Then the Crew pointed to a white finger in the sea.

‘That’s Lismore lighthouse,’ said the Mate. ‘On the way from Oban in the steamer we passed between it and the smaller lighthouse—do you see it?—a little this side of it? That smaller lighthouse is called Lady Rock. They say that four currents meet about there, and certainly there was a very nice jabble as we came through. I thought of your boat and wondered if she would stand up to it.’

‘And what do you think now?’ I asked.

‘I’ll take you through it, if you like, and we could keep the sail up?’

‘Tell me,’ said the Crew; ‘why is it called Lady Rock?’

‘I can tell you that, too—and without making it up either,’ he answered, ‘for it’s a well-known story in these parts, though there are several versions of some of its happenings. In any case and in fairness, it will balance your story, for this is about the treachery of a man to a woman. Though in the case of the lassie with the harper—that is what is called romance, for what young woman, trudging the country with a wandering minstrel, but would be attracted by a hunter on his pacing steed?’

‘Proceed,’ said the Crew.

‘This is a different story altogether. Do you see that old castle, by the Point? That’s Duart Castle, where the chiefs of the Macleans lived. Long long ago, one of the chiefs married a girl called Elizabeth, and she was the daughter of the second Earl of Argyll. Now the Macleans had no love for the Campbells, and they would be damned, they said, if ever any Campbell blood ruled over them. They would sooner, they said, kill the lady and her young child, than that that should happen. And they there and then made a plot to kill them, and the husband did nothing to stop them.

‘Well, one dark winter’s night, they got hold of her and forced her into a boat, and choked her cries, and rowed with her over to the Lady Rock, which is bare at low water, and left her there.’

‘Sorry to interrupt you,’ I said, ‘but I don’t believe for a moment that clansmen, and especially Macleans, ever forced a chief to do anything so damnable. Now I saw somewhere —perhaps in Campbell’s Popular Tales—that the actual position was that Maclean was carrying on with a Spanish lady up on the galleon in Tobermory. And now—and here’s something sudden and bright!—we do know, from the Privy Council records, that the Maclean chief was in with the Spaniards, because he headed a squad of them and wiped out the Small Isles. What do you think of that? And perhaps the original “Spanish Lady” song was not about Dublin City at all, but about Tobermory!’ ‘Same number of syllables even,’ said the Mate.

‘Correct. And Elizabeth, being an Argyll, was equal to the occasion. She got the Maclean’s own manservant to proceed privily to Tobermory and—no, not crudely despatch the Spanish lady but—blow up the whole ship. And the wreck is there to this day! Isn’t that more like the thing? And the Maclean, who had laid waste the Small Isles, once he had wormed out the truth of the affair, wouldn’t think twice of putting his own lady on the spot or at least on the rock. As a piece of cogent, if quick, reasoning—’