Nothing Left to Fear from Hell by Alan Warner

Author:Alan Warner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Birlinn

Despite his high spirits, with the rain gone, the Prince insisted they should sleep night itself again under open skies. More cautious than the risker of old, he feared that the upturn in his fortunes could be directly reversed by some rogue patrol, so he took dry swaddling rag for his face against the midges. He and MacEachain made towards the lower elevations of heather they had come down from in the ghastly night, and when the loss of light halted them, they found a good cleft in the peat rims to be hidden among, come dawn. MacEachain ripped up a bed of heather for their upper halves, and they wrapped in plaid to sleep side by side.

At dawn they climbed higher, and there settled for the day’s watch, to keep sentinel for any approach of the Lady Clan, Miss Flora, and their potential entourage – or other more disquieting movements upon this earth and water. But it was a day in utter vain, for not a thing moved upon the lands spread around them, from coast to coast. There was a middling and current breeze, which kept what the Prince called ‘the terror mitches’ away.

In an unguarded moment, the Prince talked of a fine lady who had cared for him at Bannockburn House, in January month, when he was taken with a savage grippe, whom he named as Clementina, or Clemmy Walkingshaw, possessor of innumerable charms and huge gentility. ‘Walkingshaw, and verily I walked directly in,’ as he boastingly put it to his male companion. Then he became quite poetic in talking of the mysteries of grace found in high women, their mercurial natures and passions, and how this woman revealed ‘hot surprises and revelations’, about which he found it impossible to fathom by what manner she could have come by such proclivities and wily instincts. This again, as was his habit of reasoning, he could but put down to motions and operations of a divine nature alone – for there was no other possible explanation. Other than – he speculated – this woman was driven by the power and influence of moonlight, for she seemed to take pleasure in bathing in it, and was it not possible that the moon which wheeled about the warmed chambers of Bannockburn House at January night, driving its full bars through one window and out the other in their upper floors, might have also communicated some lunar essence unknown to men but receivable only by women, as with the sea tides – as it is known the moon influences their revolving calendars of curse and procreation?

Neil asked if that was not aired with a tint of heresy, more than considerations of science.

‘Heresy, no.’ The Prince laughed and added obscurely that, in his experience, women worked their way back from childbirth, a gift-skill in all of them, from pauper to princess, and that they operated with endless pocketfuls of unexplainable instincts and swift fiery abilities, which are a delight to witness suddenly revealed.

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