Lament for a Maker

by Michael Innes

  Faith, though, her fears were justified. For in two-three minutes came a bit lull in the elements and she heard Lindsay’s voice harsh with anger. ‘Say that again–’

  And Guthrie said: ‘Married or unmarried, I say, and if it’s not too late, she’ll never be bairned by you.’

  And at that there was the sound of an open-handed blow, and then Lindsay, low and shocked. ‘Christ forgive me – you that might be my grandfather! I’m sorry, Guthrie; not all the bad blood that is between our folk–’

  Guthrie said: ‘You’ll pay.’

  And these words, as melodramatic as an old play in a barn, were the last the schoolmistress heard. For at that moment the first blast after the lull blew open some door in the biggins and she, that must have been more scared than she’d allow, took it for a pistol shot and started up in the loft scraiching murder.

  A fair scunner it must have been for them below. Lindsay took himself off straightways and Guthrie turned at once, cool enough, to deal with the surprise. Straight out and up the outside stair he must have gone, for before the schoolmistress had so much time as to fall into a tremble at the fool she’d made of herself he was through the loft door and gowking at her. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘am I to understand you are in some distress?’

  It didn’t comfort Miss Strachan any to find that she had to deal with the English travelled Guthrie, him that was all black irony and politeness; she’d sooner have had the Guthrie Lindsay had been dealing with, the laird who affected more of the Scots than the gentry have allowed themselves this century past. She gave a bit snivel – we may suppose – as she replied: ‘Oh Mr Guthrie, sir, I’m the schoolmistress at Kinkeig and I was riding by when the storm came and–’

  ‘I am very glad,’ said Guthrie – and standing outlined in the doorway he gave, she could see, a bit bow – ‘I am very glad the farm has given you shelter. But I think you cried out? You have been alarmed? Our hospitality has been at fault?’

  She could feel his louring eye, black shadow though he was, and the awful edge to his smooth words fair unnerved her quite. ‘It was a rat, Mr Guthrie,’ she cried; ‘I was sore frightened for a minute by a rat.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Guthrie. ‘The rats are troublesome round here. As it happens, I have just been dealing with one myself.’

  At that horrid speak the schoolmistress fair felt her blood go chill in her veins; she was that miserable that had she dared she would just have sat down and grat. And some further snivel she must have given, for the next words she reported of the laird were: ‘You are over-wrought; let me take you to a less disturbed asylum.’ The word ‘asylum’ really suggested to her muddled head for a moment that she was to be handed over to the daftie, she would have juiked past him if she could and out into the storm and the night. But the laird advanced with his heavy courtesy, like Sir Charles Grandison in Richardson’s fine novel, and fair handed her out of the loft as if it had been a ballroom. In the open she got another turn, for darkling as it was she could see his face as pale as Pepper’s Ghost and across it the great weal of a blow from an open hand. All the way round the arm of the loch and to the meikle house, where the laird wheeled her bicycle with one hand and armed her with the other like she had been the Duchess of Buccleuch, she could hear dinning in her lug his last words to the Lindsay chiel: ‘You’ll pay.’ And then at the meikle house he suddenly tired of his play and summoned the Hardcastle wife and said: ‘Provide for this young woman for the night.’ With that he gave her a cold bow and went his own gait, and the schoolmistress was probably as mortified by her sudden drop from ‘madam’ to ‘young woman’ as by anything had happened to her that awful day – though for that matter ‘young’ was a word of charity she might be grateful for: you must remember Guthrie hadn’t seen her in a full light.

  Nor did Miss Strachan see anything more of Guthrie save for a glimpse of him in the morning. She was up at keek of dawn, the rats had given her fient the wink of sleep all night and the supper she’d been offered was that meagre that long before she could decently get up she’d nibbled as much of the rest of her chocolate as the vermin hadn’t snatched from her bedside. Fell eager to get away she was, the storm had abated, and her best plan, she thought, was to trudge back to Kinkeig wheeling her machine – there would be no riding it, certain, with the track the way it was. So she wheedled a bit bread and treacle out of the old witch of a wife Hardcastle, said ta-ta to her right willingly, and away down the path she went. You must know that the path goes hard by the neck of the loch that comes close up to Castle Erchany, the same that they used to fill the moat from in the olden time. And there was Guthrie staring down Loch Cailie at the watery angry sunrise, intent as if he expected a message dropped for him from the chariot of the sun. And sudden as the schoolmistress looked he raised both arms and held them, hands outspread, against the lift like as if he were trying to see the blood coursing through the transparence of them. Uncanny it was and the schoolmistress minded the daft speak of how he would whiles pray to the idols of the coarse old heathen; she fair louped it round the first twist among the larches and I doubt she didn’t stop once, any more than wee Isa had done, on the first of the miles that took her clear of Castle Erchany. But at least she bore her spoils with her: never had such fuel for claiking been brought down the glen before.

  And that was the last anyone but myself in Kinkeig heard of Ranald Guthrie before the tragedy. It was the night of the twenty-eighth November Miss Strachan spent at the meikle house. It was on the tenth December, just before the great snows all but closed the glens entirely, that Christine Mathers came to me with her story.

  9

  It was seldom Christine came down to Kinkeig. After all, beer at the Arms and gossip in the kitchens and maybe a bit sprunting[1] about exhaust the attractions of the place except on the Sabbath. And Guthrie would never let Christine sit under Dr Jervie; he had small use for the kirk and less for our minister. For a bit after his coming, when he’d got to know the affairs of his parish right well, the minister walked up to Erchany and got a bit talk with the laird and hinted it was a pity to breed up so fine a quean as Christine so lonely as he did and so much the mark for idle talk. Perhaps it was because Dr Jervie was a scholar and he respected that – scholar himself that he was – that Guthrie didn’t set the dogs on him as he did on the last minister – who was but an empty pulpit-thumping billy enough with neither matter nor doctrine to him, ’tis true. But he listened coldly and coldly bowed Dr Jervie out at the end, and ever after if they met in a lane the laird would walk unheeding by. He had never, sure, been seen in the kirk, nor Christine nor the Hardcastles either – and as for Tammas I doubt if the poor daftie had ever heard there is such a thing as the Shorter Catechism.

  Christine, I say, came seldom to Kinkeig, and when she did it was to visit Ewan Bell the sutor. She and I had been long acquaint, for the first nurse that Guthrie ever got for her was my own sister’s child. There was a pony-carriage at the meikle house then and the laird, who had some mellower years during the childhood of the quean, let them drive about much as they pleased, and often they came down to visit Uncle Ewan, for I was that to the bairn as well as to my right niece. A childless and unmarried man, I grew right fond of little Christine Mathers. And when she grew and Guthrie got Mistress Menzies to the house, the weak-minded gentle fine-bred lady he kept to give Christine her strange and lonely breeding, whiles she would still come to see me, bringing maybe her troubles at Erchany and maybe just her questions about the world. Then as she grew again and her maidenhood came to her and she saw the strangeness of her life, a Miranda islanded with a black-thoughted Prospero, she became a secret quean, and with a growing sorrowfulness too, deep at the heart of her. Whiles she still came to see me, but her contacts now all mute: curled on a table, she would give herself to the scent and the texture of my bit leathers, as if she drew from them the strength one can draw from raw strong things. And now her comings had been rarer, she would look at me as if she might open her heart, but in the end n
othing would she speak of but idle matter of the day. Dreaming she would sit, toying with a bit leather, all opening into womanhood as simply and resistlessly as the flower of the heather on the braes. Fine I knew what had happened long ere the schoolmistress brought the unlucky name of the lad to Kinkeig.

  You must know something of the Guthries and the Lindsays – a little more, maybe, than you’ll find in Pitscottie’s Chronicles. It won’t keep you long from meeting Christine – it’s not a treatise on Scottish feudalism I’m writing – and I warned you fairly, Reader, back beyond the Reformation we must presently go.

  You’ll know that while in the highlands the organization of folk was ever by clans, branch upon branch each under its chieftain ramifying out from the stock of the chief, in the lowland parts was no such thing, the unit being ever the family. And great and spreading as a family might be it had seldom the cohesion of the clan, so that the strait binding together of families, and alliance betwixt this family and that, made ever the labour of the lowland landowners. The district was secure and strong in which the lairds were well bound together by band and covenant.

  Now while the Guthries were yet but bonnet-lairds at Erchany the Lindsays of Mervie were great folk, barons that held in chief from the Crown, and whose land ran nigh to the Inneses’, the coarse Fleming creatures, between Moray and Spey. And in the boyhood of James III, when Scotland was a right lawless and faithless place, the Guthries entered into bond of man rent with the Lindsays. The bond is yet preserved in which a Ranald Guthrie swore to Andrew Lindsay ‘to be for him and with him, his kin and friends and their quarrels, in council, help, supply, maintenance and defence, as far as good conscience and reason will, in the straitest form of band of kindness against and before all living men except his allegiance to our Sovereign Lord the King alone.’ Whatever inducement the Lindsays in their wealth gave, or whatever persuasion in their power they exerted, the bond was a most inviolable oath for the five years’ space it was to hold. But the word about the king was but a pious and empty speak: ever in a bond of man rent was some thought of union against the power of the Crown.

  And against the Crown in time it was invoked. For the Lindsays stood in a like bond of fealty to the Earl of Huntly, and to Andrew Lindsay came the day when the Earl wrote that his cousin the Laird of Gight had been summoned to underlie the law in Edinburgh, and that the safety of his life required the instant presence of Lindsay and his carles at St Johnston, thence to ride with the Earl to Edinburgh. So Lindsay summoned Ranald Guthrie and his men to Mervie, and Lindsays and Guthries together rode to St Johnston – which is Perth – and there joining the Earl all held forward for Edinburgh, there to overawe the king’s justices on the Laird of Gight’s behalf. Only Andrew Lindsay, feigning matter of business, tarried a day behind, and riding fast and hard to Erchany there lay with Ranald Guthrie’s wife.

  For a year and a day Ranald Guthrie held himself quiet; then he gathered such power as he might and made a foray upon Mervie and took up Andrew Lindsay, all unprepared from amid his carles, and carried him away. The Guthries carried Lindsay to their own lands and there they hacked the lecherous fingers from him, and they sent him home with an hourglass round his neck to mind the Lindsays they had bided that year-and-a-day only that the bond of man rent might be expired and the Guthrie faith unbroken. And Andrew Lindsay died.

  That was the beginning of the feud betwixt Lindsays and Guthries, and all the mischieving that was betwixt them would be but a dreich tale to tell. But as the generations passed the power of the Guthries grew and that of the Lindsays ever declined and in the Killing Time they were broken entirely, there were no Lindsays of Mervie known any longer among the gentle Lindsays of Scotland, and the burgher folk from Dunwinnie came and quarried all the New Wynd and half the Cowgate from the ruins of Mervie Tower. And the Guthries, that had long memories and unforgiving hearts, would give a bit laugh as they whiles went hunting down Mervie glen.

  But there were Lindsays enough in these lands still, crofter folk with no history, that might think themselves the heirs of the old gentle Lindsays if they would. So still there was the old enmity, Lindsays thinking always of the Guthries as the worse dirt of gentry and Guthries showing no more favour to Lindsays than they need: a strange uncharitable smouldering feeling that ever and again in the imaginative ones would flame into hatred and some vicious deed. It was ever a disgrace in a Lindsay to consent to serve kin of the Guthries of Erchany, and if young Neil Lindsay was more bitter than most against Ranald Guthrie before he met in with Christine it was for the shame of his father having syne worked for the laird’s sister Alison. You must hear of Alison, for she was surely the strangest of the Guthries: Tammas, the claiks said, was her bairn by God knew whom.

  There were four Guthries of Ranald’s generation. John, the eldest, saw two fine sons drown before his eyes far out on Loch Cailie, and lived on, childless and melancholy, till Ranald inherited. Ian, the second son, and Ranald, the third, were they that to avoid the Kirk went among the coarse Australians; as daft as daft folk thought it and impious forbye, so that few in Kinkeig were surprised or sorry when the speak came of Ian’s horrid death, killed and cooked by these same coarse Australians in their billy-cans. Alison, the daughter, was full twenty years younger than Ranald, the child of her father’s old age and her mother’s unlikely years. She was all a Guthrie, dark and driven, and her passion was for the creatures of the air. And uncannily the birds flocked to her: they flew about her head by day and were her dreams by night, she roved Scotland for the lore and the society of them, and made a book of birds and lived finally in a highland shielan, a lone rude cot white within and without with the droppings of the birds and in the end, folk said, she said she understood the voices of the birds, and some said she said their talk was all of heavenly places, and some said she said their talk was all of hell. And a certain Wat Lindsay, this Neil Lindsay’s father, because his brothers were enough to tend the croft, and because he too had skill with birds and they were a lure to him, so far forgot the old bad feeling of the feud as to serve Alison for a time, and he swam out across Loch-an-Eilan for her and photographed the last nest of the osprey found in Scotland for many a long day. And that was Alison, who died unmarried in her shielan on the far side of middle age; and that was why young Neil bore a fierce and troubled mind to the laird: it was the shame that his dead father had done such service for a Guthrie.

  It was little I knew of Neil Lindsay before Christine came to me, for he lived with his brothers on a croft remote in Mervie, the same where his ancestors, as he imagined them, had their tower. He had fought his father and his mother and his brothers, folk said, for knowledge, the English knowledge out of books that would appear but dirt to the Lindsays, small crofters as they were sunk in the hard heart-breaking losing battle of all remaining crofter folk against the very march of time. A hundred years ago, or fifty, he might have found the right Dominie to prepare him and syne carried his sack of meal on his back to the College in Aberdeen and got his letters there. But what the stationy calls the Progress of Education has made things harder now for lads like him, the path of learning being encumbered with the getting of wee bit certificates in trifling lores at every turn. Neil Lindsay’s knowledge was fragmentary and fitful and imaginative, the knowledge of a keen and fell impatient mind ever conscious of opportunities denied, for he was the kind that would have gone far with the free and careless schooling of the gentry, but that was too independent to go scraping from standard to standard in the Board schools. It’s of his sort that rebels are made and, sure as sure, Neil had taken up, ’twas said, with a hantle of folk, Nationalists, who thought Scotland should be free and independent once more. But Will Saunders said he saw nothing in a plan that was all Scotland for the Irish – meaning the Nationalists would hand us over to the coarse teeming folk on the Clyde – but that he was all for a just redistribution of colonies and it was fell time England was given back to the Scots, faith it was. This, though, is all aside from my story. What c
omes next is Christine’s tale of how she met in with Neil.

  On Midsummer Day it was she had taken a piece, the lonely quean, and gone over the glen-head and far down Glen Mervie on a brave morning, the clouds were fleecy and sailing above her, away to the left by the hidden loch the snipe were but new fallen silent and whiles a wild goose would oar its way across the lift, flying surely to the distant sea. The long day, a day with almost no night to it, was before her and sudden she thought to go where she had never been, to the yet snow-flecked summit of Ben Cailie before her. So she went half-down the glen, past the Lindsays’ croft that she scarce knew the name of, and up through a plantation where the last autumn’s sycamore leaves lay blended in their skeletal tracery with the springy carpet of larch needles. Syne she was through to the pine woods and syne through a spleiter of mountain ash, and then the bare shoulder of Ben Cailie was before her, to the left she could see the long silver splash of the loch, and far away over the rolling braes behind her the blue peat smoke was going up from Kinkeig. Whiles came the tinkle of a burn, fine hidden threads of snow-water falling down and down the Ben from the topmost snows: whiles came the warm-sounding trembling bleat of the ewes in the pastures below; and ever there was the crying of the peewits that Christine used to feel was her own cry. Far and lonely the climb over heather and rock and scree, a great camp of mountains rising on the one hand and on the other a broadening glimpse of the parks beyond Dunwinnie, that went rolling with their bright burden of green corn towards the invisible sea.

  So all that morning nearly Christine climbed to the great brow of Ben Cailie, every foot taking her, all unknowing, to the destiny of her. Fient the soul did she expect to see until the gloaming brought her home again and she wondered for a minute what would happen if she had an accident up there, for none knew she was climbing Ben Cailie and it might be long before they thought to look that high. But she wasn’t frightened; she’d been up all but the final pinnacle before and there was small danger to one with a foot half as sure as Christine’s, Christine thought. She was thinking this as she made across a rocky ledge with a seven–eight foot drop maybe to soft heather below, and it was at the moment of her thinking that she saw the man.