Bonnie Dundee (31 page)

‘What would you be having me paint?’ I asked.

‘Whatever you please. But you will grind and work up your own colours first.’

He went away; and the two apprentices left me alone, as I make no doubt they had been ordered.

I looked round the room to see what I should paint. There was a bowl of fruit on the table, the dense glowing rind of oranges contrasting with the thin old-woman-withered skin of long-biding apples; there were striped and feathered tulips in a crystal jar that caught the light from a nearby window and focused it in a silvery blot at the heart of its own shadow, on to the white cloth on which it stood. There were three peacock’s feathers in a narrow-necked jar of translucent green porcelain.

I considered them all as I began to grind my pigments, holding the mortar between my knees as I had learned to do.

But when the colours were ready, I began to paint from my inner eye the gaunt hands of an old beggar-woman lying in her black lap, with a sprig of almond blossom between the fingers.

I worked all day, until the light began to fade. And then I came back to myself, and stood back to see what I had done.

And it was bad. It was so bad that I could have put my head on my knees and wept. The brush in my hand was still loaded with paint, and I made to slash it across the painting, but suddenly Mynheer’s hand came down on my wrist. I had not heard him come, and had no idea how long he had been standing there behind me.

‘Do not spoil it,’ he said.

But it seemed to me that there was nothing there to spoil. “Tis not what I saw,’ I said, “tis not what I saw.’

‘It never is,’ he said, half sadly, half amused. ‘Even when you do not choose a subject that would tax Rembrandt – and let us admit that neither you nor I are Rembrandt – it never is. If you are to become a painter, Hugh, you must accept that always there is a falling short between the vision and what we poor mortals make of it. You must accept it, but you must never cease to strive against it. When you think that you have captured the vision whole and perfect, when you become satisfied with your work, that is when you will cease to be a painter.’

‘I’ll never be a painter,’ said I.

‘You will, and maybe a better one than I – when we have got rid of all the bad habits that you have picked up with too much sign painting.’ His voice ran up, and
cracked in exasperation, ‘Got in Heaven! Have you had hands of your own for – what, twenty-two, twenty-three years? And still you do not know how a thumb bends into its socket? Ach veil, that can vait till tomorrow. Clean up those brushes and the palette, and come down to supper. The other two vill haff begun without you.’

TWO AND A
half years later I got my first commission – the wife of a small merchant who could not or would not afford Mynheer’s price.

Mynheer told him that he had a journeyman in his studio who could paint nigh on as well as himself, and since he was
only
a journeyman, at half the fee. I should have been grateful, but I was not, for I had seen the woman. She had a fat foolish face like a bun with small dead currants in it for eyes; and I said so.

‘If you paint landscape or bunches of pretty flowers,’ Mynheer told me, ‘you can choose for yourself your own subject, trusting to God that you will be able to sell it and so continue to eat afterwards. If you are a portrait painter you can occasionally,
ferry
occasionally, do the same. But for the most part you will paint people who come to you with the price of the portrait in their hand: and occasionally,
ferry
occasionally, that will be one with a face such as Viscount Dundee, but more often it will be one with a fat foolish face like a bun with small dead currants in it for eyes. Then you will set yourself –’ his voice was rising to a roar – ‘to find what, if anything, lies behind the fat and the foolishness! I have said that you will wait upon Mevrow de Fries at two o’clock on Tuesday.’

So at two o’clock on Tuesday, I waited on Mevrow de Fries and began to work on my first commission.

Aye, it would have been a momentous day in my life, if that had been all. But it was to be a day when, light or
dark, kind or cruel, life gathers itself together in a kind of peak, and comes crashing down in a new pattern.

Mevrow wished to be painted with her little dog in her lap. It was a fat and foolish little spaniel, but she loved it, and in return it gave her the love that I think she lacked from Mynheer de Fries. And when I had cleaned my palette and brushes and made all ready for the next day’s sitting, and was on my way home in the early dusk, I found myself thinking of Caspar, and away back through Caspar, of many other things and places and people…

News trickled through to us in Utrecht from time to time, and so I knew that the Earl of Balcarres had escaped to France. And I knew that the bairn, Jamie, had died in that black Covenanting house of Auchans, only a few months after his father at Killiecrankie. Dundee’s only son, and Jean’s. Poor Jean. I knew that less than two years ago she had married again – Colonel Livingstone, when he was released into banishment with his health broken after all those captive years under the death sentence, and they were somewhere in the Low Countries now. How could she, I wondered, she that had been wife to Claverhouse? I had wondered that so often. Eh well, it could not hurt Dundee, seven years in his grave at Blair.

I fell to wondering where in all the Low Countries they might be. I had half heard that they were in Brussels before the French bombardment; but now… There was a tightening in my belly, for wherever my lady Jean was, there surely Darklis would be also; and the foolish fancy woke in me that they might be here in Utrecht as well as any other place, and I might meet her round any corner of the cobbled street. I did not think of her so often these days, but suddenly the feel of her
was so close to me that it was as though in another moment I would be able to conjure her up out of the shadows.

A fresh spattering of autumn rain in my face brought me out of my day-dream; and I realised that I must have been dawdling, for here I was but just passing the Castle of Antwerp Inn, no more than halfway home, and the candle-light from the open-shuttered windows beginning already to be reflected in the still waters of the canal.

And there I had to stop for a few moments, late or not, for they were loading peats for the winter, swinging the great creels of it up past the lighted windows on ropes and pulleys from the projecting gable beam for storage on the turf-floor under the roof, and a couple of creels were blocking the narrow way. I mind noticing that the rain – and there had been a deal of rain in the past week – had damped the turfs through, so that there was not so much dust flying around as there generally is at such times, but it had made the stuff heavy to handle. I suppose that was why they were still at it, shouting directions and the odd curse to each other, so late in the evening.

They shifted the last two creels, and I dodged past and went on my way.

A few hundred yards further on, a bridge crossed the canal and in the fading light and the shadows of the poplar trees that lined the bank at that point, I was quite close before I noticed that a woman in a dark cloak was leaning over the balustrade, watching the water and life of the barges tied up alongside; a moment more before I realised that she had a wee dog with her. Her hood was pulled forward and I could not see her face; but I think I knew, in that moment, without seeing…

In the same instant the dog let out a sudden piercing whine; and then a shower of shrill, half-joyful, halfdesperate barking, and tearing its leash from her hand, came flying along the bank towards me, ears, tail and leash all flying behind. And the woman looked up, startled, so that her hood fell back, and I could see her face.

Then Caspar was clamouring and scrambling at my knees, and even as I stooped to greet him, he swerved and darted back to the woman on the bridge, then came tearing back to me again. And so kept on, weaving a kind of shuttle of joy to and fro between us while the distance shortened as I walked forward, not hurrying – somehow it did not seem a time for hurrying.

The woman never moved at all, until I came beside her on the bridge. Then she said, ‘Hugh,’ and nothing more.

‘Darklis!’ I said, ‘Darklis! – Darklis! . . .’ and having begun to say her name, did not seem able to stop. But Caspar was scrabbling at my knee and wailing for my attention, and I squatted down to greet him. I could not be making him a pocket of my hands to bury his nose in as I had used to do, so I cupped the one hand I had under his muzzle, and saw as he thrust into it that his muzzle was feathered with white. I gathered him on to my knee while he licked my face from ear to ear, singing like a kettle in his old way.

And then Darklis was on her knees beside us, with a little half-quenched sound as though for some pain deep within herself. I suppose she had seen from the way I took Caspar’s muzzle that I had but the one hand to take it in; and she put her hand on my left shoulder, and felt downward. I’d not have let anyone else in the world do that, unless it were himself. Even with Darklis I am thinking I stiffened a little.

‘Was that in King James’s war?’ she asked softly.

‘In a way,’ I said.

‘Oh Hugh,’ she said. ‘Did they hurt ye sore?’

‘Aye,’ I said, ‘but ’tis rising four years gone by.’

For a while we bided, crouched against the balustrade of the bridge with Caspar between us, seeing nothing of the folk that went by save once or twice when someone all but fell over us. Darklis asked me how did I come to be in Utrecht, and I told her. ‘D’ye mind Mynheer van Meere that painted my lady’s wedding portrait? I’m back to the craft he would have had me follow. I’m his journeyman now, but I’ll be my own man in not much over a year.’

‘Oh, Hugh!’ she said. ‘Ye’ll mind I always said ye’d make a better painter than ye would a sojer laddie.’

‘’Tis to be hoped so,’ I said, playing with Caspar’s ears. ‘But I made none so bad a sojer laddie, a’ the same.’

I knew that, at least in part, we were only talking of surface things, in the way that we had so often done before, held back from talking of things that went deeper by the old barrier that was still there. And suddenly the fear came on me that at any moment she would be gone again; and I left off playing with Caspar’s ears, in a panic, and reached to find her hand under her cloak. ‘Oh, Darklis, I was thinking of you as I came along the way – I felt ye so near that it was as though I could call ye up out of the shadows – I havena done that, have I?’

She laughed softly, and left her hand lying in mine. ‘I’m no shadow, my dearie.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘and you’re with my lady Jean – we heard that she and Colonel Livingstone were somewhere in the Low Countries; but I was not knowing where.’

‘Moving about… We only arrived here the day. We’re lodged at the Castle of Antwerp, back yonder.’ She gave herself a little shake inside her cloak and began to draw her feet under her. ‘Hugh, I must be getting back to see to the bairn.’

‘The bairn?’ I said stupidly. ‘The bairn died, long syne.’

‘Not Jamie. Colonel Livingstone’s bairn.’

That brought the marriage home to me as it had not quite come home before. ‘Oh, Darklis,’ I said after a wee while, ‘how could she? She that had had Claverhouse for her man!’

Darklis was looking down through the balustrade, and I mind the last reflected light from the water on her face, mingling with the glow of a street lantern that someone had just hung out close by. The voice of the town seemed to have gone very far away. ‘Mind ye, he’d always been there, before ever she knew Claverhouse,’ she said. ‘And when they let him out of gaol he was awfu’ sick, and she tended him – she and I together, and after – he was there, and he was kind, and he’d always loved her. And she was so lonely, Hugh.’

‘Is she happy?’

‘Happy is a chancy word. She’s content.’

A poplar leaf, still green at the heart but edged with gold, came eddying down in the quiet air and landed on my shoulder and clung there. Darklis picked it off and put it into my hand. ‘Keep it,’ she said. ‘When a leaf comes to you like that, ’tis a gift from the People of Peace.’

She got up and shook out her skirts. ‘I must go. Come you and see her, Hugh. Not tonight, she is tired; but come.’

‘If it willna make her sad,’ I said, getting up also.

‘Not the kind of sad that will harm her. Did I no’ tell ye, she has her contentment,’ and then she said, very low, ‘Which of us keeps Caspar?’

‘He’s yours,’ I said; and the heart was sore within me, not only for Caspar’s cold nose in the hollow of my hand, but because still it seemed that there was no way in her mind that we might both be keeping Caspar. ‘I gave him to you, as you gave me your bonnie siller pin.’

But in that moment there came a kind of dull roar, a rumbling and booming sound. Once in the Pyrenees, I heard a landslip after heavy rain. It was like that, maybe, but smaller and with the cracking and tearing of timbers in it, and not lasting so long. There was shouting and screaming horribly mingled with it, too; and looking back the way I had come, I saw a cloud of dust in the light of the street lanterns engulfing the Castle of Antwerp.

And Darklis and I were running, it seemed all Utrecht was running, in the direction from which the shouts and cries and the cracking and subsiding of timbers still came. ‘It’s the Castle of Antwerp,’ somebody was shouting. ‘I told them last year the turf-floor needed shoring up – and with all this rain to make the peats heavy…’

Darklis was crying out as she ran, ‘Jean! Jean! I am coming!’

There were torches, and beyond the torches only darkness – we must have been longer on the bridge than we knew – and the whole front of the inn bulging outwards and dragged askew; and we were through the gaping doorway into choking clouds of dust. Timbers were still falling, and for a splinter of time I was back beside the burn in Glenogilvie on Midsummer’s Eve, and Darklis clinging to me and crying of death-darkness
and torches, and the world falling; and a fierce faery wind blowing out of nowhere; and the tune of a pipe lament somehow caught up in it all, as things are mingled and caught up together in the tangles of a nightmare. Then I was back in the ruins of the Castle of Antwerp, and the torchlight flaring on Colonel Livingstone’s unconscious face with a great broken place on his temple, as we dragged him out from under the wreckage of an inner doorway; and a serving-man was shouting over and over again to anyone within earshot. ‘He’d come out to speak with me in the doorway, or he’d have been under that lot, too!’