Castle Barebane

by Joan Aiken

  Tibbie’s pleasant face was pale and heavy-eyed, but she greeted Val kindly and made much of her.

  “Come in ben, by the fire, Mistress Val, for it’s a gey bitter glunshie day, an’ the fog is like to trickle into the very marrow of your bones.”

  Val drank tea and warmed herself; in a few minutes she heard Helen Ramsay’s voice call faintly, “Is my girl come yet?”

  “Wait till I sort ye,” called Tibbie, speeding to her mistress’s side, but Helen was impatient and would only suffer herself to be wrapped in a shawl and have her hair smoothed a little. Then Val was allowed in.

  If Helen had looked ill on the last visit, today she had the clear stamp of death on her. Yet she smiled at Val with her dry, flaked lips, and her eyes, sunk in huge lavender-coloured sockets, were still full of light.

  “It’s good of you to come all this way.”

  “Good? I love to come.”

  “Have you brought drawings of the children?” Helen asked immediately.

  Val had: clumsily executed sketches for which she blushed as she drew them out, but Helen said at once, “Oh, they have the very feel of childhood. There he is, pushing her on the swing. And here they are, building a little house . . . Thank you, Val! You have reminded me of something I thought I had lost for good.” She studied the drawings again; Val would have relieved her of them but she held them tight. Presently she added, “You have given me something else: Marcus writes that he is coming here.”

  A question pierced Val: would he arrive in time? She looked down, lest by chance she transmit her thought to Helen, who was so weak today that she could only talk in short snatches. Val had come intending to ask her advice about many things: Mungo, and Elspie, and Lady Stroma’s stingy offer about the children—but faced with this state of extremity she could not be so self-centred and importunate. Instead she told stories of Jannie and related her adventure with the tinklers. She tried to be entertaining, yet felt she was barely making contact with the dying woman; all that really passed between them was a warmth, a feeling of friendship. Yet perhaps no more was needed? When Helen’s lids fluttered down again, after fifteen minutes or so, Val tiptoed back to the front room, where Tibbie was ironing a pile of delicate nightwear.

  “She’ll no’ be lang, noo, my puir lamb,” Tibbie said simply, wiping her eyes. “But she’ll aye be as fresh as apple-florrish while I hae the care o’ her.”

  When Helen woke again it was plain that she was too tired for more talk. She lay flat, drawing difficult breaths, her eyes half-closed, her high forehead pearled with sweat.

  Sadly, Val said goodbye.

  The transparent lids moved slowly up; Helen’s brilliant brown eyes smiled at her.

  “I have to rest,” she whispered. “Such a bore! Goodbye, my dear girl. I am afraid we may not meet again. But amn’t I lucky to have made such a fine new friend so late in life? Perhaps the good Lord will allow me to come back—and take a look at Wolf’s Hope from time to time—for I shall certainly tell him that heaven won’t be heaven for me unless I can!—and then I shall drift over to Ardnacarrig and breathe a greeting in your ear. Which will be away better than old Thrawn Jane’s mumblings.”

  “If I’m still there,” Val said smiling, trying to keep tears back.

  “Oh, I believe you’ve taken a liking to the spot; you’ll be here a while yet. And you’ll keep friends with my Davie, won’t you?” Helen whispered. “I know it will be back to his test tubes for that one, the minute I’m gone, but he’ll be aye needing some good friends to see he keeps his clothes mended and his bills paid.”

  “I’ll do that,” Val promised.

  “And my funny old Marcus—he swore he’d come and I trust him—but if he’s too late—you’ll give him my dear love?”

  Val nodded dumbly.

  “Now you be happy—with your bairnies! God gives us such amazing presents. And mostly we are aye looking at the underside of them and turning them about—and wondering what have they to do with us, instead of just plain enjoying them.” Helen’s whisper died from weakness. Her eyes closed. But she opened them again and smiled without speaking.

  Val leaned over and kissed her cheek, then walked blindly from the room.

  She murmured a goodbye to Tibbie, who said, “Ye’ll no’ be leaving us yet? Ye’ll bide a wee while, Mistress Val?”

  “I’d rather—I’d rather go,” Val said. She longed to be outside, and Tibbie, understanding this, allowed her to leave. In front of the house she found David, with his own mare saddled.

  “I’m coming with you,” he said.

  “You can’t leave her!”

  “Why not?” He smiled sadly. “There’s nothing I can do for her that Tibbie can’t do as well, or better. Anyway, she said before you came that I was to ride back with you; besides, in the state you are in you would lose your way for sure.” He patted her arm in a comfortable, brotherly way, and helped her mount. “Come, don’t grieve! Think how she’d scold you, if she knew, and tell you that you were wasting your time, when you ought to be enjoying the view, or listening to the birds.”

  “There don’t seem to be any birds,” Val pointed out. The blanketing mist had silenced the world; not a creature seemed to be stirring on the hillside as they trotted up the steep track. David exerted himself to talk, and told her about a Russian doctor called Pavlov who was conducting some unusual experiments on the physiology of digestion and stimulation of reflex responses by extranormal means. She listened apathetically at first, but presently became interested and began putting questions, arguing, and discussing. His phrase “conditioned responses” made her think of Elspie, and she told David about the arrival of Mungo, and Mr. M’Intyre the lawyer, and Elspie’s problem.

  David viewed it rather matter-of-factly.

  “If the old body wants to marry Mungo, I don’t see what’s to stop her living with him in the gardener’s cottage. I doubt if Lady Stroma would turn her out of there.”

  “But it goes deeper than that,” said Val, who had been observing Elspie closely these last few days. “I think in a strange way she really feels wedded to the house—she has lived there alone for so long, looked after it all her life really; she has given up everything for it. And she is a Carsphairn, after all, she belongs there; she knows every corner and stair and doorknob of it blindfold. Sometimes I think I am hardly real to her—coming from so far away, such a different background—except as a kind of irritation!”

  “Does Mungo seem real to her?”

  “I’m sure she loves him. But I really doubt if she will allow herself to marry him.”

  “Maybe she will allow herself to become his mistress,” David said cheerfully.

  “Davie! How can you! At their age?”

  “Oh, Val, you do make me laugh. You are such a sweet simpleton! With all your fine talk of emancipation, and city airs! What do you think folk do, who haven’t the benefit of your education? Who don’t—like you—know all about everything?”

  She was not offended at his teasing, as she might have been a few weeks before, but said despondently, “On the contrary, I begin to think I know nothing about anything, and am the world’s biggest fool.”

  “You can’t be, or my mother would never have taken such a rare fancy to you.”

  They had reached the hilltop. The ruins of Wolf’s Crag castle loomed like grey cobwebs in the mist to their left, but the bay below them was invisible, lost under cloud. A gull cried dolefully somewhere close at hand, reminding Val of Jannie’s plaintive little songs. How long it seemed since the day they had first come up here with David, though it was only a few weeks in reality; what a lot she had learned in that time.

  “Davie, tell me about the auld laird; did you ever meet him?”

  “My dear girl! He died years before I was born—in his mid-nineties. He really was auld—a relic of the eighteenth century. Drank four bottles of claret at e
very meal—exercised the droit de seigneur over the local female population—and yet professed a gloomy hellfire religion, which justified all he did, but allowed no one else any latitude. The story goes that he used to beat his daughters regularly and kept them more or less locked up. And there was a younger brother with Jacobite leanings who got pushed out—or left home because he couldn’t stand it—and was never heard from again.”

  “No wonder Lady Stroma dislikes the place. I wonder if he beat Elspie along with the legitimate daughters?”

  “Perhaps not; perhaps he preferred her; it’s often so.”

  “And then out of remorse made an unfair will, leaving them the money and tying her there for life.”

  “Many people try to rectify the mistakes of a lifetime in one atrocious piece of testamentary injustice.”

  “The worst mistake of all.”

  David began telling tales of death-bed repentances he had come across during his practice, and they were laughing over these as they rode into the stable yard. Where, to their amazement, they found a light traveling-carriage halted, and Sir Marcus Cusack just in the act of descending from it.

  The next hours were a confusion for Val. Sir Marcus, on hearing David’s report of his mother, was for climbing back into the carriage and pressing on to Wolf’s Hope immediately. But the driver said it was not to be thought of. The carriage would not go over the headland; they would need to go round a longer way, by road, which was at least fifteen miles, and the horses were too tired to start off again until they had rested.

  “Ye should ha’ gone direct to Ravenswood, Sir Marcus, as ye planned at the outset,” said Andie the driver scoldingly, “ ‘stead o’ stravaging oot here in sic a ram-stam manner.”

  “I know, I know, Andie. One should not give way to impulses.”

  David offered the loan of his mare Greylag so that Sir Marcus could ride on ahead and suggested himself following with the carriage when the horses were rested. But Sir Marcus declined with a shudder.

  “My dear David, I am as anxious as can be to see your dear mother, but if I were to set out on that flea-bitten nag she would deposit me in some lochan—yes, yes, I remember her passion for water—and I should never get to Wolf’s Hope. No, I must e’en put up with the results of my own foolish impatience, and wait until my beasts are rested. And the undeserved reward for that—I hope—will be two hours of Miss Montgomery’s company.”

  David said in that case he would ride home and prepare his mother for Sir Marcus’s arrival.

  “Do that, David—I will be infinitely obliged to you. And bespeak me a room at the tavern, my dear lad—we shall hardly get back to Ravenswood this evening.”

  “I am sure that the news you are on your way will make my mother better.”

  David clasped Val’s hand—she could only clasp his in return, speechlessly—remounted the grey, and was away up the hill again. Greylag’s hoofbeats diminished and were lost in the mist.

  Val was left facing Sir Marcus and found, as is often the case after building up a strong image of somebody in their absence, that the reality differed from it disconcertingly. He was both younger than she had pictured him and less handsome; more human, more weary, not such an exotic, more of a real person. She found herself oddly at a loss and fell back on offering refreshment in the house.

  “Truth to tell,” he said, “I would prefer a stroll. I have been sitting in the carriage all day and am cramped and jaded, rather than hungry or tired.”

  Remembering her own exhaustion at the end of the trip from Edinburgh, Val thought his stamina remarkable, but of course he was a seasoned traveler—and she had had the children. He wore shoes today, not slippers, she noticed. His gout must be better. Perhaps it would be kinder not to inquire after it.

  “Shall we walk in the policies?” she suggested.

  “No, it is too dark and damp; let us go down to the shore. Andie can go into the house and tell them that you are back.”

  They strolled across the lawn and down between the azalea banks. Exactly as she had in Edinburgh, Val felt that their acquaintance had ripened in the interim. Neither of them felt any need for formal preliminaries.

  “You are just back from Wolf’s Hope,” he said. “Tell me about her.”

  And so Val described her visit.

  Down on the hard flat white sand—for the tide was low—they walked back and forth, turning when they came to the burn, or to Jock’s line of posts. To and fro, to and fro in the mist; the sea was hardly visible, though they could hear its hushed murmur; the fine icy moisture spangled Val’s blond coronet of hair and the fur collar of Sir Marcus’s greatcoat.

  “This is like walking round the ship,” she said.

  “That ship! What a torture chamber! And yet I did not altogether dislike the voyage.”

  “Tell me about Helen’s husband,” Val said. “Was he like David?”

  “In looks? Much more handsome. In his nature, perhaps—except that David has more of curiosity and reasonableness. Och, James was just a theologian!—a morose, bumbling, touchy, indrawn cross-grained churl of a fellow, who was forever exploring man’s relationship with God while he neglected his fellow-humans. Yet she loved him—there was something childish and touching about him—he was easy hurt, though he was aye trampling on the susceptibilities of others. Without Helen to care for him, he’d have been in a bad way indeed.”

  “I hope she is better by the time you get there,” Val said. “Should we be turning back? I do not like you to be staying here a moment longer than you need to.”

  She longed for him to stay and yet she had a simultaneous desperate urgency for him to be gone to the scene that waited for him.

  He looked at his watch.

  “A few more minutes. It is peaceful here. A kind of limbo. I have been thinking about you a great deal. I liked your essays. I shall have much to say to you about them next time we meet.” He looked about and said, “I have imagined you here, walking, looking out to see, feeling imprisoned, perhaps. How are matters going with Elspie?”

  “Oh, she has been so much better since Mungo came!” Val said and described the miracle.

  Sir Marcus laughed, and the laugh had its usual transforming effect on his drawn sallow face. “I was hoping that would happen when I encouraged Mungo to come to Ardnacarrig.”

  “You encouraged him? You know Mungo?”

  “Och, yes, we met some years ago in the port of Piraeus. His ship was docked there, and I was taking the air on the quayside. We drifted together the way two Scots will be doing, anywhere about the world, and discovered that, besides plenty of foreign towns, we also had one small part of Scotland in common. And we cracked a couple of bottles of resinated wine (terrible bad for the kidneys) and he was telling me about how he first saw Elspie—”

  “Spreading out the sheets in the bleach field!”

  “So I said, why not go back and try his luck a second time? For I knew that she was still at Ardnacarrig and still single. And he said he was minded to, when he had put by just a bit more and could go to her not as a landless young rover from Brazil but as a retired second mate with money in his pocket. Well then, whiles, he was writing to me after that from different parts of the globe, and I was putting some of his descriptions of places into Selkirk’s, for he has a fine, sharp, judgmatical way of getting the bones of a place on to paper, has old Mungo; and the result of that was, when in the end he did come back to Edinburgh and call on me, I was able to tell him that I had a publisher keen for him to write a book about his travels. So he has more to offer Elspie now than just the cash in his dorlach! But, would you believe it, the silly sumph was still not sure of his welcome and would be for writing a note first, and maybe staying away altogether, if she did not answer. I almost had to push him out on the road, before he would gather his courage. And then he was fain to walk it—like a pilgrim.”

  “That was one o
f the best deeds you ever did!”

  “And so you are content enough here? You have young David to talk to, and the sea to listen to—”

  “And your books to read—I haven’t thanked you enough—”

  “Tut! That was nothing. I am going to have some useful reviews from you. And you have heard nothing from your brother?”

  “No, nothing. But, Sir Marcus—”

  “Och,” he said, “call me Marcus. Even David does, and he is my godson. Well?”

  “In those papers you kindly sent me—there was a report of a poor unfortunate woman found killed in a London street—”

  “Oh, ay, ay,” he said. “One of those terrible murders—the Bermondsey Beast—I am sorry there should have been such a thing for you to come on in the papers I sent.”

  “It wasn’t just that—but the woman! I had met her! It was—the report said that it w-was Miss L-Letty Pettigrew,” Val said, shivering; “she was the actress I told you about, the friend of Nils who told me where the children were to be found. And she had been killed—in the same dreadful way.”

  Sir Marcus was silent for a long time, as they paced on. He looked very perturbed. At last he asked, “When did you read this?”

  “Only last night. I have been reading one of your papers every day—making them last! But Sir—but Marcus, don’t you think—doesn’t it seem—as if there must be some kind of connection between—between my brother and these awful murders?”

  “Perhaps. I will need to be thinking about this,” he said. “Have you mentioned it to anybody else—written to anyone about it?”

  “No. Nobody.”

  “But back in London did you at any time tell anyone that you had seen this actress?”

  Val thought.

  “I may have mentioned it to the waiter at my hotel—I was asking how to find the theatre—and I probably told Lady Stroma—” Had she mentioned Letty Pettigrew to Lord Clanreydon, in that curious interview? She was fairly sure she had not. But he, of course, must have known the actress—had she not intended to go with Nils on Clanreydon’s yacht, on that pleasure cruise, the arrangements for which had been instrumental in bringing Val across the Atlantic? Had the cruise ever taken place? she wondered idly. What was the yacht’s name—Dragonfly. “Cost a cool three-quarter million,” she heard Nils’ voice saying. “Curtains and carpets—the Prince of Wales is coming too.” Had the prince actually gone? Presumably not—Val had read of his presence at a London ball in one of those same papers. “I’m fairly sure I told no one else,” she said finally.