Lament for a Maker

by Michael Innes

  ‘Do you have many visitors?’

  Syllable by syllable Mrs Hardcastle digested this. Then she shook her head with decision. ‘The laird’s over narrow.’ She nodded with a sort of gloomy satisfaction. ‘There are few in these parts nearer-going than Guthrie of Erchany.’

  This was hardly a theme we could with propriety pursue – though Mrs Hardcastle had rather the air of regarding it as a main asset of the establishment. And Sybil was just casting round for another theme when the old person sank her voice to an eager whisper and said: ‘It’s the rats!’

  ‘The rats, Mrs Hardcastle?’

  ‘The Guthries have ever had black imaginings. He thinks the rats are fair eating him up – him and all his substance. He’s that near- going as he is because he thinks he’s fighting the rats. If you please – there will be plenty of places with no rats – islands and such?’

  We made embarrassed affirmative noises.

  ‘They should get him away to an island. I told the doctors that when they came. He’d sleep of nights then and be fine, poor gentleman.’

  Sybil said awkwardly: ‘You think Mr Guthrie is very worried by the rats?’

  Again Mrs Hardcastle gave her vigorous, senile nod. ‘And he won’t spend his silver on the poison for them. He says he prefers his wee penknife.’

  So many bloodthirsty persons in the Scottish ballads perform unlikely feats of slaughter with their wee penknives that I suspected here a little literary joke of the laird’s. But Mrs Hardcastle went on seriously: ‘Real skilly he is at the throwing of it. And right loudly the creatures squeal.’

  Unedifying revelations these, I thought, of the perversion of sporting instinct in the country gentry: Mrs Hardcastle’s confidences were making me distinctly uncomfortable. But Sybil was interested. ‘He goes about spearing the rats?’

  ‘Just that. And now it’s a hatchet. Sharpening and sharpening it yesterday he was in the court. And cried out at me right fearsome: “To settle accounts with a great rat, Mrs Hardcastle!” I wish he’d settle accounts with them all. I wish there were no rats. They squeal inside my head at night.’

  A cheery old soul. Sybil said rather feebly: ‘Couldn’t Mr Hardcastle get rid of them?’

  Mrs Hardcastle peered nervously about her. Her whisper grew hoarser. ‘Hardcastle’s fell unkind!’

  I believed her. At the same time I felt that a recital of the domestic infelicities of the Hardcastles would be singularly lacking in charm and I banged the billiard balls quite violently as a possible distraction. Their music, however, had ceased to compel; the unsightly old person advanced unheeding and laid a claw-like hand on Sybil’s arm. ‘And for why?’

  Neither of us felt capable of dealing with this idiomatic demand. But Mrs Hardcastle scarcely gave us time to answer. Her voice sank yet farther to an impossible croak. ‘It’s the rats!’

  We both said blankly: ‘The rats!’

  Mrs Hardcastle’s affirmative nod this time involved not her head merely but her whole body: if I remember aright, witches and bad fairies indulge just such emphatic bobs in pantomime. ‘I’m right fashed I didn’t think to warn you last night. There’s a terrible number of rats in Erchany.’

  Variations on a theme. Come, Muse, let’s sing of rats. And Mrs Hardcastle went on, a horrid and growing conviction in her voice: ‘It’s the rats. For years now they’ve been working on my man. The rat-nature working on him! I think they go through his head at night, squealing – the coarse creatures. He’s half-turned to rat now and he feels it. It makes him fell unkind. What will become of us? I lie in bed at night, Miss, and whiles the rats go squealing through my head and whiles my man. But more and more my man’s like a great grey rat, and what will become of us when I can’t any longer tell man from rat?’

  Mrs Hardcastle, you will agree, has a knack of posing awkward questions that would do credit to a nineteenth-century Scandinavian play. At the same time she plainly has, as an imaginative psychologist, a touch of genius, and her conversation, if somewhat limited in range, has powerfully reinvoked the atmosphere that was so heavy about us last night. I was just going to explore her views on the influence of the Erchany rats on the moron Tammas when Sybil said abruptly: ‘Mrs Hardcastle, has the doctor come?’

  Interesting that the doctor had continued to puzzle Sybil as well as myself; more interesting that the question drew a complete blank. ‘The doctor, Miss?’

  ‘I thought you were expecting a doctor last night.’

  ‘Faith, Miss, we never expect anyone at Erchany. Dr Noble at Dunwinnie is the family doctor, but he hasn’t been here these two years – not since Miss Christine sprained her wrist. There were some doctors a year or two back – the same I told you of – and it was but a sad welcome the laird gave them. Were you expected?’

  The question suggested that outside the rodent sphere the good Mrs Hardcastle’s perceptions are dim. We said our arrival was singularly unpremeditated. Whereupon she looked from one to the other of us doubtfully before turning again to Sybil. ‘I just thought that seeing you are a kinswoman of the laird–’

  But at this point Sybil, whose interest had been waning and who was rolling the balls vigorously about the table, hurled a ball clean over the cushion and into the pit of old Mrs Hardcastle’s stomach.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Hardcastle, I’m most terribly sorry–’

  Mrs Hardcastle picked up the ball and looked at Sybil with great respect. Her voice took on its familiar hoarsest tone. ‘Faith, Miss, were you after one of the rats? There’s a terrible number of rats in Erchany.’

  With that, Diana, I think you’ve made the grand tour of Mrs Hardcastle: other facets there may be, but as yet they have not revealed themselves.

  Which reminds me I rather want to make the grand tour of the castle. It seems a rambling place, added to from time to time in a fashion more or less in keeping with its medieval character. The oldest part, plainly, is the central keep or tower; I gather that the laird has his own set of rooms there and seldom comes out of them. So his indisposition may be a polite fiction. Still, if he is supposed to be keeping his own rooms, unwell, one can’t very decently explore in that direction. It will be dinner or supper time presently, and I am waiting with the futile bored impatience with which one waits for a meal in a dull hotel. I look forward, it must be confessed, to another appearance of Christine, and perhaps I can make the beguiling mysteriousness of the place serve as amusement for another twelve of twenty-four hours. But I am so annoyed that I am not far on the other side of the Tweed!

  Christmas eve at night – and my birthday. Shall I hang up my stocking for the owls to nest in and the rats to gnaw? What sort of presents, I wonder, come to Castle Erchany this season? I look out of my window and see that there is a lull in the gale; the gloaming is falling over a landscape wonderfully still, peaceful, white. Noel, Diana, Noel!

  Your

  NOEL.

  3

  Christmas morning

  Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night! My scribblings of the last two days have proved an induction to real tragedy. Mr Ranald Guthrie of Erchany is dead.

  It is all so fantastic – as well as rather horrible – that I really doubt if I can change the key in which I have been writing. Erchany is still the enchanted castle; only the enchantment has grown murky as one of great-uncle Horatio’s poems, and the enchanter – great-uncle Horatio’s sometime crony – is with Roull of Aberdene and gentill Roull of Corstorphine. Strange that as he walked down the corridor the other night Guthrie was chanting his own lament!

  Our plesance heir is all vane glory,

  This fals warld is bot transitory,

  The flesche is brukle, the Feyind is sle;

  Timor Mortis conturbat me.

  Onto the ded goes all Estatis,

  Princis, Prelotis, and Potestatis,

  Both riche et pur of all degre;

  Timor Mortis conturbat me.

  He spairis no lord for his piscence,

  Na clerk for his intelligence;<
br />
  His awfull strak may no man fle;

  Timor Mortis conturbat me.

  Art – magicianis, and astrologgis,

  Rethoris, logicianis, et theologgis…

  But to work – which is getting down on paper an account of what has happened. It may be useful; and it is still my journal for you, Diana. It will be some hours more before the world – doctors, police, lawyers – can get to Erchany; and I don’t at all know how soon after that I shall get away. It is the unpleasant fact that I am involved in what may be an affair of murder. A strange Christmas Day.

  I have first to persuade you – and myself – that while the sheets preceding have been an expedient for beguiling the time they are in no sense romancing. They give events accurately, and they give quite accurately too my own perhaps temperamental reactions to events. Nevertheless, I had better give a paragraph to recapitulating without fancy.

  Miss Guthrie and I arrived at Erchany, unheralded and with every appearance of sheer accident, late on Monday evening. Hardcastle was rather stealthily on the look out for a doctor. We were politely enough received by Guthrie into what appeared to be the household of a confirmed miser – though with curious elements of expense in the supper. The make-up of the household was noteworthy: the anomalous factotum Hardcastle a striking scoundrel, his wife weak minded, the odd boy halfwitted, the laird himself powerfully witted and perhaps powerfully mad – I am over the line of facts here, for I would cut a poor figure trying to speak of Guthrie’s mental condition in a witness-box. But an undoubted fact, if a mysterious one, is the sense of strain and waiting – a sort of electric current flowing round and between Guthrie, his niece Christine Mathers, and certain unknown outside persons or events. A further fact was Hardcastle’s warning about the dangerousness of a certain Neil Lindsay. After that there are merely matters of impression. First, something about Sybil Guthrie’s attitude to her kinsman’s household and the way in which Guthrie told her his American cousins had ‘sent friends’. To this, as you will hear presently, I hold a key. Second, the way Christine told her uncle he was ‘in two minds’. And third, the way Guthrie said to me: ‘I am glad you found your way here.’ These utterances were charged; they stand – somehow – full in the picture; I give them the status of enigmatic facts. There may, of course, be other points of equal significance buried in my narrative but at the moment I can’t dig them out.

  And now the events leading to Guthrie’s death. I don’t know that you will be surprised to learn that the first matter to be recorded concerns a rat.

  Christine appeared alone again at supper last night. I think she was rather stumped in the schoolroom afterwards for some method of entertaining us, and she ended by showing us a portfolio of her sketches that lay on a table as if in process of being packed up – rapid, economical impressions mostly of wild geese over Loch Cailie. But she was at once shyer and more secretly possessed than before and soon she slipped away. A few minutes later Sybil said it was cold – as indeed it was – and that she was going to read in bed. And a few minutes after that I went upstairs myself, having in my head the plan of a rat-proof tent on an improved model in which to spend the night. It was in furtherance of this ambitious project that I began studying the creatures.

  The most obvious classifications were by size and colour. There were big rats and little rats, brown rats, grey rats and – what I feel vaguely is something very choice – black rats; and there were indeterminate rats of a piebald or mildewed sort. There were a few fat rats and a great many lean rats, a few lazy rats and a great many active rats – these categories overlapping substantially – and there was a possible classification too into bold and bolder. As far as I could see there were no really timid rats, despite the consternation that must sometimes be caused by the wee penknife of the laird. All this was more or less as one might expect in a mansion in which the rodent kind have it nearly all their own way. What really startled me was the sporadic appearance of learned rats. These are, I suppose, even rarer than the pink and blue varieties.

  Learned rats. Rats, that is to say, lugging laboriously round with them little paper scrolls – rather like students who have just been given a neatly-printed degree. I am not sure whether I saw in all two or three of these learned rats.

  My first thought was that Guthrie must be amusing his solitary days by conducting experiments – the business of tying labels on whales to discover how long it takes them to swim round the world. And I was sufficiently intrigued to go learned-rat hunting, getting quite worked up indeed and spending nearly an hour at it. A mad figure in the best Erchany tradition I must have seemed, stalking the creatures with the bedroom poker. The learned brethren were lazier, I think, and bolder than the others and I believe that the poker was probably a mistake; a skilled pair of hands could have caught one fairly readily. The poker, however, if not much good in attack, might be useful as a weapon of defence; when I abandoned the hunt and set about my fortifications for the night I kept it ready to hand.

  Somehow I got to sleep. Twice I was awakened by the scuttling of the rats, twice I lammed out in the dark with the poker – and the second time there was a quite sickening squeal. Poor Mrs Hardcastle: I know now just what goes through her head in the night. I lit the candle. Miraculously, I had killed a learned rat.

  There was a nasty mess and it took me a minute to summon resolution to investigate. The scroll was a piece of fine paper – it might have been torn from an India-paper notebook – and it was tied to the leg of the rat, rather cunningly, with a fragment of cotton. I cut it free and unfolded it gingerly, for the creature’s blood was on it. Neatly written in ink were seven words. Bring help secretly to tower top urgent.

  I dressed. I don’t think it occurred to me that the thing was melodramatic, or absurd, or a joke or fantasy of Guthrie’s. A period spent at a considerable height will condition one to the job of going really high on a mountain and something over twenty-four hours spent at Erchany had conditioned me to taking the Appeal of the Learned Rat in my stride. I simply wondered how best to make the top of the tower.

  The passage outside my room was pitch dark and I hadn’t gone a couple of yards before my candle blew out. At that I remembered Sybil Guthrie’s electric torch; it seemed a shame to arouse or alarm her – not that she is of a timid sort – but at the same time I felt the circumstances of the moment demand all the aids I could lay my hands on. So I turned back and knocked at her door. There was no audible reply; not surprising this, for the wind was rattling in a hundred places round about. I tried again and then I opened the door and went in. I called, struck a match, presently summoned hardihood to grope about on the enormous bed. Suspicion became certainty: there was no one in the room.

  If leisure had been given me I believe I should have felt uncommonly apprehensive. But at this moment I caught a glint of light from the corridor; I went out expecting to find Sybil and found instead the abominable Hardcastle, holding a lantern in one hand and thumping at my bedroom door with the other. He looked at me evilly – no doubt he was putting a construction agreeable to himself on my emergence from Sybil’s room – and then he said the laird sent his compliments; he was better now and would I join him in a nightcap in the tower?

  I looked at my watch – the refinements of politeness would be wasted on Hardcastle – and saw that it wanted five minutes of midnight. The very eve of Christmas.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘As it happens, I was just going there. Lead the way.’

  The lantern gave a jump in the brute’s hand; I suppose I must have spoken about as grimly as his grim master. For the message that had come from the tower by Hardcastle – hours after it was known I had gone to bed – was scarcely less problematical than the one that had been brought by the rat: the two of them, coupled with Sybil’s disappearance, were evidence of some devilment or other that I couldn’t now do less than probe. So I tramped down the corridor after Hardcastle in a wrathful mood that probably concealed a good deal of trepidation. Whatever was happening, I
had a good notion it was a trap. Some fly was walking into the spider’s parlour. Was it Sybil? Or myself? It never occurred to me it might be Guthrie!

  But it did occur to me that Hardcastle was one of nature’s own spiders. Positively, I had told him to lead the way because I was not without anxiety about my throat and I kept a wary eye on him as we went down the great staircase and along what I rather uncertainly conjectured to be the schoolroom corridor. It must have been about half-way that he hesitated and came to a momentary halt, as if listening. I drew up behind him and listened with all my ears too. At first I thought I heard hurried footsteps approaching us; I strained my eyes down the gloomy corridor and could see no one; then, hair-raisingly, the footsteps pattered past me without visible sign. Absurdly – for one can’t brain a ghost – I wished I had brought the poker which had accounted for the learned rat: then I realised that I had been listening only to the peculiar flap-flapping noise of that long tattered carpet that works like a sea on the corridor floor. At that I recovered my wits sufficiently to hear what Hardcastle was hearing: voices from somewhere near the far end of the corridor.

  They were a mere murmur – until suddenly some trick of the fragmented Erchany winds caught them and we could distinguish the voice of Christine. I was rather relieved, for I presumed that Sybil was with her and that they were sitting up, perhaps, for Christmas. Hardcastle may have had the same thought; he looked at his watch as I had done a few minutes before; and then a further waft of wind brought us the other voice, a man’s voice – elderly, I guessed, and very Scottish. A second later a door opened in the direction of the murmuring and we could just distinguish a figure slip out and disappear into the darkness in front of us.

  The execrable Hardcastle hesitated a moment longer and then we went on. As you know, I hadn’t so far had much chance of getting the lie of the remoter parts of the castle, and our progress now was quite bewildering. The tower is the oldest part, the original keep or donjon, and as we had descended from the bedroom floor I concluded it must be structurally distinct from the later buildings and connected with them only at ground level, making it an isolated place indeed. And presently I got the measure of this isolation. We passed through a small heavy door and then, no more than three yards on, a door that was exactly similar: the intervening space, I realized even in my rather rattled state, represented the thickness of the wall of the tower. And then we climbed a staircase.