Castle Barebane

by Joan Aiken

  “And who,” asked Val, drily, to cover a certain inner qualm, “who is Thrawn Jane?”

  “Och, she was the laird’s youngest dochter twa hundred years syne. She was the youngest of five lasses, and her father hadna the siller—for times were hard then as they are noo—to give them all tochers, so Jane wasna able to marry. Syne she wished to wed a fisher laddie, as nane o’ the gentry wad take her wi’out a tocher—but her father couldna thole that either. So she e’en jumpit off the tower and killed herself; she had a bairn too, some say. The daft gowks i’ the clachan will have it that she’s aye daikering aroond, of a night, in the long gallery upstairs, wailing for her bairn an’ her lost fisher laddie. Times folk speer have I seen her? An’, sin it keeps them at a decent distance, I’ll not say them nay!”

  “And have you really seen her?” Val inquired with interest.

  “Och, no!” said Elspie with a scornful laugh. “I’m no’ one to be believing in such foolish superstitions, and me a professed member o’ the kirk.”

  Val was relieved to hear this. Herself a strong-minded sceptic, she had no time, either, for ghosts or bogies, but there was no blinking the fact that Ardnacarrig House did lend itself with alarming ease to such notions: the wind wailed in chimneys and through cracks; all the uneven floors creaked and the shutters rattled; and the air of neglect and decay, dark panelling, smell of damp and mould, and the bitter cold of the place would incline any unwary mind to thoughts of spectres and hauntings.

  “Is that why you are alone here? Will no one else live in?”

  “Na, na, it’s no’ that, it’s just her leddyship’s economy.” Another sniff. “Sin’ her leddyship is aye off voyaging in France and Araby and dear kens where, an’ disna show her nose here from one five years to the next, she sees nae reason to spend a muckle deal on the upkeep o’ the place. Forbye, at best, she was aye one to skrimp, an’ closefisted wi’ her siller,” Elspie said with a small, grim smile, breaking off a thread.

  Val was aghast. “She doesn’t expect you to look after those children on your own?” She looked at the old woman perturbedly. She had entertained expectations, not of a whole retinue, certainly, but at least some staff—a couple of maids—not just one old woman. Suppose Elspie were to fall ill? What would happen to the children then?

  “There’s Mysie’s daughter Annot. She’s anither silly flisk-mahoy, but she’ll do to mind the bairns, whiles, an’ maybe tak’ them on an airing now and again.”

  Annot sounded like a hopeful ally, to Val’s ear.

  “Will Annot be here tomorrow?”

  “Ay, aiblins I’ll be fetching her,” Elspie replied drily. “Nae doot she’ll be eident tae see the bairns an’ the leddy from London.”

  “Elspie, I want to talk to you about Jannie,” said Val, and plunged boldly into an analysis of Jannie’s peculiar difficulties and backwardness, and the dreadful time the children had had with Mrs. Pipkin.

  “Jannie doesn’t mean to misbehave, you see, it’s not wilful naughtiness or disobedience; it’s just that she hasn’t learned as fast as most small children do. She doesn’t seem to know about right and wrong.”

  Elspie’s reserved expression showed what she thought of this.

  “A wee bit ding or a skelp now and then is a grand help wi’ yon kind o’ learning for a slow bairn.”

  “No, no,” said Val firmly. “Her mother is tremendously particular that she should not be spanked or hit, particularly on the head or face.”

  “Aye, well,” said Elspie, unconvinced,” wee Kirstie was aye a douce, thowless kind of lassie herself, a thocht lacking in gumption. She’d weep buckets, gin a body flyted at her.”

  Val was discouraged, feeling that she had made little headway.

  “Just the same, I think you should take pains to try to understand Jannie, and not be impatient with her. The unkindness of that woman in London has had a very bad effect on her, it’s plain.”

  “Ou, ay,” said Elspie sourly. “There’s some lucky ones has it all laid out for ‘em. ‘Dinna be too hard—try to understand her—’ “ she mimicked. “While the lave of us e’en have to thole it oot as best we can. Naebody said ‘Try to understand her’ about me, when I first came to this cauld auld hoose, a wee thing of five, aye greeting for my mither! All I got was a skelp on the lug.”

  “Times have changed since then! And isn’t that all the more reason why you should be patient with Jannie?” As Elspie still appeared unconvinced, Val added, “Also I’ve arranged for Dr. David Ramsay to come and have a look at her.”

  Elspie’s expression relaxed.

  “Ay, ay, he’s a good laddie enow, an’ as a doctor he’s a fair marvel, folk say. I’ve nae need for doctors mysel’. Forbye he gave up a fine practice in Enbra’ tae come back here and care for his mither. If there’s aught ails the bairn, he’ll soon have her sorted to richts.”

  Val had an impulse to ask if Elspie knew Sir Marcus—but it did not seem very likely; and Elspie was such a dry, cross-grained character that if she did know him, she probably had a very poor opinion of him and his numerous ailments. But it was a lucky thing that he had written to Dr. Ramsay; the doctor’s opinion seemed the likeliest influence to make Elspie take a more humane and less Old Testament attitude.

  “Well, I’ll be off to bed,” Val said, stifling a yawn. “It was a long day.”

  “You’ll no’ be used to bairns either, I doot, being an unmarried leddy?” Elspie said with a shrewd and slightly malicious look. “Maybe yon’ll be the first time ye had charge of any?”

  Rather nettled, Val agreed that this was so. There was a considerable difference, she felt, between the attitude to be expected from an ignorant old housekeeper in the back of beyond, and an educated person who had had the benefit of growing up in the world’s most modern city with a chance to read (and even to write) all the most enlightened opinions on child development and education.

  However one could hardly say this to Elspie.

  “Oh, I almost forgot—I have a note for you,” she said suddenly, remembering it as she was about to leave the room. “An old man with a white beard came up and gave it to me just as we were about to get into the carriage. He came up and said were we going to Ardnacarrig and if so, would I please give this to Mistress Elspie Cross.”

  She handed over the little packet—a piece of paper folded and refolded until it was just a wad.

  “My sartie!” Elspie peered at the paper suspiciously. “For me? Who can it be fra? It was no’ Robina that sent it?”

  “No. It was an old man with a white beard,” Val repeated.

  Elspie seemed so completely puzzled and mystified that Val lingered inquisitively while the note—slowly and with great caution as if it might contain explosive—was unfolded and opened out. It was lucky that Val did wait, for, at sight of the handwriting, Elspie gave a long, low, gasping cry, like someone who has been pierced to the heart, and leaned back in her chair. Her cheeks were whiter than the towel she was darning.

  “Och, no, no, no!” she moaned.

  “What is it?” said Val anxiously.

  But Elspie only rocked to and fro, to and fro, with her apron over her head, moaning, “Och, it’s too late, far an’ awa too late! I canna have him noo, sic a disturbance as it would make! Forbye her leddyship wouldna care, maybe, a’ taken up as she is noo wi’ foreign travel. But no, no, it’s too late. It’s too late. I canna be fashed wi’ him noo!”

  She seemed so terribly distressed and preoccupied that Val began hunting through the cupboards until she found a decanter of whisky. A mouthful of this had a calming effect on Elspie and brought some colour back to her cheeks. She wiped her eyes on the apron.

  “I ask your pardon, Mistress Montgomery,” she said with dignity. “It was—it came on me that unexpected. And indeed it is awa’ too late. I couldna change my ways now. But it did strike me to the heart, for I loved him dearly the o
nce. And I would like fine to know how he looked. Did he—did he look well, now?”

  Val racked her brain to remember some details of his appearance. She had not taken particular notice—she had only the dimmest recollection of somebody very thin—tallish—much the same build as Elspie in fact!—with white hair under a sailor’s cap, a white beard, and very bright eyes.

  “Yes, he looked well, I think,” she said. “Brown—weatherbeaten—is he a sailor?”

  “And how would I be knowing? I havena laid eyes on him for over forty year! Eh me, eh me!”

  She still rocked to and fro, gazing at the glow of the fire. As Val walked upstairs, she heard the murmur, repeated again and again, “Nay, nay. I canna put up wi’ him now. It’s awa’ and awa’ too late!”

  Val did her best not to think about Thrawn Jane as she carried her lamp across the wide shadowy landing and along the dark passages. This is a sad house, she thought. It has been containing people’s longings and frustrations for hundreds of years.

  Yawning, she entered her room, where, to her relief, the fire still burned. The children were in peaceful sleep. She longed to climb into her own feather bed but first there was work to be done.

  Huddled close to the fire she took up her notebook and pen. Edinburgh, the coach, the countryside, Elspie, Ardnacarrig, Thrawn Jane. Journal of a Yankee Lass, she wrote. Where to begin?

  Chapter 11

  When Val woke next morning she jumped out of bed and dressed speedily, for the air in her bedroom was arctic; in the course of the night her fire had gone out. Washing in cold water she observed to herself that some means of taking a hot bath must be discovered in this mansion if she was to spend more than a day under its roof—and she had a gloomy presentiment that it would be necessary to stay at least a week—perhaps even longer—to make sure that Elspie was sufficiently inculcated into the correct way of looking after children so as to make her a safe guardian.

  Val longed to return to Edinburgh. It was all a great nuisance.

  When, clad in all her petticoats under her warmest dress, with a woollen jacket over that, she walked to the window and pulled the curtains back, a surprise awaited her. She had expected to see snow, from the white light between the draperies. What she saw instead was the sea. As they approached it from the back, Ardnacarrig House had appeared sunk in woods. But from this window there was not a tree to be seen. The window itself was half shrouded in ivy with which the whole of this side of the house appeared to be overgrown. Directly below lay a flagged terrace, half obscured with weeds. Steps led down from it to a rough lawn, which was bounded on three sides by a low-spreading azalea hedge. From a gap in the hedge on the far side, a path led across short turf to a pale crescent of sandy beach, beyond which lay the sea, inky-dark but calm, except for a white frill of waves at the edge of the sand. Looking to right and left, Val realised that the house lay on flat land in the centre of a small bay. Headlands rose steeply at either end of the half-moon of beach; to the right, a river ran out beyond a sand bar. Gulls were crying thinly, and she could hear the bleat of sheep and see a few of them feeding on the turf beyond the azalea hedge.

  The morning was grey, frosty, and bleak, but at least there had been no more snow during the night. Val was filled by a sudden urge to go out and inspect this new landscape. It was a long time since she had been in the country, after all! First, though, she tiptoed to look at the children through the communicating door. They were still in profound sleep. So she pulled on her coat and fur hood, found a pair of gloves, and went softly out of the room and downstairs.

  She took a different stair from the one they had come up last night, and it led to a big half-derelict room with a warped piano, some card tables, and, stacked in a corner, a tangle of rods and fishing tackle.

  Two French windows led on to the terrace she had seen from above, and she tried to open one of them, but it evidently had not been used for years; it first resisted her efforts, and finally gave with a terrifying screech and such a jerk that a pane fell on to the terrace and broke. Rather dashed—though the accident was hardly her fault after all—she pulled-to the broken window behind her, crossed the terrace and lawn, then followed the path, which ran between more azalea banks, down to the beach. At the crest of its sandy slope she turned to look at the house and realised for the first time how extremely large it was. Probably a central core of seventeenth-century manor house had been ‘‘improved” in the eighteenth century, she guessed, and had then received a few more additions during the present century—all those pointed pepperpot turrets like neatly-sharpened pencils must—must they not?—have been added during the last forty years, whereas the crow-stepped gables looked very ancient indeed and were probably part of the original building.

  A wall, presumably surrounding kitchen gardens, ran off to the left, and on the right were barns and outbuildings. Behind the house and gardens rose the tops of tall trees, no doubt the woods they had traversed last night. And farther back still, the ground rose sharply to purple-dark moorland, and ran out on either side to the headlands. One of these was bare and rocky, with tufts of heather; the other, much higher, rose to an awe-inspiring three-hundred-foot crag. Near the top of this crag perched a roofless ruin with crumbling battlements and shattered buttresses—no doubt the original home of the Carsphairn family before they forsook its airy height and built themselves a more comfortable and convenient residence down in the bay. Apart from the ruined castle there seemed to be no other dwelling or sign of human life in the bay, unless you counted a couple of fishing boats well out to sea.

  Exhilarated by the cold salty air but somewhat discouraged by the total solitude, Val walked swiftly back to the house and let herself in through the French window. Returning to the children’s room she found that Pieter had woken and managed, by blowing on its buried core, to rekindle his and Jannie’s fire. Adding twigs and bits of peat, he had achieved quite a creditable blaze and was sitting by it, shrouded in a blanket, immersed in one of the storybooks Val had read him on the train, every now and then looking up to add a cautious morsel of fuel to his fire.

  Val’s heart warmed to the sober, sensible little boy; he did not have Jannie’s touch of diabolical charm, but he was so practical, so reliable.

  “Hullo there, Pieter,” she said softly. “Do you want to get up? The sea’s just outside.”

  “I know.” The children’s window, also, looked on to the beach. “I’ve seen it. I saw you out there.” He did not sound particularly enthusiastic. “Wasn’t it cold?”

  “Yes,” said Val honestly. “But there are lots of beautiful shells and all kinds of things that have been washed up in storms. Don’t you want to come out and see?”

  “All right. We’d better wake Jannie.”

  Jannie stirred drowsily. Val had already discovered that she was a very heavy sleeper, perhaps in compensation for her manic activity when awake.

  “Come along Jannie—wake up!” Giving her a gentle shake Val found with dismay that Jannie had soaked both herself and her bed in the course of the night, and was lying in a dank, ammoniacal swamp.

  “Oh dear, Jannie! Couldn’t you have got up if you wanted to go to the bathroom? You’ve got the water closet right next door!”

  “She’s frightened of the way the wind howls in there,” Pieter observed philosophically, laying more peats on his fire.

  Val impatiently washed and dressed the little girl and bundled her nightclothes and bedding into a pile for later laundering. Then she led the children down, following the route she had taken before, and out on to the terrace. She was longing for them to discover something that they could enjoy about this place, so as to predispose them in its favour; also, she herself had such happy memories of trips to the beach with her father that she could not believe the sea would fail to please.

  She was wrong, however.

  “Don’t like, don’t like!” wailed Jannie, burying her face in the sk
irts of Val’s coat.

  “Oh, come on, Jannie, don’t be a misery. Look—lovely shells. See, here’s a pink one.”

  Jannie rudely struck away the proffered shell, and Val found herself within an ace of ignoring all her own exhortations to Elspie and giving the child a furious slap. But Pieter, accustomed to Jannie, was more successful in arousing her interest.

  “Look, Jannie—sheep! Lambies!” He took her hand and pointed. Jannie’s eyes followed his pointing finger to the flock feeding on the gorse-studded grass above the beach and her face lit up with pleasure and interest.

  “Let’s walk along to them,” proposed Val.

  They had gone about a hundred yards along the sand when Pieter said, “I can hear Elspie calling.”

  Val turned and saw that Elspie was scouring after them along the beach, running with the speed of a girl of twenty, and shouting something as she ran. Her cap strings had come undone, her pale-gold hair fell down her back in a loose knot, and when she caught up with them, breathless as she was, she burst into a torrent of commination which was so broken and disjointed that mention of individual ill-doings floated haphazardly like straws in the general denunciatory sweep.

  “Broken windows—door left open for the sheep tae wander in—all that peat used—all those wet sheets, who’s tae have the laundering o’ them?—breakfasts getting cauld—mun I be expected to run to Wolf’s Hope after ye? Och, maircy—bairns in the hoose is waur nor all the Goths, Vandals, and Pharisees pit together!”

  “I’ll wash the bedclothes,” Val said irritably. “You only have to tell me where you do it. Jannie was probably upset by the journey—I’m sure she’ll settle down in a day or two. And I’m sorry about the broken pane—the door was jammed—I wanted the children to see the beach—”

  Elspie had her breath back. “Never ever walk that way!” she said, gesturing on along the sand in the direction they had taken, toward the higher headland.