A Dark and Distant Shore (57 page)

Drew had hopped down from his pony. ‘But they’re not a – a tumult and what’s-it’s-name! They’re just poor women who don’t want to be put out of their homes. Can’t we do something? Can’t we tell the Sheriff-Substitute to go away? It’s so silly waving a big stick at them – you can’t expect them to like it!’ He turned to Luke. ‘And really, Luke. I do think your cousin Edward ought to be nicer to them! After all, they’re
our
people.’

No one but Sorley knew why Luke was staring at the boy. The sentiments were Vilia’s, but the straight eyes and long, curling mouth were unequivocally Perry Randall’s.

Sorley reached out and pulled the boy towards him. ‘Peace, laddie,’ he said.
‘Na abair do sh
à
r-fhacal gus an oidhche roimh d’bh
à
s.
And before you ask, that means “save your fine words until the night before you die”.’

Drew wriggled free. ‘Yes, but can’t we
do
something!’

He looked as if he were about to take off down the hill, and Luke stretched out a long arm and caught him. ‘Stay where you are, my boy. This isn’t your fight.’ He looked up and caught Sorley’s eye. Through his teeth, he added, ‘And don’t criticize
me,
Sorley McClure. It’s not my fight, either.’

But somehow his mind had been made up for him. There seemed to be a temporary truce below. ‘Stay here with the boys, Sorley. I’m going to ride over there and have a word with my cousin.’

‘Oh,
good!’
Drew said, and Gideon thought wryly that the brat was so used to getting his own way – largely because it never occurred to him that he might not – that he probably thought Luke was going to tell Edward Blair to tell the Sheriff-Substitute to go away.

It was too much for Luke, his emotions in turmoil and his immediate desire to be anywhere other than here. ‘Hold your tongue!’ he snapped. ‘You know nothing about anything. My cousin is perfectly entitled to do as he pleases where his people are concerned.
His,
not ours. And most certainly not yours!’

As he rode off down the hill, only one of the four pairs of eyes that followed him wasn’t frowning. Theo’s superior smile didn’t even falter.

They watched him all the way along the road, passing between the two camps as if he were some innocent wayfarer going about his lawful business. And then he reached Edward’s gig and leaned down to have a word with him, and they could see Edward shaking his head vigorously, and then looking up to where they sat, and then giving a grimace. After a few moments Edward waved one man over – ‘the grieve’, Sorley murmured – and then a big, sturdy fellow who looked as if he might be a shepherd, and another with the heavily-muscled arms of a forester. More time passed, and then the grieve turned his pony and took it, sure-footed, across the slope to where the Sheriff-Substitute was still sitting among the rocks, his men warily at attention around him. They spoke, and the Sheriff-Substitute pulled his watch out of his pocket and looked at it, and then called his officers to him.

Sorley hissed,
‘Ceusda-chrann ort!’
It was so obviously a malediction that none of the boys even troubled to ask what it meant. For the constables were lining up now, ash sticks in their hands, and the Glenbraddan men next to them.

Gideon said suddenly, ‘Why are they all women, except for those three or four old men?’

‘The men iss always up in the hills at this time of year. They probably put off going until after Quarter Day. The grazing in the valley iss very thin by the time spring comes, and the beasts haff a habit of wandering off to forage for themselves. It iss not worth bringing them back until about now, and they take a bit of finding. And some of the men iss probably gone to the shore with the ponies to collect seaweed. They will be away for days, because it iss slow work, and the ponies iss not able to move fast with a great weight of wet dulse and carrageen. They use it to fertilize the potatoes in the lazybeds.’

‘There aren’t very many houses for all those people,’ Drew said disapprovingly. ‘There must be forty women at least, and almost as many children.’

Sorley wasn’t really attending. ‘Three or four women to a house iss not many in this part of the world, Drew. And it is in the nature of things for women to haff children.’

The floor of the little valley wasn’t wide, and the line of men with their batons and staves stretched right across it. The Sheriff-Substitute raised his hand and cried, ‘Clear the way!’

Clear the way to the houses that were to be demolished, the scanty belongings that were to be burned. Trample down the lazybeds. Drive the ‘little old sheep’ off their pastures. Send the hens squawking into the hills to become the prey of eagle and buzzard, fox and wildcat. Beat back the harridans who had shamed the majesty of the law with their bannock spades and peat irons. Skelp the living daylights out of the children who had dared to throw stones at their betters. Clear the way.

They did. They swept without mercy from road and river right up to the walls of the houses, hitting out at anyone and everyone in their path. The women, their violence dissipated by the hour of inaction, wavered and broke. One or two ran for the false shelter of their homes, others made straight for the hillsides. It was the older ones, most of their lives behind them, who rallied briefly against the baton charge before they, too, ran – grey hair flying, screaming mouths open, some with blood pouring from head injuries, some with arms or legs half paralysed – up the slopes and out of range of the panting, swearing constables with their sticks and the grieve’s lads with their horsewhips. The children, wiry and half naked, fled with them, picking up missiles as they ran, and turning to hurl them at their pursuers as accurately as if they had been bringing down a hare or a rabbit for the pot.

In less than half an hour it was over. Once or twice Sorley murmured,
‘Chan eil teud am chlàrsaich. Chan eil teud am chlàrsaich,’
and Theo said, with a boredom that convinced nobody, ‘Really, Sorley! You
are
having an attack of the Gaelic today. To save Drew the trouble, what are you saying?’

The thin face didn’t change. ‘There iss no string to my harp. There iss nothing I can do.’

‘We could go down and help!’ Drew exclaimed, predictably. But no one was listening.

Suddenly aware of a movement on the road behind, Gideon turned to see two small, poorly clad children, tearful and forlorn. The little girl was about five, he thought, and the boy no more than three. Staring at Gideon, saucer-eyed, the girl began in a tiny, strangled voice to tell him something, but he had no idea what it was. He heard a word that might have been
mathair,
and a phrase that began
bha an t-acras
before it was swallowed up in a sniffle of misery. ‘Sorley!’ he said.

They were hungry and they wanted their Mam, and they couldn’t find her. They had been sent off that morning to gather nettles for her dyeing and had come back to find their world in chaos. With infinite patience, Sorley succeeded in extracting a rough description of their Mam. Long black hair. And she was bigger than Mhairi though not as big as Una. She had a red plaid and a bonny silver brooch to fasten it. They couldn’t see her among the women scattered on the hill, but that didn’t mean much. In the end, Sorley had no choice. ‘I will take them to find her,’ he said. ‘Theo, you are in charge. Stay here.’ His tall thin figure, with the little boy perched on his shoulder and the girl by the hand, was soon lost to sight among the descending folds of bracken and heather.

The law had done what it was here to do by clearing the way, so that Edward’s employees could go about the business of repossessing the land, but it was still the sheriff-officer’s duty to give the final admonition. Even from where they sat, the boys could hear his stentorian voice as he looked inside each house, roared, ‘Are you prepared to leave as the writ of removal requires,’ and then waved the burning party forward. There were women inside two of the houses. ‘An hour to get all your goods out!’ the sheriff-officer bellowed, and passed on to the next.

Bedding, bed frames, spinning wheels, coggs, churns, benches, tables, clothing, cauldrons and griddles swiftly began to pile up outside the doors of the unoccupied houses, thrown out by the grieve’s lads with a kind of malicious vigour. The shepherds, meanwhile, were piling dry faggots against the walls, while the foresters clambered on the roofs and began to slash through the thatch and set crowbars and axes to the turfs and timber beneath. They offered an easy target to the children, making wild sallies down the hill with their stones and rocks. Two or three of them had slings. A triumphant chorus of yells ripped through the air when one of the foresters, hit above the ear by a well-placed shot, keeled over slowly and toppled the few feet to the ground.

It made no difference, of course. A few blows with the pickaxe were enough to loosen the walls, and the roofs were easy to burn. It had been a fine, warm, blowy spring, and the sun and the wind together had dried out the thatch and turf and timber so that they took readily to the flame. Thick, slow, and oily, the smoke began to roll up into the May sky. Gables collapsed, lethargically as in a dream; powdery turrets of soil and dust appeared; hesitant flames licked and curled and, sensing their power, grew and spread.

The women on the hill, sullen and scattered, sat and watched, prevented by the ring of constables from approaching any closer. But there was a low, continuous growl coming from them, and the children had fallen silent.

Suddenly, Gideon became aware that Drew had disappeared. ‘Where’s the brat?’ he exclaimed, and Theo, furiously, replied, ‘Would you care to wager that he’s gone to offer the ladies the use of his pocket handkerchief?’

Gideon took one direction and Theo the other. It was just as Gideon was picking his way carefully along the foot of the hill, between the women and the constables, that the growling stopped. He turned to see why.

The burning party had reached the occupied houses now. There was a sturdy old biddy pushing her oatmeal kist out through the door of one, shrieking at the sheriff-officer with such venom that he backed away and turned to the hovel next door, where a young mother who was little more than a girl, her baby balanced on one arm, was dragging a knotted blanket full of her worldly goods to a place of safety. ‘Come along, now!’ he bellowed. ‘We haff not got all day!’ She said something to him, pleadingly, and he answered with a shake of the head. It was clear that she was asking for more time and he was refusing. Even while they talked, the foresters had climbed on the roof and begun hacking and gouging, throwing down the turf and attacking the rafters. With a cry, the girl turned and ran back inside.

But the men didn’t pause in their work of demolition.

The growl started again and swelled into a roar of spine-chilling fury, and before Gideon knew what was happening he found himself caught up in a mad rush that swept the constables aside like so much chaff and thundered on almost to the walls of the houses, before it was halted by a living barrier, many-limbed as an Indian god. It was the grieve’s lads on their ponies, ponies that reared and plunged and whinnied, terrified by the smoke in their dilated nostrils and the shrieks and yells, and the heat from the burning shambles behind them. Their hooves lashed out wildly, and the riders’ whips rose and fell, and the women tried to pull them from their saddles, and then the constables attacked from the rear, truncheons flailing, boots kicking out at unprotected shins and grinding viciously on unshod feet and the hands of those who had fallen. The air was alive with noise, and a fierce, bitter rage.

Gideon, ducking, weaving, parrying the limbs and weapons that threatened on all sides, grimly went on searching for Drew, sure that he would be in the thick of it. An elbow drove into his diaphragm, winding him, as its owner drew back her hand to hammer at one of the foresters. Soon afterwards, he tripped headlong into a mêlée of arms and legs, where three or four infants had pinned one of the shepherds to the ground and were thumping every accessible inch of him. Still engaged in disentangling himself, Gideon looked up to see a face looming over him and a hand with an iron-shod stick in it. But the blow didn’t fall, and in a moment of clarity Gideon recognized that his gentlemanly clothes had saved him; clouting the rich was no way for a grieve’s lad to win advancement. His devout thankfulness tinged with a shamed anger, he struggled on, making now for the edge of the battlefield where he might be able to see more clearly. He had collected a painful number of blows, including one on the point of his shoulder that had paralysed his arm and brought tears to his eyes, before he emerged into the relatively clear space before the old biddy’s house and found himself face to face with a constable whose crazed eyes told him that, this time, his clothes wouldn’t save him. For a breath-stopping moment they stared at each other. Gideon, weaponless, knew that his hour had come. And then, flying out through the door of the hovel, came an enormous china object that hit the constable a tremendous blow on the side of the head and knocked him flat. Gideon, his mouth open, stared down at the unconscious figure, and at the shards of flower-painted chamber-pot surrounding him, and began to laugh a little hysterically.

Where, in God’s name, was Drew? Where were Sorley and Theo? Where was Luke? As he was scanning the disreputable mob of combatants, swaying, wrestling, tussling, he heard a crash from behind. The foresters had jumped down from the roof of the young woman’s house, their work half finished, when the assault began, but there was a soaring cloud of dust rising from it that probably meant the half-severed rooftree had collapsed of its own weight. While Gideon was still frantically wondering whether the girl had had the sense to get out in time, she emerged through the empty door frame, staggering, filthy, the baby still in her arms and one hand to a dazed forehead.

She was moaning something in Gaelic, but everyone who might have understood was too busy to hear. As Gideon started forward, she saw the incomprehension in his face, and stumbled towards him crying, ‘My children! My bairns! The roof hass fallen on them. Help me, please help me!’ Knowing that one of his arms was useless and feeling that his strength would be inadequate, he half turned to see if there was anyone who could supply some extra muscle power, but she mistook his response. Shrieking, ‘Then hold my baby that I may haff two hands free!’ she thrust it into his arms and turned back to the house.