A Falcon for a Queen Read online

  I stopped, and then around the corner of the distillery the flock of geese came in a swirling tide. They came straight at me, their cries raucous, big white wings flapped awkwardly, long necks and beaks thrust forward. I had no time now to consider which door might lead to my grandfather’s offices. I ran for the nearest one, the whole horrible tribe following me. It might be locked, and then I would have to go the whole length of the building to the next one. I turned and faced them, waving my arms and shouting, but they retreated just a foot or two, and that only for a moment. Then they were all around me again, and as I struggled with the knob of the door I felt two quick pecks at my leg. Even through the thickness of my skirt it was sharp and painful. As the door opened on oiled catch and hinge, I turned once again and made a vengeful lunging kick at the big gander who led the flock. For a moment he was taken aback; I could nearly have laughed at the almost human surprise he displayed in the way he reared back ‒ laughed, that is, if my leg hadn’t hurt so much. But he was coming at me again.

  ‘Go on, devil! ‒ go on,’ I shouted, and slammed the door.

  Outside, the screaming went on for a time, and then gradually died down. I stood with my back to the door rubbing my leg, and trying to get my bearings in the jumble of doors, passageways and iron staircases. The windows were high up, round, and gave little light.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ It was Callum Sinclair.

  I didn’t know where he had come from. Perhaps he had been there all along enjoying my discomfort, knowing what must have happened. Then I saw his face more clearly. No, he hadn’t been enjoying anything. His face was still clouded and grim, as I had seen it in the kitchen, but it showed concern.

  ‘Not badly … I don’t think.’ I pulled up my skirt, not caring what he thought about that, and examined my calf. The stocking was torn, but that angry beak had only pinched me, not broken the flesh.

  Callum Sinclair nodded. ‘You’ll do. But you wouldn’t have been the first one Big Billy’s drawn blood from.’

  ‘The gander? Why does my grandfather have such a vicious animal around?’

  ‘It’s not his choice. The whole stupid flock belongs to the gauger ‒ the exciseman ‒ who lives in that cottage by the warehouses. He claims his geese go with him wherever he does, and when he has them, he doesn’t need any other watchman. He could almost be right. Of course, since he’s been at Cluain more than twenty years, neither he nor his flock is likely to move on.’

  I noticed while we talked that Callum Sinclair impatiently weighed the spanner he held in his hand; then it wasn’t quite true, all that he had said in the kitchen about not caring what went on at the distillery now that his agreed time there was finished. Did he only say such things to worry and anger his mother, to display his independence from Angus Macdonald? It seemed as if he had been occupied with some maintenance task in the building when the geese had alerted him to my presence. It was with such care as this, of course, that he had won his bargain with my grandfather; the indifferent gained no such privileges.

  ‘What is the watchman needed for? In a remote place like this must one guard everything so carefully?’

  For a moment he nearly smiled. ‘Miss Howard ‒ forgive me ‒ you have a great deal to learn about the whisky business. There’s a fortune in government excise taxes lying in those casks in the warehouses. If your grandfather had as much money as the government is owed in excise on the whisky he’s holding for those he’s sold it to, he’d be a rich man.’

  ‘Does my grandfather let the gau‒ ’ I stumbled over the unfamiliar word, ‘the exciseman do what he wants at Cluain?’

  Sinclair shrugged. ‘And who’s to say him nay? Cluain doesn’t pay Neil Smith ‒ Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise does. Cluain provides his house, and he takes whatever measures he thinks necessary to guard the warehouses. And Big Billy’s about the best there is. At night Smith shuts the whole flock in a pen that’s built hard by the warehouse door there ‒ so the foxes won’t have a feast. No one could get inside without the whole world knowing it. In theory, a man is supposed to come from Grantown several days a week to relieve Smith ‒ in practice it hardly ever happens. The Excise has long turned a blind eye to it. They know that Neil Smith has nothing else in his life but watching over Cluain. And Cluain is considered very secure. A small, compact distillery ‒ the warehouses a continuous building, only one door that can be opened from the outside. Neil Smith always on duty. And with Big Billy, you hardly need locks. Beside the guard duty Big Billy performs, there’s a nice profit at Christmas from the young birds that Neil Smith fattens up. Both ways, Smith does very nicely out of Big Billy.’

  ‘Big Billy nearly did very nicely out of me. If this Mr Smith is such a great guardian of Cluain, why didn’t he come out and investigate what I was doing here?’

  ‘Oh, he undoubtedly saw the whole thing from his window, and is laughing his head off, the sour old man. He knows well enough who you are, and if it had been to the warehouses you had gone running, he’d have taken the greatest pleasure in telling you you had no business there. Besides, you couldn’t have got in. And he would have let Big Billy torment you a little longer just to bring home the fact.’

  ‘But it’s all right to come here?’

  ‘We’re not distilling now. You couldn’t even get a dram of newly distilled spirits drawn off now. So he’s no care of who comes and goes here. But of the warehouses, only the exciseman and the owner have the keys. If anything is missing, the owner pays.’

  ‘Don’t you have a key? I’ve been told you’re the most important man at Cluain.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Not your mother.’

  He shrugged again. ‘It doesn’t matter. I am not the Master of Cluain. I do not hold the keys.’

  I rubbed my leg more fiercely; I had the strange impression if propriety had not forbidden it, Callum Sinclair would have done it for me. It wasn’t that he was at all interested in me as a woman, but just that the thought of any wound or hurt aroused his sympathy. I continued to rub.

  ‘Why were you so rude to me?’

  ‘I didn’t know I had been.’

  I waved my hand impatiently. ‘Oh, I have no time for this game you all play here. You know when. There, in the kitchen.’

  ‘How could I have been rude to you? We hadn’t been introduced.’

  ‘And have we now? ‒ except by Big Billy?’

  And now his face actually creased in a genuine smile, and was incredibly altered by it. I began from that moment, I think, to wish I could draw it often from him. He laughed, and then his face came to rest again. The horizontals I had noted before were all back there ‒ the straight brows, the eyes, the mouth; but not grim any longer.

  ‘You’re quite like your brother, William,’ he offered.

  ‘I’m pleased you think so. But did you like him?’

  He nodded. ‘William was all right. He had a lot to learn.’

  I bristled with resentment. ‘You say that! William was always counted very intelligent ‒ clever.’

  ‘Clever, yes. That doesn’t mean a man has nothing left to learn. William was young ‒’

  ‘And I suppose you are old?’

  He made a slight gesture of acquiescence, waving the spanner. ‘Very well then. I give you the point. I am not so old. But I have not been protected. I am not the son of a bishop ‒’

  And then he stopped, as if the inadvertent words had burned his lips. No one must enquire ‒ no one could ‒ whose son he was.

  I gave my leg a final vigorous rub. ‘Well, then, I am here now. I’ve run the gauntlet of Neil Smith and Big Billy. Has it been worth it?’

  He seemed suddenly at a loss. ‘I can take you back to the house. Big Billy keeps his distance of me. He will get to know you very soon …’

  ‘Never mind Big Billy. Next time I’ll flap a shawl at him ‒ or something. But I can’t have gone through this for nothing. You will show me the distillery?’

  At once all the friendliness, the concern
was gone. His face seemed to freeze over, not with deference, but in withdrawal. ‘You will have to excuse me. Miss Howard. It is not my province. It is your grandfather’s privilege ‒ and he is not in the distillery. I am not the Master of Cluain.’

  I clenched my fists, and for a moment my eyes closed in frustration. When I looked at him again those mud-grey eyes were staring at me in cold concentration. ‘I,’ I said, ‘am tired of hearing of the Master of Cluain. There are other people in the world. Were you my brother’s friend? A friend could show me about the distillery.’

  ‘Friend? ‒ I don’t know that I was a friend. Would he have counted me that?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘He didn’t tell you of Cluain in letters? ‒ talk about the people here?’

  ‘It takes a long time for letters to get to China. He hadn’t much time to get used to Cluain. Oh, he talked of it … in a general way.’ Then I stopped pretending, to myself and to this man. ‘Oh, it’s no use! He didn’t have much to say about Cluain. I think he was afraid of disappointing us. You know, he always intended to come back to China …’

  ‘And he changed his mind? He meant to stay on at Cluain after he had finished with the university, didn’t he?’

  I gestured impatiently. ‘How am I to know? He never said so. It’s just what he didn’t say. One began to guess.’ Then I didn’t want to talk about it any more. ‘Well, will you show me the distillery?’ I was looking about me, trying to dismiss the subject.

  But Callum Sinclair persisted. ‘So you guessed you were losing William ‒ but he died without you knowing, for sure. And then your father was killed. There was a lot written about it in the papers. A lot of talk ‒ gun-boat talk. Everyone very upset. And then they said those responsible had been punished, and that was the end of it. We heard nothing more. I knew, of course, that William had a sister. I thought of you …’

  Two men now had said this to me, in their different ways. They had thought of me, whom they didn’t know. But no word had come from my grandfather. The first anger rose again, the sense of being unwanted. More than ever I was determined that Callum Sinclair would show me about the distillery. I would prove to my grandfather I had friends. I would win the same rights as William.

  ‘Talk! Yes, there was a lot of talk! There would have been a lot more talk if one of their precious warehouses had been burned, or an opium shipment taken by bandits. But a man of God ‒ well, there are always more of them! That’s the way they think.’

  ‘You believe there should have been reprisals?’

  I sighed, and very slowly shook my head. ‘No ‒ I didn’t want that, even at the very worst moments. I know it was the last thing my father would have prayed for before he died ‒ that there would be no slaughter of innocent or misled people to pay for his life. I think he always expected to die in some such way in China. No, there would have been no wish for vengeance.’

  He nodded, and looked unblinkingly at me for a long time. ‘I think I might have respected your father very much if he was really as you say. And you might hope William would have become like him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He seems to have had no sense of power. I hate the weight of power and respect ‒ and what is owed to people, and demanded by them because of the position they hold. So many feel the need to possess ‒ and hold on. What is theirs, is theirs. Their pound of flesh!’

  I shook my head wonderingly. ‘What a strange man you are, Callum Sinclair. You should be out organising workers’ unions. Do you always talk like this? In the kitchen you wouldn’t say a word.’

  ‘In the kitchen I would have had to say useless, false words. Did you expect me to touch my forelock, and bid you welcome to Cluain? I leave that to other people. There are enough around to bow and scrape.’

  Now I laughed. ‘If you could know what lack of that I’ve had. No one has bid me welcome to Cluain. Will you do it now?’

  He shook his head. ‘No ‒ I couldn’t. I don’t know that it’s right that you’ve come. Perhaps you’ll regret it ‒ perhaps you won’t. Your grandfather is one for his pound of flesh … remember that. One thing I’ll tell you. The first morning your brother was here he wasn’t left to find his way to the distillery alone, chased by Big Billy’s tribe. No ‒ the prodigal never had a warmer welcome. Hours spent showing him how it all worked. He couldn’t possibly have understood a quarter of it that first day. And then the tasting session in the Master’s office. Your fine young man was half tipsy by the time dinner hour came around. Angus Macdonald tried so hard he almost ruined it all ‒ trying to pack into William’s head in a few hours what it would, in a natural way, take him years to learn. And trying to educate his tongue to the niceties and qualities of Cluain’s whisky at all its stages of maturing until William, I believe, could hardly see straight. The old man made it too obvious, and William almost threw it all way, then and there. For a while I thought it was in the balance, whether or not he would ever come back to Cluain. Your grandfather saw his heart’s desire, and he was stretching out his big paws to grab it before it slipped from him. Power ‒ power and greed.

  ‘So now, Miss Howard, after what I’ve said, are you sure you still want me to show you the distillery?’

  I nodded, humbly. ‘Yes ‒ yes, please. I think I trust you, Callum Sinclair. You’re outrageously honest ‒ and yet I’ll trust you not to laugh at me because I’m a woman, and I’ll seem stupid about things most men have some knowledge of.’

  He rocked back on his heels. ‘Stupid you’re not, or you wouldn’t be talking like this. Neither was William stupid. A woman, yes ‒ but women can be the very devil, because they can hide their cleverness so well. They take a man unawares. So, all right then ‒ I’m not the Master of Cluain, but I will try to do what he should be doing now.’

  My mind was weary before we were half through with it. I said ‘Yes ‒ yes …’ to each thing Callum Sinclair said, and in the first half-hour, even tried to ask questions. But in a little while I found I was just accepting, trying desperately to store what I could, and knowing I was making a miserable mess of it. And I suppose that Callum Sinclair knew it also.

  But he was patient. He talked slowly, and as he talked, his voice grew more gentle, the words and phrases less clipped. He dropped his stride to my pace as we walked all through those vast soundless spaces of the distillery. I almost could see that this was how he had trained his setter dog to move obediently at his heels, with soft words and easy, patient movements. But he also had trained a wild, fierce hawk, a creature of the skies, and how had he done that?

  Almost before we had begun I asked the one question I had prepared, the one that had puzzled me: ‘Why do they call this “the silent season”? Why is the place empty? ‒ no one working?’

  ‘You’re a little ahead of me. But no matter. Not much of it will make sense, the first time through. Later on, when the weather gets cooler, you’ll see the whole thing. We “go silent” as they say because the weather is too warm and humid now for malting the barley. Visitors to the Highlands think that’s something of a joke, because for them the weather here is always cool, if not downright cold. But if we brought the barley in now, supposing we had any left in the stores, after screening it off for impurities, and steeping it in our own water for about two to three days, we would bring it to the malting floors ‒ here, this way. Mind your dress. We keep the place clean, but it’s becoming an old building, and not meant for long skirts …’

  ‘The malting …’ I prompted.

  ‘Yes, the malting. After the barley’s been steeped it’s brought here ‒’ He opened a door, and a huge, completely empty room faced us, the stone floors clean-swept, but the whole place having a smell which seemed almost like a warm mouldiness. ‘It’s stacked about a depth of three feet here, and it begins to germinate. You could almost call it breathing. It takes in oxygen, and gives off carbon dioxide. It starts to give off a fair amount of heat, too, and we have to keep the temperature down at about sixty degrees ‒ an
d that means the men must keep turning it with these shovels here ‒’ He reached beside me to a row of long wooden shovels stacked along the wall. ‘We call these “sheds” and this whole process is called “turning the pieces”. So you see, in these few months, when the weather’s warm and humid, we stop altogether, because the barley will germinate too quickly ‒ it grows little rootlets and these would tangle up, and all you’d get is a matted mess. So, we “go silent” about this time. For us, here at Cluain, that only happened a few days ago. This is a chance, too, to repair what needs repairing about the distillery, seeing everything’s in good order for the next season. Breakdowns cost money. We’re very careful with our maintenance. And when you have a farm and your own barley to harvest, then the silent season is a necessary thing. There’s talk of some distilleries bringing in barley already malted from outside, but he would never hear of using any but Cluain’s barley … the product has to be Cluain’s from start to finish. But you must know that already.’ He gave a quick sideways glance at me as he said that.

  ‘But the silent season’s a good thing. It gives a man a chance to get the smell of the barley out of his nose ‒ barley in all its stages, dry and dusty, the wet smell of germinating, the reek of the peat when we dry it in the kilns, the smell of beer when it’s half-way through its journey, and then that final smell that’s spirits. A man needs to forget it. He needs to remember that there’s another world outside these walls. I sometimes wondered if William … well …’

  ‘What about William?’

  ‘We never talked about it. But he took to walking, I noticed. He didn’t spend all day here. And those were the times when Angus Macdonald could scarcely contain himself. He didn’t want William out of his sight, and William would not have it that way. Well, Angus Macdonald never did have his own son ‒ and he too often made the mistake of treating William like a little boy. So William used to go off without telling him where, or when he would be back …’ Then he stopped. ‘And you must be thinking that it would have been so much better if William had told him ‒ that last time. If he had, William would not have lain for two nights ‒’