‘Crofters, Dan,’ he said. ‘Gaelic.’
‘They use Gaelic,’ I said, ‘but they understand English even if we don’t understand them when they speak it. Come down before you pull the dyke to bits; there’s a gate just here we can see over much more easily.’
The gate was a worn wooden affair, smooth and shining on the top from years of elbows resting on it. We took the chance of a breather and a cigarette, and stood watching the crofters at work. There appeared to be a goodly number of them for the size of the field and from all that I could see they were replacing the stones they had toiled away removing in February. Seven men were stumping up the field, digging holes into the wet earth, and seven women were following them with creels on their backs. They were dropping stones in the holes, I was sure of it. After the women came packs of little children, some of them quite tiny, who scraped the earth back over the holes and stamped it down. It was utterly mystifying.
‘Dandy!’ came a voice and one of the women straightened and waved.
I squinted through the cigarette smoke, then almost dropped my gasper as my mouth fell open.
‘Cherry?’ I said. ‘What are you doing?’
She threw another stone into a hole and then stepped aside. ‘Tattie planting!’ she said. ‘It’s Good Friday. We always put our tatties in today.’
It made more sense than stones but I was still flabbergasted. ‘Is that basket on your back full?’ I said. She laughed and said something in Gaelic to the women around her, who replied with soft whickering laughs of their own. ‘Does Mitten know you’re carrying half a hundredweight of potatoes?’ I said. The man who was digging holes in Cherry’s row took off his hat and waved it at me.
‘Good morning, Dandy,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about the cailleach. She’s fine.’
‘What did he call you?’ I said.
‘It’s affectionate,’ said Cherry. ‘It means old woman, but it’s a term of endearment. And all the women call their husbands the bodach – “old man” – but it’s said with love.’
‘Does your father—’ I began, but they were laughing again and I bit my words off. I was glad, nevertheless, to see Cherry swing the creel down to the ground and come over to the gate, wiping her forehead on a square of red flannel she pulled from a pocket. She was still very trim-looking, although she had lost her waist and turned lozenge-shaped under her brown overalls.
‘Hoo, it’s hot!’ she said, sticking her hand out to Alec. ‘You must be Mr Osborne. Mallory told me you were here. Sorry about missing you at dinner last night but we were driving the sheep down to the fank for drenching tomorrow and then we were just so exhausted, we fell into bed after a crust of bread and a hunk of cheese.’
‘But why are you driving sheep at all?’ I said. ‘Or planting potatoes?’
‘Janet there is planting behind her man,’ said Cherry, waving at another woman with a very full creel on her back, ‘and she’s as fat as a tick. Her baby is due any day now.’
‘You astonish me,’ I said. ‘These women are used to it, Cherry. They were brought up to it. They are made for it.’
‘I was brought up to it,’ Cherry said. ‘I got my first little calf and a plot to plant up when I was six. Mallory loves the sea and the mountains and she adores Applecross as a place, but all I’ve ever wanted is to be a crofter. I thought I’d have to be a spinster because I never believed Daddy would let me marry a local man and I didn’t think anyone on his approved list would share my dream. I never dared to imagine that someone like Mitten would come along.’
I let Alec cast around for words of congratulation about her extraordinary good luck. They would have stuck in my throat. All I could think was that Mitten Tibball had ‘come along’ when Cherry’s hobby was something to smile at while his parents-in-law aged and ownership of the estate came inexorably closer. I watched him awhile, sticking his spade into the earth and throwing off clods of soil. He looked happy enough. But if he had got away with murder, then he had good reason to be happy.
‘Well, we’ll let you back to it,’ Alec was saying when I started paying attention again. ‘We are taking these flowers up to your mother’s grave.’
Cherry glanced at them. ‘Her favourites,’ she said. ‘She loved lilies. They grew like weeds in the walled garden and she just kept lifting them and splitting them year after year until we were almost overrun with the things. Mummy was such a sentimental gardener. If a little bit of thrift managed to find a home in between two stones on a path she couldn’t bear it to be pulled out. She’d water it in dry spells and put a flowerpot over it in the frost. I’ve seen her pick her way across a meadow without disturbing the dandelion heads. No plant was too lowly for her to love.’
It was a third view of Lady Love as a gardener, according neither with what McReadie had said about her ambitions for these northern climes nor her self-description as an avoider of fuss. But perhaps Lady Love had been a woman of caprice. Or perhaps she showed a different face to the various people in her life. I have often thought that someone who is universally adored must be duplicitous.
‘Would it throw off the potato planting if you were to come with us?’ I said. I needed to speak to everyone here and if Cherry could both be ticked off the list and be spared a morning’s physical labour, it would all be to the good.
‘Far from it,’ she said. ‘There are battalions of understudies.’ With that she climbed the gate and, straddling the top spar, she put her hands to her mouth and yelled. ‘Morag! Take my creel, mo ghoal. I’m going up the crow road, Mitten. I’ll be back before elevenses.’
Then she swung her leg over to the lane side and jumped down. I winced. If Nanny Palmer had been alive to see such a thing, she would have dropped dead: a girl four months pregnant with her first child jumping off a five-bar gate? I felt her turn in her grave.
Four months pregnant or not, it was Cherry who set the pace on the way up the hill. First, she greeted Bunty with showers of kisses and baby talk, and then she strode off. Bunty, eager for more of both, pulled so hard I was obliged to catch up. Alec, unwilling to be a straggler, hopped and trotted and eventually fell in beside us.
‘Why do you call this the crow road?’ he said, puffing a little.
‘It’s the local expression for the path to a cemetery,’ said Cherry. ‘Sometimes people say it when they mean “dying”, you know. Walking the crow road.’
‘I am so very sorry about your poor mother,’ I said, and I had to take a breath in the middle of it. ‘That was a terrible thing.’
‘Poor Mummy,’ Cherry agreed. ‘On her birthday. And when Daddy had such a lovely surprise for her.’
‘Yes,’ I said. Then I thought a while. There were so many things I did not understand about Lady Love’s last days, I hardly knew where to start. ‘One does wonder,’ I plumped for eventually, ‘about the ramp. At the Clachan manse. I mean, your father watching carpenters build a ramp to the front door and all the while knowing he wouldn’t need it.’
Cherry laughed softly and shook her head. ‘We used to tease Mummy mercilessly about her ramps,’ she said. ‘There’s one into the library on the east side of the house. That was supposedly for Daddy too.’
‘Supposedly?’ said Alec.
‘It took Mummy a week to start using it for her wheelbarrow,’ Cherry said. ‘It was springtime, and she brought in a load of bean seedlings to prick out and pot on. Out of the wind and listening to the gramophone. She put a ramp on the door to the flower room too.’ She caught her breath a moment at that and I am sure she was thinking of the day she and I had been there together, when I had found that strange little doll.
‘It didn’t strike me as odd at the time,’ I said, ‘but now I think of it, wheelbarrows in the house are rather unusual.’
‘So the manse ramp wouldn’t have gone to waste,’ Cherry said. ‘Golly, walking is hotter work than planting.’ She stopped and shrugged off her cardigan, tying it by the sleeves round her middle. ‘We’re halfway there,’ she said. ‘It’s jus
t hidden by that stand of gorse. Not far.’
‘Speaking of the flower room,’ I said, and I was sure that Cherry started walking even faster, as if, without being aware of it, she was trying to get away from me. ‘That day – your mother’s birthday – when you and I were in there with the wheelbarrows of flowers, what did you see in the drawer?’
Cherry glanced at Alec and then turned a miserable face on me. ‘Drawer?’ she said. ‘In the flower room?’
‘Yes, you saw something in the drawer and went rushing out,’ I said. ‘You seemed upset.’
Cherry knitted her brows and twisted her mouth to one side, in a parody of concentration. ‘I can’t think what you mean, Dandy,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember what you’re referring to. Of course it was weeks ago – months really – and we’ve all been through such a time of it since.’
‘I wondered if it was something connected to your mother’s death,’ I said.
Cherry’s bewildered expression began to look rather fixed. ‘What?’ she said.
‘Evidence of this “tramp” who was hanging round. With his dog.’
‘Putting things in flower-room drawers?’ said Cherry.
‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘When I said you saw something, I didn’t mean that you found something that didn’t belong there. It could just as easily been that something that should have been there was missing. Stolen. By the tramp.’
‘Yes!’ said Cherry. ‘Yes, that’s it. I remember now. It was missing. Mummy’s garden diary was missing. I went to find out what had become of it.’
‘Missing from the drawer?’ I said. ‘Not the shelves above?’
‘No,’ said Cherry, shifting her feet a little. ‘The complete volumes from all the earlier years are on the shelves. She keeps – that is to say, she kept – the current one in a drawer.’
‘With old seed packets and seldom-used bud vials,’ said Alec.
‘Yes.’ Cherry did not make the mistake of saying too much but she could not help colouring.
‘Why didn’t you check the other drawer?’ I said.
Cherry swallowed. ‘I should have,’ she said. ‘That would have made more sense than to go racing off like a startled rabbit.’
‘Did your mother keep money in between the pages?’ Alec said. ‘Why would a tramp break in and steal a garden diary rather than silver or jewellery?’
‘No, not money,’ said Cherry. ‘But it was irreplaceable. It had notes from years of her work. Hers and McReadie’s.’
‘And, of course, at that time,’ I said, ‘we knew nothing of this tramp, did we?’ Cherry stared, aghast. ‘So why were you so concerned that the journal was missing?’ She looked close to tears now and Alec took pity.
‘Did it turn up?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Cherry. ‘It was in the other drawer, as you said, Dandy. We found it … when we were doing the funeral flowers. A few days later.’
‘It wasn’t,’ I said. ‘I looked there.’
Cherry stared at me, frozen in the twists of her lies. If I had looked in the other drawer, as she well knew, then I would have seen the little woollen figure so cruelly suggesting her father.
‘Tell me,’ I said gently.
‘The dolls,’ she said. ‘I take it you found Daddy on the other side after I found Mummy? They were benign. White magic at worst. They simply bound my parents to Applecross, to keep them safe.’
‘Why then did you startle?’ I said.
‘It’s hard to explain,’ Cherry said, turning away. I thought she was hiding her face from me, until I saw the latch-gate set into the stone wall. We had arrived at the graveyard. I looked around. We were at the summit of the hill with a little lochan nestled into a dip ahead of us before the land rose again in a steep crag to the high tops. I could see sheep clinging to the sides of this crag like nesting seagulls.
‘Beautiful,’ I said.
‘The Linn?’ said Cherry. ‘I suppose so, if you don’t know what it once was. The waterfall dried up when the road builders diverted the burn.’
‘Bad luck, they say,’ Alec put in.
‘Do you dispute it?’ Cherry said, gesturing towards the graveyard gate and walking in. On the other side, the grass was long and grew in uneven tufts at the feet of many plain grey granite headstones.
‘Mitten was supposed to open the gate and let the sheep in,’ said Cherry. ‘They do a better job than any scythe. But it’s been left over-long. This is cow grass, this length.’
‘Don’t you have cows?’ said Alec.
‘Beautiful cows,’ said Cherry. ‘Highlands and Belties. Mitten and I have seven, all in calf. But we can’t let cows in here. They lean against gravestones to scratch and they could topple them.’
You could pick them up again,’ Alec said.
‘Yes,’ said Cherry. ‘But they might trap their legs or flatten a calf, you see. We’ll scythe it.’
She untied her cardigan from round her waist and put it on again, buttoning it to the neck. The wind was keen up here. I put my hands deep in my pockets and shrank my neck down inside my collar. Bunty snuffled around, no doubt enjoying the scent of many rabbits.
‘Mummy is over here,’ Cherry said, leading us to the far wall. ‘Beside Granny and Grandfather. I don’t remember Grandfather at all, but I remember standing here when Granny died. It was a perfect July day. Angus Lairdie – our Lairdie’s father – played the bagpipes and all the sheep and cows came off the hill to listen. I remember being handed over the top of the wall to someone because the cows were gathered round the gate. I scraped my little patent leather shoe on the capstone. Just here.’ She put her hand to the top of the wall and stroked it. Then she turned and faced me with a defiant look upon her face. ‘I know you don’t believe in the tramp, Dandy. I know you’re laughing at us over the death notice.’
‘Laughing at you?’ I said. ‘I don’t think there’s anything to laugh at there.’ I pointed rather brusquely to the gravestone as I spoke but then I caught myself and turned to pay my proper respects.
Lavinia Ernestina Pauletta Dunnoch, Lady Ross
said the bright letters newly etched into the stone.
The last of the Mallorys. Beloved wife, mother and friend. 14 February 1884–14 February 1934. In my father’s house are many castles.
‘Death came for my mother,’ said Cherry. ‘He sent his herald disguised as her own husband.’
‘The vision you saw out on the moor?’ I said. ‘But don’t you think, Cherry, that that was your father? Practising his walking for your mother’s birthday surprise?’
‘It wasn’t my father!’ said Cherry. ‘I’d know my own father. But it was enough like him. I thought death was coming for him, it was so like. I know now I was wrong about that.’
‘But Miss Dunnoch,’ Alec said. ‘When you say “Death came” …?’
‘Mrs Tibball,’ she said. ‘But call me Cherry. Of course Death came. He sent a warning vision of Daddy and then he came with a crow and a dog and he took her. We called it a tramp because we didn’t want the world to know all our black business.’
Alec looked at me and I looked at Alec. Cherry looked at her mother’s gravestone. She seemed quite sane and very calm.
‘And what about your mother packing her bags and planning to leave?’ I said gently at last.
‘I believe she would have,’ said Cherry. ‘To protect us. To draw him away from the people she loved. She set everything in place. She had it all worked out. Daddy to live in sanctuary at the manse with Dickie to take care of him. A croft for Mitten and me. Mallory going down to Benachally with Donald where she would be safe and happy. She knew what she was doing.’
‘You really and truly believe this?’ I said. ‘That Death came to take your mother?’
Cherry held her hand out towards the grave as if it were evidence.
‘What black business?’ Alec said. ‘Why would your father have to go to the manse for sanctuary? Why would Mallory have to leave Applecross to be safe? Why would you be safe here
if she wasn’t?’
‘I don’t want to tell you if you’re just going to laugh at me,’ she said.
‘As I said already,’ I told her, ‘nothing about this strikes me as a laughing matter.’
‘The Clachan church is still used,’ Cherry said. ‘Even though the congregation has moved along to the street for every day. We have services there sometimes. Mummy’s funeral was there. Mallory’s wedding will be there. This little one will be christened there.’ She rubbed the front of her overall and her face softened. ‘There where Maelrubha himself preached. It’s a very holy place.’
‘A sanctuary,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Cherry. ‘A’ Chomraich. The whole of Applecross has a sanctuary.’
‘Really?’ I said.
‘Well, there’s a legend, anyway.’
It came as absolutely no surprise to me to hear it.
‘When Maelrubha came here,’ Cherry said. ‘He was thrown ashore on rocks and his ship dashed to splinters.’
‘Rotten luck,’ I murmured.
‘And so, to stop it ever happening again he prayed for a bay to be carved out of the rock. But God told him that his prayer would go unanswered and that he should set to work. “Whatever your hands find to do, do it with all thy might.” Ecclesiastes, I think but don’t ask me what verse. So, Maelrubha tried to mould the land into two arms to cradle the sea, but the rock was too stony and, tired out from trying, he fell asleep and while he slept a ship of many souls was wrecked. And so he buried the bodies on the top of the hill and wept. He wept so hard that he flooded the land from the hilltop to the open sea. And the flood of his tears wore away a narrow bay and so he called it a sanctuary and built his church there.’
‘Well, that all sounds rather marvellous,’ I said. ‘My nanny would have hated it, of course: a story that hinges on lying down and crying until one gets one’s own way. Still, it makes Applecross sound as safe as the Bank of England. And I must ask you again: why should Mallory leave?’
A Step So Grave Page 13