Bonnie Dundee by Rosemary Sutcliff

leading rein coming after, a groom with the baggage horses bringing up the rear, and part of the Colonel’s own troop by way of escort.
    Three days we were on the journey; long June days with the hills shimmering in the heat, before we came at last in the long damp sweet-smelling dusk to Glenogilvie.
    The great house of Dudhope was the true end of our journey; Claverhouse’s new-bought home hard by Dundee. But I am thinking that he was fain to bring my lady first to the old home where he had been born and where he had been a laddie. And I am thinking that in his place I would have done the same.
    For it was a happy place, the glen winding lazy down the north slopes of the Skiddaws and opening towards the misty blue lowlands of Angus. The old house and itsoutbuildings sitting low-roofed among orchards sloping to the burn, and the swallows busy under the eaves; and old servants waiting, and old friends to come visiting…
    Among those same friends was a distant kinsman of the Grahams, James Philip of Amryclose, who truth to tell seemed almost to live at the house during the week or so that we were there.
    If I had read Cervantes at that time, I would have thought him a Don Quixote of a man, but at that time my only books were the Bible and the
Iliad
, and I knew only that he had the long uncontrolled legs of a crane-fly, and a pair of great eyes aglow with dreams in his long, drooping face; that he had a fine knowledge of the Highlands, though himself he was a Lowlander like the rest of us, and as fine a knowledge of the classics and the faery world, a strong feeling for heroes and lost causes, and a certain skill with the bagpipes. He had a fine carrying voice and was for ever talking, and no one could be within hearing of him or his pipes without knowing all that after the first day or so.
    I have aye remembered those days at Glenogilvie, there was a peace to them, a feeling of sanctuary that set them apart from ordinary life. Backwater days, you might say. But they passed, until there were but two – three of them left before we rose on the last ten miles to Dundee and Dudhope. (Claverhouse was made Constable of Dundee around that time. Did I say?) And it was Midsummer’s Eve.
    I had an idea in my head, not an over-important one, but new, that it would be pleasant to take out to think about in peace and quiet. So that evening when my work in the stables was finished, I wandered off down through the lower orchard to the burn; and followedthe water down towards the old cattle-ford midway between the house and the clachan, where an ancient elder tree split into two limbs only a few feet from the ground, and one of them, leaning out over the water, made a good place for sitting. It was a soft heavy-scented gloaming, and when I looked back I could see the taper light dimly apricot in the windows of the bower, where the shutters had been left wide; and when I looked forward again the cream curds of elder-blossom were beginning to shine to themselves among the dark of their leaves, in the way of pale flowers at dusk. But when I came down the bank, there was someone, something, sitting there already in the crotch where the two limbs parted. A girl in a gown that was pale almost as the elder flowers and yet seemed made of webbed and dappled shadows.
    For an instant my heart lurched within me, for was it not Midsummer’s Eve, and the tree an eldern tree…
    Then I saw that it was Darklis, wearing a gown of print stuff with little flower sprigs all over the whiteness of it – calico they call it for it comes from Calicut in India – that I had seen her wearing often enough in the daytime.
    ‘Would you be one of the People of Peace, then?’ I said, speaking the first thing that came into my head, and using the name that I had heard Amryclose use for the Faery Kind. ‘You perched up there in an eldern tree on Saint John’s Eve and all?’
    She laughed at that. ‘I’ll no’ disappear back into the tree, Hugh Herriot. But have