Michael Innes - Lament for a Maker

Christmas eve at night – and my birthday. Shall I hang up my stocking for the owls to nest in and the rats to gnaw? What sort of presents, I wonder, come to Castle Erchany this season? I look out of my window and see that there is a lull in the gale; the gloaming is falling over a landscape wonderfully still, peaceful, white. Noel , Diana, Noel!

Your

NOEL.

3

Christmas morning

Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night! My scribblings of the last two days have proved an induction to real tragedy. Mr Ranald Guthrie of Erchany is dead.

It is all so fantastic – as well as rather horrible – that I really doubt if I can change the key in which I have been writing. Erchany is still the enchanted castle; only the enchantment has grown murky as one of great-uncle Horatio’s poems, and the enchanter – great-uncle Horatio’s sometime crony – is with Roull of Aberdene and gentill Roull of Corstorphine. Strange that as he walked down the corridor the other night Guthrie was chanting his own lament!

Our plesance heir is all vane glory,

This fals warld is bot transitory,

The flesche is brukle, the Feyind is sle;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.

Onto the ded goes all Estatis,

Princis, Prelotis, and Potestatis,

Both riche et pur of all degre;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.

He spairis no lord for his piscence,

Na clerk for his intelligence;

His awfull strak may no man fle;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.

Art – magicianis, and astrologgis,

Rethoris, logicianis, et theologgis…

But to work – which is getting down on paper an account of what has happened. It may be useful; and it is still my journal for you, Diana. It will be some hours more before the world – doctors, police, lawyers – can get to Erchany; and I don’t at all know how soon after that I shall get away. It is the unpleasant fact that I am involved in what may be an affair of murder. A strange Christmas Day.

I have first to persuade you – and myself – that while the sheets preceding have been an expedient for beguiling the time they are in no sense romancing. They give events accurately, and they give quite accurately too my own perhaps temperamental reactions to events. Nevertheless, I had better give a paragraph to recapitulating without fancy.

Miss Guthrie and I arrived at Erchany, unheralded and with every appearance of sheer accident, late on Monday evening. Hardcastle was rather stealthily on the look out for a doctor. We were politely enough received by Guthrie into what appeared to be the household of a confirmed miser – though with curious elements of expense in the supper. The make-up of the household was noteworthy: the anomalous factotum Hardcastle a striking scoundrel, his wife weak minded, the odd boy halfwitted, the laird himself powerfully witted and perhaps powerfully mad – I am over the line of facts here, for I would cut a poor figure trying to speak of Guthrie’s mental condition in a witness-box. But an undoubted fact, if a mysterious one, is the sense of strain and waiting – a sort of electric current flowing round and between Guthrie, his niece Christine Mathers, and certain unknown outside persons or events. A further fact was Hardcastle’s warning about the dangerousness of a certain Neil Lindsay. After that there are merely matters of impression. First, something about Sybil Guthrie’s attitude to her kinsman’s household and the way in which Guthrie told her his American cousins had ‘sent friends’. To this, as you will hear presently, I hold a key. Second, the way Christine told her uncle he was ‘in two minds’. And third, the way Guthrie said to me: ‘I am glad you found your way here.’ These utterances were charged ; they stand – somehow – full in the picture; I give them the status of enigmatic facts. There may, of course, be other points of equal significance buried in my narrative but at the moment I can’t dig them out.

And now the events leading to Guthrie’s death. I don’t know that you will be surprised to learn that the first matter to be recorded concerns a rat .

Christine appeared alone again at supper last night. I think she was rather stumped in the schoolroom afterwards for some method of entertaining us, and she ended by showing us a portfolio of her sketches that lay on a table as if in process of being packed up – rapid, economical impressions mostly of wild geese over Loch Cailie. But she was at once shyer and more secretly possessed than before and soon she slipped away. A few minutes later Sybil said it was cold – as indeed it was – and that she was going to read in bed. And a few minutes after that I went upstairs myself, having in my head the plan of a rat-proof tent on an improved model in which to spend the night. It was in furtherance of this ambitious project that I began studying the creatures.

The most obvious classifications were by size and colour. There were big rats and little rats, brown rats, grey rats and – what I feel vaguely is something very choice – black rats; and there were indeterminate rats of a piebald or mildewed sort. There were a few fat rats and a great many lean rats, a few lazy rats and a great many active rats – these categories overlapping substantially – and there was a possible classification too into bold and bolder. As far as I could see there were no really timid rats, despite the consternation that must sometimes be caused by the wee penknife of the laird. All this was more or less as one might expect in a mansion in which the rodent kind have it nearly all their own way. What really startled me was the sporadic appearance of learned rats. These are, I suppose, even rarer than the pink and blue varieties.

Learned rats. Rats, that is to say, lugging laboriously round with them little paper scrolls – rather like students who have just been given a neatly-printed degree. I am not sure whether I saw in all two or three of these learned rats.

My first thought was that Guthrie must be amusing his solitary days by conducting experiments – the business of tying labels on whales to discover how long it takes them to swim round the world. And I was sufficiently intrigued to go learned-rat hunting, getting quite worked up indeed and spending nearly an hour at it. A mad figure in the best Erchany tradition I must have seemed, stalking the creatures with the bedroom poker. The learned brethren were lazier, I think, and bolder than the others and I believe that the poker was probably a mistake; a skilled pair of hands could have caught one fairly readily. The poker, however, if not much good in attack, might be useful as a weapon of defence; when I abandoned the hunt and set about my fortifications for the night I kept it ready to hand.

Somehow I got to sleep. Twice I was awakened by the scuttling of the rats, twice I lammed out in the dark with the poker – and the second time there was a quite sickening squeal. Poor Mrs Hardcastle: I know now just what goes through her head in the night. I lit the candle. Miraculously, I had killed a learned rat.

There was a nasty mess and it took me a minute to summon resolution to investigate. The scroll was a piece of fine paper – it might have been torn from an India-paper notebook – and it was tied to the leg of the rat, rather cunningly, with a fragment of cotton. I cut it free and unfolded it gingerly, for the creature’s blood was on it. Neatly written in ink were seven words. Bring help secretly to tower top urgent .

I dressed. I don’t think it occurred to me that the thing was melodramatic, or absurd, or a joke or fantasy of Guthrie’s. A period spent at a considerable height will condition one to the job of going really high on a mountain and something over twenty-four hours spent at Erchany had conditioned me to taking the Appeal of the Learned Rat in my stride. I simply wondered how best to make the top of the tower.