Lament for a Maker (33 page)

And today I’ve tramped up the glen. Eighteen months have passed since I first took pen to set this narrative in motion. I have a fancy to end it in the shadow of Castle Erchany.

John Appleby, that clever London man, would have it that the Guthrie case defeated him. He neglected, he says, the single element that changed its whole composition at the last. There was one question, he insists, he forgot to ask. But the reader will have seen that he did ask it – and would have asked it again that night but for the speed things happened with.
Who was it slipped out of the schoolroom in front of Hardcastle and the lad Gylby when they were on their way to the tower?
You know the answer, Reader. It was Ewan Bell.

Long I’d chewed over that strange letter the daftie brought me from Christine. But, old man and slow that I am, it was Christmas Eve before I saw that at the heart of it, unknown perhaps even to Christine herself, was an appeal. Nor perhaps did that truth of it rise clear in my own mind, for when I started up the glen in the gloaming I told myself it was only because I must bid the quean goodbye. But deep down I recognized the appeal and deeper still I must have felt the danger: I wouldn’t otherwise have attempted a road that was danger and daftness itself.

I reckoned to reach the meikle house by about eight o’clock and trust for the night to Guthrie’s hospitality or to a pallet like the schoolmistress had thought of in the loft at the farm. Only in such a reckoning I was thinking of myself as a younger man. By some freak of nature I reached Erchany alive through the storm that night, but it wanted only half an hour to midnight as I plodded up the last stretch of the drive, the storm lantern I had brought with me giving but the smallest glimmer in that yet driving snow. There was a light in the schoolroom; I climbed down to the moat and then, with some difficulty, up to the little terrace. Mr Wedderburn was right in spying in me the ruins of an athlete; but it seems I keep a bit of muscle still.

I wonder now that I took this secret road to Christine; no doubt it shows how strong was my instinct that Guthrie was an enemy. She let me in by the window and I could see she was right glad that I had come. She had a bit suitcase – no bigger than Mistress McLaren’s Sabbath handbag it looked – beside her, and a mackintosh over a chair. I said ‘Surely you’re not going tonight?’

She nodded. ‘It’s uncle’s way. And Neil says we can get fine to Mervie. He’s up with uncle in the tower now and we’re to go straight away when he comes down. It will be all right, don’t you think, Ewan Bell?’

She was too much in love, I suppose, to allow herself more than a troubled suspicion that it must be all wrong, that there was something crazy and sinister at the core of it. I said: ‘I’ll just be going up to see them, Christine. And when your Neil comes down away with you and write to me some day.’ And at that I kissed her. It was my idea, I believe, to act as a rearguard when they were gone. My mind didn’t stretch to the notion that it was their very getting away that might be fatal to them.

Christine said: ‘Go by the little stair and you’ll more likely avoid Hardcastle.’ And she found me a key in case the door at the bottom was locked.

I slipped from the schoolroom – it was when Gylby and Hardcastle glimpsed me – and held for the little stair. It’s something to remember that after all that trudge from Kinkeig I got up the little stair quicker than they got up the big one. And right different the story would have been had I lingered on the climb.

You must know I was familiar enough with the castle as a lad in the old laird’s time, but of the tower top I had little memory. Only I knew there was an entrance from the parapet walk and when I emerged through the trapdoor it was my plan to walk boldly in and say I’d come as a friend of Lindsay’s to see him safely away with his bride.

The wind was high and I stood for a moment wondering whether to turn to left or right along the open parapet walk. I chose left, which happened to be wrong. That is to say the scene Miss Guthrie came on by holding forward from her French window I came on from the other side. The American lassie’s presence I never knew of. Nor, I think, did Ranald Guthrie: she must have been wrong in thinking he heard her cry out.

I was on the scene a few seconds earlier than she; our movements can be fitted to each other accurately enough by the cry she heard – the cry that brought her away from her window. It was my cry. And I don’t doubt it was loud enough. For I was going cautiously along the battlement, my lantern at my feet, when something rolled out of the darkness that almost tripped me up and sent me over the tower. I put down my lantern and stooped over it. It was a human body.

Everything was a matter of seconds after that. I saw that there was another lantern burning in a niche above a door – the little bedroom door. And the next instant through the door came Guthrie. I straightened up from the huddled form I was stooping over – sore afraid it was Neil Lindsay’s – and took a step back that overturned and put out my lantern. Guthrie became aware of me on that and his axe came up in menace – which was the moment at which Miss Guthrie got her first imperfect sight of what was forward. He advanced on me; the step took him out of the light; the next minutes were a stealthy groping. I knew I was in mortal danger – knew it as well as if Guthrie had read out a declaration of war. And on getting out of it depended not only my own life but that of the man lying helplessly at my feet. For that it was murder that the laird was about I was certain.

He was crouching somewhere in the darkness, manoeuvring for position with all the cunning of that powerful brain. And suddenly he rose up by the parapet, full in the light. He had me in silhouette – as Miss Guthrie had; he had judged that it was enough and that he would take me by surprise that way. His axe was swung back low – a rising stroke that would either gut me or cleave me from the chin up. I had to get in first and I did. So much, Reader, for the death of Ranald Guthrie.

I knelt down by the figure in the snow – you’ll remember that Miss Guthrie had retreated and saw nothing of this – and said softly: ‘Man Lindsay – are you all right?’ And at that the figure stirred and turned over on its face. You may take it I was fair scunnered when I saw I was looking at a Guthrie. It was my first awful thought that in the darkness I’d killed the wrong man.

He was drugged, I think, but coming round rapidly. It was only seconds before he opened his eyes on me and whispered: ‘Who are you?’ And at my name his eyes lit up as if he had last heard it but yesterday. He said: ‘I’m Ian – Ian Guthrie. Get me away – secretly.’

Maybe I’d had my fair share of activity that night – enough to satisfy the Athletic Ideal of Miss Strachan herself. But there was no help for it. I pitched my own lantern over the parapet, took up the one burning in the niche, and got Ian Guthrie on my back. I’ve carried a calf that was fell heavier often enough on my father’s croft.

I got him to the trapdoor and through it, and I bolted it from below. It must have been only a couple of minutes later, I suppose, that the Gylby lad was out on the deserted battlements looking about him. With a little help Ian staggered down that long winding stair and along the corridor to near the schoolroom. I looked in; Christine had gone. I got him in and he rested a bit, warming himself before the little fire. Presently he said: ‘Ranald?’

‘I killed him – knocked him over the parapet.’

His face was paper-pale, but now it drained yet paler. ‘Poor crazy chap!’ He was silent for a moment. ‘He was just going to kill me, Mr Bell – after a little operation.’ And he spread out his right hand. ‘Hence the axe.’

It was to be a long time before I fully understood that. You’ll remember Mr Appleby saying that the California Flinders must display no marked character-trait which might become known as quite alien to the Sydney Flinders, and how because of that Ranald had to attempt to get the better of his miserliness. That was true enough. But there was something else about the Sydney Flinders that Appleby didn’t know – and that Ranald, thanks to what Ian had written him, did. In the early days of his radiology Flinders had lost two fingers – as you can easily do, it seems, with that unchancy stuff. Well, Ranald could arrive in California without two fingers readily enough: a little surgical reading, a period of seclusion, rather more than common fortitude – these were all that was necessary. But the body that was to be found in the moat and taken to be Ranald Guthrie’s presented a more difficult problem. Clearly it must not display two fingers amputated long ago. On the other hand a further operation to conceal this would, in normal circumstances, arouse suspicion at once – arouse suspicion through the question:
Why have Guthrie’s fingers been cut off?
But once Neil Lindsay was suspected of murdering Guthrie that question would – thanks to the dark legend of the Lindsays and the Guthries – receive a sufficient answer, and an answer incriminating Lindsay. The grand difficulty in Ranald’s way with his one enemy was made the most startling point in the case against the other. As Appleby is fond of saying, Ranald Guthrie’s jigsaw was a right neat and economical affair.

But now I was still staring at that right hand of Ian Guthrie’s in mere puzzlement when he got unsteadily to his feet. ‘I hear voices,’ he said – it must have been Gylby and the others coming down from the tower – ‘we’ll be going.’

I looked at him fair stammagasted. ‘Going!’

‘Nobody knows I’m here except the scoundrel Hardcastle, who won’t talk. And Ranald’s death will pass, maybe, as accident or suicide.’

‘Mr Ian, you needn’t think I’m feared of owning to the killing of your daft brother. It was him or you and me.’

‘True enough, Ewan Bell. But do you think I want a lurid scandal because Ranald went off his head? We’ll away to Kinkeig while we may.’

I thought he must be off his head himself to think of getting through the snows that night in his condition. But I know now, of course, what was driving him: he had near a passion – the dark Guthrie passion – to end his days as Richard Flinders. Not unnaturally, when you come to chew on it, for Richard Flinders was what he had made himself through nigh fifty years. At the moment I had to submit to what I had no understanding of and follow him out of the castle. You must remember he knew nothing of Lindsay or the danger the lad was like to be brought to. Nor had I any clear picture of it myself, or maybe I would have made him stay.

An hour before I had been wondering if my strength would take me to Erchany; now I had the task of getting a sick man back the long road to Kinkeig. The shock of it all must have made me half indifferent. I had no thought but that we were like to perish on the way and I felt simply that what must be must be. As it happened we both proved uncommonly tough and we passed Kinkeig kirk as the bell was tolling for the early service. We met no one and for the next twenty-four hours Ian Guthrie lay low in my house. But not quite low enough. The thought of seeing Kinkeig again fascinated him and the next evening he went for a bit dander in the gloaming. Hence, Reader, Ranald Guthrie’s ghost.

He told me his story and by comparing what we knew we puzzled out most of the jigsaw. But Ian still didn’t want to come forward. There would be an inquiry, he said, and he would hold his hand till that was over: if suspicion fell on Lindsay forward he would come; otherwise away he would sail as Richard Flinders and no one any the wiser. And meantime I was to persuade Christine not to let on that I had been at Erchany.

You must judge if I did right when at one point I opposed his plan absolutely. Even if it so turned out that Ian Guthrie need not come alive again to public knowledge, I said, the family and the lawyers must know. And that bit common sense I did succeed in imposing on the rank Guthrie eccentricity of the man. When and if all was quietly over, he agreed, I might get the folk intimately concerned to the castle by night and he would come over from Dunwinnie again and have it out with them. And on that Ian slipped away from Kinkeig in the darkness and tramped back to his Dunwinnie hotel – where, certain, in all the confloption of sporters and curlers Richard Flinders had not been missed.

And that’s all – though I had uneasy hours enough thereafter. I didn’t reckon on the policeman Appleby having gone up to the meikle house when I engineered that family meeting right fortunate it was that he proved a wise man, knowing where to let be. Ranald Guthrie and the coarse creature Hardcastle were both dead, and Ian Guthrie was a childless man whose attitude to the Erchany estate was his own affair. And silence for a time on the full and final story, while it was but indulgence to him, was mercy to Christine Mathers.

And so the Guthries have gone from these lands and Castle Erchany is to let. What gear was left in the place unrotted has been dispersed; the family portraits and all the schoolroom stuff were shipped away to Sybil and Christine and then there was a grand sale. The great Flemish table where they sat and had their caviare that night was bought by Dr Jervie for the kirk session. The globes that wee Isa Murdoch hid behind in the gallery were bought by Mistress Roberts of the Arms; she sits in the private now with her teapot on one side and the terrestrial globe on the other, ready to show you what port her bairns wrote from last. Fairbairn of Glenlippet – him that licenses his motor ever by the quarter – bought a great granite louping-stone from the court; folk were sore puzzled to know what use he would make of it but Will Saunders says it will bear a brave inscription to Mistress Fairbairn one day. And all the mouldering theology in the gallery I bought myself: right solid stuff to chew on it has proved and a grand stand-by in the discussions I whiles hold with the minister.

Today I have wandered through the meikle house perhaps for the last time. The winds that ever eddy about Erchany are sighing through the broken windows; warm and scented from the braes though they are they scarcely bring to the castle a suggestion of summer or of the sun. Utterly the place has slipped into the past: I doubt that its only tenants hereafter will be the rats – they have already forgotten the dottled Hardcastle wife – and the martins that know their season. Stone will fall from stone and this high tower to which I have climbed be as forgotten as the Lindsays’ tower in Mervie – the Guthries of Erchany, that have so passionately lived in the life of Scotland, like their rivals remembered only in footnotes to history.