Pride's Folly

by Fiona Harrowe

  At Balmoral, Scottish home of British royalty, I took a coach and four through the bleak Grampians. There on the other side of a boulder-strewn hill runneled with icy streams we came to a crossroads where I began the final leg of my journey on foot. After I’d trudged a mile or so of lonely road, the suitcase in each hand growing heavier and heavier, a kindly crofter came along and offered me a ride in his cart. When I told him I was bound for Invernean, he became talkative, almost garrulous. But only a word here and there made sense to my American ears: “castle,” “kirk,” “laird.”

  We jolted along the frozen road for what seemed like hours, all feeling vanishing from my toes, fingers, and the tip of my nose. Finally we rattled up through a gap in the hills where the crofter stopped his cart and pointed with his whip to the castle below.

  A tall rounded keep rose above two wings that obviously had been built at separate times, for neither addition was in harmony with the stone tower. An ancient crumbling wall stood to one side, probably a curtain wall of the original fortification. Before we plunged lower I caught a glimpse of brown meadows, a river, moorlands, and a forest beyond.

  The crofter and I parted at the head of a long drive bordered by beeches, their bare limbs clacking in the chill wind. Halfway down the drive a huge Labrador ran up to meet me, barking furiously. When I spoke, he sniffed suspiciously at my feet; then, deciding I posed no danger, he trotted along beside me. Though only four o’clock in the afternoon, it was already dusk when I came up to the massive front door of the castle.

  A man with a quizzical look—the butler, I assumed—let me into a vast hall. The oil lamps flickering on polished chests and from wall brackets did little to dispel the gloomy shadows that hovered in distant corners. One wall was completely taken up with a fireplace, its black maw so huge it could have (and probably at one time had) roasted an ox. And it was cold. I had to resist the urge to stamp my feet and swing my arms.

  “Mr. Morse, I take it.” The butler had apparently been forewarned of my arrival. “This way, sir.”

  He led me across the flag-stoned floor and up a narrow winding stair to a set of double doors. We passed through them into another large room hardly warmer than the hall below, though not as bare. Carpets deadened our footfalls as we passed tapestry-covered chairs spaced at intervals like sentinels beneath the portrait-hung walls. The air was so icy I fancied I could see my breath. But beyond the next door cheer and warmth greeted me with a roaring fireplace and Ian and Mother both on their feet before it, smiling, their faces lit up with welcome.

  “Just in time for tea, old fellow,” Ian said, shaking my hand and clapping me on the shoulder.

  Mother kissed me, rubbing her warm cheek against my frozen one. “Page, Page—let me look at you!” Then she hugged and held me for several long moments.

  I was surprised to see tears in her eyes. We had been parted and reunited many times before, but she rarely gave way to such emotion. I wondered if it was because of her “condition” or because she was lonely in this frozen, isolated place.

  If Mother harbored feelings of alienation about Invernean, Ian obviously had none. He had always struck me as a positive sort of person with an ironic sense of humor, interested in what he was doing but keeping a level balance. Now his eagerness overflowed.

  He had great plans for the estate. First off, he intended to raise the rents. Over half of Invernean was leased to tenants who were still paying the same minimal rents set a hundred years earlier.

  “Can’t blame them,” Ian said. “Nothing’s been done to improve their housing, no encouragement given to enrich their soil. My father was an indifferent landlord.”

  He intended to raise sheep on a larger scale, to have new ground broken and planted in barley. The Home Farm—that portion of acreage reserved for the sole use of the castle— would be restocked, the orchards rejuvenated, the hothouses rebuilt, and the kitchen garden increased to supply all the castle’s needs.

  At dinner that night he elaborated on his various projects. It was a different meal from the kind we’d known at Nob Hill, where all of us, though washed and combed and neatly dressed, dined informally. Here at Invernean we wore evening clothes. Mother, in a bustled black-and-white taffeta (with a black overskirt, to hide her burgeoning figure), sat at one end of the long table; Ian, in a dark velvet coat, lace-edged shirt, and scarlet kilt, at the other. I, of course, wore the customary frock coat and peg-leg trousers. But little Jamie was a replica of his father, from the silver Marksbury-crested buttons on his velvet coat to the knee-high tartan stockings, from which glinted the jeweled hilt of a skean, a lethal ridge-edge knife. I never thought a man could look truly masculine in a skirt. But Ian did. Sitting under the portrait of a fierce bearded ancestor, he was the very image of a stalwart laird of the manor.

  “I’ve come home,’’ he explained to me afterward over port and cigars. We were sitting in the “smoking room,’’ just the two of us, Mother having gone up to bed. “I spent a good part of my boyhood here and never gave it a thought—I was happy enough to leave. As you know, my father and I had a falling out.’’

  Although Mother had told me about the disagreement between Ian and his father, this was the first time Ian himself had mentioned it to me. I took his confidence as an acknowledgment of my blossoming maturity and felt flattered.

  “When my father died,’’ he went on, “I intended to return to Invernean only to pull things together, perhaps place a good man in charge. But . . .’’He paused and got to his feet, glass in hand. Turning his back to me, he stared up at a full-length painting of a man in the costume of a seventeenth-century soldier: plumed hat, buff coat, spurred leather boots, and swashbuckler’s sword.

  “This was done by Peter de Lys,’’ Ian said. “The subject; my namesake, Ian Ramsey. The castle is full of these portraits, all men and women who came before me. Kin. Not strangers, Page, but kin!’’ He sipped at his glass. “I hadn’t been here half an hour when it suddenly struck me. Invernean was where I belonged. It was home.”

  He stopped abruptly and with a flushed face self-consciously relighted his cigar. “I don’t often get this sentimental,” he apologized. “But I want your mother to love it too, Page. I think she will in time. One day Invernean will be Jamie’s.”

  I silently hoped that I could feel that kind of passion for Wildoak and that someday Sabrina and I would have our own Jamie to pass it on to.

  Ian and I said good night, shaking hands at the top of the stairs. “There’s a candle on the table at the next landing. You might need it to light your way,” Ian said. “Will you be all right?”

  “Certainly. Thank you.”

  He left and went down the corridor, disappearing into one of the rooms. I continued up the spiral stairs in semidarkness, noting the swords, claymores, dirks, and daggers that hung on the walls. From this display and the weapons I had seen earlier in the gun room I assumed the Montgomerys had once been a warlike lot. At the landing, I found the candle in a copper holder and next to it a box of matches. Touching a flame to the wick, I looked around. The only other light was a bracketed oil lamp, which gave off a feeble glow. Beyond was darkness.

  With the candle in hand I began moving down the inky passage. An icy dampness permeated the stale air. I realized then why Mother had come down to dinner wearing a woolen coat over her formal dress. It had been removed by a maid before she entered the dining room and replaced when she excused herself and went up to bed. Outside the few main rooms, no attempt had been made to heat the castle.

  I came to another small staircase and paused there. When I had first been shown up to my room after my arrival, I had been too exicted to note how we’d reached it. Now I couldn’t remember. So many doors, so many passages branching off into other passages!

  I opened the door to a room bare of furniture. On the other side was another door. Had I gone through an unfurnished room? Was it this door? That? Perhaps the one on my right?

  Every now and again a mysterious draft would swe
ep across my shoulders, causing the candle flame to dance and sputter. As I continued my search, the candle grew smaller and I became more and more perplexed. Even if I had wanted to retrace my steps, go back down the stairs, and call for help, I couldn’t have done it.

  I was hopelessly lost.

  I had visions of wandering around all night until well past breakfast, when my absence would finally be noted and someone sent to find me. But ever hopeful, I kept opening doors and following likely-looking corridors. I had tramped through a bedroom furnished with a tester bed draped in lilac-patterned curtains and was on the other side, my hand on the knob, when something made me turn my head.

  A gentleman in knee breeches was sitting on a wing chair by the cold fireplace, his white-stockinged legs above black buckled shoes neatly crossed. He smiled wanly at me.

  Although his dress was rather unusual, I thought he might be a servant who had sneaked upstairs for a private snooze, or perhaps an elderly relative of Ian’s, an eccentric who preferred not to meet strangers.

  “Sir,” I said, deciding the latter was more plausible, “pardon the intrusion, but I’ve lost my way. I am staying in what is known as the Green Room. Could you direct me?”

  He held up two fingers, then pointed them in the direction of the door, meaning, I took it, two rooms straight ahead.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He nodded. A mute, I decided. Perhaps that was why he remained in seclusion.

  I found the room just as he said. A fire had been lit, my bed turned down. I got quickly into it, doused the candle and watched the dying flames on the hearth. Just before I dropped off to sleep, it came to me with a start that the gentleman in knee breeches might have been a ghost.

  I was the last person in the world to believe in ghosts. Or any other kind of superstitious nonsense. At school I had been introduced to the sciences, to Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton, and I believed firmly in proven fact, not fancy.

  And yet, down to the very marrow of my bones, I felt that I had just seen an apparition. Strangely, it did not frighten or trouble me. Why should it? That spirit had not been a mean or threatening one. The thought amused me more than anything else.

  The next morning I followed the sound of the breakfast gong and with a minimum of blundering managed to find my way down to the dining room. Over scrambled eggs I told Ian about my encounter with the gentleman in the knee breeches. He raised his brows. “You’ve seen Lord Willie Douglas?’’

  “Well, he didn’t give me his name.” I smiled.

  “Dark knee breeches, white stockings, a drooping moustache?”

  “Yes, yes, that’s him!”

  “Why, as far as I know, he hasn’t appeared for at least fifty years. I've never laid eyes on him. You must be psychic.”

  “Not in the least. Was Lord Willie an ancestor?”

  “No. He was the laird of a neighboring castle who got the lady of Invernean in the family way while her husband was at sea. When Lady Margaret was delivered, he had the midwife do away with the infant by throwing it into the fire.”

  “How gruesome,” I said. “But the old gentleman did not seem in the least remorseful.”

  “I suppose because he got away with his crime. He lived to a very ripe old age, whereas poor Lady Margaret died some weeks after the child’s birth. Incidentally, she is also one of our ghosts. She goes about carrying the corpse of the infant in her arms and weeping copious tears over it. I’ve never seen her either.”

  But I did. Two days later.

  It was a drear snowy afternoon, I remember, and out of boredom and curiosity I had decided to explore the castle. Armed with an oil lamp, for even at midday the passages were tunnels of darkness, I started up the main staircase. On the third level I branched off into a maze of shadowy corridors and corkscrew staircases that twisted upward, leading sometimes to sudden blank walls and sometimes to hidden doors that would not open. I passed through furnished rooms, bare ones, windowless and skylighted ones, thick with dust and cobwebs. In a paneled bedroom I found a half-opened cupboard in which hung a cuirass of tarnished mail; it looked as if its owner, a soldier of Queen Elizabeth’s time, was expected back shortly. As I stood gazing at it I could hear the scurrying of rats behind the wainscotting. A squeak and then silence. Suddenly I was seized with an eerie sensation of déjà vu, a strange feeling that I had been here, in this room, standing before this cupboard, listening to the rats behind the wall; in another life, another time. The sensation must have lasted only a handful of seconds and then it was gone.

  Odd, I thought.

  I went on with my exploration. Opening a modest little door I came upon the Long Gallery, a breathtaking room different from most of the others in that it had half a dozen large windows, which let in, for Invernean, a good deal of light. Here the walls were paneled in a wood of intricate design and hung with massive family portraits. In them, powder-wigged, kilted lairds stood in patriarchal dignity next to their seated women, artfully coiffured ladies of the castle dressed in period gowns of blue, yellow, or pink. Rosy-cheeked children, girls and boys of stepladder ages, leaned against their mother’s knees, some sitting at her feet, while the little ones stretched out their hands to gamboling spaniels.

  In some of these faces, especially those of the men, I saw Ian—the rather long jaw, the blue eyes, the straight nose. I could understand now why he felt he had come home. I envied him in a way. I had been told—and I believed it—that I did not in the least resemble any of the Falconers. While this lack did not make me feel a stranger at Wildoak, I would have given anything—at least at that moment—to have been able to say there was a portrait hanging on Wildoak’s walls to which I bore a family likeness.

  Suddenly, from the far end of the room, I heard a whimpering sound and turned to see a woman with an infant in her arms. I knew at once it was the Lady Margaret. Her appearance did not surprise me; it was almost as if I’d been expecting her. She began to walk toward me, the baby now crying in heart-rending sobs. It was only when the apparition got close enough for me to make out her features, eyeless sockets that were bony wells of sorrow, that I felt the hairs along my arms rise.

  “What is it you want?’’ I whispered.

  The moment I spoke she vanished into thin air.

  Though I reencountered Lord Willie a number of times during my stay at Invernean, Lady Margaret did not show herself to me again.

  I celebrated my twenty-first birthday on March 18, a windy, rain-driven day that turned the frozen roads into hub-deep mud. Mother had wanted to throw a grand party for the occasion and invite a host of friends, some from as far away as London. But her condition (now approaching confinement) combined with the weather (quite inclement) precluded it. Instead we had a quiet dinner, drinking a goodly quantity of champagne in toasts for my future.

  After the cake was cut, Ian got up, glass in hand, and said, “Page, I’ve put the sum of five thousand American dollars in the Bank of Richmond for you to buy your first horse.”

  I thought that was terribly decent of my stepfather, and I said so. He brushed my thanks away. Then my mother, again with tears in her eyes, kissed me.

  I had a strange reaction, however, to this generosity. I felt as though I had been given a compensatory gift for not being the laird’s son, his eldest, who at twenty-one, according to Scottish custom, would be feted by Invernean’s tenants and village folk, and who would become, without the slightest effort on his part, unquestionable heir to the estate.

  Chapter 18

  A week later my mother was brought to bed. The learned medical doctor Ian had promised had been unable to leave Edinburgh at the last moment so Ian was forced to call upon the local practitioner. A man who by his own account had brought scores of babies into the world. Dr. Gordon had received his training as a veterinarian and indeed doubled as one in the village.

  Pacing the library floor, Ian said for the fifth time, “Gordon’s rarely lost a mother,” as if to reassure himself.

  It must have been
a difficult birth, for the doctor was closeted with Mother all that day. Toward dusk, Ian flung himself out of his chair, unable to bear the tension any longer.

  “I’m going for a ride,” he said. “Come along?”

  “It’s raining, Ian.” We could hear the wind lashing against the window.

  “I shan’t be long,” he said.

  A half hour later, the doctor, a short stout man, found me alone when he came in to announce that my mother had been delivered of a boy.

  I knew Ian had the prerogative of going in to see mother and child first, and if I’d had my wits about me I would have hurried out in the rain to fetch him. But I wasn’t thinking clearly at that point and so went up to Mother’s bedroom alone.

  Her face on the pillows looked very pale and shrunken. She smiled weakly at me, her shadowed eyes still reflecting the ordeal she had gone through. The baby, wrapped in a blanket, lay cuddled in her arms.

  “Seems I can only produce boys,” she said.

  I bent and kissed her forehead. Not a word of complaint or self-pity. No mention of isolation or loneliness or homesickness—all of which she must have felt—for Nob Hill, or even after all these years, Wildoak.

  I took her hot, dry hand in mine, feeling much reduced by her bravery.

  Ian arrived, wind-tousled and dripping rain. He gave me a scathing look before he knelt by the bed. I had broken protocol, his look said; and to Ian, who set much store by such things, that breach was more than bad taste—it was gross rudeness.

  From that day on, I felt a coolness between us. I wondered if there wasn’t something else behind Ian’s changed attitude. Perhaps he was jealous of my closeness to Mother and had been so all along, hiding his envy behind a forced warmth and generosity. Mother, who seemed to understand, said, “He’ll get over it.” But he didn’t. His manner remained polite but distant—like Miles’s. And then something happened that strained our relationship even more.