Drums of Autumn Read online

  “Why MacKenzie?” Brianna asked, pausing by one display of clan-marked keychains. She fingered one of the silver disks that read Luceo non uro, the Latin motto curved around a depiction of what looked like a volcano. “Didn’t Wakefield sound Scottish enough? Or did you think the people at Oxford wouldn’t like you doing—this?” She waved at the venue around them.

  Roger shrugged.

  “Partly that. But it’s my family name, as well. Both my parents were killed during the war, and my great-uncle adopted me. He gave me his own name—but I was christened Roger Jeremiah MacKenzie.”

  “Jeremiah?” She didn’t laugh out loud, but the end of her nose pinkened as though she was trying not to. “Like the Old Testament prophet?”

  “Don’t laugh,” he said, taking her arm. “I was named for my father—they called him Jerry. My Mum called me Jemmy when I was small. Old family name. It could have been worse, after all; I might have been christened Ambrose or Conan.”

  The laughter fizzed out of her like Coke bubbles.

  “Conan?”

  “Perfectly good Celtic name, before the fantasists got hold of it. Anyway, Jeremiah seems to have been the pick of the lot for good cause.”

  “Why’s that?”

  They turned and headed slowly back toward the stage, where a gang of solemnly starched little girls were doing the Highland fling in perfect unison, every pleat and bow in place.

  “Oh, it’s one of the stories Dad—the Reverend, I always called him Dad—used to tell me, going down my family tree and pointing out the folk on it.”

  Ambrose MacKenzie, that’s your great-grandfather, Rog. He’ll have been a boatwright in Dingwall. And there’s Mary Oliphant—I knew your great-grandma Oliphant, did I tell you? Lived to be ninety-seven, and sharp as a tack to her last breath; wonderful woman.

  She was married six times—all died of natural causes, too, she assured me—but I’ve only put Jeremiah MacKenzie here, since he was your ancestor. The only one she had children by, I did wonder about that.

  I asked her, and she closed one eye and nodded at me, and said, “Is fhearr an giomach na ’bhi gun fear tighe.” It’s an old Gaelic proverb—“Better a lobster than no husband.” She said some would do for marrying, but Jeremiah was the only lad bonny enough to take to her bed every night.

  “I wonder what she told the others,” Brianna said, meditatively.

  “Well, she didn’t say she didn’t sleep with them now and then,” Roger pointed out. “Just not every night.”

  “Once is enough to get pregnant,” Brianna said. “Or so my mother assured my high school health class. She’d draw pictures of sperm on the blackboard, all racing toward this huge egg with leers on their faces.” She’d gone pink again, but evidently from amusement rather than distressed memory.

  Arm in arm, he could feel the heat of her through the thin T-shirt, and a stirring under his kilt that made him think leaving the pants off had been a mistake.

  “Putting aside the question of whether sperm have faces, what has that particular subject got to do with health?”

  “Health is an American euphemism for anything to do with sex,” she explained. “They teach girls and boys separately; the girls’ class is The Mysteries of Life, and Ten Ways to Say No to a Boy.”

  “And the boys’ class?”

  “Well, I don’t know for sure, because I didn’t have any brothers to tell me. Some of my friends had brothers, though—one of them said they learned eighteen different synonyms for penile erection.”

  “Really useful, that,” Roger said, wondering why anyone required more than one. Luckily, a sporran covered a multitude of sins.

  “I suppose it might keep the conversation going—under certain circumstances.”

  Her cheeks were red. He could feel the heat creeping up his own throat, and imagined that they were beginning to attract curious glances from passersby. He hadn’t let a girl embarrass him in public since he was seventeen, but she was doing nicely. She’d started it, though—let her finish it, then.

  “Mmphm. I hadn’t noticed much conversation, under those particular circumstances.”

  “I imagine you’d know.” It wasn’t quite a question. Rather late, he realized what she was up to. He tightened his arm, pulling her closer.

  “If you mean have I, yes. If you mean am I, no.”

  “Are you, what?” Her lips were quivering slightly, holding back the urge to laugh.

  “You’re asking if I’ve got a girl in England, right?”

  “Am I?”

  “I don’t. Or rather I do, but nothing serious.” They were outside the door to the dressing rooms; nearly time to fetch his instruments. He stopped and turned to look at her. “Have you? Got a bloke, I mean.”

  She was tall enough to look him in the eye, and close enough that her breasts grazed his forearm when she turned to face him.

  “What was it your great-grandmother said? ‘Is fhearr an giomach.…’?”

  “ ‘…na ’bhi gun fear tighe.’ ”

  “Uh-huh. Well, better a lobster than no boyfriend.” She lifted a hand and touched his brooch. “So yes, there are people I go out with. But I don’t have a bonny lad—yet.”

  He caught her fingers and brought them to his mouth.

  “Give it time, lass,” he said, and kissed them.

  * * *

  The audience was amazingly quiet; not at all like a rock concert. Of course, they couldn’t be noisy, she thought; there weren’t any electric guitars or amplifiers, only a small microphone on a stand. But then, some things didn’t need amplifying. Her heart, for one, hammering in her ears.

  “Here,” he’d said, appearing abruptly out of the dressing room with guitar and drum. He’d handed her a small brown envelope. “I found these, going through my dad’s old bumf in Inverness. I thought you’d maybe want them.”

  She could tell it was photographs, but she hadn’t looked at them right away. She’d sat with them burning a hole on her knee, listening to Roger’s set.

  He was good—even distracted, she could tell he was good. He had a surprisingly rich deep baritone voice, and he knew what to do with it. Not just in terms of tone and melody; he had the true performer’s ability to pull aside the curtain between singer and audience, to look out into the crowd, meet someone’s eyes, and let them see what lay behind both words and music.

  He’d got them going with “The Road to the Isles,” a quick and lively clap-along song with a rousing chorus, and when they’d subsided from that, kept them going with “The Gallowa’ Hills,” and a sweet slide into “The Lewis Bridal Song,” with a lovely, lilting chorus in Gaelic.

  He let the last note die away on “Vhair Me Oh,” and smiled, directly at her, she thought.

  “And here’s one from the ’45,” he said. “This one is from the famous battle of Prestonpans, at which the Highland Army of Charles Stuart routed a much greater English force, under the command of General Jonathan Cope.”

  There was an appreciative murmur from the crowd, for many of whom the song was plainly an old favorite, quickly shushed as Roger’s fingers plucked out the marching line.

  “Cope sent a challenge from Dunbar

  Sayin’ ‘Charlie, meet me, and ye daur

  An’ I’ll learn ye the art o’ war

  If ye’ll meet me in the mornin’.’ ”

  He bent his head over the strings, nodding to the crowd to join in the jeering chorus.

  “Hey, Johnnie Cope, are ye walkin’ yet?

  And are your drums a-beatin’ yet?

  If ye were walkin’, I would wait

  Tae gang tae the coals in the mornin’!”

  Brianna felt a sudden prickle at the roots of her hair that had nothing to do with singer or crowd, but with the song itself.

  “When Charlie looked the letter upon,

  He drew his sword the scabbard from,

  Come, follow me, my merry men,

  And we’ll meet Johnnie Cope in the morning!”

  “No,
” she whispered, her fingers cold on the smooth brown envelope. Come follow me, my merry men…They’d been there—both her parents. It was her father who had charged the field at Preston, his broadsword and his targe in his hands.

  “…For it will be a bluidie morning!”

  “Hey, Johnnie Cope, are ye walkin’ yet?

  And are your drums a-beatin’ yet?…”

  The voices rose around her in a roar of approbation as they joined in the chorus. She had a moment of rising panic, when she would have fled away like Johnnie Cope, but it passed, leaving her buffeted by emotion as much as by the music.

  “In faith, quo Johnnie, I got sic flegs,

  Wi’ their claymores an’ philabegs,

  Gin I face them again, de’il brak my legs,

  So I wish you a’ good morning!

  Hey, Johnnie Cope, are ye walkin’ yet?…”

  Yes, he was. And he would be, as long as that song lasted. Some people tried to preserve the past; others, to escape it. And that was by far the greatest gulf between herself and Roger. Why hadn’t she seen it before?

  She didn’t know whether Roger had seen her momentary distress, but he abandoned the dangerous territory of the Jacobites and went into “MacPherson’s Lament,” sung with no more than an occasional touch of the strings. The woman next to Brianna let out a long sigh and looked doe-eyed at the stage.

  “Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, sae dauntingly gaed he,

  He played a tune and he danced it roond…alow the gallows tree!”

  She picked up the envelope, weighing it on her fingers. She ought to wait, maybe, until she got home. But curiosity was warring with reluctance. Roger hadn’t been sure he should give it to her; she’d seen that in his eyes.

  “…a bodhran,” Roger was saying. The drum was no more than a wooden hoop, a few inches wide, with a skin head stretched over it, some eighteen inches across. He held the drum balanced on the fingers of one hand, a small double-headed stick in the other. “One of the oldest known instruments, this is the drum with which the Celtic tribes scared the bejesus out of Julius Caesar’s troops in 52 BC.” The audience tittered, and he touched the wide drumhead with the stick, back and forth in a soft, quick rhythm like a heartbeat.

  “And here’s ‘The Sheriffmuir Fight,’ from the first Jacobite Rising, in 1715.”

  The drumhead shifted and the beat dropped in pitch, became martial in tone, a thundering behind the words. The audience was still well-behaved, but now sat up and leaned forward, hanging on the chant that described the battle of Sheriffmuir, and all the clans who had fought in it.

  “…then on they rushed, and blood out-gushed, and many a puke did fall, man…

  They hacked and hashed, while broadswords clashed…”

  As the song ended she put her fingers inside the envelope and pulled out a set of photographs. Old snapshots, black-and-white faded to tones of brown. Her parents. Frank and Claire Randall, both looking absurdly young—and terribly happy.

  They were in a garden somewhere; there were lawn chairs, and a table with drinks in a background dappled with the scattered light of tree leaves. The faces showed clearly, though—laughing, faces alight with youth, eyes only for each other.

  Posing formally, arm in arm, mocking their own formality. Laughing, Claire half bent over with hilarity at something Frank had said, holding down a wide skirt flying in the wind, her curly hair suffering no such restraint. Frank handing Claire a cup, she looking up into his face as she took it, with such a look of hope and trust that Brianna’s heart squeezed tight to see it.

  Then she looked at the last of the pictures, and realized what she was looking at. The two of them stood by the table, hands together on a knife, laughing as they cut into an obviously homemade cake. A wedding cake.

  “And for the last, an old favorite that you’ll know. This song is said to have been sent by a Jacobite prisoner, on his way to London to be hanged, to his wife in the Highlands…”

  She spread her hands out flat on top of the pictures, as though to keep anyone from seeing them. An icy shock went through her. Wedding pictures. Snapshots of their wedding day. Of course; they’d been married in Scotland. The Reverend Wakefield wouldn’t have done the ceremony, not being a Catholic priest, but he was one of her father’s oldest friends; the reception must have been held at the manse.

  Yes. Peeking through her fingers, she could make out familiar bits of the old house in the background. Then, reluctantly sliding her hand aside, she looked again at her mother’s young face.

  Eighteen. Claire had married Frank Randall at eighteen—perhaps that explained it. How could anyone know their mind so young?

  “By yon bonnie banks, and by yon bonnie braes,

  Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomond,

  Where me and my true love were ever wont to gae…”

  But Claire had been sure—or she’d thought so. The broad clear brow and delicate mouth admitted of no doubt; the big, luminous eyes were fixed on her new husband with no sign of reservation or misgiving. And yet—

  “But me and my true love will never meet again

  On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.”

  Oblivious of the toes she stepped on, Brianna blundered out of the row and fled, before anyone should see the tears.

  * * *

  “I can stay with you through part of the calling of the clans,” Roger said, “but I’ve a bit to do at the end of it, so I’ll have to leave you. Will you be all right?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said firmly. “I’m fine. Don’t worry.”

  He looked at her a little anxiously, but let it pass. Neither of them had mentioned her precipitous departure earlier; by the time he had made his way through the congratulatory well-wishers and gone to find her, she had had time to find a Ladies’ and get herself under control with cold water.

  They had spent the rest of the afternoon strolling through the festival, shopping a bit, going outside to watch the pipe-bands’ competition, coming in half deafened to see a young man dance between two swords crossed on the ground. The photographs stayed safely out of sight in her handbag.

  It was nearly dark now; people were leaving the eating area and heading for the open stands outside, at the foot of the mountain.

  She had thought the families with young children would leave, and some did, but there were small bodies and sleepy heads drooping among the older people in the stands. A tiny girl lay limp, sound asleep on her father’s shoulder as they made their way into one of the upper rows of the stands. There was a clear, flat space in front of the bleachers, in which a huge heap of wood had been piled.

  “What’s the calling of the clans?” she heard a woman ask her companion in the row ahead. The companion shrugged, and Brianna looked at Roger for enlightenment, but he only smiled.

  “You’ll see,” he said.

  It was full dark, and the moon not risen; the bulk of the mountainside rose up as a darker black against the star-flecked sky. There was an exclamation from somewhere in the crowd, a scattering of more, and then the notes of a single bagpipe came faintly through the air, silencing everything else.

  A pinpoint of light appeared near the top of the mountain. As they watched, it moved down, and another sprang up behind it. The music grew stronger, and another light came over the top of the mountain. For nearly ten minutes, the anticipation grew, as the music grew louder, and the string of lights grew longer, a blazing chain down the mountainside.

  Near the bottom of the slope, a trail came out from the trees above; she had seen it during her earlier exploration. Now a man stepped out of the trees into sight, holding a blazing torch above his head. Behind him was the piper, and the sound now was strong enough to drown even the oohs and ahhs of the crowd.

  As the two moved down the trail and toward the cleared space in front of the bleachers, Brianna could see that there were more men behind them; a long line of men, each with a torch, all dressed in the finery of the Highland chieftains. They were barbaro
us and splendid, decked in grouse feathers, the silver of swords and dirks gleaming red by the torchlight, picked out amid the folds of tartan cloth.

  The pipes stopped abruptly, and the first of the men strode into the clearing and stopped before the stands. He raised his torch above his head and shouted, “The Camerons are here!”

  Loud whoops of delight rang out from the stands, and he threw the torch into the kerosene-soaked wood, which went up with a roar, in a pillar of fire ten feet high.

  Against the blinding sheet of flame, another man stepped out, and called, “The MacDonalds are here!”

  Screams and yelps from those in the crowd that claimed kinship with clan MacDonald, and then—

  “The MacLachlans are here!”

  “The MacGillivrays are here!”

  She was so entranced by the spectacle that she was only dimly aware of Roger. Then another man stepped out and cried, “The MacKenzies are here!”

  “Tulach Ard!” bellowed Roger, making her jump.

  “What was that?” she asked.

  “That,” he said, grinning, “is the war cry of clan MacKenzie.”

  “Sounded like it.”

  “The Campbells are here!” There must have been a lot of Campbells; the response shook the bleachers. As though that was the signal he had been waiting for, Roger stood up and flung his plaid over his shoulder.

  “I’ll meet you afterward by the dressing rooms, all right?” She nodded, and he bent suddenly and kissed her.

  “Just in case,” he said. “The Frasers’ cry is Caisteal Dhuni!”

  She watched him go, climbing down the bleachers like a mountain goat. The smell of woodsmoke filled the night air, mixing with the smaller fragrance of tobacco from cigarettes in the crowd.

  “The MacKays are here!”

  “The MacLeods are here!”

  “The Farquarsons are here!”

  Her chest felt tight, from the smoke and from emotion. The clans had died at Culloden—or had they? Yes, they had; this was no more than memory, than the calling up of ghosts; none of the people shouting so enthusiastically owed kinship to each other, none of them lived any longer by the claims of laird and land, but…

  “The Frasers are here!”

  Sheer panic gripped her, and her hand closed tight on the clasp of her bag.

  No, she thought. Oh, no. I’m not.

  Then the moment passed, and she could breathe again, but jolts of adrenaline still thrilled through her blood.

  “The Grahams are here!”

  “The Inneses are here!”

  The Ogilvys, the Lindsays, the Gordons…and then finally, the echoes of the last shout died. Brianna held the bag on her lap, gripped tight, as though to keep its contents from escaping like the jinn from a lamp.

  How could she? she thought, and then, seeing Roger come into the light, fire on his head and his bodhran in his hand, thought again, How could she help it?

  5

  TWO HUNDRED YEARS FROM YESTERDAY

  You didn’t wear your kilt!” Gayle’s mouth turned down in disappointment.

  “Wrong century,” Roger said, smiling down at her. “Drafty for a moonwalk.”