Turn of the Tide (39 page)

Kate said, ‘I’m sorry we have to go. I had thought . . .’

‘Yes, so had I.’ Elizabeth knelt down at her side and stroked the line of pearls ringing the waist of the dress. ‘It’s a pretty gown and a pity you won’t have the
chance to wear it.’

‘There’ll be other and maybe happier times. Perhaps you could all come to Broomelaw?’

‘You know I’d like that fine.’ Elizabeth was swivelling her wedding band back and forth.

Kate tried to be encouraging. ‘This thing with Maxwell. It can’t have been hard to sort. They weren’t long away and are back safe.’ She finished the folding of the
dress.

‘What Maxwell said . . .’ Elizabeth sounded choked, ‘. . . I should never have given him the opportunity to twist things so.’

‘It’s over now and no heads broken.’

‘It won’t be the end of it. It cuts too deep, and Hugh . . . it isn’t in him to hold his temper when provoked, however much anyone may counsel. And besides,’ Elizabeth
hugged her arms against her chest, ‘Maxwell is too close kin to the Cunninghames.’

Kate stiffened at the bitterness in Elizabeth’s voice.

‘If it hadn’t been me, it would have been something else. The Montgomeries and the Cunninghames have aye been at each other’s throats, and a forced clasp of the hand or a clap
on the shoulder and a few careful words of regret won’t change anything. I am heartily sick of them all, with their talk of insult and injury and the need for satisfaction. Why can Hugh not
find satisfaction in his family, with one child already to his credit and another on the way?’ She broke off, ‘I didn’t mean . . . Oh, Kate, I’m so sorry . . .’

‘Don’t be. I have felt and said the same a hundred times.’ Kate tightened her grip ‘You aren’t the only one to wish this nonsense over. We can’t undo the
past, but we need not live in it. You will come to Broomelaw?’

Elizabeth patted her stomach. ‘Or you to Braidstane. You have a good man and he did well to broker this peace with Maxwell. For that, I will always be grateful, however short its
effect.’

For the second time, the promised visit didn’t materialize.

October slid into November and no word coming from Braidstane, Kate buried her regrets and focused her energies on the rejuvenation of the attic chamber where the children slept. Munro,
recognizing the significance of what she did, made no protest, mixing bucket-load after bucket-load of limewash and trailing it up the four flights of stairs.

December came in hard, heralding a season of frosts that silvered the loch with ice a foot thick, so that he fashioned wooden skates for all but Ellie, the blacksmith fitting them with narrow
blades. In January, when it was clear that the cold snap would last, frost fairs were held along the upper reaches of the Clyde and it took little persuasion for Munro to fit runners to the cart
and take Kate and the two older children.

It was Maggie’s first experience of a winter fair and she hopped up and down on the shore, impatient for Munro to lace her skates. Kate and Munro each took one of her hands and they struck
out towards the braziers burning on the ice and bought chestnuts so hot that even with mittens, they had to toss them from hand to hand until they cooled enough to eat. A flesher had set up a spit
and was roasting a pig, the fat sparking like a scattering of bawbees. Maggie wrinkled her nose at the smell of mulled wine and roast meat and burning tallow, and wheedled three pennies from Munro
to have her name and the date scribed on a card with a drawing of the fair.

Robbie came flying to drag them to see a man who played a whistle and had a monkey who danced and gibbered on the end of a rope. There were tents with ‘fat ladies’ and
fortune-tellers and stalls selling simples: aloes, camphor and ginger, punguent salves of egg-white, rose oil and turpentine. One stall-holder brandished a pamphlet hailing tobacco as the cure-all
for everything from toothache and bad breath to kidney stones and carbuncles.

Kate dragged Munro away. ‘Don’t even think on it. I have no wish to kiss a chimney, supposing it could do all that is claimed.’

There were entertainers of all kinds: tumblers in rainbow colours, spinning and wheeling like human kaleidoscopes. Jugglers spinning plates on the ends of long poles balanced on their chins.
Musicians who scraped and beat and blew, so fine and so fast that those who hadn’t skates hopped and jigged on the ice around them. Best of all, a conjuror: his silver hair corkscrewed around
his face, who began his act by plucking a groat from behind Maggie’s ear.

She was entranced: tipped forward onto the toe of her skates, leaning into Kate that she might not lose her balance; as he spun cards into spirals of kings and queens, aces and jokers, hearts
and spades and clubs. He made coins appear and disappear from his hands, under pewter tankards, into a tiny, brightly coloured wooden box with a sliding lid. A dove placed in a tall-crowned hat was
gone in a puff of smoke, replaced by a multi-coloured streamer yards long. And best of all: the rabbit that hopped from his sleeve. The act was finished, the conjuror bowing and smiling, Munro
fishing for a penny for Maggie to drop in the bonnet he shook.

A slow, contemptuous clapping; a voice impossible to mistake. ‘Well, well. Munro . . . and family. This is an unlooked for surprise. Enjoying yourselves? I daresay this is cheap enough
entertainment, even for you.’ William’s eyes raked over Kate, lingering on her breast and she tensed, but tilted her chin and returned his stare.

Beside her Munro smouldered, ‘You’re a step from Kilmaurs. Are you likewise straightened, or is it that Glencairn does not countenance the aggravation closer to home?’

‘I play where I choose and tonight I chose here, and might have been the sooner had I anticipated so pleasant company.’

A gust of wind lifted Kate’s hair, whipped her skirt around her legs, and against her will she shivered.

William leaned close. ‘But come, Munro, you do not treat your wife well. A pretty piece deserves to be kept warm . . . I have a horse-blanket that would serve.’

She was rigid with defiance, determined not to rise to his goading. ‘Thank you but no. I am not truly cold, and if I was I have a shawl in the cart I could put to use.’

‘Some mulled wine then? You will not refuse to drink with me?’

‘We would not, but that we have already had our fill and the bairns hope to see the conjuror’s next act.’

‘This fellow? He is scarcely proficient, or not to a discerning audience at least.’

Maggie, who had followed the sense of William’s comment, though not all the words, shot out a foot and caught him on the shin with the blade of her skate. ‘He is clever and magic and
. . .’

Kate caught her round the waist, pulled her back, and though she would have dearly liked to kick William herself, reproved her. ‘Maggie! It is not well done. Apologize this
instant.’

‘Shan’t.’ Maggie escaped from Kate’s grasp, her eyes fixed on William, hard and bright.

‘Already feisty . . . like mother, like daughter.’ William was rubbing at his leg. Have no fear Kate, I take no account of a child’s pettiness, how ever ill-bred. When she is
grown, I shall take an apology then, no doubt the sweeter for the wait.’

Munro thrust Maggie behind him to turn on William, but Kate had beaten him to it, her hand whipping out, the crack as it met his cheek, echoing like a pistol shot. Off-balance he staggered and
then Robbie was hammering at him with his fists, Maggie, who had ducked round Munro, kicking furiously at his shins. A small crowd was gathering, the conjuror, with an eye to further profit,
offering odds on the bairns. Kate dived for Maggie, Munro for Robbie.

William straightened, and then as if suddenly aware of the folk who gawked, that they made of him a laughing stock, ground out, ‘Ill-mannered as well as ill-bred. You would do well Munro
to train your children better, or you may live to regret it.’ He spun on his heel and thrust his way through the crowd, daring any to stop him.

The silence lasted only as long as it took for the conjuror to re-start his show for the new audience that the confrontation had drawn. Maggie, no longer fighting Kate, was craning to see, but
Munro, recognizing the wisdom of putting as much ground between themselves and William as possible, said, his voice brooking no resistance, ‘Home.’

They found their way to the cart in silence, the children unusually subdued, Munro and Kate, though both occupied with this new danger, neither wishing to air it. On the hill they stopped and
turned to take a last look. Maggie, pointing to the moon riding high and full in the sky, whispered,

‘There is a man. I see his face.’

The lights of the lanterns twinkled all along the shore, the flames from the braziers flaring spasmodically, figures like dolls still skating on the ice.

Kate leant back against Munro, risked, ‘If it were not for William, I could have stayed all night.’

‘If it were not for William . . .’ it hung between them, the thought of Anna: of what they had lost; the fear for what they still had.

Kate swivelled, put her hand over his mouth, ‘It is the pleasure the bairns will remember, we should too.’ Maggie was cuddled into the crook of her arm, her cheeks rosy, damp curls
of hair poking out from her fur snood. Robbie began to whistle, bouncing his head from side to side.

Maggie stirred. ‘That wasn’t it.’

‘Was so.’

‘You can’t remember.’

‘You can’t whistle.’

Kate touched Munro’s arm. ‘Time to go.’

It was mid-February before the temperature rose sufficiently for the ice to melt on the loch and the streams to begin to bubble and splash again on the hillsides above
Broomelaw. The dreich weather that followed was more chilling than ever the frost had been and the children made brief forays onto the slopes below the castle only to come back dripping and
miserable. By the beginning of March, Kate too was desperate to escape the confines of the castle, and with the first blink of sunshine, pale and watery though it was, took herself out to attack
the scum of moss and blackened weeds that stifled her herb garden, clatching muck across the cobbles each time she went to empty her pail on the midden.

‘Is it a gypsy I have for a sister-in-law?’

Kate leapt up, squinting into the sun. ‘Archie!’ Her smile widened. ‘And Sybilla. This is a welcome surprise. I didn’t hear the horses.’

‘I doubt if you’d have heard a regiment, you were that engrossed. It’s as well we aren’t reivers.’

Kate scrambled to her feet. ‘I’m that glad to see you. We have been starved of visitors these four months past and are wearied of our own company.’ She looked at Sybilla and
then down at her hands. ‘I can’t give you a right greeting, but come in to the fire. The bairns . . . you’ll be a fine distraction.’ She stopped at the door of the kitchen,
nodded towards the stair. ‘You know your way, Archie, I’ll not be a minute.’

‘You’ll have heard of Sybilla’s father’s passing?’ Archie was standing on the hearthstone raking vigorously at the fire, to encourage it into a
blaze and turned his head as Kate entered the solar.

‘Had he been ill? The weather has been that bad and Munro with plenty to sort at home, hasn’t had the leisure to traipse about. And with Mary gone there hasn’t been the same
need.’ She touched Sybilla’s hand. ‘I’m sorry. For the death and that we didn’t know. You’re here for the funeral?’

Archie came to stand behind Sybilla. ‘The funeral was a month ago.’

‘Then . . .’

‘We didn’t get away . . . that’s why we’re here now,’ Archie corrected himself. ‘Sybilla is here to sort her father’s things: clear the house, dispose
of the animals. It’s to be hoped the sale of them will cover the rent owing.’ His hand rested on the back of the settle and she tilted her head against it. ‘We plan to be
married.’

Kate beamed. ‘I did so hope when you came, and then the talk of your father. I thought perhaps I was wrong. I am that glad.’ A shadow crossed her face then her smile broke out again.
‘And so Mary would have been. She talked of it whiles.’ She took both Sybilla’s hands in hers. ‘When is it to be and where?’

‘Soon I hope . . . if Glencairn is agreeable. Though we haven’t yet sought permission, I don’t think it will be a surprise and Lady Glencairn . . . ’