Of Stone And Sky Episode 6

“You stupid thing!” she hissed. “Look what you’ve done to yourself.” “I won,” he said, a grin rising.

“And so you did. Well done for that. But they’ll no be wanting you in the army with a gammy leg, now will they?’

“Ach, shame, shame. Just have to find someone that does want me, then.” He winked.

“Good luck with that!’

“I’m having a very lucky day, Gambler Girl.”

“Doesn’t look like it!” She pointed at his knee.

“Och, but it is. If you’d seen where I fell, that bash should’ve been on my head and I should no have finished that race alive, let alone first. So, a lucky landing, for one. But even better, a lucky meeting with the bonniest lassie at the games.”

She snorted, folded her arms and blushed.

“Will you make it a hat-trick, Tinker Tess? Will you give me that kiss and make me the luckiest man alive?”

There was a spluttering from her and a wild looking about. “What? Here?!” she demanded, forcing her eyes to meet his and slain by their sheer blueness. “Anywhere at all,” he said softly.

And so it happened, right there and then, because she couldn’t resist him when he took that hobbling step closer and drew her in, the brief strong smell of his sweat and wool jacket, his lips cracked and gentle. The insides of her soared like a kite.

We have to hold that picture of Gid, bright and fleet of foot, for he was not always what he became.

Gideon Munro, Gideon That Was, Gideon the Good, set a record for the Ben Bodach hill race that day that was not broken for another forty years till Sorley, seventeen and the image of his father, shaved two seconds off the time. He did not bash his knee, but by then so much else was bashed up that neither Agnes nor Gid, nor Colvin nor I were there to cheer him at the finish.

All he had left was the prize money, enough for the bus fare away.

Inheritance

One night at university in Edinburgh, after I won the students” race up Arthur’s Seat, I went out to celebrate and the city glittered against a smoky sky and friends shouldered me in and out of crowded pubs and a girl with pink hair kissed me and I felt free and immortal and maybe even a little bit happy, so drank till the lights began to spin and the buildings collapsed and the street rose up to punch my teeth.

Next day I remembered nothing. Waking in a cell, I was charged with drunk and disorderly behaviour, brawling and threatening a police officer. Walked home alone through early morning streets of a city fagged-out and grey, tramps bundled in doorsteps like rags. Looking in the mirror – all bruises and a cut lip – I wondered how my father could have been a drunk for so long yet still have a face.

Gid, as it happens, perfected the art at the Ferryman Inn.

Ah, the dear old Ferryman. Heart, hub and hellhole of Briachan village life, it holds many a tale. So many, in truth, that despite listening to everyone’s yarns and spinning a few of my own over the years, I’m barely scratching the surface.

You see, in the beginning, it was simply the house of the ferryman, for there was no bridge over the Spey here. The building was a one-room hovel with a byre at the side and a pier at the front.

The first ferryman recorded (in 1759, in the journal of a travelling aristocrat) was a Charlie MacPherson, the venerable forebear of our own Dougie.

The tourist pronounced him “a wild brute with neither English nor manners and costume rough and reeking as cattle hide”. He added a sketch to prove it.

Charlie was indeed strong and knew the unpredictable currents where Loch Hope narrows into the Spey, but he was no savage and knew a good wife when he found one. She was Maggie Dallas, who distilled whisky (quietly) and cooked broth and bannocks (noisily) and began selling them to the passengers, first at her hearth and then in an extra room they added.

Their son Murdo, famous for singing as he plied his craft, started taking in overnight guests and the inn bulged and grew, adding rooms and upper floors over the generations till Queen Victoria herself stayed overnight on her scouting mission for a holiday shack. It was a lean time for the incumbent MacPhersons and not knowing their guest was royal, the hospitality was spartan. She wrote in her diary that “there was only tea and two starved Highland chickens! NO pudding and no fun!” Needless to say, she did not pick Briachan.

She did, however, change the course of its history. Of the entire Highlands, in fact, for she fell in love with it. Despite her predilection for desserts and evening entertainments, she was a tough breed, staring down a hoolie with a straight back and turning a stiff upper lip to the driving rain. Indeed, she seemed to enjoy it.

So she bought Balmoral and in a stroke turned the Highlands from a barbarous backwater into a fashionable holiday destination. Thus it wasn’t long before a bridge replaced the ferry, bringing stagecoaches and buggies, and not long after that, the next MacPherson built a granite hotel on the site. He also served pudding.

Then the railways came and there was no stopping them. Nobility were joined by flocks of the aspiring classes in the great summer migration north, where the plumage changed to tartan and tweed, and the mating rituals and dominance displays entailed much strutting across moors with guns, in and out of dinners and across dance floors. The Ferryman Inn flourished.

There was a pianola and a billiards table, a piper heralding evening buffets, and no surface spared from antlers, potted palms, doilies and porcelain shepherdesses. Better still, it had the best views in Briachan.

Looking over Loch Hope to the Cairngorms, its perfect angle on the osprey nest on Small Isle was enough to reduce even dignified ladies to squabbling over the telescope. By then, our beloved oak tree in the garden was already very old, and nationalists of a romantic bent claim it was planted during the first Jacobite rebellion by a local MacPherson chief.

Why he diverted energies at that critical moment from uprising to gardening I cannot fathom, but it has played a part for our current cast of characters over the years and was, indeed, about to become very important to the lovely Agnes.

And so it happened right there and then, because she couldn’t resist him when he took that hobbling step closer...

Merryn Glover is the author of three novels. She was the first writer in residence for Cairngorms National Park in 2019 and is published by Birlinn.