Andrew seemed to be driving now with a ruthless sort of determination, covering the miles to Glenkeith as quickly as possible, and Margaret sat in the back seat trying to hide the growing apprehension in her eyes.
Then, at a bend in the road, they turned in between two squat gateposts and ran up a winding drive between two high walls of dark green rhododendron bushes which must have been a blaze of glory in the spring. Their shiny leaves reflected the departing light like tiny mirrors, but since the brake had turned in at the gate Tessa had been conscious of being shut away from the sunshine of the outer world.
Glenkeith itself stood in a clearing, a green semicircle carved out from among the trees, and she saw it as a gracious old house standing proudly with its face to the hills.
Like all the other houses they had passed on the way from Dyce, it was built of grey stone and she missed the colourful stucco of her Italian childhood, but she knew that it was more in keeping with its surroundings. Glenkeith merged into its own background. Did it also reflect the character of the people who lived there?
“Here we are!” Margaret announced almost nervously as Andrew pulled the brake up at the front door. “My mother will be waiting for you.”
Tessa looked eagerly towards the door. Brought up in the sunny southland, she had expected that door to be open or at least flung wide at the first sound of their approach, but nothing happened.
Andrew got down and took her bag from the back of the brake. He had hesitated for a fraction of a second, as if he had been about to help her out, but apparently he had thought better of it. Probably he considered that seeing to her luggage was more important than the small gallantry of the helping hand!
A spark of laughter lit her eyes as they followed his broad figure up the steps to the stout oak door. He was like that door in so many ways, she thought, solid and big and reliable, and the reserve in him was as formidable a barrier to intrusion.
In the dim, shadowed interior of the house she had to blink for a moment before she could make out the proportions of the hall with its stone-flagged floor worn by the feet of many Meldrums down through the years, and then, in the mellow light filtering in through the long window of the half landing above her, she saw a woman standing there, looking down at them.
She was a tall woman, with iron-grey hair drawn back into a tight knot at the nape of her neck, giving her largeboned face an almost gaunt appearance, and her eyes were deeply sunk in sockets that seemed to be hollowed out from the dark chasm of some inward conflict. It had thrown up the stern contours of her face in bold and uncompromising relief, and her mouth, large and thinlipped, was tightly compressed. Her big, prominently-boned hands were clasped before her, as if an inner rebellion thrust their ugliness forward for all to recognize, yet in that moment they suggested a ruthless strength which could not be brushed aside. Tessa found herself recoiling before it as she might have quivered at the touch of a whip.
“So you’re back?” she said to Andrew, looking at him over Tessa’s head. “Has Meg told you what happened while you’ve been away?”
There was no welcome in her voice, no sign that a stranger stood on Glenkeith’s doorstep for the first time, waiting for at least a word which would make her feel at home. Hester MacDonald had thrust the affairs of Glenkeith before everything else, but somewhere behind the cold and colourless facade of eyes and face lay a hidden watchfulness which included them all.
“No,” Andrew said, putting Tessa’s bag down at the foot of the staircase and looking up at her, blinded a little by the light from the window. “There hasn’t been a lot of time. Is it—something important?”
His aunt came down the few remaining stairs till she was level with him, the heavily-carved newel-post between them, and Tessa saw that she was, indeed, very tall for a woman. Almost as tall as Andrew was himself.
“Lately, I’ve been inclined to wonder what is important in this house,” she said deliberately. “While you’ve been away your grandfather has been taken ill—some form of thrombosis, I am told. Dr. Coutts is with him, and a heart specialist from Aberdeen.”
Her words sank into an appalled silence, a moment of the utmost shock in which both thought and movement seemed paralysed, and then Andrew brushed past her, clearing the stairs two at a time. He had not uttered a single word, but Tessa knew that a deep bond of affection must exist between him and the old man who had been so sorely stricken in his absence. She felt the coldness of his despair settling on Glenkeith as if it were a blight and looked round for Margaret as she might have searched for assurance and courage in a moment of personal need.
Margaret had gone, however. They had come into the hall together, but Margaret MacDonald was no longer there. She had effaced herself, and it was almost as if she had failed Andrew in some way, yet Tessa knew beyond doubting that Margaret had not found the heart to confront Andrew with such dire news in the moment of his return. She had been unable to inflict the hurt because she had wanted to shield him from it for as long as she could.
Confused by the sudden clarity of her vision, Tessa turned to Margaret’s mother.
“I’m so sorry about this,” she said. “I know how anxious you must be, you and Andrew and Margaret, but I won’t be any extra trouble. I’m sorry it had to happen like this,” she repeated, “but, if you’ll let me, I’ll try to help.” Her plea was allowed to sink into a lengthening silence and it seemed, as she waited for Hester to speak, that what light there was slowly left the hall. It became altogether a place of shadows, of chill, inhospitable seconds following each other into the unfriendly darkness of the future.
Before Hester spoke she knew that there would be nothing but a cold enmity in the older woman’s voice, but even then she was scarcely prepared for the undertone of bitter animosity which sharpened it to the rapier-edge of hatred.
“You’ve brought bad luck to Glenkeith,” Hester told her, “like your mother before you. Women can destroy men’s lives as easily as they can fill them with contentment.”
Recoiling before such a grim conviction, Tessa realized that Hester MacDonald was her natural enemy. For some reason of her own, Hester had never been prepared to accept her at Glenkeith and would continue to consider her as an outsider while they both remained there.
Stricken by the thought and conscious even then of a deeply-penetrating hurt, she stood staring at the ruthless face and felt curiously forsaken, forsaken by Andrew and deserted by Margaret, who had so surely liked her when they had first met at Dyce. Where were they? Why had they left her alone with Hester MacDonald like this?
She looked about her almost desperately before she drew herself up with unconscious dignity to face the grim figure at the foot of the stairs. It seemed in that moment that Hester was barring her way, standing between her and Andrew, between her and the man who had asked her to come to Glenkeith.
“I haven’t forced myself on Glenkeith,” she said, hoping that her voice would remain steady. “Mr. Meldrum asked me to come. He wrote and said that it was to be my home.”
“By what right?” the coldly emotionless voice made instant demand. “You do not belong here. You are not a Meldrum and never could be.”
“I thought that I belonged.” Tessa’s voice was suddenly unsteady. “I had hoped to belong.”
To her utter surprise and humiliation, Hester laughed. She drew back her thin lips and her teeth flashed for a moment, but the harsh sound she emitted was not laughter as Tessa knew it. It was more like a snarl, the defiance of an angry animal unable to express its tortured feelings in words.
“You do not know what you are talking about,” Hester told her. “You could never belong here. You have been brought to Glenkeith to satisfy an old man’s whim, his last and most spectacular whim, perhaps, but no one will ever make you welcome. It wouldn’t be natural.”
Protest rose in Tessa in a great, engulfing wave, but even she could recognize that it must break unanswered against the bastion of Hester MacDonald’s hatred. She drew away and was mo
re relieved than she had ever been in all her life to see Margaret standing in a doorway at the far side of the hall.
“Since we are to have you here, it seems, for the present,” Hester said, “Meg will show you to your room. It is the one my father decided you should have. It is his choice.”
Feeling the words like a grudge, Tessa followed Margaret up the staircase. She had lifted her bag, which Andrew had forgotten in the stress of his anxiety about his grandfather, and she caught Hester looking at it as she passed her.
“Is that all you’ve brought with you?”
“Yes.” She felt the harsh criticism in the older woman and for the first time was conscious of resentment. “It is enough for my needs.”
“We must hope so,” Hester answered witheringly as she walked away.
“Don’t heed her,” Margaret whispered when they were out of earshot. “She doesn’t mean to be unkind. It’s just that she’s—bitter.”
Tessa felt that her heart must break.
“If I had known I would not have come,” she said.
Margaret made no answer to that until they had reached a room at the far end of the upper landing.
“Don’t make things harder,” she appealed, turning to stand with her back to the door. “There’s Andrew and the old man.”
“He’s your grandfather, too?” Tessa’s eyes were suddenly warm and friendly. “I wish that he was mine. I know
that he is going to be kind.”
“He has been so very ill,” Margaret explained. “Last night we were terribly worried, but now he has rallied and there’s hope, the specialist says. He’s eighty-five, but that wouldn’t make it any easier to part with him.”
“He must live!” Tessa cried almost desperately. “Does that sound selfish? I want him to live because of me!”
“He was looking forward to your coming so much,” Margaret told her.
They faced each other in the big bedroom with its wide fireplace and sprigged wallpaper where flowers had been put in a white porcelain vase on the old-fashioned wash-stand and newly-starched curtains hung at the window, and in that moment the contrast between them was very marked. Tessa looked almost ethereal beside the sturdy Scots girl, a will-o’-the-wisp with her fine, silken hair falling in an uneven half-fringe across her brow and her great violet eyes solemn and questioning as they searched the dark ones on the other side of the hearth. It was a moment of consideration and recognition and at the end of it Tessa smiled. Looking at Margaret, she felt more secure.
“You got my room ready, didn’t you?” she asked. “It was nice of you to think about the flowers.”
“I thought you would like them,” Margaret said awkwardly. “They grow in the fields here. We call them margarets and I always think they are like a star.” She flushed, surprised at her own admission as she crossed to the window to close it. “It’s getting colder,” she added “Would you like a fire?”
Tessa shook her head, although for the first time she was conscious of feeling cold.
“You’ll need something warmer to wear so far north as this,” Margaret told her, glancing at the thin coat and cotton dress. “It’s the end of August and there’s always a chill about September in Scotland, even though it is one of our loveliest months.”
Tessa turned to the case-rack, where she had set down the carpet bag.
“I haven’t very many clothes,” she said simply, “But I have a little money. It came from the sale of my father’s canvases—the unused ones, mostly,” she added candidly. She spread a few gaily-patterned cotton skirts on the bed, considering them with a critical frown and a little shake of her head. “They won’t do, will they? Perhaps we can go somewhere and buy a heavy coat or a woollen suit for me before very long?”
“It looks as if you’ll need them right away,” Margaret decided. “We don’t go to Braemar till market day as a rule, but perhaps Andrew will take us in the brake seeing that it’s something of an emergency.”
“Oh, no! We couldn’t ask him,” Tessa protested, feeling that Andrew had been deflected from his duty long enough and that, in any case, he would not wish to leave his grandfather’s bedside for such a trivial reason. “Please let me wait. I won’t feel the cold, and perhaps I can buy some wool in the village and begin to knit a jumper.”
“You’ll need shoes, too,” Margaret recommended. “I don’t think I can do anything for you in that respect,” she added with a smile. “My feet must be miles bigger than yours. Grandfather always used to say that I had a ‘good grip of Scotland’!”
“You’ve lived at Glenkeith all your life?”
“Most of it. My father died when I was very young, and my mother came back to Glenkeith to keep house for her father and brother—even before Uncle Fergus married again.”
“He married my mother,” Tessa said thoughtfully. “Do you remember her, Margaret? You would be at Glenkeith when she came here as a bride.”
“Yes,” Margaret agreed uneasily. “My mother considered it her home, although sometimes I’ve wondered if she was ever really happy in it, coming back as she did.”
“Do you think she resented my mother marrying her brother?”
Margaret flushed scarlet.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“My mother did not stay at Glenkeith very long,” Tessa mused. “Her husband died and she came south again and married my father. They were very happy together. It’s the sort of thing you feel about people, isn’t it? But I think she must have been happy with Andrew’s father, too. Glenkeith is so lovely!”
She turned to the window, looking down across the wide sweep of pastureland rising gradually to the knees of the hills where the black polled cattle grazed contentedly on the lush green grass. It looked like a painting by one of the great masters with all that quiet beauty steeped in the mellow rays of a setting sun, and somehow it seemed that conflict could not live there for very long.
Her spirits rose and she tried to forget Hester MacDonald’s harsh reception of her, feeling that there would surely be something for her to do at Glenkeith, some niche which she might carve out for herself in time.
Leaving her to unpack the remainder of her clothes, Margaret went off along the landing, but presently she came back carrying an armful of woollen sweaters and cardigans.
“Try some of these on, and then you had better keep a couple of them for a day or two till you have time to get some for yourself. They’ll probably be too big, but you can pull them in at the waist with a belt.”
Tessa wondered what Hester would say when she saw her in her borrowed plumage, but she decided not to worry about it beforehand. The kindly gesture on Margaret’s part had cancelled out much of her mother’s bitterness and she decided to forget about it.
There was so much to Glenkeith apart from Hester, and a surging, youthful enthusiasm made her want to explore immediately.
“What do you do, Margaret?” she asked. “If I can help you, I will.”
Margaret glanced at her watch.
“I’ve got the milking to see to, and the hens,” she said. “Taking the brake in to Dyce has made me late, but I’ll soon catch up. I knew Andrew would want to get back as quickly as possible and there wasn’t a suitable train.”
“He lost a lot of time coming to Rome to fetch me,” Tessa said, feeling the deep sense of resentment in the air again at the suggestion of time wasted. “Is he always— wrapped up in his work?”
Margaret took a moment to consider the question as they went back downstairs together.
“He’s very conscientious,” she said at last, “and, of course, he runs the farm. There’s a missing generation, you see. Normally, his father would have been in charge and Drew wouldn’t have had such a heavy burden of responsibility to face at an early age. My grandfather has been too old to take a full share in the running of Glenkeith for some years now. It’s all left to Drew— the active part. Perhaps it has made him—more serious in his outlook,” Margaret added. “Not so inclined towards the
lighter side of life. Less inclined to play, perhaps.”
They had reached the hall and Hester met them, coming from a room at its far end.
“There’s a meal ready,” she intimated briefly. “Andrew will come down to it, I’ve no doubt. It’s not our usual time,” she added, “but I dare say it is expected. Will you share it, Meg?” she asked, turning in her daughter’s direction, “or do you want to get on with your work? The milking must be behind as it is.”
Margaret hesitated.
“I can’t leave Agnes to do everything on her own,” she said, “but if I ate something now we needn’t have another meal later on.”
Her mother regarded her frostily.
“I have a routine at Glenkeith which I have no intention of breaking,” she said. “There will be a dinner, as usual, at seven o’clock.”
“I’ll go and see to the milking, then.”
Margaret gave Tessa a faint smile and sped away. She was afraid of her mother.
Hester had ruled at Glenkeith for so long with a rod of iron that probably no one sought to question her authority now, Tessa thought, going slowly into the room where a large mahogany table had been spread with a snowy cloth and heaped with all the bounty of a farmhouse tea. Hester MacDonald had certainly not been sparing in that respect. There stood brown and white bread and butter and scones, and two kinds of home-made jam, together with triangular biscuits which seemed to be made of meal, reminding Tessa of the Tuscan maize cakes which Maria baked every few days to satisfy her hungry brood. They were finer, perhaps, and more brittle, but they were the same rich brown colour that made you think of harvest and all the good things of the earth.
In the centre of the table was a large square cake filled with fruit, which looked as if it was made to be cut into again and again, and on top of all this there was a rather formidable row of boiled eggs, each with its small knitted cosy to keep it warm.
Would Andrew come, she wondered, for no doubt he had already been summoned by his aunt.
She stood uncertainly by the table, hearing small sounds in the world outside the window: the cackling of geese; the bark of a dog; the distant lowing of cattle as the cows were brought in from the fields, and the far-away, almost raucous cry of a bird she could not name. Only the room where she stood waiting seemed deadly quiet. There was not even the friendly ticking of a clock to assure her that time and first impressions would surely pass.
Master of Glenkeith Page 4
