Bonnie Dundee (32 page)
Authors: Rosemary Sutcliff
And all beyond was fallen beams and broken plaster and a mountain of sullen black peat.
People were fetching spades and crowbars, and meanwhile we all began to dig with our bare hands, like terriers at a rat hole – like Caspar.
But we knew that it was no use. No use at all.
A few days later, my lady Jean and the bairn with her were buried in the shadow of the Buurkirk at the heart of Utrecht. It was a very gentle day, though there had been rain earlier, with a sky of watered blue and dove and silver arching above the town, and the leaves drifting down from the poplars and the linden trees around the kirkyard.
There were not many folk to see her laid in her grave. Colonel Livingstone stood at the graveside, a bandage round his head; and with him Sir Andrew Kennedy, the Conservitor of Scottish Trade in the Netherlands, who was an old friend and had come over from Rotterdam to take charge of all things; a few more; and Darklis and myself standing back a little from the rest because we had Caspar with us. But Darklis went forward at the last, and knelt to scatter a
handful of rain-wet autumn crocuses and late Four Seasons roses on the kist before the grave was filled in.
When all was over we set out to walk home together. I looked back once from the kirkyard gate, and saw the dark figure of Colonel Livingstone standing as though he had taken root in the rank graveside grass; and for all that Sir Andrew was still with him, I never saw a man look so utterly alone before, nor have I ever seen one since. I turned away to where Darklis had checked and stood waiting for me, and we started to walk back to Silver Spur Street and the house with the carved swans on the gable, which was the nearest thing to home that either of us had since I had taken her back there to Mevrow van Meere on the night that the Castle of Antwerp fell in.
At the first, we walked a little apart, but in a while she moved in towards me. ‘If I had not been taking Caspar for his evening walk, I would have been with her,’ she said in a small hushed voice.
I put my arm around her and felt that she was shivering; and that was not from cold, for have I not said it was a gentle day? There was another thing that I felt, too. In all the days since Jean’s death, she had been frozen, like the creature that the People of Peace leave behind in the place of a stolen human being; but now the ice was melting, and with it something else, the strangeness, the holding back, that had always been like a defence-wall around her. Whether it was because Jean was dead and had left her free and lonely as Claverhouse had left me; whether it had to with that terrible flash of the Sight, that had come to its last cruel flowering, and dropped away into the past, leaving her like other lassies…
‘Not that it matters either way,’ she was saying in the
same small desolate voice. ‘She doesna need me now. Nobody needs me now.’
I stopped, and turned her towards me. Her face was curd-white in the shadow of her hood, and her eyes huge in it, and darker than I had ever seen them.
‘I need you,’ I said. ‘I’ve always needed you, my bonnie love.’
We did not even kiss each other, not then; but I held her close, and she refuged her face in the hollow of my neck. And we did not care that all the good burghers of Utrecht could be seeing us as they went by; and all the while, Caspar was weaving himself in and out around our feet; and the poplar leaves drifting golden all about us in the quiet autumn air.
Aye, that was your grandmother when she was young. You will have known it all the while, of course; no need to guess. But I did not write all this down to keep you wondering and spring surprises on you in the end. I wrote it that you might know, and pass the knowing on to your grandchildren after you, what manner of man was General John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee; him they called Bloody Claver’se; him they called Black John of the Battles; and what it was like to be one of those that followed him.
A little also, maybe, what it was like to be young Hugh Herriot. But that is by the way.
I have always had the knack of catching a likeness from memory.
Rosemary Sutcliff was born in 1920 in West Clanden, Surrey.
With over 40 books to her credit, Rosemary Sutcliff is now universally considered one of the finest writers of historical novels for children. Her first novel,
The Queen Elizabeth Story
was published in 1950. In 1972 her book
Tristan and Iseult
was runner-up for the Carnegie Medal. In 1974 she was highly commended for the Hans Christian Andersen Award and in 1978 her book,
Song for a Dark Queen
was commended for the Other Award.
Rosemary lived for a long time in Arundel, Sussex with her dogs and in 1975, she was awarded the OBE for services to Children’s Literature. Unfortunately Rosemary passed away in July 1992 and will be much missed by her many fans.
PUBLISHED BY RED FOX
Beowulf: Dragonslayer
The Hound of Ulster
The High Deeds of Finn MacCool
Tristan and Iseult
Sun Horse, Moon Horse
The Light Beyond the Forest
The Sword and the Circle
The Road to Camlann
The Witch’s Brat
The Armourer’s House
The Shining Company
Knight’s Fee
The Capricorn Bracelet
BONNIE DUNDEE
AN RHCP DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 448 17288 7
Published in Great Britain by RHCP Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Publishers UK
A Random House Group Company
This ebook edition published 2013
Copyright © Rosemary Sutcliff, 1983
First Published in Great Britain
Red Fox Classics 9781782950875 1983
The right of Rosemary Sutcliff to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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