Katherine's Marriage (The Marriage of Katherine Book 2) Read online

  KATHERINE’S MARRIAGE

  D. E. Stevenson

  © D. E. Stevenson 1965

  D. E. Stevenson has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1965 by Holt, Rineheart and Winston.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Part One: Ardfalloch

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two: The Cedars

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part Three: Limbourne

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Part One: Ardfalloch

  Chapter One

  September is one of the most beautiful months of the year in the Scottish Highlands; perhaps the most beautiful of all, to those whose home it is. The gorgeous purple heather has faded and the hills are brown and tawny; there are little wisps of mist in the valleys which drift gently in the breeze and turn golden before they disperse in the rays of the sun . . . best of all, the visitors have departed and the land belongs to the Gael.

  This particular morning was clear and bright with a slight nip in the westerly breeze. The jagged mountain tops were outlined against the blue sky as sharply as though they had been cut out of cardboard with a keen-edged knife; here and there were patches of fir trees, dark against the brown hillside, and little burns ran down amongst bright green mosses, leaping merrily from rock to rock, throwing up sparkling spray and finally plunging into the loch where the peaty stain spread out in a fan-shaped ripple before merging into the clear water.

  It was a scene to delight the heart of a poet, but Dugal MacFadyen was so familiar with the hills and burns and mountains that he never noticed their beauty. He had been born and bred in a small cottage at the edge of the loch and had seen them every day of his life and in every kind of weather. To Dugal this was a good day for the sheep, no more and no less.

  Dugal had been out since the first grey of dawn; he had been all round Ben Falloch and as far west as Ben Lithie, which was the limit of his hirsel. It was twenty miles or more, but his springy hill-man’s stride took him over the heather and through the beech-brown bracken with the least possible effort. His faithful companion, a collie bitch, ran at his heels, alert and untiring.

  Dugal was a small brown man, tough and wiry as the heather stems on his native hills. All his life had been spent tending sheep; counting them and rounding them up for dipping; searching for sheep which had got into trouble amongst the rocks. The hardest time was in April when the black-faced ewes were lambing, but there was no time of the year when a conscientious shepherd could sit back and take his ease. To-day, for instance, he had discovered two well-grown lambs stuck in a boggy place and had managed to drag them to safety (not an easy task, for they embogged themselves more deeply in their frantic struggles to escape from their rescuer). Then Fawn had found a ewe lying helpless and terrified in a crevice between two boulders—unfortunately her leg was badly broken so there was nothing to be done for the creature except to end her troubles quickly.

  After that distressing incident the two friends went on together—and for a while there was a sadness on them.

  Dugal’s next adventure was different altogether: who should he see striding across the moor, but the laird with his gun? This was the best sight in the world, for there was nobody like MacAslan, and to exchange a few words with him—in the Gaelic, of course—was enough to make Dugal happy for the rest of the day.

  Iain MacAslan had been born and bred at Ardfalloch. The moors and mountains, the sea-loch and the river—not to speak of the little burns—had all belonged to his family for hundreds of years. The people of Ardfalloch were his people and he loved them. As the chief of his clan the correct manner of addressing him was “MacAslan,” and he certainly would not have given up this proud title for any other title under the sun. But despite his traditions and possessions there was no arrogance in the man; he was human and kindly and approachable . . . so Dugal was pleased, but not surprised, when he saw his idol turn and wait for him on a grassy knoll.

  Dugal hastened towards him.

  “Tha là math ann an duigh, Dugal!” cried MacAslan, waving his hand cheerfully.

  “Tha sin ann gu dearbh, MacAslan,” returned Dugal.

  Having thus agreed that it was a fine day—indeed it was—Dugal was eager to inform MacAslan that he had just seen a small covey of grouse feeding peacefully on the farther slope of the hill.

  “Good,” said MacAslan. “I shall make a detour and come at them down wind. I want a brace for the house and so far I have had no luck; the birds seem unusually scarce this year.”

  “I have noticed that, MacAslan—and they are very wary,” replied Dugal.

  Time was when the Ardfalloch moors provided excellent sport, but for the last few years things had not been so good. MacAslan was badly off and in order to keep his property in order he was obliged to let the shooting for a month every year. He let it to a syndicate—which paid him well—but the big grouse drives played havoc with the game and when the laird returned home, as he always did about the middle of September, there was not much sport to be had.

  When he was young, MacAslan had enjoyed a well-organised grouse drive as much as anybody, but now that he was older his tastes had changed and killing for killing’s sake did not appeal to him any more; he much preferred to go out by himself with his gun and his spaniel and get a brace of birds for the pot. He wished that he could have made ends meet without letting his moors to strangers, who slaughtered his birds unmercifully and sent their miserable little carcasses to be sold to hotels in London, but he had to have the money, so it was useless to bewail.

  All this he explained to Dugal, and Dugal listened and sympathised and voiced his opinion that it would be a good day for Ardfalloch when MacAslan became rich and there would be no strangers coming for the shooting (but as MacAslan saw no prospect of becoming rich this did not comfort him much).

  “They are pleasant gentlemen,” Dugal admitted. “They are generous too, but there is a different feeling when they are here. We are all happy when they pack up and go away and the place belongs to ourselves.”

  This was exactly what MacAslan had been feeling all morning. “An là thuirt thu e!” he exclaimed (which might be interpreted, “You’ve hit the nail on the head!”).

  They smiled at each other.

  “But we are lucky here,” said Dugal, and proceeded to inform MacAslan that his brother Fergus, who was a shepherd over near Inverquill, was greatly troubled with “campers”—strange people who walked over the hills disturbing the game, knocking down dikes and setting fire to the heather. These people were in the habit of sleeping in small canvas shelters and they left behind them piles of rubbish including broken bottles.

  “Broken bottles?”

  “Yes, indeed, MacAslan,” nodde
d Dugal. “Fergus lost his dog, a good dog and clever with the sheep. His paw was cut and poisoned by a piece of broken glass—and he sickened and died. Campers are bad people.”

  “Some of them are bad,” agreed MacAslan. “It certainly is very bad to leave broken glass on the hill. If Fergus knew who they were they could be punished by law.”

  During this conversation the two bitches had been sitting in the heather some distance apart and had taken no notice of each other; the collie because she had been told to sit and was too well-trained to dream of disobeying orders; the spaniel because she was a snob.

  “Oh, MacAslan, that is the spaniel from Miss Finlay of Cluan,” said Dugal.

  “She is indeed,” replied MacAslan. “I am training her to the gun and she is not bad at all. She would be better if she did not get so much petting at home. Miss Phil spoils her.”

  Dugal made no comment; it was not for him to criticise his chief, but to waste a promising gun-dog by allowing it to be petted by women-folk was a thing he could not approve. “I am hoping Miss Phil is in good health?” he inquired politely.

  “She is in very good health,” replied her father. “I am hoping Carstiona is well?”

  “Yes, indeed, MacAslan, there is never anything wrong with Carstiona.”

  They chatted for a few minutes longer, exchanging family news, and then took leave of each other; MacAslan shouldering his gun and striking off across the side of the hill on a northerly slant to pursue the wily grouse and Dugal continuing on his round.

  Twice Dugal stopped and turned to watch the slender upright figure in the faded kilt and grey tweed jacket. It was to be hoped that the covey was still there on the sheltered slope and had not suddenly taken a fancy to fly away over the hills to some other place. Dugal was anxious about it, and continued to be anxious until he heard two shots. After that there was no need for any further anxiety; MacAslan did not miss his birds.

  *

  2

  Dugal had been out since dawn and was now on his way home. Glancing at the sun he saw that it was long past noon, which meant that Carstiona would be watching for him and his dinner would be ready. He quickened his pace down the hill and turned left along the rutty road (it was little more than a cart-track) which skirted the loch and led to his cottage. There was a small quarry at the edge of the road. Dugal’s father had told him that the stone to build the cottage had been taken from here; before that, the MacFadyen family had lived in a turf hut.

  If you had asked Dugal how long he had lived here he would have replied in his polite manner, “I am not knowing how long, but we are living here on MacAslan’s land in the time of the Great Frost when the loch was frozen over from shore to shore.” Further inquiries would have revealed the fact that this Great Frost which clamped down upon the hills and froze the sea-loch of Ardfalloch was the same Great Frost which froze the Thames in the year 1683.

  Dugal had many stories about the Great Frost which had come down to him by word of mouth, and probably had lost nothing in the telling, but it had happened so long ago that it was like a fairy-tale. The building of his cottage interested him more. The cottage was his home . . . and here in the quarry was the same pinkish-grey stone of which the cottage was built, lying about on the ground and jutting out between green ferns and brown heather from the face of the cliff.

  Carstiona, who was “fanciful” in her husband’s opinion—though admittedly a good sound cook—had uncomfortably fanciful ideas about the quarry and had said more than once that it gave her a queer feeling to know that their home had come from a hole in the ground; she wondered if some day there would be a terrible storm and a flash of lightning and the stones would all fly back to their original places . . . and she and Dugal would be left sitting at the table with no house around them to keep them warm. Or maybe it would happen in the middle of the night, suggested Carstiona, and they would find themselves lying in bed in the open air with the wind blowing about their heads.

  It was a foolish fancy and Dugal had told her so. There was no sense in it at all . . . but he wished she had kept it to herself. The fact was that although the idea seemed foolish in the day-time (a woman’s havers and nothing more), it did not seem quite so foolish on a stormy night in winter with a north-easterly gale howling in the lum.

  This afternoon in the bright sunshine Carstiona’s fancies seemed ridiculous; Dugal smiled as he was passing the quarry . . . and then stopped dead in surprise. A motor-car was standing there—a large shiny motor-car! Fawn was sniffing round it, growling softly in a manner that betokened disapproval, so Dugal went near to have a look . . . and the nearer he got the more he was convinced that this was the biggest and shiniest motor-car he had ever seen in all his life. He peered in and saw that the back seat was stacked with suitcases and there was a tartan rug lying on the floor.

  Where had it come from, Dugal wondered. This place was so out of the way—six miles off the main road down a rutty cart-track—that very few strangers ever came here. In fact nobody ever came here except an occasional hiker and, once a week, the van from which Carstiona bought what she needed in the way of stores—and every time it came the van-man used bad language about the road. Indeed if the van-man had not happened to be a second cousin of Carstiona’s brother-in-law he would not have come at all. He had said so more than once. Could this beautiful shiny monster have made its way down that dreadful road? It must have done so, because there was no other way it could have come unless it had been dropped from the skies.

  Well, here was the motor-car standing in Dugal’s quarry, but where was the owner? There would be no difficulty in finding him, of course—Fawn would seek him out—and perhaps it would be just as well to make sure that he was not up to any mischief. There were queer things in the papers nowadays, so there were. Dugal stood and thought about the matter for a minute or two (although by no means a stupid man he was a slow thinker); he had just decided to put Fawn on the trail when there was a rattle of stones behind him and he turned to see a man coming up the path from the loch. Dugal had no time to mark the details of his clothes—which was a pity, because they were well worth attention—but he realised that the man was well-dressed, much too well-dressed for scrambling about on the hills.

  “Là math leibh!” said Dugal, betrayed into his native Gaelic by astonishment.

  “Mar sin leìbh féin,” returned the stranger, adding quickly, “But that’s just about all the Gaelic I know, so I’m afraid unless you speak English we shan’t get much further.”

  “It wass well said,” declared Dugal in his careful English.

  “Good,” nodded the stranger. “As a matter of fact my nurse taught me to say it when I was a child and I’ve never forgotten it. She came from Skye. She taught me to sing ‘The Nut Brown Maiden’—but I shan’t offend your ears by endeavouring to sing it to you—and she was full of stories, some of them positively hair-raising. I loved her dearly and cried buckets when she went away. She cried too, of course. It must have been an affecting scene.”

  Dugal had been nearly sure that this was “a chentleman”; he was quite sure now. Only “chentlemen,” like MacAslan’s friends and the members of the syndicate who rented Ardfalloch, spoke in this queer way. In Dugal’s opinion “chentlemen” were all slightly wrong in the head—but there was something nice about them all the same. You could not help liking them.

  “Where would you be going?” inquired Dugal.

  “Going?”

  “There iss no through road. If you had kept to the main road it would have taken you to Inverness. Now there iss nothing for it but to turn your motor-car and go back the way you came.”

  “But supposing I don’t want to go back the way I came?” asked the gentleman, taking a small key out of his pocket and opening the door of the car.

  “I am saying thiss road does not go to any place,” said Dugal, trying his best to explain the matter clearly. “It iss a ferry bad road . . .”

  “You’re telling me!”

  “. .
. and soon it gets worse. Soon there iss no road at all but chust the moor.”

  Dugal stopped. Instead of getting into his motor-car and driving away, as Dugal had expected, the gentleman had dived into it head first and was pulling out the suitcases. “I’m staying here,” he explained.

  “But there iss no place to stay! There iss a ferry nice hotel on the main road. If you turn your motor-car and——”

  “I know, but I’d rather stay here.”

  “There iss no place to stay,” repeated Dugal. “You would not be wanting to sleep on the hill.”

  “Yes, that’s the idea.”

  He was a “camper,” thought Dugal, gazing at him in dismay. A camper! Who would have thought that this well-dressed man, who looked and spoke like one of MacAslan’s friends, could belong to that detested tribe?

  “You’ve no objection, have you?” asked the strange gentleman.

  “Would you be leaving broken bottles on the hill?”

  “Definitely not, nor empty tins, nor dirty paper; not even orange skins. Look here, you’re worried—and you’ve every right to be worried. I wouldn’t like strangers to come and camp in my garden without knowing who they were. As a matter of fact I wouldn’t like anybody to come and camp in my garden,” declared the gentleman frankly. “It would be most annoying and I should probably ring up the police. But never mind that—it isn’t the point. The point is you want to know a bit about me before giving me the all-clear. I’m quite a respectable person, I’m a lawyer in Edinburgh; a W.S., if you know what that means.”

  It was obvious that Dugal did not. It was obvious that Dugal was having a good deal of trouble in following the explanation at all. The matter would have to be explained slowly in simple words.

  “I am a lawyer,” repeated the gentleman. “I live in Edinburgh. My name is Maclaren.”

  Dugal nodded. “The rug in the motor-car iss Maclaren.”

  “Quite,” agreed its owner. “I see you accept that as proof. It isn’t, of course. I might have bought it because I liked the colour—people do, you know—but as it happens the rug was given to me as a birthday present by my sister. She had it specially woven for me.”