‘Sir.’
‘Daniel. Brush your hair.’
‘Sir.’ He ran his fingers rapidly through it and vanished towards the door to the main house.
IV
Once through the door, Daniel stopped abruptly, took a deep breath, and made what he liked to think of as a Progress towards the front door. The hall was stone-floored and echoey, and he made sure that every footstep rang. It spoiled the effect rather when Blair bumbled through the door before he could reach it, followed by the dogs. They would always forsake even the midday sunshine for Blair, who often had unexpected things in his pockets. Blair watched Daniel’s one-man procession with kindness and waited patiently to be assisted from his topcoat. Daniel noticed that its tails were muddy, and wondered what the old piece of buckram had been up to this time.
Blair nodded his thanks and wandered off to the morning parlour, making private estimates of how long Daniel would last as a servant, and whether his chances appeared better or worse after a period of responsibility. Still, Mrs. Chambers always kept a close eye on things, and now that Robbins was back from Edinburgh – if that had been Robbins he had seen while he angled that poor woman through the inadequate doorway of the manse – matters in the household would undoubtedly improve. His own man, Smith, would at least find the company more congenial.
The parlour door was ajar, and Blair ambled inside. It was a cheerful room, seemingly designed for the reading of morning papers and viewing the park to plan the day, and bright sunlight spilled through the south-east facing windows. The warm golden pools of light flooded carpets, armchairs and sofa, every inch of which was being carefully avoided by the two gentlemen in the room. Their morning activity could best be described as slumping.
There, however, the resemblance between them ended, except for what was bestowed by being male, prosperously dressed and in their third decade of life. Charles Murray was tall and dark, with one or two lines of responsibility on his high forehead and a slight abrasion on his firm chin. An observer would have had to wait to know the colour of his eyes, as they were closed, and his build was somewhat disguised by a copy of the Edinburgh Courant of the previous week, which lay crumpled across his chest.
There were no lines on James Kennedy’s face. His vacant, dark blue eyes shone from a loose-jawed, long face, innocent as a lamb’s, with rather over-long straw-coloured hair about it. He affected a dazzling white waistcoat and his neckcloth was tied with what Blair suspected was deliberate abandon. His limbs were disposed in a similar way, thin and disjointed like a careless cranefly. When he saw Blair he gathered himself together and rose to bow, a touch too punctiliously for absolute politeness. Blair felt faintly patronised. Their greetings woke Murray, and he started, clutching the newspaper, then rose quickly and made his bow, too. Kennedy had already folded himself up again and flung his feet on to the sofa opposite his chair. A small smear of dark brown polish slithered off his boot and on to the chintz.
‘I regret that we did not see you at breakfast, sir,’ Murray said shame-facedly. ‘I fear you were up and about long before me, and Kennedy here says he was late up, too.’ He glanced round at Kennedy. ‘And get your damned boots off my sofa,’ he almost said, but managed to stop himself. He had managed, similarly, not to remark on the heap of his books that Kennedy had left on the floor beside his chair – unread, Murray was sure.
Blair seated himself on the low bench below the window, and peered out at the trees.
‘Oh, when you are an ancient like me, sleep matters less, my dear Charles,’ he said, smiling gently. ‘You will know it, when you reach my advanced age!’
Murray laughed, winced at the noise, and tidied away the newspaper as quietly as possible.
‘I feel old already, sometimes. Where have you been, sir? Anywhere interesting?’
Blair bounced slightly on his seat as Murray sat down again, feeling dark circles form under his eyes and trying to ignore Kennedy’s boots.
‘It was not so much the places,’ said Blair, ‘as the events. For one thing, your man Robbins is back. At least, I think I saw him in the village heading in this direction.’
‘Robbins? Oh, thank Heaven,’ said Murray fervently. ‘Daniel has a great deal to learn about shaving.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t hold my breath, if Blair only thinks he saw him,’ said Kennedy, with a loose grin. Murray’s mouth performed a polite smile.
‘Aside from that,’ Blair went on as if oblivious, ‘I saw little of the village itself, for I was stopped by Mrs. Helliwell on the way in.’
Kennedy grinned again, holding an almost discreet hand across his face. Murray sometimes found Kennedy’s humour hard to appreciate.
‘What was her news?’
‘It was not her news so much as what was happening as I arrived on the scene,’ Blair explained. ‘She had found a poor woman lying on the path just between the manse wall and the kirkyard wall. The woman was frozen half to death.’
‘Oh, no!’ Kennedy was at once more concerned.
‘Who was it?’ asked Murray. Blair’s face and shoulders became a shrug.
‘Strange to say, she did not know. Not one of the poor of this parish, anyway, according to Mrs. Helliwell.’
‘And she should know,’ Murray agreed, ‘for she visits them all. Was it an old woman, then?’
‘Not at all,’ Blair rose, unable ever to keep still for long, and began to pace to the fireplace and back. ‘She was young, but had a look of starvation about her. She had a pack, which Mrs. Helliwell thought at first was a baby, and you can imagine the story then, who couldn’t? And she was dressed entirely in black. It was good cloth, I should say, though not new.’
‘She had fallen on hard times, perhaps,’ suggested Kennedy.
‘Perhaps,’ Blair nodded. ‘At Mrs. Helliwell’s request, I carried the woman indoors to the manse and saw her settled, and Mrs. Helliwell sent for the doctor. That house is so cold, you know, and damp, that they must keep Dr. Feilden in business entirely.’
‘That house and my servants’ quarters,’ said Murray with a frown. The problems with the damp building were uppermost in his mind at present.
Blair jiggled his hands in his pockets, exploring their contents.
‘Mrs. Helliwell thought – and I am inclined to agree with her, although of course there is no proof as yet, but balancing probabilities as we go, of course – that the woman had spent the night in that little wood, you know, that backs on to the manse garden and the kirkyard. Her pack was against a tree. And then there was the frost, and she came out on to the path this morning, unable to lift her pack, and could make it no further.’
‘So she was on Letho land, then?’ said Murray, concerned. He picked the facts from Blair’s tangled speech with the ease of long practice. ‘We must do what we can for her. I’ll get Mrs. Chambers to send someone to the manse after dinner and see if anything is required.’ Blair was pleased. He knew that Murray had inherited his estate a good deal earlier than either of them would have like, but he had never shirked his responsibilities, even the dull ones. Blair’s friend, Murray’s father, should have been proud.
‘She would not have been on the path last night, anyway,’ said Kennedy suddenly. ‘Even if she were all in black and no one saw her, there were so many about that someone was bound to trip over her. She would be black and blue!’ He laughed again, and Murray, rather to his own regret, gave a chuckle.
‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘it would have been a strange night to be alone just there.’ He yawned. ‘Excuse me. What with your fireworks in the meadow, Kennedy, and the dance at the inn, I should think that everyone in the village was up and down that path last night. I know I was at least half a dozen times.’
‘And a strange place to sleep, then,’ said Blair. ‘Still it was sheltered enough, I suppose. Mrs. Helliwell said how sad it was that the poor woman had not pulled herself a little further and asked for shelter at the manse, but perhaps the very sight of all the people – I do not know, you know, but it is po
ssible – put her off. And the manse, of course, is not warm – not that she would necessarily have known that.’ He drew a walnut out of his pocket, and looked as if he wondered how it had come to be there.
‘So?’ said Murray, feeling his mind beginning to wake up. ‘So Mrs. Helliwell imagines that the woman was heading towards the village, not away from it?’
‘What difference would that make?’ asked Kennedy, never quite in tune.
‘Well, that would mean that she had gone straight past the manse.’
Kennedy made an exaggerated O of realisation.
‘Maybe she’d heard about it,’ he said with a grin. Blair made a curious face at him: Murray hoped that it was intended to convey amusement, rather than irritation. It involved much wrinkling around the nose, but Blair had never suffered any stiffening of the facial muscles with old age.
‘It was like the Assembly Rooms in George Street in the village last night,’ Murray reflected, stretching his long legs out from his chair. ‘I have never known fifty families seem like such a multitude. And the rotas for supper!’
‘Did you see Miss George dance with that man – the apothecary, I think it was – in Strip the Willow?’ asked Kennedy, and then fell helpless with laughter at the recollection and slapped his knees with his hands. ‘She had such a look,’ he managed after a while, ‘as though some bad smell had come under her nose, and as if she thought a dance was as much as a marriage, and she would be with him for ever more!’
‘To the extreme detriment of her social standing!’ Murray added in the midst of laughter. Then he felt Blair watching him – or worse, not watching him, and a mixture of shame and defiance reduced his laughter to a stiff smile. He knew it was not kind to laugh at Miss George, who was on the edge of missing out on marriage, but was it kind of Blair to point this out, however silently?
He had known Blair so well and for so many years – Blair had seen him grow up, had taken him on his Grand Tour, had kept an eye on him after his father’s death – that he sometimes forgot that a person’s friendship is not something rigid and determined, but in the real world requires work and attention, like a tree, or it may grow diseased and die. But it was difficult when one wished to cultivate – or at least not to offend – two friends that did not seem to find much pleasure in each other’s company. The situation was further complicated by the fact that he was not very enthusiastic about Mr. Kennedy himself, but felt that he should be polite, despite realising that Kennedy had to all intents and purposes invited himself to stay at Letho for the summer. Being polite involved laughing at at least some of Kennedy’s jokes, even when they were unkind, and reminding oneself of Kennedy’s undoubted generosity: the fireworks last night had been his idea and his expense, with the whole village invited. But he lacked, as far as Murray could see, any deeper emotions beyond the gratification of his own amusement. Murray found himself hoping that Letho would cease to gratify that amusement long before the summer was out. He wanted to tell Blair that he did not really find Kennedy’s jokes very funny, and that he would far rather be solving the problems of the damp servants’ wing and the woman mysteriously starving and cold on his land, but such things were difficult to say, and had to be shown by actions.
He found himself unwittingly staring at Blair’s muddy boots and knees, and Blair, slowly becoming aware of them himself and perhaps more perceptive than Kennedy, excused himself to change for dinner.
V
On Sunday, the kirk had emptied after the morning service. The Letho party, including the laird, Mr. Blair and Mr. Kennedy, popular sponsor of Thursday night’s fireworks, and their servants respectfully in the rear, had processed down the hill to leave the village for the main road. The Dures carriage, carrying Mr. George and his sister, had departed along the north street to its far end where the drive began for Dures House. A second carriage, not so well turned out, had removed not just Mrs. Kirk, as expected, the elderly resident of Cullessie House, but also a young naval gentleman, said to be her nephew, who would have the house at her death. There was no sign of the fashionable young ladies said to have arrived with him, which absence did not meet with general approval.
Inside the kirk, the high-vaulted white plaster walls echoed less and less noise from outside, and very little from the four men who remained and now came slowly together, talking in low voices from reverence as well as discretion.
‘Has anyone thought to tell the Sheriff?’ asked Baird.
Ninian Jack, broad and whiskered, sucked the end of his pen and looked at Watson and Kenny. They both shook their heads, Watson with an unhappy frown. Kenny said,
‘Melville said he would tell Mr. Murray, but I dinna ken that he has. He’s that put about with his wife.’
‘Well, it’s no secret,’ said Ninian Jack solemnly. The kirk was cold, and they had drawn themselves nearer to the stove. ‘And anyone at the service this morning will ken the now.’
‘Not necessarily all,’ said Kenny. He was a thin man, and had wound his mittened hands between his thighs to keep them warm.
‘Aye, well,’ said Jack, ‘we’re the Kirk Session, we have the right to ken a bit more than ordinary folks.’
‘But we’re no nearer to finding who she was, all the same, are we? Any more than ordinary folks.’ The cold made him short-tempered.
The kirk door opened and let a hard wedge of cold air slice in. Melville followed it, and slammed the door behind him.
‘So the pauper woman is dead, I hear tell?’ he began without greeting. They had all seen each other at the service. ‘The minister no here yet? I needn’t have put myself out hurrying back.’
‘She’s dead,’ said Watson. ‘I suppose she’ll need the cheap mortcloth, then, and the beadle should find a site for the grave. I think there’s a gap by the north wall.’
‘And who’s going to pay for all this?’ asked Kenny, truculently.
‘Aye, I think we don’t want to move too fast,’ said Watson. ‘We should send word to the neighbouring parishes to see if they’ve lost anyone. The expense might not lie at our door after all.’
‘And we don’t know what sort of woman she was. She might not have been at all respectable,’ added Baird.
‘Was she carrying a child?’ asked Melville, anxiously. There were shrugs all round. ‘See her buried first and don’t delay,’ he advised. ‘You can argue about who’s going to pay till the cows come home, but the weather’s getting warmer and you cannot know what disease she might have brought in with her.’
‘She didna die of disease,’ said Ninian Jack, who had made a note to himself to write, as suggested, to the neighbouring parishes. His hands were numb and the writing wobbled.
‘All kinds of disease can come from being too cold,’ said Melville, authoritatively. He was a tenant farmer, holding the Hill of Letho farm, and considered himself a smallish cut above the others.
‘I daresay you can get diseases, too, from a knife in the chest, but it was the knife in the chest she died of,’ said Ninian Jack drily. Melville’s jaw dropped.
‘A knife? I never heard that!’ He had been busy tending to his wife before and after the service, as she was coming near her time and was taking it badly again. He had better keep this news from her. ‘But I thought she was a pauper and froze in the frost on Thursday night?’
‘That’s what we all thought,’ said Kenny shortly, rubbing his hands up and down his thighs. Watson, warm enough, scowled at him. Watson could manage to keep still, though he had reason enough to fidget. He informed Melville, since no one else seemed inclined to.
‘Mrs. Helliwell got her indoors and warmed up but never took the clothes off her till the doctor arrived. The woman’s dress was black, so they never saw it was stiff with blood, and the wound was made with a thin blade so the cloth was not much cut. She lived, as you heard, till yesterday afternoon, but she had lost a lot of blood, Doctor Feilden says, and she never came round.’
‘But who would want to kill a pauper? For it sounds as if she was left
for dead,’ asked Melville.
‘We don’t absolutely ken that she was a pauper,’ said Baird quietly. ‘We don’t have proof of who she was.’ He looked covertly at Ninian Jack. After a moment, a kind of realisation came over the others, and they all took peeps at Jack in their own manner. He was apparently oblivious.
‘No one seems to recall seeing her on Thursday night,’ Watson remarked at last.
‘Who would recall?’ asked Baird. He had a manner of quiet speech that tended to make people stop and think. Women buying from his drapery and general shop on the main street rarely regretted a purchase, for all impetuosity was stifled at the door.
‘Well, someone should tell the Sheriff in Cupar,’ said Melville, ‘and have the poor woman into a grave. The manse is hardly the best place for the corpse, with young children around and who kens what diseases spreading.’
‘And the manse not the healthiest of places itself,’ agreed Kenny, with the air of a man standing by Pandora’s box and fiddling with the lock.
‘Any news on that?’ Watson asked Ninian Jack.
‘The case is to come up before the Court of Session in the autumn,’ said Jack. ‘In the mean time, the cost of building a new manse, as advocated by Mr. Helliwell, or of renovating the present one, as suggested by the Heritors, have both gone up because of the war in Spain, so neither can go ahead just the now.’ He stopped and shut his mouth with a snap as the kirk door opened again and Mr. Helliwell, the minister, entered to begin the meeting formally.
VI
Minutes of the Kirk Session meeting held at Letho Parish Church on 22nd. May, 1808. Meeting opened with prayer.
An Abandoned Woman (Murray of Letho Book 4) Page 3
