regshoe

Right, I'm going to do this in two parts—one for my usual commentary on this week's chapters, and one for more general Thoughts on the Ending.

About Morar being pronounced as Móar—Christopher Duffy, in the appendix to his Fight for a Throne listing regional and period pronunciations, agrees with this, but as far as I can tell it's not typical now. Perhaps an older pronunciation that's now obsolete—or a local pronunciation that modern online sources are unaware of?

Oh my goodness, but the natural imagery in chapter 5.5 is amazing. The sea-fog, the 'ghostly ship', the moonlight, the outlines of the Isles, the white sand... Broster certainly knows how to set the scene for her tragedies. Absolutely stunning—as is the place in real life, by all accounts.

The parallels between Keith and Alison, or between Ewen/Alison and Ewen/Keith, have come up several times already in the read-along, but this is surely the most blatant—and obviously significant—of them all: '...he still carried the packet with the lock of hair upon him, a material token of the tie between him and the foe who had captured him a year ago...' Er, wow. And the line continues, '...and had held him in a species of bondage ever since.' ...! Actually, the bit after that—'The thought had never formulated itself so definitely until to-night, but, by gad, it was true!'—is a bit ambiguous; is 'the thought' Keith is thinking of here the 'species of bondage' idea or that of the lock of hair as a link between them, or both? In either case, I don't blame him for his 'by gad'!

Keith's thoughts of Ewen are so sweet—amidst his continuing (and perhaps somewhat over-compensating) ambition to do his utmost to capture Charles, here he is happily picturing Ewen to himself safe back at Ardroy. Aww. Unfortunately he's wrong.

Keith is still merciful himself—not burning all the boats along the coast although he recognises that it would have been better from a practical point of view, and perhaps also his reluctance to shoot Charles to disable him when there's a risk of doing worse—and also still naive about the extent of his superiors' mercy, in his imaginings of Ewen's chances of remaining in Scotland safely.

I said so in rot13 at the time, but again—I feel like we ought to have got a bit more explanation of Lachlan's miraculous survival after chapter 4.1 than just 'having recovered', given the descriptions back then! (Or, as I speculated last week, perhaps he didn't—the word 'spectre' is even used to describe him here...)

Right, I'm afraid most of the rest of this comment is just going to be crying over that last scene. Here we go:

As he was lifted, Keith came back from a moment’s dream of a shore with long green rollers roaring loudly under a blood-red sunset, to pain and difficult breath and Ewen’s arms. He knew him.

— ;__;

He reopened his eyes. “Your hand . . .” Ewen gave it to him, and saw a little smile in the moonlight. “Have you been . . . burying any more cannon? . . . I always liked you,” said his enemy clearly; and a moment after, with his hand in Ewen’s, was gone to that place ‘where an enemy never entered and from whence a friend never went away’.

— ;____;

He would rather have stayed, now; but he knelt again and kissed Keith’s forehead.

— ;_;

;_;

... *puts hanky away* Right, the quoted line in that second bit is from one of the sermons of Bishop Jeremy Taylor, from a passage describing the joys of the saints in heaven. You may recall Taylor as the author of the book of sermons which Aunt Margaret offered to Keith to read when he didn't attend Morning Prayer at Ardroy all the way back in chapter 1.5. I think there is some kind of religious-thematic Thing going on here.

The epilogue is a particular emotional style Broster does very well—dwelling on descriptions of light, happy, everyday details (the weather, Philippe and his sand, the basket) in the aftermath of tragedy in a significant and terribly poignant way, at once relieving and highlighting the sadness. It's very powerful.