Elizabeth George: Payment in Blood

Her placidity was infuriating. “Ye gie me no explanation?”

“’Tis practice, Gowan.”

“ Practice? ” The fire inside him was heating his blood to a boil. “Wha’ kind of practice d’ye need tha’ Jeremy Irons ’ll help you with? All over the blessit paper. And him a marrit man!”

Mary Agnes’ face paled. “Marrit?” She set one saucer down upon another. China jarred together unpleasantly.

Gowan at once regretted his impulsive words. He had no idea whether Jeremy Irons was married, but he felt driven to despair by the thought of Mary Agnes dreaming of the actor nightly as she lay in her bed while right next door Gowan sweated for the right to touch his lips to hers. It was ungodly. It was unfair. She ought well to suffer for it.

But when he saw her lips tremble, he berated himself for being such a fool. She’d hate him , not Jeremy Irons, if he wasn’t careful. And that couldn’t be borne.

“Ah, Mary, I canna say faer sairtin if he’s marrit,” Gowan admitted.

Mary Agnes sniffed, gathered up her china, and returned to the kitchen. Puppy-like, Gowan followed. She lined up the teapots on the trays and began spooning tea into them, straightening linen, arranging silver as she went, studiously ignoring him. Thoroughly chastened, Gowan searched for something to say that would get him back into her good graces. He watched her lean forward for the milk and sugar. Her full breasts strained against her soft wool dress.

Gowan’s mouth went dry. “Hae I tol’ ye aboot my row to Tomb’s Isle?”

It was not the most inspired conversational gambit. Tomb’s Isle was a tree-studded mound of land a quarter of a mile into Loch Achiemore. Capped by a curious structure that looked from a distance like a Victorian folly, it was the final resting place of Phillip Gerrard, the recently departed husband of Westerbrae’s present owner. Rowing out to it was certainly no feat of athletic prowess for a boy like Gowan, well used to labour. Certainly it was nothing that was going to impress Mary Agnes, who probably could have done the same herself. So he sought a way to make the story more interesting for her.

“Ye dinna know aboot the isle, Mary?”

Mary Agnes shrugged, setting teacups upon saucers. But her bright eyes danced to him briefly, and that was suffi cient encouragement for Gowan to wax eloquent upon his tale.

“Ye havena haird? Why, Mary, all the villagers know tha’ when the mune is full, Missus Francesca Gerrard stands buck nakit a’ the windae of her bedroom and beckons Mister Phillip to coom back to her. From Tomb’s Isle. Whair he’s buried.”

That certainly got Mary Agnes’ attention. She stopped working on the trays, leaned against the table, and folded her arms, prepared to hear more.

“I dinna believe a word of this,” she warned as preamble to his tale. But her tone suggested otherwise, and she didn’t bother to hide a mischievous smile.

“Nar did I, lass. So las’ full mune, I rowed out myself.” Gowan anxiously awaited her reaction. The smile broadened. The eyes sparkled. Encouraged, he went on. “Ach, what a sicht Missus Gerrard was, Mary. Nakit at the windae! Her arms outstretched! An’ glory, those dugs hanging claer tae her waist! Wha’ an awful sicht!” He shuddered dramatically. “’Tis na wunner to me tha’ auld Mister Phillip be lying so still!” Gowan cast a longing glance at Mary Agnes’ fine endowments. “Coorse, ’tis true tha’ the sicht of a luvely breast cuid make a man do anything.”

Mary Agnes ignored the less-than-subtle implication and went back to the tea trays, dismissing his narrative effort with, “Gae on wi’ yere work, Gowan. Weren’t ye supposed tae see tae the biler this mornin’? It wus fozling like my grannam last nicht.”

At the girl’s cool response, Gowan’s heart sank. Surely the story about Mrs. Gerrard should have engaged Mary Agnes’ imagination more than this, perhaps even encouraging her to request a row on the loch herself next full moon. With drooping shoulders, he shuffled towards the scullery and the creaking boiler within.

As if taking pity on him, however, Mary Agnes spoke again. “But aiven if Missus Gerrard wants, Mister Phillip winna coom back to her, laddie.”

Gowan stopped in his tracks. “Why?”

“‘That my body shinna lie on this cursit ground of Westerbrae,’” Mary Agnes quoted smartly. “That’s what Mister Phillip Gerrard’s will said. Mrs. Gerrard told me that herself. So, if yere story is true, she’ll be at the windae forever if she hopes tae hae him back that way. He isna aboot to walk across th’ water like Jesus. Dugs or no dugs, Gowan Kilbride.”

Finishing her remarks with a restrained giggle, she went for the kettle to begin making the morning tea. And when she came back to the table to pour the water, she brushed so near him that his blood began to heat all over again.

COUNTING MRS. GERRARD’S, there were ten trays of morning tea to be delivered. Mary Agnes was determined to do them all without stumbling, spilling a drop, or embarrassing herself by walking in on one of the gentlemen while he was dressing. Or worse.

She had rehearsed her entry often enough for her debut as hotel maid. “Guid mornin’. Luvely day,” and a quick walk to the table to set down the tea tray, careful to keep her eyes averted from the bed. “Juist in case,” Gowan would laugh.

She went through the china room, through the curtain-shrouded dining room, and out into the massive entry hall of Westerbrae. Like the stairway at its far side, the hall was uncarpeted, and its walls were panelled in smoke-stained oak. An eighteenth-century chandelier hung from its ceiling, its prisms catching and diffracting a soft beam of light from the lamp Gowan always switched on early every morning on the reception desk. Oil, a bit of sawdust, and a residual trace of turpentine scented the air, speaking of the efforts Mrs. Gerrard was making to redecorate and turn her old home into an hotel.

Overpowering these odours, however, was a more peculiar smell, the product of last night’s sudden, inexplicable flare of passion. Gowan had just come into the great hall with a tray of glasses and five bottles of liqueurs to serve to their guests when Mrs. Gerrard tore wildly out of her little sitting room, sobbing like a baby. The resulting blind collision between them had thrown Gowan to the fl oor, creating a mess of shattered Waterford crystal and a pool of alcohol a good quarter-inch deep from the sitting-room door stretching all the way to the reception desk beneath the stairs. It had taken nearly an hour for Gowan to clean the mess up-cursing dramatically whenever Mary Agnes walked by-and all that time people had been coming and going, shouting and crying, pounding up the stairs and down every corridor.

What all the excitement had been about was something that Mary Agnes had never quite determined. She knew only that the company of actors had gone into the sitting room with Mrs. Gerrard to read through a script, but within fifteen minutes their meeting had dissolved into little better than a furious brawl, with a broken curio cabinet, not to mention the disaster with the liqueurs and crystal, as evidence of it.

Mary Agnes crossed the hall to the stairs, mounting them carefully, trying to keep her feet from thundering against the bare wood. A set of house keys, bouncing importantly against her right hip, buoyed her confi dence.

“Knock quietly first,” Mrs. Gerrard had instructed. “If there’s no answer, open the door-use the master key if you must-and leave the tray on the table. Open the curtains and say what a lovely day it is.”

“And if ’tisna a luvely day?” Mary Agnes had asked impishly.

“Then pretend that it is.”