Chasing Angels (23 page)

The monument, though, dated only from 1815. It was commissioned by a local landowner, Alexander Macdonald of Glenaladale, who, it was said, had been irked by the building of a monument to the
English Admiral Nelson on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill. A man who enjoyed life to excess and had a leaning towards the romantic and the theatrical, Alexander Macdonald decided that the sacrifice
of the Highlanders in the Forty-Five should be honoured at Glenfinnan, though, as was his custom, he omitted to pay the architect, James Gillespie Graham, for his work on the tower. The monument
commemorated the day when Prince Charles Edward Stuart, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, first raised the Jacobite banner on mainland soil, and proclaimed his exiled Catholic father James VIII
of Scotland and III of England and Ireland. Thus the ill-fated rebellion of 1745 had been started, leading eight months later to Culloden and the decimation of the Highlands and the clan system.
Kathy, sitting in companionable silence with Angus and Bunty during those evenings, devoured the books in Angus’s private library, discovering a history she hadn’t known existed,
because Scottish schoolchildren were deliberately force-fed English history, presumably in case learning of the tragedies in their own country’s past would incite them to rebel again. And
being so near to where it had actually started as she read, with living history just feet away in any direction, intensified the impact of what she was learning. Every day she walked on land the
Jacobites had walked on, the Prince and his followers had arrived by boat on the loch she lived beside, and they had probably stopped to gaze at the perfection of the changing light playing on the
water and the mountains, just as she did. The Prince and his party were rowed up Loch Shiel from Glenaladale on 19 August 1745, arriving at Glenfinnan after midday, and there the standard had been
raised, exactly where, some said, Macdonald’s tower would be built seventy years later, or, according to others, on the hillside beyond, below Angus’s land, on Torr a Choit, Hill of the
Boat, because it looked like an upturned boat.

If there is nothing Scots like better than romantic myth it is romantic myth that turns out tragically; if St Jude was indeed the patron saint of hopeless cases he must’ve been a Scot. And
so the story of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s doomed adventure would still be bringing tears to the eyes of Scots exiles across the world for generations, whether they knew the real story or not.
Some of the finest Scottish songs were written in honour of Charlie and the Forty-Five, beautiful and haunting, as long as you didn’t stop to examine the futility, the tragedy and
self-delusion of the events they commemorated. Kathy remembered singing in the school choir when she was a child. The song was ‘The Skye Boat Song’, much beloved of Catholic schools,
since had the Stuart dynasty been re-established, Scotland would’ve become a Catholic country. There had been, she recalled, a great deal of effort put in to teaching the children to
harmonise, and she had sung the descant, which seemed appropriate, given that she had felt out of tune her entire life. The Young Pretender, a tall, slim, handsome, bisexual Frenchman, drew support
from the all-powerful clan chiefs, who pledged their subjects to the Jacobite cause, ordinary Highlanders obliged to die for their chiefs. And die they did, in great numbers, though worse was to
come. The Prince escaped five months after Culloden, being conducted from one place of safety to another, often barely one step ahead of discovery and certain execution, and though he was a
fugitive with the immense bounty of £30,000 on his head, he wasn’t betrayed. He returned to France by ship from Loch nan Uamh, Loch of the Caves, where he had landed fourteen months
before, leaving ‘his’ people to face the terrors of the Duke of Cumberland’s army as it marched north bent on retribution, ‘Butcher Cumberland’ as he came to be known.
Cumberland’s men, the very ones who, as Kathy remembered from her school trip, had suffered from vertigo as they marched through the mountains in search of Highland men, women and children to
kill. They systematically pillaged and destroyed every village they came to and those who survived, already poor people, were left to starve. The London government passed laws demanding the
surrender of weapons, banning the speaking of Gaelic and ‘the wearing of the kilt, tartan, or any part of the Highland garb’. The clan chiefs were stripped of their powers and became
ordinary landlords, though they were still strong enough to burn their tenants out of their homes and force them to leave the land some sixty years later, to be replaced by a more prized, lucrative
crop: sheep. Generations of families that had survived the endeavours of Prince Charlie and the Jacobites, followed by the attentions of Butcher Cumberland and his men, were herded like cattle on
to ships taking them to foreign lands in what became known as the Highland Clearances. ‘Bonnie Charlie’s noo awa’, Safely ower the friendly main,’ went ‘The Skye Boat
Song’; yup, the royal personage made damned sure of that. ‘Mony a heart will break in twa, Should he ne’er come back again.’ Aye, but more Highland hearts would’ve
kept beating had he stayed put in Paris in the first place. Had she known all this, she mused, she would’ve sung quite another descant to the powerful lament to ‘the King across the
water’, she would’ve rewritten all the verses of the song come to that. Something along the lines of ‘Why did ye come here in the first place?’ and ‘Don’t bother
comin’ back again, We’ve got troubles of our own, So don’t call us, we’ll call you.’ And of course Charlie didn’t come back, he died a syphilitic, drink-sodden
death in Italy, without gracing Scotland with his company ever again. He died, it was said, still thinking of his beloved Scotland and feeling sorry for himself. Oh, well, at least it confirmed
that the blood running through his royal veins was indeed Scottish, it was probably near enough 100% proof when he died. She wondered if, like another maudlin, sentimental Celt of her acquaintance,
Charlie Boy sang about too much rain falling in his life, or whatever tear-jerking ditty had been popular at the time.

Kathy looked up from her book and gazed down on the monument. The stone figure on top was assumed by most people to be a statue of Prince Charlie, but it wasn’t; it was a representation of
all the Highlanders who had suffered in the Forty-Five, a small enough tribute when you thought about it. And to think Old Con sobbed over the tragedies in his little life, she thought with a wry
smile. What weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth might there have been had he known the history of the Western Highlands? It would’ve been sackcloth and ashes for life! But Con didn’t
regard himself as a Scot, he wouldn’t even have agreed to be called a Celt, come to that. Con was an Irishman in exile, he didn’t belong in Scotland. One day, he knew, he would return
‘home to the ould country’, his fabled Emerald Isle, though he had never set foot there and never would. She hated his sentimentalism, his phoney emotion, yet something stirred in her
as she learned of the Forty-Five and looked around her at where it had happened. Sorrow, pity, fellow-feeling, it was all of those things, and anger too at what had become of the people. She
didn’t know them, their fates had been played out a couple of hundred years before she had even known they had existed, but the geography had changed little and it was easy to imagine them
haunting this place. At least she
hoped
it was imagination, ‘
Or else, dear God! Ah’m turnin’ intae Con!’
she thought with horror.

She rarely thought of her father, or of the rest of the family. Even if Con was a tie, a loose tie that would be there till he died, Glasgow was a long way off, another world away. It was like
being reborn; somehow she seemed to belong in Glenfinnan. All through her life in Glasgow she had felt out of place, everything about it was strange, as though she had landed there by mistake.
Maybe, she thought, the stork had dropped her down the wrong chimney, and the child destined for Moncur Street had grown up in the Western Highlands instead, foul-mouthed and angry, raging at the
stupid teuchters she had been forced to live among, just as Kathy had raged at the family she had been landed with. In Glasgow she had to keep one step ahead just to survive because nothing seemed
to work for her, and the exertion kept her short-tempered and miserable. On the West Coast there was no effort, she just lived happily within her surroundings. It was like a time of renewal, too,
after the disasters that had come along, one after another, and she grasped the chance to reinvent herself. Her life in the city was carefully filed away in a secret place in her mind that she
would try her damnedest to forget existed. She was no longer who she had once been, she was now who she should always have been. A few months after leaving Glasgow she wrote a note to her cousin,
Harry, because she and Harry had always shared a special bond. Not that they established a correspondence, that wasn’t what she wanted, but she was reluctant to let the special link she had
with him die. She told him that she didn’t want anyone else to know where she was, that she was never coming back, and had been quite happy when Harry hadn’t replied. He didn’t
have to reply, he was Harry, they understood each other. But he had her address, and one day she would be sorry she had given it to him.

10

In Stevenston Street Kathy was preparing herself for the last couple of acts of Con’s departure. Act One was over. After three months that had seemed like three hundred
years he had finally died and been carted out of his home, dressed in his HLI regalia and with his Child of Prague collection rumbling about inside his coffin. Act Two had been the Receiving,
taking him to lie in St Alphonsus’s chapel overnight, and now all she had to do was get through the funeral mass, then the reception afterwards. By that afternoon she would finally be free,
even if there was the small matter of facing Frank McCabe about the missing money. So even though the drama was only halfway finished it felt more like being on the home stretch, and this time,
when she got home to Glenfinnan, she wouldn’t be keeping in touch with Harry. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.

She didn’t know if she had any real justification for being disappointed in her cousin, but she was. Jessie had laughed at him, at his conjuring tricks and his fortune-telling, and she
wondered if her aunt had simply known him better and so had fewer illusions from the start. But Kathy had always adored Harry. If she ever had to re-visit Glasgow – touch wood – she
expected to find him happy, healthy and wealthy. It wasn’t just his looks, though being so film-star gorgeous certainly helped pad out those illusions, it was everything about him. His good
nature, his intelligence, his ability to understand all her confused thoughts throughout her life; there had never been a single thing she’d needed to explain to him, he had understood
instinctively. To Harry she had entrusted her dreams of one day being a writer, when she had read a book she liked she had given it to him, bestowed it upon him as a golden gift, and Harry had
taken it each time with his generous smile, silently sensitive to the precious treasure he had been given. He knew of her visits to art exhibitions, deep, dark secrets she never told anyone, and
when she had discussed the peculiarities of their shared family, he smiled with easy understanding. Throughout her childhood Harry had been the keeper not only of her secrets, but more than that,
of her soul. But when she had been forced back to Glasgow by the news of the onset of Con’s illness five years before, it was Harry who had contacted her, he had brought this duty to her and
laid it upon her. Her own fault, of course, for giving him her address, but still, it rankled that Harry of all people should assume she should know, that she wanted to know. And so she had come
back. Why? There was no clear answer to that no matter how many times she had asked herself the question, but she knew that she had always been aware of family ties, even those she would’ve
been happy not to have. She supposed her mother had instilled that into her, and then her own natural instinct to always complete the circle, to always end things properly, had compounded
Lily’s morality. She had done her best to keep in touch with Aggie after Lily’s death because her mother would’ve wanted her to do so, and probably Con fell into that category
too, especially since her brother, Peter, the adored absent son, had never again made contact. Her attendance, she supposed, fell into the duty category, not to Aggie or Con themselves, but to
Lily. She did it because Lily would’ve been disappointed in her if she hadn’t; she was fulfilling Lily’s duty for her. And it was during that first phase of Con’s illness
that she met her cousin again after fifteen years. She had been so shocked by the meeting that she had to dig deep to rationalize it. Fifteen years was a long time, she told herself, people change,
she had changed. What had she expected? The same fresh-faced boy, his early promise now blossomed into a mature, happy and successful man? Well, yes, that was exactly what she had expected, and no
matter how hard she tried to convince herself that she had been expecting too much, the disillusion had found its way into cracks and crevices she didn’t know existed in her vision of Harry,
and had set there like concrete. Maybe somewhere she had always had her suspicions, but if she had, she had kept them locked away in her own private filing system. What was it Jessie had said of
her son? ‘Less there than meets the eye.’ That was it.

The first time she saw him was at her father’s bedside in the Royal Infirmary, just after the nerves in his spinal column had frozen for good. Con was lying on the fresh, crisp bed linen,
so delighted with the attention he was receiving that you’d have thought someone had told him he would live for ever, and he barely acknowledged the arrival of the daughter he hadn’t
seen or heard of in all those years. It was as if, for both of them, they had seen each other hours ago, and neither had been anxious for the time to have passed quickly. ‘Why the hell am Ah
here?’ she asked herself. If she had ever needed proof of the complete absence of affection between her father and herself, it was contained in that passing glance; she only hoped that
wherever Lily was, she knew how much she was in her daughter’s debt. But there again, Lily had been looking after someone for her all this time too. The man standing at the bed with his back
to her looked familiar, but the impression was so
not
Harry that she decided not to recognise him. Then he turned round to face her and she felt a prop giving way somewhere in her life. He
wore a white, shiny suit with a royal blue shirt open to mid-chest level, and dangling there – dear God, it
couldn’t
be! – was a long gold chain with some sort of medal
attached, the size of an old half-crown. She tore her gaze away and looked down to the floor. She had hoped this would stop her from giggling out loud, until she saw his bare feet inside a pair of
Indian thong sandals. It must be a way-out doctor, she decided desperately, the medical profession had replaced the traditional white coat with a white suit, and perhaps they were more open these
days to alternative outlooks, even to the mysticism of the East. Please, let it be that! Then she looked up at the face beneath the long, shaggy, dark blond hair and all was lost; it was indeed
Harry. But still, she reminded herself, swift, superficial judgements were wrong; think of Angus, and how she could’ve dismissed him as an oddball just because of how he chose to look. But
this was
Harry
, not a stranger she might pass in the street, they had known each other all their lives. If this was the same Harry he should be wearing an understated, handmade suit, with a
silk shirt and a discreetly expensive Hermes tie. His carefully coiffed locks should complement the tan he had picked up on a secluded beach somewhere exotic, and he should be carrying a neatly
folded cashmere coat, with Gucci shoes on his feet. Instead he looked like the result of some hideous genetic accident. It was as if Mr Whippy the ice cream man, Jesus Christ and Medallion Man had
for some reason been in a laboratory while experiments in fragmentation were being conducted. Only things had gone wrong, there had been an explosion and they had all ended up with bits of each
other. ‘
They should sue
,’ she thought grimly. But it was Harry. It
was
Harry.