Throwley bowed, but did not reach out to accept the bottle, since Rufus MacIan had not yet formally presented it. He contented himself, for now, with a glance at the label. “Glen Coe, twenty-two years old,” he read. “Why, ’tis as old as the lassie who brought it in!”
Downs laughed in the manner of all subordinates subjected to the boss’s wit. Lord Gy took it gravely. “You’re rare gleg in the uptak, sir, why, the twae ir precisely alike in age.”
“My lord, I know some London gentlemen who make a study of this usquebaugh, in all its varieties, even as Frenchmen do of Burgundy wine. I confess I know little of Glen this or Glen that—but I have at least the wit to recognize that any bottle aged two and a score years must be of rare excellence.”
“Oh, ’tis rare—very few hae survived. Very few. Ye maun learn usquebaugh, sir. For many Jacobites wul be dwellin in this Tower in years to come, an a moiety of ’em wul be Highlanders. Nae man is better poised than ye to make o hissell a collector and a connoisseur.”
“Then do let my collection, and my education, begin to-day! David, bring some dram-glasses,” Throwley called to the steward who had been waiting outside the servants’ entrance to the dining-room. “What can you tell me, my lord, concerning this bottle? What distinguishes it from the common dram?”
“Och, sir, ye maun no consider only its age, but its provenance, or what the French call its terroir. For Scotland’s a big varyand countra, as crazed, riven, and pitted as ma own visage, gowstie here, cosie thare. Nae brae, nae glen, nae ben like the next. Each wi its own clime, its own sile, its own water. Adam’s wine, we call water. A hae known Highlandmen who, when they were lost in smochy weather, could ken just where they were by scoopin up a handful o water frae a burn or a loch, an havin a wee gust.”
“Or, I daresay, a wee dram from the nearest still!” put in Lieutenant-General Throwley, to the great entertainment of Yeoman Warder Downs. But Rufus MacIan accepted the jest with equanimity, and settled the chuckling of the two Englishmen with the calm stare of his clear blue eye.
“Dinna you make fun! ’Tis true. For the usquebaugh is the daughter of the cold clear waters tha dance in those Highland burns.”
“My lord, modest chap that you are, you do not do justice to the men who dwell in those glens. For surely there is skill, there is technique—it is not a mere matter of stirring together a few natural constituents.”
Rufus MacIan raised his eyebrows and held up an index finger. “Point well taken, sir, an a thank ye for gien me a fair opportunity to blaw mynes ain horn!”
Downs and Throwley laughed. A silver tray, a-rattle with small cups, had been brought in and set down. “Please, my lord, sit with us.”
“A wul stand, thank ye, as befits a professor afore his scholars.”
The two Englishmen were left slightly ill at ease, but Lord Gy made it plain by gestures that they were to sit, and even pulled out Downs’s chair for him. He explained: “In that wee tissle at Malplaquet, which ye may hae heard of, ma company were ruggin an rivin wi some Frenchmen. A took a muckle cloot frae a musket butt, fell frae ma horse, an bemang’d my rig.” He put his hands on his kidneys and shoved his pelvis forward. His sporran flew at the Englishmen and a barrage of pops and creaks came out of his lower spine.
“ ’Tis true, he never sits, but drives me mad with his pacing,” Downs put in.
MacIan was at such obvious pains to make them at ease that Downs and Throwley acquiesced, and leaned back comfortably in their chairs to hear the continuation of the lecture.
“As the landscape o ma countra is fractured into diverse muirs, glens, gullions, snibs, howes, scaurs, linns, lirks, et cetera, so ma nation, as is well known, is divided into many clans, and the clans into septs. And it is among the auld men, the lang in the horn as we say, that the wit and the airt of usquebaugh-making is concentrated—I maun wax poetic an say, distilled. As the septs and clans differ, so do the stills and the airt of their use, and so, accordingly, does the produce.”
“Prithee, then, tell us of the sept and clan of this place whose name is on the bottle,” Throwley said. “For some reason the name of Glen Coe is familiar to me; but during the War my head got so over-flowed with outlandish place-names, I can no longer sort them out.”
“Why, ’tis remarkable ye should inquire, sir, for it is ma clan and ma sept!”
Downs and Throwley laughed heartily at this, as it seemed to have been ingeniously laid, like a conjuror’s trick. The Englishmen were looking a bit wide-eyed at Lord Gy now, seeing him anew, as a regular bloke, a merry companion.
The Scotsman made the faintest suggestion of a bow to acknowledge the glow of appreciation on their faces, and continued: “That is why a am givin ye this praisent now, Lieutenant-General Throwley. For a Highlander, the water of life that comes frae his oon glen is as much a part of him as his oon livin blude. A gie ye this so it wul aye be livin on after the deid-strake hae fallen on ma neck on yonder Hill.” And now, finally, he extended the bottle across the table to Throwley. Throwley, with an Englishman’s eye for the ceremonial gesture, stood up smartly and accepted the gift with a bow. When he sat, so, finally, did MacIan.
“But my lord, again modesty obstructs your duty as our professor. We should learn something of the people of Glen Coe before we drink their, er…”
“The water o their life, sir.”
“Indeed.”
“There isna much to relate of MacIan of MacDonald,” said Lord Gy. “We ir a wee sept, much more so of late. Glen Coe is an uncommon high, weather-glim scaup o land in the north of Argyll, no far frae Fort William. It runs from a lofty gowl in the Grampians down to the slate-mines at Ballachulish, at the heid of the loch called Linnhe, which runs down to plash the shores of Mull and spaw into the Atlantic. A wilsome, out o the way place is Glen Coe. When we do receive outdwellars, ’tis ever a surpreese, and more oft than na, they turn out to be lost on the way to Crianlarich. We try to show them hospitality none the less. Hospitality, we have learnt, is an uncannie thing. One may never tell how ’twill be repaid.”
“Is very much usquebaugh produced in Glen Coe?”
“ ’Tis odd that ye should ask, for I believe none is produced there now, or for many years. Aye, the only bottles o Glen Coe ye ir like to hae in yeir collection, shall be very auld ones.”
“What—?”
“The still was shivered. No one hae made it guid.”
“Then the MacIan MacDonalds must have fallen upon hard times indeed,” Throwley said gravely.
“ ’Tis more right to say, hard times fell on thaim. Whan all of us in this room were laddies, an order went oot frae King William that the chiefs o the Highland clans maun all sign a muckle oath o loyalty, spurnin all allegiance to the Stewart—that ye call the Pretender. Alastair MacIan MacDonald, ma chief, did sign that pledge. But dwellin as he was in the back of beyond, and it bein the deid of a vicious winter, he did miss a certain deidline. Now, no long efter, a great doon-come of snow fell ding on in oor glen. The bothies an barns were smoored under it. An then wha should appear but a company o soldiers frae Fort William, that had gang agley in the spindrift. Vagand like a band o runagates they war, fagged half to deeth, sterving, blae—a company o kirkyaird deserters! They dinna hae to beg us. A sakeless hill-run lot we wes, dacent and soothfast, goodwillie toward fellow-men. Shelter we gied them, no in oor barns, mind ye, but in oor own homes, humble as they war. For these war na outdwellars to us, though they war o a different clan. They war fellow-Scotsmen. We turned it into a ceilidh. That’s whaur all o our usquebaugh went! Down the throttles o those ramscallions! But we dinna mind.”
Now an extraordinary thing happened, which was that the sound of bagpipes became audible.
The Lieutenant’s Lodging was packed into the corner of the Inner Ward. Indeed, though the front wall was half-timbered, the back was simply the ancient curtain-wall of the Tower of London, looking down over Water Lane. Windows had been made in the upper reaches of that wall so that the Lieutenant could see out ove
r the Lane, and the outer fortifications, wharf, and river beyond. Both Water Lane and the Wharf were open to the public during the day-time. It seemed likely that Throwley’s housekeeper had opened those rear windows to let April breezes air out the bedchambers, and haply a strolling bagpiper had wandered by, playing a Highland melody in hopes that strollers or soldiers would toss coins at him. It was the same tune that Lord Gy had been humming a few minutes previously.
Strong emotion had begun to tell on MacIan’s face as he related the tale of the lost soldiers and the impromptu ceilidh that his kin had thrown for them in the snowdrifts of Glen Coe. When the bagpipe’s snarl drifted through the room, his eye became watery, and he began to paw at the patch that covered the other. “Och, a need a dram,” he confessed. “Ir ye havin difficulty, sir, gettin that open?”
“I must confess with all these layers of wax, lead, and wire, the contents of this bottle are as closely guarded as this Tower!”
“Haud yeir tung, much more so!” said Lord Gy dismissively. “Gie it me, there is a trick to getting it open, a’l hae oor drams poured out smairtly.” He accepted the bottle back from Throwley.
Downs had been looking queasy these last few minutes. “I do confess, my lord, your tale has struck a chord, a melancholy one, in my memory. The details escape me. But I doubt its ending.”
“Then a’l make it quick, and make an end o it. Efter twae weeks o dwelling amang us as blude-friends, gutting our winter victuals, burning up oor peat-bings, an dancin the reel o Bogie wi our lasses, those mangrels waukened one day at five in the morning and put the MacIan MacDonalds to the fire and the sword. Our glen they made into a knacker’s midden. Some of us fled to the crags, yawin an yammerin, heart-scalded. We lived on snow an wrake-lust until the murthering wichts had gaen away. Only then durst we gae doon amang the bones an cinders to hack common graves into the frozened erd o Glen Coe.”
Yeoman Downs and Lieutenant-General Throwley were sitting gobsmacked. They were petrified for now, though a harsh word or sudden movement from Rufus MacIan might have scattered them from the house.
Noting this, he closed his eye for a moment, then opened it, and managed a wry smile.
That, to the Englishman, seemed the moral to the story. It said that in spite of the horror he had witnessed as a boy, Rufus MacIan had grown up into a gentleman, and found a kind of solace in the self-control and civility that was expected of such.
“Now,” he said, “wuid ye care for a dram?”
“My lord,” said Throwley huskily, “ ’twere disrespectful to refuse.”
“Then let me get the damned thing open,” said Rufus MacIan of MacDonald. He rubbed moisture from his eye on the shoulder of his coat, and drew in a big snuffle before it could escape from his nostrils. “Mr. Downs, as a mentioned, there’s a trick to it. Shards o glass may fly. A entreat ye to look the other way—unless ye want me to leave ye this eye-patch in ma last will and testament!”
Mr. Downs permitted himself a controlled smile at this faint jest, and averted his gaze.
Lord Gy gripped the bottle by its neck and swung it sideways until it exploded against Downs’s temple.
He was left holding only the neck of the bottle. But projecting from it was a steel dirk nine inches long, dripping usquebaugh. He was up on the table before Lieutenant-General Throwley could rise from his chair.
From the next room could be heard the sound of the red-headed maidservant throwing the door bolts to.
Rufus MacIan of MacDonald was squatting in the middle of the dining table now, giving Throwley a clear and close view of whatever it was he kept underneath his kilt. It seemed to have paralyzed the Lieutenant of the Tower. Which made his visitor’s next move a simple matter. “Can ye understand this?” MacIan asked, and rammed the dirk into Throwley’s eyeball until it stopped hard against the back of his skull.
Sloop Atalanta, Gravesend
AFTERNOON
THEY DREW ALONGSIDE A WHARF at Gravesend. It was near where the tilt-boat ran up the river to London, and so a sizable and curious crowd was there watching them, and calling out questions. Perhaps Isaac thought his outburst about “the German” really was an intelligible end to the conversation, or perhaps he did not care to stand in the open on the poop and be peered at.
Daniel sensed he was being peered at from another quarter. A certain gentleman had been haunting the corner of Daniel’s eye for above a quarter of an hour. From his dress, he was an officer of the Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guards.
“Colonel Barnes,” the man said, in response to what must have been a lapse in Daniel’s mean, flinty outlook.
“I am Dr. Daniel Waterhouse,” Daniel returned, “and I have heard criminals introduce themselves to me with greater formality and courtesy than what you have just shown.”
“I know,” said Colonel Barnes, “one of them came up to me and did just that, a few hours ago, on Tower Wharf.”
“Colonel Barnes, ’twould seem you have duties ashore, I’ll not delay you—”
Barnes glanced out over the sloop’s upperdeck, which had now been joined to the wharf by gangplanks in two places. Dragoons were streaming across, driven by cursing sergeants on the deck and exhorted by lieutenants on the wharf; as they came ashore they clustered by platoon.
“On the contrary, Dr. Waterhouse, I’m to stay ’board ship. Suits me better.” He made a loud rapping noise on the deck, and Daniel looked down to discover that one of the colonel’s legs was a rod of carven ebony with a steel tip.
“You are a Black Torrent man to the bone,” Daniel remarked. Every regiment had its own type of wood, used to make swagger sticks and the like, and ebony was the trade-mark of the Black Torrent Guards.
“Indeed, been with them since the Revolution.”
“Surely you need to supervise the disembarkation—”
“Dr. Waterhouse, you do not understand Delegation of Authority,” Barnes returned. “Here’s how it works: I tell my subordinates to get all but two platoons off the boat, and they do it.”
“Who has delegated you to harry me round the poop deck?”
“Why, the aforementioned very polite criminal.”
“A colonel commands a regiment, is it not so?”
“That is correct.”
“Do you mean to tell me that a colonel, in turn, is commanded by a Black-guard?”
“That is the custom in most armies,” Barnes returned dead-pan. “True, ’twas sometime different under my lord Marlborough, but since he was stripped of command, why, it has been Black-guards all the way to the top.”
Daniel had a natural impulse here to laugh; but some other part of him was recommending that he proceed cautiously with this Barnes. What the colonel had just said was witty, but it was also reckless.
Most of the Guards were off the ship now, leaving only two platoons of some fourteen men each, each under its own sergeant. One of them had congregated at the forward end of the deck, the other aft, directly below where Colonel Barnes and Daniel were standing. This left a large clear space amidships, claimed by Sergeant Bob Shaftoe. He was facing toward the wharf, so Daniel was viewing him in profile; but now he adjusted his posture slightly toward them and glanced, for a quarter of a second, in Barnes’s direction.
“Your sloop, Cap’n,” Barnes sang out.
The skipper retaliated with a series of histrionic commands that caused the gangplanks to be drawn back onto the wharf, and the sloop’s lines to be cast off.
“You and Sergeant Bob make war together,” Daniel said. “It is what you do.”
“If that’s true, our life’s work has been a failure!” Barnes answered, mock-offended. “I should prefer to say, we make peace, and have achieved success.”
“Say it however you like. Either way, you’ve spent a quarter-century marching around with him, and have heard every joke and anecdote he knows how to tell, a thousand times over.”
“ ’Tis a common outcome in our line of work,” Barnes allowed.
“Now you phant’sy
you know everything about me, because ten or twenty years ago, in a tent along the Rhine or a bothy in Ireland, Sergeant Bob told you a tale about me. You suppose you may approach me in a companionable way, and divulge things to me, and thereby make me your bound accomplice, as when two boys cut their thumbs on purpose and bleed on each other and then say that they are brothers. Please do not be offended if I recoil from your tender. There is a reason why old men are aloof, and it has nothing to do with being pompous.”
“You should renew your acquaintance with Marlborough,” Barnes said, putting on a little show of being impressed. “The two of you would get along famously.”
“An unfortunate choice of adverb, that.”
Barnes was silent for a while now. The two horse-barges were coming up to the wharf at Gravesend to discharge the loads. The Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guard were dragoons, meaning that they fought on foot, using the tactics and the arms of infantry. But they maneuvered round the field of battle on horseback. To put it crudely, they were shock troops. Clearly the companies that had disembarked had orders to mount, get on the turnpike that paralleled the river, and ride east, pacing the sloop.
“Everyone is scared to death just now,” Barnes said. He sidled up to Daniel along the rail and offered him half a small loaf of bread, which Daniel practically lunged at. “Why, to listen to certain Whigs, a Jacobite invasion is just over the horizon, driven on a Popish wind. And yet Sir Isaac fears the arrival of the German! ’Tis an impossibility for both the Hanovers and the Jacobites to occupy the same space. Yet the Whigs’ fears, and Sir Isaac’s, are equally real.”
When he alluded to the impossibility of two objects occupying the same space, Barnes was resorting to a verbal tic that had its origins in Descartes. He had, in other words, been to Oxford or Cambridge. He ought to be a vicar, or even a Dean, in some church. What was he doing here?
“When Sir Isaac refers, with such trepidation, to the German, he does not mean George Louis.”