Michael Innes - Lament for a Maker

Uncle came in this morning; he seemed in a rare pleased mood; he stood in front of the little fire he had made Mrs Hardcastle light for me, and he said ‘I’ve finished the biggest of all the jigsaws.’ Then he must have seen my thoughts were far away, for suddenly he said softly ‘Must you have him, Christine?’ I said just ‘Yes,’ no more – for I’ve told him long ago how much it is yes and how I can’t help myself. He said ‘You shall go with him.’

I don’t know why, I trembled and couldn’t speak, perhaps with my sick fancies lately I thought he was speaking meaninglessly from a distraught mind. But he repeated ‘You shall go with him.’ And then he spoke harshly of the disgrace and that we must go, if we did go, once and for ever; that there was money for me that I should have and that Neil should come for me at Christmas and that we might away to Canada. But that he would have no wedding or word of a wedding in these parts, and that – but I needn’t repeat words I want and shall soon have the chance to forget.

So this is Goodbye: I won’t forget you , Uncle Ewan Bell. I am so happy, happy – and yet afraid. I’m fey, I almost think – but that is foolish! If there are things I don’t understand – what does it matter when I’m going with Neil?

Tammas is being made to go down – I suppose for letters – though the snow is drifting deep now: I hope he’ll come to no harm. He’s my chance to send this – otherwise you mightn’t hear from me till I was far away – and what oceans of Kinkeig gossip, in that case, you’d hear first! Goodbye and love, dear Ewan Bell.

CHRISTINE MATHERS.

I shall be safe with Neil, and he with me.

So it was goodbye to Christine – and at the thought she was going far from Kinkeig I felt heavier-hearted than for her sake I should have done. Over and over again that night I read her letter – and ever I was the heavier-hearted. At last I must have fallen asleep, old man that I am, over my dying fire, for I awoke chilled in the night and with Ranald Guthrie’s voice again in my ears: It was right anxiously I spent the next three days.

12

The evening of the day Tammas came – Monday the twenty-third it was – saw a bit stir in Kinkeig. For long after ’twas thought the roads were closed for that fall, when the gloaming was falling in shadows of grey and silver over the snows, there came a wee closed car ploughing and slithering into the village from none knew where: it had missed the North Road through Dunwinnie maybe and was seeking it again. Folk got no more than a keek at it through their windows, for everyone was indoors that weather – all except the bairn Wattie McLaren, that had run out from his tea to have a look at a snow man he and the other bairns had been making that morning. The wee car stopped; it was a young wife was in it, Wattie said, and she called out to him Was she right for the road south? And then maybe she misunderstood Wattie – which is likely enough – or the bairn told her a right mischievous falsehood he was frightened to own to later. Anyway, the wee car gave a snort and a shake, its back wheels slithered a minute before they got a bit bite in the snow, and then it turned right and held up the glen for Erchany.

Meanwhile Mistress McLaren – and you know enough of her to known she hasn’t much sense – had missed Wattie from among her bairns – and she has enough of them, Will Saunders says, to be a right grand example to her own sows – and out she went to find him, just in time to see the red tail light of the wee car disappearing over the first brow of the hill. And at the same moment there came a great blast of a trumpet that put Mistress McLaren – who is fell religious in a gossiping way – in mind, she said, of the Herald Angels: a devout and seasonable thought, it can’t be denied. But it was nothing but the horn of another car, one near as big as a house this time and with a solitary slip of a lad in it, and with chains to its wheels that put it in a better way than the other against the snow. No doubt it had gone astray through following the wee machine in front, and I know now that when the lad called out to the smith’s wife it was to ask Was he right for London? Mistress McLaren, you needn’t be told, had about as much chance of picking that up aright as if the loon had asked her was he right for Monte Carlo; she took it into her head he was asking Which way had the wee car gone? – always liking to think, Will said, that the loons are after the lasses. So she pointed, right pleased, up the darkening road to the glen and away went the great car with a roar for Castle Erchany. Most folk thought it unlikely the cars would get there, and equally unlikely they’d get back; the greengrocer Carfrae had a bit joke, you may be sure, about their helping keep each other’s engines warm that night in the solitude of the glen.

After that nothing more that anyone knew of came through Kinkeig. A wind got up that night that swept the yet falling snow along as if it grudged the fine flakes of it their resting place on the mantled earth; all Christmas Eve it blew the fallen snow into great drifts all these lands about. On Christmas morning the wind fell but whiles the snow came softly down still; going early past the kirk I could scarcely hear the bell for the early service Dr Jervie likes to hold, so muffled was the tolling of it in the fall.

It was when the few folk in Kinkeig that will admit Christmas a Feast of the Kirk were at service that Tammas came again, and clearer than the tolling bell I heard the great cry of him as he breasted the last rise, crying the awful death of his master Ranald Guthrie of Erchany.

And here, Reader, I lay down my wandering and unready pen and you’ll be hearing, I think, what the English lad Noel Gylby, him that was in the great car, wrote to his quean in London. But you and I will meet in with one another again ere the story’s told.

PART TWO

THE JOURNAL LETTER OF NOEL GYLBY

1

24th December

Diana darling: Leaves – as Queen Victoria said – from the Journal of my Life in the Highlands. Or possibly of my Death in the Lowlands. For I don’t at all know if I’m going to survive and I don’t know – I’m kind of guessing, as my girlfriend here says – where I am. YES, I have a girlfriend, a most formidable and charming and rather mysterious American miss, and we are staying at a castle somewhere in Scotland and I have a feeling – kind of feel – that our throats may be feudally cut at any time by the seneschal, who – mark you! – bears the most appropriate name of Hardcastle, no doubt with underlings (though I haven’t yet seen them) Dampcastle, Coldcastle and Crazycastle – a whole progeny of Crazycastles would be by no means out of the way. And we kind of feel – Miss Guthrie and I – that we are presently to be besieged, no doubt by the paynim knights Sansjoy, Sansfoy and Sansloy – and if you say, Diana, that the paynims are out of the Scottish picture I retort that I’ve had a quite awful night and a little inconsistency must be allowed.

Don’t be furious, Diana, that I shan’t be in town for Christmas after all; it’s not my fault. Listen. I’ll tell you about it. By way of apology, all about it. It is – and promises to be – amusing.

I got away from Kincrae and the horrors of my aunt’s unseasonable sojourn there – do you know, positively, icicles were depending from the noses of those melancholy stags’ heads in the hall? – I got away quite early yesterday morning, and though the roads were shocking I reckoned to get to Edinburgh last night (where there is a tolerable hotel) and tonight to strike off the north road to York, and then to make town in excellent time for our Christmas dinner – just as I wired.

But I’d got it wrong. The snows have been tremendous and even on the Highland road – where the snowploughs have been out – I was losing time on schedule badly. I had luncheon – a bit dinner you’d be wanting? the pothouse keeper said wonderingly – Lord knows where, and at the end of it my eye was already on my Edinburgh dinner. So I stepped on it – but still the going was bad. I had to catch the William Nuir at Queensferry; otherwise it meant round by Stirling and in late. Diana, you know what I did. I stopped and got out the map and saw it would be ever so much quicker such a way. Alas!