A Dark and Distant Shore (76 page)

‘Has it had any effect?’

‘None.’ She shrugged fatalistically. ‘Oh, well. You don’t want to hear about my woes after your wearying day. Tell me, how are Elinor and Lizzie? You’ve left them at Marchfield?’

‘Yes. Too tiring for them to be dragged around the country with me. I’m going back next week, and then I’ve promised to take Elinor down to Tim Lawrie’s for a few days’ hunting before we set off home again.’

When Gideon went downstairs next morning, he found Magnus alone, staring despisingly at his breakfast eggs. Without looking up he muttered, ‘Kickshaws! What I want is some rare beef and a mug of ale to wash it down. But your mother says I’m putting on weight, and it isn’t good for me.
I
don’t think I’m fat. Just a little bit of a paunch, and I’m tall enough to carry it, don’t you think? She’s just trying to worry me – as if I hadn’t enough to worry me already with all this fuss about the kirk.’

‘Good morning, Magnus.’ Gideon helped himself to some kidneys and bacon from the covered dishes on the sideboard, and sat down. ‘May I trouble you for the mustard?’

‘Mmmm? Oh. Morning. Sorry I’d gone to bed last night by the time you arrived. I get very tired these days. I don’t sleep well.’

‘Oh, dear.’

‘Your mother says it’s because I don’t get enough exercise. But where am I supposed to find the energy for exercise when I’m so tired all the time? I ask you!’

‘A vicious circle.’

‘Eh? Yes, I suppose so. It’s worry that keeps me awake. If it’s not one thing it’s another. Pass me over the bannocks and marmalade, will you? Oh, and the butter, too. Betty Munro never sets this table properly, and your mother’s too busy encouraging the tenants to bite the hand that feeds them to have time to tell her.’

Gideon, never at his best at breakfast, sighed to himself. ‘Oh, dear,’ he said again non-committally.

‘You wouldn’t believe the ingratitude I’ve had to put up with! When I think how much hard-earned money I’ve put into the estate... You wouldn’t suppose it was asking too much to be allowed to appoint the minister, now would you? That’s all I ask. Not their life’s blood. I suppose I must be one of the most considerate, easygoing landlords in the whole of the Highlands!’ Magnus looked as if he were about to cry. ‘But it won’t do for them, oh no. It’s incredible, quite incredible. And that fellow Gunn.
I
appointed him. I gave him a piece of land for his cow and his hens. Dammit, I even invited him to dinner. And what thanks do I get? He walks out, without so much as a by-your-leave. Just like that. The ingratitude of the fellow. It’s beyond belief.’

Gideon mumbled sympathetically, through a mouthful of bacon.

‘Anyway, he can’t complain if I put my foot down, now can he?’

‘I shouldn’t think so.’ Gideon hesitated for a moment, but although he had a pretty shrewd idea of what the answer would be, he knew that Magnus expected him to ask the question. ‘What are you going to do?’ he said. Ten to one Magnus was going to do what the Duke of Sutherland had done.

He was. ‘Well, the fellow can’t go on living at the manse, and he can’t preach in any of the existing kirks. So when he had the incredible audacity to come to me and demand – yes,
demand
– a piece of land to build a new manse and a Free kirk, I told him, politely but firmly, mind you, that he could take his demands elsewhere. “And don’t bother to take them to Glenbraddan,” I said, “because Mr Blair is entirely in agreement with me! There’s far too much free-thinking around these days. That’s what’s the trouble with this country! Dangerous, seditious nonsense, that’s what it is. Nothing but harm can come of it. Look what happened in France in ’89,” I said.’

Gideon choked over his coffee. ‘I hope Mr Gunn isn’t a second Robespierre. I shouldn’t like to think of you in a tumbril!’

Magnus snorted. If Vilia’s boys weren’t being damned impertinent, like Drew, they were being frivolous like this one. Theo was the only one with a decent respect for his elders. ‘You never know where this kind of thing can lead,’ he said repressively. ‘Anyway, Edward and I have settled that we shan’t let Gunn have an inch of land either on Kinveil or Glenbraddan. Unless he’s prepared to hold those dour, depressing services of his on the roadside or the beach, he’ll have to leave the district. And then the people won’t have any choice but to go back to the proper church again.’

‘Have you found an orthodox minister to replace him?’

‘Edward has. He arrived last week. Officious fellow called Abernethy. Not that I’m interested. I’ve washed my hands of the whole business.’

But he hadn’t, really, as Gideon soon found out. When Sunday came, Magnus announced that the entire household, servants and all, would turn out to give Abernethy moral support on the occasion of his first service. It was as well they did, because the new minister would otherwise have been preaching to a completely empty kirk. Afterwards, however, he made the tactical error of reproaching Magnus for his failure to persuade, blackmail, browbeat, or otherwise encourage his tenants and crofters to attend, thus reducing Magnus to a state bordering on apoplexy. ‘Fine thanks for turning up to support the fellow!’ that gentleman spluttered. ‘Especially when I’m an Episcopalian, not even a Presbyterian at all!’

Tactfully, Gideon waited until after lunch, when Magnus went to lie down and recover from his exertions, before saying to Vilia, ‘Well, that was instructive in a negative kind of way! If I stay over until next Sunday, can I go to a Free Church service? What arrangements does Mr Gunn make?’

Vilia hesitated. ‘Complicated ones. Strictly speaking, he’s legally within his rights only if he preaches on the beach or the public roads, but that would be quite impracticable. So he’s been holding his services in the hills, sometimes on Edward’s land and sometimes on ours. He changes the site every week, but there’s always a danger. You remember how stupidly obstinate Edward was about the Clearances, and what the result was? Well, he feels just as strongly about this, and the law of trespass would apply if he chose to take repressive measures. So you mustn’t, on any account, breathe a word. Next week is especially important because it’s communion, and I should think every tenant and crofter for miles around will be there. I’ll come with you – Sorley will know where it’s being held – but I repeat, you must promise not to let Magnus or Edward find out!’

Gideon promised, and on the following Sunday they set out with only Sorley in attendance. By the greatest good fortune, it was a beautiful day, bright and crisp, with a clear blue sky and the hills aflame with autumn colour. Just the kind of day when they might really have been setting out for the hill walk that was their avowed purpose. Magnus, who hadn’t been up a hill for years, saw them off with a confident flow of unreliable advice about where to leave the pony cart, and which was the shortest and least exhausting way to the finest viewpoint.

Gideon’s mouth opened in astonishment when they arrived at the natural amphitheatre Mr Gunn had found for his service. It was oval in shape, set high above the glen, and bare except for a scattering of firs and a throng of people whose number Gideon estimated at almost three thousand. ‘Where have they all come from?’ he gasped. ‘This must be the entire population for forty miles around!’

Vilia nodded her fair head, with its plain, unobtrusive woollen tam. ‘Very nearly. That’s Archie Mackay from Fort Augustus over there, isn’t it, Sorley? And Donnie Mor and his family from Strome. And... Gracious me,
everyone’s
here, and they’ve all come on their own feet so they must have set out last night.’

In a real church, the communion tables would have been laid out in front of the pulpit and fenced off from the congregation, but today what lay in front of the preaching-box – which reminded Gideon irresistibly of a Punch-and-Judy stand – was an array of plaids spread on the ground. Lacking a fence, Mr Gunn made do with stern exhortations. ‘None but they who cleave tae the paths of virtue shall be permitted to approach the Lord’s Table. Let me no’ see fornicators or whores, or sabbath-breakers, or adulterers, or frequenters of concert halls or dancing assemblies, or other such seminaries of lasciviousness and debauchery. Beware the wrath of the Lord!’

Mischievously, Vilia whispered to her son, ‘That means no communion for
you,
my boy!’

In the last few weeks, Gideon had listened to more kirk services than he had heard in the whole of his life before, and more than he proposed ever to listen to again. He had no religious bent, and was never comfortable in the presence of the devout, largely because although he prided himself on knowing how people’s minds worked he had come to the conclusion that they didn’t work at all where religion was concerned. He couldn’t understand how, in this new, scientific age of the nineteenth century, people could still abandon themselves to blind, unreasoning faith. Especially people who, twenty or thirty years before, had been anything but zealous.

He had asked Vilia about it, knowing her own attitude to be ambivalent, but she had said frankly, ‘I don’t know. When I was small, everyone’s attitude to the kirk was perfunctory, but now... Something to do with the spread of learning, perhaps. Well over half the new schools in the Highlands and Islands owe their existence to the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, or to the Gaelic Societies, which are no less evangelical. No reading, writing or arithmetic, without an equivalent amount of Bible study. But I suspect it’s more than that. In the last hundred years the clan system has begun to lose its identity and its purpose. And with the estates changing hands the people can’t rely on the lairds the way they used to. The Clearances haven’t helped, either. The laird and the clan used to act as a kind of feather-bed for the people, so that there was always someone to turn to. But now there’s no one, except God.’

Gideon, from his position on the extreme fringe of the crowd, allowed his eyes to wander over the congregation. People of all shapes and sizes and ages, proclaiming their differences even in the backs of their heads, which was all he could see of most of them. Under the toories and tams and old-fashioned blue bonnets, the men’s hair showed grey, black, red, or fair, and the set of their shoulders beneath the coarse dark blue or brown homespun proclaimed six of the seven ages of man; the seventh, the infants, lay mewling and puking in their mothers’ arms in the best Shakespearian tradition. Unmarried girls were easy to distinguish since they went bare-headed, their hair neatly braided and bound with a snood of coloured woollen thread, whereas matrons all wore the curtch, a large triangle of white linen tied under the chin. A few of the girls wore garish dresses and amber beads, but most were in sober, home-dyed linsey-wolsey.

‘What
was that?’ Gideon suddenly asked his mother. His Gaelic was perfectly up to the demands of everyday conversation, but Mr Gunn’s magniloquence went rather beyond the limits of his vocabulary. ‘What’s he talking about?’

‘Original sin.’ Her face was suspiciously lacking in expression.

‘Translate, please?’

‘...as full of sin as a toad is of poison... our hearts are foul sinks of atheism... sodomy, blasphemy, murder... whoredom, adultery, witchcraft, buggery... if we have any good thing in us, it is but as a... drop of rosewater in a bucket of filth.’

‘Yes,’ Gideon said. ‘Thank you very much. I wonder why he left out cannibalism?’

There were prayers, then psalms with the congregation following the precentor line by line, then more prayers, more psalms, more exhortations. After two-and-a-half hours Mr Gunn gave himself and the congregation a breather preparatory to starting all over again in English.

Gideon, casting a hungry eye over the picnic Sorley was unpacking, noted that it wasn’t up to Kinveil’s usual standard. Oatcakes, cheese, and two flasks of straw-coloured liquid.

‘No cooking on the Sabbath,’ Vilia said. ‘No gluttony or other excesses, and no fetching water from the well. I forgot to remind you not to wash or shave this morning, either.’

Contemplating the flasks, Gideon said, ‘But drinking is all right?’

She looked at him with exaggerated surprise. ‘Of course! Everyone knows that yesterday’s water is flat and unhealthy, so that one must put plenty of whisky in it to render it wholesome. You and Sorley can share that flask between you. The paler one is mine. White wine.’

Gideon hadn’t much cared for Mr Gunn in the Gaelic, and in English he was even less attractive. Gaelic was a guttural, muscular kind of language, but although the native Gaelic-speaker, by some strange alchemy, developed a soft and rather pleasant lilt in English, Mr Gunn wasn’t a native Gaelic-speaker. In both tongues his voice was harsh, and now that Gideon was able to understand him better, he discovered that his mind was made to match. Of the many secessionist ministers Gideon had listened to, this thickset, florid man, with a mouth like a rat trap and a head of hair as creamy white and tightly curled as a cauliflower, was easily the most frightening. It was bigotry such as his that had sent men to be broken on the wheel and stoked the fires of the Inquisition, Gideon reflected, casting a sideways glance at Vilia and wondering how she could give her support to such a man. But she had said he was the kind of minister the people trusted, and that was what mattered.

And there the people still sat, all three thousand of them, listening to Mr Gunn’s tirades in a sober, concentrated silence broken only by an occasional wail from a baby or snarl from the dogs.

Then, all of a sudden, things began to look up. ‘The unrighteous shall perish,’ thundered Mr Gunn, ‘and the fires of Hell shall be fanned for adulterers and fornicators.’ His arm shot out, pointing. ‘For folk like
you,
Angus Macdonell!’

Every eye swivelled in the direction of his finger.

‘Aye, you, Angus Macdonell! For the Lord’s gaze is upon you.
He
saw you sneaking into yon house on Mearns Street when ye went up tae Inverness last week – yon house where lewd women are permitted to dwell, to the everlasting shame of the provost and corporation!’

There was no mistaking the unfortunate Angus, sitting about half-way back and slightly to the side of the congregation. The nape of his neck was scarlet, and the woman beside him was looking at him with an expression that suggested he wasn’t going to have to wait long to meet his doom. No longer than it took her to get him home.