The Posy Ring

by Catherine Czerkawska

  The men had been frightened, demoralised, homesick as well as seasick. The weather and the rocks of this inhospitable country had dealt them blow after blow, driving them straight into the arms of the waiting enemy. He had never been seasick before. Had considered himself impervious to the sickness that had afflicted so many of the soldiers in particular, early in their voyage. The sailors had laughed at them just at first, confident in their own abilities. And yet most of them had succumbed eventually. He too had been sick, over and over again. He had even been sick aboard the relative safety of the birlinn that brought them from Ireland to Eilean Garbh, retching constantly, with nothing but a little blood and spit, his stomach heaving.

  With the autumn day already darkening, they were decanted from the tender, with no great gentleness, pushed onto the white sand, and left alone there. The boat immediately pulled away again, the oarsmen fighting with wind and waves, back to the single-masted oak vessel that had brought them here. The captain and his crew were obviously relieved to be rid of their human cargo. As though to welcome them with a volley of shot, a heavy shower of rain drove into their faces from the west. At that moment, walking unsteadily on the pale sand, glad to be on land if nothing else, Mateo looked up, shivering, his teeth chattering, and saw the young woman standing some distance away, watching the incomers. She was tall, swathed in golden wool, and although she had pulled the garment over her head against the driving rain, her hair had escaped from it and was blowing around her shoulders. Red hair. He saw that she had red hair against the yellow wool, the whole unfurling like a strange flag in the wind. It might have reminded him yet again of the blood on the rocks of Ireland, but instead it made him think of sunshine and the golden orange groves of home.

  Even as he gazed up at her, he saw that she was no phantom. She had been joined by a small figure, similarly swathed in wool, brown wool this time: a child perhaps, who tugged at her to attract her attention. She glanced down, pulled the garment more closely around herself, took the child’s hand and began to walk away, quite briskly, as though alarmed but not panicked, disappearing over a little ridge of land. His gaze swivelled round and he saw that there was a house above them: a low, grey stone building with a dark thatched roof and chimneys, and a large stone and slate tower at one end. The Captain, McAllister, had promised to set them ashore close to a McNeill stronghold: ‘a friend to the Catholic cause and no friend to the English,’ was what he had said. Mateo did not entirely trust this judgement. He trusted nobody these days. But when he looked at Francisco’s poor, pale face in the failing light, he didn’t know what else to do. They must just climb up to the house, if they were able, and throw themselves on the uncertain mercy of McNeill of Garbh.

  FOUR

  The green track that constitutes a driveway to Auchenblae ends in a space, an area covered in rudimentary tarmac. Whoever laid it hasn’t made a very good job of it. Moss covers it and small self-seeded willows and elders are poking through, but there will be plenty of space to park her car. Daisy will have to make a list of things to do before she can put the house on the market. The house and contents have been valued and the inheritance tax paid out of the estate. Given the remoteness of Auchenblae and its general lack of modernisation, the value isn’t as high as it might be. There will be a little money left over, or so Mr McDowall has told her. But not much. Certainly not enough for a major renovation of a house this size. Or even a small renovation. If she sells it immediately, she’ll avoid capital gains tax. This is what everyone expects her to do. In any case, the thought of so much money makes her dizzy. She could sell it at a knockdown price, and still have more money than she could make in a lifetime of dealing in collectables.

  Daisy is a great one for lists. She has even been known to add tasks already done to her lists, just for the joy of crossing them off. Her fingers are itching to get started on a new ‘Things to Do’ list. But for now, she’ll explore the house. Then she can go back to the hotel in the village of Scoull and take stock. She has booked a couple of nights there, unsure as to how habitable Auchenblae might be. Looking at the rather grim face of this building, she’s glad she did, glad she followed the lawyer’s advice.

  ‘Perhaps you ought to assess what you’re getting into first,’ he had said.

  To her right, as she stands facing the house, there’s a long, low outhouse at right angles to the main building. Her first thought is that this may have been a stable, but it doesn’t look big enough. There’s a chimney at one end, leaning precariously. Perhaps there had been a boiler room, perhaps this had once been the gardeners’ domain. There must have been gardeners at one time. This modest building is separated from the main house by a broad pathway, already becoming choked with weeds, that leads from the hard standing in front, through a stone archway, and round the side of the house. She can hear the sea, faintly, and the cries of seabirds. This side of the house is sheltered from the worst of the weather, but she thinks the other side, facing the south-east, might get its fair share of wind and rain, especially in the winter. It’s not as exposed as the west coast, but stormy, all the same.

  She surveys the house. The door, with a couple of uneven steps in front, is made of wood and very sturdy: oak probably. There’s an old bell pull to one side and a tarnished brass knocker with a fierce green man, glaring at her like Marley’s ghost. There’s a small heraldic panel over the door but the stone carving is so worn that she can’t say what it once represented. She spots the Yale lock – incongruously modern – and, beneath it, a heavier cast-iron lock that one of the other keys probably fits, although she has been told that nobody ever uses it. The frontage to the right of the door has an oriel window (she dredges the word up from somewhere, wondering how she knows it) – a small projecting bay with rather pretty stonework and glass that undulates and bubbles with age, but the other windows on this side of the main house are small pane casements, two rows of them with skylights in the slate roof suggesting another set of attic rooms. To the side looms a chunky stone tower, four-square and solid. It looks grim and unused, its windows blank and uncurtained, a parapet wall, a chimney stack and a low slate-roofed structure on top.

  ‘Hell’s teeth, Mr McDowall was right. It is a castle,’ she says aloud. ‘I didn’t realise it really was a castle.’

  Just how old is this place? She knows that the Victorians were fond of building mock tower houses, adding them to eighteenth-century Scottish country houses to give them a spurious authenticity. But this doesn’t look like a nineteenth-century addition. It looks as though it has stood here forever. She feels a sudden fluttering in her stomach, but isn’t sure whether it’s nerves or excitement. The key, a small and rather tarnished Yale, fits into the lock, but won’t turn. Not at first. Daisy remembers that there is a can of oil in the car, and thinks that she’s going to have to go and fetch it, but quite suddenly the key bites and slides round. The door swings open with a ridiculous, horror-film creaking that makes her smile. Not just any old castle then. Dracula’s castle. In miniature.

  She goes through the door, and finds herself wiping her feet on a muddy coir doormat that sits slightly askew on the uneven flagstones. She’s in a small hallway, a porch really, but built into the house rather than out from it, with double glass-paned doors straight ahead of her. There’s a pottery umbrella stand, with a selection of faded golfing umbrellas and a couple of slender silk parasols sprouting from the top of it. She hauls this over, contents and all, to prop open the outer door, unwilling to cut off her escape route all of a sudden. Escape from what, she can’t say. Woodlice scurry from beneath it, dazed by the sudden exposure to daylight, but when she looks again they have all disappeared. Where have they gone? She almost trips over a pair of muddy green wellies and realises, with a pang of regret, that they must have belonged to her grandmother. And here they are, just where Viola left them.

  The inner doors don’t appear to be locked. She turns the knob and the right-hand panel swings open much more sm
oothly than the outer door. She props it back on its hinges and it stays open, reassuringly. She steps straight into a large room. She had been expecting a hallway of some sort, but this is more of a hall in the old-fashioned sense of a huge room: broad and long and high-ceilinged. You could hold a dance here if you wanted. Good for parties. There is an open stone fireplace on the end wall to the right, choked with years of ash. There is a battered Chesterfield, piled with faded cushions, a low oak table with heaps of books and well-thumbed magazines in front of it. Just behind her, the oriel window that she saw from outside has a window seat covered in dusty red velvet and there are matching, equally dusty curtains. She imagines Viola sitting there, watching the wrought-iron gates to the world outside. Well, the postman and the doctor had called sometimes, and the occasional neighbour; Mr McDowall too from time to time. Daisy has the disturbing thought that none of these would have been the person Viola wanted to see. Viola had only wanted to see Jessica, and Jessica had never come back.

  The room is impressive, with a stripped wood floor, worn rugs softening the broad planks. It fills the whole depths of the house between the landward and the seaward side. There are tall windows directly opposite, flooding the place with light, even through an accumulation of interior dust and exterior salt. To her left, as she stands facing the back of the house, trying to take it all in, she sees a stair with a wooden banister and turned balustrade, rising towards the upper floors, disappearing into the relative gloom. There is a big exterior door on the seaward side as well, although it looks as though it hasn’t been opened for some time. Might it, at one point, have been the actual front door, a way into the house from the sea? She wonders if there is a path up to the house from the bay below, since it stands some way above the shore. Perhaps people came more often by boat. Maybe the way she has just come in was the back door, at one time. So many questions. So many layers of history in one changed and changing building. She feels inadequate, in need of an architectural historian, but doesn’t think such a person exists on the island. Perhaps she can find one in Glasgow. She has already looked online, but can find very little about the house. It seems to have largely escaped scrutiny, although surely it must be listed. She’ll have to ask Mr McDowall.

  The low door to the right, beyond the fireplace, is half open, and she can see sunlight filtering in. Venturing inside, she finds a large and chilly lavatory with chipped black and white tiles on the floor, a wash-hand basin, a washing machine with a willow basket balanced on the top. There’s a row of pegs with a couple of waxed jackets hanging from them, spotted with mould, and a dangerous-looking electric heater on the wall. Cobwebs. Lots of cobwebs. A large spider lurks in one corner. She’s not fond of spiders, but doesn’t like to kill them either. One wall of this room is taken up by a bank of built-in cupboards. She opens one of the doors to find toiletries, toilet paper, bleach. Another has neat piles of what look like thin towels. A third has intriguing boxes and baskets, with objects wrapped in newspaper. She manages to restrain herself from investigating these. It could take all day.

  She moves back into the middle of the large room and stands facing the sea. There is a passageway to her left, behind the staircase, where she can glimpse more oak doors. The kitchen lies that way. Beyond that, there must surely be a way into the tower, unless you can access it only from the outside. There’s too much to take in all at once. The walls in here are plastered and painted magnolia, although there are wooden panels on either side of the fireplace. Between the windows are shelves, crammed with books. Ancient leather bindings rub shoulders haphazardly with modern paperbacks. There’s a decent television, and an elderly transistor radio. The whole place is warmer than she expected, perhaps because of the morning sunshine filtering in. She wonders just how watertight the house is, although it smells dry enough right now: a scent of dust, old paper, the faintest tang of wood smoke and soot from the fireplace. Underlying everything is some indefinable floral scent, pot-pourri perhaps. And now, the scent of greenery is filtering in from outside, freshening the air.

  She can’t help herself. Impulsively, she shouts, ‘Hello! Is anybody there?’ although what she would do if there was a response, she hasn’t the foggiest idea. Run for her life, she thinks, smiling. Her voice echoes back to her from the high ceiling, from the rooms upstairs, from the passageway to the left.

  ‘There, there, there…’ it says, soothingly.

  It strikes her that the house, even in its abandoned state, is friendly and civilised enough. ‘Lived in,’ her grandma Nancy would have said. There is nothing threatening in the atmosphere of the place. She has helped with the odd house clearance, doing vacation work for an auction house. She knows what it’s like to set foot in a house and find it utterly repellent. It happened only once or twice, but she can still recall the feeling. One in particular – a grim sandstone apartment on the south side of the city – had been so full of unhappiness that she had found it hard to breathe, never mind empty drawers and cupboards or pack boxes. Eventually the regular removal lads had sent her out to buy sandwiches and cakes from a nearby café and after that had encouraged her to lurk in the back of the van, stacking boxes for them. On the way back to the auction house the foreman had remarked how the woman who once lived there had become a virtual prisoner, ill and neglected by her husband. It had gone on for years.

  ‘Bit weird how you picked up on that, Daisy,’ he had said, looking sidelong at her.

  Auchenblae is different. It feels manageable, in spite of its obvious age, as though somebody – Viola perhaps – has just stepped out, gone walking in the gardens and might be back to reclaim her wellies or her coat or one of her umbrellas. It isn’t unpleasant or threatening, but it is still faintly disturbing.

  She rummages in her shoulder bag. Mr McDowall had given her a floor plan of the house and now it seems quite simple. This is the biggest room in the house. The kitchen and something labelled as a scullery are along the passageway to the left. Upstairs there are five bedrooms and a family bathroom, and beyond that, up a narrow stair, are four small attic rooms, a box room, another lavatory, all once the province of the servants, no doubt. How Viola must have rattled about this place – and that, she thinks, is without even considering the tower.

  Leaving the front door open, she goes past the stairs, along the passageway and finds herself in a big square kitchen that looks out towards the seaward side of the house. It has an ancient deal table, marked and scratched and scrubbed. There is a Victorian range on the inner wall, with ovens and a fire, a clothes airer suspended on a pulley just above it, cast-iron pots and some stainless-steel pans stacked on a shelf under the table. There’s a typically Scottish dresser on the opposite wall, with a row of spice drawers along the top instead of a plate rack (worth something, she thinks, mechanically) and an ordinary electric cooker, which is presumably what Viola used. Everything is covered in a fine film of dust. Her movement through the room disturbs it and it dances in the long lines of light filtering through the window. Back towards the front of the house, a doorway from the kitchen leads into a narrow scullery that smells oddly of potatoes, a dark room with sinks, dish drainers, even a dishwasher. Viola had clearly allowed herself some modern conveniences. In the far corner of the main kitchen, there’s an archway with a door that looks considerably older than the rest. There is a lock with a big key. She turns it with some difficulty, tugs it open, and finds a turnpike stair spiralling both up into light and down into comparative darkness. She can just make out a narrow window in the outer wall, high above her.

  The tower.

  ‘I won’t go there just yet,’ she tells herself, aloud. Her voice seems to ring out, disturbing the dust even more. She hauls the door shut, hearing the crash and bang of it echoing through the tower, and goes back into the friendly kitchen, unwilling to give in to nerves, but uneasy all the same.

  It is a fine spring day and she wants to explore the gardens, but, methodical as ever, she knows she ought to
find out about the bedrooms first. She has only one more night booked at the hotel. Mr and Mrs Cameron, who own the place, have been understandably curious about Daisy and her inheritance, but they have been discreet and welcoming. Everything about it is good, especially the food, but it isn’t cheap and she doesn’t want to spend too much money. She needs to know if it’s feasible to move in here, assess the house and make some decisions about its future. She’s committed to an antiques market outside Glasgow in a week’s time, so she can stay on the island for a few days if she wants to. There’ll be plenty of time for the gardens this afternoon. She has left teabags, milk and biscuits in her car. There’s a fridge that some considerate visitor, Mr McDowall or his representative perhaps, has switched off and left clean and empty. She sniffs cautiously at it before closing the door and switching it on, but it smells fresh enough. It powers up with a little shudder, but seems to be running smoothly. She sees an electric kettle that looks fairly new. She could make herself a cup of tea. Do a bit more exploring before going back to the hotel.

  She leaves the kitchen and ventures upstairs. After the warmth of the downstairs rooms, it feels chilly up here. On this floor, there’s a corridor running the length of the house, wood-floored with a narrow and somewhat threadbare runner down the middle, windows facing the landward side of the house, looking out on the driveway and the green hill beyond. There are five rooms off this corridor, all looking out towards the sea. The first, its door standing wide open, is a big bedroom with an en-suite bathroom tucked away in one corner. The bathroom has a Victorian cast-iron bath with ball and claw feet, and a lavatory with a polished wooden seat and an old-fashioned chain running down from a water tank set high on the wall. The porcelain pan is a riot of blue flowers. The bedroom itself is crammed with brown furniture, large walnut wardrobes, a monumental double bed (more like a mausoleum, she thinks) with a green silk eiderdown that smells of mothballs, tables on either side piled high with books, old brown medicine bottles, even a carafe of water and a crystal glass. There are lamps, rugs, a dressing table with a large oval mirror on a wooden stand, costume jewellery festooned over it, cosmetics, old and rather lovely scent bottles, some still full of dark, half-evaporated perfume: Guerlain, Lanvin, Chanel. There’s a high-backed oak chair and a blanket chest, both decorated with crude carvings, both much older than the other furniture. When she opens the chest, it seems to be full of shoes. It smells of leather and sweat with an underlying hint of beeswax. This must have been her grandmother’s room.