Jamie and I would never be able to get down to the cave. Even if we had MacGregor’s help with ropes and ladders, Doctor Hamish would never give his permission. And even if he could be persuaded, Mrs McAllister, who disapproved of the caves, would do everything she could to stop us.
I swayed and had to hold on to the wall.
“Are ye faint, miss?” Macgregor took a step towards me, ready to catch me if I fell.
“No, thank you. It is only the sight of all this destruction.”
He was satisfied and stood back. But it was not the state of the glenside that had affected me. It was my sudden conviction that Mrs McAllister did not want anyone going into the cave because there was something there she did not want discovered. Something, perhaps, to do with my father’s final visit to Drumwithie, and the long-kept secret he had left behind.
“Where are you, Cat!” Jamie’s boots crashed across the hall and he threw open the library door. I was sitting on the window seat, lost in my thoughts, my book abandoned on my lap.
“I was so nervous!” he cried. “And this fellow, this Dean or whatever he was, was an awful fop. I never trust a man who wears a monocle. But apparently he has the ear of the committee.”
“So the meeting was a success?”
“Well, he is writing to Father. The Dean of Humanities has to approve my application to study history. It is all pieces of paper, you know, being passed around between old men in old buildings.” He was standing in front of the fire, warming his hands. “And how have you spent your morning?”
“Making a discovery, actually.”
He sat down, interested.
“I went out with MacGregor and looked at the slide.”
“Indeed?” His eyes widened.
“A great deal of ground has fallen away, taking many trees with it. They are jumbled up on top of each other, farther down the slope.”
“What about the oak tree? Could you see it?”
“Not from the top, no. And, Jamie, it is quite impossible to get down the side of the glen.”
“Nonsense!” He pushed back his hair in irritation. “You have been listening to MacGregor, haven’t you? He never wants to do any more work than he has to.”
“MacGregor said nothing about it. It was clear to me that we cannot attempt it.”
“I will find that cave if I have to die in the process!”
“Jamie, now you are talking nonsense.” I swung my legs off the window seat and leaned towards him. “Listen to me. We cannot go. It is too dangerous.”
He looked at me sorrowfully. “I am not afraid of the danger and neither are you. That look is on your face again, the one you had yesterday, when you were trying to tell me something you did not believe.”
I sat back, feeling foolish. “I believe such an expedition will be foolhardy.”
“So you would abandon the ghost’s request?”
“Do not accuse me of that!”
“Then tell me the truth!”
I hesitated, hovering over my next sentence, wishing to persuade, not disappoint him. “We have very little information to go on. Even if we manage to get into the cave, we do not know what to look for. And even if we find something, we may not understand its significance. The ghost seemed to indicate the pine tree that marks the cave, but for all we know we have mistaken her meaning. We may do more harm than good. ”
His eyes narrowed. “We have not mistaken her meaning. You told me she confirmed that we were correct. You agreed you must come with me to the cave. But now you are saying neither of us should go! Where has your curiosity gone?”
Confounded by the logic of this argument, I decided to confess some of the truth. “I am still curious, of course. But I am anxious about what might be down there. What if we discover something that is better left undiscovered?”
He gazed at me, frowning slightly, his eyes busy. He could not fathom what I might mean. I suppressed feelings of disloyalty and the desire to blurt out my true fear, that the cave might contain secrets too hurtful for Jamie to bear. I tried one more feeble protest. “And anyway, we shall never get permission.”
“We do not need permission. We shall go after dark.”
“What?”
He smiled thinly at my loss of composure. “You, of all creatures, should be at home in the darkness.” He held out his hand and I instinctively took it. “Without you, Cat, none of this would have happened. The ghost needs you to see it through to its end. I do not understand your fears, but you will not let her down, will you?”
I had never been outside in the middle of the night before.
At one o’clock in the morning, I slid out of bed. I put on Jamie’s old clothes, covered my hair with a scarf and crept down the spiral stairs to the silent darkness of the landing. No moon shone; the clouds were too thick. But there was a sliver of light under Jamie’s sitting-room door. I did not need to knock. He was waiting for me.
He sat in a pool of lamplight at the table, wearing his jacket and cap, surrounded as usual by books and writing paper. When I entered he smiled with delight. Perhaps, right up until the last minute, he had not been sure I would come.
We did not speak as we made our way down the stairs and into the boot room. Once the door was closed behind us, Jamie took something from his pocket. In an instant, a beam of light flashed around the small room, brightest at its centre, but casting a halo around Jamie pointing it. I gasped. “What is that?”
“It is called a flashlight.” He turned it on his face so I could see that he was grinning. The beam gave him an eerie look, throwing the planes and hollows of his face into relief, as if painted for the stage. “An American invention. I stole it from Father’s desk when he was at work. Isn’t it a wonderful thing? No gas, no oil, no matches, not even any wires. You can take it anywhere and it will light your way.”
So he planned to visit the cave with the aid of a disembodied light, a torch with no flame. “What makes it work?” I asked, not quite believing him.
“Electricity, stored in these things called batteries. When they stop working, you put new ones in.” He reached into his other pocket and took out two cylindrical metal objects with The Ever Ready Electrical Company printed on the sides. He looked at me triumphantly. “And I stole the spare batteries too!”
I was impressed. “Very well,” I whispered as we tied our bootlaces by the light of the machine, “but I wish you had a flashlight for me.”
“One is enough,” said Jamie decisively, “because I will lead the way. Now, are you ready? The outside door is locked, but the window is merely latched. The sill is not too high for you, is it? Shall I lift you?”
The window was an ordinary square casement, about two feet wide. I could climb through such a space, if Jamie could. “The sill is not too high,” I told him. But as he reached for the window latch, I spoke again. “Jamie, what if the land slides again? What if we are injured, or killed?”
“Then I will die by the side of the woman I love!” he declared melodramatically. “But it will not happen,” he added, grinning. “I do not intend to die until I have astonished the world with my literary achievements. And like the best poets, I will meet my end by contracting tuberculosis or syphilis.” He paused. “Alternatively, I will do it by means of a flying accident.”
I clambered after him out of the window and dropped to my knees on the grass outside. It was so sodden with rain-water, the old trousers I wore were immediately wetted through. “Ugh!” I cried.
“Sshh!” He turned the flashlight off and in the darkness, we listened. Silence. Not even an owl’s cry. Nothing but the scent of the pine trees and the blackness of the chasm below Drumwithie’s rock.
Satisfied that no one had heard us, Jamie switched on the flashlight again, holding it close by his side, his fingers partly obscuring the beam. I held his other hand while we crossed the bridge and the patch of gorse to the lip of the valley. When we were out of sight of the house, he shone the full beam before us, swinging it from side to side,
illuminating the swathe of damage the rainstorm had done. It was a scar on the glen side, but happily enough, the slide had left the terrain more accessible. We no longer had to fight undergrowth or the low branches of trees, because much of what had been there before had disappeared down the hill.
We made surprisingly good progress. The ledge on which the tall pine tree stood had survived the slide, and the tree was still there, though the ground was no longer a carpet of pine needles. Debris lay all around it, stacked several feet up its trunk on the sloping side. In the artificial yellow–white of the flashlight beam, the stones and broken branches looked unreal, painted in the wrong colours.
Jamie stepped towards the edge, testing the ground before putting his weight on it. The mud was slippery, but under it was an outcrop of solid rock. “It is quite safe,” he said.
I looked over the edge. I could not see the cave entrance, but below us there was a clear path, carved horizontally along the valley side.
“You see?” said Jamie in excitement. “That is the path the tree fell across. Come on!”
Half stepping, half sliding, I followed him down the scree of mud and stones beneath the rock. Once our feet were on the path, the ground was level. Jamie pointed the flashlight. “Look!”
Where the great oak had lain for so many years there was a muddy, stony gap in the path. Beside it was a huge boulder, bigger than those that guarded the entrance to the other caves. And above that boulder was another, which stooped over the lower one like a protective parent. Between them, blacker than any of the surrounding blackness, was what could only be the entrance to the cave. Jamie gripped my hand, held the flashlight aloft, and we climbed in.
I do not know what I expected. Damp, slimy walls, years of dirt on the floor, bats and other nocturnal creatures, stalagmites and stalactites? I saw none of these. Before us lay what could only be described as a room. Protected from the elements by the two boulders, the cave had remained dry, as if it were a man-made outhouse instead of a natural feature. Jamie had told me that the caves under the castle had been used for storage for centuries, because they were so cold. This cave looked as though it could perform the function today.
The walls were of uneven rock, like the walls of the other caves, but the floor was level and the ceiling high enough for us to walk upright. We stood and looked around.
“There is nothing here,” I observed breathlessly. “Shall we go back now?”
Jamie ignored my suggestion. He shone the flashlight on the back wall. Deep in the cave, we saw a hole in the rock, just above the floor. Jamie knelt down and shone the flashlight. “It must lead to another cave.”
Kneeling beside him, I peered in. The hole was small, but not too small for a slim person to enter.
“You are smaller than I am,” he said. “You had better go in.”
“Why? There is nothing there.”
“How do you know that?” he asked in exasperation. “Stop being so nonsensical!”
He gave me the flashlight. The only way I could enter the hole was to lie on my stomach and crawl in, using my elbows to propel myself. Through my sleeves and trousers, my flesh was grazed by the rough surface of the rock. Inside, the ceiling was high enough for me to get to my feet, though I had to bend double. I took a few steps, then a few more, and suddenly the beam of the flashlight revealed a wall. I had come to the end of the passageway. When I saw what had been placed at the foot of the wall, my heart turned over. A ladies’ travelling box sat in polished-walnut splendour on the ancient floor.
This was what I had dreaded. A hiding place full of secrets. A box containing … what? Letters between those long-ago lovers, my father and Jamie’s mother? Evidence that Doctor Hamish was not telling the truth when he said that they had never met? Proof, once and for all, that Anne had kept a secret from her husband for twenty-one years, a secret so burdensome it had ruined her peace, and would now ruin Jamie’s?
My breath came jerkily. I had been handed the perfect solution. All I had to do was crawl back out of the second cave, feigning disappointment, and tell Jamie that there was nothing there. I would have to abandon the ghost and find an excuse to go back to Gilchester as soon as possible. At the end of the summer Jamie would go to university, and meet the sort of girls his grandmother wished him to meet. Gradually our letters would become infrequent, then cease. My heart would break, but Anne Hamilton’s secret would be safe for ever.
I turned to go out the way I had come, but as the flashlight beam wheeled round, I yelped in surprise. A face was emerging from the darkness of the narrow passageway. Only the face, though, and one arm; the rest of Jamie’s body was still in the hole. “I can’t get my other shoulder through!” he lamented.
“What are you doing?” I kept the flashlight on his face, hoping it would blind him to the box.
“I called to you but you didn’t hear, and I thought something might have happened to you. Are you all right? Get that light out of my eyes, will you, so I can see!”
When I did not, he lost patience. He could just reach me. His arm landed on my wrist like a battering-ram and knocked the flashlight from my hand. The suddenness of his action reminded me of the moment when he had hurled the lantern at the wall of the cave below the well. I shrieked, terrified that the flashlight would smash, and we would be left in the worst darkness I had ever known. But Providence was with me. The light did not go out. Jamie grasped it and shone it round the cave. “What’s that? A box? Cat, there’s a box in here!”
“You hurt me,” I told him, nursing my wrist. I felt cold, stupid, defeated. All I could hope was that the box was empty or full of ladies’ travelling things. “There was no need to do that. You are impossible!”
“Sorry,” he said, not sounding in the least sorry. His eyes followed the flashlight beam around the cave. “Did you find anything else?”
“No.”
“Then let’s get this box out. You push and I’ll pull.”
The box was quite light, though cumbersome in the small space. We manhandled it through the hole and I clambered out. Jamie placed the box on the smooth floor, propping the flashlight beside it. His trembling fingers travelled fruitlessly over the lid and sides. He could not open it.
“It must be locked, damn it,” he muttered in frustration. “But there’s no keyhole. How the devil do we open it?”
“I know how.” There was little point in pretending. If we did not open the box by the proper means, Jamie would take an axe to it. “My grandmother had such a box.”
I held it by the two front corners and squeezed with my thumb and forefinger. The mechanism inside slid along its groove and I lifted the lid. “It was designed to stop servants discovering secrets,” I told Jamie, propping the lid open with its little brass bracket. “Granny liked it because she didn’t have to remember where the key was.”
The inside of the lid was mirrored, and the box had four compartments, where bottles and brushes for a lady’s toilette had originally been stored. These had gone, and in their place were several pieces of folded paper, stacked in piles.
I eyed them in dread. Was I about to see my father’s familiar handwriting? My nerve failed me. I could not bear for Jamie and, worse still, Doctor Hamish, to discover what I suspected. “Please, Jamie,” I pleaded, “these things are clearly someone’s secrets. Do you not think we should leave them alone?”
“Of course not.” He scooped one pile out of its compartment. It was a collection of yellowing newspaper cuttings, tattered with age. “Now we have come this far, how can we leave them unread?” He turned the bundle over and over in his hand. “These cuttings are obviously important enough for someone to hide them down here. They must be about something scandalous, or at least interesting, Cat. How can you stand not to know what it is?”
Relief rushed over me. He was right; the contents of the box were more likely to commemorate some public event than the private one I had feared.
“Good God, listen!” He had opened the first. “This is from
The Scotsman, dated 1st February, 1888. The headline is Advertisement by Family of Missing Girl, and then it goes on to say, Mrs Jean McAllister of Drumwithie, Lothian, widow of the late Reverend Herbert McAllister of Stirling, has placed an advertisement in this newspaper, and in several other newspapers throughout the British Isles. Information is sought as to the whereabouts of her daughter, Miss Lucy McAllister, 16, who was last seen on 8th December last year. Her disappearance is a source of great distress to Mrs McAllister and her elder daughter, Miss Anne McAllister, who wait daily for news. Please see the advertisement on page 12 for further information.
Jamie was staring at me, his eyes wider and wilder than I had ever seen them. “Lucy McAllister? This cannot be right. There is no Lucy. My mother has no sister.” He consulted the cutting again. “Sixteen! Younger than you! If Mother had a sister, why does Father not know of her?” His eyes clouded in bewilderment. “And if he does, why has he never…” He looked again at the scrap of paper in his hand. “They have kept her existence secret from me, haven’t they? For God’s sake, Cat, why would they do that?”
Revulsion suddenly took hold of me. I did not wish to be in this pseudo-room hewn from rock, leafing through old secrets in the eerie, yellow light. I had no desire to know if Jamie had an aunt or what had happened to her. I longed only for my bed. “It must be very late by now,” I said urgently. “And I am very cold. Shall we take these things away with us, and read them in daylight, in the house?”
He was reluctant, but he began to take the bundles of papers from the box, and put them in the inside pockets of his jacket. “I suppose we had better leave the box here, then.” He held out a bundle to me. “Put some in the pockets of those trousers.”
The Devil's Promise Page 15
