The Dark Mile was behind them, and the little party were now riding northwards along Gleann Cia-aig on a path less dark—for the slopes to either side, neither very steep nor thickly wooded, left plenty of room for the sky above them, and the clouds which covered the sky were not heavy. From time to time a glimmer of sunlight would appear and glance briefly down upon the glen. Through the scattered birch trees Margaret Cameron saw the familiar shapes of the high peaks above them: Ruighe na Beinne, Glas Bheinn, Meall Breac. Down the braes ran burn after tiny, rushing burn, hurrying to join Abhainn Cia-aig on its progress towards the Arkaig; the path made a little ford at each one, and her pony's hoofs, and those of the garrons ridden by her companions, splashed merrily in the shallow water.
The path climbed steadily. From time to time the servants of Lochiel who were accompanying her on the journey would exchange some remark upon the surroundings or their progress; otherwise she was left to silence, and to her own thoughts. The tone of these was stoic, for Margaret Cameron was not fond of long journeys, and this one had been long indeed. Today, of course, she had travelled only from Achnacarry, after spending the morning in discussions with Lochiel; her Chief of a few months' standing, courteous, grave and hospitable, was too much occupied by business of his own to go the rest of the way with her, but he had told her all that he thought she needed to know about the state of affairs at her destination, and had sent Ian Cameron, a tacksman of his who had been acting as temporary factor, along with her. He—a man of few words and careful, methodical loyalty—brought up the rear of the party now.
Before her three days' stay at Achnacarry, however, there had been the journey down the Great Glen from Inverness, past the long-familiar lochs, hills and villages—and, less familiar, the new Army barracks at Kilcumein. And before that, there had been the ordeal of the ship from France. Margaret had lived for most of the last four years at Rouen, where her father, obliged after the bright and tragic year 1715 to leave his native country, had found a fragile refuge. The present year was another which would be remembered in the long tale of Jacobite history—less bright and less brave, and in the estimation of dispassionate historical minds rather an odd footnote to the war with Spain than anything else, but no less proud a memory for those who had won distinction and who had risked, and lost, as much as their predecessors of four years earlier. For Margaret it was important indeed; for her brother, who, not having been 'out' in the '15, had retained control of the family property after their father's exile, had now taken the same risk, and paid the same price. Their father, who had been in a gradual decline ever since he had left Scotland, had lived just long enough to see John arrive upon the Continent. After this John had implored his sister not to remain with him—he was young and strong, and he could look after himself—but to go back and see about the house, for by now the news had reached them of another tragedy in what seemed their family's constantly flowing river of ill fortune. It was not good, John had said, for Ardroy to stand empty. Isobel could look after the place no more; so she must do so instead.
The high, shrill whistle of a sandpiper came down the mountainside above her, borne on the same fresh breeze which had started to blow the clouds more definitely away. Ardroy standing empty... it was a strange and rather terrible thing to think of her childhood home, the ancestral home of the Camerons of Ardroy for many generations. She must wonder what it would be like. Somewhat grandly, she pictured the old house dark and deserted, its gardens overgrown and its walls beginning to crumble. The absurdity of this exaggeration—for the house had been empty a matter of months, and Lochiel and Ian Cameron ensuring all the time that things were kept more or less in order—brought a little smile to her face despite herself; but it was not really a happy smile, and did not disperse her other feelings.
After a while burn and path turned eastwards together. The wind, working patiently at the stubborn clouds, had by now cleared quite a respectable space between them; and so Margaret's first sight of Ardroy was lit by the sun. The autumn afternoon's light warmed the dark stone, and amplified the touches of gold beginning to tinge the birches which stood about the house; beyond them, its sparkle was just visible upon the water of the loch.
Whether it was what she remembered, or what she had been expecting, she scarcely knew. At the sight of it, an emotion took hold of her stronger than all her powers of absurdity to dispel; she could hardly have said what this was either, for it had in it so many tangled threads of feeling and memory.
However, there was little time for sentiment of any kind, for their journey was almost over. They were greeted by a little gathering of the household servants, and Margaret recognised with gladness the familiar faces amongst these. Here was Marsali—who had been a maid at Ardroy since Margaret's childhood, and who had taken charge of the house now—coming forward to greet her; and there was Alan, the gardener and an institution who might have been as old as the garden itself.
'Miss Marget! Oh, 'tis good to see you back again,' said Marsali, while the groom came forward to take charge of the ponies. These he led off to the stables, accompanied by one of the servants of Lochiel, while Margaret and the other travellers were bustled inside the house.
Marsali, as she led her mistress through the well-remembered rooms, began on a careful description of the work she had been doing that day, getting their rooms ready—for the visitors from Achnacarry were to stay overnight and make their return journey the next day—and seeing about the supper they were to have, a grander one than had been cooked at Ardroy for some time. 'You'll want to go up to your room first, of course, Miss Marget—I've given you your own old room, for I thought you would like that best. I shall see your bags are brought to you. There, now—you rest yourself after that long journey!'
And after a short rest, in which there was little time or space for serious thought, Margaret was summoned downstairs again to supper.
The house, in any case, was not the semi-ruin of her imagination. She and Ian Cameron sat at the old table in the long living-room, where much of the rest of the furniture was set out just as she remembered it. The polished oak wood glinted brightly in the light of the peat fire; and the smell of that fire, so different from the coal and wood smoke of more southerly hearths, and the Lochaber Gaelic voices of Marsali and the maid as they waited at table and of Ian as he made quietly polite remarks upon the good fortune of their easy journey, brought to her such a sharp sense of old memory that for a moment she had to lay down her spoon and compose herself before she could go on with either the excellent food or the conversation.
Margaret rose early the next morning, for there was a great deal to do.
She began after breakfast by unpacking those of her belongings which had remained in their bags overnight, assisted by Catriona, the younger of the two housemaids under Marsali's command. They worked briskly and effectively, and in a short time the room—with its window standing open and a little breeze blowing in from the loch—was looking quite well-arranged.
Eventually Margaret reached her collection of books, which were to go on the shelves tucked into a corner by the window. There were her Bible and Prayer Book, of course, and a few other religious books—collections of sermons, a psalter, Bishop Jeremy Taylor's The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living. Beneath these was a sturdy volume entitled The Country Housewife's Guide, Or, Directions to assist a Lady in the good and profitable Management of House and Farm, by William Beckley, Esq., of Oxfordshire. This she had purchased before setting off on her journey, when she had felt slightly daunted at the prospect of the responsibilities before her, and in need of some help and guidance. Since then her fears had ebbed, and looked less all-consumingly serious, and she was now looking forward with anticipation to her first experience of managing a household. Of course she had helped her mother about the house in the old days, and kept house for her father in France, but neither of these was quite to be compared with the actual management of a household and estate of the size and importance of Ardroy; still, she intended to approach this increase in responsibility with an attitude of cheerful confidence. As for Mr Beckley's book, she had already begun to doubt its usefulness—he was an Englishman, after all, and treated extensively of such subjects as wheat flour and bacon which would be of no help to her Highland cookery. Smiling, she placed the book upon the shelf.
After this were a few novels—Love in Excess and Delarivier Manley's The New Atalantis, which she had been greatly enjoying, not being one of those who hold that occasional indulgence in novel-reading is incompatible with rational and virtuous conduct in a young lady. These went on the lowest shelf; and then her unpacking was complete.
She assisted Catriona with the last few things and helped her gather together the bags to stow in the attics; then, when maid and bags had left the room, she stood up, dusted her hands on her apron and took a moment to look round her. Here were all her things, ranged in their places on the shelves and in the wardrobe and on the dressing-table, just as they had used to be; and inevitably the sight must act upon her mind and call back old memories. She remembered sleeping here in her young and carefree days—and the sleepless night, one of the last, which she had spent pacing this floor after the news of Sheriffmuir and of Fergus had arrived at Ardroy...
But the memories here were not only her own, and her mind drifted further back than that, while she leant on the windowsill and tried to discern the peak of Beinn Tigh beyond trees, lesser hills and clouds. The oldest part of the house, which had been modified and extended over the years as such houses generally are, was something more than two centuries old, and had known many joys and tragedies other than her own; now, remembering those she knew something about and filling in the imaginary details of those she did not, she thought how her arrival here, to take charge of house and estate, was a continuation of that history—of which not all the misfortunes of the Jacobite cause had yet made an end.
A corner of her mouth lifted up in that smile which always came easily to it, and she glanced towards the bookshelves again. She ought to heed the good Bishop's advice, she thought, and cheerfully take up her duty.
She stood up from the windowsill, clasped her hands together firmly, and left the room and went downstairs.
The rest of the morning was spent in discussions with Marsali, with Alan and with Ian Cameron, who between them described to her the state of the house, the gardens and the estate as they had been kept going for the last several months. It had been a busy time, with the harvest to get in and the sheep and cattle to bring down from the shielings; but things had gone on remarkably regularly, and the house was well provisioned for the coming winter. Indeed, Alan's accounts of his work in the harvest field—for his duties were by no means confined to the garden itself—gave the impression of a general feeling that the laird's ill fortune must not be allowed to magnify itself in ruin for his lands, and that they must all keep things in good order for whenever he might return. Margaret listened carefully, quietly admiring their industriousness and praising her servants as far as she thought they would like to be praised for the things they told her. In the afternoon she sat down at the writing-table in the living-room and wrote herself a comprehensive set of notes describing what she had learnt, and what she thought she ought to remember.
After this, there was another duty to be attended to.
The walk round the loch was a welcome refreshment after her busy morning. The breeze had picked up, and little gusts of wind sent ripples along the water's surface and ruffled the feathers of the heron which stood, huddled up with its long neck drawn in close against its body, amongst the reeds below the path up to Slochd nan Eun.
Before she reached the cottages themselves, she passed a plot of ground upon which a small herd of black cattle were grazing; and amongst them, apparently deep in discussion on some point of animal husbandry, were a man and a lad of twelve or thirteen. She called out a greeting to them.
'I am glad to see you safely arrived at the end of your journey, Mistress Margaret,' said Angus MacMartin—for it was he—when they met on the path below the cattle-fold. Half the cattle were his own, the other half given from the herd of Ardroy itself along with the use, without rent, of their grazing land—Lochiel having arranged the terms of fosterage in the usual way as far was possible in the circumstances. Angus himself looked very much as she remembered him, save that he was a few years older and that his manner had something more of the slow, ponderous gravity which seemed to be growing on him with the years—and which was not unsuited to a man of his talents. 'The child is well,' he added, nodding his head slowly. 'He's in the cottage with Seonaid. I suppose you'll be wanting to go and see him.'
Margaret smiled, and acknowledged that this was the purpose of her visit; 'but I'm glad to see you too, after such a long time. I trust we shall hear the pipes at Ardroy again before long!'
Angus smiled; then, turning to the boy at his side—Neil, she remembered was the name of the eldest MacMartin son, and supposed that this was he—said that they must be getting back to their work, and bid her goodbye.
She was met at the cottage door by two of Neil MacMartin's younger sisters, who—evidently too shy to address the visitor directly—hurried inside to find their mother and tell her of Margaret's arrival. They left the door open, and she followed them into the dark interior of the little building.
Seonaid MacMartin was sitting beside the fire, and rose as Margaret entered the room. She was a small woman, angular of feature and dark in colouring; her children took after her in appearance, and the little baby sleeping in her arms now was just the same, with remarkably thick dark hair for such a young creature. No doubt that this was not the child Margaret had come to see.
'It is good of you to visit us here, Mistress Margaret,' said Seonaid. Her voice was quiet and measured, and she gave even simple words such as these a sound of being carefully chosen and considered before being spoken. Margaret had always thought her a very wise woman, in a quiet way—it was the kind of wisdom and capacity for long thought, perhaps, which one might expect in a woman who had chosen to marry a piper who had the two sights. She had heard with gladness and approbation of John's choice of Seonaid as foster-mother.
'Of course you will want to see Mac 'ic Ailein's son,' said Seonaid, after an exchange of polite remarks. 'He is here.'
She turned to a corner of the room, and carefully placed her own still sleeping child in a cradle—beside which stood another.
'Oh, the poor wee bairn!' was the first thing Margaret said at the sight of this second cradle's occupant. It was her first thought, and one that could not fail to find expression. Indeed it was a poor fate for him—his mother dead before he ever knew her, and his father far away in exile, with perhaps many long years to wait before he might see his son—and the child himself was an image of tender innocence, knowing nothing of the tragedies by which his short life was already shadowed. He was sleeping, with his head—covered in wisps of fine hair which promised to have a little more red in their auburn than his aunt's own—turned to one side, a rather comical babyish expression on his little face, whether smile or frown it was difficult to say.
'He is doing well,' said Seonaid in a whisper. 'A fine, healthy child. I believe he and my Lachlan are great friends already.'
'As foster-brothers ought to be,' said Margaret with a smile, for the mother and foster-mother's pride in both her young charges was evident in her voice.
She stayed a while longer talking to Seonaid, walking slowly round outside the cottage—about how the cattle were faring, about some repairs in progress to the heather thatch of one of the neighbouring cottages, about how Margaret had spent the morning and how she anticipated spending the coming weeks and months.
'It must be different indeed from what you knew in France,' said Seonaid.
'It is certainly that,' agreed Margaret, 'though I hope I remember what life was like here in the old days! Ah, it is funny how things change—the places and times of life, I mean. Travel, and changing one's place of dwelling, does chop things up so.'
Seonaid, who had never in her life been farther from home than Inverness, nodded. 'What was your home like in France—it was at Rouen, was it not?' For the first time her tone had something of hesitancy in it; the result of curiosity mixed with reluctance to be overly forward in inquisitiveness. But Margaret understood, and happily answered the question.
'Well,' she said, 'our rooms were on the top floor of the house—it was a funny little place, narrow and so tall that it towered over the houses on either side. I would go to the market of a morning and come back and haul my fruits and vegetables, bread and meat up three flights of stairs...'
And so she described the house and her life there, answering Seonaid's increasingly easy and smiling questions as to what sorts of vegetables they ate in southern parts, who her neighbours had been, how long the ship had taken to reach Inverness and whether it had been a very rough voyage (this it had not, though Margaret had been very far from enjoying the journey). She told various anecdotes about the last four years, about her dealings with those French neighbours and about her father.
'I think he was not really unhappy there,' she said, after a pause succeeding on a story about a religious and philosophical debate which he had once got into with a Papist priest—which had ended with both participants concluding that the other was a wise man and a good one despite his errors of doctrine, and establishing a friendship which had lasted for the rest of her father's life. 'He missed his home terribly, of course—how could anyone not?—and he would think sometimes on what might have been had things gone better...'
Seonaid nodded. They had stopped in their walk, and she turned to face Margaret. 'It was a great disappointment to us all, King James's defeat,' she said; 'it must have been more than that for those who lost their homes by it.'
Margaret smiled sadly. 'Yes... But he was always cheerful, and always ready to find the little happinesses in a life of exile. He was an example to us all. Ah, but I'm getting lost in these long memories!' she added after a pause, and resumed her walk.
'Not at all,' said Seonaid. 'I like to hear your stories. Thank you for staying and telling them.'
And Margaret remembered that her father had, after all, been the 'Mac 'ic Ailein' of Seonaid's childhood and Angus's also; besides her curiosity about distant foreign lands, it was quite natural that she should want to hear something more of the old laird. And there was an odd sort of comfort too for Margaret in telling all these stories: her words, after Seonaid with her air of quiet, unassuming sympathy had heard them, seemed to pass further out into the air and to float down the hillside below Slochd nan Eun, across old and familiar distances. It was as though they brought something to rest there, and made sense somehow of those 'chopped-up' pieces of her life; and she felt that it was her listener who showed them how to do so.
And so she returned Seonaid's smile, and slowed her walk to match her companion's more sedate pace, and presently began the conversation again on more immediate and lighter matters.
By the time she left they had become quite good friends. Margaret promised to return soon—'I must keep an eye on Ewen, after all,' she said, smiling, 'though I've no doubt at all that he is being looked after well.'
The day was not yet over; for she spent the evening with a candle at the table in the living-room going over the estate's books. These Ian had already shown her, but not in any great detail, whether because he had not thought it necessary or—so she suspected—because he did not believe her capable of grasping the complications of their contents. But she thought it necessary, for surely she must understand thoroughly the operations of the household and estate if she was to undertake their management; as for her capabilities, of these Margaret Cameron had her own considered opinions, and saw no need to rely on the judgements of others in deciding how far she should exercise them.
She began with the records of rents paid by the tenants in the last year. These were extensive—for most of the men living at Ardroy were tenants, even if only of a small plot of runrig land on one of the farms and grazing for one or two cows—and impressively various. They were paid largely in kind, and ranged from the usual crops and livestock—oats, oatmeal and bere; cows, butter and cheese, lambs, hens and eggs—to such items as honey, trout, grouse, plovers and various other examples of the rich produce of the lands of Ardroy, all exhaustively but not always very neatly accounted for in the several different hands which had been responsible for them since the last time John had written these books for himself. It was a fine challenge. After overcoming the initial bewildered stage, Margaret found that she could make pretty good sense of it; she had always had a good head for figures, and rather relished this opportunity to put her talents to work. Having made some calculations, and drawn up on a piece of scrap paper a summary table to confirm the final outcomes for herself, she turned to the remainder of the book's contents: notes that one or another tenant was in arrears with his rent for one or another reason; payment of wages to the household servants, some of them again in kind; sales of grain and other produce at the local market or at Inverness, and of cattle to be driven to more distant destinations...
The candlelight flickered over the page, as though determined to add its own little element of irregularity to the complexities being worked out thereon. Catriona's voice, singing with more enthusiasm than accuracy the tune of an old Gaelic song, came from the kitchen where she was tidying up from supper; then the song was interrupted by the voice of Marsali, and a low conversation followed before the maid's singing resumed. Margaret leaned back in her chair for a minute or two, smiling to herself. Then she sat up, pushed back a strand of hair which had come loose from her snood—and lowered her head once more over her studies.
The wind was blowing colder down from the hills as Margaret walked along the path towards the house, bending the stems of the rushes that grew along the path's edge and sending the brown leaves spiralling down from the scrubby alders whose little black cones drooped in clusters over the water. She had spent the morning supervising the digging of peat from the moss to the northwest of Loch na h-Iolaire. This routine work had become the scene of an unusual spectacle, when the digging discovered an object buried in the ground which had proved to be a large, waterlogged and weirdly blackened pine-trunk. The consensus amongst the men was that this must be a tree of the ancient world, destroyed by the Flood in the time of Noah and entombed in the moss ever since. Margaret, a little doubtful of this explanation, had been musing in her walk back to the house upon what the real history of the tree might be; but now the consciousness of advancing autumn sent her thoughts wider, to the progress of the weeks since she arrived here.
There was a great deal to do. To begin with, much of her time and energy was taken up with learning the new tasks which faced her on the estate. With Ian Cameron—who was now returned to his usual duties at Achnacarry, but who would ride over to Ardroy regularly to bring help, advice and news from Lochiel—she interviewed tenants in the study, hearing about the triumphs and difficulties of their different holdings and the reasons why such-and-such a rent payment must be made late, or in oats instead of bere (with these she was sympathetic, feeling that it was no time to be a harsh landlord). She kept those books which she had taken such effort to understand—effort which amply paid off now, when she had to deal with such tricky problems as the destruction of a small area of land on the far side of the estate by the torrent of a burn swollen with the autumn rains, and the resulting calculation of an appropriate rent abatement for the tenants on the holding.
She arranged for the carriage of produce to market, which was no very easy matter in this rugged country; indeed, the days were still within living memory when there had been no market nearer than Inverness, and it was not thirty years since this little gathering, held on the flat ground round one of the villages in the Great Glen, had received its official licence. Margaret, watching the ponies laden with their creels setting out down Gleann Cia-aig in the worsening mud of autumn, would sometimes think with a smile of her vegetables and three flights of stairs in Rouen... Besides this, there were the purchases of more exotic goods—lemons, tea, linen, wine—to be made from Inverness, and a few other odd things—such as the horse manure which some of the tenants got from the soldiers at Fort William in exchange for hay, for the better growth of their infield bere.
All this was, no doubt, an irregular way to run an estate; but these were irregular times, and things went on well enough, considering. Lochiel was happy with her work, and this reassured Margaret, for she trusted implicitly her Chief's judgement in all such matters. Towards the end of October she had a letter from John, who spoke of his confidence in her and his pleasure in the thought that Ardroy went on without him there. Becoming speculative in what his sister suspected was a little sentimentality, he spoke also of the plans he had for improvements to the estate—he wished to take in some enclosures round the house for the better keeping of livestock, expand the garden and try new types of vegetable crops, plant an avenue of beech or lime trees along the approach to the house... one Day I shall come back and carry out these Designs, he wrote; and I have every Confidence that the Place shall be in a good State to begin them. And Ewen shall know it as a real Home—as what it ought to be for him—and, as you know, that is the most important Thing of all....
If her sense of responsibility was kept busy with the work of the estate, the house, being more familiar, gave her more of confident satisfaction. Here there was much to do also. Marsali showed her how to prepare the bags of oats and bere from the mill for winter storage, by heating a broomstick in the oven and thrusting it into the bags to dry out the meal. She managed the dovecote, where the pigeons would sit in a dignified, regal attitude surveying the garden, trees and farmland as though the place were a little kingdom belonging entirely to themselves. On washing-days she and all the female servants worked together at the great steaming tubs arranged in the yard and hung the laundry out to dry on the lines.
Finding that this routine work went, on the whole, very smoothly, she soon began trying out little innovations and improvements in her housekeeping techniques—new receipts, methods for cleaning stubborn stains from the tablecloth and anything else that seemed good to her. With the help of Seonaid MacMartin, who had her own little flock up at Slochd nan Eun, she began to keep hens.
'Now,' she said to herself, one day in the kitchen while making one of these experiments, 'we must take this and add the spices—powdered ginger and nutmeg, a drachm each.' In a pan over the fire were frying some slices of apple, at which Marsali—notwithstanding the promising smell—was looking with a somewhat doubtful gaze. The apples had come from Inverness, for none were grown in the mountains. Margaret had thought their arrival a good opportunity to try a promising receipt from the Country Housewife's Guide.
'I can't say I trust your book of instructions,' said Marsali. The book lay open upon the kitchen table, and Margaret, a bowl of egg and cream held in one arm and her whisk in the other hand, kept crossing back and forth from the fire to consult it. 'Perhaps they're good for the English ladies—but even so, English or Scots, a man can't know the best way to do women's work!'
Margaret paused in her whisking and smiled. 'Ah,' she said, 'but I'm not doing quite what he says—you see there's no oatmeal in the book, for instance.' Marsali frowned down at the page and nodded. 'I use my own wisdom in adapting the receipt,' went on Margaret. 'Surely it wouldn't work if I didn't!'
They both laughed at this cheerful piece of arrogance, after which Margaret poured the batter—now with its spices and sugar added—over the fried apple slices in the pan. When, a short while later, the pancakes were done, Marsali agreed with her mistress that the experiment had been a success.
'I shall ask Alan's opinion whether we might grow our own apples here,' said Margaret, thoughtfully. 'Surely along the wall across from the dairy, where it gets the sunlight, would do for some fruit trees.'
There were many more such experiments to make, and Margaret thoroughly enjoyed herself in searching out new things to try. She made bread from bere-meal and oats, steeping oatmeal in water overnight before making a dough by mixing it with the barley. The dependable Mr Beckley assured her that the result would be entirely indistinguishable from wheaten bread: having been used to eating that lowland delicacy in France, she was not entirely convinced of the perfection of the resemblance, but nevertheless found the results favourable enough. Using a receipt for elderberry syrup from the Country Housewife's Guide, along with some advice from Marsali—who, besides the inestimable value of her general expertise in the day-to-day running of the house, took great satisfaction in getting to use her own knowledge to improve upon Margaret's author's instructions—she made a syrup of the blaeberries which grew in abundance at Ardroy. Not all of these could entirely be called successes in their actual results, but—as she told Marsali—she learnt something from every one, even if only that a method which sounded perfect as an idea did not work in practice, and so constantly improved as a housekeeper.
It was perhaps inevitable that all this domestic labour should sometimes send her thoughts towards something else. She would look up from kneading her barley-bread dough, or pause while walking across the yard to the dairy, and the thought would come into her mind that quite another life might by now have been hers. It might have been a different house that she was keeping—Fergus's house, as his wife; and there would have been children also to look after, a true little family, instead of this odd half-household consisting of herself and the servants only... Indeed it would have been a very different house, for Fergus had been a younger son and had trained in the legal profession before another duty had called him away; he used to speak of their setting up house in a town—Inverness, or perhaps his ambitions would have taken them further afield still.
There was no use in dwelling on shadow-thoughts of things that would never be. Nor was there any sense in making comparisons which could have no real meaning now; but she would see the view of the loch from the kitchen window, or feel the wind on her face while in the yard dealing with the washing or picking herbs from the kitchen-garden, or see the autumn sunlight upon the hills above the bare outfields where she went to speak with the tenants, and feel that, for all she had lost, she had something good and precious here. She was too honest to try to convince herself that it was any sort of exchange or consolation, or that she would not have given it all up in a moment if the future that was gone could have been returned to her—and yet the sunlight and the wind comforted her, and seemed to disperse her old grief and send it gently drifting back from the future into the past.
God is good, she thought, although the hardships which it is His will that we must bear may be sorrowful.
About the middle of November the steady routine of life at Ardroy was interrupted by a new event in the shape of a visit from the Stewarts of Invernacree, Isobel's relations and Ewen's. Margaret had not seen any of them since before she left Scotland, and she looked forward to this little reunion with pleasure—besides enjoying the interest which such a visit brought for the house.
'Well, Margaret,' said old Mrs Stewart, as they sat down at the supper-table together, 'it is good to see the old place once again.' She was a woman of few and restrained words, and was not likely to say all, or even a small part, of what she felt; there was something of sadness, and much of warmth, in her smile.
Their supper consisted of a hare which had been killed up on the slopes above Ardroy the previous day by some keen young hunters from Slochd nan Eun, Neil MacMartin amongst them. Roasted, stuffed with a forcemeat of its own boiled liver minced with breadcrumbs, egg and spices, basted with butter and finally dressed with a claret gravy, it made a rich meal. 'I have a very clever cook-housekeeper in Marsali,' said Margaret with a twinkle, in reply to Alexander Stewart's compliment upon the meal. 'We are fortunate here.'
After supper they sat together in the long living-room. The curtains were drawn against the dark autumn night, but they did not quite keep out the restless sound of the wind, which had been lively already when the visitors had arrived and which had grown fiercer since sunset. How pleasant to hear it—outside and kept at bay, while one sat by the bright peat fire which sent flickers of light and dancing shadows up into the spaces between the wooden beams of the ceiling, and surrounded by the talk and laughter of friends. They spoke of Margaret's work about the estate—Alexander, who had only been responsible for his own lands at Invernacree for a short time, was very much interested in how she was getting on with it. And they spoke of Ewen, whom they were all to go and see tomorrow. Alexander and his wife Anne had a little boy of their own back at Invernacree; they took a fond interest in their nephew, and listened with understanding attention to Margaret's stories of his babyish adventures. Anne hoped that Margaret might bring him to see Alan, when they were a little older, and that the cousins would be friends; and Margaret happily agreed to this scheme.
At last, when the fire was getting lower and the wind seemed to be giving up its fury in submission to the absolute darkness of the night, they drank a toast to King James—whose portrait hung proudly upon the living-room wall, opposite the table—and retired to bed. The guest bedchambers—all the rooms on the first floor apart from Margaret's own—had been shut up and empty these many months, and it was good to see them all made ready to welcome the visitors whom she ushered to them now. She felt that the house had become something more like what it ought to be, full of people and cheer; she was a happy hostess.
'Margaret, dear,' said old Mrs Stewart, stopping her in the passage with a hand upon her arm, 'I know Isobel would be glad to see her house in such good hands. Nay—she does see it, I'm sure. Thank you.'
It was St Stephen's Day, and Margaret, after spending the early morning in the warmth of the kitchen, had ventured outside to feed the hens. The day was grey and dreary; the hills presented a weird appearance, with the brown heather of their slopes vanishing first beneath a covering of snow and then, a little higher up, into the obscurity of the blanketing clouds which threatened more snow for the lower ground before very long.
Margaret, however, must continue her care of the hens despite the unpromising weather, for she had plans for them; she had been diligently reading up on poultry-keeping in order that she might make their contributions to the household as effective as possible. She had made them a special food of barley-meal boiled in milk and water and sweetened with sugar, to keep up their strength in the cold. A few weeks ago some of them had begun to show worrying signs of ill-health, and she had attempted a cure by feeding them woodlice collected from under stones in the garden (a task which Catriona had flatly refused to carry out for her). The hens had recovered in a few days—though whether this was to be attributed to the woodlice or simply to the birds' own strong constitutions, she would admit to a little doubt. She wanted to get them sitting on eggs soon, that the household might have chickens to eat in the lean weeks towards the end of winter, and, having read an account of a hen enabled to sit successfully in cold weather by being brought into the kitchen and set in the chimney-corner, was thinking out in which parts of her own kitchen she might most comfortably accommodate a bird.
Around her the garden, and the fields beyond it, lay in their winter sleep of bare branches and brown earth. The ruts of the narrow track that ran round this side of the garden were frozen in place and glittered with the tiny, fractured growths of ice amidst the mud; at the edges of the track and in the trees to either side a flock of snow-birds, driven down from the high tops by the cold, were flitting about and pecking at the ground and the branches in their search for food, chirruping softly to each other and to the two or three bramblings which had joined them.
On the stone bench beneath a birch tree at the end of the garden sat Seonaid, who had brought Ewen over for a Christmas visit to the house that would one day be his. The frequent visits which they had been making in both directions were not a typical feature of Highland fosterage as Margaret knew it—more ordinarily a child would be sent to the other side of the family's lands, or even to a tenant of another laird, rather than being fostered as Ewen was in a dwelling only a mile or so distant from Ardroy itself—but, as the many irregularities of these days went, this was a very welcome one to all parties. Ewen was by now old enough to sit up in Seonaid's lap and take an intelligent interest in the hens, extracting a chubby arm from the blankets in which he had been carefully bundled up to wave to them and babbling happily, apparently in response to their clucking.
'Oh, he's quite a mischievous wee thing already,' said Seonaid, laughing as the child made a determined attempt to bounce himself off her knee and join the hens on the ground. 'He'll be a handful when he's a little older.'
Margaret set down the porringer from which she had been feeding the birds, allowing them to mop up the milk remaining in the bottom, and went over to her nephew.
'There, do you want to go to your Auntie Marget?' said Seonaid, and handed the child carefully up to her. Here he sat quite contentedly, watching out of wide blue eyes while she pointed out various features of the garden and explained to him their names and purposes. How strange to think that this small creature, this warm little weight in her arms, would—God willing—one day be a man, as tall as John was, perhaps, or taller, and the laird of Ardroy. How strange to think that he, too, might one day raise his sword for King James...
A footstep sounded from round the side of the house, and all three heads turned to look at the newcomer. Margaret recognised the man: he was one of the servants of Lochiel who had accompanied her on her first journey from Achnacarry. Hurriedly, she passed Ewen back to Seonaid—he made a little noise of protest, but did not begin to cry, and settled down quietly in his foster-mother's arms, as though already aware of the gravity of the situation—and went over to the man.
'A message from Mac Dhomhnuill Duibh, mistress,' he said. The look on his face suggested the importance of the message, and a sudden feeling of dread came over Margaret.
'Is Lochiel well?' she said at once.
'He is well,' said the messenger. 'Here—' and he handed her the note.
She sent the man inside to warm himself and get a hot drink from Marsali in the kitchen. When he had gone, she opened the letter—it was not long—and read it through.
For a few moments after she had finished reading she remained motionless, staring at the words on the page as if she might will them into a different pattern. They did not move. Then she sat down on the stone bench beside Seonaid.
Seonaid was watching her with a look of quiet concern. After a few moments she placed her free hand—the other was still holding Ewen—lightly on Margaret's arm, though she said nothing.
Slowly folding up the letter, Margaret looked from Seonaid's hand to the child in her lap. To see the house that would one day be his? 'Twas his now...
'John is dead,' she said at last. 'He came down with a fever in Amsterdam—it was only a few days...'
Seonaid showed little more outward reaction to the news than she had done herself; perhaps there was no need for displays of emotion, when they both knew quite well what this meant. Her hand only tightened on Margaret's arm—a welcome pressure, as though holding her steady in a world that might otherwise have drifted away from beneath her, uncertain in its ground as the snow-covered heather beneath the clouds.
They sat in silence for some minutes. The clouds darkened; a few soft flakes of snow began to fall. After a while Ewen, whose serious mood had left him as quickly as the moods of six-month-old children generally change and evaporate, and who was perhaps growing impatient with the strange silence of the adults, resumed his bouncing and babbling at the hens. Seonaid removed her hand and restrained him gently.
Margaret smiled at the sight, and her thoughts—despite themselves—moved away from the memory of the brother whom she would never see again in this world, to his son still living before her. It was a sad fate indeed for him. The cause of the White Rose demanded much from those still loyal to it; yet their loyalty was both a duty and a privilege, and her own loyalty and that of the young chieftain beside her would remain steadfast, whatever their cause asked of them. And the house of Ardroy was standing yet—and surely Ewen would need her now more than ever.
For the other great significance of this piece of news had already occurred to her—that she was no longer simply keeping the house and estate in order until, a few years hence, John should return; her position here was now permanent. She would manage the household for all the years of Ewen's childhood, and see him grow up and establish himself in his own domain. If anyone now was to plant that beech avenue, it would be her...
The snow was falling thicker now, and settling on the ground; the hills above the garden had retreated further into the gloom, and the hens were seeking shelter in their coop.
'Let's go inside,' said Margaret, standing up and brushing a few flakes of snow off her apron. ''Tis getting too cold to sit here.'
Seonaid agreed; and they and Ewen went together into the warmth and light of the house of Ardroy.