Bonnie Dundee (17 page)

They hauled out Alan’s body, with my blade still fast below his collar-bone.

‘Somebody’s lost his sword,’ one of them said, and set his foot on Alan’s shoulder and wrenched it out.

Corporal Paterson stooped and twisted the pistol from the rigid grip he still had on it, broke and glanced inside. ‘Not loaded,’ he said, and snapped it shut again
and thrust it into his belt. All captured weapons would be handed in later.

One of Alan’s feet hung crooked, below the red pulp of his ankle where a carbine ball had smashed the bone. I remembered how he had been crouched against the hawthorn trunk. I had not seen his feet at all.

‘Must have got a hit in the ankle, and hauled himself in there to take cover while he reloaded,’ said the corporal. ‘But cover wasna quite good enough.’

I looked from Alan’s smashed ankle to his face. A faint fierce mockery had set on it like a mask, and out of the mask he seemed to be staring up at me. But he had only two eyes to stare with, not like the drummer laddie.

The trooper who had pulled out my sword looked doubtfully from the blooded blade to Corporal Pate, and then to Claverhouse who stilt sat on his horse looking on. ‘What shall I do with this, sir?

I cut in before himself could answer, which was almost a hanging matter as you might say, but I was not thinking of such things just then. ‘Give it here, Alec, ’tis mine.’

And Claverhouse looked round at me quickly, but said no word.

Alec Geddes handed over my sword; and I took it and made to return it to its sheath. I had not felt anything when I killed Alan, just the stillness and the two of us together in it; but now suddenly I was deadly cold. I could scarcely get the point into the mouth of the scabbard for I was shaking as though with an ague, and I had to clench my teeth until the muscles of my cheeks and jaw went rigid, to keep them from chattering in my head.

The next thing I knew, Claverhouse had sent me off
with some message for the Captain of the Dragoons at the clachan end of the field. By the time I reached him, I had got myself somewhat pulled together; and for the rest of the day I was kept too busy to have much time for thinking of what had happened under the may trees that noon.

That evening back in quarters in Douglas, the Brigadier sent for me when I was halfway through my supper of oatmeal porridge and pickled herring. I pushed the platter away thankfully, for I had small stomach for food just then, and went to answer the summons.

Rain had come on at the daylight’s fading, and I mind looking up through the chill whisper of it on my face, and seeing the regimental colours hanging out above the inn doorway, just catching the light from within, for the door stood open for the usual comings and goings of headquarters. Inside, there was a smell of blood and hot pitch, for the place, being the largest building in Douglas save for the kirk, was also serving as a hospital. I went up the narrow stairs, to the room over the front door where Claverhouse sat writing the usual dispatch by the light of a couple of tallow dips.

He glanced up at my coming, and made a small gesture with the hand that held the pen, acknowledging my presence and bidding me wait; and went on writing. There were but a few lines left. He finished and signed them, then looked up.

‘Was he a friend of yours?’ he said.

I think I caught my breath a bit, but I’d no need to ask his meaning.

‘Aye,’ I said, ‘it was my cousin Alan.’ And then, ‘But ye never saw his face that night, sir? When they burned the alehouse?’

‘I doubt I’d have remembered it, if I had,’ he said. ‘I saw yours, today, when you claimed your sword back.’

The rushlights guttered in the wet breeze from the window, which stood ajar to let through the shafts of the colours propped across the sill. And we looked at each other in the unsteady light.

‘I didna ken that he was wounded,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘And I thought it was him or me; I didna ken his pistol was empty.’

‘It would not have been, if he had had time to reload.’

Claverhouse laid down his pen, and carefully sanded the dispatch and began to fold it.

‘But he
was
wounded,’ I said, desperately, ‘and his pistol was empty – and I killed him.’ I was staring down at my own hand as though it were somebody else’s, seeing it clenched until the knuckles shone waxen yellow like bare bone.

‘Hugh,’ said Claverhouse, ‘look at me when I am speaking to you.’ And I looked up, and found his eyes waiting for me coolly compelling in the taper light. ‘You wear the King’s coat. Today you were in action against the King’s enemies. War is not sport, and it is not governed by the rules of fair and unfair that govern sport; and its honour, if it has any, is of another kind.’ Suddenly his face gentled into its rare swift smile. ‘Do not be adding a new nightmare to the old one that you suffer already.’

‘No, sir,’ I said, and unclenched my hand carefully; later I found the red marks of my nails on my own palm; and as he sealed the dispatch, I moved forward to take it.

He shook his head, ‘No, Hugh, not this time.’

‘I am your galloper, sir,’ I said.

‘But Kerr can take this as well as you can. Word has
come in that the Duke of Monmouth has landed in England – a place called Lyme – and His Grace of Argyll on his own coast. The Whigs are sending Highland irregulars into the West against him, and we are ordered down into the Borders, lest trouble come up from the South. I shall need my galloper with me.’

Next day we marched for the Borders.

I have wondered whether Claverhouse had any thought as we rode out from Douglas that early summer morning that he was leaving the South West that had seen so much of his soldiering and become his own kale-garth, for the last time; the last time of all.

Eh well, there we were, waiting in the Borders with our pistols cocked; but in England the rebellion petered out in a few weeks; and even Covenanting Scotland did not rise for Argyll, as he must have thought they would. He was, after all, not a man to follow to the death, as they say that young Monmouth was. So the both of them were taken and Monmouth went to the block, and Argyll to the gallows in Edinburgh, as better men than he had gone before him.

And we went back to Dundee.

As the Brigadier’s galloper, I was among those of the troop to be billeted in Dudhope itself. And Caspar was the first to greet me when we rode in; Caspar with ears and tail flying, and his short legs scarce showing save as a blur beneath him as he came, almost before I was out of the saddle, to fling himself into my arms and lick my face from ear to ear, singing like a kettle, and send my hat spinning in his joy. And hard behind Caspar, Darklis came from the stillrooms, with her skirts kilted and spread like wings in either hands, calling ‘Caspar! Caspar, ye wicked wee dog!’

But at sight of me, she checked. ‘I might have known that it was yourself, when he ran like that.’

Hector was being brought round from the courtyard, where Claverhouse had dismounted; and the other troopers were swinging down from their saddles, and the stable folk had enough to do without watching Darklis and Caspar and me under the broad-leaved summer branches of the old fig tree, and me with my arm still through Jock’s bridle, so that he bulked between us and the rest of the world. Darklis took my face between her hands as she had done on the night before I went away; and so her face was close to mine.

‘Thank you for taking such good care of Caspar,’ I said, feeling the wee dog’s forepaws scrabbling at my knee, because suddenly I could not say any of the things I was fain to say to her.

‘I have taken good care of your painting gear, too,’ said she, half mocking me. But then the mockery flickered out, and she held me off a little, looking at me like – it sounds daft – like somebody looking for familiar landmarks in a strange country. ‘Oh, Hugh, Hugh, you were such a laddie when you went away. I felt so much older than you – and now you’re not a laddie any more. Did the sojering do that to you?’

‘Aye,’ I said, ‘just the sojering.’

But when I would have put my free arm around her, she shook her head, and took her hands away without giving me the kiss that I had looked for, and turned and ran.

AFTER THE MONMOUTH
and Argyll rebellion, Scotland had upward of three years of what looked on the surface like peace. The King was so relieved that the danger had come and gone that he rewarded his people with a Declaration of Indulgence, making it lawful for all men to go to conventicles. That fair infuriated everybody – the Loyalists and Moderates who had suffered at the hands of the Saints, and even the Saints themselves, for I suppose there was little point to such gatherings now that they were tamely within the law; and a kind of spice must have gone out of life.

My lady’s grandfather and old General Dalyell died within a few weeks of each other, early on in that time. And in Dalyell’s place General Drummond was made Commander-in-Chief. And Claverhouse? He was promoted General, again two days behind Douglas. He was Provost of Dundee now, as well as Constable, and still a Privy Councillor; and was for ever riding between Dundee and Edinburgh on business of the Council and the affairs of His Majesty’s Regiment of Horse. Once, he took my lady Jean to court. They were gone all summer, and when they came back, Darklis gave me fine accounts of sending Lady Jean off to court balls and masques, all in aurora-coloured damask with pearls in her hair.

Dudhope was as full of comings and goings as ever it had been; Balcarres and Lord Ross, and Major Livingstone who had transferred into the Scots Dragoons in
search of promotion (there is only one major to a regiment, and so there could be no way beyond captain in Claverhouse’s Horse until Major Crawford transferred or retired or stopped a bullet) and Philip of Amryclose, with his pipes and his hero tales; never many of my lady’s kinsfolk, though.

So taking it all in all, you might have thought that life was full and rich enough for Claverhouse, let alone that he had my lady Jean for his wife. But the man was a soldier before all else. He had hoped once to be Commander-in-Chief in old Dalyell’s place (he should never have allowed his liking for justice to get him on the wrong side of Queensberry, that time) and under all the to-ing and fro-ing he was the out-of-work commander of an out-of-work regiment again; and there was a restlessness about him, and times, again, when his eyes looked hot in his head.

And I was still the General’s galloper, and to and fro between Dundee and Edinburgh, also; and learning my formal soldiering that there had been no time for when I rode down into the South West at his heels. There were things I learned under the eye of authority, such as the proper use of pistol and sabre and carbine, and how to make a horse charge straight and stand firm under fire. Eh, those practices on the level ground below Dundee Law, the horses almost dancing to the canter-tune of bugle and kettle-drum; and the oneness linking myself and Jock between my knees! There were other things learned not under the eye of authority at all, such as the secret way up the hidden side of Edinburgh Castle Rock, known to most men who have ever been quartered there and needed to get back from the town after Lights Out!

During the first part of that time, too, I was finding
my way into the troop; for the troop was a strange world to me. Oh, I knew most of the men by sight, even to talk with in the by-going; but to become one of them, that was another matter. You might think the matter simple enough; you join a troop, and having joined, you are part of it. But the General’s troop of His Majesty’s Regiment of Horse was not just like any other troop of any other regiment. It was not, strictly speaking, what is called a Gentleman’s Troop, but it was an oddly mixed and mingled one. There were veterans among us, even a few who had served under Claverhouse in the Scottish Brigade in Holland; there were men from the plough and the loom and the counting-house, sons of dominies and small lairds and alehouse-keepers, and good men and rogues, such as are to be found in every troop; but among us also were friends and distant kinsfolk of the Grahams; younger brothers and younger sons who had chosen the army as many younger sons do, but chosen to serve as troopers under Claverhouse rather than try for commissions in other regiments or go overseas as he had done himself.

You might have thought that that would make for a loose-knit company easy for anyone to settle into place in. But the truth was quite otherwise, for it was as though, feeling the danger of such a loose mesh, they had closed ranks in some way, interlocking their differences for Claverhouse’s sake. On the surface they seemed an easy comradeship, underneath, they – well, I have never met with such a close-knit brotherhood in all my after-years of soldiering. Nobody sought to keep me out, but it was many months before I ceased to think of the General’s troops as ‘them’ and ‘me’ and found, almost without noticing it, that I was thinking of it as ‘us’.

But all that was long past when, on a day of high summer three years later, I sat in the window of the Unicorn’s taproom – we were often wont to gather in the Unicorn tavern in off-duty hours – with a jug of ale on the sill at my elbow, and Caspar lying contentedly at my feet. The wee dog was often with me when I was in Dundee, and being newly returned yet again from Edinburgh, I had just been up to the house to collect him from Darklis who always took charge of him for me when I was off and away. He seemed happy enough to be left with her, but he was never in any doubt that he was my dog, and would leave her without a backward glance when I whistled. Darklis had seemed glad to see me, too; she always did. But there was a distance between me and Darklis these days, even while she told me about the London gaieties and laughed with me and at me, and mended my shirts. I had been there ever since the spring that I had gone down into Ayrshire with Claverhouse, as though maybe she felt some danger in letting me close to her, now that I was not a laddie any more. And yet I did not think that she liked me any less than she had done before. I hoped not, anyway, for I liked the lassie well; too well, maybe, for my own content…

Caspar looked up, whining softly, and thumped his tattybogle tail on the sanded floor behind him, as though he knew the vague trouble that was in me, and sympathised. I stooped and rubbed him behind the ears, and he rolled on to his back, exposing his creamy underparts for the like treatment. But at that moment there came the nearing tramp of feet on the cobbles outside, and Corporal Pate Paterson loomed into the street doorway at the other end of the long taproom. The rest of us gathered there looked up from our ale or
our dice, or the kind of casual talk that men share when they are through with the day’s work and weary, or waiting to go on duty, and are well used to each other’s company. And seeing that it was Pate, we watched him hopefully as he flung himself down on a settle, stretched his long legs out in front of him and shouted for ale.