It may have been, but I could not dredge up a single remark on the strength of it. Thankfully, we had drawn abreast of a field gate by which a bent-backed man of great age was employed in some mysterious task at an upturned boat, balanced on a crooked stick to hold it off the ground at one side.
‘Good afternoon, Michael!’ Biddy exclaimed.
Michael straightened as far as he could, to a stoop instead of a hairpin, and said something that sounded like ‘whisker’, touching his cap with a blackened finger.
‘It’s not much of a day for boat-mending,’ said Hugh.
‘English, is it!’ said the old man. ‘Aye well, ’tis nut a boaty till spring. ’Tis a hutty a while.’ He kicked at the stick and the little dinghy fell to earth again, as Michael bent and swiped up two orbs, one in each of his hands.
‘They all use their boats as sheds in winter,’ said Biddy. ‘Very practical. Michael has his turnip crop earthed up under there. But it’s a surprise to see you fetching neeps, Michael. I do hope Nellie isn’t abed. We never heard that she was ailing.’
‘Naw,’ said the old man. ‘She’s up the top field clearing stones.’ He waved one of the turnips at the ridge behind us, and right enough we could see the figure of a woman with a creel on her back, making her slow way along, bending and straightening, flinging her arm up and tossing objects backwards over her head. ‘And so I’ve stirred myself from my chair to help her. She’ll have the tea ready fair time with me laying it all on like this.’
‘That’s quite a job for her on her own,’ I could not help saying.
‘Aye, ’tis not like the old days when the children could help,’ said Michael, nodding nostalgically. ‘They’re all away at the school living the high life now. And poor Nellie has another acre to go before the snow comes.’ He tutted and shook his head.
‘Yes, perhaps we should turn back too,’ said Biddy. ‘Lots to do for Lady Love’s birthday, Michael.’
‘Tell her I was asking for her,’ the old man said as he tucked a turnip under each arm and prepared to mount the hill towards his cottage. ‘We’ve all got a lot to be thankful for. You mind and tell her I said so.’
Biddy nodded uncertainly. There was something above the commonplace about the way the old man spoke.
‘Can I ask you something?’ I said to him. He turned round and skewered me with a sharp gaze that belied his creased face and bent back. Hugh made a little movement with the hand nearest to me. Perhaps he thought I was about to berate the chap for the division of labour in his household. Hugh believes that my detecting career has turned me into some kind of Bolshevik. ‘Why is your turnip clamp so far from your house?’
For I made it about five hundred yards from this field gate to the cottage nestled in the hill with its chimney comfortably smoking. It would be a bind, even on a day one were not clearing stones from a ploughed field.
‘I dinnat grudge the shaken a bite, but I’m glad they’re afar,’ he told me and with that he was off.
‘Sometimes,’ I said, ‘I can’t tell if they’re speaking English or if I’m hearing things. Did he say he doesn’t grudge the shaken?’
‘She-heech-un,’ said Biddy. ‘S-I-T-H-I-C-H-E-A-N. It’s a … fairy, more or less.’ I could not help my eyes widening. ‘They know the fairies will take the odd turnip and they don’t mind, but they don’t want them near the house, you know.’
‘I see,’ I lied. ‘Have you heard of such a thing before, Hugh?’
‘It’s similar to the way the churches are kept apart from the villages,’ said Hugh. ‘Look how far the clachan is from the village proper, after all, “The Street” as they say. In case of unrest in the graveyard. Dandy is English,’ he added and Biddy Tibball grinned at me.
‘And I’m afraid I didn’t follow what he said about thanking Lady Ross either,’ I went on, as we made our way back towards the gates to Applecross House. ‘Has she done something in particular?’
‘She has done a great many things in particular,’ Biddy said. ‘And she is going to do even more.’ Her voice was surprisingly grim, given the words she was speaking. Then suddenly she seemed to recollect herself. ‘Or perhaps it was just a birthday wish. The crofters are all very fond of her. She’s been good to them, with the shop and the school here for the little ones. And now the pier. That will make a tremendous difference in the long winters.’ There was still a rasping quality to her voice and I was not sure I believed her.
‘What surprises me,’ said Hugh, before I could think of a way to quiz Biddy any further, ‘is that there are crofters here at all to be spoiled with schools and shops and a pier. That there’s a crofter’s cottage right there by the big house, cheek by jowl. Was this land never cleared?’
‘Ah,’ said Biddy. ‘Now, you’re getting to the heart of it all. Our little corner of Wester Ross wasn’t cleared. Lady Love’s family have been good stewards and good landlords for many hundreds of years.’
‘Lady Love’s family?’ I said. ‘Not Lachlan’s?’
‘He brought the title here but it’s her family’s estate and has been since the days of Maelrubha himself.’
‘Who?’ I said, predictably ignorant.
‘That’s the seventh century!’ said Hugh, just as predictably well-informed. ‘Irish monk, Dandy. Killed by Vikings and got a sainthood for his troubles.’
I was impressed. Vikings belonged to very ancient history and, while the Lestons of Northamptonshire have a long pedigree, it was nothing in comparison.
‘Scotland wasn’t even a kingdom then, was it?’ I said, trying to raise my stock with a pinch of knowledge.
‘And yet that’s when the Mallorys first built a house and settled here,’ said Biddy.
Hugh gave her a sceptical look. ‘Mallory is a French name,’ he said. ‘There were no French around until much later. But it’s a quaint story. Like the sithichean.’
‘It’s a corruption,’ said Biddy.
‘Of Maelrubha!’ I said. ‘Golly! Imagine being descended from a saint. How thrilling. Weren’t monks celibate in those distant days?’
‘Lady Love never speaks of that side of things,’ said Biddy. ‘Understandably. But she’s very, very passionate about the place, as you can imagine. Now, if you’ll excuse me …’ and she ran off up the front steps, leaving us on the drive.
‘She’s rattled about something,’ I said.
Hugh was not listening. ‘And so she named her firstborn child,’ he said. ‘Mallory was no doubt meant to inherit the place where her forebears have been living for twelve hundred years.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘They can’t have known then there would be no son.’
‘Twelve hundred years, Dandy,’ Hugh insisted. ‘How on earth can a “Mitten Tibball” take over? A child whose father …? Dickie Tibball isn’t even Scottish!’
‘What’s it to us?’ I said, although I had a horrible feeling I knew.
‘Donald needs to be encouraged to—’
‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘No, no, no. Donald lives half an hour from my sitting room and that suits me very nicely. I do not want to have to get on that dreadful boat every time I want to see my son, Hugh.’
‘But a thriving croft system,’ Hugh said. ‘An estate that missed the clearances completely. The soil must be a wonder to behold!’
‘Quite apart from the fact that we decided immediately and in complete agreement that Donald should be detached and removed.’
‘Twelve hundred years of continuous cultivation. I wish I’d had a closer look under Michael’s turnip clamp. And we agreed no such thing. My aim was and is merely to put the kibosh on any unsuitable fancies Donald might be harbouring about Lady Love.’
We turned a corner of the house and all but fell over Lady Love herself, apparently coming to look for us. Hugh harrumphed into his collar, as if any amount of throat-clearing would undo the horror if she had overheard.
‘There you are!’ she exclaimed, ‘and just where I wanted you too. Look at that sky.’ She pointed up beyond the roof
of the house at our backs. I could see nothing more remarkable than the usual heaping bolls of grey that made up the winter sky in Perthshire, but Hugh drew his breath in over his bottom teeth and tutted.
‘Snow coming and no mistake,’ he said. ‘Will it lie, this close to the sea?’
‘Heaven knows,’ said Lady Love, ‘but just in case it does, I thought I’d grab you. This might be your only chance to see the gardens!’
I suppressed a sigh. I am very fond of my dog, proud of my detecting, and was quite beguiled by my sons when they were tiny, with heads full of curls and little piping voices. Still, I have never dragged a guest in my house to coo over a puppy or a baby, or made him listen to me recounting my triumphs, without a single word to indicate interest. Keen gardeners, though, need no encouragement. I could not count the number of rockeries, shrubberies, bluebell woods and grassy paths between mixed borders I have been driven through like a sheep for dipping, Latin names pouring into my ear and insects feasting upon me. I had, though, expected to be safe from any such fate in February.
‘Splendid, splendid,’ said Hugh. ‘I can tell from guide it’s a triumph.’
Lady Love beamed at him and took his arm to guide him down a set of stone steps leading from the terrace to her playground and domain.
It was, to be fair, quite something. The grass was free of moss even on this soggy coast and at this soggy time of year and we only had to traverse a few yards of it before we found ourselves with gravel underfoot. Overhead was the real marvel, though. The garden was a perfect warren of arbours and pergolas, loops and knots arching over the pathways making a kind of covered labyrinth. The plants trained up it were bare at this time of year and so I did not know what had arrested Hugh when he stopped dead and peered at a nearby upright from inches away.
‘Good Lord!’ he said. He spun and looked back along the way we had come, then spun again and looked ahead. ‘Good Lord above!’
Lady Love clapped her hands and gave a little chirrup of delight. I smiled blankly.
‘How long have you been working on this?’ Hugh said, in awed tones.
‘I’ve been working on it for forty-six years, since my grandmother taught me to brush the blossoms with a paintbrush to help the pollination,’ said Lady Love. ‘But the family has been breeding apples since Georgian times. Since this house with its high garden wall was built.’
‘All Malus?’ said Hugh. I knew it would come to Latin sooner or later.
‘Nothing so restrained, I’m afraid,’ said Lady Love. ‘Nothing so austere. You should hear my gardener on the topic.’ She turned away from us and shouted. ‘Sam? Are you in here?’
A loud grunt came from somewhere deep in the labyrinth.
I took the chance while she was distracted to ask Hugh in a whisper, ‘What is it? What’s so special about—’
Hugh turned a look of familiar incredulity upon me and answered me out loud in his lecturing voice, the one he uses when instructing tenant farmers in wonderful new agricultural discoveries and when scolding the boys about clashing gears in his motorcar. ‘This is not a work of construction, Dandy,’ he said. ‘Look closely. This pergola is a living thing. These are rooted trees! There must be …’
‘Oh, thousands of feet of it all told,’ said Lady Love.
‘But it’s latticework,’ I said, leaning close and inspecting the nearest section of what I had taken to be a trellis. It did look rather lumpy at close inspection.
‘Exactly!’ said Lady Love. ‘They are apple trees. Grafted into—’
‘Crosses!’ I said. ‘Oh golly, now that is clever!’
‘But as I was saying,’ Lady Love went on, ushering us round a corner and into another stretch of the – now quite mesmerising – bower. ‘It’s not all apple. Some of it is sour cherry, hence the name of my younger daughter – and how she used to complain until I pointed out that she could have been named “Apple”. Some, I’m afraid, is Rosa rugosa. We have bred some beautiful roses, my gardener and I, over the years, and I can’t resist poking some in here and there.’ She pointed at where a thorny cane had been woven up through the applewood and out into a fan shape round a corner. ‘Sam!’ she shouted again. ‘Are you at the cross?’
A second grunt came back in reply, from rather closer this time.
‘McReadie and I have our worst quarrels about the cross,’ she said. ‘Hugh, if you’re a gardener, perhaps you’d give me your opinion.’ She had got my number, clearly; she did not even pretend to want my opinion on anything.
‘But what variety are they, this far north?’ said Hugh. His tone of wonder had not let up any. ‘I struggle down in Perthshire unless I have them trained on a south wall and even at that they’re better cooking than eating.’
I nodded knowledgably, for many’s the time I have heard Mrs Tilling, our cook, on the matter of what to do with another enormous basket of sour apples when her store cupboard is already full of apple jelly and dried apple rings and the sight of another baked apple stuffed with raisins would make everyone scream.
‘They’re our own, of course,’ said Lady Love. ‘They’re the Applecross apple cross! My great-grandfather was a terrific breeder.’ She gave a tinkling laugh and Hugh joined her. ‘He started with crab-apples and the very hardiest dessert variety and spent a lifetime winnowing and discarding until he struck gold. And it’s carried on down to McReadie and me. We’ve grafted some of these eleven times.’ She bent down and pointed to some very gnarled lumps at the base of the nearest trunk.
‘Well, I take my hat off to you,’ said Hugh. ‘I thought I’d seen everything. Do you tape the grafts? Some of these new chaps use a kind of gum to guard against canker.’
‘My lips are sealed,’ said Lady Love. She dropped her voice and leaned very close to Hugh before whispering, ‘In case McReadie hears me. I’ll tell all after dinner.’ Then she drew back and spoke at a normal volume again. ‘And here we are!’
We had walked out from under the pergola and found ourselves in a small knot garden. At its centre, of course, was an apple tree; this pruned into the shape of a goblet. An intricate little dovecote was cupped in its branches, octagonal in shape and topped with a weathervane. The frames of the knot-garden beds were made of more apple branches, instead of the usual box hedges or willow hurdles. These had been forced to grow along the ground in a series of swirls, making one think of that poor Mr Van Gogh. Hugh gave a low whistle of appreciation, but I felt rather sorry for them.
The rest of it was bare earth but for the first pinkish tips of something pushing through, and in one of the sections a gardener was kneeling on the wet ground. He was dressed in a mackintosh coat, against the filthy weather, and had gaiters of sackcloth tied over his trouser-legs, as well as an apron of the same covering his front. For all that, he looked frozen; the tips of his ears were blue under his cap and his fingers red under a coating of mud, as he unrolled what looked like a bolt of mattress stuffing over the soil.
‘Oh Sam!’ said Lady Love. ‘What have you done now?’
‘It’s for Miss Mallory’s widding. Nut fur you.’
Lady Love cuffed the back of his head, dislodging his cap until it covered one of his eyes and gave him a rakish air quite at odds with the surly expression he wore. ‘McReadie thinks I interfere far too much in my own garden,’ she said, laughing. ‘What have you planted now that will die before it blooms, Sam?’
‘Peonies, isn’t it?’ said Hugh, scrutinising the pink tips just as the mattress stuffing fell on them. ‘Or hellebore?’
McReadie gave a snort and shuffled along to the next bare strip.
‘Nothing so pretty and reliable!’ said Lady Love. ‘It might be hibiscus or bougainvillea or even lotus blossom. Sam brooks no nonsense from our climate. If I had any say at all these beds would have snowdrops, daffs, summer bedding, asters, pansies and snowdrops again.’
‘Not even a lily?’ McReadie said.
‘I’ll give you the lilies,’ Lady Love replied. ‘They’re no fuss and bother and we wou
ldn’t need to have them muffled in blankets from October until May.’
McReadie sat back on his heels and looked up at her. Now, with his head raised, I could see that he was no ancient worthy but a chap probably the same age as Lady Love herself. His face was lined and brown, but his eyes were clear. They were Highland eyes and no mistake, as blue as the sea on a cloudless day when he smiled and as dark as the sea on a stormy night when he frowned. They crinkled with long-held affection as he regarded his mistress. No doubt they had gone to dame school together. Certainly as he unleashed a torrent of ‘fuchsia’ and ‘marmoset’ on her he did not sound like a servant, even to my ears; I who am far from being mistress of my own staff at home.
‘And if Mallory chooses to have a tiara in her hair and to pose for photographs on the front steps I shall be laughing at you!’ Lady Love retorted and stuck out her tongue.
McReadie looked past her and up at the sky instead of answering and a shadow passed over his face. I followed his gaze and saw a bird, huge and black, come flapping down over the roofs of the house to land on the weathervane. It was only a crow but I had never seen such a large one so close up and never seen such a glossy and vital-looking one at all. I am more used to the poor ragged creatures gamekeepers leave in the traps on the high moor. This one, free and proud, excited alarm instead of pity. Its legs were positively muscular, clenching as they took a tighter hold of the swinging arm of the vane.
‘The Fiona hag,’ whispered McReadie, as the bird rattled and rustled its wing feathers and turned its bright black eye upon us all. It opened and shut its beak as though tasting the air, then it hopped down onto the ledge at the dovecote door and popped inside with a single darting lunge.
‘A second warning!’ said Lady Love. She gasped as a scuffle and squawk rose from inside and a pair of doves came bundling out at the opening on the far corner. Shedding breast feathers as they went, they flapped off towards a distant stand of fir trees. The little tufts of down they had left behind came whirling to earth and just then there was a gust of wind that brought the first snow flurries too, just as light and soft, whirling down after them. From inside the dovecote, the crow gave one single raucous caw.
A Step So Grave Page 4