Michael Innes - Lament for a Maker

And here my interview with Ewan Bell ended. I rejoined Gylby, who had returned triumphant from the stationer’s with a tin of John Cotton, and we went out in the nip of the winter morning. The skis were piled on the roof of the car, certain parcels requisitioned by Mrs Hardcastle were deposited with the driver, and we drove off for Castle Erchany amid the universal curiosity of Kinkeig. As Mrs Roberts confided to me at parting, there had been nothing like it since the medicos – the reference being doubtless to the unfortunate London physician and his colleagues who had visited the dead man some two years before.

‘Mr Gylby,’ I said as we crept cautiously over the surface exposed by the ploughs, ‘I take it that nothing’ – I hesitated – ‘untoward was discovered about Guthrie’s body?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Well, as the story runs in Kinkeig, this desperate Lindsay had chopped off a number of the fingers.’

Abruptly, young Gylby stopped stuffing a pipe. ‘I really think the Scotch are–’

‘The bloody limit?’

My young acquaintance, I believe, had placed me comfortably as a person of somewhat ponderous utterance; it gave me considerable pleasure to see him positively jump as I thus briefly expressed his thought. ‘I was going to put it,’ he said, ‘that they are people with a developed taste in the macabre. Guthrie’s fingers are intact. It’s his gold that’s gone.’

‘Quite so…I understand that it is definitely for Miss Guthrie that I am to act?’

‘If you are going to be so good.’

‘Very well. Let me put it to you that you have made a statement in contradiction to certain apparent testimony of my client.’ And I tapped Gylby’s journal which I was still holding. ‘Miss Guthrie states that between Guthrie and Lindsay there was nothing like heat; that they shook hands and parted quietly; even that Lindsay spoke or comported himself “gently”. You state that at your own view of Lindsay little more than a minute later you received “an extraordinarily vivid impression of passion”. Now this discrepant evidence may be important. Are you sure that your impression was accurate?’

‘Yes.’ Gylby’s answer was at once reluctant and convinced. ‘Miss Guthrie was observing those people more or less at leisure. You, on the other hand, speak of what “happened in a flash”, and of “a second and a second only”. Are you not more likely to be mistaken than she?’

I thought it wise to let my tone suggest to this slightly airy young man the manner in which an inquiry of the sort impending might have to be conducted. But he was perfectly serious and perfectly forthright. ‘There seems to be such a probability, Mr Wedderburn. Nevertheless I don’t think my impression is wrong.’

I believe it was at this point that I made up my mind – if in a preliminary way – as to what had really happened at Erchany. And my conclusion, I saw, was likely to make my position delicate. I turned to another topic.

‘Mr Gylby, about the man Hardcastle. You are something of a prejudiced witness? It would be possible to suggest, on the strength of your journal, that your attitude to him has been quite venomous from the moment of his first unkind reception of you at Erchany?’

Gylby contented himself with saying: ‘You wait till you see him.’

‘And you are inclined to credit him with some hidden motive in the affair?’

‘He was up to something. Guthrie never gave him that message to me.’

‘Certainly that appears to be Miss Guthrie’s impression.’

With unexpected heat Gylby said: ‘Sybil was speaking the truth.’

‘You cannot suppose me to be suggesting otherwise. Have you any notion of why Hardcastle should give you the false message?’

‘I have some notion it might be an act of stupid malice against his master. He stumbled against the wall of the staircase once or twice as were going up and it occurred to me he was acting in some sort of random, fuddled state. I think he may be not only a rascal but a drunken rascal.’

‘And not a man engineering some complicated deception?’ Gylby shook his head. ‘He’s cunning, all right. But he couldn’t see far enough ahead for anything like that.’

‘Another point. You thought Guthrie was mad? And you formed that impression before hearing Mrs Hardcastle speak of doctors who had apparently come to inquire into his sanity some years ago?’

‘I thought him mad from the first few minutes. Only you must understand, sir, that I use the word very loosely. I don’t know that his was the sort of madness they certify; I rather suppose not. It was more as if he lived in the shadow of something that no man could remain quite sane while contemplating. He was broken, fragmented. He was mad as the heroes were mad when the Furies were hunting them down.’

I looked at my companion with a new interest. ‘A most illuminating remark, Mr Gylby. I have always maintained against our educational reformers that there is the greatest utility in the grand old fortifying classical curriculum.’

3

The road from Dunwinnie to Kinkeig and the road from Kinkeig through Glen Erchany to Castle Erchany form with the long line of Loch Cailie a rough equilateral triangle. In the centre of this soars the bulk of Ben Cailie, buttressed to the south by the smaller mass of Ben Mervie and skirted to the south again first by Glen Mervie and then by the precipitous Pass of Mervie. The panorama of this on our right as we drove – peak upon peak of virgin snow soaring into a bleakly sunlit winter sky – was a spectacle well-calculated at once to soothe and elevate the mind. The latter part of our journey was performed in silence, broken only by an involuntary exclamation of my own when we finally turned a bend and sighted the castle across a final arm of the loch. As a historical monument it is, I suppose, of quite minor importance, and additions in the later seventeenth century have somewhat modified – though they have not destroyed – its stern medieval character. But my first impression of it was of something so darkly powerful and so inviolably lonely – like a monster of the most solitary habit half couched in a lair of larch and snow – that I could not have been more struck by the sudden appearance of the original Tintagel itself. Particularly impressive was the tower, massive but remarkably lofty, and built, it may be supposed, for observation as well as defence. Looking at the sheer lines of it from a distance I could understand Gylby’s instant knowledge that the man who had fallen from that height was inevitably dead.

We drove over a drawbridge and pulled up in the central court. Young Gylby said cheerfully: ‘Home again!’ and assisted me to alight.

My first awareness – like that of Erchany’s unbidden guests a few nights before – was of the dogs; confined in a system of kennels at the farther end of the court, they were signalizing their disapproval of our advent in no uncertain terms. I was next aware of an elderly and infirm old woman in a shawl and snow-boots, hobbling towards us with every appearance of haste and anxiety. For a moment I was almost afraid we were to hear the announcement of another fatality; then she called out eagerly: ‘You’ll have minded my poison? You won’t have disremembered it, Mr Gylby, sir?’

‘Here you are, Mrs Hardcastle.’ And Gylby handed her out the parcels from beside the driver. She was about to make off with them as hastily as she had come when she became aware of the presence of a stranger. Not – as I imagine – without some discomfort in the joints, she made me a ramshackle curtsy. Gylby said politely: ‘Mr Wedderburn – Mrs Hardcastle.’

‘Sir,’ she said, ‘you’d best know at once what Mr Gylby knows. There’s a terrible great number of rats in Erchany.’ She tapped her parcels and looked fearfully about her. ‘But I’m tholing it no more! I’m an old body grown and now I’m going to sleep of nights.’ Her voice sank hoarsely and she nodded her head to where the figure of a man had appeared beside the kennels. ‘But don’t tell my man! He’s fell unkind. Whiles he sets them at me.’