Capital Union, A Read Free

toy on its black rock above the Forth. The Pentland Hills lay just behind me in a long, blue line to the south and I could see almost as far as Stirling in the west. It was too windy to sit on the bench at the top and, although it wasn’t the most sheltered, I decided to go home down the steep side. I had hidden a snare in the gorse and, sure enough, there was a rabbit in it, stone dead. I wondered if Mr Black would buy some from me if I could catch more, but I didn’t think he liked me now. Anyway, Jeff wouldn’t have thought it was ladylike to make snares out of old garden wire from the foot of the stair. The rabbit felt soft and heavy when I put it in my bag and I hoped it wouldn’t bleed all over the steps, because Mrs MacDougall would no doubt have got right back on her high horse about that, too.
    The men were still talking when I came in. I stood very quietly in the hall. I didn’t even breathe and I could hear Mr Grant saying something about the Act of Union being no better than the Anschluss. Jeff said that seemed a bit strong.
    ‘
Komm der Tag
,’ replied Mr Grant. I think it was German, and then the door opened and Jeff said, ‘Oh, there you are, Agnes. I thought it had gone very quiet. Why didn’t you tell me you were going out?’ His eye fell on my hand. ‘What on earth have you got there?’
    Mr Grant laughed when I held up the rabbit by its back feet. ‘I think this will taste better than your magic beans, Mr Grant.’
    He looked less fierce, then. ‘You have married a warrior woman, Jeff, not just an Ayrshire lass.’
    Mr Grant helped me to skin my catch at the kitchen table. Jeff looked a bit haunless and disappeared behind his paper. It was when Mr Grant was standing there with his hands all bloody that he said I should call him Douglas, and I jokingly suggested Red Douglas instead. But he replied he was too true-blue a private school boy to be red. Jeff didn’t join in the banter but read us bits from his paper, adding, ‘Your appeal is mentioned in here, Douglas. The ninth of July.’
    ‘Aye,’ he said, wiping his hands, ‘the shades of Barlinnie prison are not yet to close about me, as far as I can gather, but no doubt I shall end up in the Bastille sooner or later.’ He looked at me. ‘Don’t worry, Agnes. I have got Jeff and others to rescue me.’
    Jeff gave him a sharp look and I think he looked a wee bit afeart. At the time I thought it was for his friend.
    ‘You do the onions, Agnes,’ said Douglas, ‘and I’ll joint the rabbit for you.’
    I looked away when he pulled the eyes out. That bit always made me want to boak but Douglas didn’t seem to mind. He said to Jeff he was sure he would be able to expand on the skeleton case he had flung together before the last trial. ‘There is no way that the Act of Union gave a Scottish court the right to enforce English conscription up here.’
    Jeff wasn’t so sure. I remembered the letter that had come for him with the black crown on it.
    Douglas added the meat to the onion I was stirring, while Jeff wrote a list on the back of an old envelope. ‘You could try citing the Dumfries Proclamation against the Union,’ he suggested. ‘Not many know there was an English man o’ war in the dock at Leith when the Three Estates signed away the country in Parliament Square. I wish I had been there to kick the door in with the rest of them.’
    For some reason I wished that Jeff wouldn’t talk so much and do so little.
    Douglas wasn’t sure it mattered now. ‘I’ll fight at the head of a Scottish army,’ he said, and he sounded so old-fashioned that I couldn’t help laughing, and I asked him where he would find a horse big enough to carry him into battle if the milkman wouldn’t part with Flash. Jeff banged his pen down on the table.
    ‘It is serious, Agnes,’ he muttered, and I wondered if he might be the same as Douglas and have to go to court, too.
    ‘I don’t want you in the jail,’ I said.
    ‘Yes, what would Mrs