Bonnie Dundee by Rosemary Sutcliff Page B

stillness at last. ‘What are you thinking of, Hugh Herriot?’
    I said – for I felt that it was but fair, after she had told so much to me, though I would not have spoken of it in the ordinary way of things – ‘I was thinking that when we come to Dundee, and there are merchants to be found, I will spend some of the wedding siller that Claverhouse gave me on more paper and crayons and maybe some good sepia ink.’ And then I wished I had not told her, and was afraid that she might laugh; and I looked up quickly, and realised how long we must have sat there, for the gloaming was almost deepened into the dark – such dark as there is in the North at Midsummer – and I could scarce make out her face among the elder branches, though the flower-curds still glimmered pale.
    ‘No paints?’ she said. And she was not laughing.
    ‘I’d have no time for the grinding, nor for boiling the oil. The paper and the rest will do.’
    ‘You should have taken Mynheer van Meere’s offer,’ said she, gravely, as it might be my mother offering me good advice.
    ‘So you know about that.’
    ‘Aye, Jean showed me the picture of himself. She keeps it among her private things.’
    Pleasure shot through me. But I shook my head. ‘No; I’ve another plan in my mind.’
    ‘Not to bide in the stable-yard all your life?’
    ‘No. In a year or two, I’m minded to go for a sojer.’
    ‘Aye,’ she said, ‘Jean said somewhat of that, too.’ And then, with a kind of softness in her voice, ‘That would be in Claverhouse’s troop?’
    I found my hands were clenched on my knees, and I unclenched them carefully. ‘It’s daft. I ken that.’
    ‘It’s no’ daft,’ said she, ‘it’s no’ daft to seek to follow where your heart’s away before ye.’
    And the quiet settled between us again, filled with the faint suckle of water under the bank, and an owl crying somewhere in the glen woods.
    That time it was I that broke it, and with a blundering question. ‘And you? What will you do, mistress?’
    ‘Now that Jean will not be needing me as she used to do, you mean?’
    ‘She’ll always be needing you,’ I said stoutly, though that was what I had meant.
    She gave a little breathless laugh, and came sliding out of the tree in a froth of pale skirts, and the next instant was kneeling among the flowering sedges on the very margin of the water. ‘Mebbe I’ll wed wi’ a prince. Mebbe I’ll go back to my own people – och, not the People of Peace, the Tinkler folk – who kens what the future has waiting for any of us?’
    The burn made a pool, still and dark, just there above the ford, and she leaned forward, gazing down into the darkness of it. ‘Mebbe if I look – very hard—’
    ‘Don’t,’ I said quickly, ’tis unchancy to play such games.’
    But I do not think she even heard me; for that was when the strangeness began; and suddenly I knew that she was listening to something else, something that I could not hear.
    ‘I have a tune running in my head,’ she said after a few moments. ‘All the while I have been here this e’en– and ’tis no’ just like any tune that ever I heard before…’
    She began to hum very softly. And listening, I knew that it was no tune that I had ever heard, either. If I had heard it, I would not have been forgetting it. I never have forgotten it, I could whistle it to you now. But I will not…
    A strange, haunting tune, with broken double notes in it that made me think of Amryclose and his pipes; but it was no tune that I had heard him play, and the hairs rose a little on the back of my neck.
    Darklis broke off in her humming, then hummed a few more notes, and broke off again. She was leaning further over the water, staring down. ‘Dark, down there,’ she said, half whispering, in a small frozen voice that was not like her own. ‘Black-dark, death-dark…’
    ‘Come back,’ I said, ‘you’ll fall in.’ I wanted to catch hold of her, but something held me from the movement.
    She