A Chieftain Finds Love

Chapter One ~1885-1

Chapter One ~1885Isa McNaver walked blithely along the seashore.

The sun was warm on her head and the wind just moved her hair off her forehead.

Because there was nobody to see her, she wore nothing on her head and, having taken off her shoes, carried them in her hand.

She could feel the wet sand and the waves lapping gently over her feet.

She thought as she had so often before that there was no place lovelier in the world than Scotland.

Most particularly the little bit of it that she thought of as her own because she had always lived there.

When she was away, as she had been during the last two years, she had never gone to sleep without thinking of the purple heather on the moors.

She dreamed of the mists over the distant mountains and the sea shimmering golden in the sunshine or silver in the moonlight.

‘I am home! I am home.’

She wanted to cry the words aloud to the young gulls that flew overhead and the cormorants perched on the rocks jutting up above the surface of the sea.

She felt a little throb of her heart as she remembered that, if her voice did not recover quickly, she would have to go back to the South and find some other way of earning her living.

When she was seventeen and at school in Edinburgh, it was discovered that she had an exquisite soprano voice.

It had made her the leader of the choir in the local Kirk.

A theatrical impresario had quite by chance attended Morning Service there one Sunday and, having heard her sing, had asked the Minister to introduce him to Isa.

To her astonishment he informed her that she had a voice in a million.

He added that he was prepared to take her to London and produce her at a Concert that he was arranging where Her Majesty Queen Victoria would be present.

It was all like something out of a fairy story.

But Isa’s parents were shocked and horrified at the idea of her appearing on a stage.

At first Colonel Alister McNaver had refused point-blank to consider such a proposition.

But when the impresario told him how much he was prepared to pay Isa, he was forced, because he was in desperate need of money, to agree.

Isa had finished her term at school and had then set off for London.

It was arranged for her to stay with one of her mother’s sisters who had been no less horrified at the thought of any relation of hers being connected with the stage.

She, however, realised that Isa was singing in public solely in order to help her father and mother.

She was to be chaperoned from the moment she left the house until the moment she returned.

She never went anywhere unless she was accompanied by her aunt or else by her aunt’s companion, who was if anything even more puritanical than her employer.

Isa was actually not in the least interested in the many invitations she received from the admirers of her voice.

In any case, whether they were young or old, rich or poor, they were not permitted to become acquainted with her.

The only people she was allowed to meet in London were her aunt’s friends, who were mostly old and dull.

Also, as Isa thought secretly to herself, tone deaf.

However, she was a success!

During the last two years she had been able to send home quite a considerable amount of money earned from the Concerts arranged for her by the impresario.

They were not actually her own Concerts because she never appeared alone as he had a number of other protégés who also sang or played the piano.

There was a string quartet who, wherever they performed, drew the more experienced music lovers.

Then disaster struck.

Just before a Concert was to take place where she had been billed to perform, she developed laryngitis.

It was largely due to tiredness and her insistence on walking in Hyde Park on a cold blustery day that had brought on a streaming cold.

Under the circumstances there was no possibility of her appearing in the Concert.

And it was the impresario who had suggested that she took a holiday that she had not had since she first came to London.

She went back to her beloved Scotland.

Because he was so anxious for her to be fit to sing again as quickly as possible, he advanced the Railway fare for herself and an elderly housemaid whom her aunt insisted should escort her.

It had been a joy beyond words to see her parents again, although they now seemed much older than when she had left them.

The house on the hillside where her father’s family had lived for generations was even shabbier than she remembered it.

However, because of the money she had been able to send them, the food was wholesome and good and there was plenty of it.

There were now two servants to wait on her father and her mother when before she left there had been none.

She had been longing to learn what they had been doing, to hear news of the lambing and whether it had been a good breeding season for grouse.

Stags were rare on their very small moor and so were the salmon her father managed to catch occasionally in the small stretch of river that ran through his estate.

It was all so familiar and at the same time so comforting that Isa felt as if she had never been away.

Now that she was home she had no wish to go back to London.

She knew, however, that this would be obligatory.

She therefore spent every moment she could walking along the seashore and climbing over the moors where the heather was just coming into bloom.

This morning when she woke up she had found that her voice had returned.

It was stronger and clearer than it had been for the last two weeks.

While she hummed a little tune to herself, she knew that it would be a mistake to try to sing too soon.

‘I am better. Much better,’ she thought.

At the same time it was an agony to know that now her voice had returned she must go back to the South.

She had walked quite a long way without realising it and was now beneath the cliffs.

There was on her left a huge cave that she remembered playing in when she was a child.

It had always fascinated her because somebody had told her that it had once been used by smugglers, although her father had pooh-poohed the idea.

“There has never been much smuggling in this part of the North,” he said. “When the Vikings came, they put their longboats into one of the natural harbours and pillaged everything they could find.”

Isa had been brought up on stories of the Vikings.

How they had carried off not only the sheep and cattle of those who lived near the sea but also the younger women. Besides this they had left in their wake a large number of fair-haired, blue-eyed babies.

They were very different from the small dark Picts and Scots who inhabited that part of the land.

“What is much more likely than anything else,” Colonel McNaver often said, “is that the cave was used by the Scots to hide themselves and their families from the invaders.”

That would have been a sensible thing to do, Isa had always thought, for the cave extended a long way back under the cliff.

She had also discovered that it was easy to climb up at the back of it and there she could lie on a kind of shelf beneath the stone roof and remain unobserved by anyone below.

Because she was thinking back affectionately into her childhood, she entered the cave now.

When she reached the far end of it, she climbed carefully with her bare feet up to the flat hiding place.

It now seemed a little smaller than she remembered it.

But she was sure that there would be room there for a man, his wife and perhaps two children together with some of their possessions..

She wished that she could read a story relating the feelings of the Scots when they saw from The Castle that was further to the North the first sign of the Viking ships coming across the North Sea towards them.

‘It must have been very frightening,’ she told herself.

She closed her eyes pretending that she was hiding from a Viking who would carry her away after stealing her father’s flocks.

Perhaps, as a parting shot, they would burn down their croft.

Her eyes were still closed as she imagined it all happening.

Then astonishingly she heard voices below her.

For a moment or two she thought that she must be mistaken and it was just a part of her imagination.

Then, as she peeped over the edge of the rock where she was lying, she saw two men standing in the cave below her.

“I told Rory to meet us here,” one man said in what seemed an unnecessarily low voice.

“What made you choose this cave?” the other man asked.

As he spoke, Isa realised that he was English.

The first speaker had a faint but undoubtedly Scottish intonation in his voice.

“It’s the one place where we are out of sight of those damned stalkers,” the first man replied. “You can never be quite certain that they are not lying up on the moors with a spyglass and you are being watched.”

“I see your point,” the Englishman said. “You are quite certain that we can trust this fellow Rory?”

“Not only can we trust him but he knows the layout of the land better than anybody else. As you well know, the map may not be very accurate after the passage of years.”

“I am aware of that,” the Englishman said. “At the same time there is no doubt of its authenticity.”

He spoke sharply and the Scotsman replied in a conciliatory tone,

“My dear fellow, I am not disputing that, but even so it is very difficult to pinpoint exactly where the treasure is hidden.”

At the word ‘treasure’, Isa stiffened.

Now she realised what they were talking about.

Ever since she could remember, the Clan McNaver which her father belonged to had talked about the family treasure.

This had been hidden away somewhere when the Vikings approached.

Although they had left without it, the treasure had never been recovered and she was aware that the story was as familiar to every child in the Clan as the story of Red Riding Hood or Cinderella.

The Chieftain of the time, who had owned many acres of land along the Scottish shore, had been a man of great wealth and considerable ingenuity.

It was he who had built the old Castle that had stood high above the cliffs at the mouth of the river where it ran into the sea.

There he had lived, or so the story went, as if he was a King.

All the other Clans in the vicinity were afraid of the McNavers and had long since given up trying to fight them because they invariably lost.

The McNavers only enemies therefore were the Vikings, whose greed and seamanship brought them in the summer months to pillage everything they could find.

This meant that the McNavers were always on the watch for them.

At the first sight of the sails of the longboats on the horizon the sheep and cattle would be driven away over the moors.

Most of the women and children would go with them and the rest would hide in caves along the shore or inland in the woods.

After several skirmishes a number of the Chieftain’s best men had been killed since the Vikings had superior weapons.

The Chieftain had then given orders that they were all to hide following the principle that ‘he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day’.

He had organised their plan of action with great efficiency and when the Vikings returned they found nothing but a few empty crofts and a Castle that was abandoned.

It had also been depleted of goblets, ornaments and jewels.

The marauders had then moved North or South in search of finer plunder.

While the Chieftain of the Clan McNaver led his people so wisely that they flourished.