The Secret Vanguard (13 page)

She ran on into silence. A carpet of pine needles; here on the fringes of the wood brightened almost to orange with the rain, lent her steps the noiselessness of one of nature’s creatures; the earth as if stripped of its envelope of air seemed incapable of sound. She stopped – and heard only her own heart. It was a world of sight and scent only: the straight and soaring stems of the pines, abstract as a cathedral; the scents – aromatic, pungent, sodden, subtle, multitudinous – like a stirring at the roots of life. Sheila felt herself trembling. She was tired and famished and in fear; for a moment she felt all the wood as waiting for some horrible command. Enter these enchanted woods, you who dare. Automatically she took Dick Evans’ compass from her pocket once more. Fear and be slain. She must go lounlie through and keep her nerve the while. Lose your nerve in a wood, she said to herself, and the result is called panic. Which wouldn’t do. She would go south-east and drop into the valley. Behind her was a village and a metalled road; she was no longer in uninhabited country; she had only to go on and she would come to habitation on a scale before which the enemy must fall back. She had only to go on…

It was not like the moor. There was no horizon on which to set a mark, no less leaden grey above to hint the position of the sun. All around her was the single struggle of the pines for light, and the concentrated upthrust of the endless indistinguishable stems mocked and negated her stumbling horizontal progress beneath. An unending concentration where her own was failing. The people in the ballet who went round and round. A drawing by Daumier of a prison yard. Round and round… Sheila stopped. The unending irregular colonnades were no longer all about her. She was looking out into open space. She had stumbled out upon a long straight ride.

Danger. A story about a man who couldn’t cross a road, who was hunted down at last because he dare not cross a long white ribbon of road… There was a man on the ride.

She drew back into shelter, too tired to move instantly away. The fiddle of Harry McQueen sang faintly in her head, like music to which one has carefully listened in the recent past. It sounded again. She thrust out her head and saw that the man had disappeared. But once more the fiddle sounded. She waited and he was visible again: the blind fiddler himself, stumbling from amid the trees, moving uncertainly up the ride towards her. He stopped and she saw him raise the fiddle to his chin, draw the bow across it, stumble on. And now he was near enough for her to call softly, ‘Mr McQueen! Harry McQueen!’

He turned his face directly towards her and moved forward with strange confidence. She ran out, took him by the arm, and led him into the shelter of the pines. ‘Not in the ride,’ she said. ‘They could rake it with their glasses from end to end.’

‘I thocht to find you, lassie – but I canna haud through the forest alane.’ He held out the fiddle. ‘But I can haud to the clearin’ by the soon of this.’ He unhitched from his back a bundle wrapped in an ancient plaid and laid it on the ground beside him. ‘It’s a lang road for an auld filjit. But, lassie, are they after ye yet, the Butcher and his meinzie? I sent them to the toon.’

The Duke of Cumberland, thought Sheila – or was it the noble Duke of York? ‘Fiddler,’ she asked, ‘what part of Scotland’s this?’

‘The land of Clan Vurich’s before ye, lassie, and ahin are the Macdonalds of Keppoch and Clanranald.’ He paused. ‘Clanranald,’ he repeated, and made the word sound like a rude tune; ‘Clanranald that’s laird of Moidart and Arisaig and Morar.’ He paused again. ‘Aye – and of Benbecula and Eriskay.’

Harry McQueen had perhaps his character to keep up as a minstrel; the place was surely not as remote as he made it sound. Eriskay was an island; they could hardly be on that. But meanwhile the pine forest was around them and Sheila little the wiser. She tried again. ‘This forest,’ she said; ‘what’s on the other side?’

‘The redcoats, lassie.’

‘But, Harry McQueen–’

‘Or Frasers, maybe wi’ their traitorous chief. Simon Lovat, lassie – he that’s a Jesuit too and a right subtle preacher forbye; he that would have carried off Mistress Mackenzie of Fraserdale to marry her, and that syne when he was thwarted carried off and married the mither instead.’

Sheila suspected that she was being treated to a variety of craziness deliberately developed for foolish tourists long ago. But it looked like second nature – like the real thing – by this time. ‘Never mind Lord Lovat,’ she said. ‘He’s been beheaded, Harry McQueen, and can’t hunt us now. What’s through these woods? Where’s the nearest village with a telephone line?’

‘Whisht!’

Sheila could hear nothing. But the fiddler had raised his head and stood with the strangely sentient expression of blind people who listen.

‘They’re in the wood, lassie. We’ll be away to the Cage of the Wolf. It won’t be there they’ll find you.’ He picked up his bundle. ‘Bide skirting the clearing, lass, and tak’ me a mile forward.’

Sheila looked at Harry McQueen and saw him curiously erect and alert, like a man who turns from reverie to the substance of things. She found it possible to believe in the Cage of the Wolf: found it possible perhaps because exhaustion was upon her. ‘Give me your arm, then, Harry,’ she said, and led him slowly forward.

Silence was about them: the late summer silence of birds, the perennial silence of this carpeted and canopied place. Sheila strained her ears and could hear nothing behind – and nothing before. Two miles, she thought – when I’m certain it’s two miles we’ve gone it may be we’ll have gone Harry’s one. To the Cage of the Wolf. For a second her intelligence revolted; her head swam at the fantasy into which she had been plunged. But the men behind were something more than fantasy. And so perhaps – formidably so – were the last lonely fountain and the dead garden beyond… She walked on endlessly, steering the blind man over roots, round trees. ‘Harry,’ she said, ‘I think it will be a mile now.’

‘Turn ye frae the clearing then, my lass, and straight into the wood.’

Moving parallel with the ride, they had dropped into the valley; now as they changed their course the ground rose steeply before them. From somewhere ahead came the bubble and murmur of a burn, but still the pines pressed all about them, canted in their undeviating perpendicular against the increasing slope of the hill. They trudged on. The sound of the burn grew, rose to a little babble close on the right, faded behind them. The ride was perhaps half a mile behind. ‘Fiddler,’ Sheila said, ‘I’ve got a compass here, but I can’t promise to take you farther on a straight line.’

‘Dinna fash, lassie; you’ve done grandly.’ The blind man halted, put down the bundle, and set the fiddle to his chin.

‘But, Harry, the spies – the redcoats may hear if you start playing now.’

‘Maybe they will, lassie – and welcome, say I.’ The bow passed slowly across the strings and back. And the sound was like the call of some desolate creature high in air.

‘But, Harry–’ Sheila checked herself: the fiddler was listening intently, as if waiting for the answer of some crazier confederate far away. And then he smiled, pointed with the bow. ‘Straight that road, and never mind if it’s a sair climb.’

They went on for some two hundred yards, and it seemed to Sheila that the trees were thinning slightly about them. Then once more Harry McQueen stopped, fiddled, listened. And again they changed course. ‘Lassie,’ he asked curiously as they walked, ‘can ye no hear it?’

‘I can hear nothing, Harry.’

He laughed, and the laugh was touchingly young and gay; he patted her arm with a sudden quick grace. ‘There are things the old can hear that the young hae no ear for. And some of them mair important than this. But listen again.’

And again the two strange notes rose in air, a cry at once alien and piercing home, like some essence of the calls of many birds. Sheila strained her ears and heard far off the same sound recreate itself. ‘An echo, Harry.’

‘Aye. An echo frae the Cage of the Wolf. And there’s our road.’

‘What is it, Harry – and why is it called that?’

‘It’s a lookout, lass, that whiles the Wolf of Badenoch had – him that was a right wicked earl of Buchan long ago, Alexander Stewart, that burnt one cathedral and lies buried in another wi’ a grand stone over his banes. And this is but one of the holes he called his cages to lurk in. But we’ll keep our breath, my quean, for what’s afore us.’

And what was before them needed such breath as was left to Sheila. The forest had thinned about them; they were on high ground where outcrops of stone broke through the carpet of pine needles, and where there were glades of brown bracken between the clumps and spurs of pine. Their progress became a scramble. Harry McQueen stopped; he was panting deeply, so that Sheila feared that she and the redcoats might well be the death of him between them. ‘Lassie,’ he said, ‘look up and see if you can spie the rodden trees.’

‘There’s mountain ash, Harry, and then pines again beyond.’

‘We’re there, my dear. They canna touch us now.’

They climbed past the ash trees and entered a narrow and rocky cleft on the hillside. It rose and wound, its sides growing increasingly precipitous; they could move only one behind the other and the blind man’s progress was slow. Presently Sheila, who was in front, came to a halt. ‘There’s no further road, Harry. Nothing but solid rock.’

The blind man laughed softly and breathlessly behind her. ‘Nothing but rock? Nothing but rock underfoot maybe?’

‘There’s bracken underfoot, fiddler.’

‘Part it, lass.’

And Sheila parted the bracken. It concealed a tunnel-like aperture. They crawled through. The narrow cleft continued to wind upwards, but presently on one side it fell away. They emerged on a sort of rocky platform that looked over pine tops at the whole extent of the woods they had traversed. Across the platform a runnel of water trickled from an invisible spring above. And behind was a small dry cave.

Sheila sat down breathless on a boulder. She saw that the nearer pines were higher than the platform, so that the place was perfectly screened. Alexander Stewart, had he ever been here, chose his eyries well. From any hasty hunt that the enemy could make of all this wood and hill the place was utterly secure. But she was not a criminal who required a hiding place; she needed rest only and then it was her business to get away and tell her story. Harry McQueen had his lucid moments; could he be weaned from Simon Lord Lovat and the bad Earl of Buchan he might tell her accurately enough where they stood. Meanwhile she scanned the horizon. To the north-west it was possible to distinguish the moorland country where the railway ran. Across the valley and on the farther fringe of woodland rose the smoke of the hamlet to which Harry had misdirected her pursuers. And to the south-west, and where the pine-clad hills in which this retreat was quarried broke down into a plain, there was what appeared to be a main road. Pine woods skirted it; it should be possible to reach it and to break over only when some likely assistance came by.

‘Lassie, lassie, will ye no come into the body of the kirk?’ It was from the little cave behind that the blind man was calling her; she turned back to find him untying the knots of his bundle. When it was spread open before him he rose, groped his way to the little burn and laved his hands; then he returned, rummaged, and handed Sheila a scrap of fine linen, folded and spotlessly clean. He rummaged again and set out a tin of oatcakes, a little kebbuck of cheese, a loaf of bread.

His hands hovered over them – open, in a gesture of offering. ‘The Lord provides,’ he said. ‘Lassie, what are ye for?’

Sheila was for everything; she ate carefully and with slow satisfaction, while Harry McQueen cut deep into the loaf and the kebbuck. This was perhaps his provision for several days, and in a way she was sharing it under false pretences – in the guise of a fugitive from Sir John Cope or the butcher Cumberland. She must thank him after the best manner she could devise. ‘Harry,’ she said when she had eaten her last oatcake, ‘may I have a read of your poems?’

The paper-covered volumes had been taken from the bundle and neatly stacked; the old man picked up a copy and handed it to her. ‘Ye must mind that I’m but of a lowly and inconsiderable generation, that never went for schule-craft tae Aristotle or Plato. But the verses such as they be are my ain, and they’re yours now if you’ll take them.’

Sheila opened the book. It was faintly familiar: she remembered the poor type from some little newspaper office in the north, the careful literary English, the stock themes of Scottish sentiment with here and there a fresher sensibility showing through. For twenty years the book had been on sale, and perhaps few that bought had read; it had been tossed under the seat in first-class carriages, laid aside for cheap magazines, used to wrap up banana skins or rub steamy windows. Sheila turned over the pages, reading to herself; she picked a stanza and read it aloud as well as she could.

Upward the dying man’s carriage wound

It stopped, and in the fitful sound

Of murmuring Tweed Sir Walter found

Just strength to hail

From this henceforward hallowed ground

His native vale.

‘These are good verses, Harry.’

‘Lassie, I ken full well that they’re but dust, like the laces and fripperies I’ve peddled them instead of. And yet whiles I’ll think them scarcely bad, and be right blythe ye should think the same.’ He smiled gently. ‘There’s never a writer but thinks he sells cheap what is most dear – even at a shilling, lass, or half a crown from some that’s in a hurry.’ He rose and began to gather up the remains of their meal.

And Sheila took the book back to the boulder on the platform and continued to read. She would give herself ten minutes of this relaxation before turning to make her plans. A poem about Burns. Another poem about Sir Walter Scott. A poem about Rob Roy… She turned to the end of the volume.
An Ode
, she read,
on the Natural Beauties of the Highlands of Scotland
.