It was an agonizing position for the household at Kinnaird, glorying in the news of Montrose’s triumphs, but knowing how each fresh triumph might further endanger his family.
Then a bombshell fell on the Covenanters. The King’s secret messenger, James Small, was taken and executed on his way back from Montrose to England. The papers found on him showed Argyll that the King intended to come north. Once again his worst terror was upon him – the King in conjunction with Montrose – it would mean the end of himself. He did all he could to stir up his generals, and only increased the violent irritation between them after the flight from Dundee.
Leven was furious at having sent his best troops to Baillie for a wild-goose chase that achieved nothing; Baillie accused Hurry of treachery in never attacking the retreating army with all the full force of his cavalry at once; Hurry said that Baillie had no more strategy than a hen. Hurry was sent north to raise new levies, Baillie was settled once more near Perth, and it was hoped that Montrose would eventually be caught and crushed between the two forces.
Lord Southesk, who brought the news to his home, had also heard popular accounts of the utter destruction of Montrose’s army on the flight from Dundee; but the new urgent efforts on the part of the Covenanters gave him a shrewd guess that these reports were merely Argyll’s propaganda.
To the countryside at large, Montrose had become a terror incalculable as the forces of nature. If a few goats were seen on the tops of the hills in the twilight, they were thought to be the Macdonald men, and people fled.
But the fear of the Solemn League and Covenant was the creeping dread of a daily personal tyranny in tiny matters, prying into the most intimate details of a man’s private speech and behaviour, crippling all hope and power to change. And with it went the still deadlier fear of the torments of hell, which were confidently promised to all those who did not support the Covenant. Now came another fear.
While Montrose and his men wandered on the mountains and laughed at their enemies’ threats of execution by hanging, drawing and quartering, plague crept through the towns on the bodies of rats. It met a weakened power of resistance from the human community, who had had the sunshine squeezed out of its life by the iron determination of the Kirk towards ‘the maintenance of a serious style of manners’, and ‘the uprooting of superstition.’
A cavalier poet in England showed sound medical sense in his prescription—
My wife will dance and I will sing,
For sure it is the very best thing
To drive the plague away.
But in Scotland at this time dancing and singing were legal offences – and so was it to make a pilgrimage to a holy well or the neglected shrines of local saints, as people had done in the old days in time of pestilence, to give themselves hope for life, and comfort for those who had died.
To do so now was superstition. God had written what He had written, and nothing that the people could do, nor any heathenish saint, would alter it by a hair’s-breadth – while as for those already dead, the overwhelming majority was known to be damned. The creed of predestination may show courage; but it is the courage of despair.
Holidays that only made the grey streets vacant and silent – the fear of hellfire as the only permissible superstition – these now helped to feed the plague.
It was creeping towards Edinburgh, and there in the Castle above the town was James, who was now Lord Graham, with his tutor, Master Forrett, in prison.
Still Magdalen could not believe these things. If James were there, she might believe that Johnnie was dead, but now there was nothing through the house but a great silence. People said things to her and sobbed; and she scarcely heard them. Rob looked at her with round, frightened eyes, knowing that both his brothers had gone, and he must now be the man of the family; but she never noticed his efforts. Little Jean cried, and she hushed her as mechanically as if she were a noise, and no more.
She wrote letters to James, and answered his questions about his dogs and hawks and favourite pony. She sent him all the things she could; she looked through the shelves for books to send to him and Master Forrett. Here were the play books the little tutor had bought for Jamie when he had come out of prison in Edinburgh Castle. She opened one of them at random, a modern one called The Broken Heart, and stood staring dully at three lines whose sound came back to her in her own voice—
‘But I have signed a Covenant with sadness
And entered into bonds without condition
To bear these tempests calmly.’
Her resignation was of stone; it seemed that nothing could break it, because her heart was broken.
But those who sign a Covenant with sadness give more hostages to fortune than their children. Her husband came back and reminded her of that.
Like a thunderstorm his army had been circling round and round their home, sometimes even marching through the streets of Montrose, not five miles off. Every day came fresh tales of his exploits; they surrounded him like the flames of his burning progress, so that she could not see through them the face she used to know.
Now at last she saw it again, not dimly in her mind, through the fiery smoke of battles, ever more remote from her – but before her, close to her, looking down on her from horseback in their courtyard. His eyes looked through her, knew all that had stood frozen in her heart, knew that it was not frozen, for still it beat, for him; she put her two hands over it to still it, but it would not be quieted. He was down from his horse, beside her, he had lifted her up in his arms, and once again she saw his eyes, then saw nothing, felt nothing; and it was he now who put his hand in terror on the heart, for she had fainted.
He carried her into the house, up into their room. She opened her eyes on to his face, as he leaned over her. He had laid her on their bed with the green curtains.
‘Was it unlucky to choose green?’ she asked, ‘it is the fairies’ colour.’
It was strange to be speaking like this at random, not knowing what would come next. All these weeks it had been—
‘Oh still she stood, and bitter she stood,
And never she shed one tear.’
And now the first glimpse of him had released that icy ‘bond without condition.’ Her heart was not broken, for he was still there to break it. That was in no one else’s power, not even Johnnie’s, nor young James’.
‘You will not do it, will you?’
He did not know what she was imploring him. He took her hands in his; they had grown very small, it seemed, but then they were always thin – and cold, too cold – he put them into his breast to warm them, and they could feel his heart there, beating in strong, steady strokes, how unlike her own.
‘Little cold claws,’ he said, and then suddenly he slipped from the bed to its side, kneeling there beside her, and put his head down upon her breast, and let it lie there, for he was tired.
He had stood with his son beside him on the top of the world, and seen his enemy fly from before him; and now his son was dead, and his enemy was preparing ever fresh armies against him. His second son had been snatched from them. His estates were forfeited, his houses lay burned to the ground, his fields laid waste.
He had come home to his wife, and felt how frail a hold he had left her on life – only her hopes for him.
For he knew now in the deep silence of their peace together that what she had been imploring him just now was not to break her utterly by his own death – and how could he assure that, when sentence of death by the law of the land-had gone out against him, and twenty thousand crowns was the price offered for his murder?
‘Dear heart,’ he said, ‘you know me here with you, whenever I am from you. Will you not know it still, if I were dead?’
‘It would be a great peace for you,’ she said.
For her too perhaps. She did not face that. But peace lay round them, here and now. Their hearts ceased from straining into the future. They had even courage presently to speak of the past, of Johnnie. She asked who had nursed him. H
e told her.
‘One of the Irishwomen!’ she exclaimed in horror, and it was as though she had said a cannibal savage. Did he not know it well already, Montrose could see in his wife’s eyes the popular notion of his allies, and the major reason of his difficulties in finding recruits to fight alongside of them.
‘As fine a race of men as any soldier could hope to lead’ – it was what a General might say of black troops from Africa. The Lowland Scots could not believe the Irish had had more civilization than that. What they and the English settlers had made of that civilization, was too recent in their memories.
Magdalen had to drag her mind from pictures of hovels shared with swine, of the filth and ignorance of homeless outcasts, of the barbarities of long-deferred vengeance, as he told her of Bebinn, whom he had left in charge of an improvised field hospital at Blair Castle.
‘The last thing I did before coming here was to write a pass for a sick soldier to go there – Donochy of Celly, a very good fellow.’
She knew she had no need to ask if Johnnie had missed her when he was ill. There had been no time for that, no room left for her; she knew that no boy ever lived or died more happy. His adventure with his father had continued through the very gates of death; and she could not grudge that to his father’s son.
Her husband and her father discussed together how she could make her peace with the Covenant through her father, and so safeguard the remnant of her children.
Was she then to swear allegiance to the very men who had set a price on her husband’s head?
Her father advised it; so did her husband.
‘Your nieces are in prison for honouring you,’ she said, ‘the Napiers are punished because they are your friends. Shall your wife be the one to compound with your enemies?’
‘Yes, for it is my wife’s duty to preserve what she can from my enemies. Will it be any satisfaction to me to know you are in a dungeon for my sake, or to have Kinnaird a burnt-out ruin like my own homes of Mugdock and Kincardine?’
‘He speaks sound sense – especially about Kinnaird,’ said old Southesk, thinking to persuade his daughter, and never seeing the quiet delight it gave her to hear Montrose advocate this un-heroic and practical course.
Her father sat himself heavily at the library table, where so often in her childhood he had spread the painted charter of King James before her; and set himself to write the letter that was to comply so tamely with their enemies. She turned towards her husband where they stood together in the deep embrasure of the window.
‘So,’ said she, ‘I am to keep in with your enemies – and then when you have won all England as well as all Scotland for the King, you can beg his pardon for your recreant and disloyal wife.’
Suddenly she knew for the first time how jealous she had been of Johnnie riding off into the mountains by his side, and even of those adoring nieces in prison for their love of him. Timid and delicate, she had always sought refuge in unromantic irony from the longing to share his adventure and his fate.
‘Do you remember,’ she said, ‘how Queen Mary “repented nothing but that she was not a man, to know what life it was to lie all night in the fields, or to walk upon the causeway with a knapsack, a Glasgow buckler, and a broadsword”? – But no, all the glory is yours, and I stay here.’
He put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes.
‘Your own glory needs no other,’ he said, in so grave and tender a tone that she no longer wished she were a man.
Men enough he had to follow him to the death. Here was the hope of his life, and hers, as they sat beside each other in this window seat, looking out to where the wild April sunshine blew across those familiar pastures – a peaceful landscape under the torn silver lights – a country like herself, he told her – and other things too, precious, small and carelessly uttered, as though he had forgotten he was speaking.
‘My dear and only love,’ he whispered.
The old man at the table, who sat writing with his back towards them, complained that their half-heard murmurings drove his words out of his head.
‘Shall I read this sentence to you?’ he asked, to stop them; and came towards them with the paper in his hand, saying, T will take it with my grandson to Edinburgh, and show him to the Committee, and answer for my daughter’s obedience to them.’
He read aloud, ‘That the Committee of the Estates may ordain and allow the Earl of Southesk to deliver Robert Graham, son to the late Marquis of Montrose, to Magdalen Carnegie, his Mother, to be kept and entertained by her.’
‘The late Marquis of Montrose?’ repeated Magdalen.
‘It is the formula,’ said her father pettishly, as he handed the paper to Montrose, wishing that women did not always fasten on such trifles to fuss over – ‘Your husband is dead by law.’
Chapter Twenty-four
He rode away to conjure another army out of the heather, to send Macdonald into the west, and Black Pate into Atholl, and George Gordon to Strathbogie, all for more troops. Young Lewis had decamped with his men, either in answer to his father’s summons, or because he was in a temper, or because he had already fallen in love, and married, without waiting for his father’s consent.
But in his place there appeared another brother, Aboyne, who had escaped from Carlisle, with his arm in a sling, for he had put out his shoulder – ‘out of pure sympathy with my uncle of Argyll, to see how much it need cramp one’s movements’.
How much, he showed by a surprise cavalry attack on Aberdeen, and the capture of a score of barrels of gunpowder from two vessels which he boarded in the harbour.
Like his brothers, he was at his happiest when in danger; indeed for Aboyne it was the only time when he was really happy. A few years older than Lewis, he was not so wild a flibbertigibbet as that inconsequent youth, but his vanity was of the darker and more deadly strain of his father’s. His courage could face death gaily; but it could never find life sufficiently rapturous.
He came back with his twenty barrels of gunpowder, glowing with his exploit and the anticipation of telling it to his commander, in such haste that he reached him that same evening – and then when he arrived, there was Montrose at supper with two newcomers, lads younger than Aboyne.
They were Archie Napier and another nephew who had just joined their uncle, having escaped together from their Covenanter jailors – among them Archie’s Covenanting uncle of Bowhopple, who had already complained of the boys’ ‘preposterous love’ for their uncle of Montrose.
‘Could they have found no other evening on which to come?’ muttered Aboyne, in disgust at the unnecessary amount of pleasure that showed already on the face of his commander, before he himself had had a chance to put it there.
But then Montrose sprang up to greet him in delight at his safe return, whether successful or no – and then heard what loot Aboyne had brought back with him, and came out to look at the barrels, and praised their rare old vintage, and told him how thirsty he had been for it, for they had run clean out of ammunition – and so great was the laughter and the admiration, and so often did Aboyne have to tell how he had won the prize, that he found himself the most glorious member of the family party before he had time to notice and resent that he was being drawn into it.
His straight brows, drawn low and level over his keen eyes, relaxed their strained air of ill-temper, always on the watch for occasions to feed it. His brother, George Gordon, had never seen him so calm.
And Aboyne in his turn saw the rather worried elder brother he had always known, preoccupied with his family responsibilities, transformed by his grave and confident happiness. A stab of deeper envy than any he had felt shot through his confused spirit, as he saw that Gordon’s was now free.
When Nat Gordon brought his young cousins to serve under the Royal Standard, he introduced the most disturbing factor in Montrose’s campaigns. A civilization of as fine a culture as that of this once wealthy and extravagant old family, with all its fierce religion of personal prowess and personal riv
alries, had bred a highly complicated stock, as fine in its ideals as a Chevalier Bayard, as petty in its quarrels as a nervous woman.
Until now, all Montrose’s movements had been affected by his need to work in conjunction with the Gordons, the greatest potential royalist force in Scotland.
From now on, his career was to be directly influenced by the impulses, magnificent or puerile, of this incalculable family.
Lewis had given him warning of its dangers by flinging off with his men for no reason that his own brother, George Gordon, could explain – unless, as he confided to Nat Gordon with a shrug, the boy had never got over his envy of Lord Graham’s Highland funeral – ‘though I told him he made me willing enough to give him the chance of one myself.’
Then it was the turn of the gold side of the medal to show itself, in Aboyne’s dash on Aberdeen, while still suffering from a wounded shoulder.
And now George Gordon himself came to the fore.
In that difficult battle at Auldearn, that best showed Montrose’s genius – when he had for the first time to act on the defensive instead of attacking, and had also for the first time a chance to use modern methods with his cavalry – it was George Gordon’s magnificent charge that finally won the day.
Montrose went to Gordon’s help on his recruiting campaign, for his small force of cavalry was being beset by Hurry’s horse. A wounded boy, called James Gordon of Rhynie, had to be left behind in one of the cottages, and two of Hurry’s lieutenants murdered him brutally as he lay in bed.
Montrose and Gordon joined forces again and were pursuing Hurry’s army out of the Gordon country towards Inverness – so they imagined, for Montrose did not realize Hurry’s strategy, until his enemy turned his army in the night, and swung back upon him.
It was before dawn on a thick, raining night early in May, when Alasdair’s scouts, who had the ears of the wild deer, heard shots about five miles off, and Montrose guessed at once that they must be those of Hurry’s men, firing off the damp powder in their muskets to clear them. That meant that Hurry had taken a leaf out of his own book, had lured him out of the friendly Gordon country, where he would get intelligence from the people round about him, and had turned to make a surprise attack at dawn. If it had not been for Hurry’s wet powder, and the long ears of the mountainy men, Montrose’s army would lave been badly caught.
The Proud Servant Page 43