Sarah's Cottage (Sarah Morris Book 2)

by D. E. Stevenson

  “I doubt if it can be done at all,” said Mr Stewart. “The property is yours for your life-time, Mrs Maitland.”

  “If it belongs to me I can do what I like with it . . . and I want to give it to them,” explained grandmama. She added, “The roof belongs to my grandson-in-law already.”

  Mr Stewart had been informed of this interesting fact so it wasn’t a surprise to him. He said, “You should have consulted your trustees before allowing Mr Reede to make such extensive repairs to your property.”

  “But it’s so uncomfortable when water comes in through the roof.”

  “Yes, of course, Mrs Maitland, but all the same——”

  “Could my trustees have done it for me?” asked grandmama sweetly.

  They couldn’t, of course. There wasn’t sufficient capital in the trust funds to have paid for the necessary repairs without a substantial reduction of income. Grandmama knew this perfectly well . . . and so did Mr Stewart.

  “It’s very irregular,” he said unhappily.

  “The roof is beautiful now,” grandmama told him. “Mr Waugh says it will last for at least fifty years.”

  This seemed to end the conversation, Mr Stewart went away, saying sadly that it was all extremely complicated and irregular, and that informality in cases of this nature was deplorable, but he would get in touch with his co-trustees and see if anything could be done.

  “Silly old man!” said grandmama when he had gone.

  Charles and I looked at each other and smiled: the “silly old man” was young enough to be grandmama’s son.

  “You were rather naughty to poor Mr Stewart,” I told her.

  She smiled and replied, “Perhaps I was—a little—but he was so silly that he annoyed me. Why couldn’t he see that my plan is the best? It’s much more sensible for Craignethan to belong to you; Charles can look after everything, which will save me all the bother.”

  “They may not be able to do it,” Charles pointed out. “Mr Stewart said it was very——”

  “It’s done,” interrupted grandmama. “I’ve given Craignethan to you and Sarah . . . so it’s yours. I don’t care what the lawyers say! They can’t prevent me doing what I like with my own property, can they?”

  We thanked her suitably and said no more about it. Neither Charles nor I knew anything about the law . . . and, although Mr Stewart had endeavoured to explain the complications he had only succeeded in bewildering us, so we had no idea whether or not grandmama could do what she liked with her own property.

  “But it doesn’t really matter one way or the other,” said Charles. “I’ve been looking after everything since Grandpapa’s death and I shall just go on doing it.”

  *

  It was now several weeks since I had sent the manuscript to Willy and, except for the postcard saying that he had received it, I had heard nothing. I had waited as patiently as I could, but at last I could bear the suspense no longer so I sat down at the table in the study to write to him.

  Craignethan House

  Ryddelton.

  My dear Willy,

  I was glad to hear you received the manuscript safely. I am wondering if you have read the story and what you think of it. I hope you will . . .

  At that moment the telephone bell rang. I picked up the receiver and put it to my ear.

  “Hallo, Sarah!” said Willy. “Noakes says you can’t call your magnum opus ‘The Rainbow.’ For one thing there’s a book called that already—and, for another, it doesn’t make sense. There’s nothing in the book about a rainbow, see?”

  I was so astonished to hear Willy’s voice that I was struck dumb.

  “Are you there?” inquired Willy.

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Well, what’s the matter with you?”

  “I was surprised, that’s all. I was writing to you—and the telephone bell rang—and it was you.”

  “Telepathy, of course. You were thinking about me so I thought of you and rang you up. It’s quite simple. Now, listen, Sarah! Noakes says you can’t call your book——”

  “Who is Noakes, Willy?”

  “The publisher, of course.”

  “Do you mean you’ve sent it to a publisher?”

  “I thought that was the idea?”

  “Yes,” I said. “At least I thought perhaps you’d read it first and see if——”

  “Oh, I’ve read it! I must say I was surprised. If it hadn’t been written in your well-known fist I wouldn’t have believed you could write a thing like that—didn’t think you had it in you.”

  “I didn’t write it.”

  “You didn’t write it? But it’s in your writing!”

  “Oh, I wrote it, of course.”

  “You wrote it but you didn’t write it?”

  “No, you’ve got it wrong. I didn’t write it but I wrote it.”

  “Pull yourself together and tell me what you mean.”

  Thus adjured I pulled myself together. “Charles wrote ‘The Rainbow’ and I copied it out neatly.”

  “Oh, I see . . . but you can’t call it ‘The Rainbow.’ Noakes says it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry. I’d forgotten.”

  “If Charles wrote the book why does he call himself John Fisher?”

  “Because he doesn’t want his own name to appear.”

  “Yes, I can see that it might be awkward.”

  “Willy, did you like the story?”

  “Your joint effort kept me awake most of the night. I couldn’t stop reading the damn’ thing,” declared Willy in aggrieved tones.

  “You thought it was good?” I asked eagerly.

  “I wasn’t sure that it was as good as I thought it was—if you see what I mean?”

  I saw what he meant because I was in the same position. “You recognised the people,” I suggested.

  “Yes, that made it more interesting . . . but Noakes, who doesn’t know the people, is interested.”

  “Do you mean he’s going to publish it?”

  “That depends upon whether or not I can get a better contract elsewhere. When you’ve got something to sell you don’t leap at the first offer—at least I don’t! You’re such a little donkey that quite probably you would.”

  I was silent. Willy had a somewhat annoying habit of being right.

  “Listen, Sarah,” continued Willy. “It isn’t going to be plain sailing; there are various snags. Noakes is interested as I said before, but he won’t give me the kind of contract I want.”

  “But, Willy——”

  “Listen, this is important. He won’t give me a good contract because, for one thing, ‘John Fisher’ is an unknown author so the book would have to be widely advertised to make it sell; for another thing the book is ‘different’.”

  “Different?”

  “Yes, that’s his word for it. He means it doesn’t fit into any category. It isn’t an autobiography or a romance—in the usual sense of the word—and there’s a sort of other-worldly atmosphere about it, almost as if it were a dream.”

  “It is a dream, Willy.”

  “You couldn’t change it into an autobiography, I suppose?”

  “No, I couldn’t.”

  “It wouldn’t mean much alteration. I mean it’s Eigor’s autobiography . . . but just not written in the first person.”

  “I couldn’t change it,” The mere idea made me feel quite ill.

  “Oh well, you know best. Personally I think it’s fascinating—and I’ll be surprised if other people aren’t fascinated—but publishers are businessmen so they’re not keen on taking risks.”

  “Will Charles get any money for it?”

  “That remains to be seen; it’s a new author and a ‘different’ kind of book. Are you short of money?”

  “Oh, we aren’t destitute, but a little money would be useful. It’s expensive living in a house like this and Charles wants to rebuild the old stables. Grandpapa asked him to have them repaired but they’re too far gone for ‘repairs’.”
<
br />   “You should have them made into a modern garage.”

  “That’s our intention, but we haven’t got the money to do it.”

  “Well, I’ll nose about and do my best for you. Just leave it to me.”

  “It’s awfully good of you to bother!”

  “No bother,” said Willy cheerfully. “It’s rather amusing. I’ve never sold a book before but I can see there’s quite a lot in it. By the way, Noakes suggested ‘The Black Swan’ as a title and I agreed.”

  “The Black Swan?”

  “It’s rather attractive, isn’t it?” He added, “That’s all for now; I’ll send you a carbon copy of the typescript,” and rang off before I could reply.

  *

  The conversation left me breathless and dizzy—I didn’t know whether I was standing on my head or my heels—at one moment my hopes soared high: Willy would get a marvellous “contract”; the book would be a best-seller and our financial troubles would be over! The next moment I remembered all the “snags”: the author was unknown, the book was “different” and publishers were unwilling to take risks.

  My first thought was to rush to Charles and tell him all about it but on second thoughts I decided to wait until the copy of the typescript arrived. Then I would do as Charles had done: I would leave it for him to read and go out for the day.

  The parcel arrived by the early post; I put it on Charles’s desk and said casually, “That’s for you to read, Charles. I’m going to lunch with Debbie.” Then I took grandpapa’s old car and went over to Timperton.

  Mark had gone to Edinburgh and Debbie was busy in the garden; she had intended to lunch on bread and cheese but was delighted when I offered to make an omelet—it was a “treat” for Debbie to have a meal prepared for her—so I made a cheese omelet and coffee and we had the meal together, sitting at the kitchen table.

  “This is fun,” said Debbie, smiling. “Things are always more fun when you aren’t expecting them to happen. You must come again when Mark is here and make an omelet; my omelets are rather leathery.”

  “I learnt when I was in France,” I told her.

  Debbie must have found me an uninteresting companion (I kept on wondering if Charles was reading ‘The Black Swan’) but fortunately Debbie wasn’t the sort of person to mind. If you wanted to talk she was happy to talk, if not she was quite happy to be silent.

  In the afternoon I helped Debbie to plant some seedlings, then we had tea and I went home.

  *

  Charles was alone in the study; he was sitting in a chair by the fire, reading ‘The Black Swan.’

  He looked up at me with a puzzled frown. “Sarah, what is this? Did I write it?”

  “Of course you wrote it!”

  “But there are bits that I don’t remember at all! I was half crazy when I wrote it, but all the same . . . and it was in the most awful muddle! I can’t understand it.”

  “I tidied it for you,” I explained.

  “You tidied it? You must have rewritten the whole thing!”

  I knelt down and made up the fire, which was nearly out.

  “It’s good,” continued Charles thoughtfully. “I’ve been reading it all day. There’s something very attractive about it, you know.”

  “I know.”

  He sighed. “I just can’t believe I could have written it . . . but I suppose I must have.”

  “Nobody else could have written it,” I pointed out.

  “Except you.”

  “I just altered it a little here and there, where it needed altering, and filled in one or two gaps. You gave it to me, Charles. You said I could do what I liked with it.”

  “I told you to put it in the fire.”

  “You didn’t mean it.”

  “Of course I meant it! I had been working at it day and night for weeks. I was so tired of it that I never wanted to see it again . . . and it was in the most frightful mess.” He hesitated and then added, “How on earth did you do it, Sarah? It must have taken you hours to straighten it out.”

  I smiled and replied, “It took me years but I enjoyed the work. It’s a delightful story . . . and it’s your very own Rainbow.”

  “It’s yours, Sarah.”

  “Oh no! I couldn’t have written it to save my life.”

  “It’s yours,” repeated Charles. “I gave it to you.”

  “Yes, I know, but——”

  “It’s yours,” said Charles for the third time. “It’s your book. If you hadn’t rescued it and written it out clearly it would still be lying in a drawer, looking like a pig’s breakfast.”

  “It’s ours,” I suggested, smiling at him.

  He hesitated and then said, “All right, it’s ours. What are we going to do with it?”

  I heaved a sigh of relief: I had been a little anxious.

  “What are we going to do with our book?” repeated Charles.

  This was the moment to tell him all about it.

  *

  When I had finished telling Charles about his book—and what Willy had said on the telephone—there was a long silence.

  At last, Charles said, “It’s all true, of course. We shall just have to wait and see what happens. At any rate it’s well named; if it hadn’t been for the dear black swan my life would have been entirely different. It was he who carried me to Oxford on his strong black wings.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “I wonder what . . .”

  “You wonder what would have happened to me if I hadn’t watched the black swan circle above the castle towers and fly away northwards over the forest,” said Charles smiling. “Who knows? One thing is certain: the magic bird changed my destiny.”

  “And mine,” I said.

  “And yours,” agreed Charles. He added, “I must write to Willy and thank him for all his trouble . . . and I shall tell him that ‘The Black Swan’ is by John and Sarah Fisher.”

  “John and Margaret Fisher.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Charles, nodding.

  “I found the story very muddling, Charles. It’s such a strange mixture of fact and fiction that I began to wonder if I were Sarah Reede or Margaret MacDonald.”

  “I was muddled when I wrote it,” explained the author. “Half the time—more than half the time—I was Eigor.”

  “You were Eigor all the time,” I said.

  *

  Willy had a great many friends in London and one evening at a dinner-party he met Vivian Quince, a youngish man who had inherited a publishing business and was anxious to make his mark in the world of letters. Mr Quince was not a type Willy admired—he had side-whiskers and his hair was too long—but when he began to talk about his plans for “branching out” and told Willy that he intended to find new authors and to publish books which were different from the ordinary run, books which would appeal to people of taste and intelligence, Willy realised that this was the man he had been looking for . . . and offered him “The Black Swan.”

  Mr Quince read it and accepted it. As a matter of fact he was almost too enthusiastic about the book and caused its author a good deal of embarrassment by comparing it with the works of Hans Christian Andersen and James Barrie.

  “It must be beautifully produced,” declared Mr Quince. “We must have wood-cuts, of course—I know a man who does enchanting wood-cuts. There must be a wood-cut of the black swan, eating scraps from Eigor’s hand, and another of the bird standing on the stump of the old tree, stretching his wings; there must be a wood-cut of the first meeting of Eigor and Margaret on the seashore with the mountains of Skye in the distance. . . .”

  Charles and I came away from our interview with Mr Quince feeling rather dazed.

  “The man is a fool,” said Charles as we drove back to our hotel in a taxi.

  “Oh, it’s just his way,” said Willy, who had come to the interview with us to hold a watching brief. “Underneath all that blather Quince is pretty shrewd. I think he’s right about the wood-cuts—as long as he doesn’t have too many—but it will delay production so you’ll h
ave to be patient. The best thing for you to do is to go home and forget about ‘The Black Swan.’ I’ll deal with Quince.”

  We thanked Willy and went home but it wasn’t easy to forget about ‘The Black Swan’. Every now and then Charles would say, “I wonder what that extraordinary fellow with the whiskers is doing with our book,” and I would reply vaguely, “Yes, I wonder.”

  However, as the weeks passed and we heard nothing, we “wondered” less frequently.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  When first we came to Ryddelton there were a great many young children in the neighbourhood. Now they were all growing up. Beric was seventeen, a good-looking lad, more than ever like his father. He had passed his exams with flying colours and was all set for his chosen career in the Navy. Celia’s two girls were fourteen and fifteen respectively; they were at Dinwell House, a school near Edinburgh. The Loudon boys, Harry and Bill, were no longer “ruffians” but were civilised and well-mannered. Harry was like Bob, strong and burly with blue eyes and neatly cut fair hair. Bill was too plump, in my opinion, but he was his parents’ pet and was said to be “very clever.” He was reading law at Cambridge. Most incredible of all: Freddie was going to be fifteen in August.

  Freddie was nearly fifteen . . . and she was coming to spend her summer holidays at Craignethan.

  Charles and I were discussing the matter at dinner one evening towards the end of July. We were both very happy about it.

  “We’ll spoil her,” said Charles. “She’s good at tennis, isn’t she? We must have the lawn put in order. We’ll take her to the Edinburgh Festival—I must see about tickets for the Tattoo. We can have a picnic for her birthday at Cairnbeck and ask the Dunnes and the Loudon boys. There’s going to be a ‘young dance’ at Dunnian—Freddie will enjoy that! What else can we do to spoil her?”