Old House of Fear

by Russell Kirk

  Three thousand miles away, two men sat in a handsome office. “That’s our island,” Duncan MacAskival said: “Carnglass.”

  Across the Ordnance Survey map his thick forefinger moved to a ragged and twisted little outline, away at the verge of the Hebrides, which even upon the linen of the map seemed to recoil from the Atlantic combers. “The tattered top of a drowned mountain. And that’s the castle, by the bay to the West, Hugh: Old House of Fear. I like the names. You’re to buy Carnglass for me, cliffs and clachans and deer-forest and Old House and all; and price is no object.”

  Hugh Logan smiled at the heavy old man in the swivel chair. “Why send me to the Western Isles to haggle for a speck of rock I know nothing about, Mr. MacAskival? Why do you need Carnglass? And why not have a Glasgow solicitor do the business for you? I’d enjoy the trip, right enough, but I don’t need to tell you that my time costs you bona fide money. Any junior clerk could buy an island for you.”

  “Look out there, Hugh.” MacAskival swung round his chair to the big window at the back of his teak-panelled office. Far below, stretching eastward for a quarter of a mile along the river, the stacks and coke-ovens and corrugated-iron roofs of MacAskival Iron Works sent up to heaven their smoke and flame and thunder. “Look at it all. I made it. And what has it given me? Two coronary fits. I’m told to rest. But where could a man like me fade decently? I’m not made for quiet desperation. There’s just one place, Hugh, where I might lie quiet; and that’s Carnglass.”

  MacAskival peered at his map. “I haven’t seen Carnglass,” he went on, “except in pictures, and no more did my father, or his father. But the MacAskivals came out of Carnglass to Nova Scotia in 1780, and they didn’t forget the little croft below Cailleach – that’s the sharp hill north of the Old House, Hugh. Their Nova Scotia farm was sand and stumps, and yet not so barren as that Carnglass croft. Still, they’d have traded ten farms in Nova Scotia for that wet little plot in Carnglass. And after two strokes, I think I’d give the mills and all for that croft – with the island thrown in.”

  Logan had walked to the window, and now stood looking toward the glare of the coke-ovens; the flames went up hotly into the Michigan twilight, that April evening, and the incandescent masses of coal fell roaring. “Why, I think we might make a better bargain than that, Mr. MacAskival. Peat bogs and tumbledown castles go cheap nowadays. But why do you mean to send a man like me to buy you a few square miles of dripping misery?”

  “Cigar, Hugh?” MacAskival pushed a box toward him. “The doctor says I can have just one of these a day. Well, I’m not so crazy as I seem, and you know it. Under your veneer, you’re like me – sentimental as a sick old ironmaster. Don’t tell me you’ve never thought of having an island all to yourself. So I’d like to see you hunt this dream of mine; you work too hard for your age. ‘Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.’ I don’t plan to bare my bosom to the moon in Carnglass, but it should do you good to play at being a pagan suckled in a creed outworn – for a few days, anyhow.”

  Old Duncan MacAskival was a trifle vain of his quotations and allusions, Logan thought. But Logan liked Mac-Askival, a self-made man, a good deal better than the average product of the big business-administration schools. It came to Logan that he, Hugh Logan, rapidly was growing into an old man’s young man. It had been more than a dozen years since he had led a battalion in Okinawa. He knew much of Scotland, born in Edinburgh as he had been, though his parents had taken him to America when he was nine; and he had gone back to take a degree at Edinburgh University. A slackening of pace, for a week or two, might do no mischief. All his life he had hurried: schools, the university, the war, and the firm: in too much of a hurry, either side of the water, to laugh, to marry, or even to dream. “No Mr. MacAskival,” Logan said, “I’m not the man to laugh at you. But you’re a canny Scot, though five generations removed. Do you need to pay my price just to draw up a deed to an island?”

  “You’re more of a Scot than I am, Hugh, though you look American enough nowadays.” MacAskival leant back in his heavy chair. “Well, yes, you’ll be worth your price in this business. You know something of Scots law and tenures. And you can wheedle odd customers; Lady MacAskival is one of that breed, they tell me. Here, look at yourself in that mirror.” MacAskival nodded toward the baroque glass against the teak panelling.

  Logan saw reflected a mild-seeming, amiable face – or so most people would call it, probably – almost unlined; still a young man’s face. Sometimes, when he had been a major of infantry, that face had tended to mislead people, and then Logan had to rectify impressions. He had a spare body. “Do I look like a fool?” he asked MacAskival.

  “Not exactly a fool, boy, but close enough. You’re innocent: that’s the word, Hugh. What a face to set before a jury – or a crazy old creature like Lady MacAskival! Anyone signing a contract with you assumes that he’s had the better of the bargain. Now I’ve tried before this to buy Carnglass; I’ve been at it more than three years. I’ve tried those Glasgow solicitors. They’re too sharp: what we need with Lady MacAskival is babyish innocence.”

  “Can’t you find any intermediary but a Glasgow solicitor?”

  “Why, Hugh, somehow I got in touch with a retired major or captain – Indian Army, I think – who wrote that he might do my business for me. He seemed to want his palm greased. His name was George Hare, or George Mare, or something of that sort.”

  Logan rubbed his chin. “In Glasgow? There was a criminal case, if I’m not mistaken – something to do with state secrets, or vexing little girls, or some nasty affair – in Scotland, a year or two ago, with the defendant a cashiered Indian Army officer – and that sort of name. I may have a clipping about it in my files. I’m not sure, though, that the name was either Hare or Mare. A captain, I think.”

  “For all I know, Hugh, this may be your man: anyway, though I greased his palm in moderation, I’ve never had a line from him since. He said he knew Lady MacAskival. So that’s a bribe down the drain. Now will you take my shilling?”

  “All right: I’ll take my innocence to Carnglass.” Smiling, Logan turned back to the map on the big desk. “There still are MacAskivals in the island, then? And what sort of cousin of yours is this Lady MacAskival?”

  “Call me Duncan, Hugh,” MacAskival said, “if you’ll really take up the business for me. No, there’s not a real MacAskival left in Carnglass, so far as I can learn. Lady MacAskival was born Miss Ann Robertson; her family owned distilleries, money-makers. It was a queer match when she married Colonel Sir Alastair MacAskival, Indian Army, who was old enough to be her father, or more. Sir Alastair had scars and medals, but nothing besides. Though he was chief of the Mac-Askivals – and there’s precious few of that little clan left – he was born in a but-and-ben in North Uist. I get all this from an Edinburgh genealogist. Sir Alastair’s great-grandfather ran through his property so as to keep up a fine show in London. The Great Clearance of Carnglass was in 1780 – that’s when my people were booted out, you remember – and it was the work of that old reprobate Donald MacAskival, our Sir Alastair’s great-grandfather: he turned the whole island into two big farms and a sheepwalk, on the chance of squeezing more money from the rents, and told all the crofting MacAskivals to go to Hell or Glasgow. A few had the money for steerage passage to Nova Scotia, which eventually made me president of MacAskival Iron Works. My father was a pushing Scot, and so am I – and you, too, Hugh.”

  “So Ann Robertson brought money back to the Mac-Askivals more than a hundred years after the Clearance?”

  “Not simply money, Hugh, but Carnglass itself. What little extra Donald MacAskival contrived to wring out of the rents after the Great Clearance did him no good. He died bankrupt; and the creditors took Carnglass. His son sank down to being the factor for a small laird in North Uist, and there the family lived on, hand to mouth, until young Alastair went out to India and got some reputation for himself along the Northwest Frontier. When he was past forty, he sailed home to Edinburgh on leave. Ther
e he met Ann Robertson, and married her, and they bought back Carnglass with Robertson money, and restored Old House of Fear.”

  Logan bent over the map to find the tiny square that marked the Old House. “That’s an uneasy name, Duncan, for an ironmaster who wants peace and quiet.”

  “But it’s a brave old house, Hugh. And the name is Gaelic, not English: ‘fear’ is spelled ‘fir’ or ‘fhir,’ sometimes, and it means ‘man.’ Old House of Fear is Old House of Man. Old! Why, the foundations of the oldest tower go back to Viking times. The Norsemen took Carnglass in 799 or thereabouts. But there was some sort of chief’s house – Picts or whatever they were – before then. There’s a tale in the island that Carnglass was Eden: man started there, and woman too, I suppose. But Carnglass hasn’t many living souls today. Old Donald MacAskival swept off five hundred people – MacAskivals and MacLeods and MacDonalds – in the Great Clearance, which left only thirty or forty souls, all named MacAskival, in the whole island. There still were twenty or thirty of their descendants living in Carnglass when Alastair and Ann bought it back. But Ann, Lady MacAskival, isn’t much of a hand for company, it seems; because when Sir Alastair died, in 1914, she got rid of what MacAskival crofters were left. Off they went to a smaller island, Daldour, three miles south across the Sound of Carnglass, one soaking peat-bog: if Carnglass was Eden, Daldour was Hell. And there they are still, for all I know, if they haven’t starved. Our Lady MacAskival, who’s over eighty now, lives alone at the Old House with only a handful of Lowland and English servants, according to what I could learn from Edinburgh. She never leaves Carnglass. And she doesn’t often answer letters.”

  “Then she’s not even a cousin of sorts to you?”

  “Not she. The chiefs of MacAskival were of Norse stock – the name’s Norse, at least. And she’s from the Lowlands. Sir Alastair and she never had children – I gather, besides, there wasn’t much love lost between them – and she has no heirs, so far as I can find. And anyway, Hugh, the odds are that I’m a Pict or a Scot, not a Viking. The island people generally took the chief’s name for a surname, though they might have no blood connection, I don’t mean to set up for chief of Clan MacAskival: my people were fishermen or crofters who got themselves killed, now and then, in MacAskival’s feuds. Old Donald MacAskival’s father was out for the Pretender in ’45, which is one reason why Donald went so deep in debt and made the Clearance. No, all I want is to live in the Old House and look across the Sound of Carnglass, Hugh. That’s the dream that I want you to buy for me.”

  “The Old House is liveable, then, Duncan?”

  “Sound enough, they say, though hardly anyone but Lady MacAskival and her servants has seen the inside of it since 1914. That Edinburgh man couldn’t find any photographs for me later than 1914.” MacAskival pulled open a drawer. “There they are: not very good pictures, taken the year Sir Alastair died. It seems to have been foggy that day.”

  “I presume it usually is foggy in your tight little island, Duncan,” Logan said as he took up the half-dozen old prints. “There’s no inhabited island further out into the Atlantic.” Foggy, yes; and yet the great bulk of Old House of Fear loomed distinctly enough in the middle ground of the photograph. Carnglass meant “gray stone,” and the whole stern mass of masonry was of a gray that blended into the outcrop of living rock upon which the Old House was built. But the castle was not of a single period. The first photograph showed, on the left, an enormous square tower of rubble, capped by a high-pitched roof apparently sheathed with stone slabs. At one corner of this tower, a little turret stood up, perhaps covering the top of a stair in the thickness of the wall; Logan knew something about Scottish medieval architecture. To this great tower was joined a range of domestic buildings, three stories high, with dormers and crowstepped gables, also built of gray rubble: early seventeenth-century work, Logan thought. A smaller square tower closed the range. And then, abruptly tacked upon the right side of the smaller tower, commenced a mansion-house of ashlar, with small barred windows on the ground floor but very large windows of plate glass above; this was in the Scottish “baronial” style of Victorian times, yet carried out with some taste and not altogether disharmonious with the medieval and seventeenth-century buildings. A large door in the middle of this latterday façade seemed wide enough for a carriage to pass through; perhaps it led to an interior courtyard. “All this on the right is Sir Alastair’s addition?” Logan asked.

  “Yes,” said MacAskival, “and the place is bigger even than it looks: there’s a courtyard behind, with buildings all round. The Robertson distilleries paid for it. When Sir Alastair and his wife bought back the island, the original castle hadn’t been lived in for seventy years or more, and the roof was collapsing but they put everything in shape and made the place twice as big. I suppose old Lady MacAskival rattles about in it now. Even though she’s one of the richest old women in Britain, income tax and surtax won’t let her keep much more than five thousand pounds’ income, and that probably only pays the servants she has left, and for her food. She has trouble finding help, by the way, I hear. It’s not everyone who wants to scrub floors in Old House of Fear.”

  “And you want a white mastodon?”

  “Only to die in,” MacAskival told him, cheerfully. “Every man to his own humor, Hugh. I have the money to keep the place as long as I live; and if I stay there only from time to time, I can keep clear of British income tax. I may as well spend a few million, because the Treasury and that foundation you set up for me will take all that’s left when I die, anyway. I might leave you the Old House, though: it shouldn’t take you long to acquire a taste for that style of living.”

  Hugh was turning over the other photographs. “One of the clachans: one of the two villages in Carnglass. These are what they call black houses, because the peat smoke just goes out of a hole in the roof, after circulating round the room – but I suppose you know all this, Hugh. Snug, anyway. And I don’t suppose any one of these is lived in now, except possibly by a gamekeeper or two. Now have a look at this other picture. What do you make of it?”

  In the foreground, Hugh saw a desolate graveyard, a low drystone wall enclosing it; some tall white monuments showed above the wall, and in the center stood, at a perilous angle, an immense Celtic cross. Beyond the monuments was what seemed to be an ancient chapel with a modern roof. And away in the background there hulked, dimly, a tall circular building, rather like a vast beehive.

  “It all looks like something from before the Flood,” Logan murmured.

  “Well, much of it is nearly as old as anything in Iona,” MacAskival observed. “That’s the chapel of St. Merin. She was stoned to death, I think, in the days of St. Columba. Sir Alastair restored the chapel as the family burial-vault. And that’s the famous Cross of Carnglass, tenth century; or it would be famous, if Lady MacAskival ever let archeologists ashore. I don’t know what the thing beyond can be. Do you feel more like becoming Laird of Carnglass?”

  “It’s a strange island,” Logan said, unsmiling.

  “Yet it can’t be so strange as the rumors make it.” Mac-Askival was pleased, clearly, at having shaken Logan out of his commonsensical ways. “Except for a few friends from London, the old lady’s let nobody poke about since her own little clearance of 1914. They say that boats trying to put into the harbor have been shot at. And they say there are more bogles stalking through the heather than there are live folk. And servants who’ve left the Old House have told people in Oban and Glasgow that some of the London visitors are worse than the bogles.”

  “Scotland has no law of trespass – only acts of interdict after damage has been done to property.”

  “You can tell that to our old lady, Hugh. If we do get Carnglass, I’ll let the archeologists and the naturalists browse. I’m told there are rare plants and birds, and a few fallow deer still. Nearly the whole island has become deer forest. One of the farms – the one closer to the old house – seems to be kept in fair order; they have Highland cattle. I learned that from Lag
g, the factor, a Galloway man.”

  “You’ve corresponded with him, Duncan?”

  “In a unilateral way. First, three years ago, I wrote to Lady MacAskival herself: no answer. Then I found out the names of her London solicitors. I sent them an offer, and they wrote that they’d refer it to Lady MacAskival. Then silence. I wrote again. The solicitors answered that Lady MacAskival would give me a reply after reflection. More silence. I wrote to the solicitors a third time, a year ago yesterday, and got a letter back promptly: Lady MacAskival no longer did business with them, they said, and I should write to her factor in Carnglass, Thomas Lagg. I did. Ten months ago, Lagg replied that Lady MacAskival was indisposed, but would communicate with me after some interval. She never has said no – mind that, Hugh. Then still more silence. I wrote to Lagg three times; no reply. But yesterday this letter came.” From under his blotter MacAskival drew a sheet of cheap notepaper, which curled up as he tried to lay it before Logan.

  “I told you she was odd,” MacAskival said, as Logan smoothed the sheet. “The envelope was curled, too, and only partly straightened by having been in a mail-bag.” Also the paper seemed water-stained, and the writing in one corner had run badly. Though it was in a clear feminine hand, it appeared to have been written very hastily:

  “3rd March

  “Duncan MacAskival, Esq.

  “Sir:

  Lady MacAskival desires to discuss with you at once the proposal which you have set forth. She requests that you come in person to Carnglass without delay, or send confidential agents. Immediate action is imperative.”

  There was no signature. “Lady MacAskival’s own hand?” Logan inquired.

  “Presumably,” MacAskival said. “The doctor tells me that I’m not quite fit for ocean cruises just now. So Hugh Logan, Esquire, is my confidential agent. Do you think you can act properly conspiratorial? I saw you as Cassius in the Players’ Club performance of Julius Caesar last month, you remember, Hugh; and you were the best man in the cast. You’d have done as well as a professional actor as you have with the law. Well, I’ve cabled both the old lady and Lagg. I’ve told them that you’ll arrive this week.”