Highland Laddie Gone

James Stuart looked up sharply. “How did you know my name?”

The old man smiled. “Why, didn’t ye know that Celtic people have The Sight?” he asked. “You know-what you call the ESP.”

James Stuart nodded. “What’s your name?”

The old man inclined his head. “Lachlan Forsyth at your service. Want to tell me the rest of yours?” He added hastily, “I don’t like to overstrain mah powers, you know.”

“James Stuart McGowan. At school they call me Jimmy.”

“McGowan, eh?” Lachlan Forsyth nodded. “I take it you’re a hostage?”

“What?”

“Dragged here by your parents, man. Given ’em the slip, have you?”

James Stuart smirked. “They never find me unless I want them to.”

“Don’t be too sure of that, lad.” Over the boy’s shoulder, Lachlan could see two interesting figures: one anxious blond woman approaching the stall at full speed and one diffident young man in a Buchanan tartan who kept signaling for Lachlan to come and talk to him. The old man gave him a slight nod, and turned back to the matter at hand. “Might that be your mother coming now?”

James Stuart turned around just as his mother reached the stall. “Hello,” he said coolly. “Put my picture on any milk cartons yet?”

His mother decided to ignore him, in favor of the third party present. “I’m really sorry if he’s been bothering you,” she told Lachlan. “I only turned my back for an instant.”

“Nae bother,” said Lachlan with his most practiced smile. “Are you needing him for something?”

“Why… er… no. In fact, his father and I have been invited to a little get-together, and we weren’t sure-”

“See? You’re not able to have any fun yourselves, being burdened with the baby-sitting chores, whereas I’m stuck her in this wee stall in dire need of a capable young assistant like Jimmy here.”

Babs McGowan blinked. She was so used to apologizing for her son that it took her a moment to frame an alternate reply.

“In fact,” Lachlan went on smoothly, “the lad and I were just coming to an agreement about this lovely skian dubh, a relic of your very own clan, madam. We had just decided that he could help me out selling the goods here for a commission of five per cent, which he could use to buy the dagger. It would be ever so much of a help for an old man like myself to be able to take a wee break now and again.”

“How about ten per cent?” countered James Stuart.

“Can’t spare the profit margin, lad,” said Lachlan, still twinkling. “But a’course, if you’d rather spend the holiday with your mum and dad, there’ll be no hard feelings from here.” He took the dagger out of the jewelry case and began to polish its metal sheath with a tartan scarf.

“It looks a little dangerous,” said Babs McGowan doubtfully.

“Five percent, then!” cried James Stuart. “I’ll start now.”

“I’m not sure…”

Lachlan waved her away. “You’ve a party to get to, haven’t you? Leave the lad to me. As another of your clansmen put it: ‘You deserve a break today.’ Right, Jimmy? We’ll see you in a wee while, madam.”

Babs McGowan wandered away, wondering how long it would be before she was paged and implored to return for her son.

“Now then,” said Lachlan Forsyth when she was out of earshot, “I’ll just give you a bit of an intro to the goods here, right? Now, most of the prices are marked on the items. See, here on this key chain, there’s a four-dash. That means four dollars. Your biggest problem will be the folks who come up wanting clan items without a clue as to which one they belong to. They don’t belong to any, like as not. But look here: this little book lists all the surnames associated with Scottish clans. So you get the bloke to tell you his last name, and you look it up, right?”

James Stuart frowned. “Suppose the name isn’t in here?”

“Well, you ask for other family names. Their mum’s maiden name, or their granny’s. Sooner or later you’re bound to hit one that turns up in the book, and then you sing it out and find the tartan for whatever clan it is.”

“But I don’t know tartans.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to, lad. They’re all marked on the back with little silver stickers. And see this one? That’s the Caledonia tartan, which belongs to no family at all. It’s just general Scots plaid, for anybody. So if you can’t match up a name with a clan, you just give them this one and they’ll be happy.”

James Stuart began to leaf through the clan book. “Harper… Buchanan; Hathorn… MacDonald… Miller… MacFarlane. Got it.”

“Dead easy, isn’t it?”

“I guess so. But aren’t you fooling them with that Caledonia one?”

“Aren’t you the trusting one, though? I’ll tell you, Jimmy, seeing as how we’re in business together now: it’s no more of a sham than the rest of ’em.”

“It isn’t? Why?”

“Because clan ties aren’t as easy as coming up with the right last name, of course, but people don’t want to know that. Here, I’ll give you an example. This one, Miller-Clan Buchanan it says, right? Well, you’ve only got to think about last names to see how daft that is. Because the great majority of surnames came in one of two ways, lad: occupation or patronym.”

“What was that last one?”

“Patronym. The first name of your dad. So you might be John’s son-Johnson; or Robert’s son-Robertson; or Andrew’s son-Anderson. You see the way of it?” James Stuart nodded. “But all the Johnsons aren’t related, are they? Cause why?”

James Stuart smirked. “Because they were probably descended from a thousand different Johns.”

“Right you are, lad. And it gets even stickier than that. Here, what’s your dad’s first name?”

“Stuart.”

“And what about his dad?”

“Um… Arthur. Why?”

“Because last names didn’t stay the same in the old days, not when people took their fathers’ names. See, your dad would be Stuart Mac Arthur-son of Arthur-but you’d be Jimmy MacStuart, because you’re the son of Stuart. Now, all that changed around the sixteenth century, most likely when the bureaucrats decided to get things organized. So they say to you: we can’t be having all this surname-changing ’cause we don’t know who’s who; so from now on your lot will be MacStuarts, and it won’t change. But you see-if they’d put a stop to the name-changing twenty years earlier, in your grandad’s time, your family would be Mac Arthurs instead. Do you see? So a Johnson might just as easily have been a MacDonald or a Robertson. It was the luck of his dad’s name when the changing stopped, and it doesn’t prove a pennyworth of kinship with anybody else.”

“What does MacGowan come from?”

“Oh, well, that takes us back to occupations, lad. In Gaelic, a gow was a blacksmith. So you can be fairly certain that one of your ancestors could shoe a horse, but how do you know whether he was the smith of Kintyre or the smith of Dundee, or one of the other few hundred living all over Scotland?”

James Stuart thought it over. “Was it the same with Millers?”

“There was a mill in every town, lad. And there were Coopers making barrels, and Fletchers making arrows, and Weavers spinning cloth-but there’s no saying that the Weaver in a given clan was the one you got your name from, is there?”

“How could you be sure?”

Lachlan Forsyth stopped dusting the thistle-patterned china and shook his head. “Call it equal quantities of luck and hard work, Jimmy. You check shipping records to trace your ancestor back to Scotland-that’s if you know what port and what date he came in. And you check out his birth records in Scotland-that’s if you can trace him back to his place of origin. And you hope the courthouse or the parish church didn’t burn within the past few centuries. Believe me, it’s a lot easier to call out a last name and have someone look in a book and assign you a clan. It means about as much in the end.”

James Stuart thought about the large enameled plaque in the McGowan den, which bore the arms of Clan MacPherson. “Why doesn’t it make any difference?” he asked.

“Ask me again,” said Lachlan, noticing that the man in the Buchanan tartan was about to walk away. “I’m in