Clare stared round, her eyes adjusting to the dim light. ‘Why have you brought me here, Paul?’ She was pulling away from him desperately, terrified of his calculated, cold violence.
Paul let go of the doors and they swung back creaking behind them. Abruptly he let go of her arm and transferring his grip to her wrist, he twisted her arm sharply behind her. ‘Go on, over there. Through the side door.’
Taken by surprise she stumbled forward as he pushed her to the door and dragged it open. Beyond it was a small side yard formed by another range of old stone-built stables. Paul pushed her outside, and suddenly she understood.
In the far corner of the yard was a dog’s cage, the iron bars rusty, the floor scattered with old rubbish. The door stood open.
‘No! Paul, no! NO!’ Her voice rose in a scream as he pushed her towards it, and she began to struggle in earnest, kicking and lunging at his face with her free hand. With an oath he jerked her arm more tightly behind her, propelling her forward over the uneven cobbles.
Thrusting her inside so hard that she sprawled amongst the rubbish headlong, he slammed the door shut and groped in his pocket for the new padlock. Clicking it into place he stood back, panting. Then he began to laugh exultantly.
Clare struggled to her knees. She was sobbing desperately. ‘Paul, please, let me out! Paul! Someone will come. Mummy will come. She’ll see the car. Or Sarah! Paul, please –’
He stood, arms folded, watching her. He felt very calm now. Quite impersonal. There was no pity or affection for her, only cold amusement as he saw her crawl to the bars and clutch at them. She shook them desperately, but they didn’t move.
‘Your brother told me about the cage,’ he said after a moment, over the sound of her sobbing. ‘Do you know, he still feels guilty about it, after all these years.’ He took a step nearer again. ‘I couldn’t believe my luck when I found that it was still here. You know how to get out, of course.’ He reached under his coat into the breast pocket of his jacket and pulled out a paper. ‘I have written it all out here. How you authorised me to act in your name. How you agreed to sell the castle and how any future negotiations are up to me.’ He pushed it at her through the bars.
Clare did not even see it. ‘Paul! Please, you can’t do this! Please. Someone will come.’ She was crying hysterically.
‘No one will come, Clare. Your parents have gone away for Christmas and Sarah has returned to London.’ He smiled at the easy lies. ‘We have all the time in the world. Either you agree to back me up all the way over the sale of that damn castle, or I shall leave you here.’ He paused for a moment to let his words take effect. ‘When everyone returns after Christmas they will find your body and assume that you were acting out your macabre fantasies while the balance of your mind was disturbed. God knows, there will be enough witnesses to the state you were in. I shall be in London when they find you.’ He folded his arms. ‘I should sign, my darling. Think of the baby. Think of yourself. I have nothing to lose –’ he gave a wry laugh – ‘you have everything.’ There was a strange, cold light in his eye.
She stared up at his face, numb with fear. ‘Don’t leave me here, Paul – please –’
He did not reply. He merely shook the paper in her face.
‘No.’ Her fingers were white on the iron of the bars. Small raw flakes of rust caught on her sleeve. Slowly Paul was putting the key of the lock into his pocket. Dropping the piece of paper through the bars he watched it float to the ground beside her, then he pushed a pen after it.
‘What shall we say? A couple of hours to think about it?’ He pushed his hands into his pockets and hunched his shoulders against the cold. ‘If you haven’t signed it by then, I’ll have to leave you until tomorrow or the next day. There are things I have to do in Edinburgh before I go back to London.’ He turned away.
‘Paul –!’ Her scream echoed around the small yard.
‘Oh, don’t worry, I shall leave you enough food to last a couple of days or so.’
‘Paul, for God’s sake! Think of the baby –’
‘Ah, yes. The baby.’ His jaw hardened. ‘My baby. You’d better keep calm, or you might lose it, mightn’t you?’ He turned on his heel. ‘Two hours, Clare, then I shall come back for your signature.’
For a long time Clare didn’t move. Her sobs had frozen in her throat; her hands were locked on the bars. It was bitterly cold in the yard, shadowy beneath the heavy sky, and completely silent. The snow was falling more thickly now, drifting past the high stone walls of the coach house as Clare closed her eyes, breathing deeply, trying to force herself to stay calm.
When Isobel came she welcomed her with a sob of recognition.
Paul had stopped beside the car. He stooped and picked up her shoulder bag which had fallen to the ground in their struggle and fumbled through it until he found her keys to the house. Slowly he walked around to the front and let himself in. He stood still and listened. The place was cold and dark, the curtains in each room half closed against the dull day, the fire in the living room out, a mound of pale ash behind the ornate fire guard.
He glanced round then slowly he walked through to the kitchen. The Aga was still hot. Filling the kettle he put it on the hot plate and sat down in the chair beside it, glancing at his watch. It was one hour and fifty minutes before he could go back to the cage. He had begun to shake like a leaf.
The dog’s bowl still lay in the corner of the cage as it had all those years before when James had locked her in. Chipped enamel, dirt encrusted, lying in the corner where it had lain since the last occupant of the cage had died.
She had tried to swallow her fear, to contain it, but she could feel it creeping up, cold, shivery, the panic closing in on her, turning her throat dry and her mouth papery with terror. Her hands were still clamped on the bars. She rested her head against them for a moment, then with an effort forced herself to let go, crawling to the back of the cage where she sat, her arms tightly around her knees, her face pressed against them to blot out the bars. She closed her eyes tight. What had Isobel done? She had prayed. She had prayed to the Holy Virgin and to St Bride, and to St Fillan and St Margaret. They had not helped her, but somehow she had kept her sanity.
Slowly Clare moved until she was on her knees again. She was still wearing the bloodstained Burberry.
Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death …
My memories, your memories, merging in and out of the nightmare. Fear. Horror. Loneliness. Despair …
We are not alone. We have each other …
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, Ora pro nobis, peccatoribus, Nunc et in ora mortis nostrae …
A bird in a cage; an animal; a prisoner without hope …
She buried her face in her arms.
Dear God in heaven, let her keep her sanity. Only let her keep her sanity …
Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna …
Behind her on the floor the folded paper lay in the rubbish, the pen beside it. She had not even seen it.
The snow was falling more thickly now.
Antonia, sitting at the bar in the George Hotel, looked for the tenth time at her watch before turning to look anxiously towards the door. She was ordering another gin and tonic when Archie appeared, pocketing some spare coins. ‘I finally got through to Grant. Apparently the phone has been off the hook. He says they left soon after seven this morning.’
‘Seven!’ Antonia looked horrified. ‘Oh, Archie, do you think anything has happened to them?’
Archie picked up his own glass and drained it. He shook his head. ‘It’s pretty bad up there, apparently, and drifting. But they’ve got the Range Rover; they’ll be all right. And Paul will stop if he gets worried. We’ll give them half an hour, then if they’re not here, we’ll start without them. The hotel can keep the champers on ice until they arrive.’ He helped himself to a fistful of dry roasted peanuts and smiled at her heavily.
Jack Grant had told him about the dog, but he wasn’t going to tell
the old girl, not yet. He eased himself on to a stool. He had seen that the gun was missing at once, and he guessed that Paul had taken it. But why the dog? Beautiful, affectionate creature that she was. He frowned as he pushed the glass across the bar to be refilled. There was something in all this he didn’t like at all.
Halfway between Duncairn and Cruden Bay an old Scots pine, groaning beneath the sudden fall of snow, suddenly shed one of its lower boughs. The edge of the branch caught the phone line, near the telegraph pole, and lodged there, hanging from the wires as the thick white blizzard whirled around it. For a radius of two miles, the phones went dead.
Paul, sitting in Archie’s study, had tried to phone Grant and been told that the lines were down. Smiling, he phoned a message through to the George: ‘Returned to Duncairn because the road south closed. Don’t try to drive home tonight. Stay in Edinburgh. Will ring again in the morning.’
Conscientiously the young man at reception copied down the message, twice offering to fetch the lady or gentleman to the phone, then he put down the receiver and, note in hand, went through to the bar.
Reassured, the Macleods went into lunch and broached the champagne alone.
The snow was drifting against the window frames, high in the walls. The old buildings, smothered in snow, muffled sound and deadened it. It was very cold. Burying her face in her arms again she slipped to the floor on her knees, her forehead in the litter with its thin mantle of wisped snow. The world was spinning, the bars closing in. She had screamed again and again, sobbing, until her throat had closed over the sounds. She was no longer rational, no longer conscious of the acres of empty garden with the snow-covered trees beyond the roofs of the stables, no longer thinking of the huge empty house where her husband, whisky on the table, was sitting in the kitchen, his wristwatch in front of him beside the bottle, watching the minutes tick away. She was thinking now only of the cold angled sweep of the River Tweed and the harsh, echoing cry of the gulls as they swooped over the water and of the winter nights when skeins of geese flew high beneath the moonlit clouds, their wild bugling cries echoing across the cold countryside.
The soft whiteness of fog wrapped the cage, hiding it and lapping it in the cold wet of autumn, and Isobel felt her joints thicken and ache; her temperature soared and she lay in her rugs in a delirium of fever, her food and water untouched, alone inside her head with myriad demons who tormented and tortured her. The guards forbade the women to open the cage door and tend her, so she lay alone.
The touch of the sun healed her as the weather relented and the autumn sunshine entered the cage, drying the rugs, soothing her inflamed body, whispering in the fragrant wind which stroked her face and she awoke, weak, but sane again, and sipped the tisanes which a silent woman, on the order of the governor’s wife, pushed through the bars in the old earthenware water jug.
The death of the King, the death of her husband. Neither had brought her relief. Her captors kept her in complete ignorance of what was going on in Scotland. She did not know that Robert had swept to victory across northern Scotland. She did not know that he had beaten Lord Buchan so completely before the latter’s retreat to England that Buchan had fled to die of shame. She did not know that Robert had gone on to lay the vast Buchan district waste – revenge against the man who had made her life a living hell; revenge for the woman he could not save.
Her body grew thinner and more wasted, but her courage was unbowed. Her prayers and daydreams kept her alive.
The next winter they brought her in sooner at the command of the governor’s lady and she was given better food. Her frame was shaken with a cough which stayed for five months before the fresh air of spring soothed it as her cage was hung outside again and a new generation of Berwick’s children came to torment her with their taunts and missiles. One boy, stronger and with a better aim than most, came back again and again with a catapult, and a store of carefully selected smooth round pebbles collected from the shallow elbow of the Tweed near the ruins of the ancient bridge. She learned to recognise him and cower back in the cage when he came, protecting her head with her arms, but not before a flying stone had caught her full in the face, tearing her cheek and bruising the bone, causing her eye to swell until she could not see out of it.
Her pain had an unexpected side effect. For the first time one of the women who attended her, a new servant in the castle, showed open, defiant pity. She brought an ointment of crushed marigolds and pushed it through the bars with a sympathetic word. This first kindness reduced Isobel at last to tears.
The first she knew of Robert’s successes in the battlefield was an increase of hostility from the crowds below, then slowly the rumours began to reach her as her dulled ears picked up gossip from the guards behind her on the tower. The King of Scots, King Hob they called him, was gaining support on every side and now at last he had held a parliament. Soon they were singing about him below the castle walls too, and the ridicule and scorn in the songs contained fear.
A parliament? She did not dare let herself hope. The bars were still there; too real; too absolute. Her whole world. But still, a tiny corner of her brain reasoned, surely to hold a parliament implied a position of strength?
But if he was in Scotland, where was he? Why did he not come? Why had there been no message, no sign that he had not forgotten her?
In anguish as the sun set, her hands clutching the bars as they had when she was first imprisoned, she felt her eyes fill with tears again as she stared westward towards the golden hills and the Scotland she could not see.
Clare drifted back to consciousness, not knowing where she was, nor which the dream and which the reality. She flailed out in front of her with her hands as she had done on waking so often before, and this time they met the bars she dreaded, grazing her knuckles, jarring her fingertips.
Let me wake up. Please God, let me wake up.
She was cold, deathly cold, shaking. All around her there was silence.
Struggling to fight off the fog of fear and sleep and cold she flung out her arms again.
‘It’s no use. They are still there. You can’t get out.’ The cool voice cut through the fog. ‘And they’ll stay there until you sign.’
Crouching, Paul reached into the cage and picked up the paper between the tips of his two centre fingers, dangling it in front of her.
The dream closed over her again – Isobel’s dream. The mist from the river, the rusty bars, the rain drifting in from the Northumberland hills. Desolate with disappointment she began to cry.
‘Sign the paper then I’ll let you out. Sign!’ It danced in front of her eyes. She did not know what it said or where it came from; she did not recognise the man who held it. His face was shadowy, blurred in the twilight of the mist, unreal. It was not Robert.
Shakily she took the paper and then the pen which he pressed into her hand.
‘Sign.’
Her fingers were so cold that she could barely hold it. ‘Where? What do I sign?’
‘There.’ He was stabbing at the paper through the bars. ‘There. There.’
Her hands were shaking so much she could not hold the paper as, trembling, she scrawled her name. Almost before she had finished he had snatched it from her and slipped it into his pocket. He was smiling with relief. At last the transaction was legal. They could not catch him out now. Duncairn was his to sell to whom he pleased! He was beyond thinking about witnesses. They could be added later.
He rose to his full height and searched for the key in his pocket, then he stooped again, this time to undo the lock. ‘Now, you are free. You see it was easy all the time.’ He swung open the door. ‘You’ve nothing to be afraid of now, as long as you keep quiet about all this.’ He hesitated, then he smiled again. Who would believe her? Who would believe anything she said at all? ‘Come on. I’m getting cold.’ He was impatient now, eager to get away.
She did not move. They had tried to trick her like this once before: opened the door and beckoned, only to push her back and slam it i
n her face, their mouths contorted with cruel laughter. She shook her wings; she moved back into the shadows and she closed her eyes. The cage was home. In there she would be safe.
Paul frowned. ‘Clare!’ He stared at her, a sudden feeling of unease in the pit of his stomach. ‘Clare! Come on. You’re free.’ He turned away from the cage leaving the door hanging open, but she didn’t move. He stopped and glanced back. ‘Clare, come on. You can’t stay out here. It’s freezing.’ Her face was a complete blank. Suddenly frightened he turned back and, ducking under the low door, he went into the cage beside her. Putting his hands under her arms he dragged her out of the cage and picked her up. Her face was white, her body limp. Not once as he carried her towards the house did her eyelids move.
He carried her upstairs and took her into her bedroom, laying her on the bed before standing looking down at her. She was still breathing. He fumbled for her pulse, holding her cold wrist for a moment, not attempting to count. It was there, weak but regular. ‘Clare. It is your own fault. You made me do it.’ He spoke out loud, wheedling. ‘If you’d done what any wife would have done and helped me none of this would have happened –’
He dragged the cover from under her body and pulled it over her. ‘You’ll be glad to be rid of the place in the end. You know you will. It was going to drain every penny we had. It wasn’t realistic to keep it, Clare …’ She did not respond. ‘Clare? Clare, are you all right?’ Fear gripped him. Clare really was possessed. He stepped away from the bed and hurried towards the door. Closing it behind him he turned the key, then he ran downstairs to the telephone. Suddenly he was in a blind panic. Geoffrey had to come now.
32
Henry was shocked at Emma’s appearance. She was pale and exhausted, and her eyes were red-rimmed.
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