by Francis - TO THE HILT

Jed came back to the castle late in the afternoon, still with my gear in the boot of his car, wanting to know if he could drive me home to the bothy.

'No,' Himself said decisively. 'Al will stay here tonight. Sit down, Jed. Get yourself a drink.'

We were by then in the room my uncle considered his own private domain, a severe predominantly brown room with walls bearing stuffed fish in glass cases and deers' antlers from long-past battles on the hills. There were also three of my paintings of his racehorses and one painting of his favourite gun-dog, much loved but now dead.

Jed fixed a glass of whisky and water and sat down on one of the elderly hard-stuffed chairs.

Himself as usual made the decisions. 'I see Al seldom enough. He will stay here tonight and tomorrow night to please me, and on Monday morning you can take him to the bothy and the police station, and anywhere else you care to. I'll be fishing the Spey next week. I have guests Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday and Friday I'll be out on the moor with the guns…' He outlined his plans. 'James returns from sailing tomorrow. He'll be staying on here. His wife will take the children back to school. All clear, Jed?'

'Yes, sir.'

Jed and he discussed estate affairs for a while and I listened with half an ear and tried to imagine a good temporary home for Bede's Death Song engraved in gold.

I had asked Zoл Lang to read the poem aloud in Anglo-Saxon, and with enjoyment she had done so, her love of the old language giving the words shape and meaning and new life. I couldn't understand a syllable, but I could hear the throb and the pulse and the strong alliteration, and when I commented on it she'd told me a shade patronisingly that all Anglo-Saxon poetry had been written to be spoken, not read. The excitement, even the intoxication, she said, was engendered by the rhythmic beat as much as by the vivid imagery of the words. The poems describing battle could set sword-arms twitching. 'The Dream of the Rood' would make a Christian of an atheist.

Himself and I had listened respectfully, and I thought how much the outward appearance of age could colour one's expectation of a person's character. I wanted to paint her as young, vibrant, fanatical, with the ghost of the way she looked now superimposed in thin light grey lines, like age's cobwebs.

I strongly sensed a singular individual powerful entity that might have intensified with time, not faded. We were dealing with that inner woman, and should not forget it.

If I underpainted thickly in Payne's grey mixed with titanium white, I thought, and then brought the essential person to glowing life with strong bone structure in a faithful portrait, no colour tricks or linear gimmicks, and then scratched down into the grey for the unthinkable future… then with a steady hand and a strong vision I might produce a statement of terrible truth -or I might finish with a disaster fit only for the bin. To have the technique and the courage weren't always enough. Apart from vision as well, one needed luck.

Hide King Alfred's Gold Cup… my mind wandered back to the task in hand.

Hiding the Cup, for all its worth in gold, wasn't in the same sphere as hiding the hilt. Ivan might prize the Cup for reasons of his own, but as a symbol it wasn't entangled with history and an earl's beheading and generations of clan honour. The King Alfred Gold Cup had been fashioned a thousand years after the great king's days of glory: a tribute to him, undoubtedly, but never his own property.

The King Alfred Cup might be worth killing for… but not suffering for, or dying.

And yet… I asked myself again if I would have given the demon walkers that Cup if I'd known what they were looking for, if I'd had it to give, and I thought quite likely not. Anger… pride… cussedness .

Mad, weird, ridiculous Alexander.

The problem with hiding anything in the castle was that Himself was rarely in residence, while the administrators were not only in and out all the time but were also actively hunting treasure. In the family's private wing lived a full-time overall caretaker with his housekeeper wife, a conscientious worker who eviscerated private cupboards in the name of spring cleaning. The sideboard in the dining-room wouldn't shelter even a peanut for long. The discovery on the premises of a golden wonder, even if not the hilt, would have leaked into informed circles like burst pipes. If hiding the Cup involved hiding also any awareness of its existence, as I supposed it did, then the castle was out.

The castle grounds were out also, thanks to an efficient gardener.

So where?

Any thoughts anyone might have had about a peaceful evening were at that point blasted apart by the earthquake arrival of my friendly cousin James, who had listened to a gale-and-rain weather forecast and decided to run for port a day early, along with his boisterous family, who habitually lived fortissimo at Indy-car speed.

When the invasion stampeded upstairs to arrange bedrooms, I telephoned my mother and asked after Ivan. Things were no worse. There had been no further agitated crisis in the brewery's affairs: insolvency had gone into hiatus for the weekend.

'And Patsy?' I asked.

'Not a sound from her since yesterday morning.'

'My uncle Robert sends his regards.'

'And ours to him,' my mother said.

James, red haired and freckled, wandering by with gin and tonic in fist, asked amiably how the 'old boy' was doing.

'Depressed,' I said.

'Father says someone decamped with the brewery's nest egg.'

'Nest egg, chickens, battery hens, the lot.'

'What a lark, eh? How long are you staying?'

'Till Monday.'

'Great. Father's always saying we don't see enough of you. How are the daubs?'

'In abeyance,' I said, and gave him a lightweight account of the trouble at the bothy.

'Good Lord!' He stared. 'I didn't think you had much there worth stealing.'

'Jeep and golf clubs, and bits and pieces.'

'What rotten luck.'

His sympathy was genuine enough. James would always summon nurses to patch up one's wounds.

'Did they take your pipes?' he asked, concerned.

'Luckily they're in Inverness. The bag had sprung a leak.'

'Are you entering the contests this year?'

'I'm not good enough.'

'You don't practise enough, that's all.'

'The winners are nearly always army pipe majors. You know that. Why do I bother to say it?'

'I just like to encourage people,' he said, beaming; and I thought that that in truth was his great gift, to make people feel better about their lives.

The piping contests, held every autumn, took place from the far north all the way south to London. I had once or twice tried my hand in a piobaireachd competition, but it had been like a novice downhill skier taking on Klammer or Killy, an interesting experience memorable only for not having made an absolute fool of oneself.

Besides, I had political problems with some of the pibrochs, the ancient laments for the deaths and defeats of history. I couldn't - wouldn't - play 'My King has landed at Moidart', because the King that had landed was Prince Charles Edward, rightful King of England by descent, but disqualified (since Henry VIII's quarrel with the Pope) because of being Roman Catholic. Prince Charles Edward landed at Moidart in the Western Isles to begin his fateful march towards London, a thrust for the Crown, however understandable, that had led to the ruination of Scotland. In the wake of Prince Charles Edward's defeat at Culloden, the English, to remove the threat of a third upheaval (the 1715 and 1745 rebellions having been barely unsuccessful), had notoriously chased the Scots from their lands and had tried to wipe out nationhood by outlawing the speaking of Gaelic, the wearing of the tartan and the playing of the pipes. Scotland had never recovered. Sure, the tartan, the pipes and the slightly sentimental allegiances had crept back, but they were tourist attractions contrasting affectedly with the drab slab functional housing round the commercially regenerated modern city of Glasgow.