by Francis - TO THE HILT

'She has joined the conservationists who look after the castle,' Himself said. 'Joined them? She rules them. This past week she's somehow got herself appointed chief custodian of the castle's historic contents… and you can guess what she's chiefly after.'

'The hilt,' I said.

The hilt.' He raised his voice as we approached the white car. 'Good morning, Dr Lang.'

'Lord Kinloch.' She shook his hand, then looked me briefly up and down, unsure of my name.

'My nephew,' Himself said.

'Oh, yes.' She extended her hand again and shook mine perfunctorily. 'Lord Kinloch, I've come to discuss the Treasures of Scotland exhibition being planned for the Edinburgh Festival next year…'

Himself with faultless courtesy showed her not into the dining-room this time, nor into his private room, but into the fairly grand drawing-room into which his best pieces of furniture had been moved at the time of the handover. Dr Lang eyed two French commodes with a mixture of admiration for their beauty and workmanship and disapproval of their private ownership. She believed, as she said later, that they should have been included in the transfer, despite their having been personally bought and imported by a nineteenth-century Kinloch earl with cultured taste.

My uncle offered sherry. Dr Lang accepted.

'Al?' he enquired.

'Not right now.'

Himself took a polite tokenful. 'The flying eagle,' he said cheerfully, 'will look magnificent in the Treasures of Scotland.'

The flying eagle stood in the castle's main entrance hall, a splendid treble-life-sized marble sculpture with wing feathers shining with gold leaf, the wings high and wide as if the fabulous bird were about to alight on the onyx ball at its feet. Transporting the flying eagle to the Edinburgh exhibition would mean cranes and crates and a slow low-loader. Himself had been heard to remark (tactlessly) that the castle's conservationists still had charge of the eagle only because its weight made stealing it difficult.

'We must insist,' Dr Lang said crisply, 'on taking charge of the Kinloch hilt.'

'Mm,' my uncle made a non-committal humming noise and offered nothing more.

'You can't hide it away for ever.'

Himself said with regret, 'Thieves grow more ingenious every year.'

'You know my views,' she told him crossly. 'The hilt belongs to Scotland.'

Zoл Lang looked half the size of her adversary, and was neat and precise where he moved clumsily. Belief in their cause stiffened them both. While he controlled the whereabouts of his treasure, she couldn't claim it: if once she'd found it, she would never relinquish it. I could see that for each of them it was all hardening into a relentless battle of wills, a mortal duel fought over dry La Ina sherry in cut lead crystal.

I said to Zoл Lang, 'Do you mind if I draw you?'

' Draw me?'

'Just a pencil sketch.'

She looked astonished. 'Whatever for?'

'He's an artist,' Himself explained casually. 'He painted that large picture over there.' He pointed briefly. 'Al, if you want any paper, there's some in my room, in the desk drawers.'

Gratefully I went to fetch some: high grade typing paper, but anything would do. I sorted out a reasonable pencil and returned to the drawing-room to find my uncle and his enemy standing side by side in front of the gloomiest painting I'd ever attempted.

'Glen Coe,' Dr Lang said with certainty. 'The sun never shines.'

It was true that the shape of the terrain caused orographic cloud formation more days than not over the unhappy valley, but the dark grey morning when the perfidious Campbells murdered their hosts the Macdonalds - thirty-seven of them, including women and children - seemed to brood forever over the heather-clad hills. A place of shivers, of horror, of betrayal.

Zoл Lang stepped closer to the picture for a long inspection, then turned my way.

'The shadows,' she told me, 'the dark places round the roots of the heather, they're all painted like tiny patches of tartan , the red of the Macdonalds and the yellow of the Campbells, little ragged lines of shading. You can only see them when you're up close…'

'He knows,' my uncle said calmly.

'Oh.' She looked from me to the picture and back again. There were glazes of shadow over the hillsides and atmospheric double shadows over many of the tartan pools round the heather roots. I'd felt ill all the time, painting it. The massacre of Glen Coe could still churn in the gut of a world that had seen much worse genocide in plenty since.

She said, 'Where do you want me to sit?'

'Oh.' I was grateful. 'By the window, if you would.'

I got her to sit where the light fell on her face at the same angle as I'd painted her, and I drew the face in pencil as it appeared now to my eyes, an old face with folds and lines in the skin and taut sinews in the neck. It was clear and accurate, and predictably she didn't like it.

'You're cruel,' she said.

I shook my head. 'It's time that's cruel.'

'Tear it up.'

Himself peered at the drawing and shrugged, and said in my defence, 'He usually paints nice-looking golf scenes, all sunshine with people enjoying themselves. Sells them to America faster than he can paint them, don't you, Al?'

'Why golf ?' Zoл Lang demanded. 'Why America?'

I answered easily, 'Golf courses in America are built to look good, with lots of water hazards. Water looks great in paintings.' I painted water-washed pebbles in metal paints, gold, silver and copper, and they always sold instantly. 'American golfers buy more golf pictures than British golfers do. So I paint what sells. I paint to live.'

She looked as if she thought the commercial attitude all wrong, as if any painter not starving in a garret were somehow reprehensible. I wondered what she would think if I told her I amplified my income nicely via royalties from postcards, thousands of copies of my paintings for golfers to send to each other from places like Augusta (the Masters) and from Pebble Beach and Oakland Hills (the Open) and even, in Britain, from Muirfield, St Andrews and The Belfry.

She sparred a little more with my uncle. He offered unstinting help with the eagle and smiled blandly to all else. She asked if King Alfred's chalice had turned up, as her friend was still waiting to put a value on the 'glass ornaments' (her words) embedded in the gold.

'Not yet,' Himself said unworriedly. 'One of my family will no doubt have it safe.'

She couldn't understand his carefree attitude, and it wasn't until after she had left that I told him the glass ornaments, if they were the original gems, were in fact genuine sapphires, emeralds and rubies.

'The King Alfred Gold Cup,' I said, 'is almost certainly worth far more intrinsically than the hilt. There's far more gold by weight, and the gems are nearly double the carats.'

'You don't mean it! How do you know?'

'I had it traced to the firm that made it. It cost an absolute fortune.'

'My God. My God. And young Andrew was playing with it on the kitchen floor!'

'Upside down,' I agreed, smiling.

'Does Ivan know where it is?'

'Not exactly,' I said, and told him where to look.

'You're a rogue, Alexander.'

I had put him in great good humour. He marched us into his own room for a 'decent drink' - Scotch whisky - and I stunned him speechless by suggesting that next time Zoл Lang vowed the hilt belonged to the nation he tell her then OK, the nation would lose on the deal.

'How do you mean?'

'Generation by generation - ever since the invention of inheritance taxes - the Kinlochs have paid for that hilt. The same object, but taxed after a death and relaxed and taxed again. It never ends. If you give it into public ownership, the country forfeits the tax. It's a case of kill the goose… Dr Lang never thinks of the golden tax eggs.'