Mathew's Tale Read Free Page A

write me off as dead in the first place? Are you telling me that my mother thinks I’m gone?’
    ‘Aye, and it near broke her heart.’
    ‘Near but not entirely? She’s still alive?’
    ‘Of course. I think sometimes that whenever Armageddon comes, Hannah Fleming will be there, daring it to do its worst. Mathew, there was a letter, three years ago, from the Highlanders. It came to your mother; she brought it to me to read for her, and I have it still, in the parish records.’
    ‘Where is it? Can I see it?’
    ‘I think ye’d better. Come across to the manse with me . . . and bring your cuddy as well,’ Barclay added. ‘I asked Jessie to have a meal ready before the christening. It will stretch to two, and I always have some oats for travellers’ animals.’
    The minister’s residence was set on the right of the church, built of the same hard grey stone and accessible from within its grounds, but Mathew led the untethered Gracie the long way round rather than take her across the graves that filled them.
    There was a post and a trough at the side of the manse. He tied her there, then followed his host in through the kitchen entrance.
    Jessie was the minister’s housekeeper, not his wife. She was ancient and had come to the parish with him. There were rumours, generated by a stranger in the inn several years before, that Barclay had been born on the wrong side of the blanket and that she was, in fact, his mother, but he was too respected in the community for that tale ever to be put to him.
    The old woman eyed Mathew silently as he came in. No introduction was offered, and if she recognised him she kept it to herself. Jessie had two facial expressions, severe and less severe. There were people in Carluke who claimed to have seen her smile slightly, once, at a hanging in Lanark.
    The two men ate at a table in a small room next to the kitchen; it faced south, across the green and down into the village and thus it was sunlit. The minister was in a rush to be ready for the baptism, and so there was no conversation for they both knew that Mathew’s tale would be long in the telling. The stovies that had been their main course were followed by steamed pudding, and then, astonishingly to the newcomer, coffee, something he had never seen in his home village. He remarked upon the fact.
    ‘Glasgow,’ Barclay replied. ‘There’s all sorts of stuff coming in through that city that we’ve never seen before. Half the tobacco in the United Kingdoms is imported through there, so they say. Scotland is being split in two; there’s the aristocracy and the lawyers in the east and the merchants in the west. Edinburgh might be our capital, but I doubt that it’s our largest city, no’ any longer. Our country’s changing, young man, and places like this are under siege. If it wasna’ for Sir George Cleland, Carluke would be full of nothing but the old and the useless.’
    ‘I had a conversation with his sons just outside the village,’ Mathew remarked, quietly.
    Mention of the twins made the minister frown. ‘I know those brats,’ he said. ‘I should; I baptised them. And I look down at them every Sunday beside their father in the Cleland pew, whispering through the sermon. Hopefully Sir George will correct the pair of them out before they’re grown men.’ He glanced across the table and smiled. ‘Your tone suggests they enjoyed the conversation rather less than you did.’
    ‘That might have been the case; had it been a year or so ago, in another country, they wouldn’t have enjoyed it at all. Indeed their father might tell them to be careful who they cheek at the roadside. There’ll be a few of Wellington’s veterans making their way. If they cross the wrong one, at the wrong time and place, they could wind up in a hole in the ground and their fine horses gone for sale in some town along the way.’
    ‘I’ll pass that message on, Mathew, tho’ I doubt it’ll do much good. Those boys are Sir George’s only