The Betrayal of Maggie Blair (27 page)

"My uncle's taken," I said to Aunt Blair. I turned back to Lieutenant Dundas. "Your men took him, up on the top of Windyhill, by the cairn." I bit my lip, wishing I hadn't mentioned the cairn, afraid I'd given too much away.

"The Devil can take your damned uncle," Lieutenant Dundas barked impatiently. "Where's the traitor Renwick?"

"I'm telling you. They surrounded Windyhill and chased Uncle Blair and Mr. Renwick up it. But Mr. Renwick slipped between them, and I think—I didn't see—perhaps he hid behind some stones or a ... a gorse bush. But then he went on northward, across the moor toward the Clyde. They've gone after him, some of them. The others arrested my uncle. They said they'd bring him back to you. But please, sir, you don't want him. Please, let him..."

Lieutenant Dundas's hand shot out, and he gripped me painfully by the throat.

"Are you telling the truth? You'll be sorry if it's a lie."

I knew I'd be sorry for the sin but not for the result.

"I'm telling you," I managed to croak, though he was half strangling me. "They nearly caught Mr. Renwick on the top of Windyhill, and now they're chasing him north, over the hills."

That's the truth, after all,
I told myself.

"Hugh? They've taken Hugh?" Aunt Blair cried out, as if she'd only just understood. Still clasping Andrew, she sank down on to the stone seat by the door.

Lieutenant Dundas had lost interest in us all.

"There's no more to do here," he said curtly to his men. "Watkins, leave that girl alone. There are still hours of light left. Get mounted, all of you. We'll ride up past Kilmacolm and cut the traitor off before he reaches the coast. He'll be trying to get a crossing to Gourock or Dunoon."

No one spoke as the sound of the horses' hooves died away down the track, but the silence was broken by Aunt Blair's moaning sobs.

Behind me, Ritchie cleared his throat.

"I'm sorry you betrayed Mr. Renwick. That wasn't well done."

"I didn't betray him." I blushed at the scorn in his voice. "He's hiding inside the cairn on the top of Windyhill. I told a lie to send the troopers away in the wrong direction. They believed me and chased after him."

Ritchie managed to smile at this news.

"Well done, Maggie! You mean he's safe?"

"I suppose so, as long as he stays out of sight inside the cairn."

"I'll go and find him and take him to a good hiding place," said Ritchie, making for the yard entrance. "It's what Father would want."

Aunt Blair started up.

"Ritchie, you will
not.
It's enough that your father's been arrested. There's to be no more running about the countryside today. If you're taken too, who's to keep us going here? Who's to run the farm?"

"Mother—"

"No!" I had never heard my aunt speak so forcibly.

For once, I agreed with my aunt.

"If you go up there, you'll just draw attention to him," I dared to chip in. "He's well hidden. He's safer by himself till the troops are called off the hills."

Ritchie tightened his lips but nodded reluctantly.

"Uncle Blair gave me some messages for you. He said to pay the fines with the silver in the strongbox, and if you really have to, you can ask the Laird of Duchal for a loan. And he said to harvest the infield first when the oats are ripe."

Aunt Blair let out a cry of despair, and Ritchie looked shaken.

"Harvest? But that's months away! Did the soldiers say what they were going to do with him? Did they talk of a trial? Maggie, did you hear anything about—they're not going to execute him?"

I shook my head. "They didn't say anything. They just said they'd take him to Lieutenant Dundas."

"That monster!" Aunt Blair was rocking on her seat.

Grizel, who had run into the house disheveled and red-faced when the dragoon had at last let her go, came outside again.

"Mistress, you'll not be pleased," she said reluctantly. "They've been in and out of everything. It's turmoil in there. The cauldron's overturned and the fire's out and the silver spoon has gone."

Nanny had been cowering in her mother's skirts, and she set up a wail, only daring to raise her voice now that the danger was over. Aunt Blair looked down at her, startled, as if she'd only just realized she was there.

"And where's Martha? Maggie, you went out to find her! Where is she?"

"I'm here, Mammy! Have the nasty men all gone away?"

Martha's little white face appeared, peeping fearfully out around the frame of the kitchen door.

"Martha! Where have you been all this time?"

Martha looked at Aunt Blair doubtfully, not sure whether she was in trouble or not.

"I came home from the preaching," she said at last. "I didn't like it. Then Annie came and started looking for things. She was in a big hurry. She turned the heather out of our bed. She only found a groat, though, in Grizel's little bag."

"Ha!" snorted Grizel. "I knew all along she'd try to steal my wages. I hid them well."

"And then Annie slapped me, Mammy, and told me to fetch the key to the strongbox."

Aunt Blair gasped and clapped her hand over her mouth.

"The wickedness of her! I'd never have believed it!"

"The strongbox? We're ruined!" muttered Ritchie.

"I didn't want to give it to her," Martha said, frowning. "I don't like Annie. You said I had to like her, but she's not nice, Mammy. Not to me. I found the key before she did, and I put it in my pocket and pretended to go on looking for it. And then that man came, the horrible one, and he called her, and said he'd send her off to Sorn Castle with an escort on a horse, and she should wait for him there, and she just snatched up the silver spoon and ran out to him. I was so scared. I hid in your bed."

"Brave Martha," Aunt Blair said shakily, holding out her arms, and Martha went into them and was hugged fiercely.

Behind her, Grizel beckoned to me from the kitchen door.

"Might as well make a start," she said, looking around disgustedly at the wreckage. "Mistress is going to have a fit and half when she sees all this. She's not going to have it easy now. We'll not see the master back. He's done for, if you want my humble opinion."

***

After Lieutenant Dundas and his men had come to Ladymuir for the first time, we'd been able to repair much of the damage, scooping up the spilled meal and stitching the torn sacks, rescuing most of the cheeses, and generally putting the storeroom back in order. But this time the destruction had been complete. The troopers had stripped the storeroom, carrying off sacks and jars and barrels, and trampling what they left into a filthy mess on the floor. Inside the house, they had ripped the linen, tumbled the pots and dishes off the shelves, and smashed whatever would break.

I'd thought, when I first saw the ruin of her home, that Aunt Blair would sink into helpless despair. In fact, when she first saw the extent of the disaster, she could do nothing for at least half an hour but sit, crying and trembling, on the bench by the table, on which the remains of the breakfast porridge had been spilled and smeared and made inedible with handfuls of ash from the dead fire.

I crept around her, not wanting to irritate, not knowing where to start. I envied Grizel, who, in her usual practical way, was getting on with the work—picking up cooking pots, sweeping ashes, and fetching in twigs to try and relight the fire—while the little girls, upset by the horror of the day, squabbled noisily in the corner.

Aunt Blair stopped crying at last. She bent her head and clasped her hands, and I saw her lips moving.

She's praying,
I thought, and I knew I should be praying too. I leaned on the broom I was holding, squeezed my eyelids together, and said in my heart,
O Lord, deliver us from evil.

As the familiar phrase formed in my head, I remembered the last words I'd said to Jesus. I'd been filled with a rush of overwhelming love, up there by the waterfall, and I'd said,
I give everything! I give!

I wasn't sure now what I'd meant or what had happened to me. I only knew that I'd felt something miraculous at the time, and that a glow, like the last pink streaks of a sunset, still lit something inside me.

"Maggie," said Aunt Blair, startling me.

I opened my eyes. She was sitting upright, and a little color had returned to her cheeks.

"You saved Andrew from that fiend," she said. "I'll not forget that. You were wonderful, dear. So brave."

She spoke more warmly than she had ever done, though I could tell that her words came from a sense of duty rather than affection. Even so, I blushed with pleasure.

"And she saved Mr. Renwick too," said Ritchie, coming in from outside. "Mother, I thought they'd driven off the cows, but they only let them loose. I've rounded them up. They're all accounted for."

"God be praised. There'll be milk then, at least, when they've calved."

Nanny and Martha heard the word
milk.
They stopped tussling and looked up.

"I'm hungry, Mammy," said Martha.

"So'm I," said Nanny.

"That's just too bad," Aunt Blair said with determined briskness. "You'll have to get used to it. Maggie, see if you can find any scraps of oatcake left over from this morning and give them to the children, then put the bedding together and get them to bed. Grizel, leave the fire now and clean up the mess on this table. Then we'll have to see if there's anything that can be rescued from the storeroom. We'll have to sift the oats from the mess on the floor grain by grain."

"Then what are we going to have for supper, mistress?" asked Grizel.

"Supper?
Supper?
" Aunt Blair's self-control, which she had wrapped around herself like a cloak, fell away for a moment. "Don't you understand, you silly girl? There is no supper. And there'll be nothing for breakfast. Your master's gone. The storeroom's empty. The silver will all be taken in fines. We're ruined, Grizel. If we survive until the harvest, it will be a miracle."

And then the cloak closed around her again, and she began to give us orders in her old contradictory way. She fussed and bustled and tutted and grumbled until the house had been restored to some kind of order, the fire was lit, the children had gone whining to bed, and Andrew had been suckled and laid for the night in his cradle.

But when we were in bed and I was sinking into the sleep of complete exhaustion, in spite of the hunger gnawing at me, I heard her weeping softly behind the wooden partition that separated her bed from ours.

Of all the people at Ladymuir, I think I was best able to cope with the sudden, total poverty in which we had been plunged. Before I'd come to Kilmacolm, I'd lived on the edge of hunger all my life. On the many, many days when there had been no food in the cottage at Scalpsie Bay, I'd scavenged for limpets on the rocks by the sea, gathered berries or nuts in the autumn, and picked edible leaves and flowers wherever I could find them. But the spring, I knew, was the worst time for famine. Everyone's winter supplies were low, there were no wild fruits to gather, and the crops were a long way from harvest.

I did what I could, stinging my hands raw and red with nettles to make soup and hunting for birds' eggs on the moss. Aunt Blair wrinkled her nose at my offerings but used them all the same. She was more grateful for the stream of gifts of oatmeal and barley and even valuable cheeses from those kind neighbors whose stores had not been raided, and I saw more than ever how greatly Granny had caused us to suffer by her endless quarreling with our neighbors.

The officers from Paisley came a few days after Uncle Blair had been arrested in order to collect the fine for nonattendance at the kirk. Although we'd been expecting them, we'd hoped somehow that my uncle's arrest would have spared us, and the shock of the sum they demanded was a final blow.

They were decent men, I suppose, not like Lieutenant Dundas's dragoons. They counted out the silver pieces so carefully put by in the strongbox, piled them neatly on the table, and gave my aunt a written receipt.

"There's another two pounds owing," the older man said, almost regretfully. "Do you not have it, Mistress Blair?"

My aunt's eyes filled with tears. She shook her head.

"You've taken every penny we have. It's all there, in front of you. How am I to feed my children?"

"You should have thought of that before you broke the law," the other man said. "What harm would it have done, to sit through a sermon or two? You needn't have listened, after all." The older one frowned him to silence.

"There's nothing I can do. I'm just carrying out my orders. I'm sorry for your trouble. These are bad times for everyone. There's not a household hereabouts that isn't suffering. The jails in Paisley and Glasgow are so full of Covenant men—and women, come to that—that they've had to send some of them on to the tolbooth in Edinburgh."

"What?" Aunt Blair cried. "What about my husband? I was told he was in Glasgow. Is he one of them? Why would they send him all the way to Edinburgh? Oh, they're going to hang him! There'll be a trial and the next thing we know ... Lord, have mercy on us!"

"Hold on, mistress. I don't know if your husband's one of them. It's no use asking me. I'm just telling you what I heard. Some have been hanged already, but you'd have heard if your husband was one of them. Some are to be kept in Glasgow, and some are sent on to Edinburgh."

Aunt Blair collapsed onto her stool and looked so dreadful that I thought she would faint. The officers clearly thought so too. They exchanged quick, embarrassed nods, slipped the silver pieces into leather pouches, and almost tiptoed to the door.

"We'll not bother you for the rest of the money now," the older one said, as if conferring a great concession. "But we'll have to come back for it, mistress. The fine must be paid in full, as you well know."

At that point Ritchie, who had been out since dawn doing the work of two men on the farm, came into the yard, and the officers scuttled away.

***

I have always been amazed by how fast news travels from one end of Scotland to the other, reaching remote farms and hamlets, spreading out from towns, and drifting across the mountains and firths and lochs like thistledown blowing in the wind. By the evening of that day, we were reeling from the news that my uncle had indeed been among the group of prisoners taken to Edinburgh.