The Winter Sea (Slains, #1)(27)
‘It’s no more than a tale, mind, and there’s nothing written down to give it proof, but to this day the Chiefs of Hay still carry as their coat of arms the king’s falcon, and the ox-yoke, and three bloodstained shields, one each for that brave farmer and his sons. And the family’s motto, translated, means “Keep the Yoke”. So they believe it, anyway.’
He paused, because he’d noticed that I’d taken out my notebook and was writing down the legend, and he gave me time to finish.
‘Do you have all that?’ he asked me. ‘Good. I’ll try to go more slowly for you. Now, about the Hays. They came from Normandy, according to the history books. They were raised to the title of earls in the mid-fifteenth century, and fully a hundred years before that, they’d been made Lord High Constables of Scotland by Robert the Bruce himself. That’s an influential office, Lord High Constable, and a hereditary one, passed down the family through the generations, along with a fierce devotion to the Catholic cause.
‘They supported Mary, Queen of Scots’s son, James VI, till James decided to turn Protestant. That was too much for the 9th Earl of Erroll, and he led a mounted attack on the king’s forces. Got himself an arrow wound for his efforts, as I recall. And he made King James so angry that the king marched north personally to sack the Earl of Erroll’s castles at Delgatie and Old Slains, just south of here. Destroyed them both with gunpowder and cannon. The Earl of Erroll spent a few years biding time in exile, then came back to Scotland, and, instead of trying to rebuild Old Slains, decided to build anew, around a tower house the Hays kept here. So then he called this New Slains.
‘New Slains is the one you want to know about. The other was long gone when Colonel Hooke came over. In 1708… now, let me think…the Earl of Erroll who’d have been here would have been the 13th earl, Charles Hay, the last male of the line. And his mother, the Countess of Erroll, Anne Hay, was a driving force in the conspiracy. But then,’ he said, ‘she would have been. She was a Drummond, and her brother was the Duke of Perth, a powerful man at the court of the Stewarts, in France. She was committed to trying to bring back the king. A remarkable woman. The Countesses of Erroll have, through history, been more interesting,’ he told me, ‘than their men.’
He drank his whisky, and the warm light in the little room reflected on the thousand points of intricately cut glass on his tumbler, and his round, old-fashioned glasses, behind which his eyes turned thoughtful. ‘Mind you, her son, the 13th earl, did have some fire in his belly. He hated the Union, and fought it till his dying breath, in any way he could. And then, of course, he was a Hay, and a supporter of the Stewart kings, and that was not a choice a man made lightly. Dangerous times, so they were.’ He mused on this a moment, then went on, ‘He didn’t think to marry and produce an heir before he died, and so he passed the title to his sister. Another interesting Countess of Erroll, she was, but that’s a different story altogether. Anyway, she had no heir either, so from her the title went sideways, into her nieces and nephews, and out of the old family. Slains, though, stayed with the Earls of Erroll until 1916, when the 20th earl had to sell it for death duties. The new owner eventually gave up on it, and had the roof taken off in the 1920s—for safety, they say, though more likely it was so he wouldn’t have to pay the taxes. After that, well, with no roof, the place just fell to ruin.’
Elsie said, ‘A shame, it was, a grand old house like that, with such a history. Samuel Johnson stayed there once, you know, with Mr Boswell, his biographer. Douglas, you used to have copies of what they both wrote about Slains. It was fair interesting.’
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I forgot about those.’ Rising from his leather chair, he left the room a moment and returned with a file folder full of papers. ‘You can keep these, if you like. I’ve other copies. Boswell’s account is by far the more colorful. Johnson’s is drier, but still good to read. There are one or two other bits in the folder that might be of help to you, having to do with the history of Slains. And somewhere,’ he said, looking round, at a loss, ‘I did have the old plans for the castle, that showed where the rooms were. I can’t think what I’ve done with it.’
Elsie said, ‘You may have loaned it out.’
‘Oh, very likely.’ He sat down again and smiled at me. ‘The curse of age. I can’t remember anything. I’ll see if I can’t find them for you though, those plans. You’d like to have a look at them, I’m sure.’
‘I would, yes. Very much.’
Elsie smiled. ‘It must be fun to write about the past. What made you interested in history?’
There was no short answer to that question either, but I did my best, and so we talked about my father’s love of genealogy, and the trips we had taken to places our ancestors came from, and all of the hours that I’d spent as a child walking with him in graveyards to search out the headstones of great-great-great grandfathers. All of those people were real to me. Their faces in the framed and yellowed photographs that hung around our house were as familiar as my own, and when I stopped to look at them their eyes looked back at me, and pulled me with them to the past.
The doctor nodded understanding. ‘Aye, my father had no great love of history, but he’d inherited a portrait, quite a good painted portrait, of a Weir who had been a sea captain. It hung in the study, when I was a lad. A fair bit of imagining, I did around that portrait. I don’t doubt it’s why I’m so fond of the sea.’