A Dark and Distant Shore (30 page)

Down in the mouth of the Canongate, a new turbulence became apparent, and the head of the procession struggled into view, a cheering, dancing throng of citizens, old and young, tall and short, fat and thin – the unofficial, wildly ecstatic vanguard of the heroes of the day. The crowd rippled back before them, fanning sideways into the serried ranks of people who already lined the street and were now forced to retreat into the arcaded fronts of the older buildings, or back into the closes and wynds, or up the already bulging outside staircases of the tenements, desecrating the bright carpets that adorned them, treading on the ribbons and bunting that draped them, crushing the well-dressed ladies who had thought themselves safe from contact with the common herd. Folk who had no place to retreat to now joined the procession willy-nilly, so that the vanguard multiplied by the minute, and the regiment was reduced to a funereally slow march. The ripple of movement spread and spread until it was lapping against the crowd that crammed the street at the West Bow. Some of the old Town Guard, in their ancient cocked hats and muddy-red coats and breeches, had been brought out of retirement for the occasion, and with gnarled hands and the hafts of their Lochaber axes tried unavailingly to clear a space for the approaching hordes.

Duncan Lauriston could see, now, that the regiment’s band and pipers had been forced to lay up their instruments since there wasn’t enough room for them to play, while nothing was visible of the soldiers except their bonnets and feathers. Lieutenant-Colonel Dick, the regiment’s commander, who was supposed to be leading the column with Major-General Hope and Colonel Stewart of Garth, was nowhere to be seen. With a snort of amusement, Duncan Lauriston observed the plight of some of the better-dressed spectators, who, having succeeded in removing their hats and waving them, were now quite unable to lower their arms sufficiently to put the hats back on their heads.

The advancing throng, a long fat snake compressed by the buildings and pushed by thousands upon thousands of folk behind, was now beginning to buffet the crowd at the West Bow. The press and the noise were indescribable, and the smells almost beyond belief.

Suddenly, Duncan Lauriston felt his arm taken in a grasp like a tourniquet, and impatiently dragged his gaze from the procession in which his only son should have held so proud a place.

It was Sorley McClure, the girl half fainting against his shoulder. ‘It iss too much for her, sir. You must let me take her back to the carriage!’

‘What!’ he roared. ‘Don’t tell
me
what to do, you scum! We are here to pay honour to my son, and she will stay –
by God she will stay!
–
until we have done so.’

Vilia, almost beyond feeling, could still feel Sorley controlling his breath.

He said politely, ‘Then perhaps we could move a bit, sir. It iss the smells that are the worst.’ He gestured towards the Weigh-house.

The air reeked, if one stopped to think about it, not only with sweating humanity but with the sour tang and cloying thickness of the tons of cheese and butter that were weighed out there day after day, week after week. And the street hadn’t been swept this morning to clear it of the libations sloshed out from hundreds of chamber pots at last night’s curfew, emptied down from high windows on to the cobbles with the arbitrary warning cry of ‘Gardy loo!’ Every surge of the crowd’s movement seemed to gather up all the smells into a single noisome, insalubrious blast and fling it full in one’s face. Most of the bystanders were too engrossed to notice, but even Duncan Lauriston was aware that pregnant women were more likely than most to be overtaken by queasiness. Trust that arrogant bitch to choose her moment! He hesitated.

Sorley said, ‘Higher up the Castle Hill, perhaps, sir? Towards Blair’s Close? The people seem to haff moved down from there to get a better view.’

It was true. The last narrow enclave that led to the Castle esplanade was by no means empty, but it wasn’t full, either, though it would be soon, as the procession entered the final stretch. It was now or never. Besides, from there it would be possible to see the soldiers better, perhaps even get close enough to grip one by the arm and ask, ‘Did you know my son? My son the major.’

Without a word, he grabbed his daughter-in-law by the arm and began to push again. The crowd wasn’t pleased, but managed somehow to make way for such a big man, and one who looked as if he would have no hesitation about loosing a clout on the ear of anyone who resisted him. Only one woman, a rough-looking harridan in a fishwife’s apron, thumped him on the back with her fist as he passed, and shrieked, ‘Ye big sumph! Yon lassie shouldny be oot in yon state, so she shouldny! Huv ye nae feelings? Och, the puir lassie!’ But the man beside her pulled her fist down and growled, ‘Haud yer wheesht, wumman! She’s maybe lost her man in the wars. Let the folk be.’

The relief of getting out of the press was almost unbelievable, although it didn’t last long and Vilia was almost past awareness of it. All it did was allow her to hold on to the last, teased-out strands of consciousness. When the procession, after aeons of waiting, at last began to draw level, she could sense the soldiers through their blurred cocoon of civilians only as a wavering thread of colour, hazy and undefined, swelling and receding, a nightmare of scarlet jackets, and black-and-green kilts, and braided loops, and bright red plumes, and scuffling feet. Far and faint on the very edge of her perception there was a sound of cheering and yelling and shouting – a sound that merged in her head into screams and groans and the clash of swords and bayonets. She could hear horses neighing in terror, and the muffled crump of artillery, and the sharp crack of hand guns. And then a searing, murderous pain ripped through her, and she screamed, too, and folded her body almost double, her hands splayed wide and taut over her swollen stomach.

She screamed again, and again, and then two brutal hands seized her by the shoulders and hauled her upright, and a face glared into hers and a voice shouted, ‘I’ll not have it! I’ll not have it! Stand up straight and look!
Look!
He should be there, too!
He
should be there!’ And it was Andrew’s face, and Andrew’s voice, and he was going on shouting. On and on. ‘You killed me! You killed me! And while I was dying, you were in bed with another man, and he was getting a child on you.
His
son...
My
son... You killed me!
You killed me
!’

And she screamed again, this time in words. ‘No! No, no, no,
no, no
!’
Her voice rang out on a pitch far above that of the crowd, and the last soldier in the procession turned to look at her, startled, just as, with all the force she possessed, she pushed away the figure that was looming over her, torturing her mind without mercy while the pains of childbirth tortured her body.

Mungo Telfer, thrusting his way frantically along the rearguard with the doctor hanging on to his coat, saw the great figure of Duncan Lauriston stagger backwards. Then, even as Sorley McClure, with one arm still round Vilia, lunged forward to save him, he lost his balance and toppled like a felled tree straight in the path of the wild tumultuous mob that – propelled into the last narrow funnel leading up to the Castle by the irresistible force of the thousands of others behind – could not halt, or hesitate, or even step over him. Could do nothing in the whole wide world but trample on him.

The child was born, incontinently, in one of the houses in Blair’s Close before they had even succeeded in retrieving what remained of Duncan Lauriston from the cobbles outside.

It was a boy, and the two Misses Webster who lived in the house cooed over him and said how beautiful, how perfect he was, and that Mr Telfer mustn’t think of moving Mistress Lauriston until she had recovered from her dreadful ordeal, poor young lady. They didn’t even hesitate when the doctor, who had consented to accompany Mungo only because he had been promised the fattest fee in medical history, pursed his lips and gave it as his opinion that it would be a week at least before the lady was able to raise her head.

It was ten days before they could move her, and another three before she began to recover from the journey back to Marchfield House.

Then, on the morning of the first of April, when Mungo was ushered, pink and self-conscious, into her bedchamber for his ritual visit, he found her sitting up smiling, and holding out her hand to him.

‘April Fool!’ she said, her eyes unnaturally brilliant, and he had to swallow hard before he was able to reply, ‘It’s the best trick anyone’s ever played on me!’

For almost five minutes, he simply sat and held her hand, beaming foolishly at her and murmuring sentimental, meaningless phrases like, ‘That’s a good girl!’ and ‘That’s better!’ and ‘That’s more like yourself!’ And because she was, indeed, more like herself, she understood and said nothing.

During these anxious days he had talked to Sorley, persuading him with matter-of-fact kindliness that a footman, even one who had attained the mature age of eighteen, wasn’t expected always to behave like the three wise monkeys rolled into one. The thin, freckled face under the ginger thatch had run through every single nuance of doubt and distress, and at last Sorley had given way to the relief of tears. Mungo had learned a good deal, although he was sure Sorley hadn’t told him everything, and there were one or two things he still found puzzling. He wouldn’t have thought that Vilia had loved Andrew enough to be thrown into quite such a state by his death; and what was more, an intelligent girl who married a soldier must always be half prepared for such an outcome. But he supposed that the tragedy, and the difficult pregnancy, and all that trauchle with Duncan Lauriston would have been enough to throw anyone into a fit of the dismals. For a sensitive lassie like Vilia, they had all added up into something that was too much for her to bear. And all alone, too. That was what he could not forgive himself, and never would. He had been terrified that, even when she recovered her strength – as the doctor said she would – she might never recover the spirit that had made her the child of his heart. It was a mawkish phrase, and he shuddered at it, but it was the truth. He loved her far more than he loved the children of his body.

But it looked, now, as if her mind had been freed from its burden of shadows at the same time as her body had been freed from the weight of the child she was carrying. Smiling inwardly at this notion, he said tentatively, ‘And he’s a fine wee boy, too.’

She had refused to see the child since she had recovered consciousness, and maybe it was understandable. But Mungo hoped that, now she was better, she might begin to give the bairn a bit of motherly attention. Wet nurses were all very well, but...

All she said at first was, ‘Yes.’ But then, forcing the words out, she added, ‘I’m glad my foolishness over these last months hasn’t done him any damage. There was a time when – when I didn’t want him.’

Mungo pursed his lips and shook his head at her reprovingly. He knew she didn’t mean it.

She looked away then, and concluded, ‘I’ll call him Andrew, of course.’

It had all been said in a colourless tone, but it had been said, and that was what mattered. Mungo decided not to press it. ‘Aye, well,’ he sighed, and then became brisk. ‘Now! I’m feart we’re going to have to talk about business. Are you fit for it?’

She nodded, but stopped him just as he was about to launch forth. ‘One thing. I haven’t said thank you. Sorley is a marvel, but I can’t think what might have happened if you hadn’t turned up when you did.’

‘Turned up?’ he responded humorously. ‘Well, that’s one way of putting it! I’d have been there a deal sooner if that sleekit butler fellow hadn’t refused to tell me where you’d gone. It took me the better part of an hour to get it out of him. I didn’t even know about the regimental welcome home, you see? And when I’d got that information out of him, I still had to winkle out where you were supposed to be watching from. I tell you, I was gey near to giving him a good skelp on the lug by the time I was done – and he could see it, too!’ He almost added, ‘I’d get rid of him, if I were you,’ and then stopped himself. All in due course.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘by the time we were done it was so late that the roads were jammed. We came round the back, of course, and left the carriage down off the South Bridge, and came the rest of the way by Shanks’s pony. But I tell you, I’ve never been more relieved in my life than when I caught sight of Lauriston’s head towering above the crowd. I could see him a hundred yards off. Aye,’ he reflected without much enthusiasm, ‘if we’d got there sooner, he might be alive today instead of snibbed in a mortsafe in the kirk yard.’ It was Mungo’s un-Christian but practical opinion that men like Duncan Lauriston were better off underground, for everyone’s sake.

She said, ‘Tell me one thing. I don’t remember what happened. That day is almost nothing but a blur. But I think I pushed him.’ She was looking at Mungo very seriously. ‘Did I?’

In face of that gaze, he couldn’t lie. ‘You’ll have to know some time. Yes, you did. But you mustn’t blame yourself for what happened.’ He took her hand in a sustaining grip. ‘A push from you, in your condition, couldn’t have moved a man that size more than an inch. No. The inquiry came up with the right verdict, that I’m sure of. All you did was give him a surprise, so that he stepped back a pace. Maybe his foot skited on the cobbles – they were slippery enough, for guidsakes! – or maybe someone’s stick caught him at the back of the knees. Who’s to tell? The bailies had been expecting dozens of folk to be crushed or trampled when they saw the crowds that turned out, and I’d be telling a lie if I didn’t say they were gey relieved that there was only one fatality at the end of the day. So –
don’t blame yourself
!’

She nodded. ‘Thank you.’ It was true that she remembered almost nothing about that day. Nothing but the pain, and the fear, and the supernatural strength she had put into – she
thought
she had put into – that push. She smiled. ‘It’s forgotten. Now tell me what you wanted to talk to me about.’