Lament for a Maker

by Michael Innes

  Hardcastle slowly drew a hand from behind his slouching back – I rather expected an open razor – and gave a dubious rub at an unshaven chin. Then he said – with what I took to be an effort at the surly fidelity characteristic of retainers in the best Scottish fiction – ‘If you’ll believe me, laird, the lad’s black dangerous.’

  ‘What’s that, man?’ The laird had stopped and was glaring at his factor with what looked, in the dusky corridor, downright malignity.

  ‘I say Neil Lindsay means mischief.’

  The solicitous vassal turn or whatever it was cut, it seemed, very little ice with the laird. ‘Lindsay,’ he said dryly, ‘can come up to the tower. Mr Gylby, the ladies.’

  And on we went. My responses were becoming sluggish; we were half-way down the corridor before it occurred to me to doubt whether Guthrie had been quite as unmoved by the curious soothsayer-business as he had appeared. I think it may have been that I was not unmoved myself: the incident gave me something I had been searching for. I had dubbed the Erchany atmosphere suspense; I now suspected I might equally well have dubbed it fear. But who was afraid – and of what?

  I had got to this point in my meditations – you will say I was badly in need of bed and sleep – when I nearly jumped out of my skin. Guthrie had said aloud: ‘Fear.’ Or rather he had said it in Latin: ‘Timor…’ Softly but distinctly he had murmured: ‘Timor Mortis conturbat me.’

  A glance at him showed he had forgotten my existence – at that I remembered I believed him mad. And striding down the corridor with his eye fixed somewhere near the ceiling he continued to recite.

  ‘Clerk of Tranent eik he has tane,

  That maid the anteris of Gawane;

  Schir Gilbert Hay endit has he;

  Timor Mortis conturbat me.

  ‘He has Blind Hary, et Sandy Traill

  Slaine with his schour of mortall haill,

  Quhilk Patrik Iohnestoun myght nought fle;

  Timor Mortis conturbat me…’

  Diana, you have never assisted at anything half so weird as the spectacle of this uncanny Scottish gentleman walking wrapt down his windy crumbling corridor, chanting that tremendous dirge of Dunbar’s!

  ‘He hes tane Roull of Aberdene,

  And gentill Roull of Corstorphine;

  Two bettir fallowis did no man se;

  Timor Mortis conturbat me…’

  We turned a corner and the wind blew the words away from me, so that they became only a murmuring. At the same moment the candle spurted and I had momentarily a better view of his face than I have yet had in this murky house. And I swear the fear of Death was really stark on him.

  The second corridor seemed interminable. At length we halted before a door, and I guessed that Sybil and Christine were on the other side. Guthrie was immobile, the rhythm of his murmuring had changed, he was looking at or through the door with an expression that now, I thought, held something of exultation. And then he cried out – but softly – ‘Oh my America, my new-found land !’

  Once more, it was a scunner. And so was the succeeding moment. His hand fell to the latch of the door, and instantly his mind flicked back to me. He gave me a polite smile and said: ‘I usually spend half an hour here with my niece.’ I believe he can have had no recollection whatever of that chanting progress down the corridor. In other words, he seems almost a case of dissociated personality: two distinct Guthries, you know, playing hide and seek like twins in a stage farce. I was developing this picturesque thought – the miserly Guthrie A who starved his dogs and wouldn’t repair his windows, the lavish Guthrie B who stuffed tinned caviare – I was developing this for some time after we had joined Christine and Sybil in what is called the schoolroom. It suggested another possible explanation of Hardcastle’s calling out about the doctor: the laird was having a bout of this mild madness and the household was waiting quietly to smuggle in a leech. Not perhaps a brilliant idea – but that phrase of the indescribable Hardcastle’s was beginning to worry me. Is that the doctor? I have decided that if Erchany holds a secret the key to it is in the explanation of that question.

  Diana, if this rambling recital is interesting no doubt you will want to interrupt here and say: ‘Guthrie expects the dangerous Neil Lindsay; Hardcastle expects the mysterious doctor: surely they are likely to be one and the same person – Dr Neil Lindsay, who is not necessarily expected in a professional way? What about his being, say, an undesirable suitor of your romantic Christine?’

  On this nice point I can give you no reasonable satisfaction. That Christine has a lover – that she is in the state of having nothing but a lover on her whole horizon – I readily agree. And the lover may be Neil Lindsay – or he may be Hardcastle’s ‘doctor’. But that these two are one I somehow don’t believe: something in the abominable Hardcastle’s voice in speaking of them forbids it. Time may show.

  It is time perhaps to say a word on time. It is now eight o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, 24th December; these dedicated pages, dear Diana, have occupied me for just three and a half hours – including pauses to relight the candle. For the wind has been rising steadily and this room is a very hall of Aeolus: giant winds bumping about on the ceiling, baby winds gamboling like cinquecento putti and trying out their tender voices beneath the bed. My last night’s fire is a remote memory; it is quite fiendishly cold; I am sitting by the window – that being no colder than anywhere else – in a sort of igloo made of feather mattress, hoping for some sort of present summons to breakfast. Outside, the still falling snow is being drifted quite terrifically and I see hardly a chance of getting away for days. There was some talk last night, though, of the miraculous prowess as a snow traveller of Erchany’s odd lad. So, if I am stuck, there is just a chance of getting a wire away to you by him. It must be long past dawn now, but visibility still poor, the sky is so leaden. From this window I see just dim, whirling whiteness. Only left-centre is there a break, a dark gleam that has been puzzling me for the last twenty minutes. It is as if the snow were melting away from a surface of hot dark steel: I believe it must be water – the frozen arm of a loch that curls right up to the castle – and this howling gale driving the ice clear of snow.

  No sign of life or breakfast – so I add a few further notes on last night. The schoolroom where Christine had her learning – she has seldom if ever been away from Erchany, I gather – is now a pleasant, rather bare, species of den – Miranda’s corner of the cave, furnished with a few elegant mementoes of Milan: in this case a really beautiful Flemish cabinet and some Indian bird-paintings that deserve a better light than the couple of candles that seem the standard illumination in public rooms in Erchany. When Guthrie and I entered we found Christine and Sybil sitting side by side on a low stool beside the fire, apparently on the way to becoming friends. They both got up: Sybil’s glance, I noticed, came straight to Guthrie; Christine’s was lingering with something like puzzlement on Sybil. I remember wondering how we were all going to get on together without the help of eating and drinking.

  Formality was our refuge. I was handed, more or less on a plate, to Christine, and presently found myself conscientiously developing a vein of subdued gaiety – embodied earlier in this budget, my dear – on my day’s adventures. I don’t think Christine is normally the sort that wouldn’t relish a young man abruptly pitched out of the world into Erchany on a winter’s night, or that she hasn’t the wit and will to prick and quicken the gaiety of such a one with mockery. I am a sociable person; I meet dozens of young women in a year; and half a dozen, perhaps, are right for something like interesting personal relations. One knows at once, does one not? And Christine is right: very shy though she is, we ought to have been reacting to each other in from eight to ten minutes. Do you observe, Diana, the note of pique creeping in? She was quite charming, but if you imagine a political duchess thinking out a difficult manoeuvre at a party while being quite charming meantime to a stray young man who may be of middling importance in thirty years’ time, you will get the effect almost ex
actly. Exactly – because Christine, though a slip of a rural lass, has an old-fashioned poise that is very engaging: I am consumed with curiosity as to how she has been brought up here. Point is, though, that there we sat, and there I went through my tricks, and that she registered just the right interest and amusement, and put in just the necessary number of words of her own – and that all the time she was profoundly unaware of me. Occasion, as I say, for slight pique.

  Christine – I perhaps wearisomely reiterate – is waiting: waiting as brides must have waited when the world was younger. Undoubtedly, it is a lover!

  And Guthrie is waiting too: only his waiting I just can’t guess at – perhaps he has a date with the ghosts of Clerk of Tranent and Sir Mungo Lockhart of the Lea. But, in a way, he was putting up even a better show than the competent Christine; his taciturnity was gone, he was leading the conversation with Sybil and doing her really proud in point of courteous attention. I suppose his craziness to go with a great sense of what is owing in a laird of Erchany. When my attention drifted to them he was showing Sybil a case of curios – gold coins and medals mostly – which he had fetched from another room. Christine made an excuse of my momentarily drifting eye to move me across the room; I’m terribly afraid that – tête à tête – she’d had enough of me.

  Guthrie was handing a little medallion affair to Sybil. ‘You recognize,’ he said, ‘the device?’

  I recognized it at once from the creatures on the staircase. It was Guthrie’s crest. Sybil took it, handled it delicately, and said nothing.

  ‘The family crest,’ said Guthrie. ‘It has occurred to me, my dear young lady, to wonder if we may be related?’

  Guthrie, of course, is the sort of old person who can say my dear young lady: nevertheless, I obscurely felt the bland phrase give – paradoxically – edge to the question.

  Rather unexpectedly, Sybil gushed. ‘Mr Guthrie, wouldn’t that be just wonderful! I know my father was terribly proud of his Scotch connections. And I’d just love to think I was related to a romantic old place like your castle. It must be terribly old?’

  You mustn’t think Christine has extinguished my admiration for Sybil: I think Sybil quite remarkable, will-o’-the-wisp though she has been to me. And now I opened my eyes rather wide, for her reaction to Guthrie’s polite suggestion was just a little too good to be true. But if my eyes opened I believe Guthrie’s narrowed. Punctiliously, he answered his guest’s question. ‘It is old. There are thirteenth-century foundations.’ And then he went on carefully: ‘We have connections, I know, in the United States. Families like ours do not care to lose sight even of distant branches.’

  ‘Mr Guthrie – how exciting! And I am sure they love to come and visit Erchany.’

  ‘They have not visited me.’ And I think Guthrie smiled. ‘Not, that is, as far as I know.’ There was a pause. ‘But a year or two ago they sent – friends.’

  Christine was not rubbing shoulders with me; I must have sensed, rather than felt, her shiver. I know I glanced round at her quickly. And I believe I caught on her face what I had already caught on her uncle’s: fear.

  Guthrie waiting and Christine waiting – but not perhaps for the same thing. Guthrie afraid and Christine afraid – again not perhaps of the same thing. Here, in a word, is my preoccupation – almost my anxiety – of the moment; here – Diana – is the Mystery of Castle Erchany!

  Sybil was not very oncoming about her family and Guthrie did not press her beyond his first polite suggestion of relationship. Instead his conversation drifted to his childhood, oddly, I thought – for though the picture of the elderly laird entertaining his guests with the golden memories of an Erchany infancy was pretty enough, it yet seemed false to the basic reserve of the man. Presently he was inviting Sybil’s memories in exchange and it occurred to me rather sleepily that he was going after her family again in a ferreting way. But his interest seemed actually to be more general; he might have been a student of American social history, interested in the trend and tone of American life some twenty years ago. Sybil comes from Cincinnati, Ohio – I gathered that much – and I’m not sure there isn’t something peculiarly hypnoidal about the words. Cincinnati, Ohio…Cincinnati, Ohio: beautiful, sleepy cadences I found myself drifting away on. And then I woke up with a jerk.

  Guthrie had moved over to the dying fire and was standing before it with a small log in his hands: I think he didn’t want to provide more firing than need be. And as he hesitated Christine said: ‘You seem to be in two minds.’

  Not much, you will say, to wake a chap up – rather less than the little crash with which the log immediately fell among the embers. But the remark held all the temper I had been expecting in Christine: into the words she was putting, I knew, a whole desperate situation and she was getting from them the fierce relief that a flash of wit can give. Whatever she felt Guthrie to be in two minds about was something that was vital to her.

  And after this I remember, as they say, nothing more. We sat for some time longer, Sybil and myself waiting for bed and Guthrie and Christine waiting for I don’t know what – but certainly something as immediate as a step in the corridor or a cry in the night. But by half-past ten the charm of the mysterious had waned and I was glad when we were reconducted up the great staircase to our rooms.

  I spare you details of the horror of the night – the more willingly as Mrs Hardcastle has just put her head into the room and said: ‘Won’t you be wanting your breakfast?’ The rats had certainly wanted their supper, as had a variety of lesser vermin too: meditate the discomposing effect of these before you judge hardly of my disjointed notes on Castle Erchany. I slept for a couple of hours or so and was awakened perhaps by a rat taking an exploratory nibble at my toe, perhaps merely by the owls in the snow-laden ivy by my window. Normally I rather dote on owls, but the owlishness of the Erchany variety is something overpowering. I counted several varieties, all hooting depression or despair, and at least one the note of which was strange to me – a high long-drawn-out too-ee that really froze the blood. The dogs threw in a howl from time to time; it was hard not to believe they were wolves – or werewolves, it might be – in the spell of the enchanter. And, always, there was the wind. In still weather Erchany must be full of whisperings: in a storm it is full of great voices, crying words and phrases one just can’t catch. Perhaps after all I shall get away this morning, and to Edinburgh later in the day, and to town by an early train tomorrow.

  Believe it, Diana, that the most heroical efforts will be made by your lover

  NOEL.

  2

  Christmas Eve at night

  No go. Infuriatingly, I am hung up by blizzard for all the world like an Antarctic explorer a march short of his depot. The village – Kinkeig – is just a short Antarctic march away – nine miles or thereabouts – but the conditions are hopeless: the posts that serve to mark the track in common snowfalls will be most of them buried; a great wind and a steady fall between them surround one with a dizzying curtain of white the moment one steps beyond the door; and every hour the drifts must be becoming deeper and, I suppose, more dangerous. Even our prodigious Tammas – the Erchany odd lad, that is, who turns out to be a sort of low-grade moron (a nice finish, surely, to the amenities of the castle) – even Tammas is halted by this storm. So I must resign myself – Diana, maiden and mistress of the months and stars! – to your spending Christmas ignorant, alarmed and furious. That’s the worst of being so closely netted round by civilization; it’s hard to imagine a person dropping tolerably comfortably through and out of it without disaster suffered. I haven’t broken a limb – or anything more than a nice young lady’s baby car – and I haven’t been put in gaol; I’ve simply got myself nine miles from the nearest telephone in a spot of dirty weather.

  And I’m bored. After all my lucubrations in the small hours this is something of an anti-climax, but the mystery of Erchany fades away rather – as you might expect – in the light of common day. My host was the linchpin of my imaginings and today he
has remained invisible, sending civil messages that he is a little unwell. Perhaps the caviare was too much for him; I don’t believe somehow that caviare is a regular part of the Erchany diet. You know it was a mysterious supper. I believe the Erchany equivalent of the fatted calf would be a spot of stewed rabbit – and why even stew the rabbit without a prodigal son? Because Sybil may be all unknowing a prodigal second cousin thrice removed? Surely not. Or in honour of the favourite great-nephew of the deplorable Horatio? Surely, again, not.

  We have been left to ourselves rather, Sybil and I. Christine has presided at two meals – simple enough this time – and vanished away on the plea of vaguely described duties. After breakfast she took us up to a long sort of gallery-place, full of dead Guthries and still-born theology, and invited us with downright malice to choose a book; after luncheon she bowed us into a billiard room, whisked a dust-cloth off the identical table, one must believe, with which Noah beguiled the tedious hour, and said: All American women played? Tricks gaily and fantastically performed; the devil or an angel has entered into Christine today; she has put her fears – if I wasn’t imagining them – behind her. And still she is beautiful.

  So Sybil and I played billiards. There are no cues, one of the pockets is missing, and a fair part of the cloth has gone to nourish generations of moths; still, wrapped in our overcoats, we have played a sort of billiards and rather enjoyed it. Mrs Hardcastle brought us two large cups of villainous tea and stood for about half an hour listening to the click of the balls as if it were something as good as a wireless set. We have even had some conversation with her – thanks to the initiative of Sybil, who suspected the old soul might want a gossip.

  ‘Do you have much company at Erchany, Mrs Hardcastle?’

  Mrs Hardcastle looked bewildered. ‘You’re saying, Miss?’