And the wild mountain thyme …’
‘All the moorland is perfumin’,’ Ellen joined in.
We finished the verse together, and sang the whole thing at the tops of our voices, scaring birds. We walked side by side on the track over the moor that was ours by right of our being there, singing to the sky and the wind.
I thought, just then and fleetingly, there wasn’t any place I’d rather be or any person I’d rather be with. If I could have chosen one moment of my life to go on forever, just then, it would have been that one.
We came over the summit of Pitbroomie Hill and Ellen pointed towards the high mounds of East and West Lomond across the next valley. ‘Those are both Iron Age hill forts,’ she said. ‘There’s a big one on this side too, up the Knowes above Brig O’Fearn village. People have been here a long time. But now there’s nothing on top but birds and gorse and wind. A glen like this always makes me think: why did folk leave the hilltops?’
‘When exactly is Iron Age?’ I asked.
‘Well, two thousand years ago, give or take an odd few hundred either end. Hard to tell unless you dig things up. That’s why your grandad’s work is so important: they line up all those different blades and compare them, and then they can work out the dates. Like geological layers, but not so old.’
Frank Dunbar had said the same thing about the Murray Hoard being important. He’d quoted Hugh Housman saying it, anyway.
‘I think it’s easier dating rocks than arrowheads,’ Ellen considered. ‘But maybe geology seems easier because I learned it in school, and I’ve kent the rest myself.’
‘Did you really learn geology in school?’ I asked. ‘How do you go to school when you’re moving about?’
‘We have to do a hundred days a year or they send Cruelty folk out after us – you ken, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. They’ll take a bairn away from a family if your school attendance card isn’t filled. We mostly go in the winter – we share a cottage by Aberfeldy with my cousins. I left high school last year. Euan left when he was fourteen, but I had a scholarship for science and history.’
My heart stirred with a baffling jealousy. ‘Did you finish the course?’
‘I didn’t take the exams. They were arguing some rubbish about not being able to send the results to a proper address, but I don’t believe that. Dad collects his Black Watch pension at the post office wherever he is. I know it was really three scaldy lads making a fuss at having to share workspace with a lass – and a dirty tinker lass at that – and I left.’ She shrugged. ‘So no, I dinnae have a pass mark. But I still know what I learned.’
We passed the upper drive to Glenmoredun Castle, with its ornate stone archway and gate lodge incongruously plumped all by itself in the middle of the moor. Below us, further down in a fold of the hillside, nestled the turrets of the castle itself.
‘Ready to turn back?’ I asked. ‘If we go further we’ll just have to march back up again to get back to the car, like the Grand Old Duke of York.’
Behind us, a pair of voices suddenly chimed: ‘Hey, youse – tinkies!’
Ellen spun round at the catcalls.
I turned more slowly.
‘Tinkies, tinkies, carry bags, Go to the well and wash your rags!’
‘Got rags for us, tinks?’
It was two girls. Two working girls from Glenmoredun Castle, in service as housemaids or kitchen staff maybe, on their afternoon off. They’d come out to the gate lodge since we first passed it and were waiting for the bus.
Ellen was now one step ahead of me – and her steps were longer than mine. I could see the cords tightening in her wrists as she clenched her fists.
‘Going down to Glenmoredun, aye?’ asked one of the girls. She was round and rosy, with dark curls. ‘What are youse peddling? Needles? Wooden pegs?’
‘Or reading tea leaves?’ This with a self-conscious giggle from the other girl, whose brown hair was waved and fluffed.
They both had on lipstick and little heeled sandals, and I reckoned they were younger than me – just done with school, working for the first time. The slim one with the crimped brown hair was somehow more self-assured, more worldly than her wholesome-looking friend.
‘Tell my fortune!’ was her next knowing suggestion.
Ellen missed a step, and flinched, as though she’d stubbed her toe. She stopped, straightened her shoulders and faced the pair across the narrow unmade road.
I drew up short at her elbow.
The two other girls bent their heads together, black hair and brown, whispering and giggling. Then they looked up, and the cheeky, crimped-haired one called out, ‘What about your wee brother, would he tell my fortune?’
‘I bet your wee brother would like to give me a kiss,’ squealed the rosy one daringly.
‘I’d like to give your wee brother a kiss!’ squealed her more experienced friend.
In unison they broke into a cascade of giddy mirth.
Now Ellen faced me again with her back to this brace of gleeful idiots, and she looked me up and down with an expression of vexed and bewildered astonishment.
They went on as if we couldn’t hear them.
‘Florrie, you’d kiss anything that moves. You’d kiss my old grandad – you’d kiss a sheep.’
Florrie chastised her friend by batting her on the arm, and they both rocked with hilarity.
‘Now that is how a well-bred young person speaks in polite company,’ I said to Ellen in a level voice, hoping my attempt at deadpan Traveller sarcasm would cool her down. ‘And aren’t they optimistic about your brother!’
Ellen gave a jerk of her head in the direction of the two silly things, who were still chuckling like hens and staring at us with a kind of sideshow fascination, as if we were covered with tattoos.
‘They mean you,’ she answered quietly. ‘Wi’ your old kilt and bare legs. They think you’re a boy.’ She reached out and fluffed my Joan-of-Arc hair with one quick, rough hand, as if I were Pinkie. Or, indeed, as if I were her younger brother. As my older brothers have been doing to Jamie almost all his life.
‘Come on over here, laddie. Florrie is gasping for you!’ called the rosy one with the dark hair.
‘So I am. I’m all yours. Come over the road, wee man …’
I took a step forward, very deliberately, hands on my hips, and with a wide grin that I couldn’t quite control. I let the girls take a good long look at me. They stared and elbowed each other in the ribs.
‘I wouldn’t kiss an old woman like Florrie,’ I told them.
Ellen grabbed me by the back of my shirt. ‘Shaness, Davie, let them be.’
I shook her off.
‘You waiting for the bus to Perth?’ I asked them.
The rosy one answered, ‘Aye, we’re going to the pictures. We’ll –’
More elbows and titters were exchanged between them.
The bolder friend finished for the other, ‘Brenda will take you along if you gie her a kiss!’