Prince Across the Water (9 page)

I remembered stories Granda had told about the Lowlanders. He had never a good word for any Edinburgh folk. “Weasels and vermin,” he called them.

“Well, Granda, I hope we get our share of that stolen gold,” I said. “Ma would like it.”

“If we do, it will be honestly won,” replied Granda. “And there's nae doubt many a poor man will follow the prince in the hopes of getting such gold. But there's others that will come along just for the love of a good fight.”

“Like Jock,” I said.

Granda gave me a sidelong smirk. “Just like Jock. Especially if we MacDonalds have a chance to crack a few Campbell skulls along the way.”

“Crack! Crack!” I agreed, my fist in the air.

And suddenly we were striding up the road again, a road lined on both sides with bracken thick enough to hide a dozen men, if not an army of Campbells. The thought of the two of us fighting the Campbells seemed to shorten the road. Indeed, we fairly flew the rest of the way home.

12 THE FARM

By the time we got back, we were ready to be there. And we were full of stories—about the march, about the Keppoch, about the capture of the redcoats, and especially about the prince. I had rehearsed in my mind how I would tell it all.

Each step through the glen was a homecoming. The rocky ledges, the gurgling River Roy, even the banks of prickly gorse along the roadway cried a welcome.

As we made the last turning into the village, Ewan's sister, redheaded Maggie, saw us as she was out scattering corn for the chickens.

“They're here! They're here!” she called out. “Duncan and his granda.”

Before we knew it, the whole village had come stumbling out of their doors and crowded around us.

“Did ye see him? Did ye see the bonnie prince?” Maggie cried.

Puffing out my chest, I nodded. “Aye. Saw him and talked to him.”

“You never …”

“I did. He said he'd like a hundred hundred more like me.”

She gazed at me with a kind of awe and I could feel my cheeks redden as if I'd stood staring up at the sun all day. Suddenly, every word about the journey I'd rehearsed on the road home dropped away from me. I might as well have been a mute.

No one seemed to notice. A buzz went around the villagers. “The prince spoke, spoke to him … to a lad from our village!”

Ma pushed through the crowd. “Give way,” she said, “give way and let me see my Duncan.” She pushed past John the Miller's fat wife and Ewan's old granny. Then she grabbed me by the shoulders and gave me such a hug, the red on my cheeks began to burn.

I mumbled something then, and turned away, looking for Mairi in the press of folk. Finally, I found her, standing on her tippy-toes behind Mistress MacKinnon, the farrier's fair wife. Mairi was waving her hand at me to get my attention. “Duncan, here! Here!”

I went over and handed her the button I had taken from the soldier. “I won this for ye, Mairi.” Which was not really the truth but all I could manage.

She looked at the button I'd put in her palm, folded her hand over it carefully, and put her hand up to her breast. Then she spun around and about, and when she stopped spinning, she gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. “For courage,” she said, though I couldn't tell if she meant for the courage I had used in getting the button or courage yet to come.

“Hurrah!” my brother Andrew shouted, and the others took up his cry.

“Och—it was nothing,” I protested, meaning it.

But Granda basked in the attention, grinning like a man who's stumbled on a crock of gold.

“Sit down! Sit down,” he cried, “and we'll tell ye all.”

So everyone sat down around him, right there on the ground in front of Uncle Dougal's cottage. Ewan's ma brought out a dram of whiskey, which Granda began sipping the moment it was put in his hand.

“I have drunk the Keppoch's whiskey and the prince's brandy,” he said, licking his lips. “But none can beat the taste of our own.” And then he was off, giving them every detail of our journey.

Now and then he encouraged me to add my piece, saying, “Duncan was there, and perhaps he saw more.” But I didn't have his joy of words, and besides, the way he told the tale was so much better than the way I had rehearsed it. So much better than it had really been. I couldn't compete and so I didn't even try. I just shook my head each time he asked and, after a while, he stopped asking.

Granda spoke of the great Highland host gathered at Glenfinnan, making it sound like ten times the number we'd seen. “A hundred thousand,” he said, “cheek by cheek and arm by arm from one side of Glenfinnan to the other.” And he called the great roll call of the clans who'd been there. “Och, ye should have seen them,” he said, “all the lairds of the Stuarts, and the Camerons, led by gentle Lochiel. The MacLeods were there in a mighty number. Clanranald, too.”

“And the MacDonalds!” called out the farrier's wife.

“Of course the MacDonalds, and didna the Keppoch look grand, Duncan?”

I nodded.

He went on. “And above them all, the golden St. Andrews cross on a blue field flying. The king's own banner.”

Mairi clapped and sang out, “The prince!” I guessed she was speaking of that faerie prince of hers and not the Stuart, but no one else seemed to mind, shouting out with her, “The prince!”

Then Granda took little Sarah in his lap, and continued with the tale. He told of my translating from Scots-English into Gaelic, and how well I had done, never mentioning how I'd stumbled nor that I'd made up things. Of course, he might not have known, and I was not about to say.

Everyone turned toward me and this time Sarah led the clapping. I blushed again, but now it was with shame. If anyone could have told the difference, no one said.

After that, Granda described the prince's fine clothes in such detail, ye'd have thought he had been the one that did the dressing. And when he was done, he started the whole tale over again, as a fiddler does, repeating a favorite tune.

Our brief time of fame was soon over, though. As Ma said, “It's God that feeds the crows that neither till, harrow, nor sow.” She meant that we had work waiting to be done on the farm, work that had piled up while we were gone. And that we were not crows, to fly away from such work.

Andrew complained, saying, “Och, Ma …” and she fetched him a clout on the head.

“I would think,” she said to him, “that ye'd be glad to go back to work, since there will be so much less of it to do now that Duncan's home.” He brightened at that.

So first he and Granda and I went to the byre, the barn where the cows were bedded. We had to prepare it for the winter, a filthy job.

Then the cows needed tending in their summer pastures—the shielings—high up in the hills. While we'd been gone, Ewan had watched our cows as well as his own, but nobody had been happy with the arrangement, especially Ewan.

So I got myself ready to go up to our shieling hut alone. We had four good milkers—Bessie, Cana, Rona, and Flora Ann—and I was to keep them safe, and see to their milking till summer's end and they came back down to the winter pastures and the byre.

The hut was one my great-grandfather had built, a little stone thing with room for a wee fire, a mattress, and a small table shoved against the back wall, but nothing more. Still, it was enough.

It took half the day walking to Ewan's shieling, two hills over from our own.

Ewan greeted me with a little shrug, hardly interested in any word of what had happened.

“Yer a liar,” he said, when I tried to tell him about talking to the prince. “It's like one of yer granda's tales, or yer sister's daft stories, full of clouds and nae sky showing.”

I wondered if he was still angry with me, for I had gone and he had not. When I said so, he turned his back on me.

“It's all true, ye know,” I shouted at him. But he treated me as if I were havering, so I had to gather up our cows by myself and drive them over the two hills to our own shieling.

The first full day up there alone was strange after so much time surrounded by other folk. Cows are not much for conversation, though they're not bad as company. I spent a lot of time twisting grass ropes and thinking now and again about Ewan's sister, Maggie. I replayed my brief moment with the prince more often than I should have. I worried over Ewan's calling me a liar. And I moaned a bit in my mind about not being with Da and the men.

But otherwise I settled into the hills. I watched a golden eagle catching the hard wind in its wings. A flock of peewits flew in one day and were gone the next. I kept an eye on the hundreds of hares playing by their burrows, for holes that large could break a cow's leg.

A great stag and his harem of hinds crossed at dawn and at dusk every day and we greeted one another solemnly.
He is king here and I a lowly subject
, I thought.
But even a lowly subject can know a bit about the hills
.

Every few days Ma or Mairi or Granda would come up to lend me a hand with churning the milk into butter or wrapping it up to be made into cheese. But most of the time I was simply alone, with too much time to think.

Ma always worried when she had to be up in the shielings, thinking about all that was left at home to do, so she rarely visited. And it was a long, hard walk uphill and down for Granda after his march to see the prince. But Mairi loved it. She said she felt closer to her faerie folk than when she was up in the hills.

“The Folk are there,” she would say, pointing to a wee puddle or a stream. “And there.” Though I could see nothing but the water and the little ripples as the wind passed over.

Of course we didn't dare let Mairi come up to the shieling on her own. Too daft to care for the cows by herself, she'd go running after any butterfly or strange light she saw, leaving the cows unmilked. This time Ma had left her with me for a couple of days and I made sure to keep her close and give her plenty to do.

“The prince is watching,” Mairi told me in confidence, and I knew from the faraway look in her eye that once again she did not mean Prince Charlie. “Soon he'll take me away from all this hard work.” Her hand was on the butter churn as she spoke.

“And I suppose he'll give ye wings while he's at it,” I said, and she hit my shoulder with her fist for saying so.

I suppose I deserved that for being so unkind, but for a moment I had wanted to shake some sense into her. After all, I had seen a real prince and here she was still havering on about the prince of faerie. But then, I reminded myself, Mairi believed every word of her own faerie tales, and if it brought her comfort, who was I to destroy her dream? “I'm sorry, Mairi.”

“That's all right, Duncan.” She stroked the spot where she had just hit me, as if trying to soothe away the hurt. “How are ye to know? Was Prince Charlie real to ye before ye saw him? Did ye believe in him before he spoke to ye?”

“Of course I did,” I muttered, but she chose not to hear me.

“My prince told me once, when I was sleeping, that I'll soon go live in his palace, and have pretty winged maids to serve me.” She began to rub at her fingers, which were rough and red from all the churning. “When I am in the Fair Country, my hands will turn soft and white. I'll wear a dress of the finest silk …” She smoothed down her homespun plaid skirt. “And I'll sleep in a huge bed with pillows and silk sheets. It will be like sleeping in warm snow.”

“Warm snow? Hah!” I cried. “That's havers, Mairi. Who would want to sleep in warm snow?”

“I would,” she said, her thin face wreathed in smiles.

“Well, we can hope for something better now without expecting the Fair Folk to help us,” I told her, and I grabbed up her hands and held them tight. “There's a
real
prince in Scotland now. And he's going to bring health and wealth and happiness to our poor land.”

“My prince is as real as yers,” she said, pulling her hands away and hiding them behind her back. “Yers comes from across the water but mine comes from under it, where the Fair Folk dwell.”

I stomped away from her to go and bring back the cows for milking. Honestly, she was such a daftie.

A day later, as we watched the great stag and his hinds come up over the hill and dawn, Mairi forgave me.

“Tell me again,” she urged. “Tell me all about the prince.
Yer
prince.” It was a peace offering of sorts but I was too tired to take it as offered. I had already told her the story of my meeting with Prince Charlie many times. And while the story had gotten better with each telling, by now I was thoroughly tired of it.

“Mairi, I've said everything a hundred times already.” I started to stand, but she put her hand on my arm and pulled me back. The sudden movement startled the stag and he stamped his feet and raced away, the females right behind him.

I was sorry to see him go, afraid he would never return, for a deer startled once may be gone forever. But Mairi only shrugged. “Ye'll see him again, just like yer prince.”

I had to smile at her. It was hard to hold a bit of anger against her.

“Tell me, Duncan, please.” The wind puzzled through her straw-colored hair. “Ye make the prince sound so wonderful,” she said. “With his scarlet laces and the yellow bob on his bonnet. I wish I had seen that.” She raised a hand to her hair as if straightening a bonnet of her own. “And when he spoke to ye, yer heart near bursting.”

“Well, he didn't say all that much.” I was suddenly embarrassed at having exaggerated my telling of it. “He only said he wished he had a hundred hundred other strong young men like me.”

“A kind thing to say,” said Mairi. “He must see truly indeed, to know the brave, strong heart in yer small body.”

“I'm no so small!” I told her indignantly, my voice rising at the end.

Mairi lowered her eyes, and I turned and left her, going into the shieling house, where I poured new milk into the churn and worked at it all the morning, till sweat beaded my brow and rolled down my back.