Falkone's Promise

by Rebecca Flanders

  He was dressed today in casual grey slacks and a cream shirt, cuffed up at the sleeves and open at the neck to reveal a V of that dark, springy mat of hair Dawn remembered so distinctly from last night. With difficulty, she subdued a flush of shameful memory and returned his cool gaze. If it were to be his policy to ignore what had passed between them, her wisest course was to follow suit.

  She said, with forced pleasantness, ‘As a matter of fact, it is. But it can’t be today. I’d like to get started with all those shots of the castle I missed yesterday.’

  ‘By all means,’ he replied in a casual, dismissing tone. ‘Make yourself at home.’ He turned to Vernon. ‘Did you bring the books with you? I’d like to get started on them right away; we’re both needed back at the plant.’

  Vernon gulped the last of his tea and rose. ‘Of course. I’ll just set up in the office.’

  Dawn was acutely aware of their solitude when he was gone, but she refused to flee Byron’s presence like a nervous child. She made herself sit and sip her coffee deliberately, not looking around at him, ignoring him as he was choosing to ignore her. After a time he walked over to the window and looked out. She hastily finished the remainder of her coffee and started to rise.

  ‘I suppose by now you’ve heard the whole sordid story.’ He spoke abruptly, and she looked at him, startled.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  He turned, contempt and distaste narrowing in his eyes. ‘After what you heard in the garden last night you couldn’t wait to pry all the gory little details out of my sister. You women are all alike. You have absolutely no concept of the sanctitude of privacy!’

  ‘For your information,’ she flared, ‘I haven’t even seen your sister today! As for all women being alike—that’s probably the most narrow-minded, chauvinistic thing I’ve heard you say since I’ve been here, which is saying a great deal!’

  He withstood her onslaught implacably. ‘Then you deny that you know anything at all about my connection with Hilary Mann?’

  She looked down at her hands. ‘No,’ she admitted miserably, ‘I don’t deny it.’

  He uttered a single triumphant, ‘Ha!’ and she jerked her head up.

  ‘Maggie told me, last night,’ she defended hotly, ‘and not because I asked!’

  ‘I find that very difficult to believe,’ he returned coolly. ‘I suggest, Miss Morrison, that your first item of business here was to discover whether the lord of the castle were married, involved, or—’ a hatefully mocking twist of the lips, ‘on the rebound.’

  Dawn jumped up from the table. ‘My first and only item of business,’ she told him, controlling her voice with some difficulty, ‘was to complete my assignment and be out of your way as quickly as possible. Now, if you’ll excuse me ...’ She turned to go, but then remembered. With a breath, she turned back to him, in control now, firmly businesslike. ‘One other thing. I’ll need your permission to take some shots of the old tapestries and portraits in the original parts of the castle.’

  He was glowering into his cup, and did not respond.

  ‘I should tell you,’ she continued, feeling faintly superior now in her own realm, ‘that repeated exposure to the high-intensity of flash bulbs can sometimes cause a breakdown in the materials of old pigments and dyes. I don’t think that needs to be an immediate concern with only a few exposures, but of course it’s your decision.’

  He replied curtly, without looking up, ‘Do as you wish.’

  She started again towards the door, and this time did not turn at the sound of his voice. ‘By the way, you’ll find your camera bag on your bed. I hope the dew hasn’t done it any damage.’ His voice changed subtly, faintly taunting. ‘Really, Dawn, you must learn not to let your violent emotions sweep away your judgment so. It’s a valuable piece of equipment and your livelihood, and after all, your career does come first, doesn’t it?’

  She stepped through the door and closed it behind her with an unsatisfactory bang. Naturally, he would have the last word.

  She spent the day entirely on her own, and the hours flew past until lunchtime. She was not very adventurous in the morning, concentrating on getting the dull part of her job—the meticulous details and pictures of the accommodation—out of the way so that the rest of her stay could be devoted to capturing the glamour and romance of the island on film. She and Maggie lunched alone, for Byron had already finished his business with Vernon and gone to the distillery, and she was not sorry. He was right, she had let her emotions momentarily come before her job, and it was a mistake she vowed not to make again.

  Maggie offered to take her around, but Dawn declined. She could capture much more of the atmosphere, the charm of the castle, if she were allowed to make her discoveries on her own. Beginning with the tower of her own room, she carefully set up her tripod and various lenses, and spent almost half an hour getting what she hoped was the perfect shot of the tapestry on the wall.

  The staircase leading to the exhibition rooms was well marked and brightly lit, and she followed it eagerly. It opened on to a stone chamber which might have been transported intact at the height of its glory directly from the fifteenth century. There was a printed description on the glass-covered pedestal in the doorway, and she scanned over it quickly. ‘The Master Chamber of the Lord and his Lady...’

  And the following words were read out loud over her shoulder, in a masculine voice, ‘This room was used for much more than sleeping...’ She turned to look at Byron and he favoured her with another one of his provocative lifts of the brow. ‘But then so are a great many bedrooms around the world.’ She stepped deliberately away from him and into the room, focusing her camera on the great dais bed in the centre piled high with its many fur rugs. He continued to read, ‘It was the centre of activity for family life. Here the lady would sew and tend her children while the lord often conducted business or entertained guests. Dining was done here as well on occasion, and it was not unusual for the couple to take five or six of their favourite hounds to bed with them for warmth.’ Again, he inserted a wry opinion. ‘I’m certain I could have thought of a better arrangement than that!’

  Dawn snapped the shutter and changed lenses to get a wide view of the throne chair and the fireplace on the opposite side of the room.

  ‘Sleeping arrangements were very crude. The mattress was usually no more than corn shucks or straw covered with animal skins, and when the ticking became soiled or lost its resilience it was merely scattered along the floor to absorb odours and animal droppings. The lord and lady always slept nude.’

  She turned to glare at him. ‘That wasn’t written there.’

  ‘No,’ he followed her into the room. ‘But you seem to me a woman with an inquisitive mind, and I thought you might like to be enlightened on the subject. Maggie sent me up to check on you. She thought you might be lost.’

  ‘As you can see,’ she returned, busy with her camera, ‘I’m not.’

  She took a few more shots about the room, but suddenly the glamour was dimmed for her. Despite its present soft allure of polished wood and brass-studded chests, colourful carpets and plush furs, Byron’s description had filled the ancient chamber with the vision of flea-bitten, snapping hounds and the odour of dung, and her romantic concept of medieval life would never be the same. She thought he had done it on purpose.

  She moved her equipment into the next room, small and almost spartan in its furnishings, and Byron announced, ‘The maiden’s chamber. Now, she never slept nude. To have been discovered doing so would probably have meant dismemberment for the gallant knight who was commissioned to sleep outside her door, guarding the sacred vessel. A virgin daughter was a possession beyond jewels in those days, you know. Fortunately, customs have changed, or else most of the fathers of the world today would be paupers.’

  Dawn kept her mind on her work and a sharp rein on her tongue. Was Byron’s penchant for denigrating women a reflection of his opinion of the sex in general, or a blow aimed exclusively at her? She suspect
ed his main motive at this moment was to trap her into another flare of temper, and she refused to succumb.

  ‘Often,’ he continued airily, ‘the most barbaric methods were used to protect that treasure. The chastity belt, for example, is thought to be the precursor of the dreadful blight of venereal disease that afflicts the world to this day. Have you ever seen one? Beastly-looking things.’

  She turned on him. ‘Why do you do this?’ she demanded with as much calm and impartiality as she could muster.

  He looked innocent. ‘Do what?’

  ‘Insist upon turning everything romantic into something shameful and—dirty! Chop away at women as though we were each personally responsible for Eve’s fall from grace. Turning femininity into something cheap and—tasteless!’

  The unruffled lift of his eyebrow told her that she had stepped directly into his trap. ‘I do that, Miss Morrison? It seems to be that it’s you who holds femininity in distaste. The eternal business person too preoccupied with making a place for herself in a man’s world to allow herself to be a woman—as though your gender were something you’re ashamed of.’

  Her temper flared, but she struggled to keep it from showing. ‘I have just as much right to make a place for myself in the world as any man,’ she told him shortly. ‘And it would be a lot easier if I didn’t have to constantly fight off men like you who think women were designed for only one thing. I resent your attitude, Mr. Boyd,’ added coldly. ‘Just because you’ve been disappointed by one woman it’s no excuse for turning your bitterness towards the entire feminine sex.’ Because the venom behind her words was beginning to show, she turned deliberately back to her camera. ‘I think you do belong in the Middle Ages. I understand men back then disliked women too.’

  After a moment she heard the purposeful click of his footsteps moving away from her, and she suddenly felt very tired.

  Byron was absent from the dinner table, this time, Maggie explained, owing to the last-minute malfunction of machinery at the distillery, and once again they had a cosy meal alone. Maggie told her that she had timed her visit perfectly, to coincide with the gala celebration of Spring Fest in the native tradition which would take place towards the end of her stay.

  ‘It’s really an exciting thing to see,’ she said. ‘The castle courtyard is opened up and everyone comes in native dress at sunset bearing torches and chanting the ancient Gaelic planting song. All the cooking is done outside, and everyone lies back on cushions and pallets and eats and drinks and dances until dawn. The revelry on the lawn will take you right back to the fifteenth century.’

  Dawn agreed that it was something she would not want to miss, and thought that would make a nice addition to her article.

  She went to bed dreaming of the coming festival, the colourful costumes, the beating drums, the wildly whirling torches, and it seemed she could almost hear the music ... She was dragged out of slumber by that persistent melody and lay there in the darkness for a time, gradually realising it was not a dream.

  In fact, it could hardly be referred to as a melody, but more of a chant, toneless and high-pitched, augmented occasionally by the minor chords of guitar. It had a strange beauty of its own, eerie, wild, and oddly sensuous. She got out of bed and switched on a low lamp, crossing the room to fling open the casement window. The night air was chill as she leaned out, vainly searching the garden below for the source of the disturbance, but the music was provocative and she could not go back inside.

  Then on a high, vibrant note, it stopped, and there was the faint stir of chords as though the guitar had been set down. It sounded very close.

  ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel,’ came the soft voice below her, ‘let down your hair.’

  Dawn started at the familiar voice and words and leaned further out, searching the darkness. ‘Where are you?’ she hissed. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m here, below your window.’ His voice was conversational now, at a normal speaking tone. And so clear that he could have well been in the room with her. ‘As for what I’m doing—merely seeking to disparage your theory of my opinion of women by showing you I don’t regard you cheaply. That you’re worth, in fact, a romantic serenade beneath your bedroom window in the true Hebridean custom. How do you like our Gaelic music?’

  There, she could see it now—the slight protrusion of a portion of a portico directly below her. It must be there that Byron stood, looking up at her, but she could not see either form nor face of him.

  She said, ‘It’s—different. But nice, in a way.’

  ‘Most people don’t understand it. Musically, it’s off key and unstructured, but if folk music is supposed to epitomise the character of the people it describes, it serves its purpose very well. Islanders are all basically wild and unstructured, a people unto themselves.’

  Dawn was aware that he had the advantage, in that he could see her in her low-necked nightgown and flowing hair, but she could not see him. ‘Well,’ she said, a little uncomfortably, ‘thank you for the serenade ... Goodnight.’ She started to pull the window closed, but the sound of his voice stopped her.

  ‘Now that I’ve made an effort to prove you wrong about what I think of the feminine sex, I should like to put the question to you.’

  She hesitated, puzzled. ‘What?’

  ‘I suggest that all those ugly opinions you ascribed to me this afternoon could more aptly apply to you. I think you hold your own femininity in contempt.’

  She scowled. ‘That’s ridiculous! And so is this conversation. Goodnight.’

  Once again he stopped her. ‘Why haven’t you married? Surely it’s not because no one has asked you.’

  The question was an uncomfortable one, and also a little painful. She could not explain to him, arrogant, conceited, and already contemptuous, how the scars of her parents’ divorce would never leave her, how they had led her to set impossibly high standards for the man she would marry—standards which included permanence, stability, and unswerving loyalty. How much emotional turmoil she had endured through the years because of men who saw only a pretty face and did not suspect her deeper needs, and how, eventually, she had learned to supply those needs herself by throwing herself completely into her work ... She said, stiffly, ‘I don’t think that’s any of your business.’

  A disembodied voice floating up to her from the dark, he persisted, ‘Have you a man waiting back home?’

  ‘No,’ she answered shortly, and reached again to pull the window closed.

  ‘Ah, I rest my case.’ The soft satisfaction in his voice made her stop. ‘You are ashamed of your femininity, or afraid of it, so you hide yourself in ugly dresses and unattractive hairstyles and go out into the world to compete with men, rather than enjoy them in a natural relationship.’ Now his voice altered subtly, and being unable to see his face was maddening. ‘I’ll give you one last chance, Rapunzel, love. Let down your hair ...’

  Deliberately, Dawn pulled the window shut and got back into bed. She lay there in the darkness for a long time, shivering with cold, her heart racing with anticipation as she heard his footsteps in the hall outside the door, and then slowing again as she heard his own door open and softly close. Still she lay there, hugging herself miserably, because she knew that every word he had spoken tonight had been true.

  The next morning she met Byron in the dining room, and he casually invited her to come with him to the distillery. ‘If you’re going to write about the true nature of the island,’ he told her, ‘the article wouldn’t be complete without it.’

  And so within an hour she climbed into his white Mercedes, her camera on the seat between them, for the ten-minute drive across the asphalt to the distillery. ‘I hope you don’t have a weak stomach,’ said Byron as they pulled through a chain-link gate and into the parking lot of a long, low, rambling building. ‘Some of the odours of fermentation can take your breath away if you’re not used to them.’

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ she assured him competently, and he only glanced at her in amusement as he
helped her out of the car.

  He took her first to a large, barn-like building whose interior was dark and musty and lined with endless rows of wooden barrels. ‘This is our ageing warehouse. We don’t sell any whisky under five years old. Some of it’s twelve, fifteen, and twenty years old—but of course that’s already purchased, and we’re merely ageing it for the buyer.’ Some men were working along the rows, shifting the barrels and marking on file cards which hung below each one the date and the time. ‘It has to be turned at intervals. A lot of companies use machinery for this; we still do it by hand.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be cheaper, in the long run, to install machinery?’ Dawn asked.

  He glanced at her. ‘Perhaps. But it would put a lot of men out of work. We like the old ways.’

  The interior of the building was like a dungeon, down a cold, damp flight of stairs, into a huge, crowded, noisily echoing stone chamber lit in the eerily flickering blue-green of fluorescent tubes. Already the faint sour odour of rotting grain reached her, mixed with machine oil and human perspiration, and she busied herself with the light-meter of the camera to try to push the unpleasant sensations aside.

  ‘We’ll start at the beginning, shall we?’ Byron had to shout over the grinding and clanging of machinery and the other shouts of workers. Now she was grateful for his protective arm on her elbow as he guided her towards another extension of the main chamber.

  ‘Of course the real beginning is out in the fields, with the harvesters. They bring the grain here, where it’s washed and sorted for defects, prepared with special enzymes, and mixed with sugar and water for the mash.’ She snapped her camera on the dozen or so workers, many of them women, who bent over huge tubs or sat at long tables, their nimble fingers flying through the grain.