A Dark and Distant Shore (56 page)

Gideon had the feeling that what Theo was up to, was trying to find out what Mama was up to. And whatever
that
was seemed to have turned her into a bundle of nerves. Wondering whether it could be anything to do with Luke Telfer, Gideon decided not. Luke was just as much of a stuffed shirt as when they had last seen him at Marchfield, four years ago. Although it was Gideon’s pride to be vastly tolerant, he had never cared much for Luke, and couldn’t understand why Theo had such a weakness for him.

‘This new hot blast process,’ Theo said, pushing away the remains of his salmon and leaning back in his chair, one negligent hand in his trousers pocket and the other twirling the stem of his glass.

Oh no! Gideon moaned to himself. Not the foundry. Not again! Not now. Theo and Drew were foundry-mad, but Gideon hated the place.

‘You’ve no idea how fascinating it is, Vilia dear!’

Vilia could never decide whether to be amused or exasperated by her eldest son’s Olympian certainty that he knew more about most things than she did. ‘Oh?’ she said. If she gave him his head, it would at least relieve her of the need to make conversation.

‘It’s not just that it produces three times as much iron for the same amount of fuel, but you can use raw coal instead of coke. And fewer furnaces produce the same volume of iron. Now, those facts alone would recommend it to us. But if we look even further ahead than that, we find that the result would be to give us a great deal of spare space. So many things we could use it for. More castings, for example, and perhaps finer ones. We must think about it very seriously.’

‘Yes,’ Vilia said flatly. She couldn’t, after all, let him go on. It was too impolite to Luke, whatever she thought of him. ‘Neilson patented it only last year, and the Clyde Ironworks are turning over to it now. We’ll wait and see how the system works in practice, and then discuss it again.’

Gideon giggled to himself. There was no one like Mama for putting Theo in his place.

Luke, patently bored, roused himself to ask, ‘Still want to be the greatest poet and ironmaster the world has ever seen?’

Theo gave him his faun-like smile. ‘Of course. Though I haven’t much time for the poetry side of it these days.’

‘I’m going to be just as good,’ intervened Drew belligerently. ‘I’m going to...’

‘That will do,’ Vilia said. ‘Gideon, I’m sure Luke has had enough of the foundry. Have you nothing to contribute to the conversation?’

‘Yes, Vilia. I’m sorry.’ He turned politely to their host. ‘You know, it’s funny being at Kinveil for the first time since we were small. The castle’s really very interesting, and it’s quite different seeing it from just hearing about it. Sorley showed us round part of it while you and Vilia were talking before dinner. I hope you don’t mind,’ he added anxiously.

Drew sat up in his chair. ‘I liked the listening tube best – that Laird’s Lug thing – but Sorley wouldn’t let me put my ear to it. He said it was rude to eavesdrop, but you wouldn’t have minded, Luke, would you? Just for a minute, I mean, so that we could hear what it sounded like.’ Luke simply stared at him, and Drew sighed. ‘Anyway, when I argued he got quite cross and sent us all downstairs. Just so’s he could have a quick listen himself, I bet!’

Gideon said, ‘Drew, behave yourself!’ and added apologetically to Luke, ‘Perhaps we can satisfy his curiosity tomorrow, if it’s not inconvenient. But I was thinking, I’m sure what’s happening in the glens must be every bit as exciting as all our new industrial advances?’

‘Yes.’ There was no humour in Luke’s smile. ‘In fact, I hear there may be some very real excitement tomorrow. My cousin Edward is just back from Edinburgh, with his sister Grace, and she writes to tell me that he’s evicting some of his tenants tomorrow to make way for sheep.’

‘Oh, no,’ Vilia exclaimed. ‘Not more!’

Luke shrugged. ‘He needs the space. Grace is afraid that, this time, there may be trouble. She wants me to ride over, though what she thinks I can do to prevent it I can’t imagine.’

‘But you’ll go?’

‘I suppose so.’

Drew sat up in his chair again. ‘May we come, too? Oh, please may we come? It would be so interesting.’

Vilia said, ‘My dear, we mustn’t impose on Luke’s hospitality. This is only a flying visit. We have to leave again for Marchfield, first thing in the morning.’

There was a howl of protest from the boys, even Theo. ‘Oh, Vilia! No!’ Drew’s treble piped above the rest. ‘You can’t make us go. It’s not
fair
!’

In a tone that none of them had ever heard before, Vilia said, ‘You will do as you’re told.’

The three of them stared at her, Drew looking as hurt as if she had said something quite brutal. Gideon thought how funny it was that Drew, even at thirteen, still behaved so childishly when Vilia was present, as if he were asking her to pick him up and cuddle him. Gideon and Theo had always had a very civilized relationship with their mother, who had never talked down to them, or snapped at them, or been anything but pleasantly reasonable. Certainly, Gideon couldn’t remember her ever telling them – as he knew many of his friends’ mothers did – that they must do as she said simply because she said so. Admittedly, he couldn’t remember her ever petting or hugging them, either, but he and Theo hadn’t minded. It had always suited them to be treated less as children than as under-sized adults. But it was different with Drew, who badly needed to feel important. It made him very demanding. Vilia didn’t like it, and Gideon had wondered more than once when Drew would begin to realize that, the more he asked, the less he was given. Vilia was determined that he must learn to stand on his own feet, and he didn’t want to in the least. He was like the last of the fledglings, who wasn’t going to leave the nest without a good hearty push.

His lips quivering, Drew said, ‘But...’

And then Luke intervened. ‘Unnecessary, Vilia.’

Her eyes flew to his face and then dropped again, hidden by the veiling lashes. For hours her mind had been fluttering aimlessly, looking for an escape, but now it began to work again. To leave Kinveil the very day after she had arrived could only advertise the fact that something was seriously wrong, and at least the boys’ presence lent her visit an element of respectability. To leave at once, she knew, would be to leave forever. If she stayed on, it might – just – be possible to salvage something.

Luke said, ‘We can talk again when I get back from Glenbraddan. And the boys may accompany me, of course, if they want to. You can send Sorley to keep an eye on them.’

He came to her room that night, in spite of everything, but she had found a length of wire in the orraman’s shed and wound it round the latch. He knocked softly, and his voice, grating, said again and again, ‘Let me come in. I beg of you, let me come in.’ But she lay in silence, watching the faint vibrations of the latch, and neither moved nor answered. And after a while he went away.

Luke wondered why Sorley, riding a little ahead with Drew, had reined in so sharply when he reached the bend overlooking Grianan. He could hear Drew asking excitedly, ‘What did you say, Sorley? You said something in Gaelic. You swore, you know you did! What did you say?’ But Sorley, the freckles livid against his suddenly white face, was paying no attention.

Then Luke saw why. The sunny, peaceful little amphitheatre in the hills, with its dozen houses, its grazing cows, its carefully tended lazybeds, its sparkling river, was peaceful no more. Luke’s first impression was of frantic, scurrying movement, and shouting, and screaming, and greasy billowing smoke, of a scene now brightly lit, then blacked out, then lit again as the clouds raced small and dark and tempestuous across the sun. It took several moments before his eyes and ears were able to sort out what was happening, even though his mind grasped it at once. This was trouble – real trouble – and it looked as if Edward had brought it on himself.

Weeks ago, the Glenbraddan factor had delivered writs of removal to all the tenants of the little township of Grianan, folk whose parents and grandparents, and, probably, great-grandparents had lived here for a hundred years or more, sharing the evil-smelling comforts of their homes with a cow, some hens, and their pampered ‘little old sheep’, and supporting themselves by unambitious, careful husbandry. And now the world had caught up with them. In correct and ludicrously inappropriate legal language, the writs had told them they were under obligation ‘to flit and remove themselves, Bairns, family, servants, subtenants, Cottars and dependants, Cattle, Goods, and gear, and to leave their tenancies void, redd, and patent, that the Pursuer, Mr Edward Blair of the property of Glenbraddan in the county of Inverness-shire, or others in his name, may then enter thereto and peaceably possess, occupy and enjoy the same in time coming.’ All to be accomplished by the Quarter Day next occurring, the fifteenth day of May in this year of our Lord 1829.

But Edward had been in Edinburgh on the due date, and the tenants hadn’t flitted and no one had made them. Luke reflected that the poor souls had probably persuaded themselves that Edward had thought better of it and would let them stay. They must have had a rude awakening this morning when they heard the tramp of his cohorts on the gravelled road that skirted the valley on its way to the coast. Luke could see several of Glenbraddan’s toughest estate workers in the crowd, and there were others who could only be sheriff-officers and constables, brought along by Edward to enforce the writs. The law was undoubtedly on his side.

A hammer to crack a nut, Luke would have said if he’d been asked. Upwards of twenty-five hard-faced, strong-armed men to evict a handful of ill-nourished peasants and demolish a few hovels. If Edward hadn’t wanted to be sure the people left, he wouldn’t even have needed to demolish the hovels, because his precious Cheviots could have grazed over their roofs without so much as noticing they’d strayed from the surrounding heath. It was difficult enough for the human eye to pick the houses out from the landscape, consisting as they did mainly of heather-thatched roofs that sloped up from low boulder walls to meet the hill against which they nestled. Luke had never been inside one, but he had been told they were warm and dark and womb-like, cushioned against the rain by their thick stone foundations and the layers of turf that underlay the thatch; quiet even in the howling gales that ripped through the glens, because the wind never caught them flat on, but swept up and over, following the scarcely interrupted line of the slope in which they were embedded.

And now two of the houses were sluggishly on fire, and Luke could see that he would have been wrong and that twenty-five hard-faced strong-armed men might not be too many to evict a handful of peasants. For there was far more than a handful, and although they were mostly women and children they were wild with fury, as bellicose and as dangerous as the fishwives who had marched on Versailles at the start of the French Revolution.

Even as Luke watched, the Glenbraddan employees began to beat a craven retreat to where Edward sat in his gig on the far side of the valley, while a portly gentleman whom Luke didn’t know scrambled hastily up the hillside towards where the Kinveil party had halted. Two sheriff-officers and a dozen men guarded his rear against the shrieking horde of women and children with their sticks and hoes and bannock spades and peat irons. Luke didn’t blame the man for bolting. He’d have done the same. There weren’t more than seventy or eighty on the rampage altogether, but they couldn’t have been more frightening if there had been a thousand.

Half-way up the slope there was an outcrop of rock, rather like a pulpit, and the portly gentleman paused in his ignominious flight and began searching distractedly in his pockets.

Drew was pulling at Sorley’s sleeve. ‘Who’s that, Sorley? Who’s that man? What’s he doing, Sorley?’

The man had found what he was looking for and, turning, faced the mob from his rocky eminence and began to read aloud. At first, Luke couldn’t hear above the combined hubbub of people and dogs and cows and ‘little old sheep’, but the people fell silent as they realized what was going on.

‘...Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons being assembled immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart...’

‘It iss the Sheriff-Substitute,’ Sorley said. ‘He iss reading the Riot Act.’

‘...upon the pains contained in the Act made in the first year of King George the First for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies...’

‘What’s it
mean,
Sorley?’

‘It means that when he hass finished reading, if the people iss not going away within the hour, the law says he can use as much force as he thinks fit, in order to make them. And if anyone iss unlucky enough to be killed in the process, that iss chust too bad.’

‘...God save the King!’ The Sheriff-Substitute folded up his paper again and restored it to his pocket.

Luke said, ‘Don’t be a fool, Sorley. You know he won’t use more force than he has to,’ and Theo – at his most irritatingly superior – added coolly, ‘In any case, his men seem to have no firearms. They can’t do much damage with those sticks of theirs.’

Sorley didn’t answer.

Luke wasn’t sure what he should do. He ought to go and join Edward, either to give him moral support or apply moral pressure, he didn’t know which. But to join Edward meant riding along that very exposed stretch of road with the forces of law and order on one side and the ‘riotous assembly’ on the other. He didn’t fancy it at all, even though the stones had stopped flying for the moment and the women seemed to be busy arguing among themselves. Certainly, he couldn’t take the boys with him. If anything happened to them, Vilia would never forgive him.

He gulped, and wondered how he was ever going to make his peace with her after yesterday, for at some stage during the watches of the night, the worst night he had ever spent, he had discovered that he wanted to, more than anything else on earth. His jealousy and hatred smothered by an almost death-like exhaustion, he had lain on his bed, still fully dressed, his bandaged wrist throbbing fitfully, and had faced up to the situation. And there had crept into his dulled heart a glimmer of understanding, a recognition that everything that had happened might have stemmed from no more than a single half-hour when Vilia and Perry Randall had given in to the demands of the flesh, as Vilia and he himself had done last autumn on the hill. His mind had shied away from that, because it made it all too real, too much to bear. But at some time during the hours of darkness, he had begun to grow up at last.