The Brahan Seer

A prophecy is not the seeing of a thing. The seeing is small work, given to children and to women at wells and to men who have spent too many nights alone on a hill. The prophecy is the speaking of it aloud in a room where the speaking is not wanted. Most who see learn early to keep the seeing behind the teeth. The few who do not are remembered, and the remembering is paid for in advance.

THE SALLOW MAN OF LOCH USSIE

Coinneach Odhar Mackenzie was a farm worker on the Brahan estate, west of Dingwall, in the country of Clan Mackenzie under the third Earl of Seaforth. He was called Odhar, the sallow, for the colour of his face. By the tradition of the country he came by his sight as a boy on the shores of Loch Ussie, where a small white stone was put into his hand out of a cairn, and through the hole in the stone he saw what was not in front of him. He used the sight for the country use of it. He found cattle lost in the September fog above Strathpeffer. He told the fishwives of Avoch where the herring would run that week. He was kept on the steward's books at Brahan for the gift, and went up to the house when the steward sent for him, and otherwise he was at the byre and the peat-bank like the rest. The gift, in the country reckoning, was not his. It was lent.

THE LONG DRAWING-ROOM AT BRAHAN

It is a late afternoon in autumn in the late 1660s; the year is not preserved but the beeches at the front door are bare and the light is going off the Cromarty Firth by four. He has been brought in from the field and made to leave his boots in the hall. His coat smells of peat smoke and the byre. He is in his stocking feet on the Persian rug of the long drawing-room. The housekeeper is at the side-table with the brandy and the seal-cake. The steward is at the door. The chief, Kenneth Mackenzie, third Earl of Seaforth, is in Paris on the king's business and has been four months gone; a courier came across the Channel ten days ago with letters, and the letters have not satisfied. Isabella, Lady Seaforth, in dark green with a single string of pearls, is at the long window looking out at the country. She turns from the window. She does not look at him. She speaks to him in Gaelic, the country speech, the speech she keeps for servants. Coinneach, she says, what is my husband doing in Paris this afternoon?

THE STONE IN THE PALM

He puts the white stone to his eye. He does not need the stone. He has known, since she turned from the window, what is in Paris this afternoon: the chief in an upper room of a fine house in the rue Saint-Honoré, in the company of a Frenchwoman whose face he can see plainly and whose name he does not know, and she is younger than the woman in dark green at the window, and the chief is happier than a man four months from his wife and children ought to be in the late afternoon. The stone is for the steward at the door and for the housekeeper at the side-table and for Lady Seaforth, who will not accept the answer until the stone has been raised. He weighs it in his palm and the weighing is the whole hinge of his life. A pleasant lie about the spires of Notre Dame and the chief at his prayers would take him out of this room on his own two feet and back to the byre by dark; a pleasant lie repeated would lose him the sight, which the cairn at Loch Ussie had been clear about since he was nine years old, and losing the sight would lose him his place on the steward's books, which is the only living between him and the parish. None of that is the reason. The reason, weighed in the palm with the stone, is older than the steward's books and older than Brahan. The gift is not his to choose the use of. The gift is what it is. He lowers the stone. He answers her in the Gaelic she has asked in. Mistress, he says, I see your husband at this hour with another woman. He is in a fine house in Paris. She is younger than you. He is happier than he should be.

THE ORDER, AND THE WORD FROM THE FLAMES

Lady Seaforth walks the length of the rug, three slow paces, and looks at him. He does not lower his eyes. She turns to her steward and speaks in English, the language of the household accounts. Take him to Chanonry. The tar-barrel. Today. Before the sun is down. The steward is uncomfortable, but he is the steward of the chief's wife of Brahan and not of Coinneach Odhar of Loch Ussie, and he does as he is told. The cart goes down through Conon Bridge and across to the Black Isle. The tar-barrel is set up on the shingle below the lighthouse at Chanonry Point, where the firth narrows and the seals come up onto the spit. The priest gives him five minutes for his confession and asks him, by the country custom, whether he has a last word. He has. He looks up the coast and speaks in the Gaelic of the country, slowly, so that the steward and the men on the shingle will carry it home. The line of Seaforth, he says, shall not see another six generations. The last chief shall be deaf and dumb. He shall outlive his four sons and bury them with his own hands. The inheritance shall pass to a white-coiffed lassie from the east, and she shall kill her sister by mischance. The bleating of the sheep, he says, shall be heard from Lochalsh to Drumossie, and the country shall be emptied of its people, and the Big Sheep shall run until they meet the northern sea. Long strings of carriages without horses, he says, shall run from Dingwall to Inverness. Then he is put into the barrel and the tar is lit, and he dies before the sun is down on the shingle at Chanonry Point.

THE COURIER FROM PARIS

A fortnight later the next courier from Paris is shown into the long drawing-room at Brahan. The leaves at the front door are gone now and there is a small fire. Isabella Seaforth takes the letters at the long window. She breaks the wax. The letters are in the chief's own hand and are full of the spires and the court and the king's business and the cold weather in the rue Saint-Honoré. She reads them through twice. She folds them. She puts them in the drawer of the long table under the window. She rings for the housekeeper to take away the brandy and the seal-cake, which have not been touched. She does not send for the steward. The steward, for his part, has been down at Chanonry in the morning, and has come back, and has not spoken of it, and will not speak of it for the rest of his life. On the shingle below the lighthouse a smell of burnt tar lingers for some days and is then taken off by the wind, which comes up the firth from the east at this season and carries everything inland.

A HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS

Francis Humberston Mackenzie, fifth Earl of Seaforth and the last of the line, was deafened by scarlet fever in a school at Edinburgh as a boy. He outlived his four sons and buried them with his own hands. He died in January 1815, the sixth generation from the third Earl, and the title died with him. The estates passed to his eldest daughter Mary, who came home from India that year a young widow, white-coiffed in the mourning of the East India service. In 1823, driving a carriage on the estate near Brahan, the carriage overturned in a lane; her sister Caroline, beside her, was thrown out and killed. The Inverness and Aberdeen Junction Railway opened in 1858 and the Dingwall to Inverness line ran through Brahan country by 1862, long strings of carriages without horses between the two towns at the hour the seer had named. By then the western glens of Ross and of Sutherland and of Lochalsh had been cleared of their people through forty years of evictions for the Cheviot, and the bleating of the sheep was heard from the sea-lochs to Drumossie Muir above Inverness, where Culloden had been fought in another time. The prophecies were gathered out of the country Gaelic by Alexander Mackenzie of the Celtic Magazine and put into print in 1877, and the country recognised them.

THE CAIRN ON THE SHINGLE

The end of a house is not usually closed by an enemy. It is closed by a man who has the gift of seeing the closing, and who is asked, on a particular afternoon, what he sees, and who answers. Coinneach Odhar Mackenzie, the sallow farm worker of Loch Ussie, was the man asked, and he answered. He lies in an unmarked grave on the Black Isle, where the firth narrows and the seals come up onto the spit; on the shingle below the lighthouse at Chanonry Point there is a flat stone set into a small cairn, and the cairn is the country's mark for the place where the word was spoken into the fire.