Lament for a Maker

by Michael Innes

  Lament for a Maker

  Michael Innes

  When mad recluse, Ranald Guthrie, the laird of Erchany, falls from the ramparts of his castle on a wild winter night, Appleby discovers the doom that shrouded his life, and the grim legends of the bleak and nameless hamlets, in a tale that emanates sheer terror and suspense.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.

  After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel, Death at the President’s Lodging. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.

  After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen’s University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature.

  Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.

  PART ONE

  THE NARRATIVE OF EWAN BELL

  1

  It will appear full plain in this narrative that Mr Wedderburn, the writer from Edinburgh, is as guileful as he’s douce – and that he has need of all the guile that Eve passed on from the Serpent may be supposed, him with his living to make among the lawyers. Gleg he is. And as a first proof here is Ewan Bell, the shoemaker of Kinkeig, taking pen in hand to begin fashion a book – and all because of the way he has with him, Mr Wedderburn. It was like this.

  We two were sitting in his private room at the Arms, with a glass of toddy against the weather; and, faith, in those last days I had been through more than snow and a snell December wind, so that time had been when I scarce thought to see toddy and a brave fire again. We sat chewing over the whole strange affair – such, certain, had never been known in these parts – and syne Mr Wedderburn looked up from his glass and ‘Mr Bell,’ he said, ‘more than anything else it has been like a novel.’

  ‘Indeed, Mr Wedderburn,’ I replied, ‘that’s true; for it’s been nothing but plain work of the Devil from start to finish.’

  He smiled at this in a canny way he has: often you think Mr Wedderburn must be seeing some joke other folk don’t see. Then he looked at me fell gravely and said: ‘I believe you could make an uncommonly good story of it yourself, Mr Bell. Why not try your hand?’

  I was fair stammagasted at this: strange days, I thought, when a civil-spoken lawyer should say such a thing to an elder of the Kirk in Kinkeig. Power of invention is ever an evil lure, unless it be used for the godly purpose of conceived prayer. Yet here was Mr Wedderburn insinuating I was a romancer born, and presently urging me to write an account of the whole stour – not to any moral end but because it had the makings of a bit tale! There is ever something whimsical in Mr Wedderburn, dour as he can be at need, and this plan was sure the daftest ever. I said I had no fitness for such employment, being but a cobbler growing old, at his last.

  ‘Why, Mr Bell,’ he said, ‘it’s well known that after the minister and the dominie the sutor’s the man of learning in the parish.’

  ‘He’s said to be the atheist too,’ I replied right dryly, ‘and there are exceptions, maybe, to each rule.’ But I own I was pleased at what he said. Partly because I like the old words; long after Will Saunders had changed his bit board from Flesher to Family Butcher (which is a daft way of speaking, surely) I had bided Kinkeig’s sutor still. And partly I was well-pleased because I felt the saying true of our parish at this day: true and a bit more. For though we have a right learned minister in Dr Jervie never a dominie have we at all, the time of such being over and they replaced by unbedable queans: you can hear the scraich of the Kinkeig schoolmistress above the noise of the whole school skailing, and what man would want that by his lug in the morning? And though Miss Strachan – which is her name – has her letters from Edinburgh University she has nothing the learning of the old dominie; I mind having a bit crack with her once and she thought Plutarch had written his books in the Latin tongue: I was fell put out to change the subject. And yet pleased with herself she is: at Edinburgh she wrote a bit paper – thesis, she calls it – on The Cinema as an Aid in Visual Education, and her as proud as if she’s written Bain’s Logic or the Rhetoric of Dr Hugh Blair. I mind Rob Yule asking once: ‘And what is Visual Education?’ and before the woman could reply Will Saunders cutting in sharp: ‘It’s what Susannah afforded the elders.’ A daft speak and black affronted the schoolmistress: he’s but a coarse chiel, Will.

  But it looks ill for my writing if I am to ramble like this.

  I knew fine that if anyone in the parish was to tell the tale it must be myself, for none could expect it from Dr Jervie, who has learning for more important things. And, truth to tell, I am not an unread man, it being forty years since I followed Sir John Lubbock through the Hundred Best Books – and I doubt if the bit lassies at the colleges do that. Nevertheless I said to Mr Wedderburn now: ‘Ne sutor ultra crepidam’ – that being, strange enough, the way the Romans told a man to mind his own affairs. And I won’t say that the fetching so trig a reply out of my head didn’t put me better-humoured still. Anyway, I was right content feeling those awful days were over.

  But Mr Wedderburn gave no more than a nod to my bit Latin and went on. ‘Do you but begin, Mr Bell, and we’ll get others to take up the tale, and tell of their own part in it.’

  ‘Including yourself, Mr Wedderburn?’ I said this sharp, thinking to bring home the senselessness of the plan to him so.

  ‘To be sure,’ said he – and what did he do on that but order in more toddy!

  I was fair stammagasted again. ‘Well,’ I said, doubtful, ‘I suppose there was Sir Walter.’

  ‘To be sure there was, Mr Bell. And we can be as anonymous as he was. You’ll remember Lockhart tells what a mystery the Great Enchanter was.’

  I was pleased at his taking it for granted I’d read Lockhart’s Life of Sir Walter Scott. But even so, I believe I would have held out if my vanity hadn’t betrayed me. For I was just going to say No outright when – faith! – another appropriate bit Latin came into my head. ‘Mr Wedderburn,’ I said, ‘I’ll take it to avizandum’ – which is what his friends the judges at Edinburgh say when they’re afraid to give an opinion without sleeping on it. And at that he laughed and we left it until he was going back south next day.

  And then, when he was waiting for the car that must get him through the snow to the junction, I learnt a bit more of what was in his mind. He had a young friend, he said, a feckless chiel, who had written daft tales, mysteries, about folk the like of whom he’d never met, and of events quite beyond nature. Mr Wedderburn was concerned to
call him back to what he thought reality. And as the Guthrie business had been real enough – though half beyond nature itself – and the folk such folk as this writer-lad might have some understanding of, Mr Wedderburn thought it would be fine if we could let the chiel have all the materials, in a series of narratives, to work over as he cared; either just editing, or writing over the whole. And certain it would be he would so contrive it – what would be felt necessary – that our names and the like were changed, and Kinkeig and all in it get no more notoriety than they had already had.

  Well, it seemed a benevolent scheme, and a chance of fetching a little good out of much ill. To make a long story short, I gave Mr Wedderburn my promise. In the following pages I begin a record of the events that brought about the death of Ranald Guthrie. I shall start – as the poet Horace advises – in medias res and then hark back to earlier matters. If Mr Wedderburn’s young friend in Edinburgh distrusts Horace he can e’en change about.

  2

  When the speak came down Glen Erchany that Ranald Guthrie had taken his own ungodly life there was little grieving in Kinkeig. A coarse man he was known to be for all his years and gentry, who had lived nigh solitary like a crow as long as most could remember: a recluse, the last minister called him. And there was a story how the minister, years back, had made way up the glen to call on Guthrie and beg a subscription to a work of charity. Some said Guthrie, thinking the minister had come to chide him over the aye-empty great pew in the kirk, fired off a rusty gun at him. And some said he had but let loose the dogs – and some said the rats, for the Erchany rats were more famous in that land than all the rats of Hamlin town. And whether gun or dogs or rats all Kinkeig laughed, for the minister – him that was before Dr Jervie – was ill liked. But if folk disliked the minister they fair hated Ranald Guthrie. And that was unco at a first thinking, for while the minister was ever about folk’s houses, crying out ‘Is any of you indoors?’ and next moment stepping over the door-sill with his havering and expecting a dram for-bye, Guthrie was far enough away and himself plagued none. But folk hated his very name, he was that near-going.

  Guthrie was the nearest-going man in all the lands about, and there were some that were near-going enough. Rob Yule, who farmed the fine parks down the Drochet and had more silver than most, would walk behind the cart that brought his meal home from the mill, crying to the lad to go warily; and he had a bit grocer’s shovel and when a handful of meal coupt from the cart he’d be down with his shovel and scraping it up from the glaur. And Fairbairn – him at Glenlippet whose wife was crippled with rheumatism, and such a church-worker that she made him keep a motor so she could be sure always to get to the Dorcas and such – Fairbairn took out the motor licence by the quarter – her being by ten years the older, and him being ever in hope. But neither Rob Yule nor Fairbairn could hold a candle in meanness to Ranald Guthrie – Guthrie who was as well set-up among the gentry as Rob was among the tenant-folk, and who had been a great scholar too, men said, in his day. Of all the dwellers in the glens about it was only of Ranald Guthrie you could honestly say he was as mean as an Englishman. Most in Kinkeig had suffered through him, for he owned the lands far round and his factor, the creature Hardcastle, took kindly to the pinching and screwing he was employed in. When the word got round Kinkeig that Guthrie had done himself a fatal mischief there were many that were right glad and a few that were sorry. The many were glad, hoping surely for a better laird. But the few with a spark of imagination were sorry, for to them the pity came that Guthrie had not thought to take the coarse creature Hardcastle with him, to do his pinching and screwing for him when he was set-up – as syne he’d be sure to be – among the propertied souls in hell. But Hardcastle’s neck was as sound as the day his mother first scraiched at the ill sight of him; and there was that look in his eye – Laurie the policeman said – you could tell he expected to come fair comfortable and well-feathered out of the tragedy. When folk heard there had been a strangeness in Guthrie’s end and that the sheriff himself was coming to Kinkeig to get the truth of it there were tongues enough to prophesy that Hardcastle would soon be gaoled; and when the strangeness grew with the daft gossip of what had befallen the corpse, so that the hanging of young Neil Lindsay was on the lips of every gawpus and bap-faced old body in the parish, there were plenty that would still have Hardcastle involved as well. Old Speirs the stationy, him they called the Thoughtful Citizen because he was ever blethering out of the English newspapers, went about saying that for certain Hardcastle was an accessory before the fact and would be held on suspicion as sure as sure. Full of criminal law was old Speirs ever since he started stocking Edgar Wallace for Dr Jervie’s loons, and would air his views every night at the Arms, with a pack of bothie billies listening to his stite as if it were the wisdom of Solomon. But there – I’m losing my thread again.

  3

  It was a hard winter. Armistice morn saw the clouds gathering leaden behind Ben Cailie, the snowy summit standing brilliant still against them in a bleak early sun. Then the lift darkened and at eleven, while the minister was holding his service by the memorial, the first flakes fell: you could tell at once it was going to lie, the way it lay on the minister’s robes. Some thought he would interrupt the service, but he went on unheeding; and a few folk put up umbrellas and the rest gathered shawls about them – widow-bodies mostly, their thoughts twenty years back and more – and sang the hundred and twenty-first psalm.

  Unto the hills around do I lift up

  My longing eyes…

  Sweet and strange it was, no hills could be seen, neither Ben Cailie nor the braes about, the words like a queer parable of faith in things invisible. And then the flakes came thicker, not dancing but in a steady fall, and took the psalm from folk’s lips and muted it, so that the singing might have come from far away. There is ever something piercing the mind in an open-air service in Scotland, so piercing they are but seldom held: we had our stomach-full of that in the days of the Solemn League and Covenant.

  The eleventh of November, I say, was the beginning of a bitter season. For the snow that began that day in flakes so broad folk said it would be gone the morning’s morn lay for a fortnight in a still, cold air: you could see the boughs quivering at the tips with the weight on them. And that snow went out with a quick thaw and a great storm, a hurricane fit to bring down in ruin another Tay Bridge, that went howling up the glen to rip great sheets of lead from the crazy battlements of Castle Erchany. And hard on that, with the stubble lands still steaming, came a black frost.

  The snow was falling again in mid-December and the bairns were right pleased with the white Christmas they were like to have. But as it fell fine and unceasing day by day the canny in Kinkeig began to look to their provisions and outlying crofters made sore haste to get an extra load of corn to the mill. The Thoughtful Citizen said the winter would be a record, sure, and a grand season for the curlers. And that was fine comfort for those who were thinking of their bit kye. There’s this to be said for making your stock of Edgar Wallace and Annie S. Swan: they need no cake and no mucking.

  By the time that snow stopped we knew there had to come but another fall and a bit drift to snow the place up entirely, for though the county has snow-ploughs enough these days it would be long before they’d think to let drive at a remote place like Kinkeig. So we sat down in next to idleness, the old men with a bit park maybe sharpening a coulter against the spring and the farmer billies toasting their big bellies before a gey fire and nodding their heads over a catalogue of tractors from the coarse American creature Henry Ford. And the silence the snow brings thickened about us: fient a sound in all the glens except the peewits, that went crying their own strangeness still to the strange and blanketed earth, with whiles a bit stir in a corn yard as some wife went out to meat the hens. There’s ever a sense of expecting in a white Christmas season, and has been belike since A.D. One. And sure there were plenty to say afterwards that they had felt an Expectation; they hadn’t known of What, it was just a Fe
eling, awful, they never minded the like. And one old wife said that when the minister was preaching on the Herald Angels and she was trying, decent-like, to conjure up a bit picture of them in her mind like what they put on Christmas cards, she had a vision of the daftie Tammas, coming louping through the snow from Erchany and yammering murder; it would be just a week before he did that same certain enough, but she hadn’t let on at the time, thinking it a fell unchristian fancy. Mistress McLaren the smith’s wife, that was; she must be said to have a talent for what the stationy calls publicity.

  If an unco silence had fallen upon nature with the snow those weeks there were plenty of human tongues in Kinkeig to make good the deficiency. The less work always the more gossip, and there must have been even more claiking than usual about the meikle house. Castle Erchany is far enough from Kinkeig, but it’s the laird’s house and forbye the nearest gentry house barring the manse by many a mile, so it’s a natural centre for idle talk. It would be that were it owned by the dreichest and quietest folk in Scotland – which it’s not. The Guthries have ever had a way with them that catches the eye and sets folks either crying out or whispering: their valour of the shining kind, their treasons showing lurid in the discovery, their births at a strange term, a rape or a romance keeking out from behind their canny wivings, violence or madness or some unlikely ecstasy casting flare or shadow over their end. Many old families have as much colour to their stories as the Guthries, but few have as much colour that have contrived too to hold what they have through the centuries. The Guthries have been at Erchany since long before the Reformation – and, Reader, I warn you that back beyond the Reformation with them you and I must presently go. But for the moment my best course seems by way of Ranald Guthrie and the bogles. It was with this that the chief gossip of those weeks began.