‘Why have you organised this visit to the chamber?’ I asked. Mr Tait laughed lustily again and leaned over from his chair to squeeze my knee and shake me in a friendly fashion.
‘That’s my girl!’ he said. ‘Nose back to the ground, eh? I thought it the best way to show the grave robbers that their plan has been foiled. And, to be honest, I meant what I said about starting to treat the place with a little more architectural and historical interest and a little less reverence. It’s one thing to nod but I don’t want to be seen to honour the old ways. That wouldn’t do at all.’
‘To show the grave robbers . . . ?’ I echoed. ‘Do you mean they’re in the party?’ I desperately tried to remember the names he and Lorna had suggested they invite. The Howies, the Miss Mortons, Miss Lindsay and her postmistress friend.
‘Good Lord no,’ said Mr Tait. ‘That would look far too pointed even if I knew who they were. No, I’m just asking the proper people and trusting that village gossip will ensure it gets back to the ears of those who need to hear it. Miss McCallum talks to everyone over that post office counter, you know.’
It was a gem of a plan, subtle and yet bound to be effective, and I felt some admiration for Mr Tait for having thought of it, even while I felt a little pity for the unknowing guests being used to execute it for him. I was seeing him in a new light today, between this chamber visit and the quiet but effective finding of a new place to bury the bones. I wondered how much of the tale he had told the other minister who now sheltered the poor girl in his kirkyard, whether he had come clean or had acted as he had with me, while enticing me into taking the case; that is, told his colleague as much as he had to and as little as he could, planning to reveal the rest when it was too late to do anything but dig the wretched thing up again, which I imagined no man of the cloth would lightly do.
Just then an even more unwelcome and unsettling thought struck me. Was that the extent of Mr Tait’s toying with me or was it even worse? Perhaps I was being fanciful, but it had seemed to me more than once that Mr Tait’s only surprise whenever I had told him of some little discovery, some little step forward in the case, was that I had got there, or got there so quickly and never, not once, surprise at where I had got. Was he using me to solve a mystery which had him stumped or did he feel he had better not know, that it would be much more suitable if I were the one who found it out?
I vowed that, from that moment on, I should keep a weather eye on Mr Tait. I would no longer trot along like a good little bloodhound and report my latest findings, the better to be shown the next bit of path towards where he was guiding me. Instead, I would plough my own furrow and find out, in the name of truth, just what the devil was going on.
We were six for luncheon the following day after church, Miss McCallum, Miss Lindsay, the Taits, ‘Captain Watson’ and me; making for a mood around the table which was somewhere between high spirits and hysteria, following as it did a terribly brimstone-ish sermon – surely designed to wag a finger at the culprits, should they be in the congregation, without alerting any of the innocent to what was going on – and preceding an outing which was a kind of Sunday School Trip imagined by Edgar Allan Poe. Added to that there was Lorna’s solicitousness over her beloved Captain, which came out as relentless maternal clucking, Miss Lindsay and Miss McCallum’s frosty disapproval of the clucking, Miss Lindsay’s attempts to engage Alec in Arty Talk, Alec’s mounting terror that this would uncover him for the sham he was, Miss McCallum’s attempts to turn the talk to politics to find out if Captain Watson’s captaincy or artistry was the determining factor there, Alec’s mounting terror that she would uncover him for the Tory that he was and conclude that he could not be an artist too, Mr Tait’s open appraisal of him, which was thankfully silent because if it had taken the form of words it would only too obviously have been a series of questions on his background, prospects and intentions, Alec’s increasingly strained performance of upstanding chap (for Mr Tait), right-thinking, or rather left-thinking, modern young man (for Miss McCallum), talented and dedicated avant-garde artist (for Miss Lindsay) and friendly but unenthralled new acquaintance (for Lorna), and finally my dread that the rising bubbles of hilarity could not be contained inside my chest much longer and that any minute I was going to hiss like a steam kettle and have to slide off my chair to roll about under the table, screaming.
Mr Tait carved thin slices off the roast beef, and Lorna urged everyone – but especially Alec – to another and yet another of the Yorkshire puddings, little round ones as light and crisp as meringues and quite unlike the slab of flannel which usually masquerades as Yorkshire pudding north of the border. Even my own dear Mrs Tilling cannot quite shake off the ancestral influence when it comes to Yorkshire puddings: hundreds of years’ worth of suet, after all, must eventually seep into the very soul.
‘Mrs Wolstenthwaite’s Yorkshire puddings are Father’s very favourite thing,’ said Lorna. ‘But he can get terribly caught up after church and end by sitting down to everything dried up and nasty at half-past three.’
‘We are more fortunate today, my dear,’ said Mr Tait.
‘And I’m so happy to have you, Captain Watson,’ she went on. ‘I hate to think of you, down there all alone, frying sausages over a gas ring, while we sit down to such feasts. Would you be offended by an open invitation to luncheon any day you care to join us?’
Since I was sure that Alec could no more fry a sausage than make these little puffs of nothing with which I was at that moment mopping up gravy as though I had not eaten for a week, I thought that an open invitation to breakfast, luncheon, tea and supper would be a godsend.
Finally, when the large bowl of custard trifle had been finished, with Alec manfully spooning away the two helpings Lorna had insisted on serving him, and we were toying with our coffee cups, some of the pressure was relieved by the sound of the rather clanking manse doorbell.
‘Aha,’ said Mr Tait. ‘I was beginning to worry that there had been some trouble on the road. Lorna?’
Lorna got up, giving me one of her most beaming smiles, and Mr Tait followed her. I saw him noticing Alec’s unthinking rise as Lorna left the table and nodding in satisfaction at him for the properness of the little chivalry, just as Miss McCallum scowled at him for the same.
‘Mrs Gilver,’ said Mr Tait, ‘would you step outside? We have a lovely surprise for you, Lorna and me.’ Intrigued, I folded my napkin and went after them, noting Alec jerking upwards again and Miss McCallum’s eyebrows jerking down. Outside in the hall, the housemaid was just turning the handle and hauling open the front door and there on the porch stood my lovely surprise.
‘Hugh!’ I exclaimed. Lorna clapped her hands in glee and then held them together under her chin, almost luminous with vicarious romance. Really, she was in for a dreadful let-down if she ever did manage to land a husband of her own.
‘Sir, Miss Tait,’ said Hugh, very properly, causing the beacon of Lorna’s smile to dim just a little. ‘Dandy,’ he said at last.
‘Hugh!’ I said again even louder, loud enough to penetrate the dining-room door. ‘Darling!’ I rushed forward and threw my arms around him, almost knocking him over since he was – understandably – reeling from the shock of the greeting. Thankfully, we avoided toppling onto the porch floor and having to untangle ourselves. ‘What a lovely treat to see you. Oh Mr Tait, you are a poppet, to remember how much Hugh wanted to come, isn’t he, darling?’ Hugh was stony with outrage; Mr Tait was one of his most revered boyhood heroes – poppet, indeed!
Then, unable to think of anything else, I compounded the insult by saying to Hugh in that flirtatious but bossy voice which we both hate to hear issuing from a wife to her husband and which I never use on him: ‘Now, darling, you must come and say hello to Bunty. She always misses you so when I take her away. Come along, this way.’ I threaded my arm through his and dragged him along the passage to the boot-room near the side door where Bunty had been quartered and, since he could hardly wrest himself from my grip in front of
the Taits, he was forced to come with me.
‘What’s got into you?’ he said, when the boot-room door was closed behind us and I was trying to stop Bunty from giving him too enthusiastic a welcome. She never does get the plain message which is fired in her direction every time her path crosses Hugh’s. She still thinks he loves her.
‘What?’ I said, playing for time.
‘Have you been drinking?’ said Hugh. As an explanation this had its merits, but he could too easily find out that it was not true.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I just had to escape for a minute.’
‘Escape?’ said Hugh coldly.
‘There’s the most tremendous subterranean farce going on in the dining room,’ I said. ‘An artist, a suffragette and a socialist all squaring up to one another and poor Lorna Tait trying to keep things smooth. I’ve been fighting the giggles all through luncheon and when you gave me an excuse not to go back in, I couldn’t resist it.’
It worked. Hugh, during my outburst in the hall, had been looking at me, really looking at me, but now he was back to normal again – viewing me – and, also as normal, viewing me with some disdain.
‘I can’t see what’s funny about that,’ he said. Artists, socialists and suffragettes were some of Hugh’s least favourite characters in the world, and I am sure that the last time he had succumbed to a fit of helpless giggles was back in the days when he was in Mr Tait’s catechism class at Kingoldrum. ‘Now, before I’m made to look even more of a fool than I’ve been made to look already . . .’ He gave me a glare – again very much the norm, for being glared at is much more like being viewed than being looked at, really – and strode out of the room.
I hurried after him and caught up with him in the dining-room doorway. Beyond I could see Miss McCallum looking rather flushed, Miss Lindsay looking rather knowing, and Lorna with her mouth turned down at the corners and her shoulders in a slump.
‘Artistic temperament, I daresay,’ Mr Tait was saying. ‘We’ve lost Captain Watson, Mrs Gilver. He rushed out while Hugh was saying hello to Bunty.’
‘He suddenly went still when you were out of the room,’ Miss Lindsay explained. ‘Physically blanched, leapt up and said he had to get home immediately because he’d had a tremendous idea for a new work. I thought for a minute he was going to climb out of the window.’
After this inauspicious start to the proceedings, Hugh was at his stiffest and most quellingly polite to everyone in the party for the rest of the afternoon, and when the Howies arrived, dressed as outlandishly as ever, each in her own way, giggling like two schoolgirls on a spree, he became icy with disapproval for the whole bally lot of us and even rather short with Mr Tait for putting such a collection of individuals together and then inviting Hugh to make one of their number.
We set off for the burial chamber of the Lucken Law in three cars, making quite a procession as we swept out of the gates. Hugh was conveying Mr Tait, naturally, and Miss McCallum and Miss Lindsay, showing a marked lack of sisterly respect, I thought, had plumped to be driven by him rather than me. Since Vashti Howie had a two-seater, that left Lorna and me to bring up the rear and me alone to try to raise Lorna’s bruised spirits after the abrupt departure of the Captain.
‘Perhaps you can show him the chamber another day,’ I said. ‘Just the two of you, I mean. I – um – I’d have thought that if he’s interested in its . . . ambience, or its . . . ancient – um – aura, it would be far preferable for him to see it without the rest of us all galumphing around spoiling things.’
This worked rather too well, I thought, if my object was simply to cheer Lorna up and not to put Alec in danger of an inescapable tryst. She looked positively entranced by the notion and there was a long dreamy silence before she spoke again.
‘They’ll be turning off in a minute, Mrs Gilver,’ she said. ‘Get ready to slow down.’ We had left the village and worked our way around the law beyond the gateposts of Luck House – really, the Howies had made a terribly inefficient journey down to the manse to meet us – when the two cars in front swung in at a road end and trundled down a drive to where a farmhouse sat, tucked under the slope of the hill above it. We passed straight through the farmyard and out the other side, ending up in a little cleft at the bottom of what was almost a cliff side, as though a portion of the hill itself had been carved away to make room for the farm. There was just space enough for the three motor cars side-by-side, although Mr Tait – the bulkiest of the party – had to squeeze out of Hugh’s passenger door with a little shimmy.
Lorna, as I said, was her cheerful self again; the two spinster ladies were very serious and correct, with pencils and notebooks ready to sketch points of interest or copy down ancient runes; Hugh was unbending slightly at the prospect of such an utterly Boy’s Own Paper adventure as was facing him. The surprise amongst our number came from the Howies. I had been expecting the usual valiant good cheer overlying the rather comical despondency, but they were as genuinely excited, keyed up almost, as I had ever seen them. Nicolette’s face showed a hectic flush and she smoked intently, not waving the cigarette around in a long holder, but puffing on it with every breath, her eyes darting. Vashti, in contrast, was as pale as her muddy complexion could ever get and rather glittery about the eyes, which flared as she caught me looking at her.
‘I’ve been dying to get a look at the place,’ said Nicolette, ‘but now that I’m here . . .’
‘It’s giving you the creeps?’ I asked sympathetically.
‘Absolutely the willies,’ she said. ‘One envies Miss Lindsay with her sketchbook. She obviously has no qualms.’
‘We don’t have to go,’ muttered Vashti. ‘I don’t think I dare.’
‘Dare what?’ I said. ‘You’re surely not worried about a mummy’s curse, are you? Haven’t there been archaeologists and university scientists all over the place time and again?’ If truth be told, I was feeling rather less hearty than this made me sound, for the last twenty-four hours had seen some terribly murky deeds unfold: this chamber was very far from being a mere historical site in some people’s reckoning.
‘Scoff all you want to,’ said Vashti. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth . . .’ But I was with Mr Tait on that one: firmly believing that there were rather fewer things in heaven and earth than one was wont to hear tales of, and that stout refusal to give the tales credence was perhaps best all round.
Standing just where the little cleft became almost a cave, overhung most disquietingly with jagged plates of fissured rock which looked as though they might slide out of place at any moment and plummet, spike first, to the earth, Mr Tait was gathering everyone’s attention.
‘Now then,’ he said, ‘it is perfectly safe inside, solid rock and all most carefully pinned and buttressed by our friends from the university not five years ago, so there is no danger. I have a lantern here, and Hugh has another. You don’t mind coming at the back, Hugh, do you? The going is not arduous – I see you have all been sensible and worn stout shoes. So let us begin.’
He turned and walked into the cave and then, moving to one side, he disappeared, leaving the rest of us to give a collective gasp.
‘Come along,’ said Mr Tait’s voice, sounding rather muffled. Miss McCallum strode after him and stopped at the point where he had vanished, standing with her hands on her hips, looking upwards, then she too walked as though into the solid face of the rock facing her. I followed.
Disappointingly, although I could understand how Mr Tait might have been unable to resist the little show he had given us, there was no mouth of a tunnel, tiny doorway with odd symbols carved above it, or any other fantastical portal to be found there, but just a set of rough steps which led between outcrops of rock, hidden from view and so lending themselves to theatricality, but otherwise, with their edging of brambles, and withered stinging nettle, looking very much like many another flight of steps hacked into a hillside up and down which I had been dragged during the country walks which punctuated the early years of
my marriage. I started to climb, ignoring the brush of gorse and bracken against my skirt and hoping that we were not expected to go too far up the law on the outside before being admitted to its secret innards.
We went quite far enough, high above the hawthorn and elder which clothed the lower slopes and ending with a splendid view – almost worth it – of Wester and Over Luck Farms although the Mains was hidden by the trees below us. At last Mr Tait stopped, stepping off the path onto a flat place on the cropped grass, puffing like a bull walrus and with his spectacles slightly misted, and waited for everyone following to catch up with him.
‘Round here,’ he said. ‘Here we are,’ and he picked his way along a path as narrow as a sheep track which wound around and slightly downwards, veering out alarmingly to pass a rather twisted little rowan which was just about managing to cling to the rocky slope. On the other side of this, signs of interference by man could be seen. Earth had been shovelled out of place and was held back by restraining planks of rough wood, themselves buttressed by pegs driven deep into the ground. The resulting niche was floored with brick and there were four metal poles, rather rusted now, set in the corners which must have held up a canopy at one time. At the back of the niche was a plain wooden door, painted with creosote and shut with a sturdy padlock. Mr Tait fished in his trouser pocket and drew out a new-looking, very shiny key. He caught my eye.
‘Yes, Mrs Gilver,’ he said, loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘We very often have to change the padlock on this place, I’m afraid. Boys will be boys, I suppose, and it’s just too much of a temptation for some of the Luckenlaw rascals, this place sitting up here like the den of dens. Look, the staple and hasp are quite buckled with all the attempts over the years. And judging from these bright scratches, the scamps have been at it again not long since. Boys will be boys!’
While talking, he had undone the padlock, released the hasp and closed the padlock over the staple again, locking the door open, and now he grasped the handle and pulled. There was no spooky creaking as the door swung open, but beyond it was exactly what one might have hoped for – an older doorway, this one of stone and arched to a point at the top. Mr Tait took out a box of matches to light his lantern.
Bury Her Deep Page 24
