A Scots Quair

  There, as they’d planned, the four of them did, the Sheriff went hunting with the four fierce lairds, Arbuthnott, Pitarrow, Lauriston, Mathers; and they took him and bound him and carried him up Garvock, between two stones a great cauldron was hung; and they stripped him bare and threw him within, in the water that was just beginning to boil; and they watched while he slowly ceaed to scraich, he howled like a wolf in the warming water, then like a bairn smored in plague, and his body bloated red as the clay, till the flesh loosed off from his seething bones; and the four lairds took their horn spoons from their belts and supped the broth that the Sheriff made, and fulfilled the words that the King had said.

  They were hunted sore by the law and the kirk, the Mathers fled to the Kaimes to hide, his kinsman Mowat closed up the gates and defied the men of the King that came. So they laid a siege to the castle of Kaimes; but the burghers of Segget sent meat to the castle by a secret way that led round the hills; and a pardon came for the Mathers at last, the army withdrew and the Mathers came out, and he swore if ever again in his life he supped of broth or lodged between walls, so might any man do to himself as he had done to the Sheriff Melville.

  And for long the tale of Segget grows dim till there came the years of the Killing Time, and the Burnesses, James and Peter they were—were taken to Edinburgh and put to the question that they might forswear the Covenant and God. And Peter was old, in the torment he weakened, but by him his son James lay on the rack, and even when the thummikins bit right sore and Peter opened his mouth to forswear, his son was before him singing a psalm so loud that he drowned the voice of Peter; and the old man died, but James was more slow, they threw him into a cell at last, his body broken in many places, the rats ate him there while he still was alive; and maybe there were better folk far in Segget, but few enough with smeddum like his.

  His son was no more than a loon when he died, he’d a little farm on the Mowat’s land. But he moved to Glenbervie and there took a place, and his folk had the ups and down of all flesh till the father of Robert Burnes grew up, and grew sick of the place, and went off to Ayr; and there the poet Robert was born, him that lay with nearly as many women as Solomon did, though not all at one time.

  But some of the Burneses still bade in Segget. In the first few years of King William’s reign it was one of them, Simon, that led the feud the folk of Segget had with the Mowats. For they still owned most of Segget, the Mowats, a thrawn old wife the lady was then, her sons all dead in the wars with the French; and her wits were half gone, it was seldom she washed, she was mean as dirt and she smelt to match. And Simon Burnes and the Segget minister, they prigged on the folk of Segget against her, the weaver folk wouldn’t pay their rent, they made no bow when they met the old dame ride out in her carriage with her long Mowat nose. And at last one night folk far from Segget saw sudden a light spring up in the hills: it wavered and shook there all through the dark, and from far and near as the dawn drew nigh, there were parties of folk set out on the roads to see what this fairely was in the hills. And the thing they saw was the smoking Kaimes, a great bit fire had risen in the night and burned the old castle down to its roots, of the stones there stood hardly one on the other, the Segget folk swore they’d all slept so sound the thing was over afore they awoke. And that might be so, but for many a year, before the Old Queen was took to her end and the weaving entirely ceased to pay and folk went drifting away from the Mearns, there were meikle great clocks in this house and that, great coverlets on beds that lay neist the floor; and the bell that rung the weavers awake had once been a great handbell from the hall of the Mowats up on the Kaimes high hill.

  A Mowat cousin was the heritor of Kaimes, he looked at the ruin and saw it was done, and left it there to the wind and the rain; and builded a house lower down the slope, Segget below, yew-trees about, and had bloodhounds brought to roam the purviews, he took no chances of innocent sparks floating up in the night from Segget. But the weavers were turning to other things now, smithying and joinering and keeping wee shops for the folk of the farms that lay round about. And the Mowats looked at the Segget burn, washing west to the Bervie flow, and were ill-content that it should go waste. But it didn’t for long, the jute trade boomed, the railway came, the two jute mills came, standing out from the station a bit, south of the toun, with the burn for power. The Segget folk wouldn’t look at the things, the Mowats had to go to Bervie for spinners, and a tink-like lot of the creatures came and crowded the place, and danced and fought, raised hell’s delight, and Segget looked on as a man would look on a swarm of lice; and folk of the olden breed moved out, and builded them houses up and down the East Wynd, and called it New Toun and spoke of the dirt that swarmed in Old Toun, round about the West Wynd.

  The spinners’ coming brought trade to the toun, but the rest of Segget still tried to make out that the spinners were only there by their leave, the ill-spoken tinks, with their mufflers and shawls; the women were as bad as the men, if not worse, with their jeering and fleering in Segget Square; and if they should meet with a farmer’s bit wife as she drove into Segget to go to the shops, and looked neat and trig and maybe a bit proud, they’d scraich Away home, you country cow!

  But the Mowats were making money like dirt. They built a new kirk when the old one fell, sonsy and broad, though it hadn’t a steeple; and they lived and they died and they went to their place; and you’d hear the pound of the mills at work down through the years that brought the Great War; and that went by and still Segget endured, outlasting all in spite of the rhyme that some coarse-like tink of a spinner had made:

  Oh, Segget it’s a dirty hole,

  A kirk without a steeple,

  A midden-heap at ilka door

  And damned uncivil people

  ONE

  Cirrus

  SEGGET WAS wakening as Chris Colquohoun came down the shingle path from the Manse. Here the yews stood thick, in a starlings’ murmur, a drowsy cheep on the edge of the dawn; but down the dark, as you reached the road, you saw already lights twink here and there, in the houses of Segget, the spinners’ wynds, a smell in the air of hippens and porridge. But she’d little heed for these, had Chris, she went quick as she looked at the eastern sky, the May air warm in her face as she turned, north, and went up the Meiklebogs road. So rutted it was and sossed with the carts that there was a saying in Segget toun: There’s a road to heaven and a road to hell, but damn the road to the Meiklebogs.

  But that didn’t matter, she wasn’t going there, in a while she turned by a path that wound, dark, a burn was hidden in the grass, over a stile to the hills beyond. And now, as she climbed swift up the slope, queer and sudden a memory took her—of the hills above the farm in Kinraddie, how sometimes she’d climb to the old Druid stones and stand and remember the world below, and the things that were done and the days put by, the fun and fear of the days put by. Was that why the Kaimes had so filled her sky the twenty-four hours she had been in Segget?

  Now she was up on the lowermost ledge, it lay dark about, the old castle of Kaimes, no more than a litter of ruined walls, the earth piled high up over the stones that once were halls and men-shielded rooms. There were yews growing low in a corner outbye, they waved and moved as they heard Chris come. But she wasn’t feared, she was country-bred, she wandered a little, disappointed, then laughed, at herself, to herself, and the place grew still. Maybe it thought, as did Robert Colquohoun, that her laugh was a thing worth listening for.

  She felt her face redden, faint, at that, and she thought how over her face the slow blood would now be creeping, she’d once or twice watched it, bronzed and high in the cheek-bones her face, and a kindly smoulder of grey-gold eyes, she minded how once she had wished they were blue! She put up her hand to her hair, it was wet, with the dew she supposed from the dark Manse trees, it was coiled over either ear in the way she had worn it now for over two years.

  She turned round then and looked down at Segget, pricked in the paraffin lights of dawn. They were going out one by one as th
e east grew wanly blind in the van of the sun, behind, in the hills, a curlew shrilled—dreaming up here while the world woke, Robert turning in his bed down there in the Manse, and maybe outreaching a hand to touch her as he’d done that first morning two years ago, it had felt as though he wakened her up from the dead …

  SO STRANGE IT had seemed a long minute she’d lain, half-feared, with his hand that touched her so. Then he’d moved, quiet-breathing, deep in his sleep, and the hand went away, she reached out in the dark and sought it again and held to it, shy. It was winter that morning, they both had slept late from their marriage night; and, as the winter light seeped grey into the best bedroom of Kinraddie Manse, Chris Colquohoun, who had once been married to Εwan, and before that time was Chris Guthrie, just, had lain and thought and straightened things out, like a bairn rubbing its eyes from sleep…. This was new, she had finished with that life that had been, all the love she had given to her Ewan, dead, lost and forgotten far off in France: her father out in the old kirkyard: that wild, strange happening that had come to her the last Harvest but one there was of the War, when she and another—but she’d not think of that, part of the old, sad dream that was done. Had that other remembered the happening at all, his last hour of all in a Flanders trench?

  And she thought that maybe he had not at all, you did this and that and you went down in hell to bring the fruit of your body to birth, it was nothing to the child that came from your womb, you gave to men the love of your heart, and they’d wring it dry to the last red drop, kind, dreadful and dear, and deep in their souls, whatever the pretence they played with you, they knew it a play and Life waiting outbye.

  So she lay and thought, and then wriggled a little—to think these things on her marriage-morn, the hand she held now never held so before! And she peered in his face in the light that came, his hair lay fair on the pillow’s fringe, fair almost to whiteness, his skin ivory-white, she saw his brows set dark in a dream, and the mouth came set in a straight line below, she liked his mouth and his chin as well, and his ears that were small and lay flat back, so, and the hand that had tightened again in his sleep—oh! more than that, you liked all of him well, with his kisses in the night that had only just gone, his kisses, the twinkle-scowl in his eyes: And now it’s to bed, but I don’t think to sleep. She had laughed as well, feeling only half-shy. An awful speak, Robert, for Kinraddie’s minister! and he said Don’t ministers do things like that? and she’d looked at him swift, and looked quick away. Maybe, we’ll see; and so they had seen.

  She stretched then, softly, remembering that, warm under the quilt her own body felt queer, strange and alive as though newly blessed, and she smiled at that thought, in a way it had been, one flesh she was made with a kirk minister! Funny to think she had married a minister, that this was the Manse, that she was its mistress—oh! life was a flurry like a hen-roost at night, the doors were banging, you flew here and there, were your portion the ree or the corner of a midden you could not foretell from one night to the next.

  She got from bed then and into her clothes, agile and quick, and not looking back, if ministers ate as well as they loved, Robert would be hungry enough when he woke. Down in the kitchen she came on Else Queen, ganting as wide as a stable-door, she stopped from that, the Manse’s new maid, a handsome quean, and she said Hello! Chris felt the blood in the tips of her ears, she saw plain the thing in the great lump’s mind. You call me Mrs Colquohoun, you know. Else. And you get up smart in the morning as well, else we’ll need another maid in the Manse.

  Else went dirt-white and closed up her mouth. Yes— Mem, I’m sorry, and Chris felt a fool, but she didn’t show it, and this kind of thing had just to be settled one way or the other. My name’s not Mem, it’s just Mrs Colquohoun. Get the water boiling and we’ll make the breakfast. What kind of a range is this that we’ve got?

  THAT WAS THAT, and she had no trouble at all with meikle Else Queen in Kinraddie Manse, though the speak went out and about the parish that Chris Tavendale, the new minister’s new wife, had grown that proud that she made her maid cry Mem! every time they met on the stairs, a fair dog’s life had that poor Else Queen, it just showed you the kind of thing that happened when a creature got up a bit step in the world. And who was she to put on her airs—the daughter of a little bit farmer, just, and the wife of another, killed in the War. Ay, them that were fond of their men didn’t marry as close as that on the death of the first, the Manse and the minister’s silver the things that the new Mrs Colquohoun had had in her mind.

  Chris heard those stories in the weeks that went, if you bade in Kinraddie and any ill tale were told about you—and you fair had to be an angel in breeks if that weren’t done and even then, faith! they’d have said there were unco things under your breeks—the very trees rose and sniggered it to you, the kye lowed the news from every bit gate. But she paid no heed, she was blithe and glad, happed in her Robert and the nearness of him, young Εwan as well, a third by the fire as they sat of a night and the storms came malagarousing the trees down the length and breadth of the shrilling Howe. Behind and far up you would hear the hills quake, Robert would raise up his head and laugh, the twinkle-scowl in his deep-set eyes—The feet of the Lord on the hills, Christine!

  Ewan would look up, staring and still, Who’s the Lord? and Robert would drop his great book and stare in the fire, That’s a tough one, Ewan. But He’s Something and sure, our Father and Mother, our End and Beginning.

  Ewan’s eyes would open wider at that, My mother’s here and my father’s dead. Robert would laugh and upset his chair, A natural sceptic—come out of that chair, there’s over many of your kind already squatting their hams in the thrones of the mighty!

  So the two of them would crawl round the floor and would growl, play tigers and beasts of like gurring breeds, Ewan with his coolness and graveness forgot, Robert worse than a bairn, Chris sitting and watching, a book in her hand or darning or knitting, but not often those. Robert got angered when she sat and darned. What, waste your life when you’ll soon be dead? You’re not going to slave for me, my girl! And she’d say But you won’t like holes in your socks? and he’d laugh When they’re holed we’ll buy a new pair. Come out for a tramp, the storm’s gone down.

  And out they would tramp, young Ewan in bed, the night black under their feet as cold pitch, about them the whistle and moan of the trees till they cleared the Manse and went up by the Mains, with the smell of the dung from its hot cattle-court, and the smell of the burning wood in its lums. You’d see and hear little about you by then, just the two of you swinging up the hill in the dark, till the blow of the wind would catch in your throats as you gained by the cambered edge of the brae.

  Around them, dry, the whistle of the whins, strange shapes that rose and were lost in the dark, Robert would stop and would fuss at her collar, pretending he did it to keep out the cold. But she’d grown to know him, the thing that he’d want, she’d put up her arms round close by his throat, and hug him, half-shy, she was still half-shy. He’d told her that once and Chris had been vexed, lying in his arms, for a sudden moment she had touched him with lips fierce and sudden with a flame that came up out of her heart, up out of the years when she still was unwed: and he’d gasped, and she’d laughed Do you call that shy? Then she’d been half-ashamed and yet glad as well, and fell fast asleep till the morning came, and they both woke up and looked at each other, and he said that she blushed and she hid her face and said that one or the other was a fool.

  But best she minded of those night-time walks the first that took them up to the hills, a rousting night in December’s close. They came at last on Blawearie’s brae, and panting, looked down on the windy Mearns, the lights of Bervie a lowe in the east, the Laurencekirk gleams like a scattering of faggots, Segget’s that shone as the blurring of stars, these were the lights of the jute mills there. So they stood a long while and looked down the brae, Kinraddie below them happed in its sleep; and Robert fell into a dreaming muse, as he often did, with his mind far
off. Chris said nothing, content though she froze, after one peek at his stillness beside her. Queer with him here on Blawearie brae, that once was hers, if they walked down over that shoulder there they’d come to the loch and the Standing Stones to which she had fled for safety, compassion, so often and oft when she was a quean….

  She could smell the winter smell of the land and the sheep they pastured now on Blawearie, in the parks that once came rich with corn that Ewan had sown and they both had reaped, where the horses had pastured, their kye and their stock. And she minded the nights in the years of the War, nights such as this when she’d lain in her bed and thought of the times that would come yet again—Ewan come back and things as before, how they’d work for young Ewan and grow old together, and buy Blawearie and be happy forever. And now she stood by a stranger’s side, she slept in his bed, he loved her, she him, nearer to his mind than ever she had been to that of the body that lay mouldering in France, quiet and unmoving that had moved to her kisses, that had stirred and been glad in her arms, in her sight, that had known the stinging of rain in his face as he ploughed the steep rigs of Blawearie brae, and come striding from his work with that smile on his face, and his clumsy hands and his tongue that was shy of the things that his eyes could whisper so blithe. Dead, still and quiet, not even a body, powder and dust he with whom she had planned her life and her days in the times to be.