Bonnie Dundee Read online

  Not that any work was expected of me that day. Word as to that had come down from the house. And so I found myself with time on my hands, and yet not quite knowing what to do with it. It was the day of Lady Mary Fair, which as it were ends and crowns the summer in Dundee; and from below came the distant mingling of voices singing, shouting, quarrelling and crying their wares, fiddles and horse hooves and the blare of side-show drums and trumpets that was the voice of the town enjoying itself. I could have gone down to join it: but I did not feel in the mood for noise and crowds and sword-swallowers and gilded gingerbread. At least not yet. Maybe later, when the lanterns were lit and some of the other stable hands would be going down.

  Now in one corner of the stable-yard grew an ancient fig tree. Age had robbed it of most of its power to bear fruit, and even its leaves were not so thick and heavy as they must have been in its prime. And time and again, when the light fell in a certain way, striking through what leaves there were, and blotting its shadow velvet dark on the wall behind it (but always at a time when I had work to do), the sight of the old tree had as it were made my drawing hand itch. For the knotted trunk and branches were like some fantastic beast, a dragon maybe, caught in its coilings and turned into a tree.

  And that afternoon, as I sat on the edge of the horse-trough and wondered what to do, it caught at my awareness and made my drawing hand itch again. And me with the rest of the day before me empty and unmarked as a leaf of virgin paper.

  I fetched down the drawing materials which I had bought with some of my wedding silver and kept in a box under the head of my pallet bed, and settled myself on a convenient mounting block, to the delights of trying to capture my vision.

  Once or twice as I worked, one of the other grooms or horseboys peered over my shoulder in the by-going, puzzled, and went his way. It had become accepted in the Dudhope stables that I was daft in this one particular; but if I chose to spend my free time scribbling on bits of paper, instead of playing dice or cock-fighting or hanging round the kitchen door after the lassies, there was no harm in it and I would maybe come to more sense as I grew older. Meanwhile, I could make sketches of men or horses or anything else they called for, which amused them from time to time and was maybe none so bad practice for me either.

  So I worked on, unmolested, trying to catch the fantastic twists and coils, the ugly-beautiful strength of the old tree, the contrasting textures of rough fissured bark and smooth fleshy leaf and ripening fruit with a brown-black crayon on the blank white paper.

  It must have been not far short of supper time when there came a flurry of feet over the cobbles, and I looked up and saw Darklis with a shawl as glowing-red as rowan berries caught round her.

  ‘Hugh,’ she said, and crouched down beside me as though to look at the drawing on my knee, ‘Hugh, will ye take a message for me into the town? I canna leave Jean, and—’

  ‘We heard this morning that she was better,’ I said quickly.

  ‘So she is; but she canna be easy without me beside her, even now that himself is back; and you’re the only one I’ll trust the thing to—’

  ‘Trust what thing to?’ said I, under my breath and still drawing away, for it was clear that whatever the thing was, it was secret. ‘Take a deep breath, lassie, an’ begin again, an’ tell me clear.’

  She drew her breath and began again. ‘Hugh, ’tis Lady Mary Fair, an’ the Tinkler folk will be gathered to it wi’ all the rest, and – they’re loyal to their own; they have never forgotten that I am of their kin. Always at Paisley at fair-time, one would come up to the house to make sure that all was well wi’ me. I thought that mebbe now I have come away all across Scotland… But one o’ them came up yestere’en, an’ I was wi’ Jean and didna even know he’d come.’

  ‘An’ you’re afraid he’ll come again?’ I said. Not everyone cares for the Tinkler folk anywhere round their house or horses, and Master Gilchrist the steward was of that way of thinking.

  She shook her head. ‘I’m afraid he may not come again. I’m afraid that they’ll think me one that breaks wi’ my own kin.’

  ‘I’ll take whatever message ye give me,’ I said.

  ‘Oh Hugh, I knew I could trust you! Ask for Captain Faa – ye’ll find him wherever the horses are. Tell him all is well wi’ me, and I’m no’ in need of rescuing, and –’ She felt inside the berry-bright folds of her shawl and brought out a silver brooch; the bonniest thing fashioned like a sprig of bell-heather, with seven small amethysts set in it where the flowers would be. ‘Show him this for a proof that ye do come from me.’

  I took it from her, and without another word she was away, running like a deer, back towards the house.

  I drew on a wee while longer, then gathered the scatter of pencils and my sketch-paper on its bit of board, and ambled back to my own quarters, taking care not to seem in any kind of hurry. I put my drawing stuff back into the kist, stowed the brooch among the few coins in my purse and, returning to the stable-yard, strolled out by the side door and headed downhill towards the town and the bee-swarming of the fair.

  The first lanterns were pricking out here and there though it was still as good as daylight on the slopes of Dundee Law, and in the light of the flares the gaily coloured booths and stalls glowed with a jewel brilliance that hid their raggedness and dirt, making a kind of gaudy fungus-growth all along the dignified south flank of St Mary’s Kirk, above which the tower soared upward to cut its own dark-edged shape out of the evening sky. But minding Darklis’s directions, I left the bright lights and milling crowds, the tumblers and the gingerbread stalls, the shabby dancing bear and the man in scarlet tights breathing out great gobbets of flame, that had their stands where the lanes of merchants’ booths came together; even the savoury-smelling pie stall, though I was hungry for my missed supper; and made for the open space on the western fringes of the fairground where the horse dealing was going on.

  The crowds were not so thick there, but thick enough, all the same, and there was a great coming and going; and as I hesitated on the edge of a knot of men who had gathered to watch a bay gelding put through its paces, wondering if the swarthy horse-handler would be a good one to ask for Captain Faa, somebody jostled against me in passing, and all but sent me flying.

  Maybe the man was less skilled at his craft than most, or maybe my own thoughts being so much on my purse and the little brooch within it made me aware of what I would otherwise have missed in the general jostling of the crowd. What I felt was the faintest tug at my pocket.

  My hand flew down to it and found my purse gone before the small square man who had brushed me by had quite had time to disappear into the shifting throng.

  I dived after him with a yell, ‘Hi! Gi’ me back my purse, ye villain!’ and grabbed him by the arm. He writhed like a weazel and was all but gone again leaving his ragged coat empty in my hands, but I managed to hook his feet from under him as he leapt, and he went sprawling full length on the churned muddy grass, with me a’ top of him.

  ‘I never touched your purse!’ he squealed with his mouth full of mud.

  ‘Then whyfore will ye run?’ said I.

  And I made to shift my grip for a better one; but he took the instant’s chance, and up he came as swift as a weazel indeed, and fetched me a jab on the nose that drew the good red blood.

  Folks were pressing in round us to watch, and somewhere in the back of my head (the main part of it was full of the need to hang on to the chiel that had stolen my purse with the precious brooch in it, and get it back from him again) I heard someone laugh, and a voice crying us on as though we were a pair of game-cocks. And then there was another voice, I never heard what it said, but on the instant, hands were hauling me up off my enemy, and the chiel himself stumbling to his feet, whining out protests of his innocence. And I found myself staring up at something that looked at first sight like a very splendid and lordly tatty-bogle – what they call a scarecrow in the South.

  A very tall thin man wearing the wreck of a coat that had onc
e been mulberry velvet trimmed on cuffs and pocket-flaps with tarnished silver lace, and a proud, if something weather-worn, bunch of blue-black heron hackles clasped into his battered bonnet by a brooch like a silver targe. Grey hair hung in thick greasy locks to his shoulders, and out of the mane of it looked a long brown-skinned rogue’s face with a great hooked nose that could have belonged to a Roman emperor, and a short stump of a blackened pipe that seemed as much a part of it as his nose did, and a pair of yellow eyes – blazing wicked yellow like those of the fish-eagle that the Highlanders call lolair-Suil-Na-Greine, the Bird with the Sunlit Eye.

  A scarecrow he might be, but clearly he was a scarecrow in some kind of authority, and I appealed to him. ‘Sir, yon de’il stole my purse!’

  The wrinkles round the yellow eyes deepened, as though there were amusement somewhere at the back of them, and he jerked his head towards the pickpocket. ‘Search him,’ he said to the world in general, without moving the pipe in his mouth.

  Two men from the gathered crowd set about it, pulling open the man’s ragged shirt and delving into his breeches’ pockets, while a third went through the pockets of his cast-off coat. But there were tiny glances going to and fro between them all the while, and when a few coins that might have been anybody’s and a rabbit snare and a knife and such things had been brought to light, my purse was not among them.

  I turned back desperately. ‘He did take it, he did! He must have passed it on somehow!’

  ‘What was in it, young master?’

  ‘Three siller shillings, and something else – a lassie’s geegaw that I was to take wi’ a message to Captain Faa.’

  Nothing moved behind the yellow eyes, but he gave a slow considering nod. ‘See to it,’ he said, again seemingly to the world in general, and to me, ‘Let ye come wi’ me then.’

  And he turned and headed away towards the edge of the fairground. I went after him, close as a burr; there seemed nothing else to do. In a little the crowds thinned away, as fine horses and their buyers and sellers were left behind and we were among the tethered ponies and tilt-carts and the humped black tents of the Tinkler camp.

  Here and there in front of the tents the light of the cooking fires was beginning to bite, and faces with the queer shuttered look of the gipsy kind wormed out of the shadows and turned a little but never more than a little, to watch us go by. Faces of old grannies, walnut-wrinkled and with pipes as firmly rooted between their blackened teeth as that of the man I followed; hawk faces of men intent on the horse harness or the pots and pans that they were mending; flaunting vivid faces of girls with bright shawls about their heads and shoulders, as I had seen Darklis wear hers only an hour since. The smells that came from the cooking pots brought the soft warm water to my mouth. A man sat on the shaft of a tilt-cart playing softly on a fiddle. Bairns and dogs and once a little pig ran in and out across our path as we went. It was like a strange country, and I mind wondering if the strangeness of it accounted, at least part-way for the strangeness that was in Darklis, too. Darklis’s left-hand world that reached out to her sometimes in this right-hand world that was hers now…

  Close to one of the fires, we passed a knot of bairns and bigger louts amusing themselves by throwing clods and bits of wood and the like at a miserable mongrel pup tied by a piece of cord to the gaily painted wheel of a cart. Every time it tried to get round behind the wheel into some kind of shelter, someone kicked it out again, yelping dismally, and the game went on.

  I looked to the man I followed to do something about it, as he had done about my own affair, but he only cast a casual glance that way in the by-going, and ducked into the entrance hole of a big black tent close by. And again I followed him. It was not to be worrying about ill-used puppies that I was there, I told myself.

  Inside the tent was very dark with a kind of animal darkness, and closely warm with a faintly animal smell to it. The man struck flint and steel and kindled a horn lantern that hung against the tent pole. And as the tawny light grew and steadied, I saw the place where I was; the few pots and crocks, a three-legged stool, the thick-piled heather of the bed-place with a couple of old rugs flung across it. And save for a pair of fine brindled greyhounds tied to the tent post, the man’s lordliness certainly did not seem to include his living-place. Yet lordly the man was, even more so now that I looked at him fully.

  He sat himself down on the creepy-stool and gestured me towards the piled heather of the bed-place.

  But I was not sitting down for a chat. ‘It’s Captain Faa I’m wanting to speak wi’,’ I said.

  ‘And it’s Captain Faa ye’re speaking wi’,’ he said. ‘Sit ye down.’

  I think I had known it all along.

  So I sat me down on my haunches in the piled heather. ‘I am from Mistress Darklis,’ I said, ‘from Mistress Darklis Ruthven.’

  He nodded, ‘I was thinking ye might be so. And is it well wi’ the Rawni – wi’ Mistress Darklis Ruthven?’

  ‘It’s well with her,’ I said. ‘She bade me come because she canna leave my lady Jean while she is ill – an’ tell ye that all’s well wi’ her and she’s no’ needing to be rescued. She gave me the wee brooch to bring to ye, for proof that ’tis herself that sent me.’ And then the thought of what had happened rose in my throat, and the thought of going back and telling her that I had lost her bonnie pin, and I burst out, ‘But yon thieving de’il—’

  Again the lines deepened at the corners of his strange yellow eyes. ‘Bide a wee, and ’twill surely come back to ye. Meanwhile, what like is it, this brooch?’

  ‘Siller,’ I said, ‘like a heather sprig wi’ sparks o’ amethyst for the flower bells.’

  ‘And these heather bells, would ye have noticed the number o’ them?’

  ‘Seven, I think.’

  He knocked out his pipe, and began to refill it from the tobacco box he brought forth from a silver-laced pocket of that once-splendid coat. ‘Aye, that would be the number.’ And he lit his pipe at the lantern and settled to puffing away, gazing into the shadows beyond the tent pole as though I were not there at all.

  ‘Bide a wee,’ he said once again, when in my desperate impatience I began to fidget, and that was all. And as I sat listening to the voices outside, and the shifting of the tethered ponies and all the distant sounds of the fair, until at last somebody ducked in under the tent flap, and gave something into the hand Captain Faa held out for it, and was gone again almost before I knew he had come.

  Captain Faa opened the purse – aye, it was my purse, sure enough – and took out the silver pin with the bright flecks of amethyst, holding it to the lantern, on the thin brown palm of his hand. ‘Aye, seven it is,’ he said, and tossed it to me, and my purse after it. ‘It seems ye are a messenger to be trusted. Go back now to the Rawni, and tell her ye have done as she bade ye, and brought her back her bonnie pin again.’

  Eh! I was glad to have it back in my hand! But I was looking into my purse before I dropped it back in; and it was empty. ‘There were three siller shillings in here when ’twas taken,’ said I. ‘Where would my three siller shilling be now, Captain?’

  He looked at me without a blink. ‘Och, well now, that’s a different matter. One siller shilling is much like another, and no’ so easy to trace as a siller pin wi’ seven amethysts in it.’

  I gave him back look for look. ‘I’m thinking ye could come by them easy enough, gin ye were minded to, Captain.’

  ‘Aye, but then ye see ’twould be a poor-spirited kind o’ thing, and going altogether against the customs o’ the Tinkler kind, to be handing back good siller that was honestly stolen,’ said he blandly. And then he turned thoughtful. ‘On the other hand, I myself might well feel that a small recompense for your trouble – aye, and your bloody nose…’

  By that time I was on my feet, and all the stubbornness had set hard within me. ‘I’m no’ wanting payment for a service done in friendship,’ said I, in what you might call a dignified snuffle, for my nose was indeed sadly the worse for wear.
/>   ‘A stiff-necked young callant,’ said Captain Faa, and blew out a cloud of tobacco smoke that curled about his head in the lantern light.

  ‘An’ come to that, was Mistress Darklis’s siller pin no’ honestly stolen, too?’

  ‘Mistress Darklis is one of us,’ said he, watching the smoke with one eye narrowed; patient speaking, like one explaining something very simple to a dim-witted bairn.

  I knew that he was playing with me, idly, finding some kind of amusement in my utter helplessness to do anything about it.

  I stood silent, glaring. I wanted my money back, for silver shillings did not grow on trees, but if I accepted it as a recompense – I knew that I had but to say the word – he would have won his game, and I would have backed down in some way that mattered more than the money did; and if I went back to Dudhope without it, still I would have backed down, though in a different way…

  And at that moment a shrill shower of yelps rose outside; the piteous yelping of a pup in distress. And into the dark inside of my head flashed the picture of the miserable little creature tied to the cartwheel, and the gleeful tinkler louts gathered round.

  And suddenly, that was something more important still. ‘I’ll take yon pup for my three shillings,’ I said, not knowing that I was going to, until the words were out of me.

  He brought his gaze back from the wreathing pipe smoke, and looked at me full with those yellow eyes. ‘How if I’m no’ selling?’

  ‘Ye dinna’ seem to set much store by the wee beast.’

  ‘No’ much,’ he agreed, reaching out a foot to flick the ear of the nearest greyhound. ‘How if he’s no’ mine to sell?’

  ‘I’m thinking that most things hereabouts are yours, gin ye choose to make them so,’ I said. ‘I’m thinking three siller shillings would be a good price for him.’

  He went on looking at me, consideringly; then he gave a kind of laugh, soft at the back of his throat that never broke through into the open; and he came to his feet all in one piece and one fluid movement as a cat does. ‘It might be,’ he said. ‘Aye, it might be that.’