‘I have always loved you best,’ she said, ‘but now you love Magdalen best.’
He stared at her. ‘She is my wife.’ He did not know if he said it or not.
‘Well, I have tried to love someone else too, to love him better than you. But I cannot change as you have done. I love you better than the whole world. I know it now.’
Some strained quality in her voice startled the mare, who reared and plunged her head, but Kat, still holding the bridle, paid no attention to her; she was crying, ‘It is not too late, now you have come at last. Jamie, take me away from them all. Let us run away.’
She had often said that, years ago; and now the childish cry came again, but with how strange an echo! The cry of a thing lost and frightened – but she was never frightened, she would not let herself be so now – her voice came pantingly, and yet she forced it into the casual off-hand tones it had always worn. It was he whose voice faltered as he demanded who it was that she had ‘tried to love’.
‘And who would it be? One of the Fleming brothers or my young Lord Wigton, because you tried to arrange matches for me with one or other of them? That is how you think of love, something that comes safely and dutifully after marriage.’
‘Answer me,’ he shouted, the words rushing like blood into his mouth, ‘have you lain with any man?’
She stared at him an instant, then turned and fled from him among the trees. She had answered him. He dared not follow for fear of what he might do.
He still saw her face before him, a white distorted thing in the murky air, distorting his vision of her, mocking his love for her, making it hideous. A grinning mountebank, counterfeiting love, such as Carlippis might act to draw their uneasy laughter, so their relationship tumbled and twisted itself.
He buried his burning face against the mare’s neck, pressing it against that strong skin, cool and damp from sweat. Soothed by his touch, but still quivering, the beast stood still. Last winter he and Kat had taken the mare to be shod on a white and breathless morning when the frost was melting all round them in the sun with a faint crackling sound like that of a million tiny flames. The hills had shone pale blue like skimmed milk, the spire of smoke from John the Smith’s cottage had been iridescent as a rainbow, a thrush had sung on a bare tree, and ‘tink tonk, tink tonk’ went the clang of John the Smith’s hammer through the thin and sparkling air. They had held hands as they used to do as children, staring at the blacksmith’s forge; then they had mounted and ridden up through the heather over the crisp white moor.
Like a song that no one yet had written; so he had thought of that morning. Now he would never be able to think of it again – never – never.
And with the lost vision of that pearl-coloured morning, the thrush’s song and their ride together, the little flames of melting frost leaped up into a roar and blaze, devouring his whole childhood.
He hated to think of anyone who loved him; he now saw an unnatural force in the reproach in Magdalen’s grave eyes, when he told her he must go and see Kat. And he had lain in such deep, unspeakable content within her arms. Now there would be Kat between them. His lips moved against that clean, rank skin, muttering, ‘Never – Never – I will never touch any of you again.’
He raised his head, and stared at the birch trees where she had disappeared, and gradually his anger melted into anxiety. What could have driven her to this madness? She must be bewitched.
At that he cursed himself, and leaped into the saddle.
‘Can a trinket be made to bewitch its wearer?’
Only last night he had asked that of Sir Thomas Hope.
Surely he would have noticed it if Kat had been wearing that twisted jewel? Yet only now did he fancy he had seen the wink and sparkle of a ruby as she had stood there in that last moment, facing him, before she fled.
She had been bewitched, and he had known it, and then he had forgotten it, he had let himself be angered, when all the time it was Kat who had been hurt, and he had discovered nothing of it, not even who had been her lover – but that he would not think of – not yet.
He was urging Bess forward among the ghostly trees. He called her – ‘Kat, come back, come back. Kat, I am not angry now. Come back.’
His voice trailed through the muffled air. He seemed to be groping through a cloud, a dream. The mist had deepened. No voice answered him. And presently, he began to hear the whispering, pricking sound of the invisible rain.
Chapter Eighteen
It was late at night when he came at last to Rossdhu. The grooms who took his horse, the steward who came forward to greet him in the hall, looked at him with scared faces. He asked to be taken straight to the Lady Lilias, and found her walking up and down her room. She turned on him with her hands outflung.
‘You!’ she cried, ‘what news do you bring, brother?’
The gesture was dramatic, the small hands were white and beautifully kept, covered with rings. He found himself staring at them sullenly, unable to speak. One of them fluttered up to her face, armed with the fresh weapon of a lace handkerchief from Brussels. He watched her hold it to her eyes. There was bad news coming.
‘Kat has not returned, then?’ he said at last, slowly.
‘Kat! Are you mocking me? Oh, then, you know nothing!’
She sat on a stool, looking up at him just under the silver candle sconce so that he saw her face plainly, and that she had been crying. She said in a small, pitiful voice, ‘I am the most unhappy creature in the world. My lord has left me.’
Now he should exclaim and swear at Sir John, and vow to avenge her; or lay his hand on hers and show his sympathy and admiration for her – for all these demands were in the air, though he did not know what it was, soft and persistent, that clung about his mind, preventing him from thinking clearly, when it was more important than it had ever been for him to do this.
He blinked his eyes against the mellow light of the candles. So long had he been peering into the darkness, distinguishing only the rugged shapes of the trees, as he rode and ran through the worst hours of his life.
In this carefully lighted, pretty, modern furnished room, with its new Flemish tapestries and its French chairs covered in rose-coloured velvet, and its one good religious picture from Italy, he was in an alien world from that wet wood, where only the hoots of startled owls had answered his despairing voice. He stood squelching his toes in his sodden boot, uncomfortably regarding this beautiful woman who wore her sorrow as elegantly as a rose.
‘How do you know he has left you?’ he said. ‘I saw him at Edinburgh, only yesterday.’
Lilias stiffened a little. She told him that Sir John should have arrived home that day. He had never come – but now instead had come from Edinburgh a scared servant of Sir John’s, who said that his master had gone, this morning, south towards England. His tale had been so confused and rambling, Lilias had not been able to disentangle it. It was enough to know that she had been deserted, she who had always loved him so devotedly, and was the mother of his children.
‘How do you know,’ her brother kept saying. ‘How do you know he means to desert you?’
The real issue of all this, the chief cause for anxiety, was sliding past him. Sir John left Edinburgh this morning, Sir John went south – well, but Kat stood by the loch this afternoon. What had she to do with this?
He asked to see the servant and knew him at once, one Jock Finnie, a weak-headed, clumsy youth he had always thought him, who never knew what he should do next, torn as he was between his desire to get on in the world and his terror of the minister. Montrose had noticed his subservience to Carlippis, whose favour it was almost more worth while to win than that of Sir John. But he had to keep in with God as well as man, even when, as now, he had inconveniently to do it in turns.
He had been bribed to go to London with Sir John, and had eagerly consented. But his conscience smote him, he was afraid of the powers of darkness, at the last moment he had escaped and fled back to Rossdhu to disclose the plot. For Sir John m
eant to leave his family, he had laid all his plans with the greatest secrecy, he was going to London first, and then to Italy.
Still the reason for it all hovered just out of sight. Had Lilias never even wondered what it might be? Her brother looked at the red, twitching hands of the repentant informer; they kept catching at his handkerchief, that absurd luxury for a servant, and then thrusting it back into his pocket.
‘Did Carlippis ride with him?’
Yes. No. That is, Carlippis had left Edinburgh a day earlier than Sir John. He was to go on in advance, get lodgings, order fresh horses, prepare the way.
‘Did you see him start?’
No. Yes. That is, he had this very morning spoken to a countryman who had yesterday brought in his sheep into Edinburgh, and had met the German on the road.
‘What man was this?’ asked Jamie.
‘Oh, what can it matter?’ wailed Lilias, wringing her hands. All these tedious questions, beside the point, how men loved asking them, just to show their pompous wisdom! If only her young sons were men! Her brother was the only man now of the family, and not one word of help or sympathy had she had from him, only stupid questions.
She turned aside, chilled and lonely, and with a little tremor of fear, inexplicable, unnamed. What were all these questions leading to, what worse evil waited there in the darkness to be discovered? And what evil could there be worse than the betrayal of her true and tender heart?
She stared out of the window, for in the confusion of this evening no one had closed the shutters nor drawn the curtains. Black night, the swish of heavy rain falling, of trees in the rising wind, and the waves of the loch falling louder and louder on the shore – these were heard even through the new well-fitting glass panes. It was working up to a wild night. How often she had heard that said, and hated it. She began to cry.
The farmer was Pennycuik from The Croft over by Fernhaugh.
‘But that,’ said Jamie’s clear voice, ‘is not on the road into England. If he were driving his sheep, he was coming straight from the west, for Fernhaugh is on the way here.’
Lilias stopped crying to say, coldly, ‘Carlippis has never been here today.’
Jamie did not speak. His silence fell as heavy as a stone. She looked at him, and cried, ‘For God’s sake tell me, what is it you fear?’ Her cry had snapped discordantly. She had forgotten to be beautiful, or even sad.
But still her brother did not look at her, he was staring at the raw chapped wrists of Jock Finnie, thrust well beyond his coat sleeves; they were all that was now visible of his hands, which were clutched together, his handkerchief wound tightly round them, and yet even with this support, the wrists were shaking as though the man had got the palsy. His eyes were downcast, almost shut, but the stare of the young lord gradually forced them to rise and meet it. He flung himself on his knees, raising those clutched hands, and sobbed hysterically, ‘My lord, he is a warlock, all the world knows it, he is the devil himself.’
‘What do you know of him in this matter?’
‘He has persuaded my master to go to Italy, he has enchanted him. And not only my master—’ He stopped, was whimpering, his head down again.
‘Who else has been bewitched?’
The whimpering stopped, but Jock Finnie did not answer at once.
The silence was all round them now, no longer a stone dropped between them, but a chain uniting them, drawing their thoughts together, nearer and nearer, unwilling prisoners, forced into the same dungeon.
‘My young mistress,’ came at last in a whisper.
Chapter Nineteen
Others had to be questioned; the steward, a tearful incoherent chambermaid of Kat’s, one of Lilias’ own maids, indignant and on the defensive; each gave separate information, which went to build up that inevitable whole. They gave it in their own ways, but all hesitating – afraid, not of their master for giving it, nor of their mistress and the young Earl for having so long withheld it, but of their fellow servant, Carlippis. They would not now have confessed what they knew of his doings, but that they believed him to have gone south with Sir John on his way to Italy.
It had been his way all along. That ruthless force of mind had wrecked a great house, merely to escape from boredom. Carlippis himself, villainous and powerful as he was now proving, seemed too small a thing for this demoniac, this monstrous and miserable energy, that was too bitter and hostile ever to create, and so must always destroy.
With all the subtlety of his adopted nation, and the dogged persistence of his own, he had engineered a love affair between his master and his master’s young sister-in-law and ward, that would compel Sir John to leave his home and family, the estate that had belonged to that family for centuries, together with the dearly bought new honour of his Nova Scotia baronetcy, and all the hopes and ambitions he had been so anxiously spinning round the approaching Coronation – to fling them all to the winds, and rush headlong from them – breaking the law, incurring probably the sentence of death – and all that Carlippis might get back in comfort to Italy.
The vast selfishness of his plan lay bare at last after seven years of its contriving. He had been successful, he had started Sir John towards London, while he had gone back in secret to Rossdhu to fetch Kat, and join him later on the road.
And Kat must have been on the way to meet him when Jamie had encountered her by the lake. Yet that was strange – for Carlippis had left Edinburgh yesterday, and Kat should have met him much sooner and ridden away.
Then he remembered her greeting to himself – ‘Now I have made you come at last. Why did you not come before?’
So she had agreed to go with Carlippis, she had given herself to Sir John – but now she knew that she hated him and his pandar Carlippis, and that the only man she had ever loved was himself. She had wished him to come to her, and he had come, but he had repulsed her. He had driven her back on to those others, by now she had met Carlippis, she was riding with him through the rain to meet her seducer. She had cried, ‘It is not too late, now you have come to me at last.’ But he had made it so.
His mind swung from that in fury. These last few hours, that moment of horror-stricken anger, must be wiped out. He would not believe she had gone to meet Carlippis; she had fled from him; why should she not even now be hiding from him?
He sent a messenger on his best horse to Napier, who was still in Edinburgh and might yet have a chance of catching the fugitives on their road to London. He himself determined to seek his sister on the shores of Loch Lomond. For if she were hiding there, as he believed, only he could find her, knowing as he did their old haunts on those shores, and where she was likely to find shelter. So for three days he sought her there, going further and further afield, by the ice-white torrents that gashed the dark surface of the mountains; through the woods that had provided oaks for the roof of Glasgow Cathedral, and yews for the archers’ bows at Bannockburn.
And back through his spent childhood he seemed to be searching for her, as he scanned the country for some hut or shelter patched together with bracken and branches and heather, such as they had then made together, and might even now be harbouring her. The granite boulders, perched so oddly here and there, were where they had held their castle against the English, or the robber, Edom o’ Gordon. There was the one down on the shore that they had always looked at to see if the waves had reached it, for that meant the loch was at a good fishing level – and there was the mighty giant that had yet been split apart by a sapling growing up through it. And here was the great stone, stark and gaunt in the midst of a bare stretch of moorland, that had once marked the boundaries of three ancient kingdoms.
Other ages than his own surrounded him in these woods and stones. Unconscious of them, and of their history, he was yet reminded in this sad search back through his youth, that the world was very old, and drawing to an end.
Snow had begun to creep down the slopes of Ben Lomond, a thick white cruddled surface like the skin of a corpse, more sinister than the black clouds
that rolled across it. The year was dying round him; the dank smell of decaying leaves and rotting wood hung in his nostrils; something within him too was dying, but this he did not know.
For the happy innocence on the surface of that life at Rossdhu had shivered and broken for ever. Corruption had been at work underneath. There was no security then in his old sunny acceptance of life. Life was not lovely and happy if left to itself to slide along like a boat on summer waters. At any moment it might happen that:
When the lift grew dark, and the wind blew loud,
And gurly grew the sea,
– and the boat be rent asunder, and the face of its captain turn into that of the devil.
Chapter Twenty
They heard that Colquhoun had been seen in London with the Lady Katherine, then that he had left for Italy. The family conferred, the law was called in, King Charles sent royal mandates to the Lord Justice-General of Scotland and the Lord Advocate, and a weighty prosecution was drawn up against Colquhoun for the criminal offences of adultery and incest. The marriage tie of sister-in-law was considered the same as the blood tie of sister.
There was however no charge against the girl herself, who was regarded as a helpless victim. For there was a still graver charge against Colquhoun, that of using witchcraft to gain his ends, and employing his foreign servant, Carlippis, ‘ane necromancer’, to win the girl to him by means of love philtres, and a certain five-pointed jewel in gold and rubies, that had been ‘poisoned and intoxicate’.
Once again the shadow of sorcery lay on the family. The victim was own niece to a ‘studier of magic and a conjurer with devils’; great-granddaughter to a man whose proffered jewel Queen Mary had feared to accept, because he used enchantments.
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