GRAHAM OF CLAVERHOUSE—Constance W. Dodge—Co-old Friede ($2.50).
His real name was John Graham of Claverhouse, but the muttering Scottish Covenanters pronounced it “Bluidy Clavers.” A gentleman, a hard-bitten soldier, Clavers had come back to Scotland from the Low Countries to see his dying mother, and at her behest stayed on to serve Charles II. His inglorious job was to uphold the unpopular Established Church, put down the dissenting Covenanters with a heavy hand. A misogynist, Clavers was faithful only to his duty. Nearly everyone hated him.
Local opinion of him became practically unanimous when hot-tempered Jean, who had no love for the canting Covenanters and was much drawn to Clavers’ dark good looks, saw him superintending a bloody flogging. That night, when they met at a ball, she publicly insulted him. ‘But it was all a terrible mistake. The man she had seen flogged was one of Clavers’ own brutal troopers who had been caught torturing Jean’s old nurse. In a few hours Jean learned the rights of it, apologized to Clavers as publicly as she had insulted him. By page 120 there seems no further reason to worry about the course of their love affair.
But meantime Clavers has had a recruit —towering Alastair Maclan, a proud, penurious Highlander plagued with second sight. And when Alastair went into one of his trances he saw rocks ahead. In his waking moments he ably seconded Clavers in his police duties, wooed Margaret, Jean’s protegee. Margaret liked Alastair but could not do better than that: seeing her father murdered had been a shock that left her pathologically virginal. Clavers married his Jean but Alastair pined in vain for Margaret.
When weak, unpopular James II came to the throne, the whip hand passed from Clavers’ party to the Covenanters. James skedaddled and William of Orange took his place. William was Clavers’ old commander but the Stuarts were still his liege lords, so he and Alastair left home, rode north to raise the clans. Leading his Highlandmen’s victorious charge in the Pass of Killiecrankie, Clavers fell, shot from behind by a silver bullet. With the death of their leader the Stuart cause collapsed.
Alastair avenged his friend’s murder, and by doing it shocked Margaret (who was just emerging from her pathological state) for what looked like keeps. So he went back to his craggy home to live like a hermit. Smoked out by treacherous government soldiers, he decided to go to America. On the ship whom should he see but Margaret. This time the shock was pleasant for both parties.
Author Dodge has based her romantic tale on a rubble foundation of fact. Claverhouse was a real character who, she thinks, has been handled over roughly by historians. As raw material for the cinema, Graham of Claverhouse is magnificent stuff. As a book, it is cloak-&-sword romance, Grade B.
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