Michael Innes - Lament for a Maker

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.

And that was the last anyone but myself in Kinkeig heard of Ranald Guthrie before the tragedy. It was the night of the twenty-eighth November Miss Strachan spent at the meikle house. It was on the tenth December, just before the great snows all but closed the glens entirely, that Christine Mathers came to me with her story.

9

It was seldom Christine came down to Kinkeig. After all, beer at the Arms and gossip in the kitchens and maybe a bit sprunting[1] about exhaust the attractions of the place except on the Sabbath. And Guthrie would never let Christine sit under Dr Jervie; he had small use for the kirk and less for our minister. For a bit after his coming, when he’d got to know the affairs of his parish right well, the minister walked up to Erchany and got a bit talk with the laird and hinted it was a pity to breed up so fine a quean as Christine so lonely as he did and so much the mark for idle talk. Perhaps it was because Dr Jervie was a scholar and he respected that – scholar himself that he was – that Guthrie didn’t set the dogs on him as he did on the last minister – who was but an empty pulpit-thumping billy enough with neither matter nor doctrine to him, ’tis true. But he listened coldly and coldly bowed Dr Jervie out at the end, and ever after if they met in a lane the laird would walk unheeding by. He had never, sure, been seen in the kirk, nor Christine nor the Hardcastles either – and as for Tammas I doubt if the poor daftie had ever heard there is such a thing as the Shorter Catechism.

Christine, I say, came seldom to Kinkeig, and when she did it was to visit Ewan Bell the sutor. She and I had been long acquaint, for the first nurse that Guthrie ever got for her was my own sister’s child. There was a pony-carriage at the meikle house then and the laird, who had some mellower years during the childhood of the quean, let them drive about much as they pleased, and often they came down to visit Uncle Ewan, for I was that to the bairn as well as to my right niece. A childless and unmarried man, I grew right fond of little Christine Mathers. And when she grew and Guthrie got Mistress Menzies to the house, the weak-minded gentle fine-bred lady he kept to give Christine her strange and lonely breeding, whiles she would still come to see me, bringing maybe her troubles at Erchany and maybe just her questions about the world. Then as she grew again and her maidenhood came to her and she saw the strangeness of her life, a Miranda islanded with a black-thoughted Prospero, she became a secret quean, and with a growing sorrowfulness too, deep at the heart of her. Whiles she still came to see me, but her contacts now all mute: curled on a table, she would give herself to the scent and the texture of my bit leathers, as if she drew from them the strength one can draw from raw strong things. And now her comings had been rarer, she would look at me as if she might open her heart, but in the end nothing would she speak of but idle matter of the day. Dreaming she would sit, toying with a bit leather, all opening into womanhood as simply and resistlessly as the flower of the heather on the braes. Fine I knew what had happened long ere the schoolmistress brought the unlucky name of the lad to Kinkeig.

You must know something of the Guthries and the Lindsays – a little more, maybe, than you’ll find in Pitscottie’s Chronicles . It won’t keep you long from meeting Christine – it’s not a treatise on Scottish feudalism I’m writing – and I warned you fairly, Reader, back beyond the Reformation we must presently go.

You’ll know that while in the highlands the organization of folk was ever by clans, branch upon branch each under its chieftain ramifying out from the stock of the chief, in the lowland parts was no such thing, the unit being ever the family. And great and spreading as a family might be it had seldom the cohesion of the clan, so that the strait binding together of families, and alliance betwixt this family and that, made ever the labour of the lowland landowners. The district was secure and strong in which the lairds were well bound together by band and covenant.

Now while the Guthries were yet but bonnet-lairds at Erchany the Lindsays of Mervie were great folk, barons that held in chief from the Crown, and whose land ran nigh to the Inneses’, the coarse Fleming creatures, between Moray and Spey. And in the boyhood of James III, when Scotland was a right lawless and faithless place, the Guthries entered into bond of man rent with the Lindsays. The bond is yet preserved in which a Ranald Guthrie swore to Andrew Lindsay ‘to be for him and with him, his kin and friends and their quarrels, in council, help, supply, maintenance and defence, as far as good conscience and reason will, in the straitest form of band of kindness against and before all living men except his allegiance to our Sovereign Lord the King alone.’ Whatever inducement the Lindsays in their wealth gave, or whatever persuasion in their power they exerted, the bond was a most inviolable oath for the five years’ space it was to hold. But the word about the king was but a pious and empty speak: ever in a bond of man rent was some thought of union against the power of the Crown.

And against the Crown in time it was invoked. For the Lindsays stood in a like bond of fealty to the Earl of Huntly, and to Andrew Lindsay came the day when the Earl wrote that his cousin the Laird of Gight had been summoned to underlie the law in Edinburgh, and that the safety of his life required the instant presence of Lindsay and his carles at St Johnston, thence to ride with the Earl to Edinburgh. So Lindsay summoned Ranald Guthrie and his men to Mervie, and Lindsays and Guthries together rode to St Johnston – which is Perth – and there joining the Earl all held forward for Edinburgh, there to overawe the king’s justices on the Laird of Gight’s behalf. Only Andrew Lindsay, feigning matter of business, tarried a day behind, and riding fast and hard to Erchany there lay with Ranald Guthrie’s wife.

For a year and a day Ranald Guthrie held himself quiet; then he gathered such power as he might and made a foray upon Mervie and took up Andrew Lindsay, all unprepared from amid his carles, and carried him away. The Guthries carried Lindsay to their own lands and there they hacked the lecherous fingers from him, and they sent him home with an hourglass round his neck to mind the Lindsays they had bided that year-and-a-day only that the bond of man rent might be expired and the Guthrie faith unbroken. And Andrew Lindsay died.