Michael Innes - Lament for a Maker

But at lunch time came another shock, for the laird must needs be served in the great chamber, a dark grand place that spoke of the pride of the Guthries in times gone by. Chill and echoing, the echo half muted by the chill damp air, it was choke full of lumber at one end and had a regular minstrel chorus of rats in the gallery at the other. Before a carven fireplace, that big you could have stalled two–three shetland ponies in it, was a long Flemish table, sore eaten by the worm, and down this Guthrie and his ward Christine Mathers faced each other – with wee Isa Murdoch, right feared now by the whole unco stour, bringing them their bit stewed rabbit not on some old cracked ashet but on a half-polished silver dish. Syne Guthrie ordered up wine from the cellar and when the dusty bottles were before him he gowked at them as if they held some strange elixir new-sent him from another planet, as well he might seeing that nothing but water and milk was ever drunk at Erchany. Mistress Hardcastle had sent in a corkscrew, Guthrie’s hand hovered on it as if he would open a bottle and see, then he started up and called to them to get on with their work and that they hadn’t yet opened the gallery.

Going upstairs Isa asked Christine did she know what the laird was about, and after all these years was he going to hold in with the gentry? But Christine seemed to know nothing, her thoughts were far away as ever, it was but a dreaming life she had led at Erchany, though with passion maybe behind every dream. So Isa was none the wiser, and presently they were at the stair head and facing the gallery door.

The Erchany gallery was the work of some late seventeenth century laird, building before the lust for distant commerce nigh beggared Scotland and the Guthries. He had been among the English and liked fine the way they builded their great houses in Tudor times; at Erchany he knocked all the topmost rooms together and made a long low gallery. Three turns it had to it and would have been a right roundabout but for the tower – for he couldn’t drive his fancy through the nine foot walls of that. ’Tis said that after building it the Guthrie was fair out of patience on all but smoring wet days: then he would dander round his gallery getting exercise, as blithe as a laverock. For a Guthrie ’twas an innocent pleasure enough.

None had ever been in the gallery in Ranald’s time and when Christine and Isa took a keek at the door they must have felt none would ever enter it again. There was but the one door, massive and iron-bound, and it was here that Guthrie, closing nigh all Erchany forty years since, had cheated the locksmith of his labour. Christine turned pale, Isa said, as she glimpsed the fury that had gone to the closing of that door. Great nails had been driven slantwise through the boards deep into the jamb, the blows with the strength and skill to them of a man who had handled axe and hammer in the Australian bush. It was to save his silver that Guthrie, near-going that he was, had put shutter and key to Erchany, but here surely was some other passion, forty years past or forty years hidden, that had yet left record of itself like a sculptor’s passion, deep bitten into the dark oak.

Up to this the laird, save for an order here and an order there, had taken small part in the confloption he was causing; almost, Isa said, he seemed misdoubting of what he was about. But now he came upstairs and saw the two women standing helpless before the gallery door, and sudden he fell into a fair stamash. It was seldom Guthrie raged, cold and proud he was and with a strange cruel courtesy, and it sore frighted poor Isa anew to see him fair rampage before that door, as it might have been Satan raging before the portals warded by Sin and Death. Syne he strode to the landing window and called out, hoarse and high, to Tammas ploutering in the court below to bring him his axe and see that it was fell keen. For turned seventy though he was Guthrie ever felled his own timber, and could have given points at it to the coarse creature Gladstone, him that fooled the Midlothian folk in ’eighty. Up came Tammas then with the axe, him with his great gomeril mouth open and slavering, it with a subtle curve to its long handle that was unlike the common woodmen’s axes here about. Guthrie threw off his jacket and standing spare and straight in his sark cried ‘Stand back!’ in such a voice that Tammas tripped over his own mucky feet and fell head over heels downstairs. Isa scraiched and Christine ran down to see if he had mischieved himself, but fient the glance did the laird give to anything but the great oak door of the gallery. In a moment he was hacking at it as a man might try to hack his way out of a burning biggin – only he was fair skilly, the blows came light and fast and where any slummock of a chiel would have bedded the axe like Excalibur in that tough wood Guthrie took chip and chip just where he wanted, the axe leaping back free every time. At the first blow there was a great scampering behind the door, the gallery rats fair frantic at the shattering of generations of repose. And at the second blow the Erchany dogs in the court gave tongue and Tammas down the stair recovered sufficient breath to set up a yowling like a soul in the eternal bonfire. Down in the kitchens the Hardcastle wife heard the rumption and, half blind and half dottled that she was, she ran out to the court and tolled the great cracked rusty bell that had meant fire or foray centuries past. Almost, there had been no such uproar in a Scottish keep since they found King Duncan with his bloody sheets about him.

But Guthrie worked on unheeding, driving deep furrows here and there about the door. After an hour, the sweat pouring from him, he called for water, washed out his mouth and spat; then he drove at the living wood again; pale he was, Isa said, and with a burning spot to his cheeks, but his wrists were like steel still and his legs without a tremor. Four o’clock came, and five; a last sunbeam, thick with dancing dust, was climbing up the worn stone stair and in the court the lengthening shadows of the battlements were closing like black and jagged teeth upon the eastern wall; at six half the gallery door fell inward with a crash. And at that Guthrie came down, changed his clothes and called for his supper, the same as if he had been about some common task enough that day. Only he broached a bottle of wine, the same that had been brought up for luncheon, and offered some to Christine – that grave and formal, Isa said, he might have been entertaining a stranger, douce and decent, to the fit honours of Erchany.

These were the events of the day before Isa Murdoch left the meikle house. But the events of the night – which was when things went clean over the quean – are yet to come. And then I’ll be telling you something of Christine Mathers, and something of how I came myself to have part in what befell at Erchany.

6

Either the sore clout he gave his head on the stairs or the unco conduct of the laird fair upset the daftie Tammas. At the best of times he was an unchancy chiel, whiles almost sensible-like and whiles clean skite; whiles right sweet and gentle so that you were real sorry for him, not all there that he was, and whiles girning and glowering as malicious as the foul fiend. Always though he had kept from troubling the queans, he seemed to know nothing of the purpose of them any more than some neuter thing. Isa had never been feared of him, ever she gave him out his meals at the back-kitchen door with no more thought than if she had been meating the hens. But maybe the fall he had gave the daftie’s system a jolt the Harley Street slummock could put a learned name to, for that night the way of nature came to him and he decided to make try for Isa. Late in the night a rustling that was more than the capers of the Erchany rats awoke the quean, she opened her eyes in a full moonlight and saw Tammas just louping in at the window. One keek at the face of him was enough for her, she was out of bed and through the door while her legs had still strength to carry her. Tammas gave a sort of slavering yammer horrid to hear and was across the room in pursuit.