Short Fiction

Short Fiction by John Buchan (2026)

This collection opens with the narrative of Jean de Rohaine, a French gentleman of Touraine who has gamed away his fortune and sails to Ayr to visit his old friend Quentin Kennedy. He enjoys a month of riotous hospitality, then rides out with Kennedy's dragoons to suppress the hill folk. He is sickened to find the work is the butchery of women, children and unarmed countrymen. He quarrels with Kennedy, refuses his money, and rides off alone across the moors with his horse Saladin. Starving and soaked, he reaches a lonely inn at the Angel's Ladder, where a gaunt, preaching landlord watches his jewels. In the night he overhears the landlord's confederates plotting to rob him. He drops from his window and is helped to escape by a sentinel who is sick of the work. The sentinel names the landlord as Long Jock o' the Hirsel. Rohaine rides through the village of Drumlanrig and is taken ill on the moor. He collapses at the door of the manse of Lindean. There the minister Ephraim Lambert, silenced by the Privy Council, and his daughter Anne nurse him. He also meets Master Henry Semple of Clachlands, Anne's betrothed, whose house is quartered by soldiers. Warned that a warrant is out for them, the two men flee to the hills. Henry begs Rohaine to stay and protect Anne. Rohaine fights off a bullying captain of dragoons. As the weeks pass he teaches Anne to dance and sing, and finds under her gravity a hunger for gaiety. Both of them come to feel a dangerous attachment. Andrew Gibb brings word that the exiles' hiding place is betrayed, and Rohaine goes to give the signal at the cairn. On his return he meets Henry, ragged and half mad, who raves in scriptural phrases and asks to see Anne from a distance. Rohaine spends a night torn between honor and love. He considers carrying Anne off to France, then dreams of his dead love Cecilia. He wakes resolved, and rides away in the morning in his old tattered clothes while Anne cries out for him to stay. A new tale follows, set in the Galloway hills. A narrator goes fishing in a gale and climbs the Muneraw in mist, then wanders down the wrong stream to the Aller. He is taken in by a solitary shepherd who lives alone with his dogs and loves the weather. In the morning the shepherd sets him on his way. A shorter piece then follows a dying herd of the Lanely Bield. He is a pious man, widowed and ill, who crawls home across the moor. He reads Scripture by his fire and drinks brandy against his habit. His fear turns into a child's terror of shadows. He dies without comfort, holding only a plain courage. Two comic and sinister pieces follow. In the first, the Tory farmer of Clachlands wants to beat his Radical ploughman, William Laverhope, at the election. He lends the man his finest fishing rod and fly-book on polling day. The ploughman cannot resist a cast on the way to the poll and fishes all day, and he returns with a fine catch and no vote. The next piece follows Arnold Layden, a brilliant and fashionable man of letters. The narrator meets him at a shooting lodge, where he charms everyone with his talk. Three years later at Heston he is a famous thinker, yet he privately admits to his old friend Wratislaw that his life is hollow show and his mind is empty. Wratislaw tells him that to see this is the beginning of wisdom. Later Layden recovers his health but falls back into vanity, and he is now advertised to lecture on "The Real Thing." Next, the old drover Duncan Stewart tells of his wild youth. Driving fifty sheep over the moor near Kirk Newton, he reaches a magnificent house where a courteous host named Stewart feeds him. The host knows all his sins and reveals himself as the Devil. He demands the drover's flock or his soul, and Duncan pays with the sheep. He wakes on the heather the next morning. The Devil in this tale is hospitable and well read, and he keeps a long spoon at the table. Another story concerns Robert Linklater, called "Leein' Rob," a farmer of Clachlands. In September 1880 he goes to rescue his cattle from a rising flood. The wooden bridge is swept away behind him and he is stranded on a knoll all night among the beasts, with a fire lit across the water by his men. In the small hours he pulls a drowned man from the current. The corpse's leaden eyes terrify him, and he flings it back into the water. In the morning he learns that the young laird of Manorwater drowned in the spate. Asked later by the minister what he thought of that night, he replies that he wished for a pipe of tobacco. The last tale begins with Mr. Townshend, a young man from Oxford. He leaves Portnacroish to find his cousin Ewan Cameron, a hunted fugitive on Brae Mamore after the late troubles. His host Mr. Stewart warns him to guard his tongue, since enemies of the Camerons are heading north. On the road near Duror he rides into a party of five sober-looking travellers.

By John Buchan · First published 2026 · Genre: Historical fiction, Adventure fiction, Religious fiction · 30 chapters · 253,811 words

First lines

To Preface The narrative, now for the first time presented to the world, was written by the Sieur de Rohaine to while away the time during the long period and painful captivity, borne with heroic resolution, which preceded his death. He chose the English tongue, in which he was extraordinarily proficient, for two reasons: first, as an exercise in the language; second, because he desired to keep the passages here recorded from the knowledge of certain of his kinsfolk in France. Few changes have been made in his work. Now and then an English idiom has been substituted for a French; certain tortuous expressions have been emended; and in general the portions in the Scots dialect have been rewritten, since the author's knowledge of this manner of speech seems scarcely to have been so great as he himself thought.

Similar titles

Genres

Tags

Scottish Highlands · Galloway · Scotland · 1680s Covenanter persecution · Jacobite era · Killing time · Dragoons · Religious persecution · Presbyterian covenanters · Moorland survival · Frenchman in Scotland · Hospitality and honour

What this Textopian page supports

Short Fiction is listed on Textopian as a short story by John Buchan, dated 2026 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

Good citation fit

Contents

More by John Buchan