Flight of the Heron read-along: Part III chapters 1-2

[regshoe]

Charlie chose the place himsel', the graveyard of Culloden...

Well, it looks like Keith's prophecies about the fate of the Jacobites, at least, weren't too inaccurate...

Next week we'll read chapters 3 and 4 of part III.

Comments

[tgarnsl]

Hello, hello! I'm very late to the party (and to this week's reading), so I should probably introduce myself a bit. Name's Tgarnsl (after the proper pronunciation of 'topgallantsail') and I fell into this fandom a few weeks back when I came across it on AO3, whereupon I promptly went 'oh, looks like there are some fun evening reads in this tag, I should read the last chapter of the book to get to grips with the characters so I don't have to read the whole novel.' Which resulted in reading the final chapter, wondering who the hell this Keith character was, and going back to the first chapter so I could read the book properly. And here I am, several weeks later, alarmingly invested in this novel and its characters.

I wanted to comment on last week's chapters, as those are set in Edinburgh, and as someone who lived in the city centre for several years (and visited this summer) I enjoyed reading about the places I know quite well. Nonetheless, I enjoyed this week's chapters: the conflict between Ewen and Alison and their respective duties and loyalties is interesting, even if I would have preferred to have read it through Alison's POV. I get the sense that they're both aware of what's coming, even if neither of them want to openly acknowledge it, but their reactions to it are quite different. I find it interesting how Broster carefully sets up Alison's eagerness to get married in the early part of the book and then has her feel so conflicted about it here — it's clear she still wishes to get married, but the state of the war is clearly taking its toll on her. I can't help but wonder if her reluctance is, at least in part, based in the fear of becoming a widow so soon after marriage. Ewen, in contrast, seems to have the complete opposite view: that any time married is precious, and that they should seize life with both hands while they have it. I find the scenes of their brief married life quite sweet; one thing I really like about their pairing is that there is the real sense that they are partners in all senses of the world — they both love and respect the other tremendously, and it seems that there's an easy companionship to their marriage that makes their ensuing heartbreak over their parting all the more understandable.

I found Chapter 2 quite gloomy, as you might expect. Broster makes it clear that this isn't going to end well, and by now most of the characters recognise it too, even if they do not acknowledge it. Ewen, for his part, seems to be dissociating from everything around him, in part due to his parting from Alison, in part due to the sorry state of the war. I find it interesting how Ewen's loyalty seems to shift in this chapter, away from the Prince and towards Lochiel — he will always be loyal to the Prince, but Lochiel is his family, and his concern for the aftermath of Culloden is not so much what will happen to the Prince, but what will happen to Lochiel. The last paragraph or so of the chapter is terribly poignant in its imagery. I don't ever feel that Broster is ever in danger of purple prose, even though her writing is descriptive and lush. It's a talent I quite admire.

I did enjoy the brief mention of Keith when Ewen is at Ardroy. It was a good way to subtly remind the reader where the story is headed, that even though this particular chapter of the Jacobite Uprising is swiftly drawing to a close, there is still plenty of story left.

[luzula]

Hi and welcome to the fandom! : D

Oh, naval terms...I've been recording an audiobook with a few naval terms in it, and they're always shortened, and never in quite the way you expect.

And here I am, several weeks later, alarmingly invested in this novel and its characters.

Ha ha, I recognize this! That first reading experience was something.

I can't help but wonder if her reluctance is, at least in part, based in the fear of becoming a widow so soon after marriage. Ewen, in contrast, seems to have the complete opposite view: that any time married is precious, and that they should seize life with both hands while they have it.

Yes, I think you're right, and that this explains the conflict, such as it is, about whether to get married right away. I do like Alison a lot, but by now I feel like the Alison in my head is half my own character, since I wrote a longfic where she had a lot of POV (more than in canon).

I did enjoy the brief mention of Keith when Ewen is at Ardroy. It was a good way to subtly remind the reader where the story is headed, that even though this particular chapter of the Jacobite Uprising is swiftly drawing to a close, there is still plenty of story left.

Yes! We're only halfway through the story, really. So much slashy goodness left.

[tgarnsl]

Hello!

I've been recording an audiobook with a few naval terms in it, and they're always shortened, and never in quite the way you expect. — Yes, it's a bit like Gaelic in that you have to alter your understanding of how phonetic pronunciation works. I'm sure that there's some underlying rule, but I have yet to work it out.

I agree that it's hard to tell where one's own interpretation of character ends and the author's begins — I'm in the midst of writing some fics right now and am still working out Alison's voice and motivations, but I do feel that she is given a little more agency than other standard love interests of the era.

So much slashy goodness left. Oh, is there ever. I'm currently working on a story that slightly alters the events of the final three meetings and every time I look at the book I marvel at the fact that for every single event Broster went as far as she did, which I very much look forward to rereading in the upcoming weeks :-)

[luzula]

Yay fic! \o/ Looking forward to it, and let me know if you want a beta reader. : )

[tgarnsl]

Thank you! At this point it's looking like a serious longfic, so it might be a while.

[luzula]

Even better, then. : )

[regshoe]

Ooh, you're writing fic, how exciting :D

[regshoe]

Welcome, nice to meet you :) And I'm glad you're enjoying the book and the fic—hehe, this novel certainly does get the emotions...

Oh, it's good that you enjoyed the Edinburgh chapters when you've lived there!

Yes, Lochiel is definitely the centre of Ewen's loyalties here. Broster describes Ewen's Jacobitism as being as natural to him as breathing, and he's devoted to Charles's cause as a matter of course, but his loyalty to Lochiel is more personal and more immediately emotional.

Broster's descriptive writing is utterly lovely always—it's one of my favourite things about the book—and the sense of awful impending doom at the end of chapter 2, with those perfectly chosen images, is an especially good bit.

there is still plenty of story left.

Ahaha, there certainly is...!

[tgarnsl]

Lochiel wasn't known as 'Gentle Lochiel' for nothing. I like his relationship with Ewen, the unspoken father-son dynamic of it, and the way that Lochiel's personality seems to have shaped Ewen's own. I was listening to the In Our Time episode on the Jacobite Rebellion and found it interesting just how important Lochiel's decision to join the uprising really was.

I look forward to what comes next!

[regshoe]

I remember reading in one of my history books about the importance of Lochiel deciding to join the rising (and how nearly he didn't, which I thought was an interesting contrast to Ewen's ardour). Like all the history, Broster's portrayal of him seems to be both accurate historically and interesting fictionally!

Ah, I've found the In Our Time episode, I might give that a listen—is it good?

[tgarnsl]

In Our Time is always good for giving an overview of something, and I think it does a good job at that. I'm not sure there's a huge amount in the episode that you might not already know, but I always find them enjoyable listens at any rate.

[hyarrowen]

Hello there!

This is something that hadn't occurred to me before: I can't help but wonder if her reluctance is, at least in part, based in the fear of becoming a widow so soon after marriage. Ewen, in contrast, seems to have the complete opposite view: that any time married is precious, and that they should seize life with both hands while they have it.

Ewen isn't the one who risks finding himself pregnant and alone, after all. If Ardroy is lost, Alison will be on her own in France, with a sick father, a brother in captivity and no-one to support her. It's very like the situation in Persuasion in which Wentworth's job is so dangerous that he's not a good marriage prospect. She's taking a real risk which Ewen, and up till now, I, didn't see.

[regshoe]

Oh, good point! That's very true.

...Actually, to go off on a tangent, this touches on something I was idly thinking about for a possible fic the other day: if Ewen was killed, at Culloden or afterwards as a prisoner, who would inherit Ardroy? Without an obvious heir it's possible he's done the 'safety signing-over to a sympathetic Whig friend' thing some historical Jacobites did (and which he does to Keith in one of luzula's fics!), but we don't hear anything about it. Other than that his closest relatives are Aunt Margaret and the Stewarts of Invernacree, and I don't know how it might work out given the laws of the time and the possibility of forfeiture.

[hyarrowen]

With most of the Camerons "out" it might even be Fassefern, as the designated neutral in the family. Aunt Margaret would, of course, do the best job of them all, but as a mere female...

[luzula]

We don't actually know if Ewen owns Ardroy, or is renting it from Lochiel. This is quite complicated.

Clans could be proprietory or non-proprietory, depending on if their "oighreachd" and "duthchas" were aligned or not. In the first case, the chief owned their lands, and the clansmen paid both rent and calps (basically, protection money) to him. In the second, the chief only leased the land which someone else (often a Lowland nobleman, or another clan chief) owned, and the rents and calps went to different places. This was often the cause of feuds, because clans strove to align oighreachd and duthchas. There used to be a feud between the Camerons and Macintoshes because the latter owned much of the Cameron lands in Lochaber, which was resolved by arbitration in 1665 where Ewen Cameron of Lochiel basically bought out the Macintoshes, so their oighreachd and duthchas were now aligned. BUT he had to borrow the money from this from the Campbells, who also led the arbitration, because the land was within their heritable jurisdiction (another complication, which the Campbells seem to have used very shrewdly!) In return Lochiel had to concede that he held the lands within the feudal superiority of the House of Argyll. I'm not sure what exactly is the difference and how that was better, but...

So anyway, this also reproduced down the chain. If Ewen owns Ardroy outright, the situation is different from if he's renting the land from Lochiel. And Ardroy's tenants are of course renting from Ewen. There are all sorts of complicated terms for the leases for rents, I don't understand them all.

So if Ewen is renting it, I guess Lochiel just finds another tenant. But in fact over time, the clan chiefs sold off more and more land to their chieftains and tacksmen, because they needed the money. In my fics I've assumed that he owns it. In that case, I guess it goes to the nearest male relative. Ewen's father's brother and his sons, if they exist? Otherwise, I guess you look at Ewen's grandfather's brothers and their sons, etc? Or maybe Lochiel gets to have a say.

(All this stuff is from the book Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603-1788 by Allan I. Macinnes (1996), by the way.)

ETA: In fact the "signing over of estates" thing which went on all the time suggests that they didn't have entails? Because in that case they wouldn't have been free to sign away their estates from their sons...

[regshoe]

Oh wow, thank you for all this information—fascinating stuff, and I did not know it was this complicated! I think we're supposed to understand that Ewen owns Ardroy outright ('Ewen... had ruled his little domain'; 'Mr Cameron was apparently a landed proprietor', though that second one could easily by Keith's misinterpretation), but you're right that it's not clear. (This isn't really a side of the historical detail that Broster gets into much!).

[hyarrowen]

Ewen... had ruled his little domain

Oooh, nice catch! I'd always just assumed it was his outright, but that was mostly due to English-centric views of inheritance which are unwarranted. But that phrase points to it being the case.

[luzula]

I think that phrasing tells us nothing of whether he owned or rented--he would have "ruled" it in the clanship sense in any case.

[hyarrowen]

Yes indeed - that was just the way I took it. This is one of the great things about this read-along - pre-conceived ideas get challenged!

[luzula]

Actually, from Ewen's POV it would in some sense be good if Alison was pregnant, if he's going to die! Because then he would have an heir (well, at least if it was a boy). I'm sure Alison is brought up to see this as an important charge, as well, though if she's having second thoughts, this would be the moment to break it off. But she wouldn't be alone--she could return to Ardroy before giving birth and have the support of Aunt Margaret, and manage Ardroy until her son (if it was a son) came of age. If it was a daughter, we're in a different situation, of course, and that's a gamble! (Heh, this is the patriarchy in a very literal sense...)

This is almost the same situation that Ewen's parents were in after the '19...Ewen's father fled the country when Ewen was only three days old, leaving his wife and son, and no one knew if he would ever return, and in fact he doesn't.

But yeah, I do think Alison and Ewen do have differing fears and hopes in that moment. One fears having something and then losing it, and the other fears never having had it...

[hyarrowen]

Actually, from Ewen's POV it would in some sense be good if Alison was pregnant, if he's going to die! Because then he would have an heir (well, at least if it was a boy). I'm sure Alison is brought up to see this as an important charge

Well, quite so! He'd have his ~legacy~. But from a woman's pov, having a child in wartime is always a big gamble, hence the baby boomers. If there were repercussions including attacks on homes, she'd be in real serious trouble.

[luzula]

Hmm. But regardless of whether there was a child, their marriage contract might well give her financial/material resources as a widow that she didn't have before. I researched the situation for widows in France when I wrote my poly fic, and they were not left with nothing! The situation varied in different parts of France, but they could in some cases be left with a fair portion of their husband's estate.

*determines to research the inheritance situation of widows in Scotland*

But yeah, obviously a pregnancy would be a risk!