Cirak's Daughter

by Charlotte MacLeod

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that.”

  Marguerite Firbelle’s niece gave her a sad little smile and hung the dress on the rack. Jenny stuck one or two things on wire coat hangers for her, then drifted away. She sensed that Beth didn’t much want her help, and she’d worn too many of her cousins’ hand-me-downs in her own less affluent days to find the job anything but depressing.

  Poor Beth! Of course it wouldn’t do for a Firbelle to go parading around Meldrum in something she’d bought at a rummage sale; but what a rotten shame her aunt didn’t break down and buy her something fit to wear. Mrs. Firbelle certainly did all right by her beloved son. Even with an armload of cracked saucers, Jack looked like an advertisement for the well-dressed man. One could easily get to hate a woman like Marguerite Firbelle.

  11

  Miss Compton and Mrs. Gillespie were returning from their inspection of the sanctuary. Jenny could hear the r’s bouncing off the walls as they came downstairs.

  “An’ so I r-reminded the meenister-r last Thur-rsday.”

  Lawrence MacRae went over to meet his grandmother. “What do you say, Gran? Done enough good works for one day? I’m ready to gang alang hame and put on the feedbag.”

  “Aye, when were ye ever-r not? Miss Compton, will ye no’ come an’ sup a dish o’ tea wi’ us?”

  “Why, thank you, that sounds delightful. Unless my niece has something else planned?”

  “Br-ring the tinker-r lassie wi’ ye. She’s welcome as the flower-rs in May.”

  Mrs. Gillespie’s face beamed like a fierce red sun under its aureole of flying white hair. Jenny didn’t much relish the idea of sharing her dish of tea with Lawrence MacRae, but how could one turn down this Caledonian version of Mrs. Santa Claus?

  Anyway, the house was worth going to see. Old Elspeth’s living room was as ferociously merry as the woman herself. Everything, from the sofa to the tea cozy, was upholstered in one of several clan tartans, each of whose significance she explained in a spate of consonants. The bagpipes and sporran of her husband, the late Colin Gillespie, hung in a place of honor over the fireplace. Above them was an ebulliently horrible portrait in oils of the patriarch himself, wearing the sporran and playing the pipes with his plaid, his kilt, and his bush of red whiskers all flapping in the gale he must have been generating through his chanter.

  “That portrait is what made me decide to be a photographer instead of a painter,” the grandson told the guests with an irreverent grin.

  He seemed less hostile here in his grandmother’s house. Jenny had to wonder if he was basically a friendly chap with a chip on his shoulder about something. Since there’d hardly been time for him to work up a really good grudge against herself, much less Harriet Compton, could that something relate in any way to her father’s presence in Meldrum and his sudden mysterious death? But why pick on her? For all MacRae knew, Jenny had never even met James Cox.

  Whatever Lawrence’s problem might be, his grandmother didn’t share it, that was plain. She was scolding him now, letting him know he needn’t think he could get away with anything just because he was so obviously the apple of her eye.

  “Do ye stop pokin’ fun at your ain flesh an’ bluid. Mek the leddies a bit o’ fire to warm them while I set the pot tae draw.”

  Mrs. Gillsepie chugged off like the Little Engine That Could and came steaming back in no time at all behind a tea wagon laden with hot scones, hot crumpets, shortbread, oatcake, Dundee cake, Scotch bun, Scotch marmalade, and bone china teacups bearing the crest of Clan MacRae. She got her party comfortably sorted out around the fire, poured out their tea, loaded their plates with goodies, then settled down to a comfortable pumping session.

  “Ye say your grandmother-r was a Gillespie, Miss Compton?”

  It took three cups of tea and a great deal of oatcake to determine exactly which branch of the family tree Aunt Harriet’s forbears had perched on. At last Mrs. Gillespie satisfied herself that Harriet would have been the late Colin’s seventh cousin once removed and thus entitled to full rights and privileges as a member of his family.

  According to the mythical connection between herself and Jenny’s parents that Harriet Compton was then obliged to weave, that made Jenny and Lawrence eighth cousins, also once removed. One removal from Lawrence MacRae would do her nicely, Jenny decided, and she only wished it could be a permanent one. Why didn’t he go roving off and photograph something far, far away instead of sitting over there beside the tea cart, glowering at her from under those bushy red eyebrows? What had she done to make him look like that?

  Under the circumstances she couldn’t manage much in the way of light conversation. He wasn’t talking either, but the two older women made sure there were no awkward gaps in the conversation. They’d progressed from genealogy to neighbors by now. Mrs. Gillespie naturally understood the concern of a respectable, God-fearing maiden aunt like Seventh Cousin Harriet as to what sort of neighborhood her literary-minded young niece had moved into. She dissected every household in the general vicinity with the expertise and precision of a brain surgeon.

  Most of the residents, it appeared, were decent enough folk in their ain ways. On the subject of the Firbelles, however, Elspeth was coldly polite and none too forthcoming. Beth was conceded to be a great church worker, not that she had much chance to be anything else, puir body. Marguerite was a woman of elegance, not that elegance was quite the thing in a place like Meldrum. Elspeth smoothed down the lap of her own sensible tweed skirt, adjusted the collar of her sensible plaid blouse, and passed the scones again.

  “Well, I suppose one couldn’t expect such an attractive woman to wear widows’ weeds forever,” Miss Compton remarked as she helped herself to more marmalade. “I understand she had a near miss from being widowed a second time.”

  “Oh?” The Scotswoman’s white eyebrows shot up behind her cloud of hair. “Is that a fact?”

  “As to whether it’s a fact or not, I’m not in a position to say.” The accountant buttered a scone with elaborate care. “In any event, it’s common talk around town, or so I gather. Jenny’s next-door neighbor told us Mrs. Firbelle had been all set to marry James Cox, that man who had the carriage house before Jenny and got himself killed, nobody seems to know how.”

  “Aye, that was a deep meestery,” snapped Elspeth Gillespie. “An’ a bigger-r meestery to me is where Sue Giles got her-r information. No’ but what she keeps that lang nose o’ her-rs glued to the windowpane from mor-rn till night. How that bur-rglar ever got awa’ wi’oot her bein’ there to spy him an’ cry mur-rder is another thing I’ll never understand. Puir James Cox would for once hae been the better-r for her snoopin’. Ah weel, the Lord giveth an’ the Lord taketh awa’ accordin’ to His ain time an’ pleasure. Though whiles, as the old woman of Edinburgh said, I think he might be guidit. There’s them that could hae better been spared than James Cox.”

  “Then you knew him personally?”

  “Aye, that I did.”

  “And you don’t really believe he intended to marry Mrs. Firbelle.”

  “That,” said Mrs. Gillespie, plunging her serving knife savagely into the heart of the fruit-filled Scotch bun, “I can positeevely assur-re ye he did not.”

  “Indeed?” Harriet Compton packed a world of polite innuendo into those two syllables.

  “I hae my reasons.”

  Mrs. Gillespie was saying a lot more than mere words, too. Was it only the flickering of the firelight, or was that a coy expression on the woman’s by-no-means-unattractive face? Elspeth must have been a bonny lassie indeed when Colin Gillespie first piped his way into her heart. Had James Cox been playing a similar tune?

  “I’m sorry,” said Miss Compton. “I hope I haven’t said anything to distress you. I had no idea you were a close personal friend of Mr. Cox. Jenny and I have been wondering about him, naturally, but we didn’t mean to—”

  “Ah weel, there’s many a woman has given her-rself notions about James Cox, I’ll be bound. Mebbe you’d like tae see what a
fine figur-re of a man he was? Lawrence, show the leddies those peectur-res you took.”

  MacRae, who had barely opened his mouth for the past half-hour except to put food in it, set down his tartan teacup and unfolded himself from his tartan armchair. He left the room and came back with a glossy black-and-white print in his hand.

  “This one’s the best. I took it only a few days before he was killed. Cox made an interesting subject.”

  MacRae was an artist with his lens, no doubt about that, and Jason Cirak was a photographer’s dream of the perfect model. He’d had a magnificent head of gray hair, deep-set eyes that must have been as close to black as Jenny’s were, a strongly defined nose, and lips that showed a warm, humorous curve over a neatly trimmed imperial. The beard came somehow as a surprise to the daughter who’d been so sure she didn’t remember him at all.

  “I didn’t know he had a beard.”

  It was a stupid thing to say, but it was the only thing Jenny could think of as she stared down at her father’s face. MacRae had caught him in profile, boldly jutting against a background of ice-covered branches, wearing the plaid jacket Greg Bauer had mentioned. His head was bare, his frost-colored mane tossed by the wind. Harriet was right. Her father had been an eagle.

  How could she know this face so well? If she’d met this man on a street in Bangkok, she’d have gone up to him without a second’s hesitation. What made her so sure?

  “You don’t care for the beard, tinker lassie?” MacRae was still beside her, watching her pore over the photograph. “Shall I take it off?”

  “No. Don’t spoil it.”

  Jenny tried to snatch the picture out of his reach, but MacRae got hold of it and made quick strokes with a retouching crayon.

  “Don’t worry, I have the negative. There, now how do you like it, Miss Plummer? Or should I say Miss Cox?”

  Jenny knew now. The features were more rugged, yet the face was her own, in some subtle way she couldn’t have explained but would never fail to recognize.

  “I hope you didn’t do that to be cruel, Larry.” That was Harriet Compton, backing her up against this puzzling enemy. “Jenny didn’t know how strangely like her father she is, even though she has her mother’s delicate features. Her parents were separated when she was a baby, with great bitterness on the mother’s side. I daresay this is the first photograph of James she’s ever had a chance to see. Right, Jenny?”

  “Yes,” Jenny choked. “Mother never told me.”

  MacRae started to say something, perhaps to apologize, but Harriet’s cool voice overrode his. “As you must know by now, Jenny inherited her father’s property along with many of his characteristics. That’s how she happens to be here in Meldrum. She’d been wanting a place of her own, and it seemed foolish to put this house on the market before she’d had a chance to decide whether she wanted to live here herself. Needless to say, she didn’t really know anything about the circumstances of his death until after she got here, or she might have thought twice about coming. The estrangement was so complete that she didn’t even know he was dead until she heard from his lawyers about settling the estate.”

  “But it was in the papers,” Elspeth Gillespie protested.

  “No doubt it was in the Providence Journal and the local weekly, but not in the out-of-town papers. At least if it was, none of the family ever saw it. Isn’t that right, Jenny?”

  “Yes. They were—they couldn’t believe it. Uncle Fred—” Jenny had to give up trying to talk. Harriet, bless her, took over again.

  “I believe it was Fred’s idea that Jenny should use her mother’s name instead of her father’s. To avoid talk, you know. Naturally the neighbors would start wondering why James’s daughter would be so quick to take over his property after he was dead, when she’d never once been to visit him while he was alive. Then the whole story would have had to come out, and Jenny’d have suffered a lot of needless embarrassment at a time when she had enough to cope with already. I’m sure you understand, Mrs. Gillespie.”

  MacRae wasn’t quite ready to buy this explanation, Jenny could see, but his grandmother was nodding. “To be sur-re. Puir wee lassie!”

  “I must admit Fred’s always been stuffy about having his sister’s unfortunate marriage discussed in public,” Harriet added.

  Unnecessary lie number one. Fred and the rest discussed Jason Cirak often, with the same vindictive passion they still felt toward the late Franklin D. Roosevelt. They weren’t the sort to waste a good grudge. Aunt Martha had been quite put out to learn that her sister-in-law’s ill-chosen husband hadn’t died in the gutter, as she had so often predicted he would.

  Jenny wasn’t about to contradict, however. Aunt Harriet’s story was going down as easily as the scones and marmalade. Elspeth Gillespie’s blue eyes welled with pity. Even Lawrence MacRae had begun to look ashamed of himself.

  “Jenny hadn’t the faintest notion there’d been anything out-of-the-way about James’s death until Beth Firbelle told us yesterday morning and Sue Giles added a few more gory details later on. The lawyers had merely described it as an accident.”

  “But now, I don’t know what to think,” Jenny burst out. That, at any rate, was no lie. “I can’t pretend to any terrible sense of loss over somebody I’ve never known; but all the same it’s—I suppose it’s been a shock,” she finished lamely, looking into the fire and showing the profile so oddly reminiscent of Jason Cirak’s.

  “Aye, ’twould daunton the strongest amang us,” Mrs. Gillespie soothed. “Lawrence, fetch the lass a wee sup o’ my dandelion wine.”

  “I don’t want any, thank you,” said Jenny. “I’m all right. It was just the—the picture and everything.”

  “I’ll be glad to make you a decent enlargement if you’d care to have it.” The photographer sounded thoroughly abashed, as well he might.

  “Thank you, I’d love to have it. It’s—like him, isn’t it?”

  “Verra like. James was a gr-and man.” Elspeth Gillespie started gathering the tea things together. “It’s queer tae think o’ James havin’ a young slip of a daughter. He must hae marrit late in life. Nae doot that’s why he an’ his wife didn’t get alang. He needit a mair matur-re woman.” Again there was that self-conscious little twitch of the lips.

  “Yes, James was a good deal older than his wife in more ways than one,” Aunt Harriet agreed placidly, just as though she knew all about Marion Plummer. “It’s no wonder you didn’t spot the likeness. Most people wouldn’t. Your grandson, on the other hand, has a trained eye for faces. I suppose he noticed right away.”

  “It stuck out a mile, the minute I saw her at the Gileses’,” said MacRae. “She even has some of her father’s mannerisms: the way she holds her head, that hawklike stare she gives you when you’ve said something that doesn’t hit her just right, the flying motions she makes with her hands when she’s talking.”

  “Yes, I know. Sometimes when Jenny looks at me, it’s almost as if I’m seeing James. It’s enough to give you the shivers, when you think how long they’d been separated. I suppose it’s either genes and chromosomes or Freud and infantile memories, depending on your point of view, though I must say I get rather fed up with that stuff, myself.”

  Harriet Compton picked up her gorgeous alligator bag and straightened her jacket. “Well, Jenny Maria, I think we ought to get along home and make sure we haven’t thrown away any desperate necessities before it’s too late to borrow them back. Thank you for the lovely tea, Mrs. Gillespie. It’s been a great pleasure. You must come and see us when things are a bit less chaotic over at the carriage house.”

  Jenny said something, she didn’t know what. She was too overwhelmed by the currents of feeling in that room to be capable of rational thought. There was her own shock on seeing her image caught in that dramatic photograph of her father. There was the grandson’s contrition. There was old Elspeth’s compassion and the flirtation she must have been carrying on with the alleged James Cox. And there was in Harriet Compton something most
disconcerting of all: a tension driving this sensible, hard-headed, middle-aged businesswoman to get out of here before she burst all bounds of decorum and went into screaming hysterics.

  12

  “I move we skip dinner. After Cousin Elspeth’s tea, a cup of bouillon would be about all I can manage.”

  Harriet Compton was doing her best to act like her normal self, although she wasn’t making a very good job of it.

  “I couldn’t agree more,” said Jenny. “What’s the matter with you? You’re about one step removed from a kitten fit.”

  “Have you ever thought of getting yourself burned as a witch? I’m supposed to be Old Stoneface.”

  The elderly accountant went over to the window and straightened a fold of the wild cretonne curtain that had been Jason Cirak’s choice. “All right, I’ll admit seeing your father’s photograph gave me as big a jolt as it did you. It—I suppose it made the whole business real. Here was this vital, brilliant, unpredictable, wonderful man, living in this cut-up little house, sitting in these awful chairs, stumbling over all that junk we threw out today because he wouldn’t think to get rid of it.”

  She left the curtain and came back to sit where Jason Cirak had no doubt sat on many an evening like this one. “And now he’s gone. He simply isn’t around any more. I don’t know, Jenny. Young people can joke about dying, can even commit suicide because it’s all a game and they think they’ll snap out of it and go on tomorrow with whatever they didn’t have time for today. Death isn’t real then. But when you get to be our ages—I suppose James didn’t mind so much, going as he did. It was better than sitting around getting old and sick and helpless. But still—”

  It was a while before she managed to smile. “Okay, that’s over. Shall I heat us some soup?”

  “No,” said Jenny. “Stay where you are. I’m going to light the fire and pour you a glass of sherry.”

  “Sterling idea. Warm the ancient bones and maybe I’ll be able to act like a human being again.”