I thought, ‘She is hoping that there was some word for her – something I might have heard that nobody else did.’ And for the moment I wanted sore to tell her a kind lie. It would not have been hard to invent something. But I knew that only the truth, however hard, was good enough for my lady Jean.
‘He asked how the day went,’ I told her. ‘And Lord Dunfermline said, “It goes well for the King, but I grieve for your lordship.” And himself said, “It is the less matter for me if the day goes well for the King,” and then he died, with his head on Tam Johnston’s knee that had caught him when he fell.’
She must have seen the fear of hurting her that was on me, for she said, ‘Dear Hugh, I had my own last word from him. He left it with the Commander of the Blair garrison, in case…’ And she put up her hand and touched the breast of her gown, as though to be sure that the letter was still safe in the place where she carried it. And I saw Dundee’s signet ring on her finger. It was not the kind of thing one would miss, in time of battle, and his hands had been covered by the plaid when we carried him back to Blair… Too loose for her finger, it was, and she wore a ring of her own beneath it, to keep it safe. ‘For young Jamie when he is a man,’ she said, as though I had spoken. And then, careful of any hurt that might be on me, ‘I am not doubting that he would fain have left it in your charge, but you were as like to be killed as he was.’
And then she said quickly, ‘But I am keeping you standing and hungry. Sit ye down. And, Darklis, do you go see what there is to be found in the kitchen.’
‘I cannot be staying long,’ I said, ‘I’ve a tryst to keep with the Tinkler folk that gave me a lift here. But I could not go without taking my leave.’
Darklis made a small sharp movement that I saw out of the tail of my eye.
‘And where would you be away to, then?’ asked my lady Jean.
‘To join King James. I was hearing that men are getting away by the Western Isles to Ireland and the King’s cause.’
‘You can stay long enough to eat, at all costs,’ said my lady, ‘so sit ye down, Hugh.’
So I sat down on the creepy stool and fell to fondling Caspar behind his silky ears, he standing up with his forepaws on my knee and singing like a kettle. And I mind the end-of-summer scent of the Four Seasons roses when a breath of warm air through the crack in the shutters set the candle flames to fluttering. And the faint rhythmic sound as she set her foot again to the cradle rocker.
She was gazing into the empty hearth as though there were a fire in it, and she seeing faces in the flames.
In a few moments Darklis came back with bread and cold meat and a bowl of mulberries and a flagon of wine and set them on the table, and a bowl of scraps for Caspar, too, that she set down beside the hearth.
And when I had eaten – it was a silent meal; there was so much to say between us, and yet so little that could be said, though I told them something of the days in Lochaber and the march down to Blair – my lady rose and went to one of the open kists and delved within, and brought out a small velvet pouch drawn up at the throat with scarlet cords, and came back with something in her hand.
‘You will be needing money to get you to Ireland. I want you to take this.’
I saw the glint of gold in her palm as she held it out to me.
I shook my head. ‘I’ll manage.’
‘How?’ she said, levelly, not taking her hand away. ‘I could spare you no more than this if you were my brother; but such as it is, I ask you, as though you were my brother, to take it. John would wish you to take it, to speed you on your way back to the King’s service.’
Aye well, I took the gold, and stowed it in my pocket, and made shift to thank her. And as she returned the velvet bag, I saw among the things in the kist, where her rummaging had turned it up, a little picture half spilling out from the piece of crimson silk in which it had been wrapped. The little rough portrait sketch that I had made of Claverhouse that summer evening six years ago.
That was almost the undoing of me.
She took up the square of board and carefully and gently refolded the crimson silk about it. ‘Now go,’ she said, ‘and God go with you, Hugh Herriot. Darklis, take him out by the side door; it is not good for that arm of his to be climbing through windows.’
I mind the sense that I had of grief hanging in the room, tangible as the scent of the Four Seasons roses. I looked back once, and my last sight of Jean, she was standing by the empty hearth in her black gown, her head up, and Claverhouse’s ring loose on her finger catching the taperlight.
I left by the side door, Caspar padding at my heels; Darklis came with me, and together we went up to the head of the orchard.
It was a soft night with a young moon faintly thunder-hazed, but giving light enough to show the old trees heavy with ripening apples that had been blossom when last Darklis and I came that way.
We checked among the last of the apple trees, by the gate, and turned to each other.
‘Need you go?’ Darklis said.
‘I’ll not be William’s man,’ I told her. ‘Besides, am I no’ on the run for a rebel?’
‘The Tinklers would shelter you till all’s blown over.’
I shook my head. ‘I’m going away to follow King James.’
‘So you said… Ye dinna care a straw for King James.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘but Claverhouse did.’
‘And so ye’ll follow King James because ’tis the nearest ye can come now to following Claverhouse?’ Her voice had a kind of flash to it in the dark. But then she put a hand on mine that was already resting on the top bar of the gate. ‘You always have to follow someone. ’Tis time ye learned to be your own man, Hugh.’
‘Mebbe,’ I told her, ‘but I’ll not learn it hiding with the Tinkler kind.’
And she sighed in the dark, and very gently drew her hand away.
‘I’ll come back for you one day, if I live,’ I heard my own voice saying, and startled myself with the raw longing sound of it.
‘If I live…’ she echoed. ‘No, dinna promise. Dinna come back. I could not be leaving Jean so long as she needs me.’
And she the one that had been bidding me learn to be my own man!
‘And if she stops needing you? She might, one day.’
‘Then mebbe God will be gentle to us and lead us together again. There’s naught to be gained by hovering and hankering.’
‘Take Caspar for me,’ I said after a moment, through the knot that was in my throat.
‘Yet again? I said not to come back.’
‘Not just to care for, this time. For a gift. He’s all I have to give. Only take better care of him than ye did last time.’
‘I will that,’ she said. ‘And my silver pin – ye have it still?’
‘Inside my shirt, where I’ve worn it since ye gave it to me.’
She put her arms round my neck, and kissed me the once, sweet and fierce and quick on the mouth, then thrust me away. ‘The sun and the moon on your path, my bonnie dark laddie,’ she said, and swooped up Caspar into her arms and turned away.
I stood, hearing Caspar’s protesting whimper, and watched her go, down through the apple trees towards the light that shone dimly amber in the chinks of the bower window that tomorrow would be dark.
And it came to me that I had bidden goodbye to Darklis too many times in the past years. Well, this was like to be the last time of all.
I went out through the gate and turned towards the head of the glen, and my next dawn’s tryst with Balthazar and his woman; and not even the sound of Caspar’s paws behind me for company.
26
Study of Hands with Almond Blossom
SO I LEFT my own hills behind me and got away to Ireland, and joined the army that King James had gathered there, and fought through the sorry campaigns of that autumn and the next year’s spring. I was at the Boyne; and after that last battle was fought and lost, and the last hope of James’s cause dead with it, and the King faded away back to France, I was one
of those that followed him.
The Wild Geese, they were calling us. There have been many since to bear the name, but we were the first of them.
St Germain just outside Paris became the home of James’s court in exile. A pleasant enough place, but somehow shadowy; and the court that James held there was somehow shadowy, too. From time to time men would be coming from England or from Scotland, among them the few that remained of the General’s troop. It was good to see Pate Paterson again, and I felt a little less alone after his coming.
In name, we were in the service of our own king, but in fact the French king fed and paid us – so far as we were fed or paid at all – and so we managed as best we could. But in the end – och well, we could not be expecting Louis to keep us for ever, and we ourselves were sore pressed, and James’s kist was empty; and maybe it was Scottish pride, maybe just that we were tired of going threadbare and hungry, we went to James and asked leave to enter the French army as private soldiers.
At first be would not be hearing of any such thing, but in the end we brought him to see reason and let us go.
He reviewed us for the last time, in the palace gardens; a hundred and twenty of us, already wearing our stiff new privates’ uniforms and glad of their warmth after our old threadbare gear, for it was January and bitter cold. But though the decision had been taken by us all, some of us wept at the last, and felt ourselves shamed; and the King wept, too, thanking us for our loyalty.
We redeemed the shame later. Aye…
We were sent down to Roussillon on the Spanish border, where the Pyrenees come down to the Mediterranean Sea – France was at war with Spain as well as England and the Low Countries – and there we were joined by two other Scottish companies, and together we served through three campaigns among the high, fanged, clear-cut mountains that looked always as though they had bitten their own shapes out of the sky. We were at the taking of Rosas in Catalonia – that was a name any regiment might be proud to carry among its battle honours. They say that when Louis got the news of it, he went out to St Germain himself to take world of our part in it to our own king.
But honour seldom comes free; our losses were sore and Pate Paterson among them.
I was shot in the left elbow in the last stages of the fight. Och well, the old wound that I had in that arm always ached in the east wind. The trouble is that it still does; which is odd, though I believe not unusual, with an arm that is not there any more.
At first it did not seem likely that I would live through the surgeon’s butchery and then the long jolting journey in the ox-carts that brought our wounded back to Roussillon and the half-ruined monastery at Perpignan that was our base hospital. And at first, truth to tell, I did not want to. Dying would be a way of escape from pain and the sounds and sights and smells of that awful place; and it did not seem to me, in the odd times when the pain drew back a little and my head was clear enough to think at all, that I had much to live for, anyway. But it seemed that whatever I might feel about it, once again my body did not want to die. And little by little the pain and the fever fell away behind me, and the tarred stump below my left shoulder ceased its foul discharging and healed clean.
I began to thrust out towards the living world again. But it was a world that had, so far as I could see, no place for me.
A day came that was towards the winter’s end, and it was towards sunset of that day. The evening meal, such as it was, cabbage soup and some nameless meat that a huntsman would not have fed to his hounds, was cooking over a couple of fires in the old cloister garth; and a few of us were huddled close round the flames, with old coats and tattered blankets about our shoulders against the icy wind from the Pyrenees that was stripping the first blossom from the old twisted almond tree in the corner. It would have been warmer inside, but there are worse things than cold; and as soon as any of us were strong enough to drag ourselves out of our makeshift beds, we crawled outside, where at least there was air to breathe, away from filth, and the stink of other men’s pain. Scottish and English and French wounded huddled round the fires, and the usual hangers-on; a few camp-followers (we should have done ill without their nursing, for all that kirk-folk have to say about such lassies!), beggars drawn in off the streets by the fires and the smell of cooking food; a stray garbage-eating goat with yellow slit-pupiled eyes and a piece of rag hanging from its mouth – if it did not wander out again by dark, there would be goat stew next day; we foraged for ourselves, those of us that were able, and we were always hungry.
The place was not much of a refuge, and there was no one there who meant a straw in the wind to me, now that Pate Paterson was gone; and yet, glancing round at the figures huddled in their blankets and old army coats, a black despair was on me, because they were my own kind, and soon I would be losing them also. Any day now, I would be given my discharge and cast adrift to fend for myself. I was a sound man again, only not just sound enough; and my soldiering days were over. I was good with horses, but who was going to want a one-armed groom? I could turn beggar, the maimed soldier’s last and most common resort. But even my begging would have to be done in a foreign land; I could not get back to Scotland; not for years yet, anyway. Maybe, I thought in the black mood that was on me, the simplest thing would be to go down to the foreshore and make myself a hole in the water and be done with it all.
One of the English soldiers began to sing, crooningly as though half to himself:
‘Who passes by this road so late?
Compagnons de la Marjolaine,
Who passes by this road so late?
Always gay!
Of all the King’s Knights ’tis the flower,
Compagnons de la Marjolaine,
Of all the King’s Knights ’tis the flower,
Always gay! . . .’
I roused up and looked round me to see who could be fool enough to sing in such a howling wilderness of a world. And it was so that I saw the beggar woman who must have just come in from the street; and she sitting with her back against the almond tree.
Now the very blackness of my despair came, I am thinking (for I am not the despairing kind), at least partly from my weakness, and the long time that it had taken my wound to mend. I was in the odd state that comes to a man that has been long sick and near to death, when the living world first lays hold of him again. It is as though he has one less skin than usual between himself and that world, and he is more piercingly aware of everything, sight and sound and smell and touch – aye, and joy and despair; and the shadow of a falling leaf and the distant notes of a fiddle and the glance of a passing stranger can all invade him as they cannot do when he is a whole man with his full number of skins.
It was in that way that I saw the beggar woman.
Miserable old crone that she was, sitting with her head tipped back against the trunk of the almond tree, the last reflected brightness of the sunset shining into her withered gargoyle’s face. But it was not her face that held me; it was her hands, lying together in her ragged lap. Old, gaunt, coarse hands, dirt-coloured and cracked like earth in a drought. But they had once been beautiful. I could see the beauty in them, as maybe I would not have done at another time or in another mood, for it was a long time since I had sought below the surface of things with a painter’s eye, which is a little like a lover’s. I saw the beauty of the bones; how when she was long dead and her hands were a skeleton’s, they would still be beautiful. There was beauty, too, in the way she moved them, turning and twisting between her fingers a sprig of almond blossom torn off by the wind. I saw the shadow of her hands and the almond spray sharp-etched on to the rusty blackness of her lap; I saw the thick knotted blackish veins on the backs of her hands, and was aware of how they must have branched, blue and scarcely visible, delicate as the veining on a damsel-fly’s wing, when they were young.
Suddenly I was minded of Darklis’s hands moving light and sure on the strings of her lute, for Jean’s amusement while she sat for her wedding portrait.
In those few mome
nts, something began to wake in me that had been a long while sleeping; a kind of saprise that was kin to the buds breaking on the almond tree; a stir of old longings almost forgotten. I began to think how I should paint the old woman’s hands; how to catch the strong life and the weariness in them, as well as the hidden beauty, and make it all part with the almond flowers that were fragile as white shadow, yet strong with life also…
She was staring at the food, her gap-toothed mouth hanging a little open. Somebody threw her a hunk of bread, and she dropped the almond spray to catch it, and thrust it into her breast under her filthy shawl; then scrambled to her feet and hobbled out through the doorway that gave on to the old monastery forecourt and the streets beyond. Maybe the crust was for someone else, that she did not stay to eat it by the fire.
It seems strange, now, that she never felt my gaze upon her. Her eyes never met mine for an instant; but if she had not wandered into the cloister that evening, I am thinking it quite possible that I might have made my hole in the water. As it was, when they gave me my discharge three days later, I set out to make a new life for myself, with a reasonably clear idea of how I hoped to do it.
I had a few coins in my right-hand pocket; not many, for was there ever a soldier whose pay was not in arrears? And the end of my empty sleeve was stuffed into the left-hand one – there are few things more provoking than an empty sleeve flapping loose. And so I went down into the town. I was no stranger to Perpignan, for our headquarters had been there since we came down from St Germain the best part of two years before. I went straight to a certain tall and tottering wine-shop whose creaking sign showing the seven stars of its name arranged in a triangle had been badly in need of repainting ever since I had first known it, and was now so washed out by the storms of the past winter that the stars seemed to be sinking through the board to the other side even while you watched. I went in and spent the smallest of my coins on a measure of raw red wine; and spinning out the drinking of it as long as possible, managed before the last drop was downed to persuade the landlord to let me repaint it for my food while I was on the job, and the cost of the paint, with enough over for another sign.