Maggie (9 page)

“Before you go to find that food,” said the earl to Roshie, “be a good fellow and see if there’s anything to drink in the cellars.”

Roshie’s face brightened for the first time that day and he hurried off, to return some minutes later with a bottle of whisky and three glasses.

“You may join us for a drink later, Roshie,” said the earl firmly. “Food. Now.”

“Very well,” sighed Roshie, backing out, his eyes fixed
longingly on the bottle.

The earl poured two glasses of whisky and gave one to Maggie. Then he bent and put a match to the paper and sticks which were arranged in the hearth and added lumps of coal from a brass scuttle, concentrating on his task until a cheerful blaze was crackling up the chimney.

“Well, Maggie,” he said straightening up. “Here we are.”

“Yes,” said Maggie wearily. She finished her whisky in one gulp and held out her glass for more. Maggie was fortifying herself for the inevitable. Soon they would go to bed and this strange young man would proceed to do all those terrible things to her that Inspector Macleod had done. Why couldn’t they all leave her alone? Why was she so weak and spineless? She should have stayed in Glasgow and suffered the curiosity of the mob until the house was sold and then she should have escaped to America… alone.

As if to confirm her worst fears, the earl said, “I’ll just take a candle and inspect the bedrooms.”

He was gone for some time. Maggie heard the street door bang and the sound of dishes being laid in the dining-room across the hall. There was a great to-ing and fro-ing as if Roshie had brought back the entire staff of a restaurant to cater to his master’s needs, which, in fact, was exactly what the enterprising Highlander had done.

At one point, Roshie walked into the drawing-room where Maggie sat and said, “With your permission, Mrs. Macleod,” and, without waiting for it, poured himself a liberal glass of whisky and knocked it back in one gulp.

He then gave Maggie a jerky little bow and left the room. His face had been a polite mask, but Maggie knew that Roshie disapproved of her, to say the least.

Dinner was a silent affair. Roshie had banished the restaurant staff before calling Maggie from the drawing-room. He was afraid she might be recognized.

The earl joined Maggie as the soup was being served by
Roshie. “We’re lucky,” he said cheerfully. “I’ve been quite the little housewife. The beds are made and the fires are lit. Roshie! Splendid man! Where did you conjure up this banquet?”

“Wee place I ken,” said Roshie. “The food’s no’ bad.”

“Pull up a chair, Roshie,” said Peter. “You may as well join us.”

Maggie ate very little and drank quite a lot of wine. She was very silent, and soon the earl stopped trying to make conversation.

“Now, Maggie,” said the earl when the silent meal was finished and Roshie had retired to the kitchens with a tray of dishes. “Come and I will show you to your room.”

He was surprised by a look of disgust on her face, quickly masked. Nonetheless, she followed him quietly up the narrow staircase with its beautiful thin curving mahogany banister. He pushed open a door. A large four-poster bed dominated the room and a small fire crackled brightly on the hearth.

The earl stood looking down at her. He knew she was frightened and distressed and wanted to say some words of comfort, but he could not begin to guess what she felt. Her drawn, tired face had a tight, withdrawn look.

“Goodnight, Maggie,” he said finally. “I shall see you at breakfast.”

Her wide brown eyes stared up into his blue ones. Her gaze then flicked from the bed and back to his face and her eyes filled with tears.

“Oh, thank you,” she said. “
Thank you!
” And, throwing her arms around his neck, she kissed him on the cheek.

He patted her clumsily on the shoulder and said again that he would see her in the morning. He half turned in the doorway and looked curiously back at her. How incredibly beautiful she looked with her huge peaty eyes shining with gratitude and her midnight-black curls rioting about the
creamy pallor of her face and neck!

He raised his hand in a sort of salute and gently closed the door behind him.

Why had she suddenly been so grateful? he mused, as he removed his clothes in the privacy of his room.

All at once he realized she had been afraid that he wished to seduce her. He smiled ruefully as he climbed into bed.

Meanwhile, Maggie undressed in front of the fire. She would need to sleep in her petticoat. Miss Meikle had offered to return from Park Terrace with a suitcase but Mr. Byles had pointed out that she would undoubtedly be followed, and so Maggie had had to board the train without a change of clothes.

There was a tall chest of drawers in one of the shadowy corners of the room, and, after some hesitation, she softly drew open the top drawer.

It contained a few scarves and gloves, smelling faintly of musk. She opened one of the long drawers underneath. There was underwear, yellow with age, wrapped in tissue paper, the lace as fine as cobwebs. She would be able to change her underthings after all, the previous wearer having been as slight as herself.

She selected a nightdress, wondering who had last worn it and how old it was.

She climbed into bed, shutting out thoughts of the trial, of the earl, of her dead husband, firmly from her mind. She could not think of anything. Not yet.

Or she might go mad.

Another train, this time to Oxford.

Maggie, again silent, sat opposite the earl, her face a closed mask.

She had hardly said a thing, except ‘yes’ or ‘no’. He wondered if she had murdered her husband. Of course, he could simply ask her, but the sight of her withdrawn face
stopped him. Why was it she had seemed so innocent in the court? Why should he have these terrible doubts now?

As the flat fields of Oxfordshire began to roll past, he decided it was because he did not know her at all. She was a stranger, her very Highland-ness making her foreign to him. Her silence seemed unnatural.

By the time the train steamed into Oxford, he decided her reticence was downright sinister.

As the carriage that they had hired in Oxford took them out towards the village of Beaton Malden, the earl explained that his maiden aunt, a Miss Sarah Rochester, might not still be alive. He had not seen her in ten years. She lived in a large house on the outskirts of the village. And Maggie listened to all this information with apparent indifference.

The carriage at last stopped in front of an old iron gate bearing the legend,
The Laurels.
A short drive led up to the house which was a sprawling, rambling affair of mellow brick, so covered with ivy and creeper and roses that it was hard to guess its age.

“I want you to wait in the carriage, Maggie,” said the earl. She nodded her head, taking off her hat and placing it in her lap.

The earl and Roshie left and Maggie sat alone in the carriage, fatigue keeping her thoughts at bay. The air through the open carriage window was gentle and soft. It was almost as warm as a summer’s day. Great fleecy clouds sailed high above a pale blue sky, as pale and blue as the eyes of Lord Dancer.

No! Don’t think!

After what seemed like a very long time, the earl opened the carriage door. “My aunt will see you now,” he said. “She is in the garden.”

He led her through the sunny cluttered rooms of the house and out through the french windows at the back. A wrought-iron staircase led down to a pretty garden where a
large woman stood by a sundial, waiting for them.

She was dressed in mannish tweeds and wore a hard celluloid collar with a thin black tie. Her pepper-and-salt hair was clubbed short at the neck and she had a great beefy face with wiry grey hairs sprouting from her chin. Her eyes were small and brown and wistful, a contrast to the truculence of her face, making her look like a tired bulldog, dreaming of the days of succulent bones, long gone by.

“So you’re Maggie Macleod,” boomed Miss Rochester. “Well, what I want to know is… if
you
didn’t murder your husband, then who did?”

Maggie halted on the bottom step and stared at Miss Rochester. She put a shaking hand to her lips and then fainted dead away.

For the next two weeks, Maggie Macleod lay in the upstairs bedroom at the back of
The Laurels
while the doctor came and went. The days grew darker and colder and the birds cheeped dismally in the ivy around the windows. Shadows of leaves flickered across the walls by day, and candlelight sent dark shadows looming out of the corners of the room at night.

Raging with fever, tortured by nightmares, Maggie tossed and turned. At times she felt she was back in bed with her husband and his great body was suffocating her and his coarse voice was muttering obscenities in her ears. At other times, Lord Dancer stood at the end of the bed, slowly raising the black cap and putting it on his wigged head. Sometimes she was back in her father’s shop, slicing bacon, cutting cheese, measuring potatoes out of the barrel into the heavy brass scoop, parcelling sugar into blue paper bags and lentils and split peas into brown paper bags, looking up from her work and seeing the shadow of the inspector’s thick body falling across the floor of the shop.

One night she looked through the distorted windows of
her delirium to where her husband and Murdo Knight sat playing cards at the end of her bed. “This’ll make me superintendent,” said the inspector. “This’ll make me superintendent.”

“What will?” cried Maggie desperately, feeling that she must have his answer, but their figures faded and once more she was back in court and Lord Dancer was putting the black cap on his head.

And then as the first snow of the winter began to fall on the ploughed brown fields of Oxfordshire, Maggie’s dreams abruptly changed. She had been allowed once during her brief schooling to go on a school picnic to Glen Strathfarrer and in her dream she was back in the cart with the schoolgirls, giggling and laughing while the cart lurched and bumped and the sun slanted through birch and hazel, pine and spruce. A salmon leapt high in the river with a flash of silver scales. In reality, her father had descended on the picnic before it had hardly begun and had dragged her back to the shop, grumbling that he needed help. But in her dream, no angry father appeared and she could smell the tangy scent of pine and bracken mixed with the picnic smells of tea and strawberries.

She opened her eyes to find pale sunlight shining in at the bedroom window and the heavy figure of Miss Rochester sitting reading beside the bed.

“Thank goodness,” said Miss Rochester, putting down her book. “I thought you were going to die on me. How do you feel?”

“Strange,” murmured Maggie. “Weak.”

“Don’t try to speak,” said Miss Rochester, lowering her normal booming tones with an effort. “I’ll just sit here and read.”

Maggie closed her eyes and fell asleep again, so deeply and completely that at times Miss Rochester would lean forward anxiously and feel her pulse.

At last, after two hours, Maggie awoke again. She lay quietly watching Miss Rochester’s heavy bulldog face bent over her book.

“Where is Peter?” asked Maggie at last.

“Gone to London to see about something,” said Miss Rochester, leaning over the bed and straightening Maggie’s pillows. “See here, I’m sorry I said that thing about wondering who had really killed your husband. Was that what made you ill?”

“Not really. Well, it was,” murmured Maggie. “No. Don’t feel guilty. It was just that I had never thought… Life seemed so hard and cruel that I almost came to believe I’d done it.”

Her voice trailed away. “Don’t speak. You’re far from well,” begged Miss Rochester.

“No, I want to,” said Maggie slowly, “I never thought, until you said it, that the murderer of my husband is still at large. You don’t know… you can’t know… what it’s like. Men. First father, then my husband. Always helpless. Always at their mercy. The murder trial seemed an extension of my life. Cruelty and humiliation. Cruelty and…”

Her eyes closed. Miss Rochester leaned forward, but Maggie had fallen asleep again.

Two months drifted past and still the earl did not come. Maggie grew stronger and was able to spend most of the day downstairs.

It seemed that once she had begun to discuss the murder with Miss Rochester, Maggie could not stop. Words poured from her, her soft Highland voice telling Miss Rochester of her life with her husband. Miss Rochester often turned brick red to the tips of her ears. Maggie almost seemed to think her husband’s treatment of her was the normal behaviour of a married man, while Miss Rochester shuddered at the sadism revealed in Maggie’s gentle narrative.

But Miss Rochester was a great believer in the healing powers of ‘getting it all out’ and so she listened patiently as Maggie talked and talked. One question kept returning. Who had killed her husband?

“Probably one of those criminal types he met in his job,” said Miss Rochester robustly. “Didn’t he discuss his work with you?”

“Never,” said Maggie. “I was supposed to stay in my room until he came home at night and then he usually brought Mr. Knight with him. I thought Mr. Knight—that reporter, you know—might have softened my husband’s attitude towards me for it was after Mr. Knight started coming that Mr. Macleod suggested I might like to visit the shops and buy things for myself. But then… but then, Mr. Knight spoke so cruelly of me at the trial. It sounded as if he were describing another woman. It all seemed so inevitable somehow… that I should hang. Men. All those men ranged against me. Lord Strathairn marrying me for some joke.” Maggie blushed. “I should not have said that.”

“Oh, he told me all about it. But didn’t my silly young nephew
tell
you why he asked you to marry him?”

Maggie shook her head.

“Well, I will,” Miss Rochester had been planting seedlings in a flower bed beside the cane garden chair on which Maggie was resting. Although it was the beginning of March, the day was pleasantly warm in this sheltered area of the garden. Behind the garden wall, the wind roared through the trees, making a sound like the sea. Miss Rochester leaned back on her heels and told Maggie about the bet with the Marquess of Handley.