He pushed; the door was barred. He tried the next one: the same. At the last house, despairing, he did not knock but leant against the door, and it opened under his weight. He stepped inside, closed the door behind him.
A woman’s voice said, ‘Cò tha siud?’ – Who’s there? – and something else fast and challenging, he could not make out what: ‘Ma ’s ann a thoirt an èiginn orm a thàinig thu, tha mi cho cruaidh ri cloich; ma ’s ann dha mo spùinneadh, chan eil càil agam ach seann phoit.’ ‘Tha mi le Teàrlach,’ he said, not caring any more. I am for Charles. The voice muttered something else; it was coming from a recess at one end of the room and sounded like an acceptance, if not exactly an invitation. The room was warm, the air thick with the smell of peat, and as his eyes adjusted he saw a bank of glowing red a few feet away. He went towards it, dripping at every step, and lay down in front of the fire. In a minute, he thought, I will take off my wet things, but just for now … Seconds later he was asleep.
He woke, his joints seized, still stretched on the dirt floor of the house. The fire was blazing now; steam poured from his clothes like hill mist. Stiff and shivery, he slowly pulled himself upright, began to feel the blood in him again. There was a bed set into one wall, and in it, watching him intently, was a very old woman.
John Wedderburn’s Gaelic was sparse – learned on the march to Derby from soldiers who had laughed good-naturedly at his efforts while appreciating the fact that he made them – and the woman had a rapid and almost impenetrable intonation. By slowing her down, he gathered that he had slept the better part of a day, that she was too old now to get out of bed except to feed the fire, which she had done before he woke up, and that so long as he fetched more peats from behind the house he was welcome to eat what little food she had, as she would die before him. He went out for the peats – there was not a flicker of life in the other houses – brought in several loads and stacked them in a corner, as if by prolonging the fire he could prolong the woman’s life and thus maybe his own, but there appeared to be nothing to eat in any case. He took off his boots and stuck them almost in the fire to dry them out, hung his tunic over the back of the one wooden chair in the place. When he tentatively asked about food, the woman signalled him nearer, and pulled from beneath the bedding a small poke, at the bottom of which were a few handfuls of oatmeal. He shook his head – not if that was all she had – but she insisted, again saying that she would die before him. Then she laughed, a toothless rasp, and added something that he had to get her to repeat three times. By the time he understood, there was no joke left in it: she would probably die before him, unless the redcoats arrived before he left.
He mixed some of the meal with water in her one blackened pot and put it on the fire. She would not take any of the porridge when it was ready, so he ate it all: a dozen mouthfuls. Nor was she interested in the money he offered her – one or two of the few coins he had in a purse slung round his neck beneath his shirt – but she did gesture to him to pass his tunic over to her. He laid it across her lap as she sat up in bed, and she felt the brass buttons with crooked fingers. Then she indicated to him to look under the bed.
There was an old wooden kist there. Opening it, the first item he came upon was a grey shepherd’s plaid, filthy and matted as a sheep’s winter coat. She nodded eagerly, apparently having given up trying to speak to him: he was to take it. She proceeded to pull the buttons of his tunic with surprising strength, and they disappeared under the blankets to join the meal poke. She signed that he must throw the tunic on the fire. He did so, watched it smoulder, then catch and blaze. With a stick he stabbed at it, a cuff, a sleeve, the collar, till the evidence of his visit was all gone. He put on more peats. Knowing it was time to move on, not wishing to go, wishing somehow he could stay in the cottage for years, he sat staring into the flames for a while, then stood and turned to the old woman still sitting in the bed. ‘Tapadh leibh,’ he said. She nodded. ‘Tapadh leibhse.’ Thank you. He put on his boots, hot and white-stained, wrapped the plaid around himself, and stepped back out into the world.
Nothing after that but walking and sleeping. That first night he managed perhaps six miles before stopping, not wanting to get deep into the mountains without seeing roughly where he was. He slept in the plaid among the roots of a huge pine tree, and the night, though cold, was at least dry. Early next morning, hungry again, he followed a track that headed south-east, rising steeply alongside a burn in spate. By instinct rather than knowledge he believed this to be the northern end of the pass known as the Lairig Ghru. He had stood at the other end, more than twenty miles away, while his father pointed out the route, but he had never walked it. Part of him feared travelling in daylight, but the ache in his belly told him he must risk it: it would take a day, and beyond it he still had another full day at least, probably two, to get into Glen Isla. If he travelled only at night, hunger would beat him. Also, the morning was sunny and dry, but the weather might change at any moment. He fixed his mind on the Reverend Arthur, and pressed on.
Huge, bleak, snow-covered hills rose on either side of him. The path faded and often disappeared altogether. The sun vanished behind clouds. Sleet, heavy rain and brief patches of sunlight succeeded one another. As he climbed higher, he entered the cloud itself, and the moisture enveloped him, lying greasily on the plaid. If he heard a sound that might be another traveller, he left the path and hunkered behind a rock. But nobody came. There were others in these hills, he could sense them, but they were all moving as discreetly as he, and all in much the same direction. He wondered if his father was one of them.
On Deeside there were more people in evidence, country folk going about their daily business, also many ragged men, of varying ages but all in some kind of distress, on their way to somewhere. The atmosphere was oppressive. It was as if a veil of some indefinable material had been dropped over the Highlands, clinging invisibly to everything: everybody knew what had happened; everybody knew that, whether they had been involved or not, they would suffer for it.
The cottars were wary but not unkind. John got half a thick oatcake from one wife, an egg from another. Information about the battle was cautiously sought in return: nothing so direct as ‘Were you there?’ – although it was obvious that he and the other men had sprung from somewhere – but what news he might have heard about this or that person who seemed against their will to have got caught up in that affair in the north. He could not help them, thanked them for the food, wandered on. Soon his boots cracked and split: they had been wet too often, and dried too fast. The sole of each foot was a mass of blisters. He crossed the Clunie Water, limped into Glen Shee, met a shepherd who pointed out to him the drovers’ track known as the Monega Road over the next set of hills, and started to climb. The weather turned foul again. He slipped on mud and rock, dragged himself through wet, treacherous snow, nearly fell off a cliff, screamed his despair to the relentless sky. He found the path, lost it again, walked through the night because it was too cold to stop, and in the morning came like a ghost to the head of lovely Glen Isla. There he sat down and he wept. There were still several miles to go before he reached the manse, but at last he was in a place he recognised.
To say that the Reverend William Arthur was nervous would be something of an understatement. He was terrified. A respectable, law-abiding man of the cloth – admittedly from an Angus parish full of Episcopalians, a fact which placed him in a proximity to the rebels that many of his kirk brethren found disagreeable if not downright suspect – here he was in Edinburgh, at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland as by law Established, not a month after the crushing of those same rebels, in the company of a young man who had been, who still was, out! He was, in short, harbouring a criminal, a boy who had been present at Culloden and the earlier engagements, and whose unhappy father was languishing in custody at Inverness, or perhaps by this time even in London, awaiting trial. Should it be revealed that John Thomson, the minister’s footman, was not John Thomson at all – and was that not too obvious, too ordinary, a name for a footman? – Glen Isla would be deprived of its pastor and the pastor of his living, if not his life.
The Reverend Arthur did not take pleasure from rubbing shoulders with