Castle Barebane

by Joan Aiken

When the letter was done she straightened her back and went to make her apologies to Elspie, who received them dourly.

  “Ou, ay, ye’re well-meaning eneugh, I’ll no say the contrar’. But, gude kens, ye try my patience ilka minute o’ the day. What’s this aboot Annot, the noo, ye’ve tell’t her she’s no’ tae mind the bairnies ony mair? What gars ye be sae ram-stam?”

  “Annot tells them frightening stories,” Val said shortly. “Pieter was dreadfully upset last night. It took me a long time to quiet him down.”

  “And noo Annot’s upset, she’s fair coupit. The puir lass was greetin’ sair i’ the byre, an’ says ye’re a hard, ill-meaning wumman. What for could ye no’ tell the silly hizzie juist tae hauld her tongue and keep mim?”

  “She’s such a chatterbox she’d never remember. I couldn’t trust her.”

  “Ye canna trust me an’ ye canna trust Annot; is there a’ body i’ the whole waurld that’s high nebbit eneugh for ye to trust?” snapped Elspie, and took herself off to see how Mungo was getting on. She left Val very subdued.

  It seemed best not to visit Mungo herself, for she was afraid that Elspie must have refused him, and he must be feeling very unhappy. Instead, Val played I spy with the children, a before-bedtime game which they usually enjoyed very much; it was also a useful means of enlarging Jannie’s random vocabulary. But today, for some reason, Jannie was in a fractious mood; she would not attend but screamed like a banshee because one of the buttons on her brown holland overall was loose. Sighing with irritation Val fetched needle and thread and sewed it tight, for Jannie, if displeased with something in her surroundings, could easily keep up the screaming for a couple of hours without let, until the fault was put right.

  Even when the button was sewed, Jannie did not wish to join the game; she arranged all Val’s cotton reels in one of her strange, meticulous little patterns, and then abruptly knocked them all over the floor, wailing her eldritch wail; she ran about the kitchen wheeling and turning like a disturbed bat; she paid no heed to songs, rhymes, or counting games; even Pieter’s tickling, which usually charmed her, now only prompted her to a shriek of “G’way,way,way!” and finally she resorted to a practice that Val was hoping she had abandoned, of sitting cross-kneed on the floor, feverishly sucking her fingers and rocking, rocking, rocking from side to side until it made one dizzy to watch her.

  She resembled, Val thought, those birds that circle and cry in agitation before bad weather.

  It was a relief when the children’s bedtime came and they could be bathed in front of the kitchen range (a cheerful old-fashioned practice which Val was glad to adhere to in preference to using the glacial mahogany bathroom installed by the auld laird), shooed upstairs, seen through their prayers, and settled for the night.

  Val’s legs and back ached; by the time the children were in bed, she felt as exhausted as if six days had passed since breakfast. It was the last straw to discover that Jannie, following another of her least desirable habits, had secreted a sticky lump of cold porridge under her pillow for nighttime consumption.

  Val did not wait, after this was cleared up, to go through all the events of their day with the children, as was her usual habit; she gave them each a warm but swift hug and ran downstairs, rejoicing in the prospect of the new books waiting to welcome her in the library. Soon she was lost, happily absorbed in reading, as she had not been since she left New York, making notes as she read, deaf to all around her.

  Some hours went by before she woke to the realisation that the library fire had dwindled to a white mound of peat ash, and that her lamp was flickering and smoky, a sign that it was liable to run out of oil and leave her in the dark unless she went to bed at once.

  She walked upstairs, sighing. The house was quiet; Elspie must have retired long ago.

  As Val passed the entrance to the Long Gallery she paused, arrested by what might have been a faint, repeated sound from its shadowy farther end.

  There! Creak-creak, and again, softly, creak-creak.

  Val hesitated, thinking of Thrawn Jane and the ghostly cradle. It was almost certainly a swinging door or shutter, caught in some draught of air; now would be the chance to nail the myth and expose the fallacy.

  But her lamp flickered again; she found herself possessed of an extremely strong disinclination to explore the far, dark, cold, silent realms of the gallery. Suppose her lamp went out? Then she would be able to discover nothing. Instead she closed the gallery door and went on, rather fast, to her own room.

  All was quiet in the children’s room; no repetition of last night’s trouble, she thought thankfully. But when she went to inspect them, she found Pieter’s eyes open—wide, dark, unwinking, fixed on her.

  “What is it, Pieter? Why aren’t you asleep?”

  “I heard what you said this morning, Aunt Val. When you were talking to that man.”

  Oh heavens, she thought, not another. What now?

  “What do you mean, Pieter?”

  “Elspie and I were carrying pillows down for the poor man in the stable. And we went by the upstairs library door and we heard you. You said you—that you think Mama and Papa must be dead.”

  Val was stricken to the heart—with remorse at her own carelessness, with sorrow for the little boy.

  “I’m sorry, Pieter,” she said slowly. “I’m very sorry you heard that. It may not be so, you know. I didn’t want you to be troubled with such thoughts.”

  Suddenly his face convulsed.

  “It’s not true, it’s not true!” he cried out in a kind of anguished whisper. “I won’t believe you. I hate you. You don’t love us a bit. I want Mama! I want my own mama!”

  She tried to comfort him but he turned from her, pushing her away with a gesture of strangely adult dignity, and lay with his face to the wall.

  I am failing those children, Val thought, as slowly, tiredly, she peeled off all her layers and layers of clothes in the cold room and made herself ready for bed.

  She lay awake a long time listening to the sound of Pieter’s desolate sobbing.

  Next morning she went to check the source of the creaking. As she had expected, it was an open window, on the seaward side of the Long Gallery. She closed it and thought no more of the matter.

  Chapter 14

  Val slept late the following day and woke with a guilty start into a vacuum of silence which filled her with immediate terror.

  Usually the children were awake long before her and she would be roused by the murmur of their talk and thumps on the floor, and Jannie’s reedlike singing. But all she heard this morning was the ever present whisper of the sea, and the creeper tapping on the window. She jumped hastily out of bed and realised that it must be very late indeed; the children had already dressed and gone. Filled with foreboding she made a hasty toilet, scrambling on her clothes and bundling up her long hair. She feared that Elspie, after the scene of yesterday evening, and further harassed by the responsibility of Mungo’s presence, would be in no easy mind to cope with the children on her own. And Pieter, if he was still in last night’s state of distress, might not be able to play his usual role of mediator between Elspie and his small sister.

  Matters seemed all set for disaster, and Val ran down the wide stairs at headlong speed, across the freezing hall, and through the dining room to the kitchen, expecting to find heaven only knew what scene of hostility or chaos.

  What she found was in almost laughable contrast to her expectations.

  One of the main causes of friction every morning was Elspie’s wish to get the children through their breakfast at top speed so that she had undisturbed use of the kitchen table. Jannie, a slow eater at any time, was particularly so at breakfast and would sit dreamily dipping her spoonful of porridge into her bowl of milk and then forgetting to eat it until Elspie was almost exploding with impatience and frustration. Val had several times suggested finding a small table and seating the
children at it in a corner of the large room, but Elspie said that would clutter up the kitchen and was not to be thought of.

  But now, apparently, it had been thought of. Jannie was placidly eating porridge at her own slow pace, sitting on her three-legged stool in front of a settle which served as a table, in a warm corner beyond the hearth. Mungo was seated nearby in a rocking chair which, the day before, and no doubt for months past, had been in an outhouse lacking a rocker. He was making a rope net and Pieter, squatting by him, was absorbedly watching the process. Silence and peace reigned. Even the tabby kitchen cat, a sure barometer for Elspie’s moods, which sometimes stayed out of doors for days on end, lay at full stretch in front of the hearth, purring blissfully. And Elspie herself stood making bannocks at the big table with none of the vexed air that Val had feared; in fact she seemed positively cheerful and greeted Val as affably as if she had not called her a “silly tawpie” twelve hours before.

  “I’m sorry I overslept,” Val said.

  “Aweel, aweel. Think naething of it. The parritch is keeping hot yonder.”

  “How are you today, Mr. Bucklaw?” Val asked. “You look much better.”

  “I thank you, mistress. Ay, my fever has cleared off finely, thanks to the doctor’s medicine and Elspie’s brose. So in return I’m making her a net to catch a fish for your dinner. Is the boat yet in the boathouse, Elspie, that was aye there when I was a lad about the bothy?”

  “The boat?” Elspie gave a brief laugh. “Ay, an’ has been this fifteen year—a’ geizened an’ the boards clean rottit through. There’s nae boat fit for sea aboot the place, noo, an’ hasna been sin’ Sandie Duncan passed away.”

  “Then I’d best build you another,” said Mungo matter-of-factly.

  Pieter was amazed. “Could you, Mr. Bucklaw?”

  “And why not, laddie? A boat’s only planks nailed together.”

  Val wandered to the window with her bowl of porridge. The kitchen looked inshore, across the orchard, up the narrow glen. The wooded hillsides were hoary with frost and grey with mist, a melancholy sight; yet she suddenly felt hopeful. If Mungo planned to stay on at Ardnacarrig—that might entirely alter the aspect of life here! There seemed something tranquil and invincible about him, as if he let the waves of life wash past him and remained himself undisturbed.

  Later in the day, discovering him in the stable yard, she tackled him straightforwardly about his plans. He stood, reflective, gazing with a measuring eye at a stack of planks that lay over joists in the coach-house roof.

  “Could you really mend the boat, Mr. Bucklaw?”

  “Och, ay,” he said easily. “It’s no’ a difficult job. Seven, eight planks in the hull want renewing; the lave are sound enough. A week or two and I’ll have it sorted good as new, and Pieter and I catching you a herring for your breakfast.”

  “You’re planning to stay here, then? I’m very glad! How does Elspie feel about it?”

  “Elspie is no sae kittle and camsteerie as she makes out,” he said with a grin. “It’s true she’s aye anxious about what will Lady Stroma say. But I’ve a bit put by, for I’ve been a saving man all my days; and if I choose to redd up the gardener’s croft and pay her leddyship rent for it, I reckon she’d be sweer to pass by sic a bargain. The more so if I put in a bit work about the garden and never ask for pay! Auld Jockie will be blithe enough of a bit of help now he’s so lame. Forbye, who’s to tell tales to her leddyship if she’s awa’ stravaging around the desert on a camel?”

  “Not I,” agreed Val. “She can think herself lucky to get so good a tenant.”

  She had observed that Mungo had already mended two more of the broken chairs. Furthermore he had replaced the pane in the card room French window—a task which Elspie had been beseeching Jock to do for weeks past since the north wind whistled into the room and they were obliged to lock its door every night. Mungo had also chopped wood, fetched in enough peat from the stack to last them five days, had sharpened the kitchen knives, cleaned all the oil lamps, and had endeared himself to Pieter and Jannie by teaching the former to use a plane, and making a wooden spinning top for the latter which kept her transfixed with delight for an hour at a time.

  “What about Jock, though?” Val went on. “You’re sure he won’t object?”

  “He willna mind. He an’ I were cronies, in the auld days.”

  “Were you born here, then, Mr. Bucklaw?”

  “Nay,” he said unexpectedly, “I was born in Brazil.”

  “Brazil?” How did you ever come to travel from Brazil to Ardnacarrig?”

  “Och, weel, my kinsfolk came fra these parts. My great-grandfather emigrated to Brazil in 1780. Always, in my family, there was this tale we had from my father, and he from his, about my great-granny, how she went sorrowing all her days for her bits of apple trees, and the sight of the heather on the brae, and the sound of the sea on Ardnacarrig shore. So, when I was a young fellow, and footloose, I had a great curiosity tae come here and get a sight o’ the place that she loved so well.”

  “And?”

  “And I came, and I thought it a bonny spot—though I couldna find my great-granny’s apple trees, nor the croft, that must have fallen down long syne.”

  “And?”

  “And I was going off again, when I saw Elspie, spreading out the sheets to catch the sun in the bleach field.”

  He stopped for a moment.

  “You saw Elspie?”

  “Eh, she was a bonny young thing! With her hair the colour of a wedding ring, and her pink cheeks, and her blue eyes that, forbye, had sic a snap to them! An’ I reckoned I’d stay here a while, gin I could earn my bread by fishing or herding sheep. And so I did.”

  “And?”

  “An’ the end of it was, I asked her would she have me.”

  He stopped again. His eyes often had a visionary, meditative, indwelling look, as if he glimpsed a whole pattern of large events which he observed with reverence and love but would never attempt to alter for his own ends.

  “An’ she wouldna have me. So I left Ardnacarrig, and I wandered over the whole waurld, but I never forgot her. I never saw another woman I could love as well. And in the end I came back.”

  Val had a huge feeling of sadness. If this spot is haunted, she thought, it is by the despair of thwarted lovers—Mungo, Elspie, Marcus, the Carsphairn sisters, poor Thrawn Jane and her fisher laddie. Oh, let one story end happily!

  Gently, knowing that he would not take it amiss from her, she asked, “And will she have you now, Mungo?”

  “I dinna ken,” he said with simplicity. “She is thinking about it. Forbye it is enough happiness to be here, near by her.”

  Val felt ashamed of her own impatiences. Here she was, longing to get away, finding Elspie nothing but an impediment to her own plans. How different from Mungo, who was content to let events take their course, whose manner of loving was so pure and undemanding.

  During the next few days Val observed that Mungo, by indiscernible stages, assumed a place of greater and greater importance in the household. He removed himself to the gardener’s little tumble-down croft, long since left vacant, and set about putting it to rights. But his influence was to be felt even from a distance. Frictions, divergences that had hitherto invariably led to lost tempers and bad feeling now, by the mere fact of his peaceful presence, somehow sorted themselves out and became innocuous. Elspie and Val were more kindly disposed toward one another, more tolerant of each other’s foibles. The children seemed to snuff in draughts of Mungo like air; Pieter learned a hundred things a day from him—knots, carpentry, the solar system, songs, geography, card games, and the names of Roman emperors. Mungo seemed to possess a boundless store of information.

  “In my watches off I would aye be reading a book,” he explained when Val, discovering him with a child on each knee, reciting The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, expressed admiration at the
amount of poetry he seemed to know by heart.

  Val felt that Mungo had arrived just in time to save them all from disaster.

  By Friday she had not the slightest qualm about riding over again to see Helen Ramsay—an excursion which, at the beginning of the week, had seemed a pure impossibility.

  “Shall you mind if I go off and leave you with Elspie and Mungo?” she asked Pieter.

  “Oh, no,” said Pieter. “He’s letting me help him mend the boat. And Jannie sits in the little cart he made her, and he sings songs to her about corn rigs and barley rigs.”

  Pieter had not spoken again to Val about the possibility of his parents being dead. But a clouded, unhappy air which had hung over him for a couple of days after their conversation had gradually cleared away. He seemed happy to learn from Mungo and work with him and follow Mungo’s habit of taking events as they came. And Jannie had taken to Mungo as a kitten does to a tree.

  “ ‘Orny rig, ‘arly rig,” she repeated dreamily after Pieter, spinning her top on the kitchen table.

  Val saddled Dunkie and set off with a light heart. Now that she knew the way it seemed a shorter distance over the headland. The day was grey, dull; icily, sullenly cold and foggy; each landmark loomed up at her before she expected it. Despite the bad visibility she made good time; Dunkie seemed eager to reach his destination. In a couple of hours she was crossing the bridge above the harbour. Today the village of Wolf’s Hope lay completely silent, shrouded in mist; nobody moved or talked, down on the stone pier. Perhaps the boats were all at sea, invisible in the pearl-coloured distance.

  Unexpectedly, David Ramsay was at the manse to greet Val. He did it gravely, with a finger on his lips, and explained in a low voice, “My mother had a bad night. She is a good deal pulled down this morning.”

  “Perhaps my visit would be too tiring for her?” Val said, bitterly disappointed.

  “Oh, no. She has been wearying to see you. But she has just fallen into one of her little drifts of sleep, so sit down, till she wakes, and drink a cup of Tibbie’s tea.”