Read Online Last Writes by Catherine Aird - Free Book Online Page B

for the umpteenth time that morning. He finished up – as he invariably did these days – looking out of the window and scanning the horizon for the hundredth time. In a more peaceful decade the sheriff might have taken time to congratulate himself on the beauty of the view across the Firth from Ardmeanach – the Black Isle – but not now, not in these so very troubled times.
    True, looking towards the purple-headed mountain of Ben Wyvis presented a pretty sight to the discerning eye but these were not moments to be enjoying the beauty of the landscape. His problem was that the paths through the hills which led over to the west away from Fearnshire naturally enough led back from there too. There was the rub. That they could carry men from the opposite direction was his worry: men – armed men – from far away to the west back here to Fearnshire.
    That those paths to and from the west were only one of the sheriff’s problems he knew well enough. The trouble was that he couldn’t actually see the other well-trodden ways – the ones that came from the south, the east and the north. Another problem was that it was near Candlemass – darkest February – when there were too few hours of daylight for comfort.
    If he, Rhuaraidh Macmillan, had been able to crane his neck sufficiently far round to the left from the viewpoint of the ridge on which his house at Drummondreach was built, he would have been able to see the length of the Black Isle to the south and the paths that came from there, too, but he couldn’t.
    Those paths and what might be coming along them in his direction were another worry. Alas, the ways from Fortrose and Cromarty were out of his view altogether, which only added to the present discomfort of the Sheriff of Fearnshire. It was not for nothing that the promontory of Ardmeanach was known throughout Fearnshire as the Black Isle. It was because the whole was covered with dark pine trees. So now no one could say who was or was not approaching the back of Drummondreach through the woods. There was no view that way at all.
    So that Sheriff Rhuaraidh Macmillan was a very anxious man went without saying in these greatly disturbed times in Scotland. He was, though, at the same time an unhappy man. And if the two conditions – the present unhappiness and the worried state – were not in themselves very closely connected, nevertheless there was no doubt that they had a common cause.
    Rhuaraidh Macmillan went on pacing up and down inhis house at Drummondreach and had to concede to himself that both his unhappiness and his worry stemmed from the arrival of Mary Stuart from France and her enthronement as Queen of Scots. As her father, James V, had put it so neatly on his deathbed, ‘It began with a lass and it will end with a lass’.
    It hadn’t ended so far, but what man alive could say what the future held?
    But it did mean that that second lassie – the one that it might end with: Mary, Queen of Scots – was now Queen of Fearnshire, too. And this – and here was the difficulty – this required the Sheriff of Fearnshire leaving his Highland home and going to Edinburgh to swear his fealty to her.
    And if that was not bad enough it had also, alas, made Sheriff Rhuaraidh Macmillan feel he should acquire some little command of the French language before he made the journey south. The sheriff had the Gaelic and the English all right and some little Latin but not – so far – the French.
    But ‘Getting the French’ so to speak in remote Fearnshire was not proving easy and the sheriff, no longer a young man, had been reduced to taking lessons from a youthful tutor recently engaged at neighbouring Pitcalnie Castle for the purpose of making the laird’s daughters there fluent enough in the French language to be presented at the Queen’s court.
    The sheriff had with difficulty now accepted the principle that in the French language everything had a gender. His reluctance to do so had been compounded by certain