The Witch of Clatteringshaws (5 page)

She’d stick a spike in you as soon as look at you, thought Dido.

Her voice, when she spoke, was rather harsh, but evidently her intentions were friendly.

“Just checking to see that you were not upset by the unscheduled stop,” she said.

“Are you a rail inspector?” said Dido.

“Affiliated,” the woman answered absently. “Aldith Ironside—in charge of internal communications and maintenance. Are you traveling far?”

“To Clatteringshaws,” said Piers. Dido threw him a warning look. No need to pass out information to strangers, that was her motto. Though what harm could this woman do them?

“That holdup seemed right puny,” Dido said. “Just two o’ them, was there? And they expected to rob a whole train?”

“A bit of grapeshot soon frightened them off,” said Aldith Ironside. Her eye fell on the open hamper. “Just about to have a bite to eat, were you? It’ll be safe enough now.…”

“Would you fancy a roll or a chicken leg?” said Piers, unaware of Dido’s scowl.

“Thank you. That would be most acceptable,” said the woman, and sat down by Piers. “And a glass of wine if you can spare it.”

“Of course we can—can’t we, Dido?”

Dido nodded. She was studying the ring on Aldith’s right hand. It was a signet—gold and jet, a thick, heavy ring. She wondered where she had seen it before—or one just like it.

The woman was talking about robberies on this line.

“There have been a lot—ever since they raised that Spanish ship off the seabed on Gombeen Sands—they found an emerald in her hold as big as a rook’s egg—seventy-seven carats, worth half a million.… Now everybody going or coming this way is thought to be carrying precious stones.”

“Oh?” said Dido. “Where is Gombeen Sands?”

“Out beyond the mouth of Loch Grieve. There’s a whirlpool at the mouth of the loch when the tide is rising. Any ship not acquainted with the currents thereabouts is likely to be caught in the whirl, and then—anything up to a year later—the remains of the ship are washed up on the sands.”

“Fine pickings for beachcombers,” said Dido.

“Yes, but they have to watch their footing on the sands—some of them are quicksands.”

“So who does the emerald belong to?” Dido asked.

“Oh—probably to the Crown,” the woman said vaguely. “Now tell me—shall you stay long at Clatteringshaws?”

“Can’t really tell about that.” Forestalling Piers, Dido
echoed the woman’s vague tone. “We might have a great-aunt living up in those parts—have to see if we can find her. Is it a big place? Do you live there?”

“No, hardly more than a village.” Dido noticed that the woman failed to answer her second question. Next minute she stood up.

“Here’s where I leave you—Roman Wall. Thanks for your company—and the chicken leg.”

She picked up the cane she had been carrying.

Only, Dido noticed, it was not a cane but a golf club.

Station signs saying
ROMAN WALL
were moving slowly past the windows. Then the train drew to a stop. The small station building, Dido noticed, was built of massive granite blocks.

A melodious female voice chanted: “The train now approaching platform one is for Clatteringshaws. Clatteringshaws only. There it will terminate. Look out for the platform before you alight. Please be sure that you have all your baggage. At Clatteringshaws this train will terminate.”

Dido chuckled. The announcer chanting her message recalled an old song of Dido’s father’s, which went, “I love you in the springtime and I love you in the fall,/To love you is my fate./But shall we ever meet?/For here my train will terminate.…”

It had really been a sonata for hoboy and bassinet, but when she was younger Dido had set those words to it, and now, whenever she heard the tune, they always came to mind.

She sang them without thinking as she opened the carriage door for Aldith Ironside.

The woman stopped as if she had been stung by a wasp, and swung round.

“That tune!”
she whispered. “What
was
it?”

“Just an old song of my father’s—”

Dido was embarrassed. In her opinion Abednego Twite was best forgotten—he had been a plotter, a swindler, bent as a paper clip, slippery as a salamander, and had behaved to all his family with heartless indifference.

The only good thing about him was the tunes he made up.

“A tune of your father’s? When? Who was he?”

“Ten—twelve years ago—maybe more. I dunno.”

Dido was puzzled. What could have put the woman into such a fuss? But now the announcer was chanting, “Close the doors, please. Mind the gap. Close the doors,” and the train let out a wail and a huge hiss of steam and started to move.

The woman, looking utterly frustrated, was left standing on the station platform clutching her golf club.

Was that all the luggage she had?

I do wonder who has a ring like that? Dido thought, and she began to tidy up the picnic things.

Snow was falling when Dido and Piers left the train at the stop for Clatteringshaws.

“Och, ’tis only the spring florrish,” said the stationmaster, who received their tickets.

“Can we get a cab to take us to the town?” said Dido through chattering teeth. She glanced up and down the twilit platform. Very few passengers seemed to have got out.

“Fergie McDune will take ye, time he’s dropped off the Mayor.”

“How long will that take him?”

“Nae mair than half an hour. Ye could walk into town, of course.”

“How long would
that
take?”

“An hour and a bittock,” said the stationmaster, looking at their knapsacks. (They had left the empty picnic hamper in the train; all the food had been eaten, and the plates and forks were heavy.)

“Juist mak’ yerselves at hame,” said the man hospitably. “I’ll be locking up, whiles.”

He locked every door in the small building. “There’s a fine wee bench out yonder against the fence. I’m off hame the noo.” And he walked away over a heathery slope.

“It’s cold up here,” said the Woodlouse. The station was on a hilltop. Far below them glimmered the dark water of the loch, which they had just crossed on a bridge that seemed to go on for miles and was slung high above the water from one hill summit to another. A few lights down near the water’s edge were presumably the town of Clatteringshaws. Their train had retreated the same way it had come, and the empty countryside was silent, except for the chuntering of some night bird.

“I reckon Father Sam wasn’t wrong when he said Scotland was a big empty place,” said Dido, shivering.

“Should make it easier to find one king in it.”

“Hark. What’s that creaking noise?”

“The train coming back?”

“No—sounds like the lid on a pot of boiling water—
there!
”

The sound came nearer, came quite close, then faded again.

“Now it’s getting louder—”

“Blest if it’s not right above us!”

The sky was cloudy and dim. When they looked up, snow peppered their faces.

“There—see!”

“What was it?”

“Looked like a big three-legged bird?”

“That was no bird. It was as big as a stag.”

“They don’t have flying stags. Specially three-legged ones.”

“How could you possibly tell that it was three-legged?”

At this moment Fergie McDune came back, driving his gig.

“Ye’ll be for the town?”

“Yes, please. Someplace where we can get a bed for the night.”

“Ah, that’ll be Lachie Mackintosh, the Monster’s Arms.”

McDune cracked his whip and they set off down the hill.

“That’s a funny name for an inn—the Monster’s Arms?” suggested Piers.

“Why? Would you have him call it the Monster’s Legs?”

“Do you have many monsters round here?”

“Ilka land has its ain lauch,” said Fergie, which response so perplexed his customers that they kept silent for the rest of the drive.

Clatteringshaws seemed a larger town than they had expected, with a wide main street and gaunt, high buildings, but it was a very silent place, with no one about in the street and few lights in the curtained windows. The main street led directly to the lochside, where the Monster’s Arms, a fair-sized timber-framed inn, stood beside the boat jetty.

To their great relief the inn promised them beds for the night, and provided a welcome dinner of calf’s-head ragout, bullock’s tongue, and potato cakes.

It had been a long day, and Dido and Piers were glad to
retire, as soon as they had eaten the last lump of potato cake, to beds that proved to be equally lumpy, and so damp that Dido wondered if hers had been dipped in the loch to expel bugs.

Halfway through a restless night spent trying to find an island in the mattress-swamp, she remembered where she had seen a ring like that of the woman on the train.

It was on the finger of Father Sam.

Is that the same ring, or is there someplace where they sell them, like those painted mugs that say “A Present from the Tower of London”? Dido wondered, wriggling in an effort to find a dry spot in her bed. Could that woman have been Father Sam’s cousin? What was she doing on the train?

At last Dido fell asleep.

In the morning they were given bowls of gray glue for breakfast.

“ ’Tis parritch,” said the whiskered waiter who served them. “Forbye ye should eat it standing up.”

“I’m not sure as I want to eat it
at all
,” said Dido. “But why standing up?”

“ ’Tis a token of respect.”

“I’d sooner respect a dish of bacon and eggs.”

“Och, ye’ll no’ get that this morn.”

“Why not?”

“ ’Tis Saint Vinnipag’s Day. He was a vegetarian. Out yonder,” said the waiter, nodding his white head toward the window, through which a vista of misty loch- and cloud-wrapped mountains could be seen, “out yonder, where the loch runs intae the sea, past the twin whirly-pools of Mindluck and Hartluck, out there lies Inch Meal,
the Island of Saints. Twenty thousand and one saints lie buried on yon island,” the waiter told them.

“My gracious!” said Dido. “You’d hardly think there ud be room for them all. Is it a big island?”

“Och, no, ye could put it on Clatteringshaws golf course. That island is why we have a saint’s day here in Clatteringshaws on every day of the year.”

“Twenty thousand saints,” said Piers, doing a bit of mental arithmetic, “at three hundred and sixty-five a year you have enough to last till the year eighteen thousand—or thereabouts.”

“Ay, ’tis so. The minister of the kirk ud be able to tell ye more aboot them. That’s the Reverend Knockwinnock, who’s well informed as to their various predilections and habits. But ’tis certain that nae meat or flesh food will be servit on Saint Vinnipag’s Day.”

Dido and Piers realized that they had better make do with the porridge, for it was all they were going to get. It was washed down by a drink called mum, brewed from wheat and bitter herbs.

“And, syne, the children of the town all gather together this morn,” the waiter told them, when Dido inquired in what way the saint’s day was celebrated. “They gather at the jetty, down yonder, and each of them flings a book intae the loch.”

“Croopus! Why do they do that?”

“Ah, well, ye see, Saint Vinnipag had a great, great mistrust of the written word. As they’re printed in black, he said letters were the footprints of the Evil One. So, ilka bairn must bring to the loch the book he loves the best and cast it in.”

“If
I
were one of those children,” said Piers, “I’d bring the book I hated worst.”

“And which would that be?” asked Dido, who had read very few books.

“Logarithm tables.”

“What in the world are they?”

“Arithmetical functions abridging calculation by substituting addition and subtraction for multiplication and division.”

“Save us! Woodlouse, they oughta make
you
King! You’re
educated
,” said Dido, deeply impressed. “When does this book throwing happen?” she asked the waiter.

At noon, they were told.

“Famous,” said Dido. “We’ll pay our shot and go and take a gander at the goings-on. I likes to watch old rites and ceremonicals, don’t you, Woodlouse?”

And since he showed little enthusiasm, she explained as they walked along the cobbled way to the jetty, “Don’t you see, it will give us a first-rate chance to look at all the kids in town; maybe we’ll get a notion which one might be little Alfie Partacanute.”

Piers said: “What reason do we really have to suppose that one of the children in this place might be the King of England?”

“Well, there was a battle near here. You know that.”

“Yes, the Battle of Follodden.”

“King Malcolm of Caledonia, allied to King Bloodarrow of Bernicia, was fighting off the invading Picts. Malcolm traced his descent back to Brutus of Troy, and so did his wife, Ethelfleda. And our King Dick, who just died, had the same family tree.”

“So?”

“Well, King Malcolm was killed in that battle.”

“What happened to Queen Ethelfleda?”

“She died at the same time—on that hill over there.”

The day was very foggy. The previous night’s snow still covered the ground, a thin layer of white, above which a thick blanket of gray mist mostly concealed the gaunt dark houses of Clatteringshaws. But at this moment a stray gust of wind, a stray sunbeam, parted the fog and showed a lane of blue sky, a silvery track of loch water, and an impressive dome-shaped black hill on the opposite side of the loch.

“You see that hill? That’s Beinn Grieve. The landlord told me. It’s where the rail bridge begins.”

Indeed, looking up, they could faintly see the bridge, a black lacework high in the gray cloud over their heads.

“Why was Queen Ethelfleda up on that hill?”

“She was in a carriage, waiting to see the result of the battle. But a stray musket shot smashed the carriage window and killed her. She had just had a baby. It had been in the coach too, but it vanished. The bones of the Queen’s maid, Hild, were found on the hillside. But no baby bones were ever found.”

“How do they know it was the maid’s bones?”

“She was wearing a necklace the Queen had given her.”