January. Soldiers had helped him from the boat and oxtered him up the steps and dumped him in this icy chamber, wrapped in a blanket, feverish and shuddering.
In the first week of his being there his fellow-prisoners had tried to mend his leg and restore his physical strength, but the best they could offer was their prayers. They were ragged, slate-faced men, scrunted and thin, and bent, like the handful of wizened cherry trees that grew at the top of the Bass, by the constant buffeting of the wind. Then these men withdrew from him by degrees, because they could not reconcile themselves to the vehemence of his will. Mitchel knew that they thought him embittered, even deranged. But he saw through their weakness: he had only carried the principles that they all upheld – the right of God’s people to resist unholy rule, the duty of God’s Scotland to defend the Covenant against prelatic blasphemy – to their logical conclusion. What they shied away from was their own fear: they were afraid to strike the righteous blow, to be the sword of the Lord and of Gideon.
Because of his leg, he had spent nearly all of the two months lying helpless in his cell. There was no possibility of escape from the Bass, which was sheer and devoid of landing-places on three sides and heavily fortified at the one spot on the fourth where a boat, in calm weather and with a favouring tide, could come in; and so the prisoners were allowed, one or two at a time, to walk everywhere upon it. But this was no advantage to him, crippled as he was. In any case, he was subject to special, more restrictive orders.
Some of the others, in fine weather, or even in wet, cold-blasting storms, spent more time out stravaiging among the solans than in the company of each other. Alexander Peden, the prophet of Galloway, had been there nearly four years, and Alexander Forrester and William Bell, arrested for field-preaching in Fife and in the Pentland Hills, almost as long; James Fraser had arrived on the same boat with Mitchel, and shortly after had come another minister from the north, Thomas Hog of Kiltearn, and a man called George Scot, committed for harbouring fugitive ministers; and there was one Robert Dick, a merchant, who had organised and attended the Pentland conventicle at which William Bell had preached. Together or alone, standing among the pecking solans that moved like a crop of bleached barley in the stiff wind, these men could look across the narrow, impossible sea and dream of re-crossing it. The soldiers of the garrison used to joke that the ministers took lessons from the birds in whining and preaching, so that if they ever got back to Scotland they could deave the whole country with their piousness.
The solans’ screaming never ceased. It sometimes sounded to Mitchel, who could only get to his door and back again, as though the cell must be the only place in the world not filled with birds. A madman would think the constant racket was inside his head. Several times a day Mitchel made a conscious effort to separate the white bird noise from his thoughts; to reclaim his mind from it.
For in his dreams, behind the skull-capped bishop and the hooded torturer, there lurked a third figure, an old man, also a prisoner. Mitchel laboured at his prayers and his Bible because when his mind grew slack this old man approached. He had long white hair damp with seaspray and the skin of his face looked like it had been eaten away by years of salt. More years than Mitchel could bear to think of. He feared the old man; the doubt and self-loathing in his milky eyes. He knew who it was, and it was not himself; but he feared becoming him.
Sometimes in rough weather supplies of food could not be got across from North Berwick for a week or more. In February the prisoners – and the soldiers who guarded them – had been reduced to mixing snow with oatmeal, and chewing on dried fish. The soldiers would sometimes catch fish from the sea, nail them to wooden boards and then float the boards on ropes under the cliffs. A diving solan, spotting the herring, would impale the wood with its beak and be hauled in to be roasted, but these adult birds, some of them twenty years old or more, were tough and oily meat. It was better to eat the fish.
In late summer, men would come to catch the solan chicks, when they were fat and tender but not yet able to fly. Hundreds were taken every year, and sent to London as a delicacy, and yet the colony showed no signs of decreasing in numbers. When the catchers were at work with their nets on the upper part of the Rock, or descending on ropes to knock the flightless chicks on the heads and fling them into the sea, where other men waited to pick them up from a boat, it was like watching Satan’s helpers harvesting souls.
The captain of the garrison administered this business on behalf of the governor, in return for an annual salary and a percentage of the profits. The governor was the Secretary of State for Scotland, John Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale. The solan crop was worth around eighty pounds annually. But, this aside, neither he nor anybody else cared much how the captain exercised his power. If he chose, the captain could shut the prisoners in their cells and deny them access to the meagre criss-cross of paths that usually they could share with the birds and the two dozen scabby sheep that grazed the upper slopes of the Rock. He could put a stop to mutual prayers, or prevent visits from friends or family, some of whom travelled for days to reach North Berwick. There was no set of rules, no higher arbitrator to whom the prisoners could apply: the Bass fortress lay off Scotland as impregnable and cold to human comfort as a castle in the moon.
Hugh Hardie needed a ghost: one that would appear down a half-lit close at ten o’clock at night, and have people jumping out of their skins. He also needed a drink. He was seated at a table in Dawson’s, while Jackie Halkit was up at the bar getting it for him. The drink, he thought, might be business or it might be pleasure. He hoped both.
Dawson’s was a large overbright bar in Edinburgh’s Southside, that lurched between douceness and debauchery depending on the time of day. At four o’clock on a Monday afternoon in early spring it was quiet. Office workers were still at their desks; students from the university, with few exceptions, were attending lectures or dozing in the library. The juke-box was silent: the most noise in the place came from three old men settled in one corner, supping halfs-and-halfs and murmuring smug discontents at one another. One student, barely rebellious, was reading the Sun, and nursing his pint like a hospice patient, till all life had gone out of it. A woman, possibly a tourist, since she had a small rucksack beside her, was writing postcards at another table. She was drinking mineral water and to Hugh Hardie looked like she had been disapprovingly sober since the day she was born. The old men, he decided, were at that moment the liveliest patrons Dawson’s had. Himself and Jackie excepted, of course.
They were in Dawson’s because it was handy for them both. Hugh’s flat was a few streets away in Newington, and Jackie’s workplace, a small publishing house, was not far in the other direction, off the Canongate. Hugh had an idea for a book that he thought Jackie might be interested in publishing. Jackie was pretty certain already that she wouldn’t be but she hadn’t seen him for a while and she seemed to recall that she’d found his eager boyishness irritatingly attractive. Plus it gave her a good excuse to leave work early: the office was too cluttered and cramped to receive potential authors in any privacy. When she had suggested meeting in a pub on the phone, Hugh had named Dawson’s. Now she was returning from the bar with a pint for him and a gin and tonic for herself. She had insisted, in her role as interested publisher, on buying the first round.
‘Bit early for this,’ she said. ‘What the hell. Slàinte.’
He raised his glass, souked an inch or more out of it. ‘Slàinte.’ It was only recently that he’d learnt that this was Gaelic for ‘health’. For years he’d said ‘slange’ thinking it was an obsure Scots term signifying ‘slam your drink down your throat and let’s get another in’. It was watching Machair the Gaelic soap opera that had enlightened him.
‘Well, good to see you,’ he said.
‘Yeah, you too. I can’t remember when I last saw you,’ she lied.
‘That Chamber of Commerce day conference on tourism and small businesses,’ he said with precision. ‘Last autumn, remember?’
‘Oh aye,’ she said. ‘That was a long time ago. And now it’s spring, and the tourists are almost upon us again.’