‘Yes, that’s what I have heard.’
‘So who gave it to him?’
He held up his hands. ‘I don’t know. It had been sent down to the new town before I ever got up to see Charpentier, and I never thought to ask.’
After that, very little was said between us for the first few miles, but the further we got from Aberdeen, and the ship, and Lumsden’s house and all that that entailed, the easier things became between us, so that when we at last rode in to the bounds of Banffshire, it was almost as if the last thirteen years had never been. There was scarcely a landmark we passed that did not recall for us some escapade, some scandal, some golden hour. Only as we approached Turriff did Archie become quieter, more withdrawn, in body as well as speech. We were entering upon the country where the Hays held sway, over which he had roamed as unquestioned heir, and where he was remembered still and often. I watched as Archie Hay disappeared before my eyes, to emerge as Sergeant Nimmo. He sat more hunched on his horse, the reins lay less easily in his hand, and even I would have sworn he did not see so well from his left eye.
All the same, we took the back roads for the last few
miles to his father’s castle, spurring our horses quickly past anyone who might appear at their gate or the door of their cottage to watch us pass, acknowledging no greeting on the road. And then, in the falling darkness, above the black spikes of the trees, we saw it, waiting for us, challenging us at last to face our return: Delgatie.
Our horses slowed, as if they, too, understood this was no light step we undertook. I let mine fall a little behind Archie’s, let him look upon the sight in silence and alone. He brought his beast to a stop and looked on for a full two minutes, then I saw him square his shoulders and turn to me.
‘Well, Alexander, what think you? Shall we show them Archie Hay is back?’ and with a whoop he dug his spurs into his poor beast’s flank and galloped towards the old place like the returning hero he once would have been.
As we approached the gate, Archie at last slowed to a more dignified pace, and I, relieved, drew up behind him. The castle rose above us, every window a memory, every water spout and gargoyle a forgotten adherent or foe of childhood games. The place was not in darkness, as I had expected, but lit up, a candle burning at every window. It was only then that the realisation struck me. ‘You are expected,’ I said.
He raised his shoulders lightly. ‘By some, who are in there, but not by all. It was necessary, to make some arrangement. But the old man doesn’t know.’ He gave a boyish smile. ‘It’s an indulgence, I know, but I wanted to see his
face for myself, to see the honest face, and my father’s love in it.’ He took his gauntleted right hand from the rein and clasped mine. ‘Wish me courage, Alexander.’
Even through the gloves, I felt the warmth of my old boyhood friend. ‘You have it, more than any I have ever known, and I love you for it.’
His eyes were gleaming, the troubles, the knowledge of the darkness of the world gone from him for this short while, and I followed him as he walked his beast under the archway and in to the courtyard of Delgatie Castle. It had been fourteen years since he had last passed under that archway, the hero going to the wars, and ten since I had done so, the disgraced, reprobate ingrate who had dishonoured the daughter of the house and turned the love of her parents for him to ashes in their mouths.
We took the horses around the side to the stables – no lad or groom to be seen, but eight or nine fine mounts well tended in their stalls. The sweet smell of the hay and the warm odours of the horses brought my every sense flying back over the years to the hours we had spent here, in the loft, hiding from his sister or planning our adventures. I watched Archie’s memory make the same journey as mine, and then his eye lighted on the magnificent grey in the furthest stall from the door, the best stall, and his face came alive. ‘My Lord of Balvonie.’ He strode over to the beast and stood before it, as the old stallion lowered his head to sniff and then nuzzle his master’s son.
‘It is him,’ I said, in a kind of wonder.
‘Of course it’s him,’ said Archie, laughing. ‘Balvonie will be here as long as the old man can put foot to stirrup.’ He murmured sweet words in to the creature’s ear. ‘The King of Sweden himself never sat a finer horse.’ He patted the beast’s neck and then put his fingers to his lips in an old, long-forgotten whistle.
‘Archie, what are you …?’
‘Sh,’ he said. ‘Wait.’
And so I waited, and soon there came the sound of footsteps in the yard. The stable door was opening, and Lord Hay’s stable master was holding up a lantern and peering down the stalls to where we stood.
The man looked, then took a step closer. ‘Is it you? Is it really you, Sir Archie?’
‘Aye, Ronald, it is me.’
The old, strong man, who had more than once in our boyhood lifted both of us by our collars from the ground, began to shake his head. ‘She said you would come, but I did not think it possible. The Lord be blessed that I lived to see this day.’
Archie was still, silent, as if twenty years had fallen back and he was a scared child awaiting censure from one of the few people in the world whose approbation mattered to him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last, almost swallowing the words down, and then again more clearly, ‘I am so sorry.’
The stable master came over to us and laid a hand on Archie’s shoulder. ‘It’s the proudest thing of my life, to know that my son died fighting at your side. I wept for
him, although I should not have done, but I give thanks to God every day that he died in honour, and for his faith.’
Archie looked to the ground and could say nothing. Ronald nodded at me and became gruff, as I had always remembered him. ‘And now, if the pair of you would leave me to see to these horses, they’ve been ridden hard, no doubt, and have stood here patiently long enough.’ And so we left him, removing the tack, emotion dispensed with, fulfilling his function in this world.
Once in to the house, I would have turned to the right, and down the steps for the kitchens, but Archie stayed me.
‘No, Alexander, you would not make me do this alone?’
‘Your father will want none of me,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t wish to mar the lustre of your homecoming, or bring a moment more grief to that man’s heart. I will wait down here; there’ll be a warm corner in the kitchen somewhere where I might pass the night.’
His face was pale and I saw that his hand trembled. ‘Please. I don’t think I can do this without you. Think what I have done to that man.’
And so, with my heart beating hard and my whole body shivering as if from the cold, I mounted with him the stone stairway to the great dining hall. I had expected silence. I had thought somehow, with his wife dead, and his son and daughter gone, old Lord Hay would keep his state alone, at the end of the long table in an empty hall, under banners of his family’s past glories. And at first, silence was what accompanied us up those stairs – not a servant, not a guard
to be seen. It was like an abandoned castle. And then I heard a murmur, a low tide of voices, lapping and retreating. I turned to Archie to ask him, but his eyes were fixed straight ahead, and so we went on.
I was a little surprised to see an armed man at the door to the hall. Just as I was placing his livery in my mind I heard the voice, a woman’s voice, strong, certain, accustomed to being listened to. I turned to Archie in disbelief. ‘Katherine Forbes is here? Lady Rothiemay, here?’
He grinned awkwardly, and raised his eyebrows as a wave of laughter broke out of the dining hall and sped towards and past us in the wake of a young spaniel trailing a hunk of meat. And then we reached the top of the stairs, and the guard stood aside for Archie, and all laughter from the dining hall stopped. Four people were in there, seated at the end of the great oak table that had seen forty gathered round it before now. At its head, as ever, aged by more than the ten years it had been since I had last seen him, was Lord Hay of Delgatie. His attention had been turned towards Lady Rothiemay, seated on his left, but now something had drawn his eyes straight ahead, to the doorway. I saw his mouth begin to form a word it could not manage. His hands gripped the edge of the table, he forced himself up and tried again. This time the word but no sound. And then the sound, a call from the depths of himself, from the grief of his stomach, to sound in our ears. His goblet went over, his chair was thrown back. A dog yelped as the old master started to
stumble and then run to the lame, scarred, weary soldier who had at last come home.
I kept back, in the shadows. I had no place here, but as father and son held each other, I thought my heart might break and I could not take my eyes from them. At length, the old man released his grip a little, just a little, and stepped back to survey his son. He passed a hand over the hair that as yet showed not a fleck of grey, to run it down the scar that cleaved the left side of Archie’s face. He took the hand, freed of gauntlet now, and turned it over in his own, larger, calloused ones. His boy’s hand. He moved his head in wonder and said, ‘My darling boy. My only boy.’ He clasped Archie again, then turned his head towards the table. ‘Look, Katharine. See who has come home to me.’
From my place in the shadows, I watched Lady Rothiemay. But it was not her to whom Lord Hay spoke. Across the table, closest to the door, was Isabella Irvine, and Lord Hay was looking past her, to the woman who had been sitting on his right. I had not seen her until now, had not looked her way. As she rose from the table, Lord Hay’s eye at last lighted on me. A sudden recognition, a mild confusion, but the anger that should have come did not. Instead a smile, a kindness in the eye of the man who had done so much for me and whom I had so long ago wronged. ‘And Alexander Seaton with him.’
He held out his arm to me and drew me also into his embrace, and then one of us on each side, took us into the dining hall. Lady Rothiemay remained seated, her face a
glow of happiness in the candlelight. Isabella Irvine was seated also, but I could not see her face, for it was turned towards the woman next to her, who remained up from her seat but unable to move. Isabella put a hand on her friend’s arm. ‘Katharine …’
But Katharine Hay did not hear her, did not seem to feel her touch. She started to say my name, but her body swayed and then gave way under her. I was half-way across the room when the guard who had been behind Lord Hay’s chair caught her before she collapsed to the stone floor.
*
‘The lassie has had a bit of a shock, that is all,’ said Lady Rothiemay, lifting the cup of brandy to Katharine’s lips where we had seated her before the roaring fire. A marten rug had been brought and set over her, and Isabella Irvine sat anxiously at her feet, gently warming Katharine’s hands in her own. The women had moved me aside and I could not get near her. I felt my entire body shake, and struggled to master my breathing. A strand of pale blonde hair, a glimpse of her foot in its red velvet of her slipper, a hint of the scent of her. I was a boy again, engulfed in the proximity of her. Had anyone asked me, I could hardly have told them my own name.
Lady Rothiemay looked up a moment from her attentiveness to Katharine. ‘Matters will hardly be helped by you looming over her like a thundercloud of misery that doesn’t know what to do with itself.’ She passed the cup to Isabella and, taking my arm, eased herself wearily to her
feet. ‘Come ’till we get you some food: I never yet met a man that was any use on an empty stomach.’
She led me to the table and sat me down before calling for a clean plate and filling it up herself with items of food for me. Archie and his father sat together at the end of the table, and I caught a few words and phrases as Archie told his father what he had told me only a few nights ago, in our old burrow on the Heading Hill. Every so often Lord Hay would exclaim, ‘But surely’, or ‘How could you have thought it?’ The same useless words that I myself had uttered in trying to understand why our love had not been enough to bring him back from the wars.
Lady Rothiemay watched them. ‘If his mother could have seen him again, just once …’ She sighed. ‘But that is not in God’s plan for us, which is why we give birth in agony, that we might be prepared for all that is to come.’ The minister in me might have opened my mouth to correct another woman, on another night, but tonight, in this place, the minister in me was utterly gone. ‘You, though, that is another matter.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, Alexander Seaton, you. What is to be done about you?’
My eyes must have registered a sudden suspicion that I had been led in to some trap, for she reassured me. ‘Ho, do not tell me you think you have been brought here that you might be done away with, before you can give away the recusancy of the good baillie, Isabella and myself?’
I groped awkwardly for the right words. ‘Your recusancy, your Ladyship, would hardly be a great surprise to anyone of this country, or the baillie’s either, I think, if truth be told.’
She laughed. ‘I always liked an honest minister. Cannot be doing with snivelling sycophants.’
I put down the chicken leg I had been holding. ‘But I would like to know why I
have
been brought here.’
‘Hmmph. Well might you ask. I suspect it is because Archie Hay has not a grain of sense in his head. Katharine knew her brother was coming, of course. She has known for years that he was not dead.’
‘Years? How many years? How long has she known?’
She pursed her lips. ‘I could not tell you, for she made none privy to it that he did not require to be, which was few enough, and it is not my business to ask her. What you ask her is another matter. Anyhow, Katharine knew Archie was coming, and Isabella and I have known about it since we first saw him at Lumsden’s, with Lieutenant Ormiston.’
‘When was that?’
‘Friday night last, very late.’
‘The day of the schoolmistress trials.’ After Archie had left my own house.
‘Indeed.’ She became brisk. ‘Now, as you know, my enemies have conspired against me so that there is a warrant for my arrest speeding its way northwards as we speak. I am on my way back to Rothiemay, and they can haul me from its ramparts with ropes and horses if they wish. Isabella
is refusing to leave me, but she is too young to tie all her fortunes to a cause that is lost, or to lose that pretty head from her neck. She thinks she is coming with me to Roth-iemay, but I will be gone by the morning’ – she nodded in the direction of the two guards and I knew now exactly why I had recognised their livery – ‘and Delgatie here has undertaken to have her safely delivered to her aunt at Straloch. Anyhow, that is not the matter in hand. The only reason you are here tonight, I presume, is because Archie Hay wanted you here. He was always a determined boy, and thought that if he wished something to be so, then it would be so, and others would see the rightness of it eventually. I could scarcely believe it when Katharine told me he had insisted on his father not being forewarned of his coming – why, the man might have taken a turn and died at this table before our very eyes just at the sight of him. But as to bringing you here, when he knew his sister also would be here, and not forewarning either of you of it …’ She shook her head. ‘But the thing is done now, and must be got on with.’