Waterfall Glen

by Davie Henderson

  “If the Highland clansmen were such fierce warriors why didn’t they put up any sort of a fight?” Kate asked, looking across the lochan at the forlorn remains of an abandoned little community.

  “They did as their chief told them, Lady Kate, the way children should always do what their father tells them.”

  The sight of an old church up ahead, at the end of the lochan, prompted Finlay to add, “And they did what their ministers told them, too—not realizing that the ministers weren’t giving voice to the word of God, but were acting as mouthpieces for the lairds and ladies.”

  “Why would men of God do that?”

  “Because it wasn’t God who gave them money for manses and for churches like that one up ahead.” He pointed to the old stone church. “It wasn’t God who put them in a pulpit or had the power to remove them from it. So the ministers told their flock that the exodus was the act of a vengeful Almighty angered at their sins, and that they should be grateful for the chance of redemption.

  “In the last little township to be cleared on the other side of the lochan, though, an old woman called Jessie McDowell refused to leave her cottage. She said she’d lived there all her days, and that was where she’d die.

  “When Lady Carolyn heard that, she told the sheriff’s officers who were charged with enforcing the eviction orders, ‘The old witch has lived long enough as it is. Burn the cottage and grant her wish to die in it.’

  “The sheriff’s officers went back to Jessie’s cottage with torch in hand. Some neighbours dragged Jessie from her home just before it was burned to the ground. They put her on a cart and took her to the coast. She died as soon as she got there, and her last words were a curse on Lady Carolyn and her issue.”

  Kate shivered again, despite the summer sun.

  “As for the other clansmen who’d been moved to the coast, they could barely feed themselves, let alone pay rent. When the winter came they had to beg Malcolm for help. Full of guilt, he gave it to them.

  “Lady Carolyn was furious when she found out; she saw them as a liability rather than a responsibility. She told Malcolm the clansmen had to learn to stand on their own two feet… or fall.

  “Not long after that, Malcolm found out that Lady Carolyn was having an affair with the factor who’d been hired to oversee the leasing of the land. No doubt brokenhearted by his wife’s betrayal, and guilt-ridden by what he’d done to his clansmen, Malcolm took his own life.”

  “The first victim of the curse?”

  “So it was said.”

  “Given a free reign, now, Lady Carolyn set about clearing the rest of the glen with a vengeance. The Highlanders didn’t feel the same sort of loyalty to her that they’d felt to Malcolm, however, and she guessed they might resist. She waited until they were in the church up ahead one Sunday and had some sheep farmers who’d been made special constables—a law unto themselves, in other words—put their houses to the torch.

  “When the clansmen came out of the church it was to find their homes were in flames. They didn’t even have a chance to salvage their belongings, which was just as Lady Carolyn intended because she didn’t want them going to the coast and becoming a burden on the estate like the families Malcolm had evicted.”

  “What happened to them?” Kate asked, shocked.

  “She got the minister to gather them here.” They’d reached the church. “Right here in the churchyard they gathered, and were told that passage had been booked for them on a ship bound for America. The minister assured them that a new life awaited them, that God’s will was being done, and things would work out for the best.

  “When they got to the port they found there was indeed a ship waiting for them. They boarded it without realizing that Lady Carolyn hadn’t just bought their tickets, she’d also sold their labor. They’d been indentured, bound to work for five years to pay for their passage.

  “After they were gone Lady Carolyn got the minister to hold a service of thanks in here,” Finlay said, reaching for the church’s wrought-iron door handle. As he pulled on the rusty handle the door shuddered slowly towards him inch by inch, for wind and rain had warped the wood, and lack of use had stiffened the hinges. It made a grating sound that set nerves on edge, like a nail being scratched across a blackboard.

  When the door swung fully open a blast of cold, stale air swept out, carrying with it the smells of mould and damp, neglect and decay. Any thoughts Kate had that she was imagining the odours were dispelled by the little dog at her feet: Hamish wrinkled his nose, let out a whimper, and shrank away.

  Inside, the church was criss-crossed by slanting shafts of daylight. Again, Kate thought it might have been her imagination, but it seemed to her that the areas between those beams of light were darker than they should have been. There was no soft diffusion of the daylight, just brilliant shafts of almost solid light cutting through an even more solid darkness, like spotlights falling on an otherwise unlit stage. She was so caught up by the striking scene in front of her that she didn’t notice Hamish backing away another half dozen steps. She felt as though the interior of the church was exerting a visual gravity on her, with its pools of shadow so dark as to be devoid of all detail, and circles of light that fell on empty pews. A faint rustling from deep inside the church startled her as much as a sudden clap of thunder, and she jumped as you do in a dream where you’re falling and you wake up just before you hit the ground. Her eyes were drawn to the source of the sound—the pulpit at the far end of the aisle. There, the brightest shaft of light fell on a large old book, which she took to be a Bible. The book was lying open on top of the lectern, and a breeze that seemed to come from within the church rather than without gently tugged at its pages without ever quite managing to turn them over.

  The rustling was followed by a faint whispering from among the pews. Moments later some dried up old leaves drifted out from between the seats—a possible explanation for the sound in any other place, but not a wholly convincing once in a place such as this.

  When Finlay started speaking his voice startled her because she’d forgotten he was there. “That service of ‘thanksgiving’ was the last time the church was used,” he said. “Half a dozen southern sheep farmers sat in pews that once held over a hundred Highlanders,” he told her, looking around the desolate, empty church. “Despite the holy setting it must have been the unholiest of affairs, because when they came to sing the first hymn the sheepdogs apparently got up on the seats and drowned out the words with their howling.

  “That’s why it came to be called the Weeping Glen, Lady Kate.”

  When Kate was finally able to speak, she said, “I thought you were trying to convince me to hang on to the estate, Finlay, not frighten me away from it.”

  “Believe me, I am trying to convince you, Lady Kate—with all my heart I am. From what I hear of the vultures who’re circling the Cranoch you’re the only hope for the people who live in it and love it, and before I met you I was thinking I would just show you the good things in Glen Cranoch and not mention any notions of a curse and what had led up to it… But when I saw the sort of person you are … Well, I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t give you an idea of what you might be letting yourself in for if you try to make Glen Cranoch your home.”

  KATE’S FIRST IMPRESSION OF ARCHIBALD CUNNINGHAM was of a shining pate surrounded by a neatly trimmed fringe of silvery-grey hair, because he was looking down at some papers on his desk when she was shown into his office.

  As the lawyer looked up, Kate’s next impression was of a soft mouth that smiled easily, and calculating eyes that gave something of a lie to the ease of the smile. A man of no little wit and wisdom, she decided, though she suspected there would be a slightly sardonic turn to his wit and a calculating shrewdness about his wisdom.

  He got up to shake her hand, saying, “Sorry to keep you waiting, Lady Kate. I was taking a call about The Cranoch, but I’ll get to that later. Please, have a seat.” He gestured to the two Regency elbow chairs set at neat angles
in front of his desk.

  “This whole thing came right out of the blue, then?” he asked as Kate sat down.

  Kate nodded. “One minute I’m running a small craft shop near San Francisco; the next, a Highland estate.”

  “And have you had a chance to see around The Cranoch yet?”

  “Yes. Finlay gave me a guided tour and some history this morning.”

  “I can imagine the highly colored version of history he would give you, but that’s by the by. It’s not the past I’m concerned with, Lady Kate, it’s the present—and the future. I thought I’d give you a different kind of tour of The Cranoch: an overview of its financial situation. Then maybe we could run through the options. Unless, that is, you’ve already made up your mind what you want to do …”

  “Actually, I have,” Kate said. She was thinking about her first sight of the glen the day before, with Finlay standing at her side describing its many different moods …

  About Greystane rising from Castle Crag almost like it was a part of the rock …

  The breathtaking view from the bedroom window, her bedroom window …

  The little stone bridge and the sound of the water flowing under it before plunging into the glen …

  The osprey swooping towards the lochan …

  And the kindness of Finlay and Miss Weir.

  “I know what I want to do,” Kate said. “I just don’t know whether it’s a realistic option.”

  “Well, hopefully I can be of some help in clarifying things for you.”

  Knowing she couldn’t fool the man in front of her into thinking she was any kind of expert in estate affairs, but wanting to let him know she wasn’t just some ditzy blonde he could string along, she said, “If you don’t mind me asking, do you stand to gain significantly more if I sell the estate, or if I hang on to it?”

  “You mean, can you trust me?”

  “I didn’t want to put it so bluntly but… yes.”

  “Let’s put it like this: if you want to sell and use me as your agent I stand to gain a tidy lump sum; if you hang on to the estate, and to me as the factor, then over time I’ll also make a pretty penny. But if you’re not happy with how I handle things today, you won’t choose me as either your selling agent or your factor and I won’t make anything at all. So, quite apart from the ethics of it all, it’s in my best interests to look after your best interests.”

  Kate blushed, feeling like a naive little girl if not a ditzy blonde, and realizing just how far out of her depth she was.

  “I won’t presume to tell you what to do or what not to do. I’ll just do my best to make sure you’re in possession of all the facts and understand their implications before you make your mind up,” the lawyer said. “Fair enough?”

  Kate nodded.

  “Good. Now, from what you’ve said—and, if you’ll forgive me saying so, the slightly dreamy look in your eyes as you said it—I take it that you’d prefer not to sell?”

  Kate nodded again.

  “I can’t say I blame you, because it’s a lovely little part of the world. But I have to caution you against letting The Cranoch’s beauty blind you to its problems. Don’t get me wrong, the estate has a lot going for it; but it’s also got an awful lot working against it.”

  “After walking around it this morning, I find that hard to believe.”

  “I’m afraid I have to look at it in terms of balance sheets rather than scenic beauty, Lady Kate. You said you run a small business?”

  “Yes, but nothing on this scale.”

  “The scale might be different but the principles are exactly the same. In a nutshell, The Cranoch is like a shop that’s been losing money for about 50 years. It was highly profitable as a sheep run in the early 1800s; then as a hunting estate up to the 1930s.

  “But once Colin Chisholm took over … Well, he wanted his privacy, for reasons Finlay has no doubt explained. He wasn’t prepared to share Greystane with paying guests and so, as factors, our hands were somewhat tied. We did our best to market The Cranoch as a holiday venue to the huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ set, but we could only offer accommodation in the crofters’ cottages. The people who follow those pursuits want to be waited on hand and foot in the big house; they’re not prepared to put up with bed-and-breakfast in a crofter’s cottage.”

  “Didn’t you explain all that to Mr. Chisholm?”

  “At every opportunity. But, rather than follow our advice, he chose to keep the estate afloat by literally selling off the family silver piece by piece. Not just the silver, but the objet d’art that had been collected over the years when the family’s finances had been in a somewhat sounder state.

  “Unfortunately, I have to inform you that we’re now at the stage where there’s no family silver left to sell.”

  “Your hands wouldn’t be tied with me, Mr. Cunningham,” Kate said, smiling because she felt the problems weren’t as insurmountable as his earlier words had led her to fear. “I wouldn’t mind sharing Greystane with guests if they were helping make the estate a going concern. In fact, I might even enjoy the company,” she told him, having visions of meeting and maybe mingling with actors, sports stars, and minor royalty.

  “I’m afraid it’s not that simple,” Archibald Cunningham said. “Take Greystane: it’s four hundred years old and in the most exposed location imaginable, so it needs constant care and repair. Unfortunately, Mr. Chisholm could barely afford to do the little jobs, let alone the big ones.

  “Then there’s the estate itself. It’s a common misconception that a sporting estate is basically an area of unspoiled wilderness, and that looking after it is just a matter of letting nature run its course. In fact a good sporting estate might look wild but it’s anything but a wilderness. It doesn’t happen by itself, and doesn’t just look after itself. In its way it’s as manufactured and manicured as a golf course, with the natural balance distorted to favour one or two target species and a single predator.”

  “The paying guest.”

  “Indeed, the paying guest. To maintain that artificial balance you’ve got to juggle dozens of different factors, each of them affecting the others, all of them needing to be constantly kept in check.”

  “And at the moment the balance of The Cranoch isn’t quite what it should be for a sporting estate?”

  “To carry on with the golfing analogy, if you’ll forgive me—the game’s a passion of mine, if not an obsession—The Cranoch is closer to a pitch-and-putt course than to Pebble Beach, and Greystane House is closer to a caddyshack than the clubhouse at Augusta. I hope I’m not overstepping the mark by speaking so bluntly, but I’d be remiss not to.”

  “I understand,” Kate said, trying hard to keep the disappointment from her voice and the tears from welling up in her eyes.

  “In short, it’s sorely neglected, Lady Kate: not just Greystane but the whole estate. You’d have to spend a considerable amount of time and money on them to attract the sort of people who pay top dollar,” the lawyer told her.

  “Even if you can afford to meet all those one-off costs and get Greystane and the estate into first-class shape, you’d then be faced with increased running costs to maintain them in that condition.”

  “But it was profitable in the past,” Kate said, clutching at straws.

  “It’s a different world now,” Archibald Cunningham said. “The extra hired hands you’d need would expect to be paid far more than the estate workers and domestics who worked for a pittance back in the ‘good old days’. In other words, your income would go up, but I don’t think it would go up nearly as much as your expenses. You’d still have a crippling revenue gap, Lady Kate.”

  “Are you effectively saying that my only realistic option is to sell?”

  “I’m saying that if you want to avoid selling you have to come up with a way to close the revenue gap, or else subsidize The Cranoch’s constant loss-making from a source of income outside the estate. I don’t know if perhaps your shop near San Francisco would be able to do that?”
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  Kate laughed, but with irony rather than humor.

  Picking up on the irony, the lawyer said, “I take it that’s a ‘no’.”

  “The shop makes enough to support me and my father, but that’s about it. Anyway, I get the feeling from what you’ve said that I’d have to sell my share in the shop just to pay for the immediate repairs Greystane’s going to need.”

  “Quite possibly. There’s a rather long list of things Mr. Chisholm put off that can’t be ignored for much longer.

  “As I said, if you want to hold on to The Cranoch you’ll have to come up with some way to boost its income. I’m afraid it’s a bit beyond my remit—not to mention imagination—to make any suggestions in that respect. It’s really more of a job for a business consultant, but it’s a Catch 22 situation.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The good consultants don’t come cheap, so the times when you need their services the most are the times when you’re least able to afford them.”

  Kate felt all her romantic notions crumbling to dust as Archibald Cunningham explained the harsh realities of the situation. She knew that if worse came to worse she’d still leave Scotland a relatively wealthy woman, yet somehow she also knew that she’d be unhappier than before she’d ever heard of Greystane and The Cranoch. Suddenly Kate was no longer worried whether the man sitting across the desk from her thought she was a ditzy blonde, a dreamy romantic or a dumb American, and the tears were running down her cheeks.

  She expected Archibald Cunningham would barely be able to keep the mockery from his face, given that he had a somewhat sardonic expression at the best of times. However, the solicitor reached into the breast pocket of his pinstriped jacket and brought out a linen handkerchief for her, and there was genuine sympathy in his voice when he said, “I’m sorry I can’t be more positive, Lady Kate, but I wouldn’t be doing you any favours if I wasn’t brutally honest. You’ve been presented with something that must be like a bit of a dream come true; I have the unpleasant task of making you face the reality of it.”