Coronach, p.16
Coronach, page 16
He had heard that of all Clan Grant only the young Glenmoriston and his tacksman Dundreggan had declared for the Prince: the Laird of Grant had always been royalist. He knew that for Glenmoriston’s choice his lands had been ravaged not once but several times, by English raiders and then by Whiggish Highland lairds on their westward marches home after Culloden. He knew Grant of Dundreggan had been stripped and brutalized, despite a certificate of immunity, and left naked beside his wife with a halter around his neck, and that the great houses of Dundreggan and Glenmoriston had been burned to the ground. But he had not passed this way since the rising, and he had not known it would be like this.
If there were Grants still in the glen he did not see them. Nothing moved but a solitary shadow, a phantom-grey stag sniffing the scent of man and horse and springing away in languid flight. The river wound over stones, a black ribbon twisting between banks of melting snow, and the quarrelling water was the only sound that disturbed the stillness. And then he saw the ruins, the fallen walls of Glenmoriston, blackened timber and charred rafters, the only movement a hawk rising from a branch, beating the air with powerful wings. He had prepared himself for this sight: he had not warned the others, and quietly, in the silence, his son began to cry.
Closer to the house he slowed his horse, recognizing human shadows: tinkers, he thought, living here in what shelter remained.
He reined in and one of the ghillies came to stand at his stirrup.
“Where are the Grants? Where have they gone? Who are these hellish people?”
“They are the Grants, Glen Sian.”
He tore his eyes away from the roofless walls.
They had declared, while he had not. He had been secret, silent, safe, if safety was to be found in cataclysm. He had been discreet: for the sake of his people only, he had been discreet.
Between discretion and cowardice lay a fine line, for him too fine now to be discerned.
They lay that night at Invermoriston, and joined the road on the shore of Loch Ness in the morning.
A memory which had long disquieted him came once more to fret at the edge of his mind. The rain, the sodden red coats, the black, lonely country and the rattling beat of the drum. Women. Baggage. Pack horses, bearing plunder. And a prisoner, himself. The officers. He had watched them with a bloody vengeance in his heart, and he could not forget them even now. The lieutenant-colonel, a frail man with a Roman face and a maimed right arm. A boy whose beauty he had cause to know hid a monster of incalculable savagery. And the third officer, of senior rank, who rode at the rear of the column, and bore himself as though ill or in pain. He had acknowledged neither of the others, although he had spoken once to Ewen.
We are two unhappy bastards, you and I, but they have done for neither of us yet.
They reached Fort Augustus in the bitter sunset. It was as he remembered: the pier, Crannog castle on its islet, the burial grounds across the River Oich, the Tarff, the desolate moors. A galley from Inverness with stores for the garrison lay at uneasy anchor where he had first set foot on Scottish soil. A sharp wind had come up and was churning the black waters of the loch.
The fort itself. Once square, thick-walled, with a dozen six-pounder cannon menacing the empty hills, it was a ruin now. The Prince’s army had held it briefly against the Hanoverians and had blown it up after a week’s siege with nineteen barrels of powder. The barracks had been demolished but cellars and stables remained, and damp cells he well remembered beneath the ground. The garrison was uncomfortably lodged there, and attempting to restore it with little success.
The daylight was seeping away, darkness coming from a threatening sky. The track, now joining Wade’s military road from Inverness, led down toward the town.
They passed the fort, close enough to see the distinctive regimental lace on the facings of the scarlet coats, the light on oiled muskets. A mounted officer, following, kicked his steaming horse to a faster pace and overtook them, coughing into a stained handkerchief. The sentries, too, were coughing, and shivering at their posts. It seemed Fort Augustus was garrisoned by sick men.
Then they had left it behind.
A nondescript door opened: a young man in shabby clothing was seated in the room beyond, leaning toward the fire with a book. He could have travelled through any community and been forgotten overnight; he could pass unnoticed in any street.
Ewen bared his head and said in French, “I am Stirling of Glen Sian. My family and I have come to see Mr. Saunders.”
The guest raised his eyes, and closed the book and smiled.
“Benedicite.”
He gave his hands, and Ewen knelt and kissed them, and heard the calm voice speaking the words of comfort and sanctification for which he hungered unimaginably, and had thought never to hear again.
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.
And the sins of the lonely would be forgiven him.
They had eaten; they were lying in their clothes in the darkness. He was verminous from the dirty inn of the previous night, and the knowledge caused him acute embarrassment.
He lay, and the young man nearest the wall breathed softly, and James, between them, tossed and whimpered, and the vermin crawled from one body to another and a light rain fell, changing to snow overnight.
James woke in the middle of the night, needing but not knowing where to find in the stifling, shuttered bed the chamber pot which was always kept beneath his own. He whispered, “Papa,” against the unshaven cheek. Ewen did not respond.
He lay desperately, trying not to touch the other man, who had shifted in sleep so that one hand was resting on his hair on the pillow, thinking, why didn’t we stay at home, I can’t put out my shoes for le bonhomme Noël here... and wishing it were not so dark, and that the stinging bites on his scalp would cease to torture him. He whimpered a little, and a tear trickled into his pursed mouth. He fell asleep briefly, then woke again in torment.
Then the shutter opened quietly and he heard the familiar, contemptuous whisper.
“Come on, then. I know what you want,” and he was lifted out and over Ewen’s body into the icy darkness of the room, and he felt Malcolm take and lead him, not ungently, by the hand.
Malcolm had not been invited to join the others in the parlour which had served as the confessional, and the omission and Ewen’s failure to prevent it had hurt him briefly, although he had already begun his journey toward nonconformity and atheism, and had no real desire to participate in the rituals of the Church.
The Mass was celebrated at noon, following the arrival of four or five others. The boy stood outside with his knife in his boot, in a slowly falling snow, and watched the road to the garrison with remote eyes.
Ewen refused to return home through Glen Moriston, so he took them by a different route, over the saddle of land that rose a thousand unsheltered feet from Fort Augustus. Their progress was slow: he was no horseman, and the ghillies were on foot.
By four o’clock night had fallen. They sheltered against rocks which broke the teeth of the wind, and the ghillies tried and failed to make fire. The horses swung their rumps to the weather, the men huddled on the ground. James cried and whimpered, complaining of a pain in his side. Snow began to whiten his hair.
In the night Malcolm, who had been sheltering with the ghillies, came and rolled beneath the plaids. James lay still, embraced by his father, with the warmth of Malcolm’s body at his back, and seemed to sleep.
They reached Ardsian in the morning. James had begun to cough blood.
On the third day, his bodyservant Coll MacGregor returned to Fort Augustus and came back with the priest.
In the afternoon, Ewen opened the door to his son’s room. The priest, with great tenderness, was administering the ointment of extreme unction.
The colourless eyes lifted.
“Leave us,” he said.
Ewen walked blindly through the house, found himself in the drawing room, in its frightening privacy.
My son is dying, he thought. Because of me, he dies.
And, putting his ravaged face into his hands, he wept.
He sat in the morning room, awaiting with apprehension the man he knew only as Saunders. It was the first day of the new decade.
“Your son has had pneumonia. The crisis has passed, and I think he will recover. Careful nursing will be needed to prevent a relapse. And it seems likely that the lungs will suffer some scarring, which will leave him susceptible to future infection.”
“He has never been as robust as most boys. I was much the same at his age.”
“I would urge you to send him to a warmer climate, at least until he is older. You have relations still in France?”
“My cousin in Paris. My brother-in-law in Provence. They have families of their own.”
Silence. The fire smoked. He stared at his hands, twisting the plain band which had replaced his wedding ring.
“You have no other heirs?”
He could not speak; he felt crushed by some irresistible force.
“Will you consider what I have said? It may mean, quite literally, his life or death.”
“He is all I have of his mother. I cannot send him from me.”
Alone again, he stood a long while in the fathomless silence. The light was failing; the snow fell softly, shrouding everything.
This room had known so many tears: he had no more to give it.
He approached the scarred escritoire as he would an enemy, with hatred and bitter wariness, pulled a sheet of vellum from a drawer and began to write, filling the silence with the dry, hesitant scratching of his quill.
James departed for Provence in April. The weather was still uncompromisingly cold, and there was snow in Inverness the morning Ewen stood at Citadel Quay watching the ship for Rotterdam receive his son on board. James huddled at the rail with Coll MacGregor as the grey water of the Beauly widened between himself and his father, gravely waving and trying not to weep, although the wind made his ear ache and the uninviting sea was filling him with terror. Finally he put his hand to his ear, an odd little childish gesture seen by Ewen on the quay, and the grey water and the grey sky rushed together in a scathing flood of tears.
He hid his face in Coll’s coat. The deck began to cant under the press of sail and the shore slid slowly out of reach and time began to take him into its flood, bearing him helplessly toward an unknown life. Coll bore his grief patiently until the ship cleared the roads and beat out into the Moray, then he turned his young charge to look back for what would be his last sight of Scotland for many years. Inverness lay behind them, river and town and bridge and quay, leaning houses and tossing fishing boats, the silvered hills of the Black Isle, the summit of Meall Fuar Mhonaidh rearing above Loch Ness. It was the first landfall a homeward-bound mariner saw, tacking into the Moray a hundred miles away.
It was the last of his home James remembered.
VIII
The entry in Ewen’s journal for the twenty-fourth of June 1750 read: He disarmed me today, with a move I had not taught him. It was both instinctive and shocking.
I have taken a young eagle to my breast. I will never forget his eyes as he contemplated this epiphany, his ability to kill.
What are you doing, he said to me, slipping unconsciously into the familiar tu, for which Ewen had not reproved him. They had moved the table in the library and rolled the moth-eaten carpet, and the rapiers, sheathed and wrapped in white linen, had been brought down from the attic. Are you going to teach me to dance?
He had been sarcastic. He disliked dancing, as he disliked sweetness, on the palate or in conversation; he preferred life astringent, as he preferred solitude and extreme weather and nights sleeping rough in the heather, and hard hours on the hill in the wind and rain and the bitter cold and the obliterating cloud, and the storms that came down within minutes, the harsh land answering the harshness of his spirit and the ferocity of adolescence in his blood. He was sensual, experiencing the land throughout his body, tasting, touching, listening to it, staring into it, becoming it, knowing its scents and its secrets; but he was also ascetic, sometimes punishingly so, already possessing a quality that intimidated, and deferring to no one but Ewen. And that ferocity, that energy, that virility had to be challenged or channelled before it became a conflagration.
Yes, I said, we are going to dance. Like gentlemen. With steel.
Murdoch saw him fencing in the library one morning. The shivering clang of the blades drew him, and he walked along the gallery with his lithe dancer’s tread and looked through the half opened doors and saw the flicker of sun on steel, and the face of a stranger. His son.
The riposte faltered: some sense of his presence focused the fierce eyes on the door, and he heard Ewen’s impatient, “Fais attention!”
Murdoch let it close as though blown by the wind and walked away.
Their faces, all the faces from the past, haunted him that evening. He was not a superstitious man, had fought and overcome the Celt within himself to live in a house so peopled by ghosts, but this night he could not shake their clinging fingers. The wild swans flew over from the lochan: he sat, half drunk and half dreaming, listening to the beat of their wings.
The shadows deepened. He urinated in the weed-blown garden and stared at the glimmer of the lochan in the twilight and began to cry without any particular emotion, conscious only of a bewildering pain. He cried as he had not since the night Ewen had taken his son from him.
When his tears stopped he wiped his face on his sleeve and carried a candle upstairs and rummaged through Margaret’s kist at the foot of the bed, the marriage chest for a wedding which had never been. After a time he found what he was looking for and crouched with it in his hands. It was very worn and the shape had never been plain, but it had once resembled a horse, and she had carved it as a toy for her son.
He held it, thinking, no, he would not be wanting this now.
He cried a little more, with his head down on the chest, then he replaced it gently and closed the lid on it.
He spent the next seven nights at his task, sharpening the bone hooks, tying the mottled feathers of grouse and curlew and making them fast with horsehair and wax. Cursing his unsteady fingers and the uncertain light, for these must be perfect, they were for his son.
When they were finished he laid them on the kitchen table and admired them, the large bright patterns for brook trout, the small dark flies for brown, and several spare hooks and a reed box in which to keep them.
He put them all in the reed box, awed by the sheer delicacy and skill of his own work, then, impulsively, he emptied them out and wrapped them in an unclean handkerchief and put the small carved horse in the box instead.
He closed it and folded the handkerchief and went to bed, filled with a lingering dread, and the strange, fearful pleasure of offering himself once more for his son’s love.
At the end of the week, increasingly concerned by Malcolm’s continuing isolation, Ewen had taken him to the shielings, ostensibly to inspect the herd but hoping, by exposing him to opportunity, to facilitate some sexual rite of passage. The girls were clean, shy, virginal, and despite the austerity of his manner the boy was not immune to them.
In the event, however, he had seemed more interested in the cattle than the women, and after a curt, “À bientôt,” he was last seen at twilight climbing to a higher pasture. If he slept it was under the luminous sky, and presumably alone.
The girl had come instead to Ewen, in the soft dusk of the night. He dared not assume Malcolm’s complicity: to have done so would have attributed to him either a lascivious sense of humour, and humour he significantly lacked, or a degree of perspicacity Ewen was not prepared to contemplate.
And, starved of femaleness, he had wanted what she offered, so starved that he recorded every detail in his journal later to preserve the memory. One kiss, only one, the arousal piqued by shame and self-punishment like all his sexual experiences, sliding his fingers into the silken wetness he so desired to invade and violate. His ecstasy was premature, a second’s spasm, followed by impotence.
He poured a measure now of the cognac he kept in his dressing room and drank it, stimulated and repulsed.
He knows me. I cannot hide from him. I touch what I love: I accuse myself.
He drank another measure.
Why you and not him? What did she see in you? Her father?
His evening meal was waiting: he did not want it, did not want the asceticism of Malcolm’s presence. He wanted only to think of the beauty and the despoiled innocence, and torment himself with it a little, exquisitely.
The candles were lower, the sky darker. He had been too long about his dressing; it was time he finished it.
He had been too long alone, in this room and in this house. Tonight, and too many nights before it.
Too many years.
The fly had been lying on the boy’s pillow when he returned to his room. He was admiring it, thinking it a gift from Ewen, when memory stirred. He let it fall.
He found the reed box in the pocket of one of his coats. It opened easily, and even in the dimness he recognized what it held. Its power to move him was undiminished, so he did not look at it again.
He went down to the dining room, where Ewen was already seated in one of his unconscious attitudes of grace.
“You are late.”
He walked to the head of the table and tossed the flies on to the cloth. Unlike Ewen, he had neither washed nor changed, and knew that, if nothing else, would give offense.
“I found these in my room.” There was no response, so he pushed them closer. “I said―”
