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Updated: May 31, 2025
It being well known that Joseph Mair's cottage was one of the laird's resorts, Malcolm, as soon as he learned his flight, set out to inquire whether they knew anything of him there. Scaurnose was perched almost on the point of the promontory, where the land made its final slope, ending in a precipitous descent to the shore.
Nor was there a family meal to which any one or all together of the six men whom he had set over the Seaton and Scaurnose would not have been welcomed by the marquis and his Clemency. The House was head and heart of the whole district.
When he was at length seated on the top of the coach running betwixt Aberdeen and Fochabers, which would set him down as near Scaurnose as coach could go, he began to be doubtful how Annie, formally retained on Malcolm's side by the message he had to give her, would judge in the question between them; for what did she know of theatres and such places? And the doubt strengthened as he neared home.
Near where they lay a steep path ascended the cliff, whence through grass and ploughed land, it led across the promontory to the fishing village of Scaurnose, which lay on the other side of it. There the mad laird, or Mad Humpy, as he was called by the baser sort, often received shelter, chiefly from the family of a certain Joseph Mair, one of the most respectable inhabitants of the place.
When Mr Crathie heard of the outrage the people of Scaurnose had committed upon the surveyors, he vowed be would empty every house in the place at Michaelmas. His wife warned him that such a wholesale proceeding must put him in the wrong with the country, seeing they could not all have been guilty. He replied it would be impossible, the rascals hung so together, to find out the ringleaders even.
"What right then had you to remain and listen to my disclosure?" said Malcolm. "If you be guilty of such a mean trick as betray me and ruin my plans, no honest man in Portlossie or Scaurnose but will scorn you." "There! tak ye that!" said Peter. "An' I s' promise ye, ye s' never lay leg ower the gunnel o' my boat again. I s' hae nane but Christian men i' my pey."
When once the Scaurnose people should have passed them, they would be alone alone as in the spaces between the stars. There would not be a living soul on the shore for hours. From the harbor the nearest way to the House was by the sea-gate, but where was the haste with the lovely night around them, private as a dream shared only by two?
The proclamation ended, the piper sounded one note three times, and they passed to the next station. When they had gone through the Seaton, they entered a carriage waiting for them at the sea gate, and were driven to Scaurnose, and thence again to the several other villages on the coast belonging to the marquis, making at each in like manner the same announcement.
"I'm thinkin' ye'll fin' the puir lassie whaur I left her," remarked Malcolm. "I doobt she daured na gang hame." That night it was all over the town, that Lizzy Findlay was in a woman's worst trouble, and that Malcolm was the cause of it. Annie Mair had a brother, a carpenter, who, following her to Scaurnose, had there rented a small building next door to her cottage, and made of it a workshop.
Dubs, who had come from Scaurnose on the business of the conjuration, had stepped into the stern, not to steer but to show a white ensign somebody's Sunday shirt he had gathered, as they ran, from a furze bush, where it hung to dry, between the Seaton and the harbour. "Hoots! ye'll affront the marchioness," objected the Partan.
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