‘Three days before the weddin’ the girl was thinkin’ she ought to go an’ tidy up her father’s grave seein’ it was comin’ up to the New Year an’ seein’ she was goin’ to flout him anyway. She’d done him well, mind, an’ had a fine gravestone erected for him only six months before an’ had his name put on it along with the date of his death an’ a ‘Rest in Peace’ to calm him down as she thought, but she was keen he should be spruced up for Hogmanay. The burial ground was about three miles away round the other side of the loch an’ the rain was still pourin’ down when she left the house but ach, she didn’t mind rain; she was well used to it. It was after dark that evenin’ when the young man went to her house to do his bit of courtin’ an’ when he found the place in darkness an’ the peats cold on the hearth he was askin’ himself where she could be. The cattle were still standin’ beside the byre wantin’ in an’ the henhouse wasn’t closed up so he guessed the hens hadn’t been fed. He looked around the croft an’ shouted but gettin’ no sight nor sound of his cousin he made for the shepherd’s house to ask did they see her anywhere. Right enough, they told him, she’d called there on her way to the burial ground but they had no seen her comin’ back yet. The shepherd an’ the young man thought they’d best go lookin’ for the girl an’ they took lanterns an’ set out callin’ out her name as they went along. It was in the burial ground itself they found her an’ at first all they could make out was her boots stickin’ out from beneath the heavy gravestone. Seemingly the ground had got that soft with all the rain an’ the gravestone hadn’t been given a chance to settle properly an’ it had toppled over an’ crushed her just as she was leanin’ over attendin’ to the grave.’ The old man drained his glass.
‘She was dead?’ whispered Sue.
‘Oh, aye, right enough she was dead,’ said the old man. ‘It was a fine handsome tombstone she’d got for him an’ there was a good weight in it.’
The old woman spoke. ‘If that wasn’t the spirit reachin’ beyond the grave I don’t know what is,’ she said.
‘It’s uncanny,’ breathed Sue. The old man nodded.
‘So the young man didn’t get the croft in between after all?’ I commented.
‘Aye, he got it all right,’ replied the old man. We all looked at him enquiringly. ‘Like I was sayin’, there was no closer relations than the ones in Australia an’ they weren’t wantin’ home to claim it so the young man applied to the Land Court that has to do with these things an’ they agreed he should take it over. So he got the three crofts together again as they’d been in his grandfather’s time an’ he has them to this day.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I hope he prospered.’
‘He worked the three crofts together an’ he married an’ I’m thinkin’ he prospered,’ affirmed the old man.
‘So the father’s vengeance, if that’s what it was, was wasted,’ observed Robert.
‘It was indeed,’ replied the old man. ‘But then did I not tell you the man was a Greannach that would as often spoil himself with his spitefulness?’ He got up and rooting in a cupboard beside the fireplace produced a book from which he extracted a small newspaper cutting. The headline read, ‘Father’s Tombstone Kills Daughter’ and below it, as if it had been a fairly unremarkable experience, it gave a few sketchy details of the incident along with the verdict that it had occurred because of the phenomenally wet weather. I handed the cutting back to the old man and he replaced it carefully between the pages of the book.
The next morning we bade the old couple goodbye and continued on our way. We had not gone far before we noticed an abandoned croft house quite close to the road and Sue insisted on getting out to take a closer look. ‘I wonder who owns this one and if they would sell it?’ she murmured.
‘To us?’ asked Robert facetiously.
‘Why not?’ she replied. ‘Just think if we could have a cottage like this to come to in the summer. All this lovely remoteness and silence.’
‘Not so remote from the hotel,’ I pointed out, ‘and I imagine there’ll be plenty of tourists here in the summer.’
‘But you can’t see the hotel from here,’ argued Sue. ‘That’s what matters.’
‘Look, Sue,’ Robert reminded her patiently. ‘Even if we could buy it we would need to do it up before we could live in it and what time would we have to do it up? Holidays wouldn’t be much fun if we had to spend them indoors working to make the place habitable.’
‘You are so disgustingly practical,’ Sue complained and with a shrug of her shoulders got back into the car. As we cruised along we saw another abandoned croft house and since it was not so derelict as the previous one Sue once again insisted on getting out to inspect it. ‘I wish we could find out who owns these two empty places,’ she said. ‘This one wouldn’t take much doing up before we could spend our holidays in it and then if we ever could escape permanently it would be a wonderful place to dream of coming to.’
We stood together admiring the situation. It certainly was an attractive spot set among the snow shawled hills and looking out over the waters of the loch which this morning were racing before a pettish breeze. We heard a shout and turned to see a shepherd calling his dog to heel.
‘Ask him,’ urged Sue, prodding Robert’s arm. We waited until the shepherd came abreast of us.
‘It is a cold day,’ he greeted us cordially. We agreed it was. ‘I’m thinkin’ the snow will be with us again soon enough,’ he added.
‘Go on!’ hissed Sue.
‘I wonder,’ Robert began as the shepherd was about to walk away, ‘can you tell us who owns this cottage and whether there’s a chance of it being for sale?’
The shepherd came back to where we were standing beside the car. He was surprisingly forthcoming.
‘It is owned by the man that has the hotel there,’ he told us. ‘Did you not spend the night there?’ We told him we had. ‘Ach, but I doubt he would be selling it. There’s plenty of visitors been wantin’ to get it from him in the summer.’ I both saw and sensed Sue’s disappointment.
‘Well what about the one further back down the road,’ she persisted. ‘Who owns that one?’
‘The one in between this an’ the croft where the hotel now stands?’ he asked. Sue nodded. ‘That belongs to the old man too,’ replied the shepherd, giving her a compassionate grin. ‘But I’m thinkin’ he’s even less likely to sell that one. He had a job gettin’ it an’ he’s not wantin’ for money.’ Sue made a disappointed grimace. ‘Maybe you wouldn’t want to be livin’ in that house supposin’ you could get it,’ he told her, inclining his head in the direction of the first house we had seen. ‘There’s somethin’ queer always about that place.’
‘Queer?’ echoed Sue. ‘Do you mean haunted?’
‘Indeed I don’t know if it is haunted but it was never a happy house. It belonged to a young woman once that was going to marry someone her father had forbidden her to marry an’ though she waited until he was dead before she fixed the weddin’ she was killed three days before the day.’
‘Her father’s tombstone fell on her,’ said Sue.
‘Aye?’ The shepherd was surprised. ‘You will be knowin’ the story then?’
‘Yes, we know it,’ Sue told him. ‘Oh well, thanks for telling us,’ she said. The shepherd continued on his way and we got back into the car.
‘So it was the old man at the hotel who was once the young man who wanted the croft in between,’ said Robert. We had rounded the loch now and were looking across to where the hotel stood close to the margin of the shore. To the right of it we could see the two abandoned croft houses set almost equidistant from each other.
‘And the young man worked the three crofts and he married and he prospered,’ Sue mimicked the old man’s rich Highland accents.
‘And why not?’ Robert demanded. ‘After all, he does serve damn good whisky.’
Copyright
First published in 1975 by Hutchinson & Co.
This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of P
an Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world
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Copyright © Lillian Beckwith, 1975
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Beautiful Just! Page 14