Free Last Writes by Catherine Aird

illogicalities in this that he, Rhuaraidh Macmillan, had been inclined to cavil at.
    Why, he had asked, should ‘ship’ be consideredmasculine – ‘
le bâtiment
’ – when every right thinking man – Scotsman, that is – knew that ships were always feminine? Every ship that the sheriff had ever known – and there had always been ships and plenty ploughing their way across the Firth – had invariably been addressed by all and sundry as ‘she’. It even went for ‘
le rafiau
’, the small sailing ships that could put into the little slipway at Balblair, not far from Drummondreach. Graceful line or no, they, too, were addressed as masculine in French.
    The tutor from Pitcalnie had not attempted to explain this or any other Anglo-French anomaly the sheriff had latched on. Instead, he had merely counselled learning them by heart: worse, the man had added unhelpfully that that went for the irregular verbs, too. ‘Learn them the hard way,’ the teacher had said airily, being himself still young enough to do that with ease. ‘You’ll just have to commit them to memory.’
    The irregular verbs had done nothing, either, to enhance the sheriff’s already jaundiced view of the French language. Nor had he been exactly enchanted with some of their nouns. Why potatoes should be called ‘
pommes de terre
’ or ‘apples of the earth’ defeated him. The word ‘
feu
’, which he himself used often in his everyday speech, was a perfectly proper Scottish word for that ancient duty which was owed by a tenant to a landlord in whose fiefdom he lived. Why the French should use it for the word ‘fire’ he couldn’t begin to imagine …
    It was this struggle with a new language that accounted for the sheriff’s present unhappiness. The sheriff’s real worry – admittedly a much more urgent one than becoming fluent in the French tongue – was a warring band of cateransthat he had reason to believe was presently on its way to Fearnshire from somewhere else. That particular ‘somewhere else’ was almost certainly the west but not certainly enough for Rhuaraidh Macmillan – nobody’s fool – not to maintain a keen watch on possible approaches from the other three points of the compass.
    He smiled grimly to himself as he put his clerk to watch as well as he could in these directions. ‘It’s called “
placer une sentinelle
”,’ he said to a bemused Dougal, ‘although why the word “
sentinelle
” should always be feminine, I do not know.’
    ‘All the sentries I’ve ever known have been men, my lord,’ agreed Dougal hastily. ‘Good men,’ that worthy added somewhat ambiguously.
    The sheriff sighed and took another turn round his room. Those who lived and had their being in the Highland fastnesses that comprised Fearnshire were usually quite unconcerned by what went on in faraway Edinburgh – but not now. It was a time of change in Scotland and as that clever young Italian, Niccolò Machiavelli, had pointed out, ‘dramatic regime change’ was always a dangerous time for any society. And dramatic regime change was undoubtedly what they had in Scotland just now.
    Not everybody in Fearnshire liked it – Pitcalnie the Younger, for one, was known to be a rebel – and the sheriff did not blame them. The behaviour of she on the throne at the Palace of Holyrood was not meeting with favour in every other quarter either. And the county of Fearnshire was one of those quarters. In consequence, rebellion was raising its ugly head and, as is the way of such things, serious dissenters were being joined by a tatterdemalioncollection of miscreants, ne’er-do-wells and landless clansmen disaffected by the toadying of their chieftains at that faraway court in Edinburgh.
    One of these roving bands, he had been warned, was even now making its way towards Fearnshire on trouble bent. This was the cause of his worry and speaking to them in French wouldn’t get him very far. While the unhappiness could wait, the worry