The main element in Robert Louis Stevenson’s mind as he embarked on The Master of Ballantrae was the idea of an old Scottish family hedging its bets at the time of the 1745 Revolution by dispatching one son to serve with the Pretender while another son remained at home, a loyal servant of King George. Stevenson had an actual historical case in mind.1 It is, in the story, quite arbitrary which brother will join the rebels. The question is decided by the flip of a coin, as are other crucial decisions in the Durie brothers’ careers. But what began as an eminently sensible hedging of bets returns as a curse which haunts and eventually destroys the House of Durrisdeer and Ballantrae.

An early, discarded title for the new novel was ‘Brothers’. Another was ‘The Familiar Incubus’. The incubus in The Master of Ballantrae is self-evidently James – the elder brother (or ‘Master’) who is ‘killed’ first at Culloden, then in the duel with his brother, and finally in the frozen Adirondacks. On each occasion he rises from the grave to haunt his brother Henry (‘Jacob’, as he tauntingly calls him, for having stolen the birthright of Esau). The Master, James, finally dies only after he has succeeded in frightening his luckless victim into dying first. It is a surreal conception. And one can perhaps track its meaning by looking more closely into the meaning of ‘incubus’. Its primary sense is, as the OED tells us: ‘A feigned evil spirit or demon, supposed to descend upon persons in their sleep, and especially to seek carnal intercourse with women.’ Sexual predatoriness is the salient characteristic of the incubus. One of the most masterly elements in the telling of this most obliquely narrated of tales is the way in which RLS manoeuvres the reader into calculations and reckonings which ‘prove’ adultery, illegitimacy and incest. These things are never actually made clear, but the reader, almost unwillingly, cannot but be conscious of them.

The narrative of The Master of Ballantrae opens with the protestation by Ephraim Mackellar that he will give the world ‘The full truth of this odd matter’. A couple of pages later, it is made clear that where the ‘full truth’ is concerned, Mr Mackellar can sometimes be less than forthcoming. Of the early scapegrace history of James (the elder, and from childhood the more wayward of the brothers) he writes:

One very black mark he had to his name; but the matter was hushed up at the time, and so defaced by legends before I came into those parts that I scruple to set it down. If it was true, it was a horrid fact in one so young; and if false, it was a horrid calumny. (Chapter 1)

What this ‘black mark’ is, we never learn. It must be something more than merely spawning bastards and spurning their mothers (Ephraim is later forthcoming enough on that score). Something of the order of rape or murder seems to be alluded to.

The Durie brothers are brought up in the same household with Alison Graeme, ‘a near kinswoman, an orphan, and the heir to a considerable fortune’. She and James fall in love, and – we may assume – possibly their love has been consummated. The Master is not one to rein his appetites back in such matters. After the flip of the coin, which decides that James shall join the rebels, the following exchange occurs between the Master and his young mistress:

‘If you loved me as well as I love you, you would have stayed’, cried she.

‘“I could not love you, dear, so well, loved I not honour more”,’ sang the Master.

‘Oh!’ she cried, ‘you have no heart – I hope you may be killed!’ and she ran from the room, and in tears, to her own chamber. (Ch. 1)

James goes off to fight with the Pretender, and is reported to have been killed at Culloden. In her grief, Alison upbraids Henry: ‘There is none but me to know one thing – that you were a traitor to him in your heart’ (Ch. 1). The significance of this remark is obscure, like much of the sexual underplot of this story.

Although he inherits the estate, Henry is much maligned. Survivors of the Jacobite faction in the neighbourhood call him ‘Judas’. As Ephraim recalls: ‘One trollop, who had had a child to the Master [i.e. James], and by all accounts very badly used, yet made herself a kind of champion of his memory. She flung a stone one day at Mr Henry’ (Ch. 1). The trollop, Jessie Broun, witnesses to the sexual ruthlessness of James, and his none the less irresistible attraction to the women he preys on.

‘Miss Alison’s money was highly needful for the estates’, Ephraim, the steward, notes. Marriage will ensure the survival of the house. In what may be gratitude for the shelter she has received over the years, Alison finally accepts Henry’s proposal with the bleak statement: ‘I bring you no love, Henry; but God knows, all the pity in the world’. They marry, as Ephraim precisely records, on 1 June 1748. By the end of December, as he again precisely records, Alison’s baby is ‘due in about six weeks’ (Ch. 1). The conjunction of dates is a clear instruction to the reader to do some reckoning. If the marriage took place on 1 June and the baby is due in mid-February (giving an interval of some eight months) one assumes that the child was conceived just before the wedding or on the wedding-night itself.

The first child is a daughter, Katherine, and the birth is harrowingly difficult. Unusually for the period, Henry chose to be present at the delivery, ‘as white (they tell me) as a sheet and the sweat dropping from his brow; and the handkerchief he had in his hand was crushed into a little ball no bigger than a musket bullet’ (Ch. 2). Afterwards, we learn, he has difficulty in showing any tenderness towards his little daughter Katherine. Nor is the relationship between man and wife harmonious. As Ephraim tells us:

On 7 April 1749 what little serenity the Durie household enjoys is shattered by the arrival of Francis Burke, with the appalling news that James is not, after all, dead but alive in France. ‘The seductive Miss Alison’, as Burke provocatively calls her, faints when she hears the news (Ch. 2). There follows the long leeching of money from the estate to the wastrel across the water. News of James’s survival also brings about a palpable change in Mrs Henry, what Ephraim calls ‘a certain deprecation towards her husband’ (Ch. 4). He, on his part, is tormented by what he conceives to be her ‘truant fancies’ – that is, a continuing love for James. What is most significant is that there are no more children after Katherine. Ephraim several times alludes to ‘estrangement’ and, the reader presumes, sexual relations between husband and wife have been suspended. So it goes on for seven years, during which period the estate is bled of £8,000.

On 7 November 1756 James returns. His family still fondly imagine that he is a political exile, in danger of his life should he be discovered. ‘Mister Bally’, as he is called, taunts and insults Henry from their first encounter. He reminds Ephraim of a cat playing with its prey. Alison, who is visibly affected by the reappearance of her old lover, at first tries to avoid him. Initially, he too seems inclined to keep her at a distance. But, after a furious quarrel with Henry about his refusal to dismiss Ephraim (for refusing, on his part, to drive away the pertinacious trollop Jessie Broun), James’s attitude to Alison changes. She, it appears, becomes instrumental in his grand scheme of revenge against his brother. Up to that hour, Ephraim records:

the Master had played a very close game with Mrs. Henry; avoiding pointedly to be alone with her, which I took at the time for an effect of decency, but now think to be a most insidious act … Now all that was to be changed; but whether really in revenge, or because he was wearying of Durrisdeer, and looked about for some diversion, who but the devil shall decide. (Ch. 4)

There now begins what Ephraim calls ‘the siege of Mrs Henry’. James woos her with romantic tales, ballads, and kindness towards little Katherine (whom her father seems unfairly to neglect). ‘Presently there came walks in the long shrubbery, talks in the Belvedere, and I know not what tender familiarity’ (Ch. 4). Ephraim may choose not to know, but the reader can easily guess. Alison’s infatuation with James is only momentarily cooled by the revelation that he is not – after all – a Jacobite refugee, but a government spy who can move without let or hindrance between France and England. All the ‘Mr Bally’ business was a sham.

Ephraim is convinced that Alison is ‘playing very near the fire’ (Ch. 4) in her intimacy with James. Dark suspicions have formed in his mind, and in those of Mr Henry – so dark, in fact, that neither man can dare to articulate them:

There were times, too, when we talked, and a strange manner of talk it was; there was never a person named, nor an individual circumstance referred to; yet we had the same matter in our minds, and we were each aware of it. It is a strange art that can thus be practised: to talk for hours of a thing, and never name nor yet so much as hint at it. And I remember I wondered if it was by some such natural skill that the Master made love to Mrs. Henry all day long (as he manifestly did), yet never startled her into reserve. (Ch. 4)

It is, at this point, 26 February 1757, as we learn from Ephraim’s pedantic notation of such matters. The events of the following night – ‘the fatal 27th’ – occupy a whole chapter. The evening’s tragedy begins with a game of cards, and too much liquor taken by James, who delivers himself of a ‘stream of insult’ against his luckless brother, ‘Jacob’ (as he tauntingly persists in calling him). There ensues the crowning insult:

‘For instance, with all those solid qualities which I delight to recognise in you, I never knew a woman who did not prefer me – nor, I think’, he continued, with the most silken deliberation, ‘I think – who did not continue to prefer me’. (Ch. 4)

Henry strikes James, and the inevitable duel takes place in the long shrubbery. Before they cross swords, James again alludes to ‘your wife – who is in love with me, as you very well know’. In the subsequent fight James is ‘killed’, and the woes of the House of Durrisdeer and Ballantrae begin in earnest.

Not until much later is a crucial date introduced, almost in passing, by Ephraim:

And now there came upon the scene a new character, and one that played his part, too, in the story; I mean the present lord, Alexander, whose birth (17th July, 1757) filled the cup of my poor master’s happiness. (Ch. 6)

Let us review dates at this point. The Duries’ first child, Katherine, was born as soon as possible after the marriage on 1 June 1748. Thereafter, for almost nine years, there were no children and – we may suspect – no sexual relations between the ‘estranged’ husband and wife. On 7 November 1756 James returns to the scene. He is a former lover of Alison (and may have been a lover in the carnal sense). With at least one bastard child, and the mother cruelly cast off, he is no respecter of female persons. He enjoys secret intimacies with his brother’s wife in the long shrubbery and elsewhere. On 17 July, some nine months after his arrival and his ‘siege’ of Alison, Alexander is born. Henry, meanwhile, is so mad with sexual jealousy that he is willing to commit one of the most heinous of primal sins – fratricide.

The dates all point in one direction. So does Ephraim’s coyness. It is singular that – during all the period leading up to the ‘fateful 27th’ – no mention is made of Alison’s pregnancy. By March she will be five months pregnant. Her condition must be known – at least to Henry and Ephraim. Why do they not mention it? Because it is one of those things that they dare not even ‘hint at’.

Notes

1. See Mary Lascelles, The Story-Teller Retrieves the Past (Oxford, 1980), 70 and the RLS essay on ‘The Genesis of The Master of Ballantrae’, reprinted in the ‘Vailima’ edition of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (London, 1922), xiv. 15–19.