a second or two, and then he’d be gone, and the adventure would be over. Tell your friends,’ the guide would conclude, ‘but – don’t tell them everything. Leave them to be unpleasantly surprised.’
Hardie had handed Carlin the props – the wig, the cloak, the staff and the rat. ‘You hang onto them in the meantime,’ he’d said. ‘But don’t lose them. The other guy used to carry a plastic bag with him, to put the stuff in when he’d finished. He said he felt a bit of a prat walking home otherwise. But there’s not much you can do about the stick. Still, should stand you in good stead if anybody gives you any hassle, eh? Now, the tour kicks off at nine o’clock. It usually gets here at about half-past, but you’ll need to be in position ten minutes before that. And sometimes there’s a bit of rubbish lying about, you know, some broken glass or a few old cans. If you can kick anything like that to one side I’d appreciate it. I’m all for realism but we don’t want people stepping in anything too nasty.’
Now Carlin waited. This was playing at history. He should chuck it. But it had kind of happened upon him, the whole thing. Because that was the way of it, he’d let it go on. In any case, he wanted to find out why he was like Major Weir. If he was like him.
The moor was a place of refuge. The boy saw that. In its endless browns and greens you could become nothing, be hidden from the eyes that sought you. You could coorie under a peat bank, in the oxter of a rock, or beneath the grass overhang of a burn. In winter, when the ground was a bog and the mist clung to it like a dripping blanket, men on horses could not follow you among the black pools and moss hags. You could be yards away and they’d never ken you were there. You’d be invisible. The only one you could never hide from, even out here in the worst of weather, was God.
But this was September. The ground was as dry as it would ever be. The boy, hunkered in the sun on a grassy hummock pockmarked with burrows, picked up yellow-brown pellets from the dirt and cut open a couple with his thumbnail. ‘Tabacca’s low,’ his uncle had said. ‘Awa up on the hill, James, and fetch us mair rabbit purls. Mind that they’re no full dried oot, but crotlie – like this, see.’ He handed him a twist of brown leaf, breaking it up with his fingers. ‘On yer wey then. Whit the sodgers dinna ken’ll no hurt them.’
The boy fished the sample out of his pouch and compared it with the compacted shite in his palm. Slivers of grass, like colourless veins, were pressed into the tiny balls. He tore off some tobacco and stuck it in his mouth, began chewing on it. After a minute, when the first bitter shock had diminished and his mouth was filling with juice, he selected a rabbit pellet and pushed it in too, crushing it with his teeth. He couldn’t taste it under the flow of tobacco.
He began to gather the purls, dozens of them, into the pouch. The town was a mile or two away, out of sight, a thin straggle of houses stretched beside a loch, dominated by the old royal palace which had lain empty and unused for years and was beginning to fall into disrepair. The army was encamped in and around the town, and under the walls of the palace. The boy was only eight, and might have been fearful alone on the moor, but he was not. He was used to being alone. Nothing much made him anxious.
His uncle had come to Linlithgow because of the army, and when the army moved on so would he. He might take James with him but more likely he would return him to his mother in Falkirk. He sold goods to the soldiers: wee eating-irons, needles, cured and salted meat, eggs (if he could get them), anything not too bulky which a soldier might need or in his boredom might believe he wanted. But his main sales were of tobacco. The war had involved the movement of great numbers of troops throughout the country – not least when the Covenant had sent an army into England against the King the previous year – and demand for the weed had exploded. Some people in distant parts had never even seen tobacco, but they were quick to acquire a taste or a craving for it. Very few had much idea about the quality of what they were buying.
A whaup flew overhead making its plaintive cry and the boy looked up at the long thin curve of its beak. He stood with his pouch of shite and walked to the top of the hummock, to see where it landed.
On the other side, not twenty feet away, a man lay sleeping. The boy dropped onto his front and all the juice in his mouth burst out onto the grass with what seemed to him a horribly loud gurgle. For a minute he did not dare raise his head to take another look. When he did the man had not moved.
The boy saw the chest rise and fall. A dark-faced man, in ragged, filthy clothing; his hair and beard thick, black and matted. The boy breathed in, deep but silent, and caught a stench like that of a fox. The man’s hands lay half-clenched at his sides. The boy could not see a weapon of any kind lying nearby.
He was looking at an Irish. He had never seen one before but he kent that was what it was. One of the terrible Irishes from Montrose’s army, who had burned and murdered their way from Aberdeen to Dundee to Kilsyth. They ate bairns. If they couldn’t get enough Scots bairns to eat they boiled their own up in big pots and ate them. But the days of their terror were over. The Covenant had destroyed them a week past near a town called Selkirk, fifty miles away. Scotland was safe again and Montrose had fled back to the mountains of the north. Most of his men had been slaughtered in the battle; others had been caught and killed on the high ground between the border country and the Forth, the ground that stretched away south under the boy’s gaze.
He thought of the rabble of women and boys, the camp followers, wives and sons of the Irishes, who had been captured and brought to Linlithgow. They had spent the night huddled up against the old walls of the great palace, seventy or eighty of them, staring glumly at their guards and the curious townsfolk, or breaking into the strange mutterings of their incomprehensible language. Their clothes were rags, their bodies were smoored in dirt, reddened with cuts and sores. Most of them had no shoes. The boy had watched them for a long while. Some of the lads looked about the same age as himself. In the shadow of the crumbling palace, the light cast by the fires they were permitted seemed to make them more like small demons than real people.
That morning his uncle had warned him to keep away from the army camp and from the Irish prisoners. He was told he was too young to be among soldiers and see the things that they were sometimes obliged to do. Then he was packed off to the moor. But something special was happening in the camp, he could tell. The Irishes were being moved from the palace to the west port of the town, towards the river, where they were hidden from sight. The boy was desperate to go to the river but his uncle would have had him cutting and mixing wads of tobacco and rabbit shite all afternoon. Not now though. Not now that he had discovered the stray Irish.
He kent what he had to do. He slid back down the slope on his belly, then got to his feet and crept away. Only when he was well out of earshot did he start to run.
The Irish was a stranger in a strange land. He was weak, hungry and weaponless. He did not stand a chance.
They brought him in to the town around noon, his wrists tied by a rope to the saddle of a trooper’s horse, like a stirk that had wandered. His eyes were wide and panicky, dangerous too; he looked as though he would break and run if he got the chance. Somebody asked the soldiers why they had bothered to bring him back. Why had they not struck him down on the moor as they had any others they’d found in the last week? One of the soldiers laughed and said they were taking him to be with his own kind.
The boy ran beside them as they rode along the thick brown streak that was the town’s thoroughfare. The prisoner stumbled and the boy’s heart leapt. The Irish was his. His uncle would be proud of him.
Folk from the town were hurrying back from whatever had been going on at the river. Some were laughing and shouting; others looked grim and tight-faced, shocked, even. They seemed hardly to notice the group of riders and their prisoner.
The little procession went straight through the town, through the west port, towards the high bridge over the river. There were more people on the road, and many soldiers, armed with long pikes and swords. And here was a minister too, black among the buff leather and steel, holding