Highland Laddie Gone (9 page)

“She sounds much more Scottish than you do,” Elizabeth remarked. “Such a wonderful accent.”

“Oh, toffee-noses talk like the Beeb,” said Heather.

Cameron sighed. “Look: if there are no further strikes on Morningside, the Gorbals will be safe as well. Got it, Senga?”

Heather shrugged. “Fair enough, Jimmy.”

“Right. We’ll be off, then, your ladyship.” Cameron turned to Elizabeth. “Come on, hen.”

When they were out of earshot, Elizabeth said, “At first I thought she was mad at you because you didn’t treat her like one of the nobility. Then I got really confused. I guess you got along okay, though.” She sniffed. “After all, you called
her
your ladyship, and
me,
hen.”

Cameron smiled. “You got the best of it, lassie.”

Walter Hutcheson tried not to look worried as he maneuvered his way toward the uninvited guest. He hoped that Colin hadn’t come to continue their argument about the lake property.

“Evening, Colin,” he said cautiously. “Can I get you a drink?”

Colin Campbell scowled at the party in general. “Oh, why not?” he grumbled. “As long as you don’t go off playing the host. I need your attention for once.”

“Is anything the matter?” asked Dr. Hutcheson in his
professional voice. He couldn’t think of a likelier candidate for a stroke.

Dr. Campbell followed his host back to the picnic table, trying to converse over recorded bagpipe music. “Now, you know we don’t always get along, Walter,” he said in an urgent undertone. “But the one thing we have no problem with is
fraud.
Remember that resident at the hospital who turned out to have a medical degree from a match-book? You were on my side about that fast enough.”

“Well, of course, Colin,” said Dr. Hutcheson mildly. “It was a matter of ethics, for the good of the organization, and all that. Why?”

“Exactly. I came to tell you that we need to call a meeting of the festival committee first thing tomorrow. There’s something extraordinary going on. I happened on to it by chance.”

“Here you are, Batair,” Heather pouted. “Why did you go off and leave me with that prat and his bird? And we’re nearly out of ice, as well.”

“Sorry, dear,” he murmured. “I just need to have a word with Dr. Campbell. Colin, may I present my wife, Heather.”

“How do you do?” said Colin stiffly. “I’ve heard of you.”

Heather turned on her new husband. “Oh, Batair! Have you been telling folk about my family connections again? You promised you wouldn’t! I don’t want to be treated any different.”

“Heather, I didn’t—”

“That sort of secret doesn’t keep,” said Colin with a sour smile. “I found it very interesting. I believe you’re to be congratulated on a new cousin.”

“What?”

“Your uncle, the Duke. Once again a proud father, I believe.”

Heather frowned. “You know him?”

Dr. Campbell remained noncommittal. “I mustn’t take up the hostess’s time with family chitchat. You’ll have to see to your guests. But sometime we might talk about it.”

“Colin is quite a hobbyist in genealogy,” Dr. Hutcheson remarked. “Now, what was it you wanted to see me about?”

“Oh, the fraud business? Perhaps we ought to wait until the committee assembles in the morning. I’ll have the materials with me then. It’ll save time.”

“Look,” said Heather, “do you want a drink?”

“What are you having?” asked Colin Campbell. “Babycham?”

He was still laughing as he walked away.

   G
LENCOE MOUNTAIN
loomed dark against the sky. In the light of a quarter-moon, the stalls and clan tents stood as empty as a stage set of
Brigadoon;
but farther along the field path, in the herding meadow, the festival folk were preparing for the Hill-Sing. An hour after sunset, members of the clans began to line up for the ceremony, while the spectators spread their tartan blankets down on the meadow and hillside in preparation for the evening’s festivities.

“This is a lovely ceremony,” Elizabeth whispered to Cameron. “Watch.”

One by one, a kilted representative from each clan ran across the field, holding aloft a burning torch. When all of the clansmen stood on the field, the torches formed a Cross of St. Andrew that they held in flickering silence for a few moments, followed by wild cheering from the spectators in the darkness.

“Yes, that was quite nice,” said Cameron. “What happens next?”

Elizabeth pointed to a dark shape in the center of the field. As the cheering died away, each torchbearer laid his firebrand on the stack of logs, igniting it into a roaring blaze. From the shadows a tenor voice sang the first line of “Annie Laurie,” and one
by one other voices joined in from all sections of the field.

“Do you know this one?” whispered Elizabeth.

“What do you mean do I know this one?” Cameron hissed back. “It’s a Scottish song! We bloody wrote it! Of course I—Well, I’m a bit hazy on the verses, though.”

Elizabeth joined in for the chorus. By the time they had sung it twice, she had noticed that “Cameron Dawson” had almost the same number of syllables as “Annie Laurie” and while she was careful to sing the words correctly, there was unusual fervor in her rendering of “lay me doon and dee.”

Cameron began to feel relaxed for the first time all day. The soothing sounds of a familiar song, mingled with the darkness and the beauty of the mountain setting, made him feel that the trip hadn’t been such a waste after all. He smiled at Elizabeth, and reached down to pet the sleeping bobcat. Somehow it was all beginning to make sense.

Jimmy McGowan stared into the flames of the bonfire, thankful that his parents were not around to foist marshmallows off on him. Beside him, Lachlan Forsyth was leaning forward and swinging on his cane in time to the music.

“That’s the only good song they’ll sing tonight, lad,” he roared as the crowd struggled with the high note with varying degrees of success. “From here on out, they won’t half come out with some rubbish.”

A voice across the meadow began to bellow:
“You take the high road, and I’ll take the low road!”

“I’ve heard this one,” said Jimmy.

“Sung just like that, I’ll wager,” growled Lachlan. “Folk should nae sing a tune if they haven’t any idea what it means. Listen to them belting it out like they were singing about a bloody hiking competition!”

“And I’ll be in Scotland before ya!”
roared the crowd.
“But me and my true love will never meet again …”

“What does it mean?” asked Jimmy.

“It’s a Jacobite song from the ’45,” Lachlan said. “When Charles Edward Stuart—”

Jimmy recognized the name. “Bonnie Prince Charlie?”

The old man grunted. “He was nae bonny, and nae much of a prince, but he was a right bloody Charlie. Anyway, he and his Highland army invaded England, and this song is about a Scottish soldier dying. He says for his mates to take the high road-the highway—back to Scotland, and he’ll take the low road, which is the way the fairy folk travel—in a twinkling of an eye.”

Jimmy nodded. “So he’ll be in Scotland before them because he’s using magic.”

“Aye, but it won’t profit him any to get there, because he’ll not be meeting his sweetheart again, being dead like he is.”

“On the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond …”

Jimmy was still thinking about the prince. His parents were always bragging about a McGowan ancestor who’d fought with him, and how Jimmy ought to be proud to wear a kilt in his honor. “My parents want me to get a kilt,” he told Lachlan. He explained about his Jacobite ancestor, and the old man listened, shaking his head. “Do you think I ought to let them buy me one?”

The voices on the hill had begun to croon “The Bluebells of Scotland.”

“Ah, your braw McGowan ancestor,” sighed Lachlan. “Let me tell you how it was, laddie, as if you was him.”

James Stuart McGowan pictured himself astride a white horse, wearing the red and black Gow tartan, sword at his side. Too cool, he thought.

“April 16, 1746 … and the Highland army under his right bloody Charlie is waiting to meet the English at Culloden Field. McGowan. He wasn’t a clan chief. Nobody very important. Say he was a subtenant. So part of the rent for his little piece of land was that he had to go and fight when he was told to, or else have his house burned over his head and his one cow killed. He might have been quite young—say fourteen.”

“Did he have a horse?” asked Jimmy.

Lachlan laughed. “He did not. And nae food, either. They left the food back in Inverness by mistake. And brought the wrong size ammunition for the cannon, as well.”

“What about a sword?”

“Oh, aye, a bloody great claymore ye canna lift. And waiting for you across the field is a well-fed English army led by the Duke of Cumberland—Stinking Billy, he was—and they’ve got loaded muskets, bayonets, and cannons with grapeshot.”

Jimmy shivered.
“Swords
against muskets and bayonets?”

“Aye. So there you are, McGowan of the prince’s army. You’re cold and ragged; you have nae eaten for three days n’er slept for twa, and you did nae want to come and fight in the first place, but the laird said you had to. And you’re holding a sword ye canna lift while
looking down the barrel of a bloody musket, or at an army of grinning faces who’ll bayonet you on the field if you don’t die during the battle. Aye. Sounds a treat, doesn’t it, Jimmy? And McGowan of Clan Gow is thinking tae himself: ‘If I can stay alive long enough to get off this sodding field, I’ll get me out of Scotland and ship out to whatever godforsaken colony will have me, and please God that I never see that stinking tartan of my landlord’s ever again.’ ”

“What a stupid war,” grumbled Jimmy.

“Well, don’t go blaming McGowan for it. Sometimes I think of the likes of him, though, in some celestial distillery looking down on his descendants parading around in that great bloody tartan that got him killed, and I think how fash’t he’d be with you.”

“Then why do people make such a big deal out of it?” asked Jimmy.

“Because people like to think that glory and honor existed in the world somewhere, sometime, and that it has aught to do with them.” He sighed. “I don’t suppose they do any harm, though.”

Jimmy didn’t answer. He was listening to the wail of a bagpipe somewhere in the distance, and trying to imagine how it would feel to walk into the crossfire of an army.

“I always cry at this one,” said Elizabeth, dabbing her eyes. “ ‘The Bluebells of Scotland.’ When they say, ‘O where and o where is your Highland laddie gone?’ I always think he must have been killed in the war.”

“War?”

“Oh, yes. In Charlie’s year, when the Highland clans fought the English. For Bonnie Prince Charlie.”

“Is he popular over here? I saw Princess Diana in a parade once.”

“You
don’t
mean you’ve never heard of Charles Edward Stuart?” said Elizabeth menacingly.

“Oh, him. Of course I have. I think I had to do a report on him once.”

“Isn’t it sad that the Rising failed?” sighed Elizabeth. “If only they hadn’t had such bad luck—”

“Yes, but then we’d be out of the United Kingdom,” said Cameron reasonably. “And that would simply kill the economy. It would set us back forty years industrially.”

Elizabeth shook her head. She couldn’t see what economics could have to do with such a just and noble cause as the Stuarts’ right to the throne. Men had such odd ways of looking at things. But, she thought, snuggling closer to Cameron, it didn’t seem worth fighting about this late in the day.

As a student of theatre, Geoffrey thought that the Hill-Sing had the most dramatic potential of anything that had happened thus far. He wondered if he could incorporate something similar into the second act of
Brigadoon.
He was just trying to decide what kind of lighting it would take to get the shadows right, when a single voice began a new song.

“Flower of Scotland, when will we see your like again …”

Geoffrey noticed that several people about the field were struggling to their feet and standing at attention. Must be
another of their rituals, he thought. Might as well go along with it. Geoffrey stood respectfully, straining to catch the words. Something about “proud Edward’s army.” History, he supposed.

By the time the singers had reached the last verse, most of the people at the Hill-Sing were standing, out of some obscure instinct to follow the leader.

“Those days are passed now, And in the past they must remain …”
“They’re dead right about that,” muttered Lachlan Forsyth in another part of the field.

Near the bonfire, Jerry Buchanan wiped a tear from under his glasses and sang on lustily. So many people standing—the Cause was growing.

The last notes of the Corries’ song were still hanging in the air when a stocky man in a kilt eased in beside Geoffrey and said in a solemn undertone:
“Stands Scotland where it did?”

Hello! thought Geoffrey. Another theatre person. Act four, scene three. In his best Shakespearean tones, Geoffrey rounded on the man and proclaimed:
“Alas, poor country! Almost afraid to know itself! It cannot be called our mother but our grave
 …” Then, dropping his pose, he said cheerfully, “There! We’ve quoted from the Scottish tragedy and we’re both damned. Quick—turn round three times and swear!”

The man shook his head. “You must outrank me, friend,” he drawled. “I just know the ordinary password. Anyhow, I’d like to invite you to a little get-together some of us are having.”

“A party?” asked Geoffrey hopefully.

“Yep. You don’t even have to bring your own bottle, seeing as how you’re one of the big-shots. Follow me, sir.”

The mention of bottles combined with Geoffrey’s natural curiosity to make him follow the man without further discussion. This is interesting, he thought. He managed to resist the temptation to say,
“Lay on, Macduff.”
His new acquaintance led him to a large motor home in the camping area. Inside, half a dozen men in different plaids were seated at a plastic table examining a map of Scotland.

“The boss will be here soon,” said a man in a green kilt and a cowboy hat. “He had a kid with him, and he’s waiting for the parents to come back.”