Bonnie Dundee by Rosemary Sutcliff Page A

ye no’ heard that all Ruthvens, whether they be of the Tinkler kind or the Earl of Gowrie himself, have a streak of the witch blood in them? All of us kin to the Fair Folk?’
    ‘That’s but an old story, mistress,’ said I, firmly changing my tune, ‘and ’tis dangerous to talk so,’ for to speak of the People of Peace half in jest was one thing, but to claim witch blood quite another. The duckings and burnings were too real a hazard.
    ‘That depends on who you talk to,’ said she. ‘But I’m thinking you’ll have come here for much the same reason as myself. And I found it first, and I’ll not give up to you my bonnie secret place; but I’ll share it wi’ ye a while. Sit ye down on the grass.’
    And whether it was the time or the place or – nay, I’d not be knowing. We had had few enough dealings with each other, save for that one shared secret, in all the year and more since I came to Place of Paisley, and she was my lady’s kinswoman and I but a laddie out of the stable, but I sat down with my back against the deep-fissured tree trunk and her feet swinging within a hand’s span of my shoulder, as though the meeting had been long fixed between us and the most natural thing in the world.
    ‘So it is from your Tinkler kin that you have your name, Mistress Darklis Ruthven,’ said I.
    ‘And how do you know my name?’ said she.
    ‘I have heard my lady call you by it, whiles and whiles.’
    ‘Aye, here am I, kin to the Tinklers and kin to the fine stiff-backed Covenanting Cochranes; and there’s a daft way to be! Did ye ken that Jean’s great-grandmother – oh, not on the Cochrane side, her Casselis great-grandmother it would be – fell in love wi’ a Tinkler laddie that came wi’ his fiddle to play beneath her window, and ran away wi’ him from her rightful lord?’
    ‘That’s
The Ballad of Johnnie Faa
. You were singing it that time in the Little Dining-room. And her lord hunted them down and hanged her bonnie Tinkler laddie before his castle gates.’
    ‘Aye, so the song tells. But it doesna tell that nine months later when her hedgerow-bairn was born it was put out to foster, while the lady bore her lord his rightful brood until she dies o’ the last of them.’
    In the silence between us, a fish jumped, close in to the bank.
    ‘Then why is your name no’ Faa, Mistress Darklis Ruthven?’ said I in a while. No question of why would it not be Casselis.
    ‘Because the hedgerow-bairn was a lassie, and married out of the royal tribe of Faa into the witch tribe of Ruthven. And her son, my father, left the black tents of his own people to settle down and become falconer to the last Lord Casselis all for the love of a white-skinned lassie. He was killed taking an eyas from the nest. They say he was drunk at the time, an’ rock climbing’s no ploy for a drunk man. And my mother died when I was born, and so—’
    ‘And so here you are wi’ the stiff-backed Covenanting Cochranes.’
    ‘That was unjust,’ she said after a moment. ‘Here I am with my kinswoman Jean, and that’s a different thing altogether.’ And then on a note of surprise, ‘Why am I telling a’ this to you, Hugh Herriot?’
    ‘Mebbe because you were feeling lonely,’ I said, after giving the matter careful thought.
    She denied it quickly. ‘Why would I be feeling lonely?’
    I could not think of a reason, but I had enough sense to know that it was best not spoken. ‘Och, I dinna ken. It’s awfu’ quiet out here in the glen, after Paisley,’ I said vaguely, ‘quiet enough to make a body feel lonely, most of all in the gloaming.’
    ‘I like the quiet of it,’ she said softly now, as though she were listening to it.
    And for a while it seemed that neither of us had any more to say. We just sat there, listening to the voice of the burn together. It was that evening I found for the first time the goodness of silence shared between companions who do not need always to be talking.
    It was Darklis who broke the