Coronach, page 1
CORONACH
KIMBERLEY JORDAN REEMAN
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For Douglas, my love, my star at sea, my life.
I wish to thank the Lady Jean Fforde for her kind permission to quote from the Arran journals of John Burrel; my cherished friends Dale Burnett, Winston Graham O.B.E., and Carol Spendlove for their faith and encouragement; and those others whose friendship remains my beacon and my compass in these rough, dark seas.
Every one knew before he engaged in the cause what he was to expect, and shou’d have staid at home if he cou’d not face death in any shape.
Charles Edward Stuart
January 1746
****
When I came into this Country, it was my only view to do all in my power for your good and safety. This I will allways do as long as life is in me. But alas! I see with grief, I can at present do little for you on this side the water, for the only thing that now can be done, is to defend your selves.
Charles Edward Stuart
April 1746, after Culloden
Prologue
1746: THE LOST CAUSE
Interlude: Glen Sian 1758
THE HEIRESS
Interlude: Glen Sian 1763
THE LOVERS
Interlude: Evesham 1772
THE FACTOR
Interlude: Fairlight 1774
THE UNQUIET SHORE
Interlude: Evesham
1790: THE SUNLIT ROCK
Prologue
You ask me, how shall we overcome these shadows?
How much truth is unbearable?
I have known the darkness, and the poignancy of the light. I shrink from neither, deny neither.
They are my truths: it was my life.
Here it began, and, for me, ended.
Glen Sian, the glen of the storm, is a narrow, torturous scar in the mountains between Loch Ness and Loch Cluanie. A minor military road twists up from Fort Augustus to mount a thousand feet over the heights before dropping to the glen itself. The road, no more than a path now, follows the course of the River Sian to the place where it meets Allt na Dour Oir, and a waterfall throws a bridal wreath of spray over the black rocks at the Bridge of Sian.
The military road drives further on through a pass to Kyle of Lochalsh some thirty miles to the west, bringing nothing, taking nothing away, although this was not always so.
The windows of the great house of Ardsian, far up in the sweet silence of the eastern glen, still look toward the heights: Carn Dubh, Carn Mhor, Creag na h’ Iolaire, black peaks where the mist hangs and the eagles and the storms breed. They are laced with a thousand nameless streams, silver in the light of morning, soft and dark with peat, and the sound of water is sometimes the only sound in all that vast and empty silence.
There were crofts; they are ruins now. The gardens are overgrown, the old roads reclaimed by ling and bracken. No one goes there. No one is left to go.
On the morning of Thursday, the twenty-fourth of April 1746, George Keppel, Lord Bury, rode with his escort at a racking gallop down the Great North Road into London.
He was a king’s son’s messenger and he brought with him momentous news, but the word of victory had preceded him, carried in the middle of the night by a hireling of the Lord Justice Clerk of Scotland. The King’s army under His Royal Highness the Duke of Cumberland had met the Jacobite forces of his cousin Charles Edward Stuart and defeated them on the field of Culloden, six miles outside of Inverness. The news was a week old when Bury brought it.
By noon, the great guns on Tower Hill were firing salutes. The ships in the river from London to Greenwich answered them. The Household Brigade, drawn up in Green Park, began to fire volley after volley, the sharp crack of musketry drowned out by the cheers of the watching crowd. The bells of every church were ringing. Broadsheets, hastily printed, spread lies and speculation about the battle.
By evening the town was blazing with fireworks. Drury Lane presented an old play resurrected from the War of the Spanish Succession called “The Honours of the Army”. The New Wells, in Lemon Street, offered “an exact view of our Gallant Army under the command of their Glorious Hero passing the River Spey, giving the Rebels battle, and gaining a Complete Victory near Culloden House.” The broadsheets gave out the King’s message to that hero, his son William Augustus: “I desire you may give my hearty thanks to those brave officers and soldiers who fought so gloriously at the late battle, and assure them, no less of my real esteem than of my constant favour and protection.”
The bells pealed all evening. The crowds in St. James’s, Piccadilly, Pall Mall, swelled and with nightfall became a mob. Any stray soldier was cheered and fêted. A Court of Thanksgiving was planned for Sunday the twenty-seventh to celebrate the Royal Family’s deliverance from the Jacobite threat. Overhead, the sky-rockets burst into a million shards, brighter than the brightest jewel in a lost crown, fading like the fading of a dream.
By Tuesday the mood of the mob had turned ugly, from celebration and gratitude to vengeance, and violence, and blood.
For Scots in London, for Catholics, for Jacobites and suspected Jacobites, the flower of safety faded quickly. In the mist-shrouded Highlands, uprooted by the sword, it was already dead.
1746: THE LOST CAUSE
I
It was nine o’clock. It had been raining all day in Glen Sian, and the rain stood in pools on the wet stones, throwing back the light. The grey service gaiters of the drummers beating Tattoo were spattered with mud.
They had been here two days, three officers and a hundred men of His Majesty’s army from Inverness. It was July, high summer, and bitterly cold. A man woke chilled to the bone, under canvas unless he could find any better shelter— and then the houses were claimed by the officers first— the canvas sweating with rain or dew and the air inside fetid with the breath of five other men and the smell of clothing and boots too long worn, bodies too long unwashed, and the mould that could not be kept away.
Then, with the drums beating Reveille, that man, any man, any common soldier, sprang up shivering and went shivering to the latrine trenches and returned to hear the day’s orders. It might rain, dampening his powder, rusting his bayonet and firelock and wetting him to the skin, shrinking his already ill-fitting coat so that it caught him under the arms and across the shoulders; or it might be so cold that his fingers ached; or it might be windy, with an edge to that wind as keen as a surgeon’s knife, cutting through his damp clothing and setting his bad teeth chattering in his head. Of one thing he could be certain: he was almost as likely to sight the sun as he was to escape a flogging, or see his pay raised to something he could live on.
The miserable conditions served only to sharpen the army’s resentment of Scotland. It was overwhelmingly lonely, foreign, and bleak: it seemed, even in defeat, indefinably hostile. It offered nothing, not the frailest compensation, not warmth, not colour, not comfort, not welcome, only a landscape of monotonous greys and browns, sullen mountain, fog, stretches of black water under lowering skies: no sound but water and crying birds and wind, nothing for the eye but a naked desolation. If it had revealed to them any of its beauty, and beautiful it was, although haunting and empty and immeasurably sad, not a man among them would have found it so.
The rain had stopped. It was ten past nine.
The second-highest ranking officer in Glen Sian was alone at that hour in his quarters, attempting, as adjutant to Lieutenant-Colonel the Honourable Aeneas Bancroft, to resume a semblance of correspondence to his generals at Fort Augustus. On the table lay the records of the regiment: the Orders of the Day in their mottled covers, his journal with assiduously kept accounts, the payroll, and several drafts of a difficult letter to the Quartermaster-General, requesting reimbursement for boots, stockings and ammunition loaf purchased by Bancroft for the regiment out of his own pocket. They constituted his third such submission within the past six months; the others had met with resounding failure. He wrote, in an austere and disciplined hand, supporting his wrist.
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He was twenty-nine years old, half English, half Irish, a tall, raw-boned, enigmatic man who had held his first commission at the age of barely fifteen: he had been ordered into the army by his father, one of Marlborough’s generals, who had thought effeminate his youthful preoccupation with music and been determined to put an unequivocal end to it. He had served dispassionately, a dedicated if not inspired soldier, a career officer. There was very little choice for a younger son, without fortune or the expectation of a brilliant marriage.
The writing hand paused. The skin was cracked with eczema, the nails broken and unkempt. The broad, soiled cuff of the scarlet coat was the dark blue of a Royal regiment, ornamented with two tarnished bands of gilt lace in the regiment’s distinctive zigzag pattern, and three coinlike buttons. The fourth had been torn off, and it was symptomatic of his own state and of the army’s endemic squalor that he who had once been fastidious had made no attempt to replace it.
His wrist was aching. It was massively scarred, the result of an injury suffered at Dettingen in the second year of the Austrian war. It had been thought that he would lose the hand, and his frenzied insistence that it be saved had not been welcomed by a surgeon intent only on closing the other wounds in his body and transferring his attention to the next casualty. The suturing had been perfunctory, and later he realized that it had done more to cripple him than any effort of the enemy.
He was a man profoundly disillusioned by life, a cynic and an atheist whom circumstance, and physical pain, and a growing mental disquiet had rendered irritable and intolerant: younger officers found him a pitiless superior, and he felt the depth of his estrangement from them as from another generation. He had cherished ideals, and conceptions of honour which he now considered absurd, and they had been destroyed in a bloody sewer of war which had also claimed his politics and his ambitions. He had no friends— they had been slaughtered while, incomprehensibly, he had lived— and no fears, only an insensate courage born of prolonged exposure to death. And he had expected to die in Flanders: when death had overlooked him, he had submitted to the next twist in the game he perceived fate to be playing with him, and at the end of 1745 joined the Fourth, an old line-regiment bound for British soil after four years of foreign service. Seven months later in Scotland he remained with it, held by a curious paralysis, inertia, or the remnants of a troubled loyalty, although he knew himself balanced on the edge of some crisis, and recognized in this his last commission, and these as the final months of his career.
The rain had begun again; the drums had fallen silent. It was dark in the room, and penetratingly cold: he groped for flint and steel and struck a spark to light the cruisie lamp on the table, a cast-iron Highland affair with a rush wick held by a clamp. As it caught, the rush smoked in its pool of rancid oil. Some one, Bancroft’s sentry he surmised, coughed outside, and the sound carried clearly. The wind moaned a little in its dismal, sobbing undertone.
He closed his eyes and let his thoughts carry him, the old regret, a certain passive resentment and surprise at the docility with which he had come to a life he had never chosen, until a staccato rapping at the door drew him back to the present.
He called, “Come,” and glanced up: his eyes, a keen greyish blue, rested briefly on the dark blue lapels and filthy knotted sash looming out of the shadows and resumed their study of the quartermaster’s letter without rising to the sergeant’s face.
“Lieutenant Brevet’s compliments and he returns the muster book, sir.”
The clutter on the table was hesitantly disturbed, the still air overlaid with fumes of gin.
“How many men were absent without leave?”
“None, sir.”
“Was the colonel present?”
“No, sir.”
“It was fortunate for you that he was not.” There was an uncomfortable silence. “For God’s sake, man, I can smell it from here.”
He opened the punishment book and entered a terse statement. Although he was known to drink heavily himself he had no pity for non-commissioned or enlisted men who did likewise, only a clearer perception than most officers of his own hypocrisy.
“Your pay will be docked two shillings. You may be relieved it was not more, and that I am not Colonel Bancroft.”
There was no sign of anger or embarrassment and he had expected none: the sergeant’s expression remained stolidly blank.
“Lieutenant Brevet begs leave to ask will there be anything else tonight, sir.”
“No. That will be all.”
“Very good, sir.” He saluted and turned on his heel, the greased queue swinging to the small of his back with the movement.
The muster book lay closed, its marbled cover misted with rain. When he was alone again the adjutant opened it: in the faulty light the names stood out like the dramatis personae of some remorseless Greek tragedy, headed by Aeneas Alexander George Robert Bancroft, Lieutenant-Colonel; and then, of the two majors, his own name, Thomas Achill Mordaunt-Collins; among the lieutenants Henry Francis David Brevet; and the others, their existence documented in a clear, elegant hand on pages softened with use. Here and there a stark phrase recalled the losses of a regiment mauled by the Jacobite charges at both Falkirk and Culloden.
“Discharged dead… discharged dead, of wounds….” “Private soldier aged 20 years, at Inverness….” “Private soldier aged 18 years… drummer aged 15 years… ensign aged 16 years… serjeant… corporal… grenadier… grenadier….”
Culloden. He took his thoughts from it and from Inverness and signed the letter to the Quartermaster-General.
The evening progressed. His fingers cramped on the quill, his eyes tired in the unsteady light, the rain drummed endlessly. From time to time he coughed, dryly and with pain: he had had pleurisy at the age of twenty-two, which had almost taken his life, and it had begun with similar symptoms under similar conditions of exhaustion and neglect. He had had five months’ convalescence in Naples, secured by his father’s influence, and he had spent it in an idyll of uncharacteristic sensuality, under the tutelage of a pupil of Domenico Scarlatti and, under the auspices of Neapolitan friends, in less aesthetic pleasures. He had been on the point of resigning his commission: his father’s death had forestalled that decision, summoning him back to England too late to do more than regret they had not been closer, and that he had lied in his letters when he had promised Marlborough’s general that he was not consorting with whores and musicians. On his return he had met his brother’s wife, and, already weighted by guilt and grief, he had not resisted the circumstances impelling them toward a liaison.
He tried to hold his memories of her but they were scattered and indistinct: time and absence had begun to blur the details of her face. He had not seen her for three years, and her image, like others of a civilized world, was becoming remote.
He read through the remainder of the waiting correspondence, drinking purposefully. At this hour the likelihood of interruption was slight, and without it he would not sleep. His watch had stopped, but he sensed it was well after midnight: time in any case except as lived by the drums had ceased to be relevant here. When he woke it was to pain, and the terrified uncertainty of not knowing where he was: the lamp had burned down, his clothing was damp, the sweat stood on his face and he was shivering. He had no idea what had disturbed him.
He remembered nothing of opening the door, only the sensation of the rain, and the gradual emergence from obscurity of a sordid little tableau of rape. The assailants, private soldiers, must have seen him silhouetted against the light, and he knew a word from him would have stopped them, if only for a time. But he did not give the word. He closed the door on them and laid his head on his arms on the papers, and slept again. Outside the sounds went on, and the unheard cries, and the rain.
