The Proud Servant Read online

  But at this possibility, which should have cheered him, the young Lord James was so much dismayed that for the first time he really understood the meaning of the words he had so often repeated to himself, ‘My father may be dying.’

  And something very curious happened. For instantly his life at Glasgow with his tutor and his pages and his impertinent younger sister, receded, and became small, bright and remote, like something seen on a clear day very far away. The suite of little dark rooms made over to his use and coloured with all his possessions, turned into a set of painted boxes; his life in them, self-contained and seemingly eternal, became suddenly childish, unreal, like the life that he and Kat used to imagine for their toys.

  Yet never had he seen every detail of those rooms so clearly – the leaded panes of the windows that had shown them one tiny square at a time of the narrow street where carts and riders went racketing over the cobbles – the flowers that the gardener was ordered to put always on the tables – the yellow curtains in his bedroom, and yellow counterpane sewn with red (for he liked always the brightest colours) – and the dancing to fiddlers and pipers on the noisy boards – yes, and the lessons too, and old Forrett’s puckered face, always worried about something until one had chaffed that slow unwilling smile on to it – good old Forrett now riding far behind him and counting up expenses on his nobbly fingers – all these things suddenly floated up into the air, and a hundred years away – all finished – all over.

  For he knew at this moment that he would never go back to it, and that his father was dying.

  Chapter Two

  The old lord lay in his great bed. He was not really old, but he looked it now. His round rosy face had fallen suddenly into bluish folds, and his smile as he greeted Jamie was wavering and uncertain.

  Even his son, even his youngest daughter, Beatrix, who gazed at him in childish, frightened solemnity, were now remote from him; he was withdrawn from them, intent on his own business of dying. They could not accompany him.

  Time shifted round his bed. The present faded, grew invisible; someone from the past came forward to bear him company; they saw him look up into her face, and heard him murmur, ‘Margaret.’

  Then he died, and his heir was the next Earl of Montrose.

  Chapter Three

  His children, his sons-in-law, his neighbours, his relatives and connexions by marriage to the fifth and sixth degrees, gathered together to do honour to the old earl and to greet the new. The funeral began, and went on for weeks.

  There came to it the Grahams of Claverhouse and the Grahams of Morphie, the Grahams of Braco and the Grahams of Fintry, the Grahams of Orchill, the Grahams of Balgowan, the Grahams of Inchbrakie; there was Jamie’s cousin german, the Earl of Wigton, and Jamie’s brothers-in-law, Lord Napier of Merchiston and Sir John Colquhoun, the Laird of Luss; there was Thomas Hope, the fussy family legal adviser from Edinburgh; there were his five sisters, there was a sprinkling of lesser relatives and connexions, an army of pages, valets and servants. And there was room for them all, since the Castle of Kincardine was a hundred and sixty feet long.

  On the open hearths glowed huge fires of peat and logs and sea-coal. The meals were prodigious. Most of the guests brought contributions of game or venison, but that went nowhere. The housekeeper provided beef and mutton, veal and ham; poultry and game, ptarmigan and partridges and plovers, were bought or slaughtered in hundreds for the occasion.

  Claret and white wine and Easter ale were reckoned by the puncheon in the cellars, and cheese by the stone in the ‘petty larder’, where butter and eggs were kept cool, and herrings preserved in salt barrels, and confectionery in spices. Kincardine was famous for its savory-amber and pistache-amber. Salmon was so plentiful that it could only be given to the servants, who objected if it were served to them more than five times a week.

  Over barley and mutton broth, and mountainous pies of venison and blackcock and capercailzie, and horn and silver and leather cups of French and Spanish wines and March ales, the funeral guests told the new young earl how they remembered his doing this or that ridiculous and undignified thing when he was a baby.

  He had roared so when put back in his cot that his father had declared so lusty a young rebel would trouble all Scotland.

  Old John Graham of Balgowan insisted that the boy, when a few weeks old, had swallowed a toad. Jamie’s kinsfolk took his part in denying this unnatural charge, for it bore a possible taint in it of witchcraft, such as he might well have inherited from his mother’s side of the family.

  A woman of a dangerous stillness – many remembered the old earl’s rather timid pride in his beautiful wife. On the whole they were well content that she had died first – the funeral feast would not have been so comfortable with her in the house. As it was, it all went as pleasantly as if the cheerful and kindly spirit of their dead host were still presiding; and happy, friendly and intimate was all their talk of him.

  They praised his management of his farms and pasture lands; told how he had improved the tillage of ‘red land’ in his wheat fields with so many bolls of common salt, and half as much in sandy ground; how particular he was about the grazing of his cattle on fresh grass, turning them from one park into the other, and instructing his herds to clean the ground of dung after them, so that his acres fed twice as many cattle, and his cows yielded twice as much milk as those of his more careless neighbours, and Jamie’s estates had come to him twice as prosperous as in his grandfather’s day. So his uncle, Sir William Graham of Braco, told the young earl who sat at the head of the table, holding his head very high, because now at last he was a man, and the head of his family, sitting among the men of the family, and must be as tall as the rest of them.

  His eyes looked out on his kinsfolk, clear and grave, but his mouth turned up at the corners, giving it the shape of a half-moon, as though he were smiling. But he was not smiling, he was far too full of the importance of the occasion. He heard his elders talk of his fields and barns and byres – the talk of grown men, admitting him to their fellowship. But it was long and often prosy; and the stuffy air, breathed by so many, heavy with the smell of peat smoke and roast meat and ale and wine, was soporific.

  He must not nod nor yawn as though he were a sleepy child, and so he sat very straight, his eyes bright and alert. On his walls burned dozens of candles that had been made in the kitchens out of animal fat and perfumed with lavender oil to try and drown the smell of the tallow. In the strong draughts they guttered and dripped grease down their beautiful silver sconces; sometimes, to the secret delight of the new earl, a scalding drop blew outwards and fell on the head of a servant passing with a dish, or, better still, of one of the various family pipers who played in turn at each meal. They were more majestically jealous than their masters about precedence, so that it was pleasant to see their stately pace startled into an undignified hop.

  The candle-flames blew this way and that, lighting up here a ruddy nose, and there a combative bright eye, as one Graham contradicted another, and here a Graham spat on the floor, and there a Graham delicately bit the last pieces of meat from the fowl’s leg between his fingers before throwing it to the dogs, and all the lords and masters of this few-week-old world discussed the ever-disturbing politics of Church and state.

  Lord Napier was telling an old story of his father’s – ‘And I heard them tell King Jamie to his face – “You must make us all bishops if you make any!” ’

  There was an assenting roar of laughter, through which Sir Robert Graham of Morphie could be heard agreeing solemnly, a trifle bibulously.

  Sir John Colquhoun, who was tipping back in his chair and picking his teeth with a long elegant silver toothpick, shouted out, ‘Because we have been good enough to give England a king, is that any reason why she should give us bishops? A bad bargain, I call it!’

  He rolled his black eyes round the table to see how it had taken; for whenever Napier made a hit, his brother-in-law had to go one better.

  Archie Napier was a v
ery good fellow, he frequently declared, but he did hope that his brand-new peerage would not go to his head. Sir John had just been made one of the Nova Scotia baronets, who had been created by King James as a means of raising money for his new colony. Sir John had had to pay an appalling amount of money for his dignity and for thirty thousand acres of useless land on the other side of the world, but it was worth it, he would say with a deprecating smile, just to prove that adventure was not yet dead in the hearts of Scotsmen. And, though he did not mention that, it would ensure him further promotion when the new young King Charles came north to be crowned King of Scotland.

  But when would that be? King Charles had been on the throne of England a year now, and still it was only talk as to when he would come to Scotland. All the Scots lords who hoped to make their way in the world had forsaken their lands and people and were busy currying favour down at the court in London. That was no way for a young man of spirit – ‘let you remember that, my young lord,’ said Graham of Fintry to Jamie, who tried to look profound over his baked sugar comfits, and wished that dinner did not last three hours.

  They all said to him the things that his father had said, and told his father’s stories, as they sat at his father’s table, and drank his father’s wine. Down went his head, down, down, then up with a jerk.

  Why, out of all his long family of fighters and heroes, had the lot fallen on him to lead the peaceful life of a farmer? Why, when his ancestors had fought the English again and again, had he been born just after it was all over – so that everyone should tell him that the best way he could serve his country was by seeing that his cattle grazed a different grass on Tuesday from that which they had grazed on Monday?

  There were no more Border raids nowadays, no more midnight fordings of the River Tweed, no more sudden attacks on impregnable castles. Kinmont Willie had been the last of the raiders; the Border ballad was nothing now but an old song. The King no longer sat in Dunfermline town; he had gone south to London. There was nothing left to do but to go to the English Court and be a toady, or stay at home and mind his farms; nothing left but peace and profit and fat pastures and interminable meals and old men talking.

  He crumbled his bread into pellets, marshalled them into armies, pushed them this way and that in positions of attack and defence. Behind the rise and fall of the voices round him, other words were forming lines and forming rhymes, until a couplet leaped into his head—

  So, great attempts, heroic ventures shall

  Advance my fortune or renown my fall.

  Chapter Four

  Only kat was ever allowed a glimpse of his verses, but she was not appreciative. She never could see why one wanted to put words into lines of a certain length and sound – and anyway the poets could do it better. That was what they were there for, weren’t they? So she demanded, shaking back her defiant tangled head.

  When he expostulated, all she would say was, ‘Show them to Dorothea then.’

  Dorothea would have cooed her pleasure over his verses almost before she had read them, she would have set them to a tune, and sung them to her lute. He did not want that. It was just the difficulty in winning Kat’s attention that stimulated him to seek it. She would never try to express anything she did not feel, and there were few things that she felt except animal high spirits, the joy of exercising her strong young legs over the heather, either in riding or running, and the most exquisite thrill of danger.

  The more mettlesome a horse, the more determined she was to ride it; and her wildest pleasure had been a sail in a coracle on Loch Lomond when a storm had suddenly sprung up and all but wrecked the fragile craft. Those who had seen her then, said that of all the family she was the only one who truly resembled her mother. Kat had overheard this and was very proud of it.

  She said she could remember going walks with her mother at night and being carried in her shawl; but Jamie would not believe it, as he could only just remember their mother, and Kat was a whole year younger.

  ‘What do you remember? Nothing, I know, so that proves it. Where did she take you? Tell me that.’

  ‘To the churchyard wall,’ she answered, grinning, her eyes glinting at him.

  She was like a little wild black cat. He guessed her to be making it up, playing with the notion of their mother’s witch blood in order to try and frighten him. The tall nettles in Kincardine churchyard, black and ragged against the moon, plants plucked from a grave at midnight, Kat’s elfin face peering out from the folds of the shawl, and above it his mother’s clear, implacable eyes – the picture rushed across his brain, and would not be exorcized.

  He swore at Kat for inventing it, warned her she might find her tricks recoil on her own head, since her noble blood might not prevent her being burnt at the stake if she insisted on fastening the charge of witchcraft on herself.

  But one could not frighten Kat, only excite her to further mischief; she danced up and down, chanting a silly mumble-jumble she pretended her mother had taught her.

  ‘Liar!’ he shouted, and catching her at last, as she dodged and writhed away from him, he hit her hard, so that she squealed and bit his hand. The fight was regrettably undignified – and just as he had begun to feel himself so much a man.

  He had stood beside his father’s coffin, and seen it lowered into the vault of all their fathers; he had heard the wailing and the keening, and, above all, the piercing desolation of the pipes; he had been torn by memories of his father’s gentle and understanding humour.

  He had received acknowledgement and deference everywhere as the head of his house; King Charles himself had written to show his interest in his young kinsman.

  Yet he was squabbling and sparring with Kat again just as they had done since they were small children. He could thump her harder than she could thump him, but that was all – he could never make her acknowledge his superior judgement as elder brother, not even now he was head of their house. Dimly he had begun to see that it was not in Kat to acknowledge any authority; but this did not lessen his desire to dominate her; it was so poignant that when, as in the old childish days of their quarrels, she cried, ‘I hate you, I hate you,’ he answered with tears of impotent fury in his eyes, ‘And I hate you.’

  She flung away from him into the woods. She would never speak to him again. She would run away and die in a ditch, and only Moffat, her baby donkey, would be sorry, and he only because she would no longer bring him carrots. All her tenderness was reserved for Moffat, whose demure nose and furry forehead and soft, bulging eyes roused her to ecstasy.

  She rolled over on the damp leaves and stared round her at the lovely Glen of Kincardine. Above her hung the castle on its crest, its vast grey bulk seen here and there like a thundercloud through the thinning golden trees. Below her, the river of the Ruthven (her mother’s river) tossed and tumbled its rocky way, now white and sparkling, now mysterious in its black depths. She never looked at it without thinking of her mother. Some said they had seen her ghost just before the old earl died, and that she had come back to earth to fetch her husband; others said the spirit had been that of the lady in green who, when misfortune was coming to the house, walked under the Tree of Dule, the great yew that had been the Graham Justice Tree in the ancient days when all the family charters were signed beneath it.

  Now her brother was head of their house; he would go to college at Saint Andrews, she would do lessons with him no longer but would go and live for good with Lilias and Sir John in their home on the wooded shore of Loch Lomond. She thought her sister silly, and her brother-in-law too, and that his foreign servant, Carlippis, was the only person worth talking to at Rossdhu – so she told her brother, with the priggish conceit of thirteen, when they next met.

  Jamie told her she ought not to talk to Carlippis, who was a rascally fellow – and she seized the opportunity to say that there would be no chance for her to do so, if only he would agree to their going back together to Glasgow again. Why should he not go to college there, now that Glasgow had started a univ
ersity too?

  But she was told that girls did not understand these things, that it was unthinkable that he should go to Glasgow, or anywhere but to the college of Saint Salvator’s which his ancestors had helped to found at Saint Andrews.

  So she brooded, savage and miserable, and clenched her fists into hard round balls to keep herself from sobbing as she lay in bed with her two sisters, who talked, talked, talked, all the night, she thought. The three younger girls, Dorothea, Katherine and Beatrix, all slept in one bed with their favourite dogs, and complained of fleas.

  It was Beatrix who missed the old earl most. Stolid as she seemed with her round, rosy cheeks and placid eyes – spoilt by her father as everyone declared her to have been – there was enough sensitive perception in her round brown head to tell her that never again would she be so tenderly and royally important as she had been to her father. At ten years old she ceased to be a queen, and became a doggedly courageous child who was yet far more of a woman than her three-year-older sister, Kat.

  For it was she and not Kat who sympathized with Dorothea’s love troubles. Sir James Rollock, the young laird of Duncruib, had fallen in love with her from the very beginning of the funeral; but her younger brother, now the head of the house, had not been sympathetic, saying that he liked Rollock’s brother, William, the best of that family. It was the Napiers whose opinion would really count, but even dear Margaret had not understood how important it was – she had said that Dorothea should not marry yet, and had better live with them at Merchiston for another couple of years, until she had grown stronger and more capable of bearing children.

  ‘But many women bear children at sixteen,’ sobbed Dorothea, ‘so why should I not do so?’

  Kat kicked contemptuously up at the sheet on her side of the bed, dislodging a brace of spaniels. All this talk of bearing or not bearing children, and growing old enough and strong enough to do it – was there nothing else for a woman to do? Jamie would go abroad and finish his education in Italy and France, living in strange countries for years and years, like her tragic uncle, the Earl of Gowrie, who had studied for seven years at the University of Padua, and was supposed to have gained his knowledge of the Black Art there in a fencing class conducted by the devil himself. Certainly he had come back an excellent swordsman, which in some sort proved it.