Authors: Rosemary Sutcliff
And on the afternoon of Monday the thirteenth of May, with the first of the hawthorn coming into flower, we were on the high ground above Dundee. There we waited, as the long hours wore by, for Colonel Livingstone and the Dragoons to come out to us.
‘They’re no’ coming,’ said Robin Findlay to me, as we sat beside our horses chewing on grass stems to pass the time.
And he was right.
Presently there was a dust-cloud on the road up from Tayside, but it was only a knot of horsemen, only a few of Claverhouse’s friends who had not joined him when he raised the royal standard, and had second thoughts and come to join him now.
Aye, and ill news they brought with them, for beside the loss of the Dragoons, Colonel Livingstone was taken, and in gaol in Edinburgh in peril of his life; and most of his officers with him. Who had betrayed him there was no knowing; and so far as I am concerned, there is no knowing to this day. There was a new man, an Orange man, Balfour by name, in command of the remaining Dragoons; and the Provost and bailies of Dundee had had the gates shut and barricaded, allowing no one in or out.
‘Do they think I am going to sack the town, with less than two hundred men?’ Claverhouse said.
Nevertheless, we waited until dusk. Maybe he had a hope, even then, that the Dragoons would find a way to break out to him. But Colonel Balfour had done his work too well.
LATE INTO THAT
night, having left the rest quartered in and around the village, Claverhouse and I, just the two of us, came riding into Glenogilvie. He had spoken not one word all the way, and we rode in silence save for our horses’ hoof-beats and the creak and jingle of saddle leather and accoutrements.
I had wondered earlier that he had made no attempt before we had left to make for Dudhope and snatch a glimpse of Lady Jean and the bairn. But when we came riding up the burnside and saw the glimmer of light from the unshuttered window of the bower and the signs of life and movement about the place, the truth dawned upon me.
When we rode into the narrow courtyard the house door stood ajar, late as it was, as though the old house was expecting us. One of the Dudhope grooms came to take the horses. I heard a sudden frenzied barking somewhere, and as I dropped from the saddle, Caspar came with flying ears and tail to meet me.
I began to feel as though I were in some kind of dream, as I followed Dundee into the hall. There was a feeling of people nearby, and I caught the smell of cooking wafting out of the kitchen quarters, that brought the soft warm hunger-water to my mouth as I turned after Dundee towards the door of the bower which also stood open.
In the bower, the tapers burned crocus-flamed on the mantel and on a table near the window, and there was a
fragrant waft of burning wood from the low fire on the hearth. And in the great cushioned chair beside the hearth sat my lady Jean, her foot on the rocker of the heavy carved wooden cradle at her side. I mind she had a green gown on, like the sun on young beech leaves; and her hair had come out of its fashionable curls – maybe she had let it loose on purpose – and was caught back with a ribbon as she had used to wear it when I first knew her. She looked young, that way; only a lassie still, and like the lassie that had given her word to Colonel John Graham in the Abbey ruins at Paisley, more than five years ago.
And on the rug before the hearth, Darklis sat among the tumble of outflung russet skirts, with her lute lying in her lap. But her hand had fallen away from the strings, as my lady’s foot had fallen still on the cradle-rocker, and both of them were looking towards the door, and for that moment not moving at all.
There were no explainings or greetings; it was as though we had all four of us just come by old and sure arrangement to a moment that had been waiting for us for a long time.
Claverhouse did not even speak my lady’s name, nor make any move towards her, not at first. He just stood within the doorway, leaning against the jamb as though he were very weary. ‘I should not have left the Dragoons to wait for me so long,’ he said, ‘but I had pressing need to be elsewhere in the King’s service. If William hangs, his death will be at my door.’
And my lady said nothing but his name, with an aching tenderness. ‘Johnnie, my Johnnie,’ and held out her arms to him.
He went to her then, and stumbled to his knees beside her, and put his head in her lap.
And I had not even the sense to look away, until I found that Darklis had set aside her lute and was beside me with her hand in mine, turning me back towards the door. ‘Come away now,’ she said, “tis a fair night, and you must be saddle-cramped, a wee stretch to your legs before supper will do you good.’
We did not go down to the pool where the elder trees hung over the burn. Whether she remembered anything of that long-past Midsummer’s Eve I would not be knowing; she had never spoken of it since. But I remembered uncomfortably well, and we had never gone back there again. Instead we went up the glen to where the unkempt garden ran out into a few old apple trees, not enough to be called an orchard, where there was a little garden-house.
Darklis was right; it was a fine night, with a young moon tangled in the apple branches; and the dew already falling. You could smell it on the long grass – too long, it should have been scythed, but in a place such as Glenogilvie, that is only woken from its sleep to be lived in now and then, such things get overlooked.
Darklis went ahead, her long skirts trailing through it, and Caspar followed after me, so close that he must dodge from heel to heel behind me as a cattle dog does; and I mind the apple blossom that had lost its daytime coral tips was ghost-pale in the light of the moon.
We came to the little garden-house and ducked in under its moss-cushioned roof. Inside, it smelled dark and earthy; a brown smell; and I could scarcely see Darklis as she sat down on the bench and drew her wide skirts close to make room for me. Caspar jumped up beside me, and lay down half across my thigh, and I felt his long belly-hair cold-wet with the dew when I put my hand round him to draw him close.
I put my other hand out and Darklis’s came somehow to find it in the dark.
We sat there talking a little, but mostly in silence a long time, while the young moon, slipping lower in the glimmering sky, began to silver the threshold of the garden-house and make a water paleness among the shadows so that we could see each other again.
‘I’m no’ just sure whether I’m waking or dreaming,’ I said.
‘And why would that be?’ said she, laughing at me a little.
‘Och – because yestere’en – even today the noon – I’d no’ thought that tonight I would be sitting here in the garden at Glenogilvie wi’ you and Caspar,’ I said. ‘I wondered why himself didna spare a wee while for Dudhope.’
‘When we heard about Colonel Livingstone, Jean got word to Mr Haliburton – he being set to join you —’
‘Aye, he joined us this afternoon, wi’ a few more.’
‘—that now there was nothing more to hold to Dudhope for, she would be here, the night, if he could come.’
‘And tomorrow? Will it be back to Dudhope?’
‘I think we will be biding here a while,’ said Darklis. ‘This place has more the feeling of sanctuary about it than Dudhope has… And you? Where is it for himself and you, in the morning?’
‘Northward again,’ I told her. ‘In four days’ time we must be in Glen Roy, in Lochaber. Lochiel has offered Claverhouse himself and his clansmen, and Glen Roy for a gathering place; and the gathering of the chiefs is fixed for the eighteenth. The Fiery Cross is already going round.’ (I was quoting Amryclose, that bit, half Highlander that he was.)
I heard her catch her breath. ‘Aye me, that has a brave sound and a fearsome sound to it.’
There was a little shaken silence between us. Caspar turned his head and licked my wrist; and I began to fondle his ears, feeling how the silky dome of his head fitted into the hollow of my hand. And suddenly I was wondering, as I had not quite wondered at any parting-time before, whether I should ever feel the loving warmth of Caspar’s head pushing up into the hollow of my hand again.
‘Ye’ll take care of Caspar for me,’ I said.
I had said it so often before, and I knew that there was no need to say it; but as usual the other things, the things that there was an ache in me to say, could not be said.
Darklis slipped her hand out of mine. ‘If I am to look after Caspar for ye yet again, then ’tis but fair return that ye should look after something for me,’ she said; and when I looked round, she was taking something from the breast of her gown, holding it out to me.
In the faint moon-water light, I saw what it was. Like a heather sprig made of haw-frost in her fingers.
‘Darklis, no,’ I said, ‘not your bonnie pin.’
‘Take it.’ It was a command, though a whispered one. ‘I would have given it ye before – the day ye followed the King’s standard from Dundee Law; but there were so many folk all around, and – I think ’twas in my mind that ye would be back before long, anyway.’
‘And this time? Mebbe I’ll be back before long this time, too.’
‘Mebbe,’ she said, ‘mebbe… Take it, all the same.’ And this time it was a plea. “Tisna good for a laddie to go riding off to war, and no keepsake from a lassie to take with him to keep him safe. And ’tisna good – for the lassie left behind.’
The last bit she said so quietly that I was scarce sure that she had said the words at all. But I took the brooch, and pinned it inside my shirt, under my buff coat.
And with the feel of it there, warm with her warmth, ‘It isna good for a laddie to go riding off to war wi’out a kiss to remember in the cold nights, either,’ said I; light enough, as it might be half in jest; and I put my arms round her.
For a moment I had the odd unchancy feeling that she might turn into empty air, as though she were indeed one of the People of Peace; but then she gave a little fluttering sigh, and leaned closer into my hold, and the warmth and life began to spring up in her, and she was of the human kind after all…
And I am none so sure what would happen next; but in that instant, down in the house behind the lighted windows, the bairn began to cry. And Darklis slipped free of me without a word, and turned and ran down through the long grass of the ill-kept garden.
And there I was, alone in the garden-house save for Caspar.
And my heart within me drubbing away like a kettle-drum under my breastbone.
In a while I got up, feeling for the silver pin inside my shirt, to make sure that it was still there and had not disappeared with all the rest, and whistled Caspar to heel, and went down towards the house too – and the smell of cooking from the kitchen.
WE RODE OUT
from Glenogilvie at first light; a green morning dusk with the cuckoo calling away down the glen. And Caspar as usual shut up until we were well away.
We picked up the troop and the Gordon clansmen, and headed back by yesterday’s road, skirting Perth and Dunkeld, to Pitlochry among the outriders of the high hills; and there we made camp for the night.
Pate Paterson and Willie Kerr and I found ourselves warm enough shelter in the last year’s hay that yet remained at one end of a tumbledown barn, and when we had picketed and fed and rubbed down the horses, we turned in. And I for one was asleep almost before I had done burrowing into the hay. It was a June crop, I mind, clover-scented.
I dreamed that I heard Caspar barking, and woke with a start and lay listening. There was nothing to hear now; but the dream had been so strong that it was with me still, and I could not find the sleep again. And in the end, just to clear my mind of the thing, I got up, falling over somebody’s legs in the dark and being cursed for my pains, and found my way to the rickety door. Something was snuffling under the crack; I could hear it now that I was close by, and as I put my hand on the wooden pin, there was a piteous whine outside, and a frantic scrabbling of paws. I pulled the door open; and a small crouching shape in the darkness flung itself against my legs.
I stooped, scarce believing it, and next instant Caspar was in my arms, sodden wet and shivering from nose to tail; too far spent for any outcry of reunion, but refuging against my shoulder as a weary traveller who has come home.
There was a stirring in the hay behind me, and Pate’s voice sleepily demanding to know what the De’il was amiss.
‘It’s Caspar,’ I said, and shut the ramshackle door. I could feel the ragged end of the strap about his neck. ‘He’s chewed through his leash and come after me.’
We scraped him together some bits of stale bannock and cheese out of the bottoms of our saddle-bags, and he slept the rest of the night in his usual place with his chin across my ankles. And in the morning he marched out with us. There could be no question of getting the wee beast back to Glenogilvie; from now on he must take his chance with the rest of us. His way must be our way.
There was a bit of talk and argument about our line of march as we saddled up, eating our morning bannock as we did so.
‘Why not by Blair, as we came, and over Druimuchdair, that’s the plainest way even if ’tis a bit longer,’ grumbled Tam Johnston, saddling his horse next to me. ‘We’ve three days before the start of the gathering; and ’twill go on a good few days, even if we should be a wee thing late.’
‘And a fine thing that would be, for Dundee to be a wee thing late for his own gathering,’ said Pate Paterson with his mouth full of bannock. ‘Beside, to go that way, now that MacKay and his lot are loose in the land, would be to risk running up against the Government troops. Delay, at the best; and wi’ less than two
hundred of us, I’m thinking we’ve no call to go asking for losses.’
‘Wi’ MacKay loose in the land, why will we be less like to meet him one way than another?’
‘Because Highlander though he is, MacKay only thinks along roads. Mind our last near-meeting at Deeside?’
So we left the clear track just beyond Pitlochry, and with our buff coats pulled on over our uniforms for warmth, took to the mountains, and so disappeared out of the ken of the Whigs in Edinburgh and the troops they had sent out after us. It was only a two-day march, but I am thinking that none of us who made it with Dundee would ever be forgetting it.