Bonnie Dundee (3 page)

‘Looks fair daft to me. But mebbe there’s some sense to be got out of him with a pistol butt. Best have him up to the Colonel,’ said the first man.

And him that held me by the hair gave a twisting heave that all but had me screaming. ‘Up, you.’

Somehow, with the world and the flamelight swirling round me, I managed to clamber to my feet and out of the ditch.

They twisted my arms behind me, and hauled me
back through the thorn-brake, past a man standing by with their horses who spat at me as I staggered by. The alehouse was burned through, and the flames beginning to sink. But there was light enough to see the bodies that had been fetched round from where they fell and lay roughly side by side in what had been old Phemie’s kale plot; and light enough also to see the man who wheeled his tall sorrel horse as my captors hauled me towards him.

‘We’ve got one of them, sir,’ said the soldier with the torch.

The man on the horse sat looking down at me. ‘So I see. A something small one.’ His voice was cool and clipped.

‘Mebbe he can tell us the who and where of the others, sir.’

‘Maybe.’

Memory is an odd and kittle thing. It seems to me now, looking back, that I must have seen then what I came to see and know later: the cool arrogant face well matched to the voice, that could yet kindle into eagerness and quirk swiftly into laughter, the slight, tense figure, even the thin strong hands, nervous, sensitive, horseman’s hands inside the riding gloves. But truth to tell I saw only a man on a tall red horse, whose face seemed to hover over me as a hawk hovers over some terrified small creature in the grass.

I began to babble. ‘I didna do it! I didna do any of it! I only followed the others to see…’

‘What others?’ The cool voice cut me off between word and word.

I heard the crackle of the sinking flames, and the wind hushing up over the moors in the dark, in the silence between the man and me; that and the racing
drub of my own heart. In another instant it would be too late. The merciless grip on my arms tightened so that I must have yelped, but that the terror l was in was that I must have yelped, but that the terror I was in was more than the pain. And then memory came to my aid – one of the soldiers saying, ‘Looks fair daft to me.’ Maybe if I could act that way! The memory of Daft Eckie who I had seen once or twice at Lochinloch market straggled into my mind; though indeed I must have looked daft enough already with the shock and fear of that night’s doings, and I scarcely had to act at all.

‘What others?’ said the man again, with a kind of deadly patience that was more fearful than any spoken threat.

And the man who held my arms began to shake me to and fro. I let my head loll sideways, indeed it felt like to part company with my shoulders, and gasped out, ‘Just folk. I saw the fire an’ I thought mebbe ’twas a wake, and there’d be food an’ drink an’ – an’ an’ a fiddler if the minister wasn’t there —’

‘It was a wake, sure enough,’ said the man on the red horse. And then, speaking slow and clear, to reach any understanding there might be in my addled wits, ‘These folks, who were they? Did you know any of them?’

I swung to and fro blubbering in the hands of the man behind me. ‘I didna ken them. When I got close they was all running away – ’cept them as winna run no more. I’m thinking they was witches – and there werena any food or drink, an’ there werena any fiddler, and I was feart —’

‘Let me try what a pistol butt will do, sir,’ said one of the soldiers who seemed to be chief among the rest.

But the man on the red horse shook his head. ‘There’s no sense to be got out of that one, I’m thinking, with a pistol butt or any other way. Let him go.’

‘But, sir —’

‘Let him go, Corporal.’

‘Sir,’ said the one he called Corporal.

The shaking stopped, and the agonising grip on my back-twisted arms slacked off, and I was free.

‘Now be away home with you,’ said the man on the red horse.

And I turned and ran, darting and swerving like a hare with the dogs after it. But I had just enough sense left to know even then that one of them would like enough to be coming after me to see where I went. I’ve never known whether or not there was, but I took no chances, and led any that might come off in the wrong direction at the start, and a fine dance through bushes and briars until I was sure that I’d shaken him off, before I turned myself back towards Wauprigg.

I would not be knowing how far I had gone out of my way, nor how long was the road home; time and distance seemed little to do with it, as they are little to do with the hampered and confused journeys of a dream. Broom and brambles clawed at me as though with small, evil, hating hands, and once I fell headlong into a boggy patch; but I came down the driftway at last, and saw the light from the house-place windows that were unshuttered now as though to show all men that they had nothing to hide.

And just as I reached the gate the kitchen door swung wide, and my grandfather came out, flinging his old plaid round his shoulders, and two of the farm men after him. He checked at sight of me, and called back over his shoulder, ‘All’s well. He’s back.’ He flung arm and plaid around me as I lurched near, and swept me into the firelit kitchen, slamming the door to behind me, with the farmhands outside.

I mind I staggered back against the door, and stood there, hearing their feet go trudging off to their own lodgings, and looking about me. The neighbourhood-women and their bairns had gone and the place looked much its usual self. Aunt Margaret and Elspeth the maid were sitting at the table with their sewing, the Bible at the other side of it, open for the evening reading, in the light of the tallow dips. Alan stood in the inner doorway; maybe he had just come from putting the old horse pistol back in its usual place. And I mind that just for the one instant our eyes met. Then he turned and strolled across to the hearth and flung himself down on the bench beside it.

Aunt Margaret was the first to break the silence, the frown-line bitten deep between her brows. ‘Where have you been?’ she demanded. ‘Through half the bogs and briars of Ayrshire by the looks of you.’

Maybe there was just a hope in her that I had not been where she knew in her heart that I had been.

‘I told you,’ said Alan to the ceiling. ‘He must have come prying after us.’

I could feel the currents washing to and fro in that room, under the surface quietness of it. Hate and fear and triumph and anger – and shame. The shame was Grandfather’s, mixed with the anger.

‘I did go after you,’ I said, ‘and I saw what there was to see – and then the soldiers came.’

‘Did they see you? Did they see you?’ Grandfather rounded on me as he slipped the old plaid from his shoulders.

‘Aye,’ I said, ‘they caught me and hauled me up before a man on a red horse —’

‘What like of man?’ demanded Grandfather.

‘A man wi’ a quiet way with him that was worse than shouting.’

‘That will be Colonel Graham of Claverhouse.’

And Aunt Margaret drew the thread through her sewing, and said, ‘Bloody Claver’se.’

‘What did you tell him?’ said Grandfather.

‘Nothing. I made out I was like Daft Eckie over to Lochinloch market; and in a bit he let me go.’

Aunt Margaret let her sewing fall and rose from the table. I saw the knuckles on her hands like bare yellow bone where they were gripped together against the dark stuff of her gown. ‘Then God help us! They’ll have followed you.’

Elspeth was whimpering.

‘What matter if they have – now,’ said Alan. ‘Never fash yourself, Mother, they’ll not be finding anything that’s no’ as it should be.’

And I said, ‘They’ll not have followed me back, either. I took care of that.’

And Aunt Margaret’s hands slowly relaxed. ‘Get up to your bed,’ she said, and after a moment, ‘and forget what you’ve seen the night.’

‘I’ll go to my bed,’ I said, ‘but I doubt I’ll forget.’

And I turned and blundered across to the inner door and up the ladder stair.

Lying empty and sick and wakeful on my bed of piled straw in the loft, I pulled the blanket over my head to try to shut out the low terrible roaring coming up from below that was Grandfather giving rein to his anger at last. But I could not shut out the face of the drummer laddie staring at me out of the darkness, with the hole that was like a third eye in the middle of his forehead.

It was still there when despite myself, sobbing and shivering, I dropped off into an uneasy half-sleep. And I never heard feet on the ladder and the rustle of straw;
and when the blanket was pulled down from my head, I thought that it was the drummer laddie. But the hand that clamped over my mouth to cut off my scream was alive, and the voice in my ear was Alan’s.

‘Hush you,’ he said, ‘’tis only me.’

He was squatting beside me. I could just make out his shape in the faint light from the hole in the thatch that served as a window.

‘I’m sorry you saw what you saw the night,’ he whispered out of the dark, ‘but we need those carbines for the Lord’s work, and for the freedom of Scotland. And when bairns go thrusting their noses into the doings of grown men, often enough they get more than they bargained for.’

He was trying to make it all sound quite reasonable. Somehow small. Was that how it seemed to him?

He had taken his hand away from my mouth, and I managed to get out two words, ‘Go
away
!’

‘I’ve somewhat to say first,’ he said, ‘and you’d best listen. The sojers are bound to come asking questions and hunting in the thatch at all the houses round about by morning. Mebbe before morning. And mebbe they’ll be the same ones that saw ye back at the alehouse, so mind that ye are still like Daft Eckie over to Lochinloch market! And mind also that I was with Grandfather and his sick cow all evening!’ And then suddenly he was bending very close, and his breath was on my face and his hands came up round my neck, quite lightly. ‘If ye tell, we shall all hang.’ His hands tightened for an instant, making me choke. ‘But if we hang, Hugh Herriot, so
will you
!’

He kept his grip for a moment just long enough to be sure I’d got the point, then took his hands away, and
got up and turned him to his own sleeping place, leaving me crowing for breath and with a new sense of sick astonishment upon me.

For until he put it into my head, it never for an instant occurred to me to betray my own kinfolk.

It was scarce cock-light when the troopers came. They were not the ones that I had seen the night before, and so I did not have to play Daft Eckie again, which was a merciful thing, for I am no actor, and I doubted my ability to play the part a second time.

‘Where were you yestere’en?’ demanded the corporal in charge of them.

‘And why would you be spiering to know that?’ returned my grandfather. ‘What was to do yestere’en?’

‘Ye’ve no heard?’

‘Heard
what
?’

‘Never mind for that.’ The corporal came a menacing step forward, but my grandfather never gave back an inch.
‘Where were ye?’

‘Most of the evening I was in the byre with a sick cow,’ said Grandfather.

The corporal looked round about. ‘And the rest of ye?’

‘My older grandson was with me, the younger was here in the kitchen with the women. That’s so, Hugh?’

‘Aye,’ I said.

‘And I was where all God-fearing bodies should be, at home with my woman and bairns,’ put in one of the farmhands, and the rest added their voices to his.

‘And for why would ye be seeing to the cow yourself, when ye’ve farmhands and to spare?’ The corporal turned back to Grandfather.

‘Because she’s a good cow, and dropped a good calf
at the evening’s end, and I’d not trust her to any care but my own at such a time.’

So it went on. And when the questions were over, they herded us, farmhands and family alike, into the parlour, which had but the one door, and held us there, a man standing in the doorway with his carbine at the ready, while the rest went through the house and outbuildings like terriers rat-hunting in a barn – we missed half the hens afterwards! But they found no sign of stolen carbines or smuggled Dutch muskets; only the ancient fowling-piece which every farm possessed, and my grandfather’s pistols in their holsters hanging in their usual place at the head of the big box-bed.

The corporal sniffed at both barrels, but they had been cleaned too well to carry any smell of burned powder, and anyway it was upward of twelve hours since the one had been fired.

When the search was finished, and they had found no sign of anything that was not as it should be, my grandfather asked again, ‘Now that you have done turning my house out of doors, will you be telling me the meaning of it all, and what happened yestere’en?’

The corporal considered, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘Och well, I don’t see there’s any harm telling ye. For the one thing, three Government issue carbines are gone missing; for the other, the alehouse over at Blackmoor was burned down and the four of our men inside – fools that they were – slaughtered for the sake of those same carbines.’

There was a little silence, and then my grandfather said, ‘It’s sorry I am to hear it… What became of old Phemie that kept the alehouse?’

‘Found dead in a ditch this morning,’ said the corporal. ‘Sore burned, she was, and old to be taking a shock the like of that one.’

And he gathered up his men, and in a while they mounted their horses that were waiting in the farmyard and clattered away.

Nobody moved until the last dwindling hoof – beats had quite died into the distance. Then a kind of sigh ran through the little parlour. And I mind a whaup rose crying from the moors behind the house.

And oh, but the grief was on me, for the drummer laddie, and for my own loss of Alan that left me like a stray dog with no heel to follow. My head felt stiff on my shoulders when I forced it round to look at him. He was an odd pearly white, and he was looking at Grandfather. But in a little, as though my looking had reached him like a touch, he turned and answered it with a long cool stare.

Feeling like somebody much older than myself, I said, ‘So we’ll not be hanging. Not this time, anyway. Bu you be awfu’ careful another time, because I’d like to kill you, Alan Armstrong; I’d like to kill you fine.’