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has a way with horses.’
    ‘But to go for a stable laddie!’ cried Aunt Margaret. ‘An Armstrong of Wauprigg!’
    Oh well, I suppose ’twas the disgrace to the family, all over again; and I my mother’s son.
    I mind getting up so sharply that I all but knocked over my creepy stool, and hearing my voice speaking as ’twere of its own accord. ‘But I’m not an Armstrong of Wauprigg, Aunt Margaret, I’m a Herriot of nowhere in particular, and plain enough you ha’ made it to me, all this while. And, Grandfather, I would like it well enough, to be a stable laddie for Lord Dundonel.’
    Two days later, when the carrier passed by on his weekly way, I was waiting for him at the foot of the driftway, with all that I possessed in the world bundled in an old plaid; a clean shirt and a plumbago pencil and some odd bits and pieces of paper that I could be drawing on, and the like.
    Grandfather and I had had a final word under the rowan tree by the gate. ‘I’ll no’ be needing to bid youkeep a close mouth on what happened up at old Phemie’s,’ he’d said. And suddenly he’d been not Armstrong of Wauprigg but just a troubled old man. ‘But I’ll ask ye not to think of us more hardly than ye can help, Hugh.’
    ‘I’ll never think hardly of
you
, Grandfather,’ I’d said, with a sudden aching in my throat.
    He had put his hand for an instant on my shoulder, then turned back towards the house; and I mind old Jess thrusting her rough muzzle into my hand before she padded after him.
    That was my last parting with Wauprigg, that had been my mother’s home, though it had never been mine. Then I had picked up my bundle and set out down the driftway to meet the carrier.
    I did not look back.
    Place of Paisley is a fine great house, and the stable-yard a good enough place to work in, for old Lord Dundonel was one for the keeping and breeding of fine horses. Life was not exactly easy there, not with Willie Sempill in charge of the stables, but there was a goodness to it, all the same.
    And so I was part of another Covenanting household, though one that for the most part followed the cause more gently than the last that I had known. Sir John Cochrane, the second son of the house, was refuging in Holland after being caught up in a plot to kill the King; and the first son, who was dead before ever I came to Place of Paisley (they said, praying with his last breath for the death of that same King), had married Lady Catherine Kennedy, of as black a Covenanting family as ever prayed to the Lord, a grim-faced, godly woman who divided her time between Paisley andAuchans, her own house some miles off. And most of their sons and daughters were safely married into families of their own way of thinking, and rearing broods of fledgeling Covenanters in their turn. But old Lord Dundonel, the head of the house, had been made Earl for his loyalty to the first Charles, in the bad days; and I have often thought that there was a likeness between him and my grandfather, and he could have done with a sick cow himself from time to time…
    And no house could have been quite without light and laughter that held my lady Jean.
    Lady Jean Cochrane, youngest daughter to the eldest son and that bleak-faced widow woman he left behind him. Sixteen or seventeen she’d have been, the spring I first saw her; old for a lassie to be still unwed, but I’m thinking she was hard to please, and the old Earl would not force her, though there was talk that her mother would have taken a whip to her if she’d had
her
way. A slight, long-boned lassie, with straight dove-gold hair that she wore at most times tied back with a ribbon as though she were a boy, and a pair of straight grey eyes like a boy’s too, and a wide mouth that seemed made for joy. She was in and out of the stable-yard more often than any well-brought-up lady should have been; for she had all her grandfather’s love of horses; and wherever my lady Jean wished to be, there she would be, whether