The next morning, Davie lies awake with a still-sleeping Alan in his arms and tries to think about the future.
In the jumbled, half-coherent explanations of last night Alan managed to make it clear that he’s here for good. (All he really needed to say was that one word when Davie first saw him: he’s come home.) So Davie can have Alan beside him every day of his life here as the laird of Shaws—can wake up like this every single morning... It’s weirdly difficult to think about—almost painful. The happiness of it is too much. It’s like trying to look straight at the sun, or like how when a person has been starving they can’t eat more than a little just to begin with, even though they need the food more than anything. So Davie limits his mental ambitions for now, and just thinks about today. He can manage that. And his heart glows with it...
He strokes Alan’s shoulder with the hand of an arm that’s going to have terrible pins and needles in whenever Alan wakes up and moves off it, and smiles, and goes on with his imaginings. They’ve got so much to do—together...
Presently Alan stirs in his arms and stretches himself out in the bed, making a little approving noise as Davie kisses his forehead and strokes his shoulder again. He’s wearing a borrowed nightshirt of Davie’s, having left all his own things with a Jacobite friend at Leith, where he landed yesterday evening (this was another of the hurried explanations of yesterday)—in order to reach Cramond himself as soon as he possibly could.
He opens his eyes and blinks a few times.
‘Davie,’ he says, voice muzzy with sleep. ‘...Please tell me I’m not dreaming again.’
‘I really hope I’m not,’ says Davie. Alan laughs softly, closes his eyes again and nuzzles against Davie’s neck, apparently finding this proof of reality satisfying enough.
‘Have you been awake long?’ he asks after a little while.
‘Not very,’ says Davie. ‘I’ve just been thinking.’
‘What about?’
‘You, mostly.’ More quiet laughter. ‘What we’re going to do today.’
‘Mm. What are we going to do today, then?’
‘Oh, lots of things... I’ll show you over the house. We’ll go to pick up your luggage. We might start with breakfast?’
‘And that’s a fine idea,’ says Alan, ‘but not just yet, Davie. Just a few moments.’ And he sighs and turns over to settle back on the pillows and look at Davie. Then he reaches his hand up to caress Davie’s face, and Davie, who’s totally in agreement with this plan, leans down to him and kisses him.
‘There,’ says Alan, after they’ve spent slightly more than just a few moments kissing. He’s still speaking in the quiet voice that suits the first moments of the morning. ‘Now, I think you said something about breakfast?’
The house of Shaws is a very different place now from what it was when Davie first saw it. He lives in only a fairly small part of it—as he explains to Alan as they go up the main staircase together after breakfast—but lots of the other rooms are kept ready for visitors, of whom he always has plenty. Friends from all different parts of the country—distant cousins—any traveller who needs a roof over their head for the night.
‘The place is far too big for me on my own,’ he says, ‘but there’s a lot you can do with so much space, after all.’
‘Well, I like what you’ve done with it,’ says Alan, peering through the doorway of one of the guest bedrooms and inspecting the wallpaper.
‘You can have one of these rooms—several, if you like,’ says Davie. ‘There’s plenty of them.’
Alan frowns, not quite in a serious way. ‘Not a bedroom, Davie.’
And Davie smiles at that, remembering the early morning. ‘No, of course not... I mean somewhere you can keep all your things, and—somewhere that’s yours. I want this to be your home as much as mine, you know.’
Alan resumes his inspection of the guest room, an absurdly pleased look on his face. Then he turns back to Davie and says with one of his sudden turns into sincerity, ‘I’m glad you haven’t been all alone here all the time. I’d hate to think of you being lonely.’
‘Alan...’ He goes up to him and rests his hand on Alan’s cheek. They both keep coming back to each other like that this morning—as if by touching and holding each other they can go on reassuring each other that all this is really happening. ‘Of course I’ve been lonely. It’s been just—empty without you.’ He doesn’t only mean the house, and he thinks Alan can tell.
Alan takes Davie’s face in his own hands and touches their foreheads together for a moment. ‘I came back as soon as I could,’ he murmurs. ‘I think it would have broken my heart for good if it was any longer.’
‘Of course you did,’ says Davie stoutly. ‘And you know I wouldn’t have wanted you to—I mean, of course I wanted... but you know what I mean... to come back any sooner—if it wasn’t safe.’
Alan nods. ‘It’s a good thing I’m here now, then, isn’t it?’
Davie is smiling; it’s the kind of smile that could turn into tears far too easily. ‘I think it is,’ he says.
They’re already so close together, it’s only the smallest movement to close the distance entirely and meet Alan’s lips with his own. Alan responds readily, wrapping his arms round Davie and holding him tight.
It can’t make up for the long, aching emptiness of all those years alone. But it’s not a bad start.
Later they get out a spare hay-cart and drive over to Leith to collect Alan’s things from his friend. This man is a Jacobite minister—a combination that seems a bit odd to Davie, though over the last few years he’s met what seems like most of the sorts of people there are in Scotland, but he’s very friendly and polite, if eccentric. He and his wife press cups of tea on Davie and Alan, and dither about getting Alan’s bags loaded into the cart, and then they’re on the way back to Cramond.
‘The things you were doing when we first met—for your King in France, I mean—’ says Davie, as they get nearer the bounds of the land belonging to Shaws. The harvest has just been brought in (and taken up most of Davie’s time for the last few weeks), and they’re driving through brown stubble fields. A flock of linnets and yellowhammers keep pace with them in their twittering flights over the ground.
‘Yes?’ says Alan, when Davie doesn’t continue.
‘Are you still doing that?’
‘They don’t need me anymore.’ Alan looks pensive, and Davie thinks of how the Jacobite cause has been declining these last years (he’s not totally ignorant of things like that, these days). But Scotland is still a country divided, and there are ardent Jacobites in the Lowlands and Highlands yet. And Alan knows that. He says, ‘I am as much a Jacobite as ever I was, Davie. It’s a matter of honour. So’—and his tone and expression get less serious—‘if you can bear to have an old Highland rebel living in your great house—’
‘You silly, Alan, you know I can,’ says Davie, laughing now. Divisions regardless, there’s no question about that. For his own part, with all he’s seen and thought about Scotland in these years, he’s not sure he’s quite so much a pure Whig as he once was.
They’ll talk about that, later. But it won’t be now, because at this point they’re interrupted by a voice that hails them from the far side of a hedge.
‘Davie! Good afternoon.’
‘Jannet—how are you?’ says Davie as Jannet Clouston comes into view, carrying a basket of something or other on her arm. He brings the cart to a stop, to patient snorting from the horse.
‘Not so bad, not so bad. But’—she puts down the basket and leans foward, squinting—‘Davie, is that your sweetheart, Mr—Brown? Back here again?’
‘You may give me my right name now, Miss Clouston,’ says Alan, leaning down from his seat next to Davie to take her hand. He adds, ‘It’s the name of a king. I am proud to bear it.’
‘Mr Stewart, then,’ she says, giving his hand a vigorous shake. ‘Oh, I am glad to see you here.’ Dropping Alan’s hand, she picks up her basket again and looks back at Davie, her face all over smiles. ‘I’m so happy for you, Davie. Wait till I tell Ebenezer and Sandy about this!’ And she turns and runs off.
‘She’s still a fixture here, then?’ says Alan, looking back at Jannet’s retreating figure as they drive on.
‘She’s my best tenant,’ says Davie with a broad smile. ‘And never fails to let me know when I go wrong, or try anything that’s not as good for them as I think.’ He pauses and adds, ‘Actually, “when I’m being a daft ignorant wee bugger” is how she puts it. But she’s a lovely person really.’
As Alan laughs, Davie’s still cherishing the little warm glow in his chest from hearing Alan called his sweetheart. And perhaps Alan is too. He’s had his arm round Davie for most of the journey, but he tightens his hold now, and leans his head on Davie’s shoulder as they go up to the house.
‘Where did you get those, Davie?’
It’s early in the evening, and they’re in the library—the cosiest room in the house—with a batch of teacakes ready to toast at the bright fire in the hearth. The evenings are beginning to get colder at this time of year. Dark, too—but there’s daylight still coming from the sunset sky beyond the tall windows, and that and the firelight are enough between them for Alan to see the pictures that he’s just pointed out.
‘Those paintings?’ says Davie, twisting round in his seat on the sofa to look at them. ‘They’re by my old friend Mr Campbell. He’s retired from being a minister now, and he’s set up a little studio at Essendean. Puts on exhibitions. They’re getting quite popular, apparently. I told him, it’s never too late to find your calling. And, well—’
He gets up from the sofa and joins Alan in examining the paintings. One of them shows a sheep standing in a field next to a boulder; somehow both the sheep and the boulder are full of life and personality. Another is a view of heather-covered hills at sunrise, fading away into a misty distance.
Alan, smiling, pronounces them ‘not bad, for a Campbell.’
They’re standing by the window next to the paintings now. This room is on the first floor and has a wide view over the garden—up to the rising ground and the expanse of heather where, yesterday night, Davie first saw Alan again. Its purple is deepening in the sunset now; later, the moon will rise.
And from contemplating this view they turn back to each other at the same moment, and Davie folds Alan in his arms. For a little while they don’t speak. Then Davie says, ‘Alan, I think today has been the happiest day I’ve ever had. I hope... I hope we have many more days like this.’
‘I hope so too,’ says Alan, speaking in a slightly muffled voice against Davie’s neck.
And Davie can begin to imagine it. The life he’s built up for himself here—busy and absorbing and happy in its way, but incomplete until now—with Alan beside him. Every day...
The teacakes won’t toast themselves, as Alan points out a little while later, and they go back over to the fireplace and sit down, Davie on the sofa and Alan on the hearthrug, leaning against Davie’s knees.
‘What shall we do tomorrow, mo chridhe?’ says Alan, spearing a teacake on his toasting fork.
Davie considers the question. More unpacking... there are some repairs going on at one of the outlying farms that he ought to go and check on, and Alan can go with him... ‘We could go over to the Bam & Anchor,’ he suggests. ‘Catch up with old friends. Those ex-pir—ex-sailors really aren’t such a bad lot when you get to know them.’
Alan pronounces this a good plan and hands a teacake up to Davie, who reaches down and strokes his hair with the other hand.
That night, as the moon hangs bright over the heathered hills, they lie again in each other’s arms, closer together than ever.