Dubious Deeds

by Philip Ardagh

  Magnus rubbed the back of his head. ‘Will ye no’ keep doin’ that, Ma,’ he grumbled. (Aha! I was right.) ‘Anyhow, English here knows I was only joking.’

  ‘Of course you were,’ said Eddie, for a quiet life. He found being called ‘English’ effectively annoying, but he wasn’t about to admit it. He concentrated on his breakfast instead, which tasted delicious. It was often his favourite meal back home, too, because Dawkins (his father’s gentleman’s gentleman) was excellent at rustling up what he called ‘eggy snacks’.

  Mr McFeeeeeeee folded his paper in half and laid it on the breakfast table. ‘Is there any more mash in the pot?’ he asked. For some reason best known to himself, he called tea ‘mash’, so don’t you go thinking there were potatoes in there too.

  ‘You’ve had the last of it, Angus,’ said his wife.

  ‘Then I’ll have McDuff bring round the pony and trap so as I can be takin’ the boy to Tall Hall,’ he said.

  His wife stood up and busied herself clearing the table. Breakfast was the one meal she liked to prepare and clear away herself. Her one maid wasn’t live-in and didn’t usually arrive at the house until after Angus McFee had left for his office in town.

  No sooner had Angus left the room than the mini-version of him, Magnus, had snatched the paper from his place at the table. Magnus flipped through the pages until he apparently came to a story which caught his eye.

  ‘Oh! It says in this here article that there’s now conclusive proof that the Scots are more intelligent than the English,’ he said. ‘They did a series of scientific tests with a Scotsman, an Englishman, a monkey and a parrot and …’ he pretended to read on, ‘… apparently, the Englishman came last in all of them. No surprises there, then!’ Magnus grinned.

  ‘Very funny,’ sighed Eddie.

  Not ten minutes later, he was in the trap with Angus McFeeeeeeee at the reins of the pony once more. When he got out to open the freshly painted white gate, Eddie was careful to be on the lookout for horse manure – steaming or otherwise – but noticed that it had already been cleared away from the night before. McFeeeeeeee rode the pony and trap through, and Eddie closed the gate, then jumped up behind the lawyer again.

  The ride to Tall Hall was uneventful, but the scenery was even more dramatic than Eddie’d seen on the way to the McFeeeeeeees’ house. They passed a few more crofters’ cottages and saw one or two people, but for much of the time their only audience was some very shaggy-looking red-coloured cattle, with long fringes over their eyes and very large pairs of horns on their heads, and some equally shaggy-looking goats with equally impressive sets of horns. Once Eddie even thought he’d caught sight of a large-antlered deer.

  Then Tall Hall came into view; the Scottish seat of the last of the MacMuckles by birth, the woman Eddie knew as Even Madder Aunt Maud. Eddie felt proud that this huge house now belonged to the Dickens family. It certainly was a strange sight with its very high walls and small windows, but with its very ordinary roof plonked down on top of it.

  ‘Where’s Gudger’s Dump – I mean the MacMuckle Falls?’ asked Eddie as the trap clattered up the uneven and very stony track leading to the hall. It had obviously once been a cobbled driveway, but the cobbles had been robbed out – pinched/nicked/purloined/stolen/half-inched/removed – to build other things elsewhere, and the few remaining lay like a smattering of stones found naturally in the soil.

  ‘There,’ the lawyer pointed.

  It took Eddie some time to realise what McFeeeeeeee was pointing at. Today, we live in a world where Do-It-Yourself ‘water features’ are everywhere. Nowadays, around my neck of the woods, it’s unusual to find a garden that doesn’t have an artificial plastic-lined pond or an imitation Greek urn with water bubbling out of it, or a glass wall with a thin veil of water cascading down it, or a human-made stream flowing down steps of pebbles, all powered by an electric water pump. Back then there were really only two types of water feature: those made by Mother Nature and those made for very rich people by landscape gardeners who did things on a big scale.

  Mother Nature nearly always did a good job, on a variety of scales ranging from intimate sources of springs bubbling out of the earth to dramatic, pounding waterfalls with thousands of gallons of water pouring from staggering heights. Professional gardeners created huge formal ponds, stone-statued fountains of writhing mermaids or characters from ancient Greek mythology, with jets of water spraying here, there and everywhere.

  The name Gudger’s Dump certainly suited what Eddie saw before him far better than the grandly entitled MacMuckle Falls. It looked like a dribbling bog; an accident … a puddle left by a passing herd of elephants. It was also slimy, black and horrible.

  Reaching the front of the house, Angus McFeeeeeeee pulled the horse to a halt, jumped down from his seat, adjusted his tam-o’-shanter to a more jaunty angle on his head, and produced a large key from his pocket. He handed it to Eddie, who had jumped down beside him on the gravel. ‘Would ya like to do the honours?’ he asked. Eddie took the key. ‘Thank you,’ he said. They strode together across the driveway. Eddie’s Scottish mission was a clear one. He was to visit Tall Hall and take a look around to see what state everything was in. He was to check that the furniture wasn’t rotten and the roof fallen in, for example, and to see which – if any – items were worth boxing and sending down to Awful End. They were planning to sell the last of the MacMuckle property.

  ‘A house in Scotland’s no use to me,’ Even Madder Aunt Maud had told Eddie before his departure. ‘I have all I need here. My Malcolm. My Jack. My shiny things and, of course, my Marjorie.’ She patted a wall. ‘What more could a woman need?’ She picked up a large glass eye from a bowl of assorted shiny things and popped it in her mouth, sucking it like a gobstopper.

  The Malcolm she was referring to was her stuffed stoat who went with her just about everywhere. ‘Her Jack’ was her husband, Mad Uncle Jack. Her shiny things were … shiny things. She liked shiny things. She begged, borrowed and even (sometimes) stole them. And Marjorie? She was the large hollow wooden cow she lived in and that she and Eddie were sitting inside at the time. Her walls were papered with what looked to Eddie suspiciously like shredded American one-thousand-dollar bills, but that couldn’t be right. Could it? Eddie’s great-uncle had been equally dismissive about Tall Hall. ‘I have no need of a home all the way up there,’ he said. ‘It might be different if it had a lake full of fish, of course. One can never have too much fish … but, as far as I can recall from my single visit, many years before you were born, Melony –’

  ‘Eddie,’ Eddie corrected him. Melony was the name of a girl who came every other month to oil the hinge on Mr Dickens’s pocket knife.

  ‘– and there was no lake and no fish. No fish I say!’

  It wasn’t that Mad Uncle Jack enjoyed fishing – I’m not sure whether he went fishing in his entire life – it’s just that (with the exception of the dried swordfish he now carried about with him in his jacket pocket, as a back-scratcher and ear cleaner) he used dried fish as a method of payment. Please don’t ask. I have no idea why.

  Eddie’s father, Mr Dickens, had also seemed to think that getting rid of Tall Hall was a good idea. ‘Any nice pieces of furniture can be brought back to Awful End and the rest sold with the house,’ he said. ‘Some of the money made from the sale can go towards my buying new materials.’

  These ‘new materials’ were for his latest hobby: sculpting. Having painted the ceiling of the hall at Awful End, he had recently turned his attention to this different art form. The general consensus is that his painting abilities were worse than awful. Unfortunately, his sculpting abilities were worse still. (Mad Uncle Jack did a little and was a whole lot better.)

  Mr Dickens had started on a small scale, carving the corks from wine bottles into Great Characters From History. In his eagerness to carve, he’d opened a great many bottles of wine from the Awful End cellars and, not wanting to waste their contents, often drank them before letting carving commence.
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  Mr Dickens’s cork-carvings were bad enough when he was sober. Imagine what they were like after he’d had too much to drink. A few of them survive today (in the archives of the Society of Amateur Sculptors, Bricklayers and Dramatists, in Manchester), and I for one find it extremely difficult to tell which way up they should be. Julius Caesar’s feet, for instance, look remarkably similar to his head.

  Another problem with Mr Dickens carving whilst under the influence of alcohol was that he was forever cutting himself. He now had bandages on most fingers. But that hadn’t stopped him starting work on a whole new scale. He’d gone from carving corks to carving logs and had even had one of the ex-soldiers who often helped out at Awful End chop down an oak tree in the grounds. Although the falling tree had destroyed the orangery – a very fancy greenhouse – the old gardener’s cottage (though, fortunately, there was no old gardener in it at the time) and part of the stable block, no one seemed to mind and Mr Dickens had plenty of wood to work with.

  His greatest triumph up to that time was carved from the main trunk of the tree. It was, according to him, a statue of his son, Eddie, on the back of a turtle. Although it was finally used as firewood in the great winter of ’98, there is in existence a photograph of it taken by the world-famous photographer Wolfe Tablet. The picture is dark and grainy but you can still clearly see that the sculpture looks like a badly carved liver sausage on the back of a huge – equally badly carved – bowler hat.

  As for Eddie’s mother’s opinion about what should be done with Tall Hall, she didn’t have one. When Eddie’d asked her about it, she’d been far too busy trying to wash the dirt out of a piece of coal.

  ‘I just can’t get this black off,’ she’d said, scrubbing it with a nailbrush.

  So there it was: all four members of Eddie’s immediate family happy to sell off Tall Hall. Having heard from Angus McFeeeeeeee what the locals had thought of the MacMuckles, and having seen what young Magnus’s attitude was towards the English in general, Eddie didn’t think there’d be any tears shed if the house were put up for sale … as long as, of course, a Scot bought it.

  Eddie mounted the two stone steps to the front door and put the key in the lock.

  ‘McFeeeeeeee!’ cried a voice, and Eddie turned in time to see a huge horse thundering across the open ground straight towards them, steam rising from its flared nostrils. It appeared to be being ridden by … by a headless horseman!

  Episode 4

  A Clash of Wills

  In which Eddie waves a temporary bye-bye to his lawyer and meets some strange fruit-eaters

  Angus McFeeeeeeee’s reaction to the headless apparition was rather different to Eddie’s. Whereas Eddie recoiled in horror, not quite believing his eyes, the lawyer simply strode purposefully across the grass towards the oncoming horse.

  ‘What is it, man?’ he demanded in his broad Scottish accent.

  ‘McFeeeeeeee!’ the voice repeated, and it suddenly occurred to Eddie that headless horsemen wouldn’t have mouths (on account of having no heads) so were unlikely to be able to shout ‘McFeeeeeeee’, especially with exactly the right number of ‘e’s. This last point led Eddie to further deduce that it was likely that McFeeeeeeee was known to the horseman and that, by McFeeeeeeee’s behaviour, the horseman, in turn, was known to McFeeeeeeee.

  The rider dismounted and landed on the springy turf with quite a thud. Now that he was at Eddie’s eye level, all became clear. The newcomer was a small man but with a very high collar and large neckerchief (which is a cross between a scarf and a tie, and unlike a handkerchief – which is for the hand or, maybe, the nose – was for the neck). Having such a short neck, the man’s head was almost completely obscured by his monstrous collar!

  ‘What’s the matter, McCrumb?’ McFeeeeeeee asked.

  ‘It’s Mary MacHine,’ said McCrumb. ‘A piano’s fallen on her. It doesnae look like she’ll survive.’

  ‘I’m a lawyer, not a priest,’ said McFeeeeeeee, which Eddie thought was rather unsympathetic. If he were ever squashed by a piano, he hoped that the news would, at least, merit an ‘I’m sorry to hear that’.

  ‘It’s not spiritual help she’s after, man: she wants you to change the will!’ said McCrumb. ‘You must hurry.’

  The lawyer still seemed a little reluctant to leave Eddie. ‘She only wrote her new will at the end of last month. Why would she want to change it now?’

  ‘She wants to write Mungo McDougal out of it. She doesnae want the man to get a single brass farthing!’

  (A farthing, brass or otherwise, was the coin with the lowest value of all coins or notes/bills in Britain; it was a quarter of one penny, or half a halfpenny, which was called a ha’penny. And don’t you go thinking that there were a hundred pennies to the pound. Oh, no. That would be faaaaaaaaar too simple. There were twelve pennies to a shilling and twenty shillings to the pound, which means – if this calculator’s still working properly – that there were 240 pennies to the pound back then. And not only back then, come to think of it. There were 240 pennies to the pound when I was growing up, and I’m not that old. There aren’t that many white hairs in this beard of mine, yet.)

  A look of surprise crossed McFeeeeeeee’s face, and got lost somewhere in those bushy eyebrows of his. ‘But Mungo McDougal’s forever buying Mary MacHine presents. I thought she liked the man.’

  ‘It was he who bought her the piano …’ McCrumb explained. ‘It was riddled with woodworm.’

  ‘Hence its collapse?’ asked McFeeeeeeee.

  ‘Hence its collapse,’ McCrumb confirmed.

  ‘Oh,’ said Angus McFeeeeeeee.

  Eddie came to a quick decision. ‘If you must go to Mrs MacHine, Mr McFeeeeeeee, then go you must. I’ll be fine here, going through the house on my own.’

  ‘I’ll ride with Mr McCrumb on his horse and leave you the pony and trap –’ suggested the lawyer.

  ‘No, don’t worry, sir,’ said Eddie. ‘You can come back for me later when your work is done.’ The truth be told, Eddie preferred the idea of going through Tall Hall his own. That way he could spend as much or as little time in a room as he wanted. He could explore exactly how he wanted to explore.

  ‘If you’re sure,’ said Angus McFeeeeeeee doubtfully.

  ‘The boy’s sure!’ said McCrumb, placing his foot in his stirrup and swinging himself back on to his mount. Up on his horse, his head looked invisible to Eddie once again. ‘Now hurry, McFeeeeeeee. It’s a grand piano and Mrs MacHine may soon breathe her last!’

  Angus McFeeeeeeee, one hand on his tam-o’-shanter to keep it in place, ran back down the driveway and into the pony and trap. With a flick of the reins he was rattling after McCrumb across the grass.

  Eddie climbed back up the two stone steps, which looked like they were sagging in the middle where they’d been worn by hundreds of years of treading feet, and turned the key in the lock. The huge oak door swung open with a creak that would have delighted the sound-effects department of a film crew making a horror movie.

  *

  Whatever Eddie expected to find inside, it wasn’t a room with people in it. The front door opened straight into a great hall with a high hammer-beamed ceiling and a huge table in the centre which was probably long enough to seat about sixty people. As it was, there were six people seated around it at one end, and that was enough of a shock.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked a very puzzled and surprised Eddie.

  A woman seated near the head of the table got to her feet and glided across the stone-flagged floor towards him. ‘I think you’ll find the question should be who are you, laddie?’ She prodded Eddie with the tip of the long fingernail of her index finger.

  ‘Me … I’m – er –’ Eddie had been wrong-footed but quickly regained his composure. ‘No, I think the question’s still who are you?’ He looked back at the others, still seated around the table.

  They appeared to be eating a meal consisting entirely of fruit and nuts.

  Eddie put his hand in his pocket and pulled ou
t a fob watch on a chain. This was in the days before wristwatches, remember; though, by a quirk of fate, when he’d been aboard a ship named the Pompous Pig, Eddie had met the man who would later invent the steam wristwatch. (For those storing information for future use, the inventor’s name was Tobias Belch.) On the back of this particular fob watch were the words:

  TO MAUD

  HAPPY 2ND BIRTHDAY

  JACK

  because it had been lent to Eddie by his great-aunt, Mad Uncle Jack having given it to her for her twenty-first birthday (ignore the ‘2nd’ part!). Back in the days when she was still known as plain Mad Aunt Maud – before she’d become even madder – this self-same watch had indirectly led to Eddie being locked up in St Horrid’s Home for Grateful Orphans.

  Life can be strange like that. It’s to do with something called either ‘cause and effect’ or ‘the Chaos Theory’. Both work on the principle that someone picking his or her nose in South Africa can have an effect on politics in China, if the wind’s blowing in the right direction … or something like that. I wasn’t giving the subject my undivided attention when it was being discussed on the radio the other day.

  Eddie checked the time. It was just gone eleven o’clock, so he couldn’t tell whether these people, whoever they were, were having a late breakfast, an early lunch or something in between. They came in all shapes and sizes but, apart from the fruit-eating, all had one thing in common. They were all wearing tartan – checked – clothing. But none of it matched.

  For example, the woman who’d come over and prodded Eddie was wearing a black dress with a tartan shawl that was predominantly (mainly) green and black squares. The two women at the table (whom Eddie was later to discover were mother and daughter) were both wearing mainly red tartans, but the mother – who was almost as wide as she was tall – was wearing a much stripier tartan than her daughter’s (which was more ‘boxy’). As you can gather, tartans aren’t the easiest things to describe. The three men at the table, all of whom had enormous beards, were wearing predominantly orange, blue and black tartans. The overall effect was of a television with the colour-balance turned up too high and everyone looking over-bright and zingy (although, with television not having been invented yet, this would have been a meaningless comparison to Eddie).