We took our candles, and Doctor Hamish put out the last lamp and closed the door behind us. “I am going to light Cat to the tower, Father,” announced Jamie. “That staircase is easy for a lady to stumble on, and it is very dark tonight.”
“Good boy,” said the doctor, starting up the main staircase. “I wish you both goodnight.”
We followed slowly. I held my skirt with one hand and the candle with the other; Jamie’s free arm encircled my waist. It was comforting to feel him there and know he cared for me. But however lovingly he behaved, he could not protect me from the moment when I would be left alone in that room. I had already decided I would not put out the oil lamp tonight, in the hope of discouraging spirits, or at least assuaging my fear of them. But if the girl in the ragged dress should appear, and fix me again with her pale gaze, only I must face her. As Jamie had declared, she would not come if anyone else was there.
When we reached the spiral staircase, which was only wide enough for one, Jamie led the way. He opened the door to the tower bedroom; the candlelight danced round it as he crossed to the table and turned on the lamp. “There,” he said. “No need to fear.” He smiled calmly, his face without shadows, in the full glow of the light.
“I will try not to,” I told him uncertainly. “But do you remember we discussed why the vision appears only in this room, and we thought perhaps the girl had died here? Ghosts haunt the place they died, do they not? I am not sure I like sleeping in a place where someone died.”
Anxiety flitted across Jamie’s face, but he checked it. “But bedrooms are where people die,” he said reasonably. “If we all worried about that, we would never sleep anywhere. Are you sure no one has ever died in your room at home?”
“No, of course not.” I put down my candle and began to take the pins out of my hair. An unbearable weariness had come over me. All I wished for was sleep. “But my room at home is not haunted.” He made to speak, but I held up my hand. “I am a young girl, about the age of the ghost. I spend every night in this bed, in this room, in this tower. I adore my view, but if she suffered and died here, it is easy to imagine the same happening to me!”
I sat down despondently on the edge of the bed, drawing my hair over one shoulder, the pins in my hand. Jamie said nothing for a few moments, then he came and kissed my forehead. “Very well. I see I cannot kiss your fear away. I will arrange for you to sleep in another bedroom for the rest of your stay.”
I could not tell if he was joking. “Are you sure? But what about tonight?”
“I mean, from this minute.” He thought for a moment. “Look, next to my sitting room is a room so small it is usually occupied by children. There are bars on the windows, I’m afraid. The bed is not made up, but if you bring your pillows, I will get blankets from my room.”
I was so grateful that my eyes filled. “Thank you,” I whispered, wondering when a child had last stayed at Drumwithie. Or, for that matter, when an adult guest had last slept in the tower. No one ever seemed to call, or invite the Buchanans anywhere. They lived at Drumwithie in all its splendour, as isolated as the castle itself. What had such a life been like for Anne Buchanan, the daughter of a clergyman, used to a busy parish and the comings and goings of a vicarage?
Jamie picked up his candle. “I will leave you to collect whatever you need. Come down when you are ready, and I will show you the room.”
“What will we tell your father?” I asked, swallowing. “And Bridie?”
“Goodness, how you worry! I’ll think of something by the morning. Now, there will be no fire in the little room, so wrap yourself up well.”
When he had gone and I could no longer see the light from the candle flickering under the door, something compelled me to look at the ceiling. There were the beams: one, two, three, four. It was a pity wishes only came true if the beams were counted on the first night, because now I had something important to wish for: I longed for Jamie to find happiness, and for us to be together always.
I stood up, fighting the desire for sleep, my head full of plans. I would need my thicker nightdress, which was in my trunk. I dragged it from the corner, and it was when I opened the lid that my senses sharpened. The air around me became stifling. Out of the shadows, surrounded by a glittering haze like sun through mist, stepped the girl in the ragged dress.
Jamie was awake, I knew, only a few yards away downstairs. If I screamed he would hear me and rush upstairs, and the ghost would disappear. I took a breath, but the scream did not come. I was transfixed by her dark-eyed gaze.
“What do you want?” I blurted. “We have done your bidding. We found the tree. Now, I beg you, go back wherever you came from, and let me be!”
Still she stared at me, the pallor of her skin luminous in the aura surrounding her. “Why have you come back?” I asked, searching my memory for an explanation. “We found where the cave is. Is it something to do with the cave?”
Her head drooped, then slowly rose again. I interpreted this as affirmation. “But we cannot get in,” I told her. “There is a great oak across the entrance.”
This time her head turned one way, then the other. Her profile, which she had never shown me before, was very beautiful. As I looked at it, I was struck by a strong sense of recognition. The ghost girl bore a resemblance to some other, real girl I had seen quite recently. Shocked to the point of collapse, I sat down quickly on the bed. “Who are you?” I demanded. “Tell me who you are!”
She turned her head, this way and that, again. She was saying “no”, but whether to my comment about the impossibility of entering the cave, or my request to know her identity, it was unclear. I watched, riveted. And I realized that I was no longer frightened of her. “Please,” I told her gently. “I only wish to help you.”
She went towards the window. Just as she had done before, she pointed to the middle pane. And just as before, she turned to me with a beseeching gaze. Her head inclined towards my travelling trunk with its open lid, then back to my face with an even more dramatic expression of pleading. With amazement I realized she was asking me to close the trunk. She was asking me not to leave the tower room.
I tried to speak, but the air cleared suddenly, and the vision faded away to nothing. I got up and stood in the spot where she had been. The middle pane. The tree. She was telling me that it was the right tree, and that whatever was troubling her had something to do with the cave. I went to my trunk and shut the lid. Then I tiptoed down the spiral staircase. The door next to Jamie’s was open. “Jamie!” I hissed. “Jamie! Are you there?”
His head came round the door. “Where are your pillows?”
“I do not need them. She came again!”
“Oh!” He stared at me in disbelief, his arms full of blankets.
“Sshh! Your father will hear!”
He drew me into the sitting room, shut the door and threw the blankets onto a chair. “What happened?”
I recounted how the ghost had looked, how she had indicated that our conclusions about the tree and the cave were correct, and had showed me I could not leave the tower. “And most astonishing, Jamie,” I added, “I am no longer frightened of her.”
“You see?” His face lit up with relief. “She needs you, so why should she harm you?” As he spoke, he began to walk about the room in an untidy circle. “This is the ghost’s third visitation,” he said. “We do not know if that has any significance, but this latest appearance had a clear purpose. She had to make you stay in the tower room, because her mission is not completed. She will visit you again and again until we find out what she wants.” He stopped pacing and looked directly at me. His hair had fallen over his eyes, and he tossed it back impatiently. “And we can only find out what she wants, my darling, by getting into that cave!”
That night my dreams were vivid.
I found myself in my nightdress in the tower room, but it was not the bedroom I knew. It had been transformed into a cold place, the same odd shape as the real tower, but with stone walls and floor like a dung
eon, and no furniture. The windows looked out in two directions, but they were not my windows. They were slits, made by placing two boulders so that they almost touched, but leaving just enough space for a shaft of light to pierce the blackness of the tower. Or perhaps it was not a tower or a dungeon at all, but a cave?
The darkness in my dream was so thick it was palpable; I had to part it like curtains in order to see what lay beyond it. When I did, my eyes were assailed by a silver light, and my ears by a silver sound. I saw an insubstantial world, full of radiance, yet as two-dimensional as the painting of Ophelia lying in the stream.
Visions quivered on the edges of the scene. I saw the woman in the pool, her hair submerged, her skin gleaming white against the black of the rock. I saw Jane Eyre frantically stamping on the bed curtains to put out the fire started by the madwoman. Crowds of crows appeared, so many that the sight filled my ears, and their cries filled my mouth, mixing up my senses with greedy glee. I know I screamed – I tasted the scream on my tongue. And then she emerged, her youth and beauty glowing, undiminished by her dirty appearance, or by my fear. I did not fear her, even in a dream.
The walls closed in. The tower, or the dungeon, or cave, whatever it was, changed back into solid darkness and the girl disappeared. I was blind and suffocating. I reached out my hands in case I stumbled, but they found only wet, mossy walls. Someone was speaking. “She did not die, though, did she?” Then someone else was shouting. “You can stay here for ever, for all I care!” The voices became louder. I shouted too, something incoherent, but was powerless to stop them. Eventually, when in my dream world I was on the edge of exhaustion, the terrible sound of the screaming woman came back. Despair, agony, loss – I could hear, see, taste, touch, smell everything contained in her cry. Compassion rushed through me. What had happened to her? Who was she and why, sleeping and waking, did she invade my peace?
Real exhaustion overtook me. I must have fallen into a very heavy slumber, because when I opened my eyes the clock read twenty past nine. I was surprised it was so late; the room seemed too dark, as if the dawn were still about to break. I was hungry, but breakfast would have been cleared away by now.
I stretched, pushed back the covers and padded to the window. When I parted the curtains I gasped. My view had disappeared behind a wall of mist, and rain sluiced against the window pane. I had never seen clouds swirl around a high place like Drumwithie, or felt their presence so close outside the window. In Gilchester, clouds were white or grey, and stayed in the sky. They did not come down to earth and surround me, thick as candy floss, obliterating the world so completely I felt as if the tower were the world.
I watched with awe this new version of the familiar view, marvelling at the intensity of the downpour. Perhaps the reason no one had wakened me was simple: on a day like today, the best place to be was in bed. As I dressed, I wondered what a day when going outdoors was impossible would bring. The castle was at its most castle-like in the gloom, and unless Bridie lit every lamp in the place, it would remain so. We would be imprisoned in the semi-dark all day, or perhaps longer if the weather set in.
I stood before the looking-glass to brush my hair. My face had changed. Hours spent in the sunshine had reddened my nose and freckled my cheeks. The breeze that whipped the pine trees had also whipped my skin to a glow. Washing my hair in Scotland’s famously soft water had made it shine with health, and it had grown unruly too, as I rarely tied it up any more. Drumwithie had turned me into a sunburned hobbledehoy, prepared to put on men’s trousers, drink coffee and sherry, and abandon my gloves and stockings. I looked like what Mother referred to as a “bohemian”, the sort of girl who would smoke, and live with an artist in a studio in Paris, posing naked for him.
I would not do anything like that, of course, but at Drumwithie I had encountered the world of women who would. The poets and painters Jamie had introduced me to loved women who let their hair down and left off their stays, who suffered the infidelity of their lovers and, I imagined, met tragic ends. Did the model who had posed for Ophelia not catch pneumonia after lying for so long in Millais’s cold bath? Or was that only a story?
Some of these women were poets themselves. Some were the sisters of poets and painters, and all were educated to a high level. I could never be like them: confident, striding through a man’s world, sure of their talent and influence. The only poet I knew, as yet unpublished, of course, would be the only one I would ever meet.
These thoughts drifted round and round while I brushed my hair. “I will not be jealous of them. I will not!” I said to the mirror. In a flurry, I gathered my shoes and stockings in one hand, intending to put them on downstairs, thrust the shawl Mother had sent me around my shoulders, and started purposefully down the spiral staircase. In the darkness at the bottom, I almost collided with someone.
“There you are at last!” It was Jamie. “I thought you were never going to wake up!”
“I had very strange dreams.” While I spoke I pulled the shawl around my shoulders and thrust my feet into my house shoes. “What terrible weather!”
“Hrrmph! There will be no cave-hunting or walking in the woods today!” He fell into step with me along the landing, taking my arm. “Good God, my father was odd about those woods, was he not? Even if he did court my mother there, that is hardly the fault of the woods. And the stupid thing is” – he gave me a sheepish look – “I used to go there all the time! When my father was at the surgery and my mother was in her room, my afternoons were free. I hardly ever had other boys to play with, so what else could I do but explore? Old Blairguthrie’s gillie used to try and chase me off sometimes, but he was about ninety.”
A thought struck me. “Is it odd too,” I suggested, “that your father has never before discussed his dislike of Blairguthrie’s woods with your grandmother? In twenty-one years?”
He stopped and looked at me. Something had evidently occurred to him too. His grip on my arm tightened and he took hold of my other arm as well. “You are quite right!” he exclaimed. “Just as I said, it has begun! You have made it happen! And now I will find the answer!”
“The answer to what?” I was baffled. “Not everything can be my responsibility, you know.”
He let go of my arms and thrust his hands in his pockets. “The answer to these unending questions of mine. Why do I feel so … discontented? No, that is not the right word. Unsettled?”
“Do you mean…” I began uncertainly, “because of your disagreement with your father?”
“No, not exactly.” Concentration narrowed his eyes as he searched for words. “It is more the feeling that something is wrong, here at the castle. Something has always been wrong.”
“I do not understand,” I confessed.
He sighed. When he spoke his voice held a mixture of bitterness and dismay. “Oh, Cat, I love Drumwithie very much, with the part of my heart that is left over from loving those who love me. But can you imagine what it has been like to grow up here?”
I could, and it broke my heart. A boy alone, cared for by a servant, only able to be with his adored mother when her nervous illness permitted. A strong, clever, artistic boy, who should have been at school with other boys, roughing and tumbling, bringing friends home for the holidays. Jamie had been indulged yet disciplined, protected from the world yet exposed to distressing events within the castle. What could a young child understand about his mother’s nervous collapse? How could he know why, between one day and the next, she no longer played with him in the garden they had made together? And later, on that day he had so vividly described to me, what horror had been impressed upon his fertile fourteen-year-old mind? Seven years later, the first thing he had shown me at the castle was the underground pool: the last place she had been, and the last connection he had with her.
“I think so,” I told him gently.
“What has happened to Mother and my fear that I will have to become a doctor against my will, or lose both my father’s regard and Drumwithie itself, is a burden.
All my life, I have felt that whatever I do, I have never been worthy of his love, or my mother’s. I am for ever at odds with the life I have been given.”
I was beginning to understand. Jamie was a naturally good-humoured young man, quick to joke, full of enthusiasm, and interested in any subject that came to hand. But he was also given to dark moments, when his face lost its joy and he did or said unkind things. If he considered himself never to have met either of his parents’ expectations, and feared the future, who could be surprised at these sudden glimpses of hidden unhappiness?
It was cold on the landing. I drew my shawl closer around my body, contemplating Jamie, wondering how to reply. As I did so, an imploring look came into his eyes.
“Please, my darling,” he said gently, “however far-fetched this sounds, I believe us to be on the brink of discovering something that will explain why I feel as I do.”
I breathed carefully, trying not to shiver. “The thing the Cait Sìth has been sent to find?”
He nodded. The imploring look had turned to sadness. “You are my only hope.” He took his hands from his pockets and held them out to me. I took them and nestled close to him. “Do not leave me, Cat,” he murmured.
“I will not.” I had no thought of such practicalities as the University, or my mother. I listened to Jamie’s heart beating in his chest and made my decision. “I will stay with you for ever, if you will let me.”
“And will you help me find … the answer?”
“Of course.”
Releasing me, he gave a yawn, stretched his fingers and examined his nails. As unexpectedly as ever, his mood had changed. “Now, had we better not go and find a fire? You are frozen.” He gazed at me for a moment, then bestowed upon me one of his warmest smiles. “Amid all this speculation, dearest, I can tell you something for absolutely certain. My grandmother will not attempt the hill in these conditions. We shall be free of her today.”
PART THREE
The Devil's Promise Page 12
