The Whispering Knights (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “The risk was negligible. He or she thought I was taking a bath.”

  “Didn’t you want to nip out and see who it was?”

  “I shall know in due course who it was.”

  “If I were to make a bet, my money would be on Owen.”

  “Why so?”

  “He engineered the game and I’m pretty sure he was the only one of us who knew Catherine before we all met in Exeter.”

  “But Owen need not have asked me to be the adjudicator. There was nothing to prevent him from collecting the papers and judging them for himself. After all, it is he who is awarding the prize.”

  “Perhaps he thought you would tackle the job with an unbiased mind. Is there any objection to my having another look through my shorthand?”

  “None whatever, provided that you wait until our Kilmartin party has moved off and that you do not let any of the others know what you are doing.”

  While the two nuns remained at the hotel, Capella and Laura went shopping for picnic food and soft drinks, and a little later Laura drove on board the car ferry for Brodick. Her companions climbed out and mounted to the passenger deck, and at ten the ferry moved off.

  The day was sunny and already warm; the crossing, sheltered by the mountains of Arran, was smooth, and at Brodick the disembarkation was simple and expeditious. It was far too early even for a picnic lunch, so Laura parked the car near the broad beach of the bay. They sat on the warm, soft sand and watched the summer visitors swimming, paddling, embarking on small boats, or, like themselves, sitting and enjoying the sunshine and the scene, while, with a white cloud passing along its summit, the great blue mass of Goatfell rose to an almost symmetrical peak of granite.

  When the nuns were ready to journey onwards (for Laura took it for granted that the outing was to be ruled by their wishes), the car took the coast road—the only road except for two which crossed the island between the mountains in long slants south-westwards—and discharged the party at Sannox Bay.

  Here, having parked the car, they followed a footpath up the beautiful Glen Sannox. The path ran beside the river and, this time to the south of them, Goatfell still dominated the island, although there were other mountains almost as high. When they had returned to the car, Laura suggested that they should take an early lunch on the sands, as they wanted not only to visit the standing stones, but to complete the circuit of the island before they caught the return ferry to get back to Ardrossan.

  The day was uneventful. Capella was silent most of the time and Laura wondered whether she was regretting her decision to join the present party instead of going with Owen and Stewart and the others. Laura also wondered whether it was Dame Beatrice’s inclusion in the other party which had been instrumental in causing Capella to choose Arran, or whether she had done so merely to spite Stewart.

  “Although why she should be afraid of Dame B.,” she said to Sister Pascal when the two younger women had gone together to the edge of the water, “I really can’t think.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow you, Mrs. Gavin. Is Dame Beatrice here to—is she here in her professional capacity?”

  “As a matter of fact, no, she isn’t. She’s on holiday, like the rest of us. She’s almost bound to be interested, I suppose, in standing stones. She and I live in the Stone House. There’s a tumbled-over monolith close by, from which the house takes its name. I’m a bit superstitious about the beastly thing. It’s got a bad name and sometimes I wonder whether the stone—the locals call it the Stone of Sacrifice—isn’t responsible for all the murders that follow us about.”

  Sister Pascal began to purse her thin lips in mild deprecation of this statement, but decided to laugh instead.

  “But that is mere superstition, Mrs. Gavin,” she said. She returned to Laura’s previous remark, which had been a thought spoken aloud. “Who is afraid of Dame Beatrice?” she asked.

  “Oh, young Capella,” said Laura. “The girl’s cuckoo. I think she, well—”

  “Yes?”

  “I think she opted to come with us when she knew that Dame B. was joining the other party. If your remember, she did not make up her mind until the last minute that she would come to Arran.”

  “That is true, but I still do not think it had anything to do with Dame Beatrice.”

  “You mean it was done to score off Stewart. Yes, I’d thought of that. Maybe you’re right.”

  “But I have not mentioned Mr. Stewart. What is more, Mrs. Gavin, you may know something about Miss Babbacombe-Starr which I do not. I am not asking for your confidence, of course, but I thought there was something a little strange about that game we played last night. You say that Dame Beatrice is not here in her official capacity, but, if she were, I should see some significance in the fact that all our answers were handed over to her without anybody else being given so much as a glance at them.”

  “Look, Sister,” said Laura earnestly, “would you mind not pursuing this line of enquiry? If you go on, you may get me babbling all sorts of things which might be better left unsaid.”

  “Yes,” said Sister Pascal, “I know.” She smiled with great sweetness and added: “I have not, in my time, been a Mistress of Novices for nothing. I will abandon the subject.”

  The other two came back and the journey along the coast continued until the road left the coast and, with hills between it and the sea, ran inland up another part of the lovely Glen Sannox only to approach to sea again at Lochranza. Here it followed the exact shape of the island past bays and river-mouths, skirted the mountains which were sometimes not more than a mile inland, and all the time the sun shone on golden sands, seagulls swooped and glided against a blue sky, and Capella, who had an untrained but pleasing soprano voice, sang O for the wings of a dove.

  Laura said, “I’m not able to enjoy that song any more.” Sister Pascal, who was in the front seat beside her, asked why. “Well, I was at a concert once, sitting next to a lively, rather naughty Jewess, and Wings of a Dove was sung by an extremely buxom prima donna. Out of the corner of my neighbour’s mouth came, ‘It’s not the wings of a dove but a jumbo jet that one needs to get her off the ground.’ ”

  “Oh, dear!” said Capella, breaking off the song. “That reminds me of Anton Dolin.”

  “He didn’t need the wings of a dove,” said Laura. “He could get off the ground under his own impulsion.”

  “I know. I was talking about rude but truthful remarks. He said of one ballerina that she was too fat and would have to get thinner if he had to lift her. ‘I am a dancer, not a piano-mover,’ he said.”

  In this light-hearted mood the drive continued. The car rounded the north coast of the island and came southward down the west side. Laura pulled up in the village of Machrie and asked for directions, and the four women were soon walking across the moor alongside the little stream called Machrie Water.

  The stone circles and the monoliths which also formed part of the impressive landscape appeared against the mountain masses of Ard Beinn and A’Chruach to the south, Beinn Tarsuinn to the north. There were the lesser but still significant masses behind Brodick, but still Goatfell, a giant even among giants, dominated the picture, rising behing Beinn Tarsuinn and Beinn Nuis like a god overshadowing his sons.

  They passed a standing stone on their way shortly after leaving the coast, and a ruined circle of stones on the other side of Machrie Water, but their objective was a collective of five circles about a mile into the desolation of the moor. These were very close together, but, except for one of them, they were so denuded of the original stones as to be, to the casual visitor, uninteresting.

  The fifth circle, which was on the west side and was flanked by two chambered tombs, was still very nearly complete. It comprised two concentric circles of low-lying stones. A quarter of a mile to the west was a tall monolith and there were traces of cist graves within the five rings. “Rings” was hardly an accurate description, since the stones formed ovals and not circles, as Sister Pascal pointed out.

  The v
isitors ambled about, Laura and Sister Veronica together, Capella by herself until she tired and came and seated herself beside Sister Pascal on one of the flatter stones.

  It was when the other two were coming back from looking at the remains of a cairn on the far side of the five circles that strange remarks were made.

  Veronica said, “Well, at any rate, it hasn’t followed us here.”

  “Followed us?” said Laura. “What is it and why should it?”

  Capella, pulling up a sprig of heather and twisting it between her fingers, said, “I’d noticed it wasn’t here. I’ve been keeping watch for it out of the corner of my eye.”

  “Look,” said Laura, addressing Capella but not mentally excluding the young Sister Veronica from her strictures, “this is a lonely, eerie, ancient, and once sacred area, and spookery is both out-of-place and dangerous here. If you talk about It in the middle of this sort of set-up, you may produce It, and nobody wants that to happen. I personally am as superstitious as a Hottentot, so lay off, if you don’t mind. I don’t want to go into the screaming heebie-jeebies.”

  “Mea culpa,” said Sister Veronica meekly. Capella tossed the heather-root into Laura’s lap and said defiantly, “It or no It, I did see a dead body lying in the rectangle at Callanish.”

  “We haven’t been to Callanish,” said Laura.

  “Rather a strange mistake for her to have made, don’t you think?” said Laura to Dame Beatrice when they met before dinner that evening.

  “To confuse Castlerigg with Callanish? Both, perhaps, are unusual names to those of us who live in the south.”

  “Yes, but why Callanish?”

  “She has seen the name on our itinerary.”

  “Oh, I suppose so, yes. How did you get on at Kilmartin today?”

  “We had an interesting if not an exciting time. Stewart, deprived of Miss Starr’s company, escorted Miss Catherine around the Kilmartin complex and nobody else.”

  “What about Lionel and Clarissa?”

  “They appear to have had an altercation before we left the hotel to visit the Kilmartin monuments.”

  “A domestic tiff, I suppose. I wonder how long they’ve been married?”

  “Or if they are married at all.”

  “Oh, a love nest of the modern sort, you think?”

  “I never think about other people’s business if I can help it, and then only if they are determined to confide in me.”

  “So they had a falling-out. I could hazard a guess at the cause of it. I bet they told each other what their answers were to the Truth Game questions, and one of them thought the other had been a bit too frank. May I consult my dossier and see what I can come up with? That Truth Game is dynamite.”

  “So long as you do not transcribe your shorthand until I give the word, you may consult it as much as you please. Before we left yesterday morning, I judged that the original documents would be better out of the way, as you know.”

  “Well, now that one set of answers has been pinched and another may have led to a show-down between Lionel and Clarissa, yes, indeed, very much better to let sleeping dogs lie. Rather interesting if there’s a bomb in one or more of those answers. Going back to Lionel and Clarissa, how did you all travel back, then?”

  “Lionel conveyed Catherine, Stewart, and myself, while Clarissa drove with Owen. Stewart told us about his thesis. As for your remarking on the four sites which we are scheduled to visit on this tour, they represent the tip of the iceberg so far as his researches are concerned. He has seen the stone circles on Bodmin Moor, Stonehenge, and Avebury, of course, and the more important Welsh sites. He has seen Arminghall in Norfolk, Arbour Low in Derbyshire, the circles of Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Northumbria, and now, on this tour, Long Meg, Castlerigg, and the Kilmartin valley. Later he plans to look at Shap, Mayburgh, and Bleasdale—that will be on his return journey—and he will finish up at Stanton Drew in Somerset before travelling to Ireland and then to Brittany.”

  “Good Lord! One thing strikes me, though.”

  “I thought perhaps it might. You are wondering why, if he has visited all these stones either alone or with friends, he should have chosen to come on this very limited tour and with people who regard the thing as a jaunt rather than as a scientific study of stone circles. I can only guess the answer. What did your party think of the Island of Arran as a whole?”

  “I can only tell you what I thought. My word, what a place for a holiday! I could have stayed six months so long as the weather held up. Lamlash Bay is beautiful. There are low green hills with the mountains behind them and lots of wild flowers on the hill-slopes round the bay. As for Glen Sannox, well, we must go and see it again some day. Besides, I want to climb Goatfell. You can do it the easy way or the hard way. I’d like to try both.”

  When dinner was over, Stewart came up to where they were seated in the lounge.

  “May I?” he said, indicating a vacant chair. “How did you enjoy Arran, Mrs. Gavin?”

  Laura gave a shortened version of her day and asked about his.

  “Oh, splendid. Most interesting,” he replied. “I say, could you give me a few notes about the site on Machrie Moor? I’ve collected what the Sisters and Capella can tell me, but if I could have your views as well I’d be ever so grateful. I’m sure you noticed things which escaped the others. You seem, if I may say so, a highly intelligent and appreciative person and your impressions of a site I have not been able to see would mean a lot to me.”

  “Insinuating monster!” said Laura. Dame Beatrice, with a vague excuse of wanting to go out and look at the sunset over the sea, left them to it. Laura, still astonished at what she had learned of Stewart’s activities in pursuit of material for his thesis, did her best for him. She gave a description of the setting of sea, moor, river, and mountains, and then, hoping that she was not sounding too amateurish, a description of the site itself. He made notes while she talked of the flat moorland on which the stones had been erected, the way to them from the nearby coast and the mountain pass which must, she thought, connect them with the east side of the island.

  “There are five circles,” she said, “but there’s very little left of four of them. The fifth is great. There are chambered tombs as well as the circles themselves. We didn’t visit all the tombs because it was too far to walk in the time we had to spare, but the stone circle which was almost complete was something a bit special.”

  “Two concentric circles, I believe.”

  “Yes, that’s right, with some low stones on the outer ring.”

  He went on scribbling away, occasionally interjecting remarks about the finds of bones, flint arrowheads, and food-vessels which had been made in other circles during Bryce’s excavations of 1862.

  “Well, many thanks,” he said when she had told him all she could. “Did you spot the outlier, a tall stone about a quarter of a mile away?”

  “Yes, we had a look at it.”

  “There are at least two more solitary standing stones, I believe, and the alignment of three of the circles is rather like the alignment of the cairns I saw in the valley today. Machrie Moor was undoubtedly a burial ground. Did you spot the hole in one of the outer ring stones by which the giant Fingal tethered his dog while he cooked himself some food in the inner circle?”

  “Yes, we saw the hole, but didn’t know the legend. I must tell the others.”

  “You seem to have seen most of what there was. I suppose you didn’t spot our vanishing lady?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Oh, come, now! Don’t tell me you haven’t heard the rumours.”

  “Such as?” asked Laura, who was not disposed to commit herself in any way except to give him an account of her day with the nuns and Capella. He laughed and said, although a trifle impatiently, that she could not have spent a whole day in the company of Sister Veronica without hearing something of the young nun’s theories, but Laura still stalled.

  “We talked of this and that, apart from admiring the stones and playin
g at guessing games about them,” she said. “We certainly saw nothing of any vanishing lady. It sounds more like a conjuring trick than an addition to the party. Besides, what do you know about Sister Veronica’s theories? So far as I have noticed, you’ve had nothing to do with her. The two of you haven’t even travelled in the same car, have you?”

  “Oh, young Capella has picked up some rumours and passed them on to me.”

  “There have always been other visitors to the sites besides ourselves, you know,” said Laura, abandoning her defences.

  “I think you are going cagey on me, my dear Mrs. Gavin. Incidentally, couldn’t it be Laura?”

  “Oh, I answer to Hi, or to any loud cry. Well, now, fair’s fair. I’ve told you all I can about our day on Arran. Suppose you tell me about Kilmartin and Temple Wood. It will all make something to put into my letters to my husband.”

  “Fair’s fair, as you say.” He turned back the pages of his scribbling tablet. “I will follow the wise advice given to all story-tellers; that is to say, I shall begin at the beginning and go on to the end . . .”

  “Leaving out no detail, however slight,” amended Laura, who thought it would be interesting to compare his account with that of Dame Beatrice.

  “Right you are. Oh, by the way, you know we are booked in at Inverness after Fort William? Well, I understand it is because of the nuns. I shall be sorry to lose them, but they are not going to Stornoway. They are staying a couple of nights at a convent in Inverness, and will be taken to see the Clava stones by their friends. I’m going to Clava, too, but don’t spill that to anybody else. As you know, I rather like to do my stones on my own.”

  “Or else with Capella or, possibly, Catherine,” said Laura.

  “Now, now! Anyway, I shan’t be crossing to Lewis. I’ve already seen Callanish and have made copious notes about it. Why don’t you and Dame Beatrice put in an extra night at Inverness and have a look at Clava? It’s fantastic.”

  “I know. You forget I’m in my own country. I’ve seen Clava more than once.”