The Goose Girl and Other Stories (17 page)

‘Where is it?' asked the King. ‘What troops can be led against them?'

‘There are troops at Fort William in Inverlochy; and more, if they are needed, at Inverness.' ‘How far away?'

The Master looked enquiringly at Breadalbane, who answered, ‘If
they ferry across Loch Leven, Argyll's Regiment at Inverlochy are within twenty miles of Glencoe. And Inverness to Fort William is no more than seventy miles; less, I think.'

‘So to punish them will cost less than bribery,' said the King.

‘That is good. I had thought you wanted more money. But punishment is better. What will you do?'

As if to wipe from his face a film of doubt or fatigue, the Master passed his hands over his cheeks, pressing them down from the centre line of his nose—it was a gesture not unlike that which the King had made in the anteroom—and apparently moved by a similar uneasiness, Breadalbane stifled a yawn with a hand that moved firmly down from brow to chin. On both faces the expression hardened and was fixed, as if they had put on invisible masks which, being assumed, became visible by their obliteration of all tenderness, humanity, and natural feeling. Now the King, already masked, looked through his frozen calm of obligation at two men who wore no semblance of day-by-day humanity, but faces that were the artefacts of statecraft and their purpose.

‘I am going to ask you, Sir,' said the Master, ‘to sign this document. It is the customary letter of fire and sword. Scotland must be cleansed of Maclan and his brood. They must be wholly and utterly destroyed—and I ask for your authority on the order I have drafted.'

‘Is it necessary to go so far?'

‘These people, Sir, are no better than the wild Indians of North America. Call them, not Highlanders, but Iroquois or Mohicans, and you would better realise their nature. There is no room for them in our world, that must be ruled by law and shaped by an ordered custom. We must be rid of them.'

‘Indeed, Sir,' said Breadalbane, ‘they are a cursed nuisance to any landowner who tries to keep his estates in good shape and preserve his people against violence and murder. That by heredity and inclination they are rebels against your rule, is well known; but only we who live neighbourly with them suffer year by year the depredations by which they sustain themselves. They are cut-throats, foot-pads, cattle-lifters, blackmailers—one and all of the same vile stock—and the only way to deal with it, is to uproot and burn it.'

‘What are their numbers?' asked the King.

‘Not many,' said the Master, and looked to Breadalbane for confirmation.

‘Maclan can put fifty fighting-men in the field,' said Breadalbane. ‘Of old dodderers, women and children, add two hundred more.'

‘In battle,' said the King, ‘I have seen more than that fall before the armies met in main assault.'

‘In truth, Sir,' said the Master, ‘it is a very small matter; but if we destroy entirely this incurable clan of malefactors, we may win the large reward of pacifying all Highland Scotland. For when greater men see what will befall Maclan, they will think twice—twice, thrice, and again—before they utter a word or do anything to offend Your Majesty.'

‘That may be the conclusion,' said the King, ‘or it may not. You told me you could win them over by bribery, and you were wrong. But this is cheaper than bribery, and now you may be right. Where's the paper, and where do I sign?'

‘Here, Sir,' said the Master, as the King sat himself at the table. ‘And will you, Sir, counter-sign at the top as well as at the bottom?'

‘Why?'

‘To mark the urgency of the instructions, and fortify your order. It is customary, Sir, in such special circumstances as these.'

Slowly and deliberately the King read the order, and then, saying ‘I suppose you know your business better than I do,' signed at top and bottom.

Over his shoulder he handed the document to the Master, and with a restive, enquiring hand pulled from the sheaf of papers on the table a couple of letters, and read them too.

Presently he asked, ‘What are these? Here's one, dated December in which you write,
Delenda est Carthago
. And another, written this year, where you advise somebody, “I hope the soldiers will not trouble the Government with prisoners.”'

The Master showed no sign of the embarrassment and deep discomfort that he felt, but answered in a firm voice, ‘They are copies, Sir, of letters that I wrote when it appeared that none of the chiefs would accept your mercy and take the oath; and when, so it seemed, we would have to undertake military action on a large scale. In no sense are they orders, but merely an expression of my own opinion, written to advise and help the officers to whom they were sent.'

‘You give advice in a very peremptory tone,' said the King, and rose from his chair. He paused at the doorway to ask, ‘Do you think Cato was a happy man? Or does that not matter?' And without waiting for an answer, left them.

‘What has Cato to do with it?' asked Breadalbane.

‘It was he who used to say, perhaps too often,
Delenda est Carthago.'

‘If a man can't abide the consequence of policy, he should stay at home and grow cabbages.'

The room seemed to have grown warmer, and moved by the same feeling of discomfort ebbing, relief emerging, Breadalbane and the Master, almost simultaneously, pulled from their long coats handkerchiefs edged with lace, and like men now at ease after hot exercise in the sun, mopped their tired cheeks and brows. The masks of purpose vanished, and such weakness, geniality, or normal impulses as they possessed were again apparent.

‘That went more easily than I expected.'

‘Does he always come soft-footed and take you by surprise?' asked Breadalbane.

‘He doesn't stand on ceremony.'

‘I should sleep uncomfortably under his roof.'

‘He is the King we need. He has strength of purpose. And he has signed the order.'

‘It's a good king who does what he is told. And I shall lose less cattle this year, without Maclan in my arm-pit. Who, do you say, should have the task of destroying Carthage?'

‘The orders will go to Hill, at Inverlochy, but Hill is not the man we want. Too old, and he has been too long in the country. Leave an Englishman in the Highlands, in command of Highland troops, and within three or four years he's half a Highlander himself, and thinks his men are children whom he alone can handle, drill, and understand—and therefore must comfort and sustain. We need a stiffer man than Hill.'

‘Have you asked Argyll for candidates?'

‘There was no thought of making a positive choice until we had the King's approval, but we spoke of the matter, and Argyll—if you approve—inclines to think Campbell of Glenlyon may serve the turn.'

‘Poor Robin! He's fed off the crumbs from my table these three years past. He can't afford to say no: that's one thing in his favour. He's been a gambler all his life, and thinks every day of the year is a new card dealt by fortune—no nonsense about good works, desert, or merit—so there's another good mark. And he's now so steeped and pickled in drink, though he still carries himself like a gentleman, and looks, from a distance, a very pretty gentleman, that he's lost all fear of foresight and dread of memory. Yes, Glenlyon may be your man.'

‘If, then, you and Argyll agree—'

‘When do you see him again?'

‘Let us meet tomorrow.'

‘Dine with me, in my lodgings. I have a saddle of five-year mutton, and two or three dozen of old Margaux,' said Breadalbane. ‘Yes, it
is a good King, though I dislike the quietness of his tread—and we shall be his good servants.'

Two

On a sky as taut and clear as the skin of a black grape a half-moon and stars that quivered in the frosty air with, as it seemed, the energy of their own brilliance, lighted the white Shepherds of Etive and the dark straits of Glencoe. They showed a landscape of majestic fantasy that now, in the moonlight and the stillness of frost, looked like the chance exposure of nature's abundance and natural extravagance: as if geology, in a mood of prodigal invention, had shaped the mountains and the glen and the long sealoch for pleasure alone and the fulfilment of a romantic vision.

The half-moon did, indeed, discover wealth of a sort; for in some respects the glen was rich. Not, however, in a material way. Not by ordinary accounting. The houses that sheltered Maclan's little clan numbered no more, or scarcely more, than forty; and only one of them was built with stone walls. This was Maclan's own house of Carnoch on the shore of Loch Leven, and now it stood empty. All the rest were built of turf—of turf walls and a roof of great clods of heather—about a frame of wattle-and-daub, wooden door-posts, and a roof of rough-hewn beams with a hole in the middle to let out the smoke of a peat-fire that burnt against a stone reredos. There was no comfort in these humble dwellings: no comfort more than shelter against rain or snow or the howling winds that swept the glen. But, incongruously, they enclosed a measure of luxury.

The men had their weapons: targe and broadsword and dirk, often a targe richly patterned, and blades well forged and firmly fitted to comely hilts. Their clothes were rough and scanty, but they had their great plaids that gave them bedding in the hills as well as at home, and though they stank in the breeze when their wearers, with a gesture, folded and threw them over their shoulders, they flaunted bright colours and bold patterns.

The women went bare-foot, but their minds were stored with song and story. They laboured constantly, but laboured with music in their ears, and all their labour went with song. Their minds were rich with a knowledge, so close to them it seemed like memory, of ancestors who reached back in a dancing, desolated, loud-singing line to him who had fathered the first Lord of the Isles—and farther still, in kinship of the imagination, to legendary heroes. No woman and no man lived in herself or in himself alone, but all were bound by the same thongs
to a community and to history. They were whole and separate, yet variations on a theme; and the theme was rich.

They knew hunger in the spring, but fatness in the autumn. They knew the shrinking of an unfilled belly, and the joy of filling it full. They had no priest in the glen to tell them of the wrath of God, and the memories of old teaching that survived, all assured them of the mercy of Jesus and the unceasing kindness of his Mother. They had poor beds to lie on, and many were lousy; but their faith gave them soft pillows and let them sleep without scratching.

Poverty on the surface, riches in the depths. Within the clan there was no ill behaviour—nothing serious, nothing but boys' mischief—and the blood they spilled beyond the clan did not harden their hearts, for to do battle with their enemies was part of their nature. Between their hills they guarded peace, and beneath their poverty lay a hoard of secret riches.

The night of the half-moon a man came out of his own turf cabin, where the rush-lights gleamed about a spinning-wheel and his son knelt weeping at his mother's knee, and trod deliberately—not quickly, but with deliberation—to the house of John, Maclan's older son. The great hills on either side were thickly quilted with snow, but in the valley there was only a thin coverlet that dissolved beneath his feet, and left his foot-prints black and visible. He came to John's house, which, like all the others, was turf-built, but larger than most, and being distinguished by an upper storey was called a loft-house.

He opened the door and went in, saying ‘Hail to the house and household.' Immediately there was a stir of interest, and those within came from their corners and their several tasks to hear what he had to say. He was a man called Red Angus, and he had a reputation in the glen for his skill in piping, for his aptitude in singing ‘mouth-music'—that serves for dancing when there is no instrument, or no one to play an instrument—and for his knowledge of old stories and new riddles. He had not come to ask riddles, however, but to bring news.

He sat down beside John, Maclan's son, and was given ale. He said, ‘My child Hamish, who is a good boy and not much inclined to lying, went out in the gloaming to look for an old ewe that had not come home with the flock, and he could not find her. But high up on the side of the hill, in the corrie above the loch, he met a great beast with a hide of dark hair and yellow eyes, and a long mouth full of snarling teeth. He struck it with his stick, and ran for his life, and now he is at home and crying on his mother's knee for the fear he felt.'

‘What sort of a beast would that have been?' asked John.

‘I am thinking it would be a wolf,' said Red Angus.

‘There are no wolves here in Lochaber. Not now,' said John.

‘The very last of them was killed, by Lochiel himself—was it ten years ago? No, more. It was twelve years ago—and no one in this glen, now living, has ever seen a wolf.'

‘Your father will have seen one.'

‘I do not think so.' He called his own son, a boy of ten or eleven, and said, ‘Run to my father's house, and tell him what Red Angus has been saying. Then ask him if he ever saw a wolf in the glen.'

Maclan had left his big house of Carnoch because it was too near the Loch Leven ferry, and he was afraid of being surprised by soldiers from Fort William. He, who all his life had been fearless, was now grown nervous and melancholy, and he chose to live in a little narrow valley that lay south of the glen, where, in a turf cabin, he was less conspicuous. He had taken some furniture from Carnoch, and when the boy arrived he found Maclan and another old man—a winter guest, a Stewart of Appin—seated on good chairs at a round table, with claret before them and candles lighting the wine.

Such refinement was incongruous on a bare mud floor, in the smoke of an open fire, and the boy stared with astonished eyes at the unexpected scene. There were women in the room, some carding wool, others spinning or knitting, and one of them said Maclan must not be interrupted while he was talking to his guest.