Bonnie Dundee Read online

  Johannes was groaning and sobbing; and indeed the pain must have been sore, for his eyebrows and front hair were clean burned off, and when I saw his hands later – well, I reckon I would have been bawling like a bull calf for its dam, if it had been me. Myself, I had no more than a scorch-mark on one wrist. And Willie Sempill was there, and telling me ’twas well done, and to leave it for all was safe now.

  I shook my head, ‘If ’tis left now, ’tis good oil ruined and mebbe no more to spare. It needs to be brought to flame-point twice more.’

  I suppose I had the air of knowing what I was talking about, for they let me be, and I – I took my attention away from all of them to give it to the oil in the pot.

  I made the proper count, then lifted the lid. The oil lay there dark and still faintly stirring. I let the air get to it until the last stirring and dimpling was stilled, then took up the skimming spoon and cleared the sooty scum that had risen to the surface, and left it again for the time of three paternosters said within my head. Aye, I should have counted it off, but my father had taught me the old way; and come to that, I’m thinking there’s a good few even here in the Protestant Low Countries that still use the old Popish prayers when they need an accurate timing too short for the clock or the sandglass – swordsmiths and apothecaries and such – then swung it back over the fire and fed a bit more charcoal to the flames and stood by with the lid, watching…

  The dark surface began to dimple again. I stared down at it as the movement changed to a rolling boil and then fell away into stillness; and above the stillness came the faint blue haze that comes a lick of time before flash-point. In the instant, as the flame began, I slammed the lid back on, and again swung the pot clear of the fire, and again betook me to my paternosters and the skimming spoon.

  Once more the whole thing had to be gone through; and then, with the lid slammed on again and the pot swung clear and the last skimming done, I straightened up and fetched a long breath, as though it was the first breath I had fetched since it all started, and drew the back of my forearm across my sweaty face.

  And the outside world came to me again.

  Johannes had been hauled off somewhere to have his hurts tended, there were folks all about me in the well-court, and amongst them the squat round figure in the preposterous curled peruke of Mynheer Cornelius van Meere himself. And him looking at me somewhat oddly, so that I realised he had been watching me most of the while.

  ‘And where did you learn how to boil the black oil?’ said he, speaking our tongue well enough, though with the broad thick accent of the Low Countries.

  ‘My father taught me,’ I told him.

  ‘Ach, so – he was a painter, this father?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘And you were his apprentice?’

  ‘I was but eleven when he died,’ I said, ‘but he’d no other help, so I’m thinking I’d learned as well as most apprentices, how to boil the black oil and a size a canvas and grind the colours, and clean his brushes after him.’

  ‘So-o,’ said Mynheer thoughtfully, nodding so that I thought his great peruke would over-balance him. ‘Then will you finish the task that you have so well begun, and when the oil is cooled, pour it into this flask and bring it to me in the Little Dining-room?’

  ‘Aye,’ I said, ‘if Master Sempill—’ I looked round and caught the head groom’s eye on me.

  He nodded, ‘But mind the kitchen lassies dinna keep you from your proper work.’

  And Mynheer turned and trotted away, and for the moment that was all.

  But by and by, when the oil was cooled and safely in its flask, I took it into the Little Dining-room, one of those same kitchen lassies showing me the way, for I’d never set foot beyond the great smoky kitchens before. And the place was as bonnie as I’d imagined it, with the tooled and gilded leather on its walls catching the candlelight, for the day was fading, and the tall easel set up and covered with a white cloth, and the familiar smell of oil and paint… And Mynheer standing by the table, rubbing his hands on an oily rag.

  ‘Ah, Hugh,’ he greeted me, ‘that is your name? It seems that Johannes my apprentice will be small use to me for the next few days until his hands are healed. Therefore I have asked Milord Dundonel that he lend you to me in his place meanwhile – if you like?’

  ‘I’d like fine,’ I said, feeling a little as though I was in a dream.

  ‘Goot!’ he said. ‘Then clean up all these brushes.’

  6

  Portrait of a Dream

  FOR THE WHILE, then, I became Mynheer van Meere’s monkey; and the centre of my daily world which for more than a year had been the stable-yard, was the Little Dining-room, where my lady Jean came every day to sit in the big carved chair cushioned in faded golden cut-velvet, for Mynheer to paint her wedding portrait.

  For those sittings she wore a gown of blue damask, much grander than anything I had ever seen her wear before, and had her side hair curled into bunches of ringlets hanging over her ears. ‘Confidantes’ they were called, the height of fashion at the time so I was told. And altogether she did not look at all like the Lady Jean I knew. But even so, it seemed she lit up the room with her coming, as thought she brought the sunlight and the scent of the high heather moors in with her; aye, and the linnets singing bonnie among the broom.

  Most times Mistress Darklis would be there too, just for company, for Mynheer was not one for chit-chat while he was painting. (I always thought of her by her real name, her gipsy name, now, for though we had seldom spoken with each other since the evening in the Abbey ruins, the shared secret seemed to have made a kind of bond between us.) And whiles, she would bring her lute, and sing to it the old songs of the Border country; The Twa Sisters and The Gay Goshawk, and the like; for listening to them, he said, gave my lady’s face the right look to it.

  I listened too, and looked on, and thought that I would like fine to be painting the brown lassie with the lute in her lap, and the way her hands caught the light against the dark stuff of her gown.

  Once she sang The Ballad of Johnnie Faa:

  ‘The Gipsies cam to our gude lord’s yett,

  And oh but they sang sweetly;

  They sang sae sweet and sae very complete,

  That down cam our fair Lady.

  And she cam tripping down the stair,

  And all her maids before her;

  And sune as they saw her weel-favr’d face,

  They cast the glamourie ower her.

  “Oh come with me,” says Johnnie Faa;

  “Oh come with me my dearie;

  For I vow and I swear by the hilt of my sword

  That your Lord shall nae mair come near ye! . . .”

  And when our Lord cam hame at e’en

  And speired for his fair lady,

  The tane she cried, and the other replied,

  “She’s away wi’ the Gipsy Laddie.”

  “Gae saddle to me my black, black steed,

  Gae saddle and mak him ready;

  Before that I either eat or sleep

  I’ll gae seek my fair lady…”

  And we were fifteen weel made men,

  Although we were na’ bonnie;

  And we were a’ put down for ane,

  A fair young wanton lady.’

  She sang it very softly, and I mind the glance that brushed between her and my lady, towards the end, guessed that the singing of that song, and the listening to it must have been a small shared rebellion to lift the boredom of the long portrait sittings.

  Mynheer worked me hard, at mixing the oils and grinding the colours and clearing up after him, but much of that was done when we were alone, while he himself worked on at the background, or the posy of pansies and briar roses on the table, or even the folds of the stiff blue gown laid across the empty chair with no Lady Jean in it at all. But anyway grinding paint does not take all one’s mind, and one can listen well enough at the same time. I seemed always to be grinding the blue called ultramarine which he needed for that gown, fo
r it was a deep blue and he painted thickly; and he would have only small amounts ground and oil-mixed at a time, lest any should be wasted, that colour, which the old church masters used for the Virgin’s mantle, being the most costly of all pigments, ground from pure lapis lazuli.

  I watched the painting grow from the rough sketches, and its first outline in the warm black-brown ingres, while form and colour took shape. And if not the Lady Jean I knew, then at least this new lady in the fine stiff gown and the ‘Confidantes’ ringlets bound with silver ribbons over her ears, began to grow out of the canvas. It was all like returning to a familiar but long-forgotten world to me; and I began to itch in my fingers and in some place deep inside myself to an odd bit of board and a brush and a dap of ingres of my own, such as my father had whiles and whiles allowed me.

  Then one evening Mynheer, going off for his supper, left me to grind some more ultramarine before I went off to mine, for he would be needing it to put the finishing touches to my lady’s slashed and ruffled sleeves in the morning.

  When the door shut behind him, I set to work, first with the pestle and mortar, and then when the rough grinding was done, adding the oil drop by drop and working the pigment up on the marble grinding slab until it came smooth as curd and deeply blue as fresh-opened cornflowers. Finally I scraped off with the palette knife and put it into its wee pot, making sure that not one speck was wasted. I had been in a hurry at first, wanting my own supper. But when it was finished – och, I don’t know; it was the first time I had ever been left alone in the Little Dining-room, and there was the canvas standing up on its easel, with its veil of fine linen flung over it to keep off the dust while the paint was damp, and plenty of daylight left, for the room faced westward and we were almost into June. And the wish was on me to take a good look while I was on my own with no one by to call me to this task or that. I lifted back the cloth, and there it was, the bonniest thing, even though the Lady Jean looking back at me was not just the Lady Jean I knew. And I thought it was a sad thing that it was just her on her lone, and not a proper wedding portrait with Claverhouse in it, too. But then I wondered how would the man look, dressed up and stiff as she was, with fine new point-lace at his throat and wrists, and maybe his own hair cut off close, and a fine fashionable peruke the like of Mynheer’s? And I thought of him as I’d come to know him, riding into the stable-yard with his uniform often enough wet and mired with the moorland ways, and sometimes that quick quiet smile of his, and sometimes his eyes red-rimmed and weary in his head…

  There were a couple of bits of board on the deep windowsill, all ready sized; the kind that Mynheer used for making sketches, and the window was very near. I had only to reach out my hand…

  I’ll never know what possessed me. I reached out, not really knowing what I did. And I found a small brush and the crock of ingres; and I was settled on the windowsill with the board on my knee.

  I began to paint.

  And having begun, I went on. I was scarcely aware of finishing with the ingres and calmly helping myself to the colours I wanted and setting out my palette as I had set it out so often for my father and now for Mynheer. I worked at top speed, seeking to catch all that was left of the daylight, utterly absorbed in what I did.

  I have become a skilled and, as I think, a bonnie painter in the years since then, though alas, never the great one, the master that every painter dreams of becoming when he sets out. I have had joy of my painting, aye, as well as the hard work and the times when I would have liked fine to throw the whole thing at some fat sitter’s head. But I do not think that I have ever had such joy of it again as I had in that hour. I am thinking that as with many other things, love, aye, and friendship among them, so it is with painting and the making of songs and the like, we have a first time, a virginity to lose, and the hour that we lose it is not just like any other hour in all our lives.

  But I am wandering from my story. When I came back to myself the painting light was almost gone, and there were footsteps and voices outside the door; and the door opened and in came Mynheer himself, carrying a great three-branched silver candlestick, and behind him Lord Dundonel and her old ladyship and two – three more that must have been supping with them, and my lady Jean – and Colonel Graham.

  I sat where I was, frozen, not so much with any sense of guilt or fear that I would be getting into trouble, but because I had not had time to come fully back from one world to another, and was somewhat dazed.

  Mynheer van Meere saw the portrait on its easel, uncovered, and then myself in the window embrasure, and he let out something startled in Dutch sounding like a small explosion, and came quickly across the room, the candle flames trailing in the draught of his coming, and next instant he was standing over me, peering down at the bit of board on my knee.

  I looked, too, seeing what I had done spring out at me in the new light of the candles. Claverhouse’s head and shoulders in his shabby buff coat as I had so often seen him in the stable-yard; and under the slim black brows his eyes looking so directly into mine that for the moment it came almost as a shock.

  It was a crude enough bit of work, mind you; I was not yet fifteen, and I had had no teaching save the little that my father had given me when I was too young to profit much by it. But I have always had the knack of catching a likeness from memory.

  Mynheer was silent so long that I grew afraid that he was angry after all. But then he said, ‘It seems we have another portrait painter here among us.’

  And he was not mocking; not mocking at all.

  And then everyone came crowding round exclaiming, my lady’s portrait that they had come to see all unnoticed for the moment, while I had not even the presence of mind to get up but just went on perching in the windowsill with the bit of board tipped sideways on my knee to show them since it seemed that they wanted to see. Old Lady Dundonel was clucking like a hen just off the nest; and Lord Dundonel said suddenly, as though in surprise, ‘John, I never knew you had a look of your famous kinsman!’

  ‘What kinsman would that be?’ Claverhouse said.

  ‘Montrose.’

  ‘Montrose,’ Claverhouse echoed the name quiet-like, but with something in his voice that made me look round at him. ‘I was but two years old when he – died, and I never saw him, but I should be glad to think that I had a look of him.’

  He was looking at the little sketch, and I was looking at him, and in that moment I learned something about Claverhouse. I learned that despite his thirty-five years and his hardness with the Covenanters, he had a laddie’s gift for hero-worship in him still; and I knew who the hero was.

  As though he felt my gaze on him, he looked from the picture to my face, and our eyes met. As before in the stable-yard I had the feeling that he was seeing me, directly and clearly and consciously, as few men see the people they look at. Maybe he, too, was learning something – that he had a follower for life, though at that time just a follower the like of many others…

  ‘It is strange, I have found it before,’ said Mynheer, ‘how family likenesses will appear in a painting that lie concealed in life; and of a certainty the boy has caught the likeness of Colonel Graham. The work is crude, of course – untaught—’

  ‘But it’s bonnie for all that,’ Lady Jean put in softly. ‘And it is like.’ And ah, but she was bonnie herself, with the candles making the bright hair shine round her head. ‘And for a soldier’s wife who must often go lonely with her man not beside her, it would be a fine thing to have such a likeness.’ She fell silent a moment, and then speaking still more softly, said to me, ‘Hugh, may I have your picture?’

  That was the first time I knew the sorrow of a painter, that when he has painted something and set a bit of his own heart in it, folks want to take it from him – oh, maybe they give him gold and silver in its place, but never his painting with the bit of his own heart in it, back again. But it was not for that reason that I hesitated.

  ‘The paint and the board are no’ mine,’ I said, doubtfully.

&nbs
p; ‘It is not the paint nor yet the board that makes the picture,’ said Mynheer, ‘it is yours to do as you will with.’

  ‘Then when ’tis dry, my lady, ’tis yours for a wedding gift.’

  And that was the first time I knew the joy of the painter, in having such a great thing to give.

  ‘Thank you for my wedding gift, Hugh,’ said my lady.

  I got up, remembering at last that I should not be sitting in the presence of my betters, and propped the little picture carefully in the window recess.

  Mynheer was still looking at it, and rubbing his nose in the way that he had when he was thinking hard. ‘Boy,’ he said suddenly, as one making up his mind, ‘you are a bad painter, but with teaching you could be a goot one, which is more than can be said for Johannes, who vill never be goot for aught but to stretch canvases and grind pigments. If you come with me as my second apprentice – I have room for two at home in Utrecht – I will make of you one day a better painter than I am myself.’

  For the moment, as I stood silent, temptations tugged at me sore. But something else pulled more strongly the other way.

  ‘I am thinking Johannes would knife me,’ I said, ‘and beside then, when my lady is wed, I go with – ‘I almost said ‘with Claverhouse’, but I turned the words in time – ‘with her to her new home.’

  ‘And so you will be a groom all your life?’ said Mynheer. He said other things, too, but I did not hear them, for Colonel Graham had turned that clear hard gaze of his on to me again,and meeting it, I knew – I scarce know how to put it – it was as though he had heard what I had not said, and understood, and accepted, gravely, like a liege lord accepting the fealty of his newest knight. Och, it sounds daft, I know, but for that moment even my lady Jean was not there. Just the two of us. And I was no longer a lost dog without a heel to follow.

  ‘And now,’ Mynheer was saying, ‘allow me to show you vat ve came to see – how it goes with my portrait of Lady Jean.’