‘Elspeth?’
‘Madam?’
She was a pretty little thing, very much in the style of storybook dairy maids, with her pink cheeks and her yellow curls peeping out from under her cap, and although she must work hard here at her butter churn and her cheese moulds there was as yet nothing of Mrs Palmer’s brawny competence about her arms and her soft little hands. A spike of anger stabbed me to think of some beastly lout frightening her in the dark and my resolve was strengthened. Before I could even begin to tiptoe my way towards the questions I must ask her, however, I heard Mrs Palmer’s boots clattering over the cobbles of the yard towards us.
‘I’m not going to take up much of your time,’ I managed to get out before she reached us. ‘I know you’re a busy girl.’
‘And dairy work cannot be kept waiting,’ said Mrs Palmer behind me, panting rather. ‘You’ve still the butter to finish, mind, Elspeth.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Elspeth, do carry on. I shan’t mind talking to your back under the circumstances. Not at all.’ Elspeth glanced uncertainly between her employer and me and then turned her back and plied her ladle once more. I repeated my spiel in as unconcerned a voice as I could muster, while Mrs Palmer hovered at my elbow, saying nothing.
‘I dinna go to the Rural, madam,’ said Elspeth when I was finished. ‘Not any more.’ She was holding the ladle over a dish, letting the skimmed cream drop from it in soft dollops.
‘So I hear,’ I said. ‘But I’d hoped you might come back if I promised to address your questions in my talk, you know.’
‘No, thank you, madam,’ Elspeth replied. ‘I canna see me goin’ back again.’ She scraped the last of the cream off her ladle with a wooden spoon and turned back to the bowl.
‘Don’t upset yourself,’ said Mrs Palmer. Then to me: ‘I’ll not have her vexed.’ It is, I suppose, very commendable in any employer to be concerned with her servant’s peace of mind and, if I could have been sure that was all that lay behind Mrs Palmer’s sprint up the garden and her anxious hovering now, I should have been absolutely on her side. But had young Elspeth been in need of such solicitousness – had she still been, after all these months, quite as fragile as all that – she would surely not have held such a steady hand above the cream dish, nor looked around so calmly at the sound of my approach. I knew from my nursing days that anyone still wobbly from shock would have jumped a foot in the air at my sudden entrance into their quiet room.
‘I can’t imagine what you’re referring to, Mrs Palmer,’ I said. ‘I don’t intend to ask anything that could possibly cause upset. What on earth do you mean?’
‘I stopped goin’ to the Rural,’ said Elspeth.
‘You don’t have to say anything,’ said Mrs Palmer. ‘You don’t have to speak to anyone about it ever again.’
‘I seem to have stumbled into something I shouldn’t have,’ I said. ‘I do apologise, Elspeth.’
‘That’s all right, madam,’ she said. ‘I dinna mind tellin’ you.’
‘Least said, soonest mended,’ said Mrs Palmer, a philosophy for which I have never had much time, unless by ‘mended’ one means ‘well-hidden but causing a nasty atmosphere for evermore’, but one which they go in for in quite a big way in Perthshire, and I imagined here in Fife too.
‘I was . . . I was . . .’ said Elspeth, turning round to face us again and folding her arms firmly across her chest. ‘Common assault, the policeman ca’ed it. And they nivver caught the man, if it was a man, and half the folk in the village think I made it up.’
‘Why would anyone think that?’ I said. ‘How horrid for you.’
‘It was,’ said Elspeth. ‘It is.’ She was far too well-trained a servant and I daresay too sweet a girl actually to glare at Mrs Palmer, but in her studious refusal even to look at the woman she got her point across.
‘Oh . . . do what you will,’ said Mrs Palmer, sounding as though she meant anything but, and she took herself back across the yard, leaving us. I heard the kitchen door slam shut.
‘Well,’ I said, in the camaraderie which always ensues when one of a trio sweeps off in a huff and leaves two calmer souls behind. ‘I take it Mrs Palmer is one of the ones who thinks you’re telling stories, Elspeth.’
‘I do not ken, madam,’ said Elspeth. ‘And that’s a fact. I sometimes canna make head nor tail of what she thinks.’ I took the chance to sit myself down unobtrusively on a wooden chair just beside the door, hoping that the girl would speak unbidden if I wore a sympathetic look and said nothing.
Perhaps, though, loquacity is not essential to the dairy maid’s art; Elspeth merely turned her back with a sigh and left me with all the work to do.
‘When you say assaulted . . .’ I began.
‘He rushed up ahint me, madam,’ she said. ‘Pushed me over – I put the knees oot o’ my good stockings and it was the first time I had had them on – pulled my hair so hard that some of it came oot. I thocht – I thocht—’
‘Well, you would,’ I said. ‘I should if it were me. They never caught him?’
‘They nivver did.’
‘And you have no idea yourself?’
‘None,’ she said firmly, unrolling a straw mat over the big bowl of milk and pushing it to the back of the table. It hit the stone wall with a clunk. ‘I didna recognise him and I couldna tell you now who he was or what he was, for I’ve thocht it all roond and roond until I’m birlin’ with it.’
‘But your first instinct – that night, I mean – was that he was just an ordinary man?’ I was determined to keep the facts firmly in hand. She nodded. ‘And if you didn’t recognise him you must have got a good look at him?’ I said, my heart leaping at this cheering thought.
‘No,’ she said slowly. She had put the dish of cream away on a dim shelf at the back of the room and now she turned and spoke to me directly, wiping her hands and appearing to be casting her mind back. ‘He come up ahint me and then like I said he flitted off again afore I had richted myself. But he was nobody I kent. I’ve never met anybody anything like that, not roond here, nor anywhere else.’
‘It couldn’t have been . . .’ My nerve crumbled. I could not name blameless men I had never even met, not on Mr Black’s say-so. I could not even, as it turned out, name Mr Black. ‘There’s no one you even suspect?’
‘I kept a sharp eye oot, at the kirk, and roond the village, and I would have kent right away if he had appeart again,’ she said. ‘There was . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Folk kept sayin’ . . .’
‘What?’
‘Well, John Christie up by there has no’ been around that very long and he’s no’ that well kent, but it wasna him, no matter whae whispers his name.’
‘You sound very certain,’ I said.
She had finished wiping her hands and now she laid them flat on the table, leaning towards me, remembering. ‘He was the richt height and all that. And John Christie’s a young laddie, fit for scaling’ dykes, to be sure. But the one that come at me that nicht was different. He was . . . how wid you say it?’ I bit my lip to keep from prompting her. ‘He was . . . sort of . . .’ She gave up. ‘It’s no’ even like he was big,’ she said. ‘If I’d seen him first I could mebbes have pushed him off me or ducked and run. I’m wee, but I’m strong and I’m fast on my feet when I have to be.’
‘When someone jumps out at you, he always has the advantage, Elspeth,’ I said. ‘You cannot berate yourself for being surprised.’
‘It wasna like that, though,’ she said. ‘He didna jump oot. He came doon the lane, I’m sure o’ it. Doon to meet me. At first I thocht it was maybe an owl’s wings I could hear, and then I thocht a deer was runnin’ in the field and I stopped to look for it. So I was keekin’ over the dyke when he landed on me.’
‘An owl?’ I said. ‘A deer? He must be remarkably light on his feet for you to think that.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Elspeth. ‘I never thocht before but I suppose he must be.’
‘Did you mention it
to the police?’ I ventured, but at that Elspeth seemed to come out of the trance of memory which had engulfed her. She sniffed decisively and seized a large jar which had been upended over the sink, dripping, then she shook it until a heap of new butter fell out onto the table with a flat slap.
‘I did, madam,’ she said. ‘And they jist laughed. I wouldna send for the police again to save my life or theirs.’
‘And once again, I have to agree with you,’ I told her. ‘It must have been absolutely infuriating.’
‘Aye well,’ said Elspeth. ‘Let them as got knocked over and their hair pulled oot by the roots say it’s all tattle, that’s all.’
I believed her, but just to make sure, I thought I would try a little experiment. I thought I would ask her a question she could not possibly be expecting and see if she blurted something out – always a mark of honesty – or if she took time and made something up, the way that honest people never need to do.
‘If you fell over and didn’t manage to push him off you,’ I said, ‘he must have been pretty close.’ I paused, then spoke sharply. ‘What did he smell of, Elspeth?’ The answer came back without a moment’s pause.
‘Eggs,’ she said. We both blinked.
‘On his breath?’ I asked her. ‘As though he had been eating them?’
‘No,’ said Elspeth, looking so startled at what had come out of her mouth that I was convinced she was telling me the plain unvarnished truth. ‘I mean, yes. I mean, it must have been, must it no’? How else could someone smell o’ eggs, after all?’
7
On my way to Mrs Fraser at Balniel, I was aware of a lessening of enthusiasm for the encounter, a dread of hearing about any more horridness. Mrs Fraser, however, proved to be just what I needed. Working on the principles of those German doctors who treat like, rather perversely I have aways considered, with like (while watering down their ingredients like an unscrupulous butler eking out the gin) Mrs Fraser’s whole-hearted embrace of the most fanciful elements of the dark stranger had me retreating determinedly into a conviction that he was no more than a farm labourer with an unfortunate kink. We went through the preliminaries: what aspect of household budgeting would interest her most? She had joined the Rural at first, with her husband’s blessing, almost at her husband’s urging, but she did not go now. Heavy emphasis on the ‘now’ and a significant look practically commanded me to ask why not and the floodgates opened.
‘Well, Mrs Gilver,’ she said, glancing over first one shoulder and then the other, although we were quite alone in her kitchen and all the doors were firmly closed, ‘I’ll just have time to tell you before the men get in for their piece. I had a verra Distressing Experience’ – the capital letters were clearly audible – ‘after the August meeting. On my road home, out there in my own lane that I’ve walked up and down, morning, noon and night, woman, girl and bairn, for I was born in Luckenlaw and lived there all my life until Eck brought me here last year. Aye, right there on that lane where I have walked in rain, hail, sleet and snow’ – this last was Fifish for ‘come rain or come shine’; I had heard the expression before – ‘I was visited by evil.’
‘Golly,’ I murmured, since she had left a pause to be filled.
‘Black as the night he was, fleet as the wind. I saw him coming for me over the field—’
‘Which field was that?’ I interjected, sensing that Mrs Fraser would not be thrown off her course by any number of interrupting questions.
‘The lang howe,’ she said. ‘West of the village road.’ I made a mental note and as I had expected, she took a deep breath and plunged on. ‘Saw him coming, flying over the ground, but could I move? Could I never. I was Transfixed’ – she drew nearer and dropped her voice – ‘and Ravaged.’ She drew back again the better to view the effect she caused in me.
‘Heavens,’ I supplied and she nodded gravely.
‘Ravaged,’ she said. ‘He streamed over the dyke and just lunged at me. Knocked me clean off my feet, pinching at me, plucking at me, all the time breathing his hot breath on me.’
‘Did you scream?’ I asked. She looked as though she could put up a pretty fair bellow if she tried.
‘He had his hand over my mouth,’ she told me. ‘A grip like iron it was too.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I prayed,’ she said. ‘And he heard me.’
‘He heard you praying?’ I echoed. ‘What did he do then?’
‘No,’ said Mrs Fraser. ‘I mean, He heard me and He answered my prayers.’ I must have looked sceptical, for she hurried to assure me. ‘I cannot explain it any other way,’ she said. ‘For as soon as it had started it stopped again. Up he got and off he swooped, back over the dyke into the field. I just thank the Lord I have always lived a good life and asked for nothing until that moment. Aye, He heard my prayers.’
I should have been happier to have some other, rather more mundane, way to account for the abrupt end to the ravagement, but I thought it most politic to say nothing. Instead I decided to attack on another flank.
‘I don’t suppose that you recognised him, did you?’ I began. ‘I mean, I know that had you recognised him at the time you would have said something, but thinking it over since, have you ever thought of who it might be?’
‘Certainly, I recognised him,’ said Mrs Fraser.
‘John Christie?’ I said, before I could help it.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Mrs Fraser. ‘His name’s been all around the place. He’s an incomer. Lives up there on his own and by all accounts he’s a bit of a queer one, although his notions are no more daft than many I’ve heard from old enough to know better. He’s a tenant of those Howies, you know, and they’re not liked. Oh yes, it would have suited some folk down to the ground to blame Jockie Christie.’
‘But it wasn’t him?’ I guessed.
‘It was not,’ she said stoutly. ‘I knew right away who it was and I went straight to Mr Tait at the manse to tell him. I’m surprised, if ye’re staying there, that Mr Tait hasn’t told you.’ As was I.
‘And?’ I prompted. ‘Who was the man? Who was this dark stranger?’
‘Oh, it was no stranger,’ said Mrs Fraser. ‘It was Himself.’
I ran quickly through the possibilities that this extraordinary statement seemed to offer. She could not mean that it was Mr Tait himself; anyone less snaky could hardly be imagined. Nor could she possibly be hinting that it was a visitation from God or one of His angels. For one thing, He would hardly swoop over dykes and knock people down, and for another, visions of God were far too theatrical for the likes of Mrs Fraser. No, there was only one being by whom a self-respecting Fife housewife would submit to being bothered on a dark night.
‘Ah,’ I said.
‘Aye,’ said Mrs Fraser. ‘He doesn’t ayeways come on cloven hooves.’
‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘Well, I’m not surprised that you opted for Mr Tait then, in preference to the police.’
‘You’d think,’ said Mrs Fraser with some asperity. ‘Him being a minister o’ the kirk. But he’s all for it.’
Again, I forced myself to stay within the bounds of reason. She could not possibly mean what her words implied. I took a guess.
‘All for the Rural?’ I said. ‘All for the gallivanting which opened the door to . . . it?’
‘Aye, there’s that for sure,’ said Mrs Fraser. ‘The devil watches, waits and picks his time, right enough. But it’s not that I was meaning. Mr Tait does not believe in keeping out of evil’s way. He invites evil in. Mr Tait has unleashed the beast.’
‘He’s done wh . . .’ I began.
‘And given it succour,’ said Mrs Fraser.
I took my leave rather hurriedly after that, as might well be imagined, but on my way out of the door I did steel myself enough to ask one question.
‘Please don’t think me prurient, Mrs Fraser,’ I said, ‘but is it true what they always say? What did this beast with his hot breath and his hand clamped over your mouth . . . What did he smell of? Can you
remember?’
Mrs Fraser lifted her chin in the air as though sniffing at the memory.
‘Beer?’ she ventured, but she shook her head and tried again. ‘No, not beer. But definitely yeast.’
‘Yeast?’ I had been ready for eggs, of course.
‘Yeast,’ she said again.
What did she mean? I asked myself as I retraced my path back to the village. Mr Tait unleashed the beast? What could she possibly mean? I marched straight back to the manse to ask him.
‘Yes,’ said Mr Tait, removing his spectacles and rubbing the bridge of his nose. I was perched on the hard chair in front of his desk where Mr Black had been but, unlike Mr Black, I was beginning to feel my self-righteous indignation seeping away. ‘Mrs Fraser no longer believes that I am a right-thinking man, you see. And so she imagines I am quite happy to see my parishioners being ravaged by evil spirits in the night.’
I was speechless.
‘It was most unfortunate,’ Mr Tait went on. ‘Nothing to do with our current troubles of course. This was years ago. When the archaeologists came.’
‘To open the chamber?’ I said. ‘This chamber certainly does keep popping up, doesn’t it?’
‘Nice chaps,’ Mr Tait said, ignoring me. ‘Two of them lodged here with us. Well anyway, they found a body.’
‘In a burial chamber?’ I asked drily, expecting another of Mr Tait’s teases.
‘Oh certainly,’ he said. ‘There were numerous cists in there and a sort of sarcophagus in pride of place too. But as well as those there was a body. Unembalmed and unsheltered, just lying on the floor.’
Bury Her Deep Page 10
