A Dark and Distant Shore (28 page)

There was a brig sailing from Fort William three weeks later, and Mungo, for diverse and vaguely sentimental reasons of his own, decided that he and Luke would go to see Perry off. Charlotte had flounced back to Glenbraddan with the children ten days before, her face set, and her manner – Mungo had been sorry to see – vindictively self-righteous. Her father had been relieved to see her go, for although he had no real idea of the depth of torture to which his stipulation had subjected Perry, he had been worried stiff by the change in his son-in-law. Perry had been numb when he arrived at Kinveil, but in the days that followed it was as if he were dying by inches.

The journey to Fort William wasn’t enjoyable, because the two adults’ conversation rang hollow, however much they tried to sound at ease, while Luke swung like a weathercock between laments over the departure of his idol, and envy at the excitements he thought Perry had in store for him.

To Mungo, everything seemed unreal. Even the countryside was at odds with itself. Below the thousand-foot level, the trees were still full of sap, and the leaves hanging on past their usual season, some still green, others in the full splendour of crimson and copper, gold and amber, while the berries and bracken and dying heather displayed every colour in the spectrum from acid yellow to purple. But there had been three or four days of biting east winds that had brought snow to the higher ground, and the rioting colour stopped dead and perfectly straight at the snow-line, separated from the bright blue sky by a wide stripe of black-and-white slashed mountain tops. It was all as improbable as a theatre backdrop by some artist who had never set foot outside a city. Even the sunset was pure melodrama. When they came at last to Fort William, the sun was dropping behind the hills of Ardgour, and the whole vault of the sky for as far as they could see was a violent blood red, streaked with long black-purple clouds whose feathered edges were ablaze with purest flame. The high snows of Ben Nevis were alight, and the silhouettes of the western hills fringed in fire. It was awe-inspiring, savage, and magnificent.

The sky sat like a Chinese lacquer lid over Fort William’s single mean and narrow street which, like the surrounding fields, was full of people due to sail next day on the brig
Rapido.
Mungo hoped the name was justified, but doubted it. Not a wall or patch of scrub, not a doorway that didn’t shelter some emigrant, or someone who had come to see a dear one off. Mungo assumed it would be mostly the young ones who were going. Some of the bundles they clasped contained not clothes, or food, or necessities for the journey, but babies whose disconsolate howls made a kind of litany all the way along the street, as the carriage struggled through to the inn where Mungo had bespoken accommodation.

It was both better and worse the next morning when they walked the few yards to the shore and found a place a little apart from the crowd. Luke, who hadn’t yet learned humanity, wrinkled his nose disgustedly and said, ‘Phoo! I don’t envy you your travelling companions, Uncle Perry!’

‘Hold your wheesht!’ his grandfather told him sharply. ‘Och, the poor folk! The poor folk!’

Three hundred people were to sail on the brig, and for most of them – perhaps all – it would be a last farewell to the land that had borne them. Months and years of scrimping and saving had been needed to bring this day about, and it should have been one of triumph. Instead, there was undisguised heartbreak in the pinched faces that thronged the beach, as if the realization of a hope they had never really believed in was the cruellest blow they had ever been called upon to bear. It seemed to Mungo as if they were thinking of today not as the first day of the rest of their lives, but as a kind of death sentence.

Trying for the light touch, he muttered to Perry, ‘Och, it’s a shame, isn’t it! Who’d want to leave the Highlands on a fine, sunny day like this? If Fort William had only produced its usual downpour, they’d be glad enough to get away!’ But there was a dampness about his eyes.

The scene would have moved a harder man than Mungo. Ceaseless, unregarded tears streamed down the faces of men and women alike as they tried to smile through their last embraces. The older folk, who had trudged forty or fifty miles to see the young ones sail, refused at first to prolong the misery, pushing their children away from them towards the boat. But the younger women seemed unable to break the last physical contact and, time after time, as the calloused old hands with the swollen knuckles deliberately set them loose, flew back again into their parents’ arms and clung to them fiercely, until their husbands, in little better case, had to drag them away to the boats that were waiting to carry them out to the brig. One girl, her baby in a knotted shawl on her back, flung herself face down on the shore, sinking her clawed fingers into the rough sand in a passion of grief until at last two of the sailors brushed her man aside and, oddly gentle, pried her hands loose and carried her bodily to the boat.

Perry was one of the last to embark, because the families had to be settled first in the cramped hold with its makeshift bunks and great piles of boxes, bags, and chests taking up all the space that remained. Mungo was unashamedly weeping by now, and Luke, though trying hard to be manful, wasn’t succeeding very well. But Perry himself showed not a trace of emotion, although there was perhaps a touch of sadness in the handsome, exhausted face as he shook them both by the hand. If he held his clasp a little longer than usual, it was scarcely perceptible.

All he said was, ‘Tell Charlotte that, however little she may believe it now, it is for the best. And try, if you will, not to let her bring little Grace up to hate her father. God bless you both.’

The brig’s boats were hauled in, and the crowd on the beach managed somehow to raise a cheer, although the answering cheer from the brig sounded more like a dirge. When there was no more possibility of words being exchanged between brig and shore, the piper on board inflated his bag and sent the wild, haunting notes of ‘MacCrimmon’s Lament’, the finest and saddest of all pibroch tunes, into the clear air.
Cha till mi tuille
–
‘I will return no more.’

It was too much for most of the folk on the beach, but Luke had sufficiently recovered to say with a watery grin, ‘The pipes do sound better over the water, don’t they!’ He was old enough, too, to be able to interpret the wry, approving smile that twisted the corners of his grandfather’s lips. Mungo clapped a hand on the boy’s shoulder, and they stood watching the brig tack south down Loch Linnhe until she was almost out of sight, still listing heavily to port with the weight of all her passengers seeking a last, desperate sight of the place and people they would never see again. At last, Mungo blew his nose resoundingly and said, ‘Well, that’s the end, laddie. Time to go home.’

They were almost halfway back to Kinveil when it struck Mungo that he had never brought Perry up to date on all the things that had been happening to family and friends while he had been shut up in his sanctuary in the Canongate. Not that there had been much, except about Andrew Lauriston being killed at Waterloo. He thought about it for a moment, and then decided that since Perry had scarcely known Vilia, and Andrew not at all, it wouldn’t have been of more than passing interest. Funny he should have forgotten to mention it, though. If ‘forgotten’ was the right word.

It was on a Tuesday in March of the following year that Mungo encountered Iain Mor the Post, plodding across the sleet-swept causeway with his home-made leather pouch over his shoulder and his shaggy woollen toorie pulled down to his eyebrows, so that he looked like a wildcat glowering out of a gorse bush. The postie’s round was a long one, almost seventy miles, and was accomplished entirely on foot twice or three times a week. It was Mungo’s humane custom to press a good strong dram on him to help him on his way, although this generosity wasn’t wholly disinterested. Iain Mor, in the right mood, was a fount of local gossip, and besides, it gave Mungo an innocent pleasure to see the man’s usually truculent expression melt into genial satisfaction as the whisky did its work. A full tumbler, a straight wrist, and the neat spirits disappeared down his throat in a smooth and single gulp.

‘Aye, aye,’ he said on this occasion, passing the back of his hand genteelly across his lips. ‘It iss a poor return for your hospitality right enough, but I am afraid I will haff to lift seffenpence off you. All your letters but the one iss franked. I see it iss from young Sorley McClure, and he would not be able to get a frank, being only a footman. But iss it not a fine thing that he iss able to write, and a fair hand, too? He will be telling you how Mistress Vilia iss getting on at Marchfield. I would be ferry obliged – if it iss not inconvenient, mind you! – if you would be sending her my kindest regards. Och, well. Thank you, Mr Telfer, sir, and good day to you. I will be getting on my way.’

With a grimace of foreboding, Mungo broke the seal. Sorley wouldn’t have landed him with the postal charge without good and urgent reason. The letter was short.

Dear Mr Telfer, sir – I trust you will pardon the libberty I take in writing to you and without a frank but I could not get one. You know that Mistress Vilia has been staying here with Mr Lauriston (Sen.) since the Major was killt. She is not happy and very unwell. The baby is due any day and I am fritened for her. She needs a friend and not just me. This is why I am being so bold to write tho I know it is not my place to. If it is not convenient I am sorry for troubling you and please will you accept my apollogies. Yours truly – S. McClure.

Mungo, who didn’t approve of swearing, swore furiously for several minutes and then began to make his arrangements.

In the last days of August 1815, too sick in mind and body to go on resisting the pressures that were being exerted on her, Vilia had given up the house in Half Moon Street that Duncan Lauriston now refused to pay for, dismissed most of the servants, and with the babies, their nurse, her maid, Sorley, and the kitten to keep her company, had left London for her father-in-law’s house in Marchfield. She didn’t know, as her coach rolled into Edinburgh, that she was passing within a few hundred yards of where Perry Randall lay in sanctuary.

Languidly, she noticed the splendid new buildings that had been finished since her last visit the year before, hotels like palaces backing onto the narrow, fetid wynds of the Old Town, and the mansions of the New Town across the Nor’ Loch, clean and supercilious still despite the encroaching smoke. Summer or not, Auld Reekie went on reeking, the dwellings so piled up on one another round the Castle Hill that none of the smells or smuts were wasted on the desert air before the inhabitants had been able to derive the fullest benefit from them.

‘Mercy me!’ Nurse exclaimed. ‘You could smoke bacon just by hanging it out of the window!’

The air was clearer out to the west as they drove the last sixteen miles to Clarkstoun village, but the countryside had no pastures and few hedges or dykes, only crop lands where the harvest was being taken in by men and women with no spring in their movements. It was flat and open, and there was a damp wind from the Firth. Even to the adults it was dull and enervating, and baby Gideon, normally a placid child, woke up and began to whine miserably. Theo, eighteen months old and never demonstrative, wriggled when Nurse put a hand on his shoulder and jerked away pettishly. He didn’t like being coddled.

Clarkstoun was pretty enough in a white-washed, old-fashioned way. The houses had thick walls, and small windows set in wide stone surrounds, smooth against the rough harling. The steeply gabled roofs were crow-stepped, although it was seagulls, not crows, that perched on the ridged copings. Many of the houses still had outside staircases giving access to the upper floors. But the east wind from the Firth raked through the narrow streets, overlaying the farmyard smells of unswept cobbles with an odour of salt and fish, and it was a relief to turn inland for the last mile to Marchfield House.

While she lived, Duncan Lauriston’s wife Mary had been in sole charge of domestic affairs, and it was she who had chosen and furnished Marchfield. Everything about it spoke of her worldly ambition, the same ambition that had ensured a gentleman’s education for Andrew. The house was not to Vilia’s taste, but at least it was relatively civilized. It was about fifty years old, built originally for some sprig of the minor gentry, and took the form of a square, symmetrical block with a hipped roof and handsome pediment. Over a sunken basement there was a central forestair leading to the front door, which was in the first of the two main floors. The house sat on the edge of a semicircle of gravel and turf, whose straight side was closed off by a high stone wall. At one end of the wall was the coach house, and at the other the stables. The house was trimly painted, the gravel and lawns impeccably kept. It was a very respectable, rather dull dwelling.

Vilia’s father-in-law, determined though he was to oversee the upbringing of his grandsons – his
three
grandsons, for he was sure it was another boy on the way – was not minded to have them spoil his comfort. He had therefore resigned the whole of the upper floor to Vilia and the children, and had grudgingly allocated rooms in the attic to Sorley and the other servants. All he insisted on was that Vilia sup with him in the evenings, and then sit with him until it was time to retire.

Things could have been worse, but Sorley, observing, thought they couldn’t have been much worse. If Vilia had been in normal health, she could have stood up to her father-in-law. If she had been in normal health, she would never have come to Marchfield House at all. But where her previous pregnancies had been uncomplicated, this one was not. Nausea racked her almost unceasingly, and her nerves were raw as torn flesh. Then her ankles began to swell, and she was constantly dizzy, and had a headache that never left her and a paralysing fatigue that settled round her like a blanket. Day after day she would lie half-fainting on the sofa in her dressing-room, only to drag herself up when evening came so that she could appear at supper to suffer her father-in-law’s brutality.