A Maid for the Grieving Highlander Read online

  A Maid for the Grieving Highlander

  Fiona Farris

  Copyright© 2018 by Fiona Faris

  All Rights Reserved.

  * * *

  This book may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher. In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Epilogue

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  Glossary

  Chapter One

  “Catriona! Catriona! Sing us a song! Please, Catriona, sing us a song!”

  The children of the clachan swarmed around Catriona, the youngest of them plucking at her skirts. Catriona smiled at them fondly, touching their heads as if she were rearranging some flowers. The children had been working hard all morning and were tiring now; they deserved a wee diversion.

  Catriona sat down, cross-legged, with her back against one of the stooks she had been gathering. The August sun beat down on the outfield where the people of the clachan were harvesting their barley crop. A welcome breeze blew up the glen from Loch Muideart, bringing with it a faint tang of the sea. Her father was working his way along a rigg, swaying to the rhythm of his scythe as it swung its wide whispering arc through the barley stalks. To either side of him, the menfolk formed a line across the entire width of the long narrow field that lay between the baulks, edging forward with every sweep of their blades, leaving a carpet of short stubble in their wake. Their feet and legs were bare, their plaids kilted up around their pale sinewy thighs.

  Catriona’s heart soared. These were her people, her kinfolk, the eight families that made up the clachan of Ath Tharracail – Torquil’s Ford. A little way further down the brae towards the infields, on a patch of greensward, her mother and the other women of the clachan were beating the mown barley with flails to separate the grain from the straw and tossing it into the winnowing breeze, pausing periodically to let the children gather up the straw in armfuls to stand into stooks to dry in the sun and the younger lassies to scrape up the grain left on the grass. The women too worked in kilted plaids, their torsos stripped to their sarks and bodices.

  The children gathered around Catriona. Two naked toddlers scrambled onto her lap and cooried into the crooks of her arms, the older children arranging themselves in a half-circle around her bare feet. She settled herself, then began to sing in a low, conspiratorial voice, her brown birdlike eyes dancing around the children’s eager faces, drawing them into the conspiracy of her song.

  She sang a nonsense-rhyme about a field mouse which loses its tail to a reaper’s sickle and repays the reaper by creeping into his house at night and nibbling a hole in the seat of his Sunday breeches. The children squealed with delight at the vision Catriona wove of the reaper appearing at the next kirk service with his dowp protruding out like a hare’s tail from the hole in his breeks.

  Catriona lay back against the straw and let the sun bathe her face and the breeze caress her naked legs. Before her, at the foot of the brae, beyond the infields and the scattered houses of the clachan, the River Seille wended its way through the glen. Ath Tharracail lay on a bend where the river emptied from Loch Seille and swung sharply to the north. Cliffs rose on the far side, fringed by a flat shingle beach. Behind her loomed Cnoc Uaine, on the higher slopes of which the clachan’s animals – cattle, sheep, and goats – had been turned out in the spring for the summer shieling. Catriona was suddenly seized by a sharp yearning for the land, for her people. She settled the two toddlers, one in each arm, as a love song came unbidden to her lips.

  Her voice rose clear and pure, spilling like spring water across the gentle slope of the hillside. It had the timbre of a bell and chimed cleanly in the warm breeze. She sang of a lover lost in the mountain and the longing of his beloved that goes out forever to the tumbling burns and corries, the crags and the wild heather-clad fells, wherein his soul now dwells. And she sang of the beloved’s plea to the golden eagle that soars above the mountains, encompassing the whole world with its godlike eye, beseeching it to find her lover and lead him home to her, ere her heart breaks into a thousand pieces.

  By the end of her song, the outfield had fallen silent. The men were resting on their scythes, the women on their pitchforks and flails. Several of the women were weeping, as they remembered their loves lost to warfare, illness, and starvation. The children too had fallen silent, awed by the beauty of Catriona’s lament. The two toddlers had fallen asleep against her breast.

  Then the spell was broken, and the work resumed, the men swinging their scythes and the women threshing and winnowing the grain. But their chatter was more subdued as they each reflected privately on the hardships and uncertainties of their lives.

  Catriona stirred the children and, standing up, clapped her hands.

  “Come on, now!” she cried brightly. “It’s time for the Stookie Lairds.”

  The children cheered, and the adults smiled.

  Catriona divided the children into two groups, roughly equal in the distribution of age and sex, and set each group to build and defend a stook of straw while trying to knock down the other group’s stook.

  The battle commenced.

  While the children shrieked and fought, Catriona sought out her older sister, Sorcha. Sorcha was with the threshing party, gathering the grain into small sacks and binding the neck of each one filled with a twist of straw. In contrast to Catriona, who was small-built and pale in complexion, Sorcha was tall and tanned by the sun. Her long legs and broad hips moved with an animal grace beneath the skirts of her arisaid as she stooped and rose with the work. A long tress of hair fell over her brow from beneath her linen headscarf and gleamed in the sunlight with the gloss of a raven’s wing. She straightened and pressed the heels of her hands to the ache in the small of her back as Catriona approached.

  “I was thinking,” Catriona said with a smile, “that it will not be long now until Ruairi is back from the shieling. They will be bringing the animals down for the winter in just a few weeks’ time.”

  Sorcha swallowed and grinned shyly.

  “I shall see my Ruairi sooner than that.” She blushed. “He is coming down for the Lunastal. I will be with him tonight.”

  Catriona beamed and grabbed both of Sorcha’s hands in her own.

  “Och, Sorcha! That is wonderful!”

  “It is that. Our families have agreed to our handfasting. It is to take place at the ceilidh tonight.”

  “So, you are to be wed.” Catriona sighed, averting her eyes from Sorcha’s. There was an edge of disappointment to her happiness.

  “A year to the day if the handfasting goes well.” Sorcha bit her lip and dipped her head to look up with solicitude into Catriona’s downcast eyes. “You are happy for me, Catriona, are you not?”

  Catriona beamed again, dispelling whatever sweet sadness she had been feeling and meeting her sister’s look with a fulsome smile that extended to her hazel eyes.

  �
�Of course, I am,” she affirmed, squeezing Sorcha’s hands. “It’s just… Well, you know…”

  Sorcha understood. As the younger daughter, there would be no dowry for Catriona, leaving her little prospect of making a good marriage. Unlike Sorcha MacPherson, whose marriage to the handsome and virile Ruairi Murray had been an understanding between the two families ever since they had been small children, Catriona’s fate would be to go into service as either an indoor or an outdoor servant until some wizened old widower took her to work for him and to keep his bed warm.

  “I am sorry, Catriona,” Sorcha said quietly.

  “Och, what for?” Catriona replied with a smile. “It is just the way of things. There is no blame; and even if there were, none of it would be yours. I wish you nothing but happiness, Sorcha. And you will be happy with Ruairi; I know you will.”

  Sorcha returned her sister’s smile and pulled her into a warm embrace. Then they separated; Sorcha returning to the threshing green while Catriona went to pacify the Stookie Lairds.

  Chapter Two

  That evening, the clachan gathered around the Cross to celebrate the Lunastal, the first bread of the harvest, a return to times of plenty.

  The ‘Cross’ was a massive shard of gray-lichened stone, as old as the land itself and no more a Cross than the river was a baptismal font. It was a remnant of a bygone age, a standing stone whose purpose was as mysterious as the ancient people, the Picts, who had raised it. But, whatever its original significance to the clachan’s forebears, the stone remained the focal point of the community, standing proud and haughty on its little knowe, watching over them as a stern father might watch over his children.

  From the cottages came the freshly baked bannocks and bowls of creamy butter, the cloth-wrapped cheeses, the barley brose flavored with honey, cream, and early raspberries from the woods. From the cottages too came clay flasks of uisge beatha, the water of life, and fat-bellied flagons of small beer. It was all laid out on a large square of white linen, spread on the grass in the long shadow of the standing stone. Old Hector MacLeod brought out his fiddle from its soft velvet sack, rubbed the bow with a knob of resin, and set to tuning the strings.

  “Is that a baudrons I hear being drawn?” Catriona’s father, Aonghas MacPherson, called to him, then laughed a single loud bark of a laugh as Hector raised two gnarled fingers from the bow and cocked them in Aonghas’s direction. “I am told you are meant to drown the cat before you draw its guts for strings.”

  Catriona’s mother, Floraidh, put a hand on Aonghas’ arm to stay his mischief.

  “Wheesht, Aonghas!” she hissed out under her breath. “Or Auld Hector shall take the huff, and there won’t be any music for us tonight.”

  A murmur ran through the clachan’s eight families as Hector’s wife, Anna, appeared below the Cross and raised above her head a round wooden trencher on which was piled a stack of three bannocks.

  “Blessed be the harvest,” Anna’s voice crackled out. “May the season be a good one. And may we never starve a winter.”

  “We’ve never starved a winter yet!” the clachan responded in unison.

  And, just so, the ceilidh was begun.

  The evening was still bright with the late summer sun, though the shadows were lengthening, and a chill breeze scurried up from the river and shook the hems of the women’s plaids and the tapered tails of their headscarves. Old Hector struck up a reel, and the children danced around him, darting at him every now and again to pluck at his baggy breeks. The adults ate and passed the flasks around, their conversation and laughter growing ever louder until Hector could no longer compete with it, and he laid his fiddle aside and joined with the eating and drinking and the craic.

  “A song, Catriona,” Aonghas suddenly called out.

  He was tipsy from the uisge beatha and staggered uncertainly as he cast about, looking for his younger daughter.

  “Aye, a song,” several voices echoed.

  Catriona broke away from the group of women with whom she had been talking and came to stand in front of the Cross. The clachan fell silent. She stood for a moment in the honeyed light, silently contemplating what song she might sing. Then her voice rose like a laverock into the sky. The clachan let out a collective gasp at the sheer beauty of the sound.

  She sang a simple ballad, in which the singer meets a handsome young man on Lunastal night, who walks her home beneath a silver-shining moon, where he takes leave of her on the threshold with a kiss ‘sticky from the eating of honey brose.’

  The song ended to an awed silence.

  One of the women sighed, a long, heartfelt sigh.

  Then Aonghas sniggered.

  “Aye, there’s the pity of it!” he declared too loudly, swaying and rubbing the bristle on his chin. “That shall not be the fate of my poor Catriona, I’m afraid.” He sniggered again. “I am a man cursed, I tell you! Two daughters and ne’er a tocher but one. I fear that there shall be no handsome young laddie to buy you, my lass. I fear you shall be spinning the flax at Shielfoot for the rest of your days.”

  The men and women of the clachan looked at their feet, at their hands… everywhere except at Catriona who stood before the Cross with her mouth dropped open in shock.

  Floraidh turned on Aonghas with a fury.

  “Shut your drunken gab afore I rip the tongue from your gullet,” she cried at him. “How dare you affront the lassie like that, afore all her neighbors?”

  “I was just saying…” he weakly protested.

  He looked around the faces of the clachan in appeal, but his look was met by only the dark glowers of the women and embarrassed glances from the men. The children’s play stuttered to a stop as they detected a change in the atmosphere of the celebration.

  Suddenly, Catriona pressed her hands to her face and fled into the twilight. Floraidh made to follow her, but Aonghas caught her by the arm.

  “Let her go,” he told her. “I have said hurtful words, and for that I am sorry. But she must come to know that her father is a poor man and cannot afford two marriage portions. Leave her to bear that in her sadness and know that life is not a ballad.”

  Floraidh wrenched her arm free of Aonghas’ grip.

  “Aye, I shall let her go,” she hissed out with venom. “But I shall not forget this evening, Aonghas MacPherson, not for a long time. And I shall make damned sure that you will not forget it either.”

  “And what is going on here?” a voice called out from beyond the Cross. “I thought it was a handfasting I was coming to, and not a wake.”

  It was Ruairi Murray, come down from the shieling.

  He cut a fine figure as he tramped down the last brae through the heather. He was tall and broad-chested, with a mass of red curly hair tumbling to his shoulders from beneath his blue bonnet and falling across his piercing blue eyes. His calf muscles bulged beneath the hem of his kilted plaid, and he hefted the crook that he held in his thick fist as if it were as light as a twist of straw. He was, as they said in the glens, a bull of a man!

  “Och, Ruairi, lad!” His father clapped him on the shoulder as he joined the company. “We were just taking a wee rest from the feasting and the dancing.” He swept his arm towards the food and drink. “Help yourself. You must be famished after the long traik down. Help yourself; there is plenty still.”

  Ruairi stooped and picked up a wad of bannocks and broke a hunk from a large round cheese.

  “And what is the matter with Catriona?” he enquired as he tore and chewed the food in full hungry mouthfuls. “I just heard her singing as I came down the braes; beautiful it was. But now she seems a little put out.”

  “It is nothing, Ruairi,” his mother said, casting a black look at Aonghas. “Some words were said that should have remained unsaid. But they will be soon mended.”

  Ruairi hooked his finger through the loop on one of the big-bellied bottles, rested its weight across his forearm, and hefted its neck to his lips.

  “If it is a man she is fretting after, there is a gang
of randie chiels up on the shieling that would gladly ‘tup’ her. They are growing tired of having to make do with the ewes.”

  “Ruairi Murray!” his mother scolded him, casting mortified glances at her neighbors. “Mind your tongue too and remember the company that you are in. You are not on the high pastures with the randies now, to be talking of the lassies like that.”

  Ruairi shrugged and took another deep draught of beer.

  “Anyway,” he said, casting his eyes hungrily around the clachan, beer dribbling down his beard. “Where is my lassie? Where is my Sorcha?”

  Sorcha’s voice came clear and proud, as she stepped into the circle around Ruairi. “It is here that I am.” Sorcha’s voice came clear and proud, as she stepped into the circle around Ruairi. Her eyes were demurely downcast, and a soft pink blush colored her cheeks.

  Ruairi’s jaw fell slack; his eyes grew round like saucers. Beer continued to drip unheeded from the ends of his mustache. A murmur of appreciation passed through the clachan.

  Sorcha was dressed in a plain white plaid, into which had been woven a few small stripes of black, blue, and red. It reached from her neck to her heels and was tied above her breast with a buckle of brass and below with a leather belt. A fine kerchief of linen tightly covered her hair and tapered down her back. A single large lock of crow-black hair hung down her cheek to rest on her breast, the end tied with a knot of ribbands and into which a few daisies had been twined.

  The clachan hushed and Anna stepped forward.

  “Give me your left hands,” she commanded them in her hoarse cracked voice.

  Ruairi and Sorcha came together in front of Anna in the shadow of the ancient standing stone and raised their left hands. Anna took one in each of her own arthritic hands and placed them together, one on top of the other.