smashed those panes of the little windows that were not made to open, and told the Gordons’ scandalized family doctor that in any hospital at home in the good old days, the patient would have had four doors open to the four winds of heaven, and a stream running through the centre of the house, but that she supposed there was no more knowledge of hygiene here than there was of anything else.
‘If she is so proud of her home, why does she not stay in it?’ grumbled the physician, once he was safely outside the sickroom. ‘It is my belief the Irish only came here for the sake of telling us how superior they are.’
Bebinn could not have stayed in her home, for she had been driven out of it on to the hills with all her family when she was a girl, and her father’s house and lands given as one of the new ‘plantations’ to a Glasgow trader. Her mother had died of the effects of exposure, one of her sisters from starvation, so that she had had good opportunity to practise her early acquired art of doctoring.
She was tall and plump, with pleasant, laughing features, a white skin, thick ropes of black hair round her head, and hands of which she took great care, lamenting to Johnnie that it was no longer fashionable to dye the nails crimson as in the days of the heroes, when every good house and the guest-house of every monastery had a bath, and all the men bathed after hunting and carefully combed their long hair before sitting down to dinner.
He lay luxuriously contented with the low sound of her voice as she moved about his bed. The candlelight gleamed on the necklet, shaped like a crescent moon, that fitted round her firm white neck; it was of gold, so finely wrought that no jeweller today knew how it was done; it had been made by the Sidh, she said, magicians, skilled in science and metal-work, who once ruled all Ireland, but now live under the earth in the elf-mounds, where they have built palaces that are ablaze with light and jewels.
The beauty and learning and noble living of ‘the old ancient days’ – he had caught glimpses of them in the talk of even the roughest of the Irish kerns – and now they shone about the sick boy as he lay in bed, dreaming of what he would do when he was full grown.
When he and his father had put the King on his throne again, he would ask in reward that he should be given the old title of the Lord of Ireland, and he would rule her with the wisdom of the Norman lords who had made themselves a part of the country, unlike the later colonists who had ruined Ireland by exploiting her for their own commercial ends; for the last hundred years they had settled in thousands like locusts on the land, driving the people out of their houses and fields to wander homeless and starving among the hills, until they had been reduced to utter savagery of spirit as well as of body.
‘When you are Duke of Ireland,’ Bebinn told him, ‘we will raise an army for you out of Ulster as fine as that in the Tain, where every man had a cloak of a different colour, some orange, some white, some blue, some yellow, and in their midst a young red-freckled lad in a crimson cloak, and who should that be but your Honour’s self?’
‘No, for I’ll be a man then.’
‘You will indeed, and you shall make me chief doctor and give me a laboratory for students to be making all sorts of experiments.’
‘And what shall I make O’Cahan?’
‘Tamer in chief to your Honour’s pets,’ said Bebinn, with a glance across the bed at the great Manus, who was imperturbably engaged in feeding a baby squirrel with milk from his mouth, squirting it drop by drop down a dandelion stalk.
There were no animals that O’Cahan could not tame; he had had as pets, but not, he explained, all at the same time, a crane, a crow, a badger, a wolf, a deer, and two sparrows that he had taught to fly at two darts, one red and one blue, which he would shoot from a blowpipe at a tree, and the one sparrow would fly after the red, and the other after the blue, and bring them back and put them into his mouth.
He would stay in for hours on those bright spring days to be with the boy when Bebinn allowed it, carving chessmen for him to have for his own to play with when he was better, or playing on a little flute the tunes of his famous cousin, Rory Dall O’Cahan, ‘which you thieving Scots try to claim as your own, and just because he did you the great honour to come over on a visit with a large retinue, and died here.’
Manus O’Cahan was famous enough himself by now, and infamous to his enemies for the courage and the cruelty that he had shown in the wars; but like many Irishmen he was prouder of the deeds of his illustrious kinsmen, even of those so peaceable as an old blind musician’s.
Alasdair came in too with his great dog Bran, and in his hand the magic green stone that the Macdonalds had kept for over a thousand years, ever since their chaplain, Saint Maelias, had brought it into the family. It had the power, sa
id Alasdair, to remove stitches from the sides of sick persons, and if the patient were not going to recover then it would of its own accord get out of the bed and roll away.
‘It looks like a green goose’s egg,’ murmured Johnnie – and Bebinn murmured still lower some further comparison, not flattering to its owner. He and his stone and dog were soon swept out again by her; and she came back into the room, quoting her ancient medical authority that ‘Dogs, fools and talkative people are to be kept away from the patient.’
Johnnie’s illness was very short. He had seemed at first only over-exhausted, but there came high fever, and two or three days of tossing in that great bed, where faces hovered over him. There was one like a moon, set in black hair above a ring of gold, that swam before him and disappeared but always stayed somewhere near him, for he had only to call and she came again.
Until he no longer wanted her, for there was his father’s face, keen and high like a hawk’s, with the clear eyes that could always pierce through the mist that now surrounded him; and his father’s voice could always be heard, low and ringing, when the others could only move their mouths at him and say nothing. And his father’s hand came down on his shoulder and made him know that all was well, when nothing else in that room remained, and the curtains of his bed had turned into the white and scarlet sky beyond the mountains, where he had stood beside his father and heard the trumpets salute the King’s Standard at dawn.
That hand was still on his shoulder, though its touch grew lighter and lighter yet – but now he did not need its touch to tell him that his wish had come true, that he and his father would go on like this for ever.
Montrose saw his son die. Years ago, at the same age as that son he had seen his father die. A world of peaceful family life, of security and leisure, had rolled away since that great gathering of his family had met together for weeks to do honour to the old Earl. Now his heir was buried in haste at the little church of Bellie, in the country of a rival clan – ‘And long will the Gordons be proud of it,’ said George Gordon.
The Irish wanted to give him a wake as long as that of Saint Patrick or Brian Boru, with a King torch of the thickness of a man’s body to burn before the house; but there was no time for that, nor to collect any of his family.
But Lord Graham had mourners enough. Four chiefs bore his coffin on their shoulders. The Macdonalds of Antrim from over the sea, the Macdonalds of Glengarry and Clanranald, of Keppoch and the Isles, the Camerons of Lochaber, the Macleans from Morvern and Mull, the Farquharsons from Braemar, the Gordons, the Grants and the Stewarts, the men from Skye and Orkney, from Uist and Kintyre, from Atholl and Nairn and Moray, all the different clans in turn marched over the bleak, dun-coloured heather, each with their pipers playing their immemorial lament for the dead, their inconsolable music sobbing and wailing like the lament of lost spirits borne on the cold air.
When all the clans were gathered together, then the women rushed forward, a rabble of mourning furies, and with frantic gestures threw themselves upon the coffin, beating their hands upon it, then flinging them above their heads – beating their breasts, tearing their hair, while the wail of the keeners rose and fell in long dying cadence, and one voice after another cried out, in verse made up on the instant, the love and honour that all the Highlanders, Scots and Irish, had had for the dead boy.
He had been their prince and their playfellow, their hope, and the tenderest object of their protection. Like his father he had been made free of their charmed circle, and before he was in his grave had passed into their other world of legend and song. Like a song he was remembered, a gay hunting song on the notes of the horns, that is heard only in the freshness of the morning.
And with him went the last moment when Montrose had felt himself that boy.
Chapter Twenty-One
Within a week of Johnnie’s death, young James, who did not yet know that he was now Lord Graham and his father’s heir, was riding down the street of Montrose, four miles from Kinnaird, accompanied by Master Forrett, to buy some new fishing tackle. Just as they had stopped before the little shop, there came a troop of cavalry clattering round the corner of the street, and at their head a tall, lean, horsey-looking gentleman, with a long scar on his cheek, and beside him, rather oddly, a ragged boy of the town, who hung on to his stirrup as he ran.
‘There he is!’ yelled the boy’s shrill voice. ‘That’s my lord James!’
‘And that’s your shilling, my boy,’ replied the gentleman, smiling at James in a way that precisian felt to be extremely familiar on so informal an introduction – ‘And now, my young sir, you will have to go with us.’
James thought at first he was still addressing the ragamuffin, and was wondering why he looked so cheerful, when the gentleman rode up closer to him, put his hand on his pony’s bridle and began turning his head round.
‘Who are you?’ asked James.
‘You’ll soon know,’ said the genial but bad-mannered stranger. For one wild leaping moment, James thought he might be a messenger from his father, come to take him to him. But he was Sir John Hurry, a Covenanting soldier, returning from a raid on some of Montrose’s men; he was now taking James and his tutor prisoner, to be sent on to Edinburgh Castle. He had good reason to be cheerful over this lucky windfall, and his raid had also been most successful.
Montrose was now in camp at Kintore near Aberdeen, which the Covenanters had evacuated, and had given his word that the Irishes should not come within eight miles of the city. But the gay Nat Gordon organized a pleasure party of about eighty companions to ride into the town and enjoy a really good dinner, for some of the inns had excellent cooking and wines. Sir John Hurry, who happened to be near by with about eight score horse, got word of this, and charged through the town, cutting down all the dismounted men who happened to be standing about, utterly unprepared in the streets; and drove off their horses. Nat Gordon, deeply closeted with the chief innkeeper in the cellar, dashed out to find that some of their best captains had been killed and among them Donald Farquharson, one of the finest men Montrose had. A miserable remnant of the pleasure party rode back to Kintore, as empty as when they rode out. Nat Gordon had to force himself to tell his commander of the carelessness that had cost them so dear.
For the first time since the campaign had begun, Montrose gave way to fury with his own men. The blind, needless stupidity of such a chance enraged him, and the wanton destruction of necessary men – but more than all, the loss in Donald Farquharson of a friend who never lost courage or hope or his temper, or the joyful alacrity he showed in all he did.
Everything seemed to be drifting from him at once. Old Lord Airlie was another victim of the winter campaign; he had fallen dangerously ill, and now the army was on the march again he had to be sent to Huntly Castle at Strathbogie to be nursed, with a guard of several hundred of his horse. The Atholl men had begun to go home; the Gordons under Lord Lewis showed every sign of doing the same. Seaforth, who had been sent to his own country to fortify it against the Covenant, had taken the opportunity to change sides again.
Montrose’s men were again short of food and ammunition, and their clothes in rags, for the plunder of Inverlochy had had plenty of wear and tear. His recruiting had to be carried on by threat of fire and sword, but the Covenanting lords preferred to see the threats carried out rather than join the Royal Standard in company with Western Highlanders and Irish.
There were strong fortresses for them to retire to; in one of them, the Earl Marischal, whose brother had fallen at Fyvie, shut himself up with sixteen ministers, among them Montrose’s old travelling companion to Aberdeen, Mr Cant, who told Marischal that the smoke of his burning barns was ‘a sweet-smelling incense in the nostrils of the Lord.’ What Marischal replied was not recorded. He sent no answer to Montrose’s repeated warnings, and refused all parley with him.
Montrose had still had no answer to his letter to the King, dispatched nearly two months ago; and without any promise of help from the King he could not now
march on the Lowlands. His army was rapidly dwindling, and General Baillie blocked the road to the south with three thousand men, most of them picked regulars.
He must do something quickly to hold the remnant of his men together, and counteract the Gordon grumblings, spread by their junior leader, who complained they had had no profit nor excitement since they had joined the Standard.
So he sent the weaker portion of his army on to Brechin with the baggage; and with the rest marched all night down on to Dundee, the most important Covenanting town in Angus. He summoned the magistrates to surrender, and on receiving no answer, stormed the walls, captured the guns on the little mound of Corbie Hill, turned them against the defenders, and entered the town. The citizens hurried to arrange a formal surrender with Lord Gordon, while the Highlanders burst into the shops, flung lengths of cloth over their shoulders, stuffed money from the till, raisins, dried figs, and even, in the agitation of the moment, split white peas, into their knapsacks.
Soon they found what they were really seeking – loaves and cakes and meat pies at the pastrycooks, smoked herrings, and, above all, barrels of wine and ale. They had not halted in the march all night, nor been full-fed for many days – now many of them drank till they fell. At ten o’clock that morning, April 4th, the assault had begun. By early evening a remarkable peace prevailed in the stormed town, and their commander looked down on it from Corbie Hill with a somewhat grim amusement.
To Black Pate of Inchbrakie, who was standing beside him, he said, ‘They have got their pay.’
Black Pate gave a glance at the worn face of his commander and knew well enough what he was thinking.
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