Bonnie Dundee (30 page)

I roused up and looked round me to see who could be fool enough to sing in such a howling wilderness of a world. And it was so that I saw the beggar woman who must have just come in from the street; and she sitting with her back against the almond tree.

Now the very blackness of my despair came, I am thinking (for I am not the despairing kind), at least partly from my weakness, and the long time that it had taken my wound to mend. I was in the odd state that comes to a man that has been long sick and near to death, when the living world first lays hold of him again. It is as though he has one less skin than usual between himself and that world, and he is more piercingly aware of everything, sight and sound and smell and touch – aye, and joy and despair; and the shadow of a falling leaf and the distant notes of a fiddle and the glance of a passing stranger can all invade him as they cannot do when he is a whole man with his full number of skins.

It was in that way that I saw the beggar woman.

Miserable old crone that she was, sitting with her head tipped back against the trunk of the almond tree, the last reflected brightness of the sunset shining into her withered gargoyle’s face. But it was not her face that held me; it was her hands, lying together in her ragged lap. Old, gaunt, coarse hands, dirt-coloured and cracked like earth in a drought. But they had once been beautiful. I could see the beauty in them, as maybe I would not have done at another time or in another mood, for it was a long time since I had sought below the surface of things with a painter’s eye, which is a
little like a lover’s. I saw the beauty of the bones; how when she was long dead and her hands were a skeleton’s, they would still be beautiful. There was beauty, too, in the way she moved them, turning and twisting between her fingers a sprig of almond blossom torn off by the wind. I saw the shadow of her hands and the almond spray sharp-etched on to the rusty blackness of her lap; I saw the thick knotted blackish veins on the backs of her hands, and was aware of how they must have branched, blue and scarcely visible, delicate as the veining on a damsel-fly’s wing, when they were young.

Suddenly I was minded of Darklis’s hands moving light and sure on the strings of her lute, for Jean’s amusement while she sat for her wedding portrait.

In those few moments, something began to wake in me that had been a long while sleeping; a kind of saprise that was kin to the buds breaking on the almond tree; a stir of old longings almost forgotten. I began to think how I should paint the old woman’s hands; how to catch the strong life and the weariness in them, as well as the hidden beauty, and make it all part with the almond flowers that were fragile as white shadow, yet strong with life also…

She was staring at the food, her gap-toothed mouth hanging a little open. Somebody threw her a hunk of bread, and she dropped the almond spray to catch it, and thrust it into her breast under her filthy shawl; then scrambled to her feet and hobbled out through the doorway that gave on to the old monastery forecourt and the streets beyond. Maybe the crust was for someone else, that she did not stay to eat it by the fire.

It seems strange, now, that she never felt my gaze upon her. Her eyes never met mine for an instant; but if she had not wandered into the cloister that evening, I
am thinking it quite possible that I might have made my hole in the water. As it was, when they gave me my discharge three days later, I set out to make a new life for myself, with a reasonably clear idea of how I hoped to do it.

I had a few coins in my right-hand pocket; not many, for was there ever a soldier whose pay was not in arrears? And the end of my empty sleeve was stuffed into the left-hand one – there are few things more provoking than an empty sleeve flapping loose. And so I went down into the town. I was no stranger to Perpignan, for our headquarters had been there since we came down from St Germain the best part of two years before. I went straight to a certain tall and tottering wine-shop whose creaking sign showing the seven stars of its name arranged in a triangle had been badly in need of repainting ever since I had first known it, and was now so washed out by the storms of the past winter that the stars seemed to be sinking through the board to the other side even while you watched. I went in and spent the smallest of my coins on a measure of raw red wine; and spinning out the drinking of it as long as possible, managed before the last drop was downed to persuade the landlord to let me repaint it for my food while I was on the job, and the cost of the paint, with enough over for another sign.

Seeing the painted house-timbers of the town and the boats in the harbour, I knew that there must be paint to be got, easy enough, in Perpignan.

Having agreed, though unwillingly, that the old faded sign was unworthy of the good wine he sold, the landlord sent his potboy with me to show me where to get what I needed, and to make sure that I did not cheat him and run off with the money.

So, I painted my first shop sign.

I settled down to work, with the old sign rubbed down and propped against the wall, with the walnut oil and my couple of brushes and my shells of colour. (I had bought my pigments ready-ground and only requiring to be worked up with oil, which is a thing no painter should do; but I needed time and practice to work out how to grind my colours one-handed, and meanwhile I needed to eat.) And oh, but I was feart! It was so long since I had last put brush to board, and though the old love had woken in me, there was no saying whether I had yet the old skill. Lacking that, I should just have to paint up the sign as it had been before, and be content with that. Only I should not be content, for the loss in me would be not just the loss of my new bonnie plans, but something deeper and more sore.

But with the first brush-strokes I knew that all was well. The old skill was rusty with lack of use, but it was still there… I laid on a background of a dark blue-green, the colour of a clear sky at twilight seen from a lighted room, and against it painted a wreath of twisted stalks and leaves in solid black, and set my seven stars among them – white, with yellow hearts to them, like white roses in a garland. It was clumsy work, and I was beginning to know by the end of it how often a painter uses his left hand without even knowing that he is doing so. But the thing was bonnie enough in its way.

The landlord was inclined to grumble that nobody would recognise the new sign; but his fat wife wept at sight of it and said that it was a garland of stars for the Mother of God. I had not thought of it that way, but if it pleased her, where was the harm?

And it got me another sign to paint, for Monsieur
Dupont, a crony of the landlord’s and a shoemaker by trade. I struck the same bargain with him, and painted him a fine pair of buckled shoes with high red heels, such as I had seen often in London Town, three-four years ago.

And then, with enough pigments in small membrane-covered pots for at least two more signs, I took to the road, for I had no mind to spend more time within a bugle-call of the regiment.

I painted my way across France, teaching myself the craft as I went, and discovering how best to carry it out one-handed. More than a year it took me, painting shop signs for the most part, though from time to time somebody would ask me to paint their dog, and once it was a village bull, and once a girl on the bottom of a wine cask. And there were times when I had money to jingle in my pocket, and times when I came uncomfortably near to starving. More than a year, come to think of it, for it was March when I changed the rags of my French soldier’s coat for the rags of a decent brown on that I had found hanging on a blackthorn bush, its owner busy at the spring sowing in the field beyond, and crossed the border into what they used to call the Spanish Netherlands, by a suitably lonely woodland track, no one seeking to bar my way.

Life was more difficult after that, making my way through a countryside that had been fought over for the past five years, and was being fought over still, in a fitful way, though I kept well clear of the guns. Nothing of that was part of my life any more. But it seemed strange after my years with the French, with Spain and the Low Countries and the England of Orange William for the enemy, to be in a world to which France and King James’s England were the enemy after all.

I minded my tattered French coat that I had left hanging on a blackthorn bush, and away past that, far, far back, till I seemed to catch the waft of hawthorn flowers, and the light bitter mocking of Alan’s voice: ‘The De’il’s greeting to ye, Hughie lad, here’s turning your coat with a vengeance!’

But I was not turning my coat; I was one of the Wild Geese, whose loyalties are not bounded by frontiers. I had followed Claverhouse, and I had followed James for Claverhouse’s sake, and now King James’s service was closed to me, and I went to find another life for myself in the only way that I knew.

Life was more difficult also, for the very simple reason that I did not know the language and must get along as best I could by shouting and dumb-show. But once across the second border into the Dutch Republic, I found help that I had not expected, though I suppose I might have done so if I had thought, for in the sea-port towns there were Scottish and English merchants and seamen. It was good to hear my own tongue again. And if any of them guessed that I was one of the Wild Geese, they asked no questions, but set me on my way.

And so at last I came to Utrecht, and to Silver Spur Street, and found the third house above the kirk, with the swans carved on its gable, and asked the feather-bolster-shaped serving maid who opened to my knocking at the door, was Mynheer Cornelius van Meere at home.

She stared at me as though I were the Man in the Moon, and when I repeated the question, made shooing gestures at me that were understandable in any language, and would have shut the door in my face. But at that moment, luckily for me, another woman came across the hall behind her, and paused to ask a
question. The two spoke together quickly in their own tongue, the maid holding the door still half-closed. Then it opened a little wider, and the maid, with a disapproving sniff, moved back a pace, though remaining ready to give support if need be, and the other woman, who was clearly the mistress of the house, took her place in the doorway.

She asked me something – I suppose it was my business; and I repeated my own question again.

She stood and looked at me, like a bright-eyed robin, her head a little on one side, and I saw that she understood no more English than her maid did. Fool that I was, because Mynheer spoke English, I had thought that his wife would, too. ‘Cornelius van Meere,’ she said, and nodded, and waited again; and I thought that maybe, just maybe, she might know my name. Mynheer had said all those years ago, that if ever I changed my mind I was to come to the house with the carved swans, and if he was from home, his wife would take me in until he returned. So, if he had meant it, and he
had
meant it, he would surely have told her all about me, told her my name.

But it was all a long time ago.

I slung my bundle higher on to my shoulder, and made her a small bow with my hand on my chest, and said, ‘Hugh Herriot,’ and waited in my turn.

I saw blankness in her face, and then questioning, and then a small struggling memory. And the memory opened like a flower.

‘Hugh Herriot,’ she said; and then flinging the door open wide, ‘Com!’ And as I came in over the scrubbed white step, she put out a hand to my free arm and found only an empty sleeve to my ragged coat; and I saw her plump kind face flinch with shock, and crumple. But I
was too tired to mind. Then she was shooing the maid off in her turn, calling behind her into the depths of the house, a quick string of guttural words in which I could make out only three, ‘Cornelius!’ and my own name, and she was thrusting me across a wide dim hallway.

And then, not quite sure how I got there, I was in a room with black-and-white tiles on the floor; a very cool calm room through which the light seemed to wash like water into every corner; standing with my bundle at my feet. And Mynheer, looking more than ever like a toad in a vast curled wig, was pumping my hand up and down between both of his.

‘Hugh!’ he said. ‘Hugh – after all these so many years!’

And suddenly my mouth felt dry. It was so many years, as he said; too many years to leave an offer lying and then try to take it up again, expecting it still to be there. I said nothing, and in a little he stood back and looked at me. ‘And zo you change your mind,’ he said, as though it was only last week that we had spoken of the thing.

I swallowed against the dryness of my mouth. ‘If you will still take me, Mynheer.’

And after a troubled moment, he said, ‘Can you still paint, my Hugh?’ He was not surprised by my arm, somewhere in that stream of words his wife must have told him. But I could see that it might raise problems.

‘I’m right-handed,’ I said.

‘Ach, that I know. Lacking an arm you will contrive; but there are other things to cut off the gift – the flow – the fire.’

I shook my head. ‘I have painted my way across France – shop signs and the like, and learned to grind my own colours one-handed as I came, but whether I can still paint as ye mean it, I do not know.’

‘We shall find out,’ said Mynheer, seemingly from rather a long way off, through the fog of weariness that was gathering about me. ‘But first you must eat, and then you must sleep; and then tomorrow we will talk of many things such as how you came to be painting your way across France and whether you can still paint other things than shop signs.’

And so I ate and slept, and next morning answered a great many questions over a hot thick bowl of chocolate – I had never tasted chocolate before. And then Mynheer took me up to a long light room at the top of the house, where two apprentices were already at work, one grinding colours while the other was preparing a canvas, and at the far end a big canvas stood on its easel, covered with a cloth. Mynheer spoke to them, and they went on with their work. Then he showed me where the pigments and oils, the pestles and mortars and grinding slabs were kept, the spare pieces of board for sketching, and all the ordered chaos of brushes in jars and the like, and said, ‘Now paint.’