Lament for a Maker (7 page)

This time the schoolmistress could hardly believe that the quean had failed to hear her – but hearing or not she strode straight on unheeding. The schoolmistress stopped in her tracks, right taken aback and not knowing whether to be affronted or alarmed, she wondered was Christine sleep-walking or was she gone clean skite with the awfulness of Erchany and the laird. And at that her heart near louped into her mouth, for at the thought of Guthrie she saw – and it was as if a flash of lightning had split the driving storm clouds above her – the Guthrie in Christine. That was what had ever stammagasted the gossips – that the quean showed nothing of the Guthrie stamp on her – and now here she was striding out as if she would scale Ben Cailie, looking neither to right nor left but gowking at the middle air, her cheeks whitened to real pallor and with flaming spots of colour to them, her lips moving as if it were in some prayer or chant. Just so, like a creature possessed, would Guthrie himself go by, you might speak to him if you dared but devil the answer would you get.

Miss Strachan’s revelation, the judicious reader will think, would count for little in a court of law, being but the fancy, in a dramatic moment, of a body whose head was choke full of scandal and prejudice. But certain she was that struck with the thing had come to her she made fient the effort to stop Christine again, but stood and watched her in her uncouthy course until she was fair lost in the drive of the storm. And fair lost the schoolmistress must have felt herself, for the wind was rising and rising, the fall of night wouldn’t be long, and sleet was coming down enough to sore damp the Athletic Ideal of a whole Olympic Games. The home farm, where syne she got a cup tea from Mistress Gamley, was, she well knew, deserted; and with Christine gone off on her mad rampage there would be none at the meikle house but Guthrie and Tammas and the creature Hardcastle with his doddered old wife. And attractive as the mystery of the dark ancient place may have seemed from the snug security of the Kinkeig schoolhouse, it was something she found she had little stomach for now: we may take leave to think the silly body stood there in the sleet and cursed the lure of the wanderer roundly. But that didn’t help her to as much as the lithe of a dyke or a bit dry straw. As the stationy might have said, she could distinguish three alternatives: she could stay where she was, or she could go on and break her neck as Christine was surely like to do, or she could struggle down to Erchany and the doubtful hospitality of Ranald Guthrie. And it came to her then, poor soul, what a fell awful place the meikle house was and how ill the douce quean Isa Murdoch had fared there, so that almost she decided to struggle on and try find Glen Mervie. Then from somewhere came a rush of good sense to her head, she went back for her bit machine and syne faced the old wives’ horrors of Guthrie and his eye and swords and gallery.

That resolution lasted her till she was up with the home farm; then she minded what a grand loft the Gamleys had had, Geordie and Alice had used to sleep there and awful fun they’d known, the two nickums, on the outside stair that climbed to it in the lithe of the cattle court. Like enough, she thought, the Gamleys had left behind the pallets the weans had slept on; could she get up there she’d be snug enough till morning, her having two–three cakes of chocolate with her such as wanderers and them that go in quest of Scotland and such stite always carry. So she made into the court and pushed her mucky bicycle into a byre and mounted the long stone outside stair, slushy and unchancy as it was. She tried the sneck of the door, sure enough nobody had thought to lock it, and sure enough there were the pallets, right cosy seeming after the snell wind and the louring lift. She’d be better here on her lone, she thought, than seeking the company of the uncanny folk at Erchany.

She was soaked to the skin despite the fine mackintosh she had, and going to the far end of the dim-lit loft she started to get out of her clothes. She was near stripped, she says – and you’ll notice there must always be a bit nakedness in Kinkeig gossip – she was near stripped when suddenly it darkened in the loft. The door must have blown right to, she thought, and she turned to keek at it and what did she see but the figure of a man in horrid silhouette against the waning daylight. More, she recognized that spare figure. It was Ranald Guthrie himself.

So you see the schoolmistress had got herself into a situation not unlike wee Isa Murdoch’s: I don’t know but what the author lad will scent some danger of monotony here. But certain Miss Strachan was far from feeling the position monotonous; she gave a yelp that would have startled the laird as much as he had startled her if he hadn’t at that moment banged to the door and thrust home a great bolt on the outside. For fient the thing had he seen of the dripping Bethsabe at the far end of the loft, nor maybe would his reactions have been much like King David’s if he had; he was only concerned to make the place fast against the storm, and a minute later the schoolmistress heard his feet going slush-slush down the stair again.

Syne when she’d recovered a bit from her start she saw the position wasn’t so bad if only Guthrie would go away. She wasn’t hopelessly a prisoner; there was a trapdoor down from the loft to the house, only never used and with no loft ladder to it, forbye she had her clothes and the pallets and she could still maybe swarm down an improvised rope-ladder like she had used to do at the training college when they were dinging the Athletic Ideal into her. And once down she could surely get out by one window or another when she wanted to. Meantime she huddled on her wet clothes again, there seemed nothing else to do with a man about the place.

And certain enough Guthrie was still about; she could hear him through the thin flooring of the loft pacing about the one storey house much as he must have paced about his gallery. She wondered what the laird was doing out from the castle in the storm, almost it seemed he must be waiting for someone, and that thought was no sooner in her head than as if in answer to it Guthrie cried out in a loud voice: ‘Come in!’

There was silence on that, as if he had cried out to the air or as if the words had startled him they were spoken to into a momentary stillness. Then again came the laird’s voice, and Miss Strachan swore there was something mocking to it.

‘Come in, man!’

Again there was a pause, and then the sound of a door thrown open with a strong thrust that might have been a reply to that mockery in Guthrie’s voice. Then another pause and Guthrie’s voice again, so quiet and different this time that it scarce came up through the old cracked flooring.

‘So it’s you.’

The schoolmistress, whether because of the wringing clouts on her or because of something in the way the words were spoken, shivered in her soggy shoes. But you may be sure her long nose was twitching by now, and her sharp eye searching in the gloom for a good crack to lay her ugly lug to. And syne came the voice of Guthrie’s unknown visitor, young and strong and defiant, a voice that the schoolmistress couldn’t put a name to.

‘Where’s Christine?’

‘It’s not Christine you’re seeing today, Neil Lindsay. Nor any day henceforth, now I’ve found you out, the two of you.’

So that was who. Neil Lindsay was little more than a name to Miss Strachan, half-English from Edinburgh as she was, but she knew enough of the lads about to understand there would be fur flying if a Lindsay had been thinking to court Christine Mathers. It was like to be flying now in the long farm kitchen below her.

‘Where is she, Guthrie?’

Defiant the repeated question and the calling Guthrie so, Lindsay but a crofter chiel as he was; fine he knew, though, he had history to license him, as you’ll hear. And now the schoolmistress heard Guthrie answer, right dry and quiet: ‘I chanced to follow Christine and found her finding your message. I sent her back to the house and waited here myself. Was I wrong? Do you complain?’

‘She’s her own mistress.’

‘Not if you’re seeking to make her yours.’

The schoolmistress liked this fine; she strained her ears and heard what might have been Lindsay taking a swift step towards the laird. Then he seemed to check himself and his voice came, carefully controlled, desperately earnest: ‘I want to marry her, Guthrie.’

The laird said: ‘It can’t be.’

‘She wants to marry me.’

‘It can’t be.’

‘We’re marrying, Guthrie, and it’s not you can stop us.’

‘That I can, Neil Lindsay.’

‘For how?’

‘Christine is under age, and you know it.’

‘That will mend. And there’s another question.’

‘Indeed?’

‘What is Christine to you?’

They were wasting no words, the two of them, in hammering out what lay between them. And the schoolmistress was in an ecstasy; snug and unsuspected in her loft, she was hearing what would make Isa Murdoch’s story pale round every teapot in Kinkeig. So she reached for a bittock chocolate and only wished she could risk lighting a cigarette: a right coarse habit in a woman. Then she put her lug to the floor again to hear what Guthrie should find to reply.

But she was reckoning without the winter ways of Glen Erchany. The storm, that had been but spitting and girning till now, burst all in a moment into its full fury, the wind howling – a thing it does less often in nature than in books – and the sleet, now turned to rain, dashed in gusts against the slates like bursts of machine-gun fire. Guthrie and young Lindsay might be singing
Auld Lang Syne
together for all she could hear, or – what was more like – they might be fair murdering each other. She was right anxious, she said, for both of them: real solicitous-like is Miss Strachan.

Faith, though, her fears were justified. For in two-three minutes came a bit lull in the elements and she heard Lindsay’s voice harsh with anger. ‘Say that again–’

And Guthrie said: ‘Married or unmarried, I say, and if it’s not too late, she’ll never be bairned by you.’

And at that there was the sound of an open-handed blow, and then Lindsay, low and shocked. ‘Christ forgive me – you that might be my grandfather! I’m sorry, Guthrie; not all the bad blood that is between our folk–’

Guthrie said: ‘You’ll pay.’

And these words, as melodramatic as an old play in a barn, were the last the schoolmistress heard. For at that moment the first blast after the lull blew open some door in the biggins and she, that must have been more scared than she’d allow, took it for a pistol shot and started up in the loft scraiching murder.

A fair scunner it must have been for them below. Lindsay took himself off straightways and Guthrie turned at once, cool enough, to deal with the surprise. Straight out and up the outside stair he must have gone, for before the schoolmistress had so much time as to fall into a tremble at the fool she’d made of herself he was through the loft door and gowking at her. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘am I to understand you are in some distress?’

It didn’t comfort Miss Strachan any to find that she had to deal with the English travelled Guthrie, him that was all black irony and politeness; she’d sooner have had the Guthrie Lindsay had been dealing with, the laird who affected more of the Scots than the gentry have allowed themselves this century past. She gave a bit snivel – we may suppose – as she replied: ‘Oh Mr Guthrie, sir, I’m the schoolmistress at Kinkeig and I was riding by when the storm came and–’

‘I am very glad,’ said Guthrie – and standing outlined in the doorway he gave, she could see, a bit bow – ‘I am very glad the farm has given you shelter. But I think you cried out? You have been alarmed? Our hospitality has been at fault?’

She could feel his louring eye, black shadow though he was, and the awful edge to his smooth words fair unnerved her quite. ‘It was a rat, Mr Guthrie,’ she cried; ‘I was sore frightened for a minute by a rat.’

‘Ah yes,’ said Guthrie. ‘The rats are troublesome round here. As it happens, I have just been dealing with one myself.’

At that horrid speak the schoolmistress fair felt her blood go chill in her veins; she was that miserable that had she dared she would just have sat down and grat. And some further snivel she must have given, for the next words she reported of the laird were: ‘You are over-wrought; let me take you to a less disturbed asylum.’ The word ‘asylum’ really suggested to her muddled head for a moment that she was to be handed over to the daftie, she would have juiked past him if she could and out into the storm and the night. But the laird advanced with his heavy courtesy, like Sir Charles Grandison in Richardson’s fine novel, and fair handed her out of the loft as if it had been a ballroom. In the open she got another turn, for darkling as it was she could see his face as pale as Pepper’s Ghost and across it the great weal of a blow from an open hand. All the way round the arm of the loch and to the meikle house, where the laird wheeled her bicycle with one hand and armed her with the other like she had been the Duchess of Buccleuch, she could hear dinning in her lug his last words to the Lindsay chiel: ‘You’ll pay.’ And then at the meikle house he suddenly tired of his play and summoned the Hardcastle wife and said: ‘Provide for this young woman for the night.’ With that he gave her a cold bow and went his own gait, and the schoolmistress was probably as mortified by her sudden drop from ‘madam’ to ‘young woman’ as by anything had happened to her that awful day – though for that matter ‘young’ was a word of charity she might be grateful for: you must remember Guthrie hadn’t seen her in a full light.

Nor did Miss Strachan see anything more of Guthrie save for a glimpse of him in the morning. She was up at keek of dawn, the rats had given her fient the wink of sleep all night and the supper she’d been offered was that meagre that long before she could decently get up she’d nibbled as much of the rest of her chocolate as the vermin hadn’t snatched from her bedside. Fell eager to get away she was, the storm had abated, and her best plan, she thought, was to trudge back to Kinkeig wheeling her machine – there would be no riding it, certain, with the track the way it was. So she wheedled a bit bread and treacle out of the old witch of a wife Hardcastle, said ta-ta to her right willingly, and away down the path she went. You must know that the path goes hard by the neck of the loch that comes close up to Castle Erchany, the same that they used to fill the moat from in the olden time. And there was Guthrie staring down Loch Cailie at the watery angry sunrise, intent as if he expected a message dropped for him from the chariot of the sun. And sudden as the schoolmistress looked he raised both arms and held them, hands outspread, against the lift like as if he were trying to see the blood coursing through the transparence of them. Uncanny it was and the schoolmistress minded the daft speak of how he would whiles pray to the idols of the coarse old heathen; she fair louped it round the first twist among the larches and I doubt she didn’t stop once, any more than wee Isa had done, on the first of the miles that took her clear of Castle Erchany. But at least she bore her spoils with her: never had such fuel for claiking been brought down the glen before.