Pat McIntosh - The Stolen Voice

Now she was seated in the shadowed interior of the house, answering the inevitable civil inquisition about her background, origins and status and accepting oatcakes and buttermilk from one of the granddaughters, a plain girl of about twelve with a strong resemblance to the young man who had met them. Socrates lay at her feet; Murdo Dubh had vanished, taking Steenie with him. A surprising number of people had passed the doorway, peering casually through it with a greeting in Ersche for the old woman or the girl. Hens wandered in and out, a loom clacked somewhere, and from time to time, echoing across the yard, there was a piercing scream like a peacock’s. Through the open door Alys could see a woman spinning on a great wheel slung on the side of one of the other houses, padding back and forward on bare feet, her slender ankles and calves visible below her short checked skirts. She was singing like the reapers; there seemed to be music everywhere. A long cradle near her rocked erratically and seemed to be the source of the screams.

‘But you came there from France, mistress?’ went on Mistress Drummond. ‘There’s a thing, now. And what brought you into Scotland?’

‘My father is a master-mason,’ she answered. ‘He is building for Archbishop Blacader at the Cathedral.’

‘That would explain it,’ said the old woman, nodding. She wore a dark red gown of ancient cut, laced over a checked kirtle which was probably her everyday dress about the place, and the linen on her head and neck was crisp. She herself was bent and shrunken, so that the wide wool skirts had to be kilted up over a man’s worn leather belt; her face was a veil of wrinkles, her hands crabbed, but her voice was sweet and clear. ‘And what is Robert Blacader building?’ she asked, with interest.

Alys opened her mouth to answer, and there was another of those peacock screams. Mistress Drummond peered round. ‘Agnes, mo chridh , go and see what ails Iain, will you?’ The girl slipped out, and her grandmother turned her smile at Alys, awaiting her answer as if nothing had happened.

This was difficult, she thought, explaining the Fergus Aisle. ‘And yourself, Mistress Drummond,’ she said, finally turning the questioning. ‘Are you from these parts?’

‘Oh aye, indeed. A MacLaren of Auchtoo, I am. My father was the chief man of this country, and my brother after him, until the king put his kinsman William Stewart into Balquhidder as his bailie.’

‘Kings do what they must,’ said Alys.

‘Aye,’ said Mistress Drummond darkly. ‘But I wedded James Drummond,’ she added, ‘and St Angus blessed the marriage, and we dwell here in Glen Buckie now.’

‘Does your man live?’ Alys asked.

‘James?’ she said, suddenly vague. ‘And we have four sons,’ she added, ‘and also a daughter, and all well and doing well.’

‘My!’ said Alys in admiration, comparing this with what the elder Murdo had told them last night and finding it incompatible. ‘Are they all wedded?’

‘Not all,’ the old woman said in that musical voice. ‘For Andrew is a Canon at Dunblane, and my son David is by far too young to be wed.’

Alys caught her breath, trying to work out how to answer that, but was forestalled. There was a shrill babble of Ersche in the yard; Socrates raised his head to stare, and the spinner and another woman came in at the open door, scolding like rival blackbirds and followed by the eerie peacock wail.

‘Caterin! Mòr!’ said Mistress Drummond, and the argument broke off. ‘Not before our guest, lassies,’ she said, though neither woman was young. Alys rose and curtsied. ‘This is my good-daughters, the wife of Patrick and the wife of James.’

‘Indeed I am pleased to meet you both,’ said Alys. ‘Murdo Dubh MacGregor was telling me as we rode up Glen Buckie, that you make the best cloth in Perthshire for colour and web.’

The two looked sideways at one another in the dim light, and curtsied simultaneously in acknowledgement of this, setting their bare feet as precisely as any lady at court.

‘It is my good-sister’s weaving that does it,’ said the spinner, a small woman, her body still curved and sweet under her checked kirtle, her face an extraordinary little triangle within the folds of her linen headdress. ‘She can weave like no other in Balquhidder.’

‘Och, no, Caterin, it will be the colours you put in the thread,’ said the taller woman. Another scream resounded from the other side of the yard, and Caterin jerked like a child’s toy.

‘He’s wanting his uncle,’ she said to her mother-in-law, still speaking Scots. ‘You know how Davie can soothe him. I wished Agnes to go up the field and fetch him, and she will not be permitting it — ’ She tossed her head at the weaver.

‘Agnes has enough to do — ’

‘But Agnes was about her duties under my roof,’ said the old woman. Alys watched, fascinated by the contradictions in the scene. ‘Will you go, Mòr, and fetch the boy in?’

This had not been the answer Mòr hoped for or expected. She recoiled, drew breath on a retort of some sort, then turned on her heel and walked out of the house with uneven steps.

‘Is that the laddie that’s returned to you?’ Alys asked, snatching her chance.

‘That it is,’ said Caterin. ‘You would think we were in one of the old tales, for such a thing to happen here at Dalriach.’

‘I could hardly believe what Murdo Dubh was telling us,’ Alys confessed. ‘Does he have the right of it?’

‘Murdo? Likely he does. He’s hardly off Dalriach land long enough to sleep, the notion he has to Mòr’s Ailidh,’ pronounced Caterin, confirming Alys’s deduction. ‘He is knowing more of our business than we are ourselves.’

‘It was a wonderful thing, and Our Lady be praised for the moment it happened. My laddie came walking down the glen,’ said Mistress Drummond, ‘and I caught sight of him from where I sat at the end of the house there.’ She had clearly been waiting to recite her tale again. ‘I thought to myself, There is Davie coming now , and then I minded that Davie was gone for thirty year, and then I looked again and I saw it was Davie right enough. Is that not a strange thing?’

‘It must have given you a great shock,’ said Alys.

‘Och, indeed yes, such a turn it gave me, I thought the heart would fly away out of my breast. I hurried to meet him, and he saw me coming and he said, do you know what he said to me? He said, Is it my grandmother? Did you ever hear the like? And I said, Heart of my heart, it is your own mother . And he said, Do you know me, then? As if I would not know my own bairn!’

Alys glanced at Caterin, who still stood near the open house door, and caught a strange, wry expression crossing her tiny face. Sensing Alys’s gaze, she looked round and gave her a smile which seemed to convey sympathy for Mistress Drummond and something else besides. There was another scream from outside.

‘But how did you know him at such a distance?’ Alys asked carefully. ‘Was it his bearing, or the way he walked, or what he wore?’

‘All of those,’ said the old woman, nodding. ‘And the great shock of hair, white as flax, like a coltsfoot gone to seed. All my bairns have that hair, you see, lassie. Mistress Mason,’ she corrected herself. ‘They take it from their father, and he took it from his mother, an Beurlanaich , that was English.’

‘English?’ repeated Alys in astonishment. ‘How ever did that come about?’ The two countries have been at war for centuries, she thought, how would a man living in this remote place find an English wife?

‘My good-father met her at Stirling when he was there selling beasts, and her a sewing-woman in Queen Joan’s household. My man was the only child they reared, all the others was carried off with the Good People. But there is nobody else in the whole of Balquhidder that has such hair.’ She chuckled. ‘I was always saying to my man, he would never stray from me, for I would be knowing his get wherever I saw it, and my sons’ the same.’