The Betrayal of Maggie Blair - By Elizabeth Laird Page 0,97

Ritchie no more than the truth when I'd bragged about Tam's cleverness. Even in peaceful times he had avoided the main routes, wary of officials and ministers and lawyers and busybodies, who always seemed to want to arrest him for begging or drunkenness or being a vagabond. A lifetime's wandering about the south of Scotland had made him familiar with every burn and sheepfold and stand of trees. He knew which cottage housed an old companion who might be good for a meal in exchange for a tune or two on the pipes. He knew the back doors of every laird's house, which ones had a mean cook or a ferocious dog, and which had a kind housekeeper with a full storeroom. He could sniff his way as if by instinct to the lairs in remote glens and bothies where outcasts met to divide the gains of their thieving or to roast the meat and fish they had poached and comfort themselves with whiskey.

Tam showed his true colors when we had got no farther than the end of the track to Ladymuir, where it met the lane running up to Kilmacolm. I turned to the left, heading for the village.

"No, no, Maidie." Tam grasped my arm. "We'll not need to trouble the folk of Kilmacolm with our presence."

"But the troops aren't there. They're at Sorn. And the lane's easy walking," I objected.

"Aye, well." He grinned apologetically. "There's an awful irritable lady I'm not anxious to run into, and a couple of fellows..."

"Tam," I said accusingly. "What did you do?"

"Nothing! But we'll give the place a wide berth, if you don't mind."

My walk with Archie Lithgow on the drove to Dumbarton had seemed like a great adventure last year, but it had been nothing at all compared to my furtive progress over the hills and through the glens with Tam. I thought almost with longing of the cattle's gentle, ambling pace, the steady, reassuring click of Mr. Lithgow's knitting needles, and the hearty bowls of porridge morning and night. With Tam, there was haste, dodging and darting, and very little food. We would scurry over a high empty moor in the morning, ducking down to hide in the ditches of peat cutters if a farmer or a shepherd came by. Then we would creep stealthily past a highland farm, snatching a chicken from the yard as we went, and end the day in a high nook by a lonely crag, sharing our little bit of meat with a band of destitute old soldiers and highwaymen, while Tam entertained them with stories and music in return for some drink and a little of their food.

"Keep your silver pieces and your buckle out of sight," he warned me. "The temptation might be too much for these poor fellows."

I marveled at how he kept us both alive and fed from day to day, with the help of a little begging, a poached trout or two, and payment for his piping.

"And to think," he said sometimes, looking down at his new clothes, "that I could pass for a respectable man now and walk down the main street of any town raising my bonnet to the ladies like a gentleman."

I hadn't the heart to point out to him that after only a couple of days of sleeping out in the open, being drenched in constant showers, and hiding in stands of gorse, my uncle's old clothes were unrecognizably dirty, crumpled, and torn.

Seven days after we'd left Ladymuir, we came around the edge of a hillside and stopped to take in the awe-inspiring view. The city of Edinburgh lay along a raised spine that sloped down from the west to the east, where it crouched close to the ground. Along its back rose ranks of tall buildings, so closely crammed together that they seemed to squeeze each other thin. Church spires sprouted above the chimneys, and long gardens fell to the valley below, fenced in by the high wall that enclosed the whole city. At the far, lower end of the spine, I could see a palace of such size and magnificence that my mouth fell open.

"Aye," said Tam, enjoying my wonder. "You may well gasp, Maidie. That's Holyrood, the king's palace. There's enough jewels and furs and silver and gold in there to feed an army of poor bodies till their bellies burst, but never a bit of it comes to us."

Now I was looking at the great rock at the top end of the spine.