Waterfall Glen

by Davie Henderson

  Kate laughed and shook her head.

  The denial didn’t seem to convince the older woman, who said, “Well, we’ll soon have you cured of that, don’t you worry.”

  Kate knew there was no point protesting any further, and instead said, “Wouldn’t you like some tea yourself?”

  “Well, now that you mention it.” Miss Weir whipped out a mug, filled it with tea and milk, and perched herself on the stool opposite Kate. “I’m just hoping you’re not going to suggest that I try one of the scones I made for you this morning, because I might be tempted and I should really be watching my weight.”

  “Go on, be a devil.”

  “Well, I’ll maybe just take a little one. Can I be getting one for yourself as well?”

  “I won’t have room for dinner if you do, and it smells too good to miss,” Kate said diplomatically.

  With surprising agility, Miss Weir flew off the stool and over to a big platter of scones on the worktop next to the bread. “I’m just looking for the smallest one,” she said, a predatory hand hovering over the scones.

  Kate suspected Miss Weir was thinking aloud, but that her words weren’t a perfect match for her thoughts.

  This suspicion was confirmed when the housekeeper returned with a scone that wasn’t much smaller than the teaplate it was sitting on. She cut it open and spread a thin layer of butter on it. After taking a bite she said, “Hmm, a bit dry. It needs a wee spot of jam to moisten it.” Again she seemed to be thinking aloud when she said, “I suppose there’s no harm if I just have the one spoonful.” She dismounted from her stool once more, and when she came back she had a jar of strawberry jam in one hand and a tablespoon in the other. After rolling off the elastic band and peeling back the wax paper she dug the spoon into the jar in agricultural fashion and brought out a mountainous, wobbling heap of jam. Upending the spoon over the bottom half of the scone, she scraped every last trace of jam from it with a knife, which she then meticulously wiped on the top half.

  “That looks good,” Kate said as Miss Weir set about devouring the scone.

  “Aye, but it could do with a bit more jam. I just wish I didn’t have to think about my figure,” Miss Weir lamented. “Are you sure I can’t get you one?”

  Kate shook her head. “I really am stuffed, thanks.”

  “I’ll just leave the rest of the sandwich on the table if you don’t mind,” Miss Weir said. “It’ll do for Finlay. There’ll be a timid, mouselike knock at the door any minute now, mark my words, and a wheedling little voice saying, ‘Miss Weir, I wonder if I might trouble you for just the smallest bite to eat’.”

  Kate laughed at the perfect imitation of Finlay’s singsong lilt. “Something tells me that, underneath it all, you’re quite fond of him,” she said.

  “I suppose I am, at that,” Miss Weir conceded. “He must have been quite a man,” she said thoughtfully, and for once in a quiet voice. “You might have noticed a wee ribbon on his blazer. Well, I once asked him what it was for, but he changed the subject and wouldn’t tell me. I’m a nosy besom, I have to admit, so I asked Auld Davie about it—he’s one of the crofters who served with Finlay during the war. He said that the pretty little ribbon is for the Military Medal. He also said it’s second only to the Victoria Cross.”

  “How did Finlay win it?” Kate asked, impressed even before hearing the details.

  “The hard way.”

  “I can’t imagine there’s an easy way to win a medal like that.”

  “No, indeed. Anyway, he didn’t win it charging forward with a blazing gun and all-consuming rage, blinded by the heat of battle to the risks he was taking, but with an altogether more uncommon kind of courage. It turns out Finlay McRae was one of the first men—well, he can’t have been much more than a boy—to set foot on the beaches during D-Day. While the bombs and bullets were flying all around and other men dived for cover he stayed on his feet to pipe the commandoes ashore to the tune of Highland Laddie.”

  Kate had taken to Finlay from the start, and now felt admiration for him as well as affection.

  Miss Weir started washing up the plates and knives. Before she’d finished there was a barely audible knock at the door, followed by a timid, “Miss Weir—”

  Kate couldn’t hear the rest of what Finlay said for the sound of her own laughter.

  “Come in, Finlay. We’ve been expecting you,” the housekeeper announced smugly.

  The door opened and in came Finlay, taken aback to see Kate sitting quite the thing at the kitchen table.

  “It’s okay,” Miss Weir told Finlay. “It seems that Lady Kate is quite at home taking a mug of tea with the likes or us.”

  As Finlay sat down, Miss Weir said, “You’ll be wanting a sandwich, I take it.”

  “Just if there’s one already made,” Finlay said, looking at the leftover half of Kate’s sandwich sitting in the middle of the table.

  Miss Weir shook her head. “Men,” she said to Kate. “They’re so predictable.”

  “I’d prefer to say ‘reliable’,” Finlay said.

  “I can rely on you wanting a mug of tea and a scone as well, I suppose.”

  “That you can, but I’ll see to it myself.”

  “That means he wants to pick his own scone,” Miss Weir told Kate.

  Finlay polished off his sandwich in short order and got up to help himself to a scone. “I see that someone’s already taken the ‘smallest’ one,” he said, peeved.

  Once more, Kate had to work hard not to burst out laughing.

  Finlay took a bite of his scone and said, “It’s very nice, Miss Weir. Yes, very nice indeed. But maybe just the littlest bit dry, if I might be so bold as to say so.”

  Without a word Miss Weir brought him the jam jar.

  “It only needs a spoonful,” he said.

  “Aye, well, just remember what happened with your wallies the last time you took more than that.”

  Kate knew it was probably better not to ask, but couldn’t keep her curiosity at bay: “Wallies?”

  “Aye, falsers—you know, false teeth.”

  “Miss Weir!” Finlay said indignantly. “I’m sure Lady Kate doesn’t want to know about such things.”

  Miss Weir carried on regardless. “Greedy guts here overdid it with the strawberry jam one afternoon and got his wallies stuck fast in a scone. Not a pretty sight, I can assure you. In fact, I’m still having nightmares about it yet. It was a month before I could bring myself to even think about baking another tray of scones or making a pot of jam.”

  “Miss Weir, please! A man’s entitled to a bit of dignity in his senior years,” Finlay protested, so embarrassed that his face had turned almost the same color as the jam on his scone.

  “Not if he gets his wallies stuck in a scone, he’s not,” Mrs. Weir said.

  Finlay shook his head sadly and said, “Old age is a terrible, terrible thing.”

  Kate laughed. “I’m sorry, Finlay, but your accent cracks me up,” she told him. “You only said terrible twice but I heard way more than two words’ worth of ‘r’s.”

  “You’re not going to be tricking me into saying words with lots of ‘r’s in them just so you can laugh at me, are you?”

  “It’s a distinct possibility once I’ve had enough sleep to be able to think straight.”

  “You must be exhausted, right enough. Would you like to get some rest now, and I’ll show you around after?” he asked.

  Kate shook her head. “There’s no way I could sleep until I’ve looked around this place, Finlay—I’m way too curious and excited.”

  “AFTER YOU,” FINLAY SAID, OPENING THE DOOR AT THE foot of the tower house.

  The windows were so small and high that little light was let in, and at first Kate had no idea what sort of space she was walking in to. As her eyes adapted she discerned different shades of shadow, and gradually the shades took on shape and form. Rows of wooden pews flanked a central passage leading to a dais with a simple altar. The ceiling was braced with thick wooden beams,
and the walls were lined with dark oak panelling.

  “This is the chapel,” Finlay said in a reverential whisper.

  Kate understood why Finlay’s tone had changed. She’d always thought it seemed more likely that man had created God rather than the other way around, but even so she experienced an almost religious sense of awe as she stood there. Grand churches and cathedrals distracted a congregation with the glories of their architecture and artistry; this plain, dimly-lit little place left a person with nothing to think about but God, and seemed far more holy as a result. Pointing to a double door on the right, barely distinguishable from the panelling it was set in, Finlay said, “The banquet hall’s through there, if you want a look.”

  Kate followed him through a slender, slanting shaft of sunlight, their footsteps echoing on the flagstones as they made their way along the rear of the chapel and up the narrow passage between the end of the pews and the panelled wall.

  Finlay opened the double doors to the banquet hall and stood aside to let Kate enter. She hesitated before doing so, as enchanted by what lay in front of her as she had been when she opened the door in the outer wall and caught her first sight of Greystane. “Finlay,” she whispered, “it’s amazing!”

  The ceiling was dominated by a chandelier which wouldn’t have looked out of place in the ballroom of a grand hotel. It hung over a long table, which had at least thirty antique chairs around it. Their legs were elegantly bowed, their upholstery a plummy velvet. The far wall was taken up by a tall fireplace, above which hung a round leather shield crossed by two rusty old basket-hilted broadswords. Sunlight streamed through the deep-set windows in the long wall to the right, while the opposite wall was lined with oil portraits in ornate gilt frames.

  One picture in particular caught Kate’s attention. It hung the wrong way around, so that only the blank canvas backing was on display.

  “That’s Jamie’s picture,” Finlay said, following Kate’s gaze. “He was sent off to fight with Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745 while his older brother stayed at home. Landed families often hedged their bets and backed both sides in those days. Anyway, Charlie’s men were slaughtered at Culloden, a bleak moor not far from here. Jamie was spotted running away from the enemy, not at them, and was never seen again. The story goes that he was too ashamed to show his face in the glen. His portrait was turned to face the wall, and it’s hung that way ever since.”

  “You mentioned a run of misfortune in the family—is the ‘curse’, or whatever you might want to call it, down to Jamie?”

  Finlay shook his head. “Jamie brought shame on himself and disgrace to his family, but not the sort of bitter hatred that lies behind a curse.”

  “If Jamie’s not to blame, then who is?”

  Finlay moved on to the next painting and said, “Him …”

  The portrait showed a weak-jawed man with shifty eyes and strands of ginger hair combed over a balding pate.

  “And especially her.”

  Kate looked at the man’s portrait with little more than passing interest, but caught her breath when she saw the picture hanging next to it. It showed a young woman with shoulder-length blond hair, cold blue bedroom eyes, and a seductive smile. Kate stood rooted to the spot as she stared at the old oil painting because there was something disconcertingly familiar about the woman it portrayed. The longer she looked at the face, the more it unsettled her. How could someone she’d never seen or even heard of before be so hauntingly familiar? She stared at the painting as if mesmerized.

  Not noticing Kate’s distraction, Finlay carried on with his commentary. “Malcolm and Lady Carolyn,” he said, with no attempt to hide his disgust.

  “What did they do to earn such hatred?” Kate asked.

  “I’ll tell you when I give you a tour of the glen, Lady Kate, because it’d be better explained in the places where it happened.”

  “Come on, Finlay—you’ve got me intrigued.”

  “I couldn’t do the telling of the tale justice with words alone,” Finlay told her. “And, believe me, there’s enough injustice in this story as it is.”

  Before Kate could press the old ghillie any further he’d moved along the line of portraits, stopping near the far end at the picture of a sophisticated blonde with her hair pinned up and just a hint of the look of Lady Carolyn about her. She was shown with a silk-gloved hand draped around the shoulder of a handsome, high-cheekboned man. “This is Janette Chisholm. She would be your grandmother’s sister, if I’m not mistaken,” Finlay said. “The two of them never got on at all, from what I heard. I’m not surprised, because Janette was what you might call a bit of a madam. Anyway, they fell out over Struan.” He gestured to the man in the painting. “As you can see, Janette got her man—like she got most of the things she set her sights on.”

  “And my grandmother left the country to start a new life in America,” Kate said.

  Finlay nodded. Still looking at Janette and Struan, he said, “These two belonged to what I think was politely referred to as the ‘Lost Generation’, giving themselves over to the pursuit of pleasure after the horrors of the Great War, and burned themselves out while they were still young as a result. They partied like there was no tomorrow, turning Greystane into a northern outpost for their fancy friends from Edinburgh and London.”

  Kate imagined the banquet hall filled with jazz from a gramophone horn and smoke from a dozen cigars; with perfume and laughter and loud conversation; the clicking of fingers to summon servants, the popping of champagne corks and the clink of crystal decanters. She imagined handsome, brandy-clutching men in bow ties and dinner jackets, and beautiful women in fishtailed, sequined evening dresses, with silk gloves that came up to their elbows, and foot-long cigarette holders. She could almost see them doing the Foxtrot and Charleston, like a Jack Vettriano painting come to life. “Do you remember any of those parties?” she asked.

  Finlay smiled. “Like they were yesterday,” he told her. “I’ve been playing the pipes since I had enough breath in me to fill a bag, and I used to be invited here to do a turn during the grand bashes. The Chisholms even had a special wee kiltie outfit made up for me with a dress sporran, white lace shirt, and black velvet waistcoat. I suppose I was comic relief for their sophisticated friends. I must have been a funny sight, right enough—an earnest-faced, skinny wee scrap of a boy dressed up to the nines—but I can remember being pleased as punch with myself, full of my own importance when I marched around the table, playing my heart out.” He smiled at the thought, and the sparkle in his eyes told Kate that as he looked down the banquet hall he was seeing down the years.

  Finally coming back to the present, he said, “The table’s on trestles, so that after a banquet it could be cleared away to make room for dancing—Highland or waltz or whatever the fashion of the day. That’s why this floor is wood and not stone,” he added, tapping the polished floorboards with the tip of a burnished brogue. “It’s far easier on the feet.”

  “Sounds like you’ve done quite a bit of dancing yourself.”

  “Not since the war. No one’s danced in here since the war,” he said, with more than a hint of sadness. “I never did any of that fancy nonsense, you understand, just the Highland dances. Have you ever done any Highland dancing yourself, Lady Kate?”

  Kate shook her head. “What’s it like?”

  “Oh, it’s fun,” Finlay said, his eyes sparkling again. “During a fling or a reel the floor would shake and the paintings would seem set to jump off the walls as if the people in them wanted to join in. The windows rattled like the glass was ready to fall out of the frames, and the chandelier swung like it might come crashing down on our heads at any moment—and nobody gave a damn, because we were so caught up in the music and the moment.” He let out a wistful sigh and said, “There hasn’t been a night like that here for more than fifty years. That’s far too long, Lady Kate. But sorry, there’s me ranting on again.”

  “Finlay, I love listening to your ‘rants’,” she told him.

&nbs
p; He looked away shyly, and in that moment Kate thought he was more like a little boy than an old man.

  Kate’s eyes were drawn back to the portraits, and she said, “What happened to them—Janette and Struan?”

  “It caught up with them—the curse or their lifestyle, depending on how you want to look at things. Struan’s liver packed up, and Janette didn’t last too much longer. She went grey overnight after he died, and within a year she was dead herself. A heart attack, the doctor said. A broken heart seemed more like it, if you ask me—broken by losing Struan, and by the shock of what happened to her son, Colin.”

  Finlay walked to the last portrait in the line and said, “I’ve told you about what Mr. Colin was like when he came back from the war—this is what he was like before he went away.”

  The picture showed a dark-haired, dashingly handsome man with clean-cut, well-co-ordinated features, bright blue eyes, and a boyish smile.

  “A damn shame,” Finlay said. “Aye, a damn shame.”

  Looking at the painting and thinking of the terrible thing that had happened to the man it depicted, Kate said, “Finlay, do you believe there’s some sort of curse on my family?”

  The old Highlander pretended not to hear. “You’ll be wanting to see the rest of the house, now.”

  “Finlay!”

  “If you’ll just follow me, I’ll show you the lounge and bedrooms,” he said, hurrying past Kate so that he didn’t have to meet her eye or answer her question.

  Kate followed him back to the chapel, then through a doorway in its left-hand wall and up a narrow, steeply pitched wooden staircase.

  Opening the nearest door when they got to the first-floor landing, Finlay said, “This is the sitting room.”

  The room had a 1920s art deco feel to it, and a musty atmosphere of faded, slightly tatty grandeur. It was dominated by a wrought-iron fireplace with an insert of cream ceramic tiles painted in a rosebud pattern. The maroon-toned Oriental rug that covered most of the floor and took the place of a carpet was threadbare; the ivory-colored chaise longue was frayed and grubby, and the matching chairs by the fireside had badly worn armrests. Kate sensed that the room had been furnished by someone with good—and expensive—taste, but had been sorely neglected over the years.