McLennan was beside himself with triumph. He had him! He had his enemy at last in his power! His old foe slumped, bound hand and foot, in a wooden chair, grey-faced from defeat and fear as well as loss of blood. McLennan, standing over him, said just three words.
‘Now ye’ll pay.’
He turned on his heel. But as he reached the door, McInnes’s voice halted him.
‘What will I pay for? Raiders who exceeded their orders?’
McLennan whirled to face him. ‘Ye admit ye sent those barbarous brutes against me!’
‘Aye, I sent them, but not to slaughter your children. I sent them to pay ye back for the murder of my sister’s son. I could ha’ done no less, with her on my neck day and night crying for satisfaction.’
‘Murder ye call it? When he and the henchmen you sent with him were trying to drive my people off my land so you could claim it?’
McInnes slumped further into his chair and turned his head aside. McLennan could see now that he was old, and that the old quarrels were nothing to him but a burdensome memory that couldn’t be shaken off.
‘Och, what’s the use of bandying words about it ten years on?’
Balked of the verbal battle he now wanted, McLennan spat at the man. ‘Ye cowardly blackguard!’ he shouted.
McInnes straightened himself as well as he could.
‘Coward, am I? And what are you? When your wife was first lost to ye and brought to me, I posted every guard I had, thinking ye’d be riding against me within hours, alone if necessary – but ye never came. Why not? Did ye no’ want her, thinking that she was now spoilt goods?’
McLennan stood before him, shocked and stunned. How dared the man, helpless as he was, speak thus! But he himself had uttered the word ‘coward’ first.
‘I didna come,’ he returned in a deathly quiet voice, ‘because for two months after ye had my wee’uns butchered and stole my wife from me, I was out of my senses. Those attending on me had to tie me down and drug me with whiskey to control my raving. By the time I came to myself, word was brought to me that my wife—’ He stopped, clenching his teeth.
‘Aye,’ said McInnes, now equally hushed. ‘Aye. If I weren’t afraid ye’d think I was trying to pacify ye, I’d tell ye that I was sorry for her death. I never purposed it. I never purposed the deaths of your children.’
‘Be wary, ye liar!’ barked McLennan. ‘I have means to do worse than imprison ye—’
‘Your wife,’ McInnes went on wearily, ‘whom my men brought back to me expecting reward – I didna mean to keep her – I was going to send her back to ye but—’
McLennan stood perfectly still.
‘She was stalwart for ye. She wouldna take food or drink, and then she sickened of low fever and died.’
‘Of low fever? Liar! She died of shame!’
‘No, McLennan. I swear to ye. Not that. She suffered no more shame than confinement and some taunts from my sister.’
‘Either way, ye killed her. Ye killed all that was best of me and in me. And now I have ye and the price is to be paid.’
And the image of his dungeon rose to his mind, a dark, cruel image. For this he had had it made and now it would fulfil its purpose! He would lock this enemy in and never—
In the very act of walking from the room, McLennan stopped cold.
He remembered with a shock like a lightning strike who was there already.
He was stunned by the realisation. Six days she had been down there, without food or water, alone in the dark! His hard heart trembled, and his hand flew to his belt. But the key! The key was gone.
It took him ten full seconds to realise that the stable-boy had stolen it, that night he had tried to stab him. That meant—
The relief was what unmanned him. Pure, hot, naked relief. That was three days ago! He would have gone down there, that boy, opened that great door, and let her out. It was all right. She was alive, she was safe, the boy would have saved her.
A prayer – the first genuine prayer to have issued from him in years – left his dry lips.
‘Thank God! Thank God!’
But was it certain? What if the key had slipped his belt some other way? What if – what if she were still there?
He ran from the room and down the dungeon steps, his snatched-up torch trailing smoke. He had not felt fear all the time the enemy was at his gates. Now he was afraid – mortally afraid of what he would find.
As the torchlight touched the door, he saw it was open and the key in the lock. His hopes rocketed upwards. Yes, it was as he’d thought! She’d been freed! What he felt, he couldn’t disguise from himself – it was pure happiness. Again he cried out a prayer of gratitude, ‘Blessed Christ, be praised—’
But as he entered the dungeon and swept the torch about, letting the light flicker on the stone walls, the iron rings, the chains, his prayer died. For there she was, a little, crumpled shape, lying on the floor in the farthest corner.
He rushed towards her, and fell on his knees at her side. As he had once before, he put his hand on her throat to feel for her pulse. He started back, his fingers wet, horror running over his skin. He saw the sharp stone near her hand.
After a long moment of paralysis, he stood up slowly. His legs were unsteady. He kept staring down at her. Then he began to shout, a high note of desperation like a shrill trumpet blast ringing round the cold walls.
‘A body can live eight days without food! But ye couldna wait! Why did ye believe me? Ye should ha’ known! Ye should ha’ known I didna mean it!’
Something strange was happening to his eyes. The torchlight was glistening and he couldn’t see properly. He dropped the torch on the stones and put his face in both his hands. His big shoulders heaved and he stood there for what might have been minutes or hours, lost to all sense of himself, feeling only the most agonising regret. Then he picked up the smouldering torch and turned away. He couldn’t bear to stay there.
But as he was leaving, the torchlight showed him something scratched on the wall. It was the writing of Chi-na.
He stopped and stared at it, his breath billowing out in clouds like a terrified stag cornered in a frozen field. He hadn’t seen such writing for years. But he understood what was written as well as if the words were being spoken in his ears.
‘I am with you till you die.’
He stood there, bereft, stunned, and afraid to the marrow of his bones. Then he turned and fled, stopping only to heave the door shut. But the key would not budge, and he left it in the lock.
McLennan couldn’t chain his enemy in the dungeon. He couldn’t even think about the dungeon. Instead, he had him shut into an upper room in one of the castle turrets. But he ordered bread and water to be given him. How was it he was feeding his enemy when he had let the girl starve?
But decisions, work and responsibilities pressed in on him too heavily to allow much time for reflections. Many of his tenants were dead or hurt. Farmhouses and crops had been destroyed. The men who had been left outside the castle at the time of the siege were very angry. It was rumoured that some had deserted him and fled to other landowners, carrying news of what had happened, blackening his name. Even McLennan’s own servants were angry because he had left so many families at the enemy’s mercy. After years of caring nothing for what anyone thought of him, suddenly he was vulnerable. He felt they were against him and no longer wanted to serve him. After their brave fight for him, remorse awakened and smote him.
It wasn’t in his nature to show that he was sorry. But he gave the survivors gold to rebuild their farms and buy more animals. He buried the dead with honour, and paid the widows and orphans compensation. Then his strict duty was done. The sullen, angry looks from his household, the rumors of defection, stopped. But he had no satisfaction from it.
Once he might have eased his mind by going to gloat over his captive, to accuse him and torment him. He couldn’t, and he didn’t understand why he couldn’t. McInnes was at last his prisoner, but every time the word ‘prisoner’ crossed his thoughts, McLennan twisted his mind away.
When one day news was brought to him that McInnes had died of his wounds, he felt not the smallest quiver of gladness. ‘Bury him,’ was all he said. ‘No marker. Let his name be forgotten.’ And a strange premonition came to him. I too wullna have a stone on my grave.
The death of his old enemy did nothing to restore his peace. At night he slept badly. He had terrible dreams. Over and over again, the same one – the child in chains. He heard chains rattling in his sleep. When he woke suddenly, he thought he could still hear them. He lay on his bed, staring upward into the dark, and tears, such as he had not shed since the deaths of his own children, rolled down the sides of his face and soaked his silken sheets. The red of them made him feel as if he slept in a pool of blood.
‘I didna chain her! At least I didna chain her! Why do I hear chains?’ he muttered.
Sometimes he saw her face, pale and bloodless, and sometimes he felt her cold little hands touching him. He would reach for them before he could stop himself, the impulse to rub and warm them back to life was so strong. Sometimes he heard clicking sounds, like bones knocking and scraping each other. Once he dreamed he went down to the dungeon and opened the door, and there was a little skeleton, standing upright. Peony’s slanted eyes were peering at him through the sockets in the skull. In his dream he found he wanted to embrace it – to clasp all that was left of her in his arms. But when he laid hands on the skeleton, it fell to the floor in a heap of bones.
He feared he was going mad. And yet he almost welcomed it, because madness would be an escape from his sorrow, his bewilderment. ‘She was a slave! A witch!’ he tried to tell himself. But he knew now she had been neither, that she had been his little one, his dear one, the child fate had sent him as a gift to comfort his heart which had been too hard to feel the love for her that had grown there all unrecognised.
Only now when it was too late did he know it.
His body seemed to shrink. He no longer walked tall, with his plaid lifting on the breeze behind him. His beard grew wild and untrimmed; he wouldn’t let anyone touch him. His arms hung at his sides. His face was pale and drawn, his eyes were unfocussed.
‘He’s no’ the man he was,’ muttered his servants.
‘It’s the wee witch,’ the goblin-cook whispered. ‘Witches dunna die quiet and they dunna lie quiet. She’s haunting him.’
Some of the women said they’d seen her. Fin, deep in grief, heard them.
‘Wee Eyes! Come to me! Haunt me, I dunna mind, so ye’ll come!’ he whispered in the night.
His parents were safe, and neither of the other boys had been killed in the battle – they had fought bravely, and brought honour on the family that McLennan now rewarded. They went back to their burnt-out farmhouse and rebuilt it with their own labour and McLennan’s money. They cursed him, but what else could they do? Many of their neighbours were doing the same. Life had to go on.
Janet grew big and the family began to look ahead to the birth of the new baby, and to be a little happy again. Fin alone didn’t join in. He could only think of Wee Eyes, and of avenging her. He watched McLennan and, when he could, followed him about like his shadow. He always knew where he was.
One day, after yet another terrible night of dreams and fantasies, McLennan could stand it no longer.
‘I’ll away down there and take her out and bury her,’ he thought. ‘That’ll be the end of it. It’s because I didna give her decent burial that she wullna let me be.’
He took a torch and went down the steps to the dungeon. His knees were knocking and the torch shook in his hand, casting demonic shadows on the stone walls. The key was where he had left it, in the lock. He pulled the door open. He walked slowly to the corner where he’d last seen Peony.
She was gone.
All trace of her was gone. Even the bloodstain. Everything. Except the characters scratched on the wall.
‘I am with you till you die.’
McLennan felt his head swim. He hadn’t eaten or slept properly for weeks. Now he felt himself falling. He fell just where Peony had lain, and lay there in a dead faint.
Some time later, he woke up. It was a screeching sound that roused him. His torch had gone out – he was in darkness. But he knew that sound. It was the key turning in the lock of the dungeon door.
He jumped to his feet and threw himself against it. He cried out, as she had cried, ‘Och, dunna! Dunna! Dunna!’ He didn’t hear the sound of feet climbing the steps. And of course he never heard the distant splash of the key falling into the river.
But still, his death was not as difficult as perhaps he deserved. The scratched words on the dungeon wall came true another way. For McLennan the darkness of his dungeon was not empty, and although he languished there for many, many days, and lost his mind completely, in the end he did not die alone.