The Devil's Promise

by Veronica Bennett

  “Yes,” agreed Jamie. “And even better when the oak tree fell and blocked the entrance.”

  Mrs McAllister’s chin began to wobble and she took a lace-trimmed handkerchief from her pocket. “That was a gift from God!” she said, wiping her eyes. “But what God giveth, He taketh away. When MacGregor came in the other day and said the land had slid again, I prayed the tree would not be dislodged. But God knows best.”

  Neither Jamie nor I spoke; there seemed nothing to say that would comfort her. She wept for a few moments, then, as she began to recover, her eyes fell on me. With a faint smile, she addressed me. “You are dark like Lucy was, Catriona. She even had a similar shape of eye, though yours have quite a different expression. As for your figure and your way of moving, you are quick and light like she was. Never still, always wanting to be outdoors, unless she was bent over one of her drawings. A creature from another world, my husband used to say, quite unlike Anne, who was quiet and all too human.” She thought for a moment, the smile fading. “Though Anne, it must be said, had the greater share of beauty.”

  “A creature from another world,” repeated Jamie. He fixed me with his green gaze. “Our Cait Sìth, who came from the faeries to find Lucy for me.” His eyes slid to Mrs McAllister. “Do you not agree, Grandmother, that without Cat none of this would have happened? I would still be unaware that I am a changeling, and not at all who I thought I was.”

  Embarrassed, I began to make apologies to Mrs McAllister. But she interrupted me. “I do agree. There is something of the faeries about you, Catriona, as there was about Lucy. And the power of the faeries is great, though in this modern world, many deny it. They have our human lives, and deaths, in their grasp.”

  She paused and tilted her head towards Jamie. “So you will return the letters to the box, my dear?”

  I had never heard her use a term of endearment towards her grandson before. “Of course, Grandmother,” he said. Then something occurred to him. “But may I keep the photographs? Of my mother in her best dress? And the wedding?”

  She bowed her permission in her gracious way. “And now, I had better get dressed. We shall meet again this evening.”

  She began to climb the stairs, a mass of figured crêpe de Chine billowing in her wake, and her loose sleeves floating at her wrists. Jamie and I watched her in silence until she disappeared around the corner of the landing.

  “What are you so anxious to speak to your father about?” I asked him again.

  He gave me a bemused look. “About you. You are the only loose end left.”

  “I am not a loose end!” I said, offended. “What nonsense you talk!”

  “You are so impatient,” he said, putting his arms around me. “You must wait and see.”

  After supper the doctor suggested we take our coffee outside into the garden. Jamie helped Bridie fetch the wrought-iron table and chairs, and we settled ourselves on the west-facing lawn.

  The evening light was glorious in itself, but as it fell on the castle walls it was an especially beautiful sight, burnishing the stone to grey–gold, and the windows to jewels. The sky was as pink as a silk petticoat above the refreshed greens of the glen. And in the distance lay the blue mountains. Drumwithie stood, square and shining, as it always had.

  In Doctor Hamish’s eyes the haunted look of last night had given way to the fatigue of a long day. But he was calm. Mrs McAllister looked drawn and seemed loath to talk, and there were shadows under Jamie’s eyes. As they drank their coffee in quiet contemplation, in all their faces I saw the bewilderment that sudden bereavement brings.

  All evening I had been possessed of a restlessness unlike any I had ever known. My heartbeat would not settle. It murmured unnervingly, as if in anticipation of something unknown. I had eaten so little supper the doctor had been concerned, but my stomach seemed to be in the wrong place, much higher up than usual, and I had found it impossible to swallow.

  I put down my coffee cup and gathered my skirt. “It is such a lovely evening, I think I’ll go for a walk,” I announced, to no one in particular.

  None of them moved to accompany me; each seemed preoccupied. I was anxious to exercise my limbs and hoped the view of the valley would calm me. I stood up, meaning to set off in the direction of Anne’s garden. But I had not taken two steps before the doctor spoke again. “Catriona, my dear, do not leave us.”

  I stopped beside his chair. He took hold of my arm lightly. “I would like to speak with you about something, and I fear I will not get the chance again for a while.” He paused, weighing his words. “I must go to Edinburgh tomorrow, for several days, and I do not wish you, or anyone else, to make any hasty decisions in my absence.”

  I waited uncertainly. What decisions did he mean?

  “About the future,” he continued. He felt for the silver cigarette case, took out a cigarette and tapped it absent-mindedly on the lid. I watched, seeing my father’s fingers doing the same thing, on the same cigarette case. “Your future, Catriona. Do you have any thoughts on the matter?”

  I could not get my breath. I fumbled for an answer. “I expect I will go home to Mother.”

  “Indeed.” The cigarette remained unlit between the doctor’s fingers. He fixed me with his steady, sensible, doctor’s gaze. “So you are still of a mind to do what you described to us: stay at Chester House until you are married and eventually inherit Graham’s Wholesome Foods?” he asked.

  I turned and looked at Jamie. I could not help myself. He responded with a cool, inscrutable gaze. Mrs McAllister, who had closed her eyes, opened them again. I turned back to face the doctor. “Well…” I ventured uncertainly, then stopped. I did not know what to say.

  “Or will you allow me to present you with an alternative suggestion?” he asked. “One that I can take only partial credit for, but have been charged with imparting to you?”

  I nodded, silenced by expectation. Though he was sitting where I could not see him, I sensed Jamie’s expectation too.

  “I am convinced,” continued the doctor, “and I would very easily convince your dear mother that you would never be comfortable in the life she envisages for you. I believe Miss Catriona Graham would rather be educated and free to enter a profession that admits women, the number of which is growing every year. Am I right?”

  My mouth fell open. I closed it again, my brain racing. But I had no breath to make a reply. I must have been staring at the doctor as if he had gone mad. I managed a nod, but that was all.

  “Very well,” he said with satisfaction. He struck a match and lit his cigarette at last. “Then I will leave Jamie to tell you of the plan we have been hatching,” he said, blowing out the first puff of smoke. “I can see he is itching to do so.”

  “Behold Miss Graham, future student of the University of Edinburgh!” came Jamie’s voice from behind me.

  I spun round, still too astonished to speak. His face was full of what I could only describe as many kinds of light. The light of the setting sun, the light of joy, and the light of love.

  “Will you stay here at Drumwithie with us?” he asked. “And be tutored by Father and others, perhaps my old tutors – the mathematics chap was pretty good – in preparation for the examinations? You will go to the University too. And Father will get his wish of not leaving Drumwithie in the hands of a wastrel, because what is mine, my dearest Cat, will be yours.”

  I went on standing there, in the landscape yellowed by the lowering sun. Jamie, his father and his grandmother went on sitting in the garden chairs, with the coffee pot cooling on the table and the smoke from the doctor’s cigarette making blue curls in the still air. This moment, when such unimaginable happiness descended upon me, seemed suspended in space, as immoveable as a star.

  “Oh, thank you, thank you!” I blurted. My heart was pounding so hard I had to put my hands over it. I felt tears sting my eyelids. “I am so happy … I cannot express… Jamie, this is so wonderful!”

  He came and stood beside me, and the golden sun fell on his golde
n hair. “It is you, our Cait Sìth sent from the faeries, who have made this happiness,” he said. “Mine, my father’s, my own.” He glanced at his grandmother, who raised her eyebrows and nodded at me. “You see, even Grandmother, who can scarcely believe there are any professional women, approves.” He took my hands in both of his. “She loves you as we all do, darling Cat.”

  I clasped his hands tightly. He drew me towards him and kissed me on each cheek. “Catriona Graham, I gave you my promise once that I would love and care for you always,” he said solemnly. “Well, I still hold to that promise.”

  “And I promise too.” My voice was shaky. “James Buchanan, I will love and care for you always.”

  It was a betrothal, though an unconventional one. The doctor and Mrs McAllister rose and shook our hands, and we stood there in the lengthening shadow of the castle walls until the sun had disappeared below the mountains, and Drumwithie was in darkness again.

  Ten days later

  “This is the place.”

  Doctor Hamish prodded the earth with his stick. Jamie and I stood beside him, breathless from our climb through Blairguthrie’s woods. Though autumn would soon be upon us, the weather was warm and humid. But I could not take off my hat or coat. It would not be respectful to the memory of the person we had come to honour.

  Jamie stepped forward and laid a small brass plaque upon the ground. We all looked at it, set there on a mossy, leaf-strewn patch of earth that was too shaded from the sunlight for any grass to grow. It had not been possible to engrave it with the usual sort of epitaph for a child, because this burial had been illegal and must remain secret. Instead, it bore one word only: Cat.

  It had been Jamie’s idea. If anyone should chance upon the plaque, he had declared, they would assume it marked the burial place of a beloved pet. Mrs McAllister had approved; it had been a cat, of sorts, that had brought her second grandson back to her.

  “The soil is loose here,” observed Doctor Hamish. His voice was serious, but not distressed. “We knew these woods so well, Anne and I, it was easy for us to find a convenient spot.”

  I thought how different the place must have been on that long-ago January day. The treetops had perhaps been agitated by the wind, or sleet had fallen in freezing spikes that stung the faces of the man and the woman as they lowered their baby into his grave. And the enormity of the secret they had kept for all these years struck me once again: if Lucy had not been so strictly bound by an unforgiving society’s rules, she would never have given up her child. Jamie would have grown up at the Lodge with his mother and grandmother, and gone to school like other boys. Anne might never have become ill, and another boy might have been born to her. This little boy and his cousin, like Hamish Buchanan and David Graham before them, would have grown to love Drumwithie, spending happy days in this wild and beautiful landscape.

  But society’s rules could not be broken. I wondered ruefully if the twenty-one years that had passed had changed those rules at all. New Georgians we might be, and women might achieve the vote and enter professions, as Doctor Hamish predicted. But if I were to have a baby without a husband, would my own mother welcome me and my child to Chester House and brave the social stigma of such a scandalous event? I doubted it.

  I shuddered, violently enough for Jamie to step closer and draw my arm around his waist. Doctor Hamish’s eyes were closed; I wondered if he was praying. His brow was not furrowed or his mouth drawn. He looked at peace.

  All around us was silence. I gazed down at my name, alert for a sound which never came. No birds sang; no leaves rustled. And high above, where the trees met the sky, no crows’ wings beat their death knell. They no longer held the power to herald disaster. The master of Drumwithie, his heir, his family and those who served them, were free.

  THE END

  ANGELMONSTER

  “I saw no one but him, dreaming or waking. I fell in love so madly, I almost did not recognize it as love. It was madness and nothing else.“

  The story of Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Bysshe Shelley is one of the most famous love stories of all time – passionate yet volatile, heart-warming yet heart-breaking – and the backdrop to the writing of the world-famous novel Frankenstein.

  “Those in search of a good story need look no further.” The Guardian

  “A haunting story, beautifully written and rich in historical detail.” The Bookseller

  THE DEVIL’S

  PROMISE

  Veronica Bennett was an English lecturer for many years, but now writes full-time. In 2011, she was elected a Hawthornden Fellow, and spent four weeks at the International Writers’ Retreat at Hawthornden Castle, Scotland. “I worked on other books while I was there,” she says, “but the atmosphere and setting of Hawthornden made such an impression that I decided to set my next historical novel in a Scottish castle. What happens in the book is imaginary, of course, but without my stay at a real castle I would never have envisaged the fictional one. I am grateful to Mrs Drue Heinz and the Hawthornden Foundation for making The Devil’s Promise possible.” Veronica lives in Middlesex with her husband, and has an adult son and daughter.

  Books by the same author

  Angelmonster

  The Boy-free Zone

  Cassandra’s Sister

  Fish Feet

  Monkey

  Shakespeare’s Apprentice

  Vice and Virtue

  For younger readers

  Dandelion and Bobcat

  The Poppy Love series

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. All statements, activities, stunts, descriptions, information and material of any other kind contained herein are included for entertainment purposes only and should not be relied on for accuracy or replicated as they may result in injury.

  First published 2013 by Walker Books Ltd

  87 Vauxhall Walk, London SE11 5HJ

  Text © 2013 Veronica Bennett

  Cover illustration © 2013 Adam McCauley

  The right of Veronica Bennett to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, taping and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:

  a catalogue record for this bookis available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-4063-5102-6 (ePub)

  www.walker.co.uk