Fortunately for the Glenclachans, their guest made no attempt to voice her thoughts out loud. Life, for the earl and his countess, had already been complicated enough by the appearance in their lives of Miss Emily Dorothea Seeton . . .
Who was otherwise a model guest. She expected no fuss; she did not plague for attention; she was pleasant and amusing company when everyone was together, but able to amuse herself when they were not. As happened again the next morning, with Ranald shut away once more with his factor and Liusaidh busy with the baby. The imminent tooth had still not yet broken through, and Lady Glenclachan was adamant that Miss Seeton was to spend no more of her holiday caring for someone else’s offspring. She was to take her binoculars and a packed lunch, and enjoy herself among the birds of the Scottish Highlands. She might even find the gold mine, after all. Miss Seeton smiled, and turned pink. She had to confess to being a little curious—as would not anyone be, in the circumstances?
“Oh, I agree. I’m sure Ranald and his friends must have had tremendous fun looking for it, when they were children—but of course they didn’t find it. So please don’t be too disappointed when you don’t, either.” Liusaidh’s smile was kindly. “It’s far more likely you’ll sight a moonie, or even a spink—but, whatever you see, I hope you enjoy yourself.”
And, having repeated the earl’s warnings about the risks of Highland climbing, checked with her on the map where she planned to go, and promised search parties if she was not safely back by suppertime, Lady Glenclachan waved farewell to her guest in the confidence that Miss Seeton was really a most sensible little body, who had taken in everything she had been told and would surely come to no harm in the hills.
Surely . . .
chapter
~16~
MISS SEETON WAS relieved that her appearance and equipment had met with the approval of her hostess. She had no wish to cause anxiety to anyone, and she could now set off on her little excursion in complete confidence.
Apart from the map, and a delicious packed lunch which Mrs. McScurrie had so kindly prepared for her, Miss Seeton’s capacious handbag contained two clean pocket handkerchiefs, a comb, a small mirror, some loose change and her emergency five-pound note (inflation having made this a more realistic sum than the two separate notes she’d been accustomed to keep by her), her pocket flashlight, and a selection of pencils varying in hardness, together with a pencil sharpener and—she sighed for her limitations—an eraser. And, most important of all, her sketchbook. Over her arm she carried her umbrella, and on her head she wore her cockscomb hat.
Miss Seeton smiled at the memory of his lordship’s gentle teasing last night, after dinner, when he had left the room at the coffee stage and returned with a feather which, he assured her, was an eagle’s, and the mark of a Highland chief. She ought, he said, to be properly dressed, just in case she met the Queen again: everyone was equal in the open air, and Her Majesty would understand the democratic significance of the new decoration on Miss Seeton’s hat.
Miss Seeton had demurred, pointing out that she was, as surely his lordship remembered, neither Scottish nor of any importance in the world whatsoever—certainly not a chief. Ranald said that, in gratitude for her sterling service to his infant daughter, he was making her an honorary chieftain of the MacSporrans, as (he being the head of that clan) was his prerogative. She was to regard it as the nearest to a medal he could award, and Liusaidh added that she thought it looked rather well inside the band, and they must remember to take Miss Seeton’s photograph in an appropriate setting before she went back home to Plummergen.
Miss Seeton allowed herself to be persuaded; and, having later studied the reflection in her bedroom looking glass, conceded that the addition might almost be said to suit her—or rather (modesty added hastily) the hat, anyway. One was tempted to say—a temptation to be resisted—to say, well, distinguished. Which, of course, she was not, for how could a retired art teacher expect to distinguish herself in any way? She led the quietest and most private of lives . . . but, should there be even the slightest chance that, during her little excursion, she might encounter Her Majesty, then it was plainly her duty to show every respect. Which dressing the part, she supposed, would do. If only—she sighed once more—she had remembered to ask about the curtsey . . .
Miss Seeton, in sensible tweeds and comfortable shoes, walked on under the August sun, drinking in the view and the birdsong, from time to time raising the binoculars she wore about her neck to study some passing songster as it settled on a clump of heather or the low branch of a tree. It was a beautiful day—indeed, a fine day. Miss Seeton hummed Madame Butterfly’s famous aria and felt at peace with the world.
She began to feel thirsty. Mrs McScurrie had suggested she should carry a flask of coffee, for which kindness Miss Seeton had been grateful, though it would make one’s bag rather heavier than one would wish, for a day out in the hills. Lady Glenclachan had come to her rescue, speaking with such enthusiasm on the joys of drinking from clear Highland streams that Miss Seeton had been enchanted.
“It’s the finest water in the world, true enough,” Ranald MacSporran, overhearing the discussion, confirmed in his most fervent tones. “Soft and pure and flavoured with peat—just a taste, no more—but it’s what makes our whisky what it is, Miss Seeton. There’s none better.”
Miss Seeton didn’t plan to take whisky with her any more than she wanted to carry a heavy thermos. She compromised by slipping the silver top of his lordship’s personal flask, which he mischievously offered her, into her jacket pocket. Her original romantic notion of scooping up water in cupped hands was dismissed, on reflection, as impractical.
For this dismissal, she was to be thankful. She found a stream, every bit as bright and sparkling as Liusaidh had promised, chattering over pebbles between low green banks—banks with steep, crumbling sides. The rich peaty soil, no doubt. Stooping and scooping from such water would mean the grave risk of a tumble, Miss Seeton thought. Even for one such as herself, whose knees, thanks to the yoga . . .
Having found a little inlet where she might safely lower and fill the silver cup, Miss Seeton did so, and sat for a while on a convenient boulder, grey and glittering with what common sense told her was unlikely to be gold. She smiled for her daydreams. Hadn’t his lordship said something about mica, in granite? And calcium, or had that been carbon, as well? She couldn’t quite remember, but on a day like this it didn’t seem to matter much. She dipped another cup of water, drank it, and decided it made her feel hungry.
She sat for a while after her modest lunch—saving some for later in case, as she recalled the warnings, anything should go wrong—with her sketchpad open on her knee and a pencil in her hand, drawing quick impressions of the various views to be seen in different directions. Consulting the Ordnance Survey map lent her by Lord Glenclachan, she identified most of the obvious landmarks, and was particularly struck by the name of a strangely shaped crag in the near distance. Quet-na-Scrabberteistie reminded Miss Seeton, as her pencil captured its remarkable outline, of a seabird—one of the auk family, perhaps. “A guillemot,” mused Miss Seeton, and smiled as she remembered the talk she’d had last night with Lady Glenclachan. “Or do I mean a cuttie? When it does not look in the least,” she added, surveying first her drawing and then the crag, “like a shirt, which is what I understood it to mean. Cutty Sark—a witch, as I recall, trying to lure poor Tam O’Shanter to his doom—although the ship is most graceful, and for school excursions so interesting, as well as convenient.” She gazed slowly about her. “How very different all this is from Greenwich, although it occurs to me now to wonder why it is pronounced Grennitch and not green witch— most apposite, with the Cutty Sark on display there—and from London in general, of course. Different, that is . . .”
For a while she pondered her time at the school in Hampstead, and thought how glad she was that, now she’d retired, she could still be of use (albeit in a part-time capacity) to the village in which she had been so fortunate as to m
ake her home, where she was happy to stay in utter contentment. Apart from the occasional holiday, which the kindness of friends made possible, nothing ever happened to disturb her otherwise unremarkable life . . .
She came out of her daydream to find that the sheet of paper on which she’d begun to sketch Quet-na-Scrabberteistie had now been filled by a series of sketches of birds. Which was, she supposed, understandable—or would have been, had they been recognisable as guillemots or other auks. To her surprise and dismay, they were nothing like seabirds, or at least most of them weren’t, being small and perky and bright of eye, with inquisitive beaks that reminded her of finches, or wrens, perhaps. The other birds were obviously waterfowl of some sort, but ducks rather than auks—the bills were entirely different.
“Oh dear,” said Miss Seeton, turning to a fresh page and wondering whether it was worth the effort of starting again. Maybe if she were to look at the crag from another angle, it might be easier to capture its strange appearance on paper; and the map showed her that, by a fortunate coincidence, if she followed the stream—Skutie Burn, she corrected herself—she would, before long, find herself at the foot of Quet-na-Scrabberteistie.
She collected her belongings together, briefly admired the glitter of the granite boulder which had been her seat, and headed off upstream. The correct procedure when lost, as his lordship had made clear last night, was to find water and follow it downstream; as she did not mean to become lost, it would surely not matter if she reversed the theory in order to achieve her goal.
It took longer than she had intended, mostly because the terrain grew more uneven where what she guessed was an outcrop of the crag had shattered through centuries of rough weather, forming pebbles, stones, and scree which were partly overgrown, partly exposed, so that she could never be sure, until she was almost on top of an obstacle, how much of an obstacle it would turn out to be. Skutie Burn had taken the easiest course down from the summit, winding around and between rock or root or tree trunk gnarled with age; and Miss Seeton kept wanting to stop and sketch details of these unusual formations, which slowed her progress all the more.
She marvelled at the rainbow and the wind ripples on a small pool formed by the spillage from a waterfall, which danced and splashed and sparkled in the sun. It splashed, indeed, rather more than Miss Seeton would have liked, blowing faint spray into her eyes and, she realised, soaking her hat, with its special feather. How ungrateful of his lordship’s kindness it would be to return to his home with her chieftain’s token damp and bedraggled! She moved to one side, looking for some way to bypass the waterfall, but a mischievous breeze tossed spray in her face again, and without conscious thought she opened her umbrella.
With a screech and a flap of startled wings, a bird, big and black and green-gleaming in the sunlight, flew up out of a nearby clump of gorse. A crow, maybe a rook, Miss Seeton thought—no, a rook’s glossiness was purple, rather than greenish. A carrion crow, then. She wondered what it had been doing. Either the sudden movement or the unaccustomed shape of the umbrella’s shadow had disturbed it; and, as her new path was to take her within a few feet of the golden gorse in which the bird had been so busy, she realised with a slight sensation of queasiness—dear Mel, she hoped she was feeling better today—that it was very probable she was about to find, unfortunately, a dead or dying sheep. His lordship had spoken at some length last night on the regrettable feeding habits of the bird family Corvus, although his wife had reminded him that “carrion” was rather a corruption of the qualifying “corone” than a description of what the bird ate.
“Very suitable, then,” retorted Ranald, going on to talk of gamekeepers, and ghillies, and living lambs with their eyes pecked out.
Miss Seeton swallowed. She looked towards the clump of gorse, then back to the waterfall, then on to the soaring strangeness of Quet-na-Scrabberteistie. She was probably now close enough to attempt another sketch . . . but suppose the lamb was still alive . . . but she had heard no bleats or cries . . . and were lambs so small and helpless this late in the year . . . but it might have been injured in a tumble down the waterfall, and crawled for shelter on broken legs . . .
Miss Seeton’s imagination made up her mind for her, even as she flinched from what she was about to see. A dead lamb was beyond her assistance; a living creature, wounded, helpless, a suffering victim, was another matter. Her duty was plain. She lowered and furled the umbrella, with some vague thought of a prod to ward off predators. She gulped, took a deep breath, and set her shoulders. Feeling decidedly shaky inside, Miss Seeton marched straight for the gorse and forced herself to walk round behind it to see what the crow had been doing . . .
And then she wished she hadn’t.
Mel Forby had felt much better after a good night’s sleep. The poached egg and toast Miss Seeton had persuaded her to swallow, washed down with two cups of weak tea, sent her off into a comfortable doze from which she woke in time to enjoy a lightly cooked supper in the hotel dining room. The uniformed female glimpsed fleetingly on her first night was in attendance and, after some prompting, revealed that her name was Shona. She offered Mel the wine list and asked, with a smirk, if she was to expect the pleasure of Miss Forby’s company in the bar later on. Mr. McQueest, she added with another smirk, was away on one of his jaunts, so . . .
Mel loftily ignored both the insinuations and the wine list and said she’d think about it. She drank water right through her meal and, having thought, went instead for a gentle stroll among the moth-soft shadows of Scotland’s summer dusk.
There were still lights on in the bar when she returned, with her weak ankle twinging slightly but her spirits—no, make that joie de vivre—once more high. She almost felt like throwing her walking stick away. She would be her old self again tomorrow: one day older, but a good deal wiser. No more Lairigigh, she vowed silently, and she ran up the stairs to her room two steps at a time before she could change her mind and march into the bar just for the satisfaction of proving Shona wrong.
Pride goes before a fall. Mel spent most of the next day rubbing liniment into her aching ankle, and talking with whichever of the hotel staff was prepared to spare the time. Shona, now that the ice had been broken, was good for a spot of gossip whenever Hamish wasn’t around. When he was, the girl communicated in monosyllables, and performed her usual vanishing trick. She, Mel had no need to ask, was a local. Newcomer Hamish, when finally cornered, expounded on life in Glenclachan, his wish to turn the Pock and Tang into a tourist attraction, and the virtues of moderation (in a tone of barely suppressed amusement). Mel pointedly drank orange juice, feeling peeved, wondering yet again how the landlord managed to keep his clientele. He probably didn’t care, she concluded: he hoped to drive them all away, so that he could go upmarket with a vengeance, and fleece the trippers in their thousands.
But he hadn’t driven them away just yet. The afternoon contingent muttered when they arrived to find Mel once more perched on her stool by the bar, but by the time she headed for the dining room, they seemed to have resigned themselves to her presence. She hadn’t said much; she’d been too busy listening to the accent, making mental notes for the series of Pieces she planned for the Daily Negative on “The Uniqueness of Highland Life.”
Malcolm MacDonald was not among the drinkers, and from what Mel could make out, hadn’t been seen all day. Campbell, too, had been invisible, it seemed. At least there couldn’t be any punch-ups in the bar while they were both absent . . .
Mel returned to her room to renew her makeup, and wished she could talk to Thrudd, whose presence she was missing rather more than she’d expected. Would the editor of the Negative, she wondered, permit a personal telephone call on her expenses? Except that the telephone booth in the hall near Reception wasn’t all that personal, really. If Hamish was serious about going upmarket, phones in bedrooms would be an excellent place to start. But there might not be anyone around when she rang; she could always hang up, or change the subject, if—oh. No, she couldn’t—or at leas
t she wouldn’t—because Glenclachan, as she’d learned among other items of varying interest from Shona, wasn’t on Subscriber Trunk Dialling yet. She didn’t fancy the idea of some bat-eared postmistress at the one-horse telephone exchange—they probably still had to crank a handle, for heaven’s sake—being able to quote every last syllable of her London-bound badinage . . .
There came a sudden hubbub from the bar below. Mel’s ears pricked up, and her eyes sparkled. Campbell, or MacDonald, maybe both of them, had come back, she’d bet on it—which meant action—which meant a story. And, where there was a story, there too was Amelita Forby. Mel jumped to her feet, winced without noticing she did so, snatched up her stick, and headed out of her room in the direction of the bar.
“Aye, it’s true enough, there’s no chance of a mistake,” someone was saying as she opened the door. “Dead as a doornail, close by Skutie Burn, and looking for all the world at first as if drowning was the cause, they say—”
“Except,” broke in someone else, “that nobody who’s been drowned comes crawling oot the watter after to hide under a gorse bush . . .”
Mel’s ears were out on stalks. Somebody dead—and foul play suspected, which she’d bet was the crime she’d been waiting for. Or else she’d made a big mistake coming to Glenclachan right from the start.
“. . . heid fairly bashed in, on seeing the back of it,” she heard someone say, “and a great stone covered with blood close by . . .”
Definitely foul play. But who was the victim? Had the kidnappers returned for another attempt at Lady Marguerite, and quarrelled? When thieves fall out . . .
“. . . a corbie set to peck out his eyes,” offered someone else, “if it hadnae been for that auld woman covering his heid with her umbrella to scare the creature away . . .”
Miss Seeton Rocks the Cradle (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 13) Page 13