Coronach, page 13
He did not consider, did not allow himself to consider, that it was without Coventry that the days were meaningless, but it was true. Whatever he had been before had died, and now he had no identity except what Coventry chose to allow him.
He had fallen asleep that night in February listening to the sea. It was a lonely sound and sometimes heartbreaking, but tonight it comforted him. He woke once and saw nothing, only the strong pattern of moonlight, and slept again. The second time he woke he found Coventry watching him, with a face bleached by the moonlight and deeply shadowed eyes.
He had been drinking but he was not drunk, and he had brought the rum with him. “Will you drink?” He waited for an answer and when none came he drank from the jug himself and put it down. He was smoking, and the end of the slender cigar glowed and faded in the darkness. “I’ve been down to the sea. You should have come with me― perhaps we shall go later.”
One sharp attempt to fight, and it was aborted as swiftly. The voice remained gentle, but the hand was brutally strong.
“It would be better for you if you drank.”
There was pain, but he made neither sound nor movement, and his tears were never seen.
Coventry was at his desk, the wind from the sea disturbing his papers. It was a dull afternoon, heavy with approaching storm; the surf was audible. The season of calamity, he had always called it.
He had walked along the beach at dawn and seen the wrack thrown up by a passing hurricane; it might yet claw round and assault them with only slightly diminished fury. He had no cane to lose at this time of year, but there was Ironshore’s safety to be considered, and the safety of Rosewynd on its seaward prominence to the east.
The palms lifted and rattled; the thunder was closer, reminding him of gunfire across water. The wind brought no freshness, only an unsettling chill that smelled of salt and the churning sea.
The papers stirred again on his desk and he weighed them down with a piece of coral. He had been writing to a young naval officer who had sought his advice on buying land on the north shore. Ships’ officers were welcome guests in Jamaican society, fresh faces in an incestuous round, and were lionized whenever they strayed from the naval base at Fort Charles.
Upstairs louvres banged. A patter of bare black feet and soft patois, and they were secured.
The lines in his own handwriting stared back at him.
17th September 1748. My dear St. James, I have the pleasure of acquainting you with a little news.... He sealed it and began another, to Lydia Seguin, the newly bereaved owner of Rosewynd.
My sweet love....
He had known Seguin since coming to Jamaica; it had begun as a casual acquaintance and become a friendship, with advice exchanged on cane and the shared ownership of a mill that served both estates. His liaison with Seguin’s widow had begun the night of his funeral.
She was an attractive Creole from Haiti with black hair and black eyes and a touch of African blood, which excited him as the exotic always did. He had taken her to bed and they had found one another mutually satisfying, and he had spent many of his days and some of his nights at Rosewynd since. Her body was golden, small-breasted, pared of femininity, and her sweat and her ardour were what he had wanted from his other lover, who after eight months still offered him only cold submission.
The idea of their marriage had come as a matter of course: that it would be loveless did not disturb him. He had no doubt that their physical relationship would be as short-lived as it was violent. It was Rosewynd he was marrying.
His back was aching, and his head. He shouted along the gallery.
“MacIain!”
The wind took his voice and ran with it. A heavy crash from somewhere, a door blowing shut, and excited voices. The slave patois again, knowing he was within earshot, not wanting him to understand what they said.
“MacIain!”
He came eventually, the golden eyes without expression.
“Why don’t you come when you’re called?”
“Because I am not a dog.”
Coventry let it pass, and began to gather the pages of his letter.
“I am going to marry Mrs. Seguin next week. I shall be riding to Rosewynd. In the meantime I want―”
Their skins were equally bronzed now, but the knuckles bleached on his wrist: he watched with an odd detachment as the veins on his own hand swelled beneath the pressure. The light was grey and flat; even the sea was grey and flattened, and rain obscured it like a veil.
“Take your hand away.” There was no response. “Take it off me, damn you. Who do you think you are?”
Silence. The rain had reached the shore.
He said, “Well, what did you expect? I want a wife, I want a hostess, I want a woman I can be seen with. Who the devil should I present to the governor, some mulatto from Port Royal?”
The wind had dropped completely with the rain. It was curious how silent it had become.
“I’ve never stopped you from taking some whore to your bed, as long as she’s clean.”
The rain came in waves, at first driven, then dying away.
He said into the silence, “I shall want to see you tonight.”
Lachlan said, very softly, “You go to hell,” and was halted at the door only by the voice, which was as quiet as his own.
“I will marry her, MacIain, whether you care for it or not. I will do as I wish.”
But he did not. Two days later he fell from the saddle with yellow fever and lay near death for almost a week, his skin cold and jaundiced, his vomit the characteristic black of the disease.
Lydia Seguin came as soon as she received the news. She arrived on horseback and entered the house uninvited, throwing her crop on the table and leaving her hat in the hands of an astonished slave who tried to prevent her from mounting the stairs. The smell of sickness hit her like a wall. She pressed on.
Rain was falling heavily, and the room was in a strange half-light; the pall of the storm was cast over everything. The bed was draped in mosquito netting. She went toward it without hesitation.
Then she saw that she was not alone with him: some one else was sitting by the bed.
“Get out, you Creole bitch.”
She stared at him without speaking, then she turned on her heel and went.
The hurricane veered and ploughed out to sea, cutting a vicious swath toward the Bahamas and the coast of Florida. It passed Ironshore with only torrential rain; mudslides swept away the shacks of Montego Bay. There was no wind, only days and nights of smothering stillness, throughout which Noel Coventry struggled to live.
Two days had passed since Lydia Seguin’s visit. Whether he lived or died now, there would be no marriage. She had left Rosewynd, or so the slaves were saying, to return to Haiti. Her overseer had orders to sell.
Lachlan had remained by the bed. It was ‘dead time’, after the crop was harvested and before the December planting, but had there been work in the fields he would not have gone to it. It was still raining, the eaves rushing with water and a sharp fragrance rising from the gardens. He had ordered the windows to be opened, unable to bear the stench of a closed room and doubting it would make any difference to the outcome. He had nursed roughly, with little instinct, neither knowing nor caring if the powders mixed by the slaves at his request would kill or cure.
Coventry was lying still, the tanned skin a ghastly yellow with disease. He had neither moved nor spoken for some time: it was either sleep or coma, the last long sleep before death.
Lachlan listened to the heart, the breath. Both were very faint.
He lifted the other pillow. The rain gushed; there was no other sound. He looked for the last time at the face, which was not handsome, although it could charm both men and women into believing it was. The strong, swarthy, irregular features, the heavy-lidded, sunken eyes: a parchment mask, no more.
He held the pillow to press it down: it would not take much effort.
He hesitated, his mind torn, and as he was struggling with himself the eyes opened, dark and endless, drawing him in.
“MacIain?”
He put the pillow gently down, knowing now he would not use it, could not; perhaps he never could.
“I am here,” he said.
VI
The Culloden battalions were recalled to Flanders, where they were once more engaged in bitter conflict with the French.
The Highlands were divided into four military districts, garrisoned, and harried by patrols of dragoons who routed out fugitives and rumours of spies with sullen determination. They came and went, staying in shielings and bothies, sometimes dirked or shot, mostly shooting, raping and hanging where they pleased.
There was talk of another rising. There was little food and less kindling in any of the ravaged glens, but the agents did exist, and where they eluded their pursuers they carried rumour enough to fire men’s imaginations. French spies in the Fraser country were bearing letters from the Prince; French gold lay hidden at Loch Arkaig to finance another revolt; rebellion would come in the Isles with the spring. Perhaps some of it was true― most of it was lies, the beginning of legend.
They fed on it for a time. The first yearning ballads sprang up about the Prince, cherishing their vision of his return. The men who had crept home buried their broadswords in the thatches and peat hags, and waited.
They had been stripped of their dreams, their hopes. By late summer of the year after the rebellion, they were stripped of their very clothes.
The notices of the proscription of Highland dress were posted at every market cross, town house and church door in Scotland :
…. And it is further enacted. That from and after the 1st of August 1747 no man or boy within Scotland other than such as shall be employed as officers and soldiers in the King’s forces, shall on any pretense whatsoever, wear or put on the cloathes commonly called highland cloathes, that is to say, the plaid, philebeg or little kilt, trowse, shoulder-belts, or any part whatsoever of what peculiarly belongs to the highland garb; and that no tartan or party-coloured plaids or stuff shall be used for great-coats, or for upper coats; and if any such persons shall, after said 1st of August, wear or put on the aforesaid garments, or any part of them, every such person so offending, being convicted thereof by the mouth of one or more witnesses, before any court of justiciary, or any one or more Justices of the Peace for the shire or stewartry, or judge ordinary of the place where such offence shall be committed, shall suffer imprisonment without bail, during six months and no longer; and being convicted of a second offence, before the court of justiciary, or at the circuits, shall be liable to be transported to any of His Majesty’s plantations beyond the sea, for seven years.
Some resisted. Some fled into the hills rather than surrender their arms or their dress, or the right to wear them. Some openly defied the laws and were imprisoned, transported, or shot. In Glen Sian they were mainly broken and sullen: MacNeil was sick and often drunk and Lachlan had disappeared, and the flame of rebellion had flickered out among them; those who had fought retired to the crofts and drank the raw spirit from illegal stills and surrendered themselves to their memories, to the shadows of what they had been.
Ewen Stirling heard them one night singing Jacobite songs forbidden now by law, with the recklessness of men who had nothing left to lose. Slowly and mournfully, voices in the dark.
Who will play the silver whistle
when my King’s son to sea is going?
All Scotland prepare, prepare his coming ….
I will be dancing, I will be singing
and I will play the silver whistle ….
By autumn of 1747 many of them had rendered up their weapons and were forced to take the oath of disarmament. The more ingenious submitted pistols that appeared not to have been fired since the first rising thirty-two years before, keeping their newer, brighter swords hidden. Murdoch Scott took the oath like the others, swearing in the Irish tongue with his hand resting on the iron of an old knife which he later surrendered :
…. as I shall answer to God at the great day of judgment, I have not, nor shall have in my possession any gun, sword, pistol or arm whatsoever, and never use tartan, plaid or any part of the highland garb; and if I do so may I be cursed in my undertakings, family and property, may I be killed in battle as a coward, and lie without burial in a strange land, far from the graves of my forefathers and kindred; may all this come across me if I break my oath.
Then, like the others, he tossed a brace of rusted wheellocks onto the table, so clearly useless that it seemed unlikely his oath could be taken seriously. It was indeed a token submission: within a month he was openly carrying his steel pistols across his saddle again as he made his rounds of Glen Sian.
His rent rolls had decreased. From every glen the homeless were on the roads. Women went to the garrisons at Fort Augustus and Fort William, prostituting themselves for heels of bread; they were driven away by the provost guard and drifted on to Inverness, or to the squalid slums of Edinburgh or Glasgow. Young men went as labourers to the Lowlands, but it was brutal living: their speech was not understood, their clothing outlawed, and the pitiful rags they wore in place of the Highland dress mocked: they were rebels and savages. They endured the abuse and lived in misery, or they died of unknown diseases in the filthy, overcrowded towns, or they returned, not often, to the Highlands where no future awaited them.
There was no other rising. The chiefs were away, dead, or in hiding, and those who said the Prince would come again said it less often and with less conviction. But the rumours lingered, disquieting an already anxious Parliament, and as an alien and a suspected Jacobite Ewen Stirling was required to lodge bail of a sum that staggered him, against his own future loyalty to the Hanoverian. He paid it and was beggared: if his fortunes had been depleted before, they were entirely ruined now.
Before the end of the year another legislation had been nailed to the door of the kirk in Glen Mor. He read it and found he had lost his right of hereditary jurisdiction: what legal privileges, what power to try and condemn his own people he had possessed before the rebellion had been stripped from him by a jealous government. He had become nothing more than a petty landowner, with a title that was meaningless in England.
The loyal chiefs were paid compensation in cash for the forfeit of their hereditary powers: the great Campbell, Argyll, received twenty thousand pounds. And so it went, down the roster of Protestant Whiggish peers and the heads of clans who had fought for King George or kept their disaffection well hidden. Attainted rebels, exiled lairds and suspected Jacobites were not compensated. For the loss of his rights and his cattle, the forfeit of much personal freedom, and the theft or vandalism of many of his possessions, Ewen Stirling received nothing at all, nor ever would.
In the summer of 1748 Inglis MacNeil was arrested, and taken to the garrison at Fort Augustus. Ewen followed him, and by oaths and promises and humiliating bribery secured his release. MacNeil came home a bitter man, cheated of the death he had craved.
So it ended, the lost cause, as a song sung in the darkness, as a shred of tartan cloth, as a sword rusting in the peat hags awaiting a call that never came, as a sad tale told.
The desperate tragedy that was sweeping the Highlands affected Ewen surprisingly little: the estate was Murdoch Scott’s concern. Ewen received news of it as he heard of each parliamentary legislation that stripped old powers from him, as distant echoes from a foreign land, a land which meant nothing to him.
From time to time he rode out in Glen Sian and observed his devastated fields, and Murdoch’s difficult work of restoration, but he could not help his people and he had always held himself aloof behind the barriers of foreign birth and breeding. Even now, with his fragile world of grace and pleasure lying in ruins, he found it hard to understand them or the upheaval which had torn away the ground from beneath their feet.
He wept, often, and woke trembling at strange sounds, sudden shouts, passing hooves in the night. He slept with one of his Italian pistols by the bed. He could not bring himself to leave off mourning clothes, or to hear the subject discussed; he wore his wife’s watch around his neck and carried always, on his person, something of hers.
He was sick, bodily, and as he came later to understand, in mind. Sick, as Scotland was sick, as the whole world seemed, reeling and without purpose.
The year turned, and winter came.
The boys were playing shinty in Glen Mor. Not the great shinty game which had been played before the rising at New Year’s by teams of men from the two parishes for the prize of a keg of whisky, but a lesser game altogether, for children only. Murdoch’s son loitered, wanting to be asked to join, as the two teams marked their goals with broken slate, and one produced the ball.
There were eleven on each team: he had heard the captains quarrelling over players. A youth of about fifteen led off with a hard, clean shot and loped after the ball, and the others swarmed after him. Some girls smothered in the dyed-black plaids now required by law came out from the crofts to watch, but the cold soon drove them in. The game raged up and down, through oatfields gnawed by winter, down the track and across the bridge and out on to the frozen river; the child following heard the vicious thwack of camans and the ice groaning in protest. They scrambled off then, hitting the ball up over the bank. It bounded toward a goal; they surged after it, laughing and swearing. It sped between the marks. A brutal scrimmage ensued, stick cracking on shin, and one player emerged with blood dripping from his nose. The afternoon sun swung lower. The game with all its violence would continue until dark.
The child ran, his feet in their thin hide brogans too numbed by cold to feel the stubble. One of the players had hobbled off the field, dropping his caman. He seized it and ran out after the ball.
