An Abandoned Woman (Murray of Letho Book 4)

by Lexie Conyngham

  ‘What are these?’ he asked. The baskets had a residual smell of vegetables and hens.

  ‘They are what you were good enough to send the food in,’ explained Kennedy. ‘I wanted to return them to your housekeeper.’

  ‘She is upstairs at present. We could leave them round at the kitchens, and she will find them later,’ Murray suggested.

  ‘That will be perfect,’ Kennedy said, and waved Murray ahead of him down the passage to the kitchen garden gate. After a brief struggle with the baskets they went through, and with a word to Mrs. Mutch left the baskets at the kitchen door.

  ‘Will you come through to the Italian garden?’ Murray asked. ‘Robbins will bring us some lemonade.’

  ‘Where is Mr. Blair?’ Kennedy asked.

  ‘Asleep in the parlour, when I last saw him,’ said Murray reassuringly.

  ‘Then I shall be happy to stay,’ said Kennedy, but it did not, strangely, sound impolitely meant. Murray retreated a few steps to the kitchen door again, and called for lemonade to be brought to the terrace.

  ‘I wanted to thank you particularly for the food,’ said Kennedy, as they crossed the back of the courtyard to the terrace. ‘Least of all for my sake, but for Miss Kirk’s, who is so anxious for her sister, and for Parnell’s own sake. The food at Cullessie is not such that encourages an invalid’s recovery, or strengthens those that tend her.’

  ‘I am glad to have been of service,’ said Murray. They sat on a stone bench that was hot from the day. It was curious, he thought, remembering his last meeting with Miss Kirk at Cullessie, but Kennedy seemed also to have undergone a kind of change since they had last met. While Virginia Kirk seemed more alive, he seemed more sober, perhaps more grown up. Well, he thought, many a sickroom had made its attendants age faster than their years.

  ‘How is Miss Parnell?’ he asked, suddenly alarmed that Kennedy might have been released from his sickroom duties for the worst of reasons. Kennedy sighed.

  ‘She does not do well. She is so strong inside, but she grows weaker and weaker on the outside.’ He stopped. Robbins was approaching with a tray, and Kennedy waited until he had set it down, poured them some lemonade, and gone again, before he continued.

  ‘I may sit with her, when she is strong enough,’ he went on, ‘and I read to her, and we talk of things. When she is tired, sometimes Miss Kirk stays with her, or sometimes I take Miss Kirk out to walk a little distance down the drive and back – we do not wish to go too far. She is so brave.’

  ‘She has left a good example of that, in Anna’s recovered health,’ Murray said encouragingly.

  ‘Oh! Yes, Parnell, too, and more than brave. It was Parnell told me I should come and see you today. She said I would benefit from the exercise, can you believe it? Concerned about me, when she herself is in such a state! And she said I should tell you how all this has come about. She has shown me that I used you and your household and your hospitality shamefully, and she is right. I have come to apologise, Murray. You have been a kind friend, and I have misused your friendship. I am sorry.’

  ‘I think it is Robbins who deserves the apology, you know, but I shall accept it on his behalf,’ said Murray drily, trying not to think of all the less than hospitable thoughts he had often entertained regarding Kennedy. ‘And are you to tell me? Miss Kirk said that you were all acquainted in Bath – is that the start of it?’

  Kennedy stretched his legs out and contemplated them without joy. At last he nodded.

  ‘Yes, it is. My father, as you know, lives not far from Bath, and since I came down from St. Andrews I have spent some considerable time there. My father had encouraged me to look for a wife, and I was not loath to do so. The Kirks were quite new in town, and were everywhere – you can imagine, having seen Parnell when she is herself, how popular she was, the centre of all attention, which she adores. I remember the first time I set eyes on her so clearly: she wore a white gown, with a string of coral beads at her throat, laughing at a card table because she had lost. She was beautiful.’

  ‘White her gown and red her lips and sable was her hair,’ thought Murray, and nodded. He could picture it perfectly.

  ‘Well, every man was after her. Aside from her beauty, it was well known that her brother was wealthy and the sisters would have generous settlements when they married, besides a few thousand each of their own. My father came to town and met her, and though he said he thought her a little flighty he agreed on her charms, and encouraged me to speak for her with her brother. I decided to speak to Parnell first, and went to call on her.

  ‘Well, they were staying with an older woman, some distant cousin of their mother’s who was supposed to be chaperoning them, whose luck or skill in keeping good servants was about equal to their aunt’s. The maid led me straight up to the parlour, which she should not have done: the old cousin had screamed herself to the verge of hysterics, Miss Kirk was as white as a sheet, and Parnell, still in a bedgown, was green, and trying to slap the chaperone. It was clear something was very wrong, but before I could retreat I heard the old woman saying,

  ‘Marry him? Marry him! Do you think folk cannot count? Do you think he’ll take you now? You have disgraced me, oh, I am ruined!’

  ‘There could be only one explanation,’ Kennedy continued, ‘and when Parnell’s eyes met mine I knew I was right: she was with child. And I, to my eternal shame, left the house and never went back.’

  His head slumped into his hand. Murray asked tentatively,

  ‘It was not yours, then?’

  ‘No,’ said Kennedy, ‘I only wish it had been. My father would have been shocked at that, but marriage was intended and would have been the solution. But to present my father with another man’s grandchild, that I could not do.’

  ‘And did you know whose it was?’

  ‘I have never asked. I had one or two suspicions, but I do not think that even Miss Kirk knows. Anyway, the man made no offer for her, and if I had known him I should have called him out and killed him.’

  He stopped again, and gulped down some lemonade.

  ‘So the brother came and they left Bath. I did not hear where they were to go, for a while, but when I did I – I wrote to you and obliged you to invite me to stay. They were due to arrive on the nineteenth: I made sure the village was distracted with a fine display of fireworks to allow them in unseen at least, though I knew in a small place like this they would soon become known. I should not have followed her, I suppose, but you have seen what she is like: you understand, do you not?’

  Murray nodded, not meeting his eye.

  ‘I had to make communication with her by note first, in case I should shock her too much by appearing unannounced. I feigned illness to avoid her in society before we could meet in private – yes, even that, the hard work of your housekeeper and the doctor, you must lay to my charge. An extra hot water bottle raised my temperature to a nice fever. And later, before the trip to St. Andrews, she was not well – Miss Kirk said she was not taking things gently enough – I took some irises from your garden, just there by the pond, wrapped in a napkin so that Miss Kirk could make an infusion for her. There, I have deceived you and stolen from you. But her I have injured much more greatly, for I could have taken her then and married her, and none of this would ever have happened.’

  He stayed only a little longer, and then, concerned for Parnell, he fetched the little donkey cart from the stableyard and climbed in, with the food baskets replenished at his back. Murray watched as he disappeared down the long drive, shoulders hunched dejectedly, the donkey sleepy from an unaccustomed good meal, until they vanished out of sight.

  Chapter Seven

  I

  Murray woke next day with so clear an image of Parnell Kirk in his mind that he was sure something had happened. He could have sent a servant down to Cullessie to enquire straight away, but felt foolish at the thought of doing so on such flimsy account, and made himself wait indoors instead for a message to arrive. He fidgeted his way through his letters and estate w
ork, through a meeting with Thalland to discuss the end of the month and the rental payments, through an inspection visit to the tunnel-makers bedding their sturdy props under the north wall of the servants’ wing, and through dinner with Blair. No matter how often he told himself that it was perfectly natural to wake up with a vivid dream in one’s mind – it happened to him often, and he rarely attached preternatural significance to such visions - and even more natural to wake up to the image of a pretty and beguiling woman of one’s acquaintance, he still felt edgy, every sound in the passage outside the parlour door heralding, in his imagination, Robbins bearing bad tidings. At last Blair, who was more used to being the fidgeter than being the companion of fidgeters, declared that he was going to walk into Letho village to see what the day had brought, and if Murray felt like the exercise he was more than welcome to come too. Murray swiftly persuaded himself that this was a way of obtaining news without his pride suffering too much, and consented to accompany Blair.

  The weather was still hot, the path over the hill to the village grown dusty with use, the hedge that ran beside it tiring now with the long sunny days. The cattle in the pasture below them stood in the shade of the trees dotted about, and stared up at them uncaring.

  They walked in silence, and the bustle of the village, when they reached it, came as something of a shock. Labourers were hurrying back to their tasks after their dinners, the few shops there were reopened to admit impatient customers, and by the green Watson could be seen returning to the weigh house he oversaw, checking and marking goods to be sold at Cupar market later in the week. In every house along the broadening street the windows, where they could be, were flung open to admit what air there was: little cottages designed for cold weather sweated over the heat of their dinner time fires.

  Murray felt an impulse to go into the kirkyard and feel melancholic, and Blair, who seemed anxious enough about him, drew himself away from the tantalising sights of the busy village green and followed. It prevented Murray from greeting too obviously the graves of the people of his acquaintance buried there, but after a stroll right around the church itself – with a discreet nod to the pauper woman’s grave as he passed – he came, with Blair as his shadow, to his own family’s monument on the east side of the kirkyard.

  Murray’s great grandparents were buried here, and his grandparents who had seen to the Italian garden, and his mother, who had died when Murray was five. Her portraits showed her as pretty, fair, delicate as a snowdrop, though by all accounts she had been very lively, loving music and dancing and riding. It was after a soaking on her morning ride that she had caught the chill which killed her: such a little thing to drag her down. Murray thought of Parnell, and shivered, and roused himself to walk away. His father was not here, anyway. He was buried in Edinburgh where he had died, and last year Murray had had a few lines added to his mother’s headstone to commemorate this fact. They did not say anything of the circumstances of old Mr. Murray’s death: his father would not have considered that appropriate.

  ‘Shall we walk down towards the inn?’ he asked Blair, breaking a long silence. Blair was immediately like a dog off the leash, and they turned quickly down the steep path out of the kirkyard back to the road. They had just passed through the tall gateway when they saw Mrs. Helliwell, with her daughter Anna, coming down the front path of the manse. Murray, hopeful of news, called out a greeting and the gentlemen removed their hats to bow. Mrs. Helliwell handed the basket she was carrying to Anna and sent her scurrying off towards the centre of the village, hair flying from beneath her bonnet.

  ‘She hates wearing a bonnet in this heat,’ Mrs. Helliwell remarked, watching her, ‘but she will be as brown as a walnut table before she is out at this rate.’

  ‘She is well again, then?’ asked Murray.

  ‘Well? There is little can stop her just now. We have been so blessed,’ she added, rather thoughtfully.

  ‘And the rest of the family?’ asked Blair.

  ‘Oh, all well, and thankful for Anna’s preservation. Um,’ she went on, taking a step closer to them and looking about her as she lowered her voice, ‘I visited – I called on –’ she seemed unaccustomedly lost for the right words or the right tone. ‘I went down to Cullessie this morning,’ she finished in a rush.

  ‘And how are they?’ Murray asked, trying to imply his own sympathy. She seemed to catch it, for she went on more confidently.

  ‘Miss Parnell Kirk – I was glad to be able to see her, but she is very weak indeed. She let me stay by her bed for a little, and would have talked longer, I think, had Miss Kirk let her, and indeed I myself was reluctant to tire her. You know, Mr. Blair, Mr. Murray, when the Kirk sisters came here I should not have thought that I would feel so inclined towards them. I like to think – well, I like to think I should have found their worth even had Miss Parnell not rescued Anna so bravely.’

  Blair said, with an almost scientific detachment that made Murray’s throat seem to clutch itself,

  ‘Will Miss Parnell recover, do you think, Mrs. Helliwell?’

  Murray held his breath. Mrs. Helliwell was a woman much accustomed to the sick and their prospects.

  ‘I hope so,’ was all she said at last. ‘Dr. Feilden is with her often, and Miss Kirk has shown herself to be an admirable nurse. Mr. Kennedy, too, raises her spirits, I believe. But she is very weak from losing the child. I believe that the Episcopal minister from St. Andrews has been twice to see her, and he has had to borrow a horse to do it.’

  ‘A kind man,’ said Murray, who knew him slightly.

  ‘He is,’ agreed Mrs. Helliwell, ‘and kindness is what they need just now. Well,’ she said, turning towards the village, ‘I must follow my daughter, before she gives the soup to the dogs and bones to the invalids. I have a couple of loaves of bread for Mrs. Duff, if you can pass the word on to Iffy and Effy that she is cared for for a few days yet. I know they’re scared to visit her after what happened to Effy.’ She walked along with them as far as the upper point of the green and then, waving farewell, stooped to enter one of the smallest sandstone cottages.

  Blair and Murray continued down the gentle slope of the north street, wondering what to do next. Murray was so relieved at hearing that Parnell was alive that morning that he found himself humming a part of the oratorio Messiah by Mr. Handel that he had heard in Edinburgh once, and greeting passersby with the same cheer that Blair did. The Fairlie sisters, Louisa, Mary and a younger one, fluttered across the fading emerald of the green on an errand for their brother John, and with their smiling faces (constantly forgetting to be romantically miserable) and pretty sprigged gowns bright in the sunlight, few could fail to be charmed by the scene. Kids, born in the spring to the goats on the green, tethered only by the loosest of lyams to their grazing, frolicked by the water trough, and children freed from school for the summer, who had somehow escaped the tether of their duties at home, played their complex games together by the side of the road. Murray breathed in in delight as he looked about him. His was a prosperous village, for all its small size: the air was clear, the people healthy, the land fertile and just now the grain prices good. Even Ninian Jack, the solemn Session Clerk, gave a cheerful greeting as he passed them.

  ‘It’s another grand day,’ he called, ‘though I reckon it’ll change soon, sirs.’

  ‘Do you?’ said Blair in concern. ‘My daughter and sister arrive this week, and I had hoped for fine weather for them.’

  ‘It’s swithering now,’ agreed Jack, ‘but that’s a mite too hot to last. It’s been plottin het here for days, and I think it’ll change to thunder before long. Storms, that’s what’ll come, and before the week is out.’

  ‘That would clear the air, anyway,’ said Murray. He liked a good storm.

  ‘Aye,’ agreed Jack with gloomy satisfaction, ‘we’ll see the auld moon in the arms of the new by Friday. Well, I’ll bid you good day, gentlemen.’ And content with his cheerful prognostication he went on his way, down the hill out of the village that led to th
e main road and the smithy. Blair and Murray sat themselves down on the bench on the green opposite the inn, and idly watched his progress.

  Ninian Jack, upright and sober, did not manage to go very far down the hill on that occasion. In the distance, hurtling towards him up the road, arms flailing like an escaped windmill, came the idiot lad from Cullessie. He ran heedless straight into Mr. Jack, and the pair of them crashed to the ground in a cloud of dust. The idiot boy pulled himself clear, staggered forward a couple of steps, and seeing the people running towards him cried out in a voice like a human corbie,

  ‘Deid! She’s deid!’

  II

  Murray worked hard at estate matters that day and the next. He found, when he looked, that there were a great number of things that could serve to distract him, as long as they were busy and noisy enough. Taking Thalland with him to force himself into conversation, he rode the bounds of his estate, examining each building or feature with minuteness. He made sure of the wheels on the ladders in the doocots, he had the beehives gone through in his presence for any sign of disease, he looked at the masonry of the icehouse, the sluicegates of the lakes and the mechanisms of the mills. With Dunnet and Thalland he inspected the stables and coach sheds: with Robbins and Thalland he examined the roof of the house itself, ignoring the views of Cullessie and his own gardens that it afforded. He told Blair at dinner on Tuesday that it was important to see one’s estate as a whole on occasion, and that it was best to carry out such surveys when the weather was fine and before major social events such as balls. Blair nodded.