Lament for a Maker (3 page)

What Guthrie did on his own land he did on the tenants’ land too, and there were some made jokes about poaching and pooching and others said the pooching rights should go with the shooting rights in the leases. The strange thing was that Guthrie had as much respect for other people’s property as for his own, and you could see he knew it an unco thing, prowling his tenants’ land to such an end. For on the home farm he’d stride to it as if it were as natural a part of a landowner’s tasks as giving a look to the dykes and fences. But off his own ground he’d stand canny in a lane ten minutes maybe, giving a look here and a look there with his great eyes, the eyes folk said had a glint of gold in them, and then he’d loup warily over the dyke and be up to the bogle as quick and quiet as a futret. Uncanny it was, this strait need to do so daft a thing: you’ll realise the uncanniness of it the better if you remember he was not the first Guthrie to wear boots; dirt as he was in most folk’s speaking there was yet gentry plain in the presence of him. When the bairns mocked at him, as whiles they did the few times he came near a dwelling, never a sign of seeing them would he show – let alone give a bit swipe at them or curse as a common billy would do – but kept all his glowering looks as he strode past for some invisible devil of the middle air. So there was the more talk when he turned out the Gamleys.

The site of Erchany had been chosen long since for the strength of it, the land about right tough and stony, the home farm no more than a splatter of oats and turnips amid the larch woods. Rob Gamley was called grieve, he and his two grown sons tended the land together and had the farm-house and a wage for their labour. Gamley had a young wife, his second, and by her two bairns, the children of his old age that he fair doated on. Twins they were, a bonny boy and girl, spoilt maybe and wild enough for certain: and it was over no more than an impudent prank of theirs that the trouble came. For one day late in October they were playing together some way from the house when they saw the laird making across the next field and giving a bit poke here and there with his stick, rational enough. But fine the bairns knew what he was after, for straight in front was a brave new bogle their father had set up but the day before. And wee Geordie Gamley, a fair nickum for sure, slipped through the hedge and up to the bogle and hid behind it with his hands in the pooches of the jacket of the thing. Along came the laird and out came Geordie’s fists from the pooches as it might have been the very arms of the bogle, and he waved them before the laird and cried out the old rhyme:

Nickety-nickety, nick-nack,

Which hand will ye tak’?

Alice in the lithe of the hedge laughed out blithe and wild, Geordie ran back to her laughing and fleering and away the two of them skedaddled as fast as their legs would carry them, for you may be sure they were right scared of Guthrie and his evil eye for all the bold trick they’d played him. But Guthrie went straight to the meikle house and got a bit silver and syne went over to the farm; there he put the silver on the table in front of Gamley, called the twins bastards and their mother by a worse name and gave them all twenty-four hours to get off any land of his. Gamley being but a fee’d man had no choice but to go and go he did – with never a word spoken, his wife said, only strode about the house packing, himself as pale as a sheep’s skull found bleached in the heather. He didn’t even think to strap the twins, and that made his wife fear the thing had sent him fair demented. No doubt it was to Guthrie he would fain have taken the strap.

The Gamleys went right away to a foreign part, beyond Ben Cailie and ten miles down the loch; there they got a short lease on a bit clay, poor stuff it showed itself at the turn of the season, with biggins folk said that scarce kept wind and rain from them; for though Gamley had something put by he could get no better at the time. A fell mean trick it was thought Guthrie had played them and more than ever his name was dirt in Kinkeig. The old folk gave a bit polish up to their dark tales of the mad Guthries and the bloody Guthries of times past, and stopped telling tales of the gay Guthries and the good Guthries altogether, though they had store of those as well. And someone revived the daft speak of Ranald Guthrie’s having the evil eye, which is no more than a coarse superstition current among Catholics and Highlanders. It was fine for Mistress McLaren, her that was to have the vision of the daftie Tammas: all over again the whole of Kinkeig had to thole the stite about her pigs.

There have been Guthries before this that have been held magicians. Alexander Guthrie, a loyal chiel in James II’s time, is said to have put so strong a spell upon John Lord Ballwaine, procurator to the Douglas, that he compelled him against his own lord’s command to appear before the king. And another Alexander, left to fatten on seagulls’ eggs on the isle of May for couching with the daughter of one Cochrine, an upstart at the court of James III, lapped his cloak around him and ran to the sea’s edge and in one loup landed on the Bass Rock and in another on North Berwick Law and before the sun was down was bedded again with his leman safe in France. If Ranald Guthrie of Erchany had no such picturesque jiggery-pokery to his credit he had at least the tradition behind him, and was known to be learned in strange sciences forbye, whiles digging pits amid the fortifications of the Romans, the coarse heathen, and whiles giving out he was collecting and studying runes – and that runes were anything different from the like things the witches boil up in cauldrons only the minister and myself perhaps clearly knew in Kinkeig parish. And, certain, Ranald Guthrie had an eye, and though it was but the eye of all the Guthries – their menfolk being as alike generation by generation as the Hapsburgs or the Stewarts in the old pictures – it was enough to set weak-witted bodies like Mistress McLaren dreaming of deadly curses and fearing for their pigs and kye.

You may mind that McLaren was the smith. A while after the medicals had been – and the business of the medicals set some foolish folk’s minds chewing again on the laird’s magic – McLaren had fallen into a fair hot dispute with Guthrie over the shoeing of the broken old cuddy they kept at Erchany for Christine Mathers. Most of Guthrie’s contacts with the Kinkeig folk – and they weren’t many – were by way of dispute, and this was a bad one. For McLaren, fair furious over some sixpence or shilling withheld, had called Christine the laird’s daughter to his face and though Guthrie knew well enough how to crush impertinence by ignoring it he was fell angry, McLaren said, and Mistress McLaren was sure he nursed a hatred for them from that day. I don’t think myself that Guthrie remembered or heeded such things: if you’d held the book of human nature long open before you you could see he was the kind that is driven and tormented by some deep and single thing – and that to the point of a large oblivion of much that went on around him. But Mistress McLaren was sure that if he could he would put the evil eye on her pigs. For she saw Guthrie as the evilest thing between the Firths of Forth and Moray and her dirty brutes as the importantest, and it seemed natural to her silly soul that the one should attempt to bring destruction on the other. Dr Jervie and the ministers at Mervie and Dunwinnie, she said, should arrange it that one or another was ever up and waking; her grannie had told her that was the sure way to keep the evil eye from out a district.

Well, the pigs had been set by Rob Yule’s boar, the old body was fair daft about the creatures and would lean over their sties snuffing up the sham like a tourist taking the Ozone at Nairn in an advertisement, from the fret she took she might have been waiting the birth of a Prince of Wales. One day she had boiled them up an awful grand brose – every sow, she said, had to eat for twenty, after all – and she had just taken it out to the court to cool a bit when who should she see striding down the lane by the Drochet but the laird himself. Mistress McLaren was fair frantic; she was sure if Guthrie but cast eye on the sows never a litter would there be. So she poured the brose fell quickly into the troughs at the back of the sties, drove the pigs through – and they needed no urging when they smelt the grand brose – and shut the bit doors to, so that Guthrie would have to be right curious if he were to get a keek at the brutes. But Guthrie for all his learning had the instincts of a farmer; he winded the pigs, said a civil word to the McLaren wife, and was presently peering into the sties and running his eye over the dirty backsides of the creatures as they sloshed and slavered over their brose. The next morning all Mistress McLaren’s pigs were dead. And though some tried to talk sense to the old runt, asking what did you expect if you fed breeding sows a great piping hot brose, nothing would persuade her but that it was the laird’s doing, him that never came to the kirk and was plain familiar with the Devil. This, I say, was the full story we all had to hear again after the Gamleys were put out; and indeed the opinion grew from that time in Kinkeig that Lucifer himself was enthroned at Castle Erchany.

It seemed to be Lucifer’s wish to bide as lone as might be on that bad eminence. A week went by and folk were wondering whom he’d put in at the farm in the stead of Gamley, and when nothing happened they wondered if maybe he could get none to thole the thought of such a fee, for the Gamleys had laboured right hard tearing up that tough land and all to put the silver in Guthrie’s pocket. But there was no news of the laird’s speiring round for a grieve; that made folk fell curious and then one day Will Saunders went to market at Dunwinnie and came back with the speak that Guthrie’s bit kye had been trucked there two–three days after the Gamleys left. It seemed clear there was to be no more tillage at Erchany; Will said that with the spring a shepherd would be fee’d and yet another bit land go back to the sheep. Soon, he said, there would be nothing left of old Scotland; only a pack of highland gillies to lick the dowps of a feckless grouse-raising gentry, that and a few million coarse Irish creatures starving on the Clyde.

Whatever was on Guthrie’s mind – and there were stories enough going round – the closing of the home farm made Erchany a strangely isolated place. For it had been ever a Gamley that brought down the gossip from the glen-head, and now there was none there on claiking terms with Kinkeig except wee Isa Murdoch. And presently Isa came away too; had she stayed much longer at the meikle house, she said, a fit mate she’d soon have been for Tammas himself. The old wives welcomed the quean, that day she came down from the castle with her bit tin box on her head, much as the faithful angels might have welcomed Abdiel, filling her up with tea until she looked five months bairned, and hanging on her words as if she were the first to bring news of a second Livingstone out of Africa. And, faith, her tale was like a keek at some remote and savage place.

It’s time I said a word about the household at Castle Erchany; unco it was in a dwelling that had once counted its retainers by the score. Ever since the Guthries came near to ruin through the Darien scheme the castle has been half desolate: in the eighteenth century the family scarce had silver to breech themselves, for their pride was as high as their debts and they would part with no acre of land. And when they rebuilded their fortunes in the early years of the Old Queen they were right slow to repoint their walls or replenish their gear – there being something of Ranald’s temper hereditary, maybe, to the stock. But always until Ranald came home from Australia and inherited, the lairds had lived in fair style, with steward and footmen and queans enough indoors, and whiles a chaplain forbye for the dinging a bit Latin into the heir and a bit Divinity into those that must be got decent within the Kirk. Ranald was the first that was fair miserly: on his coming he turned out the servants much as he was to turn out the Gamleys; most of the rooms he locked the door on, and where lock was wanting he drove in nails rather than send to Dunwinnie for the locksmith; no penny would he spend and no soul would he see, but lived lone and low like a mouse in a cathedral.

All that is old history, for it was in the year 1894 that Ranald Guthrie became laird of Erchany. But now at the time I’m writing of things weren’t much different. Mistress Menzies, her that had bred up Christine, had gone to her grave, poor gentle soul; in the family, if such you could call it, were but Christine and Guthrie; the Hardcastles, man and wife, had a wing of the house to themselves, Mistress Hardcastle doing any bittock work she couldn’t ring out of Isa Murdoch, the one servant; and sleeping in a barn and doing the fell mucky work was the daftie Tammas. It was no place for Isa, the great shabby, shadowy, echoing house deep in the lithe of the larch woods, her that was but seventeen and liking fine the Saturday bus to Dunwinnie, or a romp with the loons about the Kinkeig biggins in the gloaming. Folk wondered she hadn’t given her notice long since, some said it was because she was right fond of Christine and loath to leave her in so coarse a place, and some said it was the grown Gamley lads, that they had all the soft and fragrant carpeting of Erchany Forest for their sporting with the quean and didn’t fail to take advantage of it. But whether it was Christine or the Gamleys that kept Isa at the meikle house, none doubted her story that it was Guthrie himself that drove her away at last.

Most times it was little that Isa saw of the laird. Nigh all day he’d bide in his study high in the great tower and when he went out to dander through the woods or whiles fish the Drochet it would be down the long tower staircase that dropped past his own private rooms and out by a little postern door remote from the rest of the house, a door of which the key was ever in his pocket. Isa would see no more of him than a keek at meals, and that was maybe enough. Only once a week she was allowed up to his bedroom for the thoroughing of it and then she would hear him pacing the study above, murmuring verses, another’s or his own. For you must know that Guthrie was poet as well as scholar. Years ago he put out a book of poems, a slender thing in black and yellow covers that fair scunnered those who thought a Scottish laird’s poems would naturally take after Rabbie Burns. I was a younger man myself then, unwilling to admit that a sutor will do well if he but knows a few classics, and once a week I used to read what they were writing of the new books, over in the Dunwinnie Institute – ten miles there and ten back, and long before the Saturday bus. And there bides in my memory a review in one of the London papers that ended:
Mr Guthrie cultivates the abyss
. I thought
cultivates
an unjust word: the reviewer creature had confounded Guthrie with the many poets of that day who were but playing at damnation. Guthrie – I must have believed these many years back – was damned in good earnest. I was romantic, maybe.