Twelve Great Black Cats (11 page)

At the foot of the crag there is a wide sweep of sand and shingle half enclosing a wee bit of a harbor. The shore is bright and shining—
an traigh bhean
, they call it—and above the line of high tide, where the road comes down from the castle to the sea, a scattering of fishermen's shielings once nestled against the cliff. The shielings are long gone, and the fisherfolk who once lived in them are dead and forgotten. Nothing is left now but the white sands below and the old castle on its dark crag above.

Six hundred years have passed since the castle was built, and for a full half of them it has been abandoned and tenantless. No man's foot has trod its floors, no man's voice has echoed from its walls. The fox hunts through its passages by day, and the owl seeks its prey in its halls by night. Curlews call mournfully above its crumbling stones, and screaming sea gulls wheel around its ruined towers and return to the sea. The roof has fallen, the moat is dry, bracken grows among the stones of the courtyard, and there is an air of desolation over all, enough to chill a man's blood to behold it. Yet, the fishermen will tell you, there was a time when the castle was full of light and life. As the old story goes the time of its greatest glory was in the day of its last laird.

The last laird of the castle was young and handsome and gallant, in face and form and bearing all that a man should be. He was a sea captain and often away from home, but he had in his heart the true spirit of western Highland hospitality. His door was always open and a warm welcome awaited every guest. All in his household were instructed to welcome and provide for anyone who came to his house during his absence in the same way that they would have done if he had been at home. And so they did, indeed.

There was a day when the sea captain came home from a voyage, and went up to his chamber to change his travel-worn clothes for fresh ones before going down to greet the visitors who had come to the castle while he was away. As he dressed he talked to the ghillie who had brought him wood for his fire and water for washing.

“Who would my guests be?” he asked the ghillie. “Can you tell me who is waiting for me below?”

“Och, the usual run of folk from roundabout,” the ghillie answered. “They having got word that you'd be returning during the day. Nay! I'm forgetting. There are two fine ladies from Edinbro' that are cousins of your own, or so they say. One of them has brought her young daughter along. I doubt they've been here before.”

“Cousins?” the sea captain said. “Aye, then! That would be the Frasers. There were some of them from Edinburgh who were distant cousins on my mother's side, but the kinship is not close. Och, I've not laid eyes upon them since I went with my mother to visit them when I was a lad. I saw the daughter then.” He settled his coat and shook out the lace at his throat and wrists, and finding himself garbed to suit his taste, he started down the stairs. As he went down he thought of the young daughter of his mother's cousin. He remembered her very well. A greedy wee dumpling of a lassie, that one had been, with tousled red hair. A whey-faced brat with her mouth always sucking on sweeties. She'd pawed him with her sticky wee hands, forbye! He shuddered at the thought.

Then he was down in the room where the company awaited him, greeting the gentlemen and making his manners to the ladies. And there were his mother's cousins, and one of them drawing forward a young lady by the hand and saying, “You'll be remembering my daughter, your cousin Catriona, will ye not?”

He stood, dumbfounded. This was no wee dumpling with sticky paws!

He looked, and saw a tall lass, a slim lass, as straight as a young birch tree. If her hair was red it was the red of pure gold, and her face was not the color of whey but so white and smooth that he thought it would put shame to the petals of the whitest rose that ever grew. He saw two eyes of gentian blue, two smiling rosy lips, and two rows of teeth like pearls. “This is all the beauty of Edinburgh!” he told himself. “All in one caillean.”

She looked at him, and saw a big man, a tall man, with broad shoulders, and a handsome face. She saw a mop of black curls sweeping back from his brow, two bold black eyes with laughter lines at the outer corners, a firm mouth, a strong chin, and the proud air of a man who liked to have folk heed what he said, and to have his word obeyed. They stood there, silent for the space of half a minute, no more, looking at each other, and anybody seeing them would have said that nothing had happened at all. But in that short time he had fallen in love with her, and she with him.

Then he collected his wits and greeted her courteously, calling her “cousin” and bidding her welcome to his house. And she, composed and calm, replied, thanking him for his courtesy in receiving them.

That was where the trouble began. Because he had no right to love her. He had already given his heart to the sea. Nevertheless, he did woo her. He lilted to her, he danced with her, he sang to her, he talked to her, until he had her as tame as if she were a bird coaxed to his hand from its nest, and before spring turned fairly into summer they were wed.

He loved her, be sure, as much as he was able, but she doted upon him. The world held nothing for her but himself. Nothing else had value in her life. But she could never be more than second best in his life. His first love and his dearest love was the sea. Her heart nearly broke when she found it out, and they not more than two months wed. If it had been another woman he loved she could have fought for him, and no doubt won him. But how could one fight against the hold the sea can have on a man? Folk who knew him well told her that when he was but a wean in his nurse's arms he clapped his wee hands and leaped for joy to see the white-capped waves come rolling in. When he was a bairn he ran from home whenever he could, they said, to play around the boats and over the rocks with the fishing lads and lassies on the shore. When he was a lad half-grown he coaxed a boat of his own out of his father, and after that his days from morn to night were spent sailing along the coast, and his nights, as like as not, out with the fishermen until they came in from the sea with their fish in the early misty dawn. Nobody had the need to tell her that now that he was a man, and master of a great ship, he loved the sea so dearly that he could not be happy long away from it.

So with their wedding day no more than two months behind them, the sea captain told his young wife that he was going to leave her and go to sea.

“But we have not been married long,
mo graidh
,” she protested, unable to believe he meant it.

“Och, I'll come back,” he said, laughing. “But I must go. I'll not be long away,
nighean mhúirninn
. A month, or maybe two.” She stormed at him, she wept, she begged him to stay. But he only shook his head. “You knew I was a sea captain before you wed me,” he told her. “Did you not expect that I would go to sea?”

“Do you not love me?” she cried.

“I love you,
nighean mhúirninn
” he said. But she saw his head was half-turned from her, and he listened to the murmur of the sea on the white sands below.

“You love the sea more than you do me,” she said, and he said nothing. There was nothing he could say. It was true.

So a few days later he kissed her and bade her farewell, and went down to his ship and sailed off. And the sea took the ship in its arms and carried him far away.

In a month or so he came home, full of tales of adventures and bringing chests of booty taken in battles with the Portingales on the high seas. He poured out golden rings, fine jewel-set chains, earrings, wristlets, and pieces of gold in a bright shining shower, heaping them all, hugger-mugger, into her lap and laughing to see the fine show they made. But she stood up and let them all tumble to the floor.

“I care naught for these baubles,” she said. “I had rather you were a poor ploughman and I your wife, to work and strive to make ends meet on a shilling a week—and keep you at home with me.”

But she knew he would not stay. The sea would call to him and naught she could do would hold him beside her. So he went, and came back, and went again, over and over, and two years went by. She loved him no less. But she grew to hate the sea, and all things belonging to the sea.

Then one day he kissed her and bade her farewell as he had done so often before. But this time he did not return. He had been gone overlong and she began to grow anxious, leaning her breast against the window-sill, and watching daily and hourly for sight of his ship.

Then, a messenger came riding in with word that her husband the sea captain would never come back again. The messenger was not able to say how or when her husband came to his death. The captain of another ship, coming into port at Greenoch, had sent the messenger to her with the news. He thought something had been said about a sea battle, and a great storm, but what it was all about he himself could not say. All he knew certainly was that her husband was dead.

The captain's wife nearly went mad for grief. She shut herself in her chamber and would let no one come near her to console or advise her. The guests in the castle saw that she wished to bear her sorrow alone, and went quietly on their ways. They were uneasy at leaving her, but what use was it to stay? All their pleading would not bring her out of her room nor persuade her to open the door to let them come in. She did not want them, it was plain to see, so they could do nothing else but go.

When they were all gone she came out and for a day or two went here and there about the castle, and the servants, seeing her in her deep black velvet gown, with her face so white and her hair flaming out above it, thought she was far more like a sea fairy than a mortal woman. There was something fey about her, and it distressed and frightened them.

Then she called the servants together, and after paying them handsomely, she bade them go and seek to work elsewhere. They were unwilling to leave her alone in the castle, but she spoke brusquely and told them there'd be naught for them to do. She had a mind to shut the place up and go away herself, and she'd not be coming back in a hurry—if she ever came back at all—so they must go quickly. None of them dared gainsay her then, and within a few days the last of them had departed and she was alone in the castle. But she did not go away. By night and by day she stayed, brooding over her lost love, and the sound of the sea was in her ears all the days and all the nights of her life.

Then one day, as the sun was sinking into the far-off western sea, she looked out of the window and saw that a great ship was moored in the little harbor, riding at anchor on the gentle swell of the waves. She knew it at first glance, for if she had seen it once before she had seen it a score of times, bringing her husband home or taking him away. She could not bear the sight of it, for she knew it would never again feel the tread of his foot upon its decks. How and why the ship was there at its mooring she did not ask herself. She turned quickly from the window and did not look that way again.

Then she heard feet tramping the stony road that led up from the shore. She stood at the door and looked to see who came. Three seamen came trudging up to the castle and, as they drew near, the captain's wife saw that two of them were well-seasoned sailors with weatherbeaten faces and grizzled hair but the third was a fresh-faced, rosy-cheeked young lad, who looked hardly old enough to have got his sea legs under him yet. Each seaman carried a sea chest upon his shoulder, and they came steadily up to the captain's wife, where she stood at the door. They greeted her respectfully and, without replying to them, she beckoned them into the hall, standing aside to let them pass. They set the sea chests upon the great table that stood in the middle of the hall, and turned to face her, and then she spoke to them. “Why have you come here?” she asked.

“The captain said that we should bring the ship and the treasure to you, my lady, and so we have done,” the oldest of the three sailors said.

“A ship and treasure!” the captain's wife said scornfully. “What am I to do with such things? I have no use for them at all. Why did you not bring my husband back to me?”

“That we would have done if we could,” the seaman told her. “Och, the battle was over, and we were well away, but a great storm came up, with the winds blowing wild and the waves high beyond believing. Then the sea came up over the deck and carried the captain away. We tried to keep him with us, but our strength was nothing against the sea.”

“So you let the sea take him,” she said.

“We could do naught else,” the seaman said.

She turned, then, and threw back the lids of the chests, and fingered the treasures within them, the pieces of gold and the jewels, and as she let them slip from her hands she had, in her inner heart, a feeling that these men were to blame in some way for her husband's death. She resolved that she would have their lives in payment for his. She shut the chests.

“Well, then,” she said, “since you are here, you must have food and drink to refresh yourselves, and after a while I may have a task for you to do.”

She led them to the guard room of the castle and bade them seat themselves at the table there. Then she went back and forth, bringing bread and meat and cheese from the larder and setting it on the table, and she fetched wine for them to drink. But before she brought the wine into the room she put into it a drug that would put them fast asleep.

They ate and drank, and she sat a little apart from them, watching while they made their meal.

Soon the drugged wine began to make them drowsy. They yawned and rubbed their eyes; their hands grew clumsy and fumbled with their food. Then, almost at the same moment, slumber overtook them, so that they lay soundly sleeping, with their heads upon the table by their plates. The captain's wife rose from her chair and looked about the room at the thick stone walls and at the iron-barred windows, and at the heavy oaken iron-bound door. Out of the room she went, and shut the door and locked it, and took the key away from the lock.