Fortnight of Fear (7 page)

“That sounds awful,” said Claire, squeezing out more alizarin crimson.

“It was a long time ago,” replied the Laird of Dunain. “The sixteenth day of April, 1746. Almost two hundred and fifty years ago; and whose memory can span such a time?”

“You make it sound like yesterday,” said Claire, busily mixing.

The Laird of Dunain turned his head away for the very first time that day. “On that day, when he lay bleeding, the laird swore that he would have his revenge on the English for every drop of blood that he had let. He would have it back, he said, a thousandfold; and then a thousandfold more.

“They never discovered his body, you know, although there were plenty of tales in the glens that it was hurried away by Dunains and Macduffs. That was partly the reason that the Duke of Cumberland pursued the Highlanders with such savagery. He made his own promise that he would never return to England until he had seen for himself the body of Dunain of Dunain, and fed it to the dogs.”

“Savage times,” Claire remarked. She sat back. The laird's face was still appallingly white, even though she had mixed his skin-tones with almost two whole tubes of crimson. She couldn't understand it. She ran her hand
back through her hair and said, “I'll have to come back to this tomorrow.”

“Of course,” said the Laird of Dunain.

On her way to supper, she met Margot in the oak-panelled corridor. Margot was unexpectedly bustling and fierce. “You didn't come with us yesterday and you didn't come with us today. Today we sketched sheep.”

“I've been –” Claire began, inclining her head toward the Laird of Dunain's apartments.

“Oh, yes,” said Margot. “I thought as much. We
all
thought as much.” And then she went off, with wig-wagging bottom.

Claire was amazed. But then she suddenly thought:
she's jealous. She's really jealous
.

All the next day while the Laird of Dunain sat composed and motionless in front of her, Claire struggled with her portrait. She used six tubes of light red and eight tubes of alizarin crimson, and still his face appeared as starkly white as ever.

She began to grow more and more desperate, but she refused to give up. In a strange way that she couldn't really understand, her painting was like a battlefield on which she and the Laird of Dunain were fighting a silent, deadly struggle. Perhaps she was doing nothing more than struggling with Alan, and all of the men who had treated her with such contempt.

Halfway through the afternoon, the light in the clerestory window gradually died, and it began to rain. She could hear the raindrops pattering on the roof and the gutters quietly gurgling.

“Are you sure you can see well enough?” asked the laird.

“I can see,” she replied, doggedly squeezing out another glistening snake of red gouache.

“You could always give up,” he said. His voice sounded almost sly.

“I can
see
,” Claire insisted. “And I'll finish this bloody portrait if it kills me.”

She picked up her scalpel to open the cellophane wrapping around another box of designers' colours.

“I'm sorry I'm such an awkward subject,” smiled the laird. He sounded as if it quite amused him, to be awkward.

“Art always has to be a challenge,” Claire retorted. She was still struggling to open the new box of paints. Without warning, there was a devastating bellow of thunder, so close to the castle roof that Claire felt the rafters shake. Her hand slipped on the box and the scalpel sliced into the top of her finger.

“Ow!” she cried, dropping the box and squeezing her finger. Blood dripped onto the painting, one quick drop after another.

“Is anything wrong?” asked the laird, although he didn't make any attempt to move from his seat.

Claire winced, watching the blood well up. She was about to tell him that she had cut herself and that she wouldn't be able to continue painting when she saw that her blood had mingled with the wet paint on the laird's face
and had suffused it with an unnaturally healthy flush
.

“You've not hurt yourself, have you?” asked the laird.

“Oh, no,” said Claire. She squeezed out more blood, and began to mix it with her paintbrush. Gradually the laird's face began to look rosier, and much more alive. “I'm fine, I'm absolutely fine.” Thinking to herself:
now I've got you, you sly bastard. Now I'll show you how well I can paint. I'll catch you here for ever and ever; the way that I saw you; the way that I want you to be
.

The laird held his pose and said nothing, but watched her with a curious expression of satisfaction and contentedness, like a man who has tasted a particularly fine
wine. That night, in her room overlooking the grounds, Claire dreamed of men in ragged cloaks and feathered bonnets; men with gaunt faces and hollow eyes. She dreamed of smoke and blood and screaming. She heard a sharp, aggressive rattle of drums – drums that pursued her through one dream and into another.

When she woke up, it was still only five o'clock in the morning, and raining, and the window-catch was rattling and rattling in time to the drums in her dreams.

She dressed in jeans and a blue plaid blouse, and then she quiet-footedly climbed the stairs to the room where she was painting the laird's portrait. Somehow she knew what she was going to find, but she was still shocked.

The portrait was as white-faced as it had been before she had mixed the paint with her own blood. Whiter, if anything. His whole expression seemed to have changed, too, to a glare of silent emaciated fury.

Claire stared at the portrait in horror and fascination. Then, slowly, she sat down, and opened up her paintbox, and began to mix a flesh tone. Flake white, red and yellow ochre. When it was ready, she picked up her scalpel, and held her wrist over her palette. She hesitated for only a moment. The Laird of Dunain was glaring at her too angrily; too resentfully. She wasn't going to let a man like him get the better of her.

She slit her wrist in a long diagonal, and blood instantly pumped from her artery onto the palette, almost drowning the watercolours in rich and sticky red.

When the palette was flooded with blood, she bound her paint-rag around her wrist as tightly as she could, and gripped it with her teeth while she knotted it. Trembling, breathless, she began to mix blood and gouache, and then she began to paint.

She worked with her brush for almost an hour, but as fast
as she applied the mixture of blood and paint, the faster it seemed to drain from the laird's chalk-white face.

At last – almost hysterical with frustration – she sat back and dropped her brush. The laird stared back at her – mocking, accusing, belittling her talent and her womanhood. Just like Alan. Just like every other man. You gave them everything and they still treated you with complete contempt.

But not this time. Not this time. She stood up, and unbuttoned her blouse, so that she confronted the portrait of the Laird of Dunain bare-breasted. Then she picked up her scalpel in her fist, so that the point pricked the plump pale flesh just below her navel.

“
The sleepy bit lassie, she dreaded nae ill; the weather was cauld and the lassie lay still. She thought that the tailor could do her no ill
.”

She cut into her stomach. Her hand was shaking but she was calm and deliberate. She cut through skin and layers of white fat and deeper still, until her intestines exhaled a deep sweet breath. She was disappointed by the lack of blood. She had imagined that she would bleed like a pig. Instead, her wound simply glistened, and yellowish fluid flowed.

“
There's somebody weary wi' lying her lane; there's some that are dowie, I trow wad be fain … to see that bit tailor come skippin' again
.”

Claire sliced upward, right up to her breastbone, and the scalpel was so sharp that it became lodged in her rib. She tugged it out, and the tugging sensation was worse than the pain. She wanted the blood, but she hadn't thought that it would hurt so much. The pain was as devastating as the thunderclap had been, overwhelming. She thought about screaming but she wasn't sure that it would do any good; and she had forgotten how.

With bloodied hands she reached inside her sliced-open stomach and grasped all the hot slippery heavy things she found there.
She heaved them out, all over her painting of the Laird of Dunain, and wiped them around, and wiped them around, until the art-board was smothered in blood, and the portrait of the laird was almost completely obscured.

Then she pitched sideways, knocking her head against the oak-boarded floor. The light from the clerestory window brightened and faded, brightened and faded, and then faded away forever.

They took her to the Riverside Medical Centre but she was already dead. Massive trauma, loss of blood. Duncan stood in the car-park furiously smoking a cigarette and clutching himself. Margot sat on the leatherette seats in the waiting-room and wept.

They drove back to Dunain Castle. The laird was standing on the back lawn, watching the light play across the valley.

“She's dead, then?” he said, as Margot came marching up to him. “A grousome thing, no doubt about it.”

Margot didn't know what to say to him. She could only stand in front of him and quake with anger. He seemed so self-satisfied, so calm, so pleased; like the cat who has swallowed the last dollop of cream.

“Look,” said the Laird of Dunain, pointing up to the birds that were circling overhead. “The hoodie-craws. They always know when there's a death.”

Margot stormed up to the room where – only two hours ago – she had found Claire dying. It was bright as a church. And there on its board was the portrait of the Laird of Dunain, shining and clean, without a single smear of blood on it. The smiling, triumphant, rosy-cheeked Laird of Dunain.

“Self-opinionated chauvinist sod,” she said, and she seized the art-board and ripped it in half, top to bottom.
Out of temper. Out of enraged feminism. But, more than anything else, out of jealousy. Why had
she
never met a man that she would kill herself for?

And out in the garden, on the sloping lawns, the painting class heard a scream. It was a scream so echoing and terrible that they could scarcely believe that it had been uttered by one man.

In front of their eyes, the Laird of Dunain literally burst apart. His face exploded, his jawbone dropped out, his chest came bursting through his sweater in a crush of ribs and a bucketful of blood. There was so much blood that it sprayed up the walls of Dunain Castle, and ran down the windows.

They sat, open-mouthed, their paintbrushes poised, while he dropped onto the gravel path, and twitched, and lay still, while blood ran down everywhere, and the hoodie-craws circled and cried and cried again, because they always knew when there was a death.

“
Gie me the groat again, canny young man; the day it is short and the night it is lang; the dearest siller that ever I wan
.

“
The tailor fell thro' the bed, thimbles an' a'.
”

New York, New York

The locale of
Ever, Ever After
is Central Park South, which has always fascinated me because of its history. Walking along it now, it's almost impossible to conceive that until as recently as the 1860s it was one of the ugliest and least desirable areas on Manhattan – a swash of garbage dumps, shantytowns and decrepit taverns, all punctuated by slabby outcroppings of rock. As the
Herald
said in the 1850s, “these things all looked bad, and some of them smelt bad.” Only with millions of dollars and thousands of laborers was the park transformed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux into what it is today. Even if you're not very well-heeled, you can still enjoy the foyer and the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel; and there are few pleasures that better improve a snappy Sunday morning than a hot toddy in the Oak Bar and a walk in the park. Maybe the “poverty, misery, beggary, starvation, crimes, filth and licentiousness” that was rife in the 1850s has been replaced by “swank, perfume and a view that costs a thousand dollars a square inch”, but I could still conceive of something unsettling happening here …

The road was greasy; the light was poor; and the truck's braking-lights were caked in dirt. Robbie saw it pull up ahead of him only ten feet too late; but those ten feet were enough to send a scaffolding-pole smashing through the windshield of his Porsche and straight into his chest.

The medical examiner told me that he never would have known what hit him. “I'm truly sorry, Mr Deacon; but he never would have known what hit him.” Instant death; painless.

Painless, that is, to Robbie. But not to Jill; and not to me; and not to anybody who had known him. Jill was his wife of thirteen weeks; and I was his brother of 31 years; and his humor and vivacity had won him more friends than you could count.

For a whole month afterward I kept his photograph on my desk. Broad-faced, five years younger than me, much more like Dad than I was; laughing at some long-forgotten joke. Then one morning in early October I came into the office and put the photograph away in my middle desk-drawer. It was then that I knew it was over; that he was really gone for ever.

That same afternoon, as if she had been affected by the same feeling of finality, Jill called me. “David? Can I meet you after work? I feel like talking.”

She was waiting for me in the lobby, at the Avenue of the Americas entrance. Already the sidewalks were crowded with homegoing workers; and there wasn't a
chance of finding a cab. The air was frosty, and sharp with the smell of bagels and chestnuts.

She looked pale and tired, but just as beautiful as ever. She had a Polish mother and a Swedish father, and she had inherited the chiseled face of one and the snow-white blondness of the other. She was tall, almost five feet nine, although her dark mink coat concealed most of her figure, just as her dark mink hat concealed most of her face.