A Falcon for a Queen Read online

  I went to the window and through the gathering twilight I saw the lights of Ballochtorra. It looked strangely far away now, and far beyond my reach. Lights burned at many windows ‒ they had not yet drawn the curtains against the coming night, but they were prodigal of their lamps. There even seemed to be a few windows on the lower level which glowed with the brighter light of electricity. It was exciting and extravagant in this remote place ‒ like the gold leaf on the crested plate. Now I grew hungry for the lights and the voices, the sense of company, and a place shared. Was there a large family at Ballochtorra, I wondered? Did they sit together, and talk and laugh? Cluain was so silent, except for the rain. One of the turves burned through then, and quickly folded into the bed of coals. The gentle sound came like a crash.

  But there was someone else as alone as I was. On the road beyond the walled garden I heard, very faintly, the sound of the pony’s hooves. At first the rider was indistinguishable in the grey light; he came out of the mist on the road leading from Ballochtorra, and I thought then that I recognised him. His long legs were thrust forward on a big, tough-looking Highland pony. He rode bareheaded in the rain, without the traditional Highland bonnet to match the kilt. He had been in the rain a long time; even his sheepskin jerkin seemed to be sodden. The dog followed closely at the pony’s flanks. The man held the pony with one hand; on the other, gloved, was perched the bird. Now the bird was not so still as it had been in the beech wood. It turned its head from side to side; but it made no attempt to fly up from its master’s hand, hardly seeming to need the bright red streamers that attached it. I pressed closer to the glass, straining to see the strange procession. The bird danced a little on the glove, and I had the sensation that its bright hawk’s eyes noted me; but the man did not look up.

  They moved on past the house and the distillery building, along the road that led up the strath. I followed their progress for as long as I could, longer than it took for the pony’s light tread to fade into silence. Then the mist shut them off. I was alone again.

  Now, to close out the mist and the emptiness I drew the curtains and lighted my candle. Then I turned to the task of unpacking. But even with the opening of the trunk I gave up the idea. Fatigue had been fought too long, and the whisky was almost drug-like in its effect. I fumbled among my clothes and found my night shift. I washed, and gave my hair a perfunctory brush; would I ever be convinced that it was worth the hundred strokes at night? A strong sense of depression was settling on me, in the way the mist had crept down from the heights of Ballochtorra. I laid more turf on the fire just for the comfort of seeing the flames leap up, and was ready to climb into bed when the notion came suddenly to me. I think it was born of the loneliness engulfing me ‒ the frightening conviction that I had come all this way for nothing ‒ without real purpose. I needed now urgently to touch someone or something that was familiar and loved, to drive away the sense of loss. I went back to the trunk and felt about in its depths until I found the box laid so carefully among the layers of my clothes. It came out, and in the candlelight the rich polish of the inlaid wood seemed more beautiful than ever before. I took the contents out tenderly; the figures lay securely each in their carved and padded niches within the box. When they were all out I turned the box over and opened the hinges wide; the chessboard was not flat, the hinges sunk so that they were out of sight, and the box itself was the playing surface. Then I laid the pieces on their squares ‒ lining up the Queens and Knights, the Castles and the Kings, the Pawns forming their protective ranks before them. There was comfort just to hold these things, a feeling of order restored. It brought back to me sharply the thought that whatever happened, the game of life was still there, and the strongest game was always played by the attacker.

  It was a chess set of great beauty and rarity ‒ certainly, I believed, the most valuable thing I owned. It had been given to me by William, who had received it in thanks for a favour done by him for one of the Mandarin class. Neither of us could have put a price on it, and I had never asked William what he had done to have such a reward. It was one of the rarities of China ‒ the ‘rat’ chess set, carved of Indian ivory, with all of the pieces having the bodies and faces of rats, but clothed in the costume of medieval China, the long gowns, the fans, the knights mounted on richly caparisoned horses. Amber and ruby eyes gave them an astonishingly lifelike appearance. It had been made, William said, more than a hundred years ago. ‘Take it, Little Sister,’ he had said lightly. ‘It may be the only dowry you ever have.’ We made jokes about being poor; clearly William did not believe he would remain poor. He was clever and quick; he would come back to China with an engineering degree and help build her railways; we had seen too many fortunes made in the China trade not to be infected with the belief that William might do it also. We were children of a clergyman, but we were realists.

  With the pieces set up in their ranks, my hands grew restless. I began taking them off and setting them aside. It was madness what I was doing, but I couldn’t help it. My fingers traced the moves of that last game with William ‒ for some reason they seemed burned into my memory. Piece by piece, as the game progressed, my forces had fallen to William’s. And then we readied the last move ‒ it had been bold, and I had not seen it coming. Swiftly, William’s hand with the Knight, and a little, triumphant laugh. ‘Check to the Queen, Kirsty! Now puzzle that one out, Little Sister.’ And he had gone off, chuckling, to some appointment. This had been shortly before he left Peking to begin the long journey to Edinburgh. There never had been time for another game, and in the weeks after he had gone I had not disturbed the pieces, and I had known there was no way out of the check. With the Queen taken, the King must fall. The check was complete.

  The time had passed, and I had played with my father, or practised moves by myself, solved chess problems from books, determined to show William how I had improved when he returned. And it had all been wiped out. First my father’s death, and then the letter from Cluain. The sympathetic voices of friends had murmured, ‘Stay here, Kirsty. China is all you have ever known. In time you’ll marry here … Stay, Kirsty …’

  But I knew I would go. With the letter about William’s death had come the scroll. I saw the crimson characters scrawled along its length ‒ not much like William’s careful rendering. And yet they could only have been made by William. I had translated them in my own rough fashion, and then, not believing my senses, had carried the scroll to my father’s translator, a scholar of both Chinese and Manchu. He had shaken his head. ‘It does not make true sense ‒ your brother’s thoughts were not concentrated.’ Truth, or imagination, once the doubt had been aroused, I knew I must go. The wind was blowing away from China. My time there was over. I bent, as he said I should, before the wind. ‘Check to the Queen, Kirsty.’ The game was done.

  I was tired almost beyond thinking, but rest would not come. I went to the window that overlooked the garden, and drew back the curtain. The light from a candle in the dining-room cast the faintest glow beyond the window. My grandfather was still there. Perhaps to-night, in the desperation of fatigue, was the only time I would have the courage to ask what I had come to know. I let the curtain fall, and then I went back to the chest. For a moment my fingers closed over the box that held the scroll, and other things of William’s which had been sent back to me ‒ papers belonging to him, draftsman’s instruments in their velvet-lined case, a silver watch, a collar stud. Not much else. William had still been poor. And then I released my hold. Time enough ‒ the characters on the scroll would mean nothing to Angus Macdonald. First I would hear his own account of how William had died.

  I pulled out my robe. It struck me again that it was also red ‒ that favourite Chinese colour. A red silk robe, padded with layers of cotton against the Peking winters, high-necked, in the Chinese style with bands of embroidery at the neck and wide sleeves. Such garments had been cheap for Westerners to buy in China; in this setting it seemed outlandishly rich and foreign. I could not help it. This was all I had. My
grandfather would have to accept it, as I must accept so much about Cluain I did not yet understand.

  The soft-soled slippers made no sound upon the stairs. When I lifted the latch of the dining-room door his head was still bent over what absorbed him at the table. His eyebrows came together in a frown of enquiry ‒ almost annoyance.

  ‘Well?’ Again there was no welcome in his tone, I was an intruder into the solitude of his years, the thousands of nights he had sat here alone.

  Slowly now I advanced towards him. He had only a single candle beside him, and it flickered subtly over the polish of the chessboard which he had moved here to the centre of the big table. Here was no reflection of the richness of the one I had left upstairs; it was a plain board, and the pieces upon it were plain, with no decoration but the shape needed to identify each one; I recognised the classic Staunton set, the sturdy, weighted pieces of boxwood and ebony that the fingers could grip firmly, and the player could hear the decisive, satisfying rap of wood upon wood as he moved his piece. It was on such a set as this that William had taught me to play.

  I laid my candle on the other side of the board and the shadows cast by the chessmen raced together and joined. The fierce old eyes looked at me across them. Unbidden, I drew out a chair and seated myself opposite him.

  ‘You played with William?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Did he win?’

  ‘Aye ‒ he had a head on him, my grandson. A head I could have used for Cluain.’

  ‘I would like to know how William died. I came here to learn that ‒ to hear it from you.’

  ‘I told in my letter how he died. What does it matter ‒ since he is dead? All men must, in their time. His was before his time ‒ when I had need of him.’

  That, almost more than anything, was what made him bitter. He could not forgive William for dying because he had needed him; he had begun to believe that William was seduced away from China, away from my father and myself, and it might have been true. And then William had died and had cheated him. Had he ever loved William, or merely needed him?

  The silence between us was heavy. The true darkness had come now, and the light of our separate candles and the glow of the dying fire was the only thing that warmed Cluain. And then, as my eyes dropped from the old man’s, lest he should see my yearning for William, and for some comfort and companionship, I looked closely at the chessboard, taking in for the first time the disposition of the pieces ‒ those that were set to the side of the board, and those that still remained. The familiarity I had sought asserted itself, the pattern I knew too well. Only one move remained.

  I reached out and took up the Knight and placed it swiftly. ‘Check to the Queen.’

  Now our eyes met again in a look of dawning wonderment, of recognition.

  ‘He played that game with you?’ I said.

  He nodded.

  It was as if a wind had stirred in that quiet room, a cold draught had swirled about us. Somewhere, from back in time and beyond death, William had reached to us. He had played this game with us both, and both had reached the impasse which must acknowledge his victory.

  ‘Was it the last game he played with you?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘With me, also.’

  And now the silence was more than before; in it we knew we shared a bond, and for the first time we felt we shared our blood. William was there between us, strong, living. Who could believe he was dead when he was so forcibly with us? It was as if he himself had drawn me here, to be his instrument, his tool, to play the game as he had taught it to me, to attack, to dare, to seize and use what came in life. What he had not said, but what his life implied, was that when one went before the wind, one also used the wind. I was here because of him. His life was over, but mine was not.

  ‘I would like a dram, Grandfather.’

  For a moment I saw the lids close on those faded, but still burning eyes. I thought a shudder racked that strong body, and then the shoulders seemed to say even more. It was as if he were touched by a force he did not fully comprehend, but could not now withstand. Wordlessly he rose from his chair and went to the sideboard. He poured a good measure into two glasses and returned and set them each beside the candles. Then he raised his glass to me in slight salute.

  ‘You were sent. I did not perceive it, but now I know. William has sent you. Welcome to Cluain.’

  I returned his gesture, and we both drank. This time it was not strange, or burning; the peaty taste was only the essence of the smell of the peat fire burning here and in my room. The comfort I had sought was in his words, spoken at last, and in the warmth that slid through me with the liquid. I allowed it to carry away my fatigue and my loneliness. I thought of how many times William must have sat where I sat now, the candles burning, the chessmen set out before them both, and the glass of whisky to each hand. Was it right to believe that someone could reach from beyond death to bring two people together like this? ‒ was it tampering with forces that neither of us understood to try to invoke his name and his spirit? Was it an evil or a benign contact that we made? Were not such things forbidden? Forbidden or not, we both believed it was William who had drawn me here ‒ inexplicably drawn together this old man with hunger in his eyes, and myself, hungry in my own fashion. The instrument of the contact had been the chessmen. William’s hand had lain on these pieces, as it had done on those upstairs. He seemed to move them at his will ‒ as he had surely brought me to this meeting. Strangely, I did not feel afraid. If William, though dead, was our bond, then let it be. There could be no evil where there had been love.

  I looked at the old man and knew that the veil of indifference had been removed. He seemed to see me for the first time, and yet he was also looking at something, or someone, beyond me.

  ‘Aye ‒ you have the look of him, even. And I did not see it. It was as though I were blind. All I saw was a wee lass. I did not look … I did not see.’

  ‘Then tell me how he died.’

  ‘Died? ‒ he died. I wrote that in the letter.’

  ‘You did not say how.’

  ‘A hunting accident. I wrote it …’

  ‘You did not write it. William had never been hunting in his life.’

  ‘Och, I did not mean the English kind of hunting. Did you imagine this is country to set a horse at a gallop after a fox? No, he went with a gun after birds, or rabbits, or some such thing. A young man out for a walk with a gun.’

  ‘We do not carry guns in China ‒ no one who is not military. We are careful to try not to give offence ‒ we are the Foreign Devils, and William had the peculiar position of being a bishop’s son. I doubt that he had handled a gun in his life …’

  ‘Here it is different. Every man will snare or trap or shoot to add to his family larder. Most will poach when they can. They must. Life is hard. And if you are rich you do it for sport. The Prince of Wales comes here to shoot …’

  ‘William was not the Prince of Wales. Who was with him?’

  The big head sagged as if with the weight of guilt. ‘That was it. There was no one with him. He did not know it was a foolish thing to do. He did not tell anyone that he was going with a gun. He used often to take long walks. But only the most experienced here go with a gun. There was no time for him to learn.’

  ‘You didn’t warn him?’ I accused.

  His reply was submissive, as though in accepting me, he would deny me nothing now, not even the price of his own conscience. ‘Perhaps not enough. It is hard, when you are old, to remember that a young man does not know all the terrain, cannot find his way in mist and rain. He was foolhardy to go so much alone, but could I hold back a young man of spirit? Would I question him as to his comings and goings?’

  ‘No ‒ you could not. Not William. Then how did he die?’

  He sighed. ‘That visit he intended only staying a few days ‒ it was all the time he could spare from the university. On the second evening he was missing. He did not return when he usually came. It was early November, a
nd the evenings were very short then. But I did not worry too much ‒ he had made himself welcome in a number of places up and down the strath, and he often tarried in one or the other. But by the time supper was finished I knew something was amiss. And then I checked the guns. He had taken one. I was not sure he even knew how to use it. We could not set out to search in the dark, but by dawn ‒ and dawn comes late in November ‒ every man on the place, every household along the strath ‒ and, aye, even every servant at Ballochtorra who had the sense to keep upright on the moor had turned out to search for him.’

  ‘How long?’ I could dispense with the details of the search.

  ‘Two nights he was out. For one not bred to wrap himself in a plaid, and make a bed from the heather and bracken, it was bitter suffering. It was cold, lass. Even for us, it was cold. The second night there was some snow. And he had the gunshot wound in his knee. He could never have walked.’

  ‘You found him ‒ where?’

  ‘Close by. That was what near killed me. He had somehow crawled into a rock opening in the crag up there by Ballochtorra. Only a slight shelter from the cold and snow ‒ and he had gone unconscious. Not able to cry for help. We had believed he had gone farther afield, and were searching up on the mountain. Indeed, it was a wee bit of kitchen boy from Ballochtorra that found him, trying to help with the search, but not daring to be away from his post too long ‒ not strong enough to go with the men sent out by Campbell. We brought him back and I got a surgeon from Inverness to remove the bullet ‒ I did not trust the man here not to bungle it. But we could all see that the fever did not go down. I sent for a man from Edinburgh. By the time he came, William was dead.’