Lament for a Maker

by Michael Innes

  ‘But the recollection of so very old a lady – ?’

  Jervie shook his head. ‘There were a couple of letters preserved. Not much detail, but as to the fact – conclusive.’

  Sybil Guthrie said: ‘Dr Jervie – nobody else knows yet? They won’t be told – brutally?’

  ‘Nobody else knows yet. And I will tell them myself.’

  Gylby broke in almost with violence. ‘Why need they know? It’s not a real relationship – a buried relationship like that! It must have happened hundreds of times, and nobody the wiser or the worse.’

  I laid my hand on his arm. ‘No good, Gylby – no good at all. At Ranald’s trial it must come out. Even if we concealed it – Lady Anderson and ourselves – Ranald would almost certainly divulge it in the end. It would be his only way to triumph, and almost certainly it would overcome his silence.’

  Sybil Guthrie jumped up and came over to me. ‘But, Mr Appleby, if we left the whole thing entirely alone! At present Mr Wedderburn’s case holds the field. Ranald is off, undetected, to his retirement and his pension. Lindsay is no longer in any danger of being hanged. He and Christine are making their plans for Canada–’ She broke off, turned to Dr Jervie in sudden appeal. ‘Dr Jervie, couldn’t you agree?’

  Jervie walked to the window and gazed out. Without turning round he said in a low voice: ‘No.’

  A futile debate. I tried to stop it. ‘There is no utility in discussing keeping quiet. Quite apart from ethical issues, it just wouldn’t help. Ranald would keep an eye on what was happening. When he found his plot against Lindsay had failed and that the young people were off to Canada it is overwhelmingly likely he would see to it they learnt the truth.’

  Sybil said: ‘Find Ranald. Make a bargain. Silence for silence.’

  I shook my head. ‘He is an old man and he could break his bargain at his death. That the truth should come upon them after years of marriage – one couldn’t take the responsibility of that. If only because it is impossible to know how they themselves would look back on our silence. There is no soft way out.’

  From the window Jervie said in a new voice. ‘There’s somebody coming.’

  I crossed the room and we both stepped out once more on the little terrace. A car was approaching the castle; its headlamps, faint in the moonlight, were sweeping the narrow arm of the loch that ran nearly to the moat. The lights caught us for a moment and circled right to follow the drive round the stretch of frozen water. Then they stopped. ‘The dip by the last turn of the drive,’ Jervie said. ‘It was most a slushy bog when we came; I suppose the car can’t get through.’ A minute later two figures appeared on the further verge, scrambled down the bank and began rapidly to cross the ice. Half-way they came into the full moonlight and we recognized Neil Lindsay and Christine Mathers.

  They were hand in hand. I think their spirits were high: in leaving the blocked drive to take a short cut over the ice they were doing a foolhardy thing. The ice was already cracking everywhere; they must have felt it cracking beneath them; they quickened their pace and I believe they were laughing as they ran. They were young, resilient, and they had escaped that day from the shadow of great danger. Suddenly we heard Christine’s voice, clear and eager, calling out something about the night. I felt Jervie brace himself as the sound floated up to us. ‘It must be tonight,’ he said. ‘I will go and let them in.’

  From below, distinguishable now, came Christine’s voice. ‘Impossible shoes! Lift me, Neil.’

  5

  They came running down the corridor and into the schoolroom, Jervie – who had meant, I fancy, to take them to another room – out-distanced behind. I looked from one to the other. They were indeed resilient. They were happy.

  ‘Don’t anyone try to cross the ice! The next man will go in.’ Christine tossed off her hat and looked about her – first at her own room and then at the people in it. She ran over to Sybil Guthrie. ‘Miss Guthrie of Erchany! Bring peace and sanity to the castle – and fun and good plumbing too.’ She glanced round us again. ‘But where’s Ewan Bell?’

  Jervie said gently: ‘You expected him to be here?’

  ‘Of course. He said he was going to meet us and the lawyers here for explanations – explanations that were to be kept private. I don’t know–’

  She had been unaware in her excitement of the atmosphere in the room; she caught it now and suddenly fell silent. And Lindsay, who had been standing quietly by the door watching us all, spoke.

  ‘We don’t know what he meant. But it’s plain there are explanations to come. There’s a secret on every face in this room. What is it?’

  I saw that for a moment Dr Jervie was at a loss. What he had to say required privacy and preparation: and meantime here was young Lindsay demanding truth. As a stop-gap I plunged in. ‘The first news is this. Ranald Guthrie is not dead. His plot against you, Mr Lindsay, stands; only he killed not himself but his elder brother, a doctor recently returned from Australia.’

  Barely put it must have been next to unintelligible, and I don’t think Christine grasped a word. But Lindsay caught the central fact and held it. His eyes darkened. ‘Guthrie alive!’

  Gylby from the window called out – the relief of even a moment’s diversion in his voice: ‘Another visitor in sight. And taking the same route.’

  Christine spun round. ‘It must be Ewan Bell. He mustn’t take the ice!’ and she ran to the window.

  We all followed. For a moment we could see only an indistinct figure scrambling down the further bank. Christine turned to Lindsay. ‘Neil,’ she said, ‘call to him – warn him.’ At the same moment the figure emerged into the full moonlight. She swayed beside me. ‘Uncle Ranald!’ And Lindsay echoed ‘Guthrie!’

  Gylby leapt back into the schoolroom and plunged it in darkness. Sybil Guthrie whispered: ‘He must think the castle deserted. We’ve got him; oh, we’ve got him!’

  But Lindsay took a great breath and shouted: ‘Back, man, back!’ And in the same instant the ice broke.

  For a fraction of a second we were all immobile, staring at the circle of dark water that spread, it seemed with the slowness of oil, in the middle of the faintly glimmering ice. Then I felt myself thrust aside by a taut arm. It was Lindsay’s. And he leapt from the little terrace direct to the moat.

  It looked fifteen feet but was probably less. And the drop was to snow. Gylby and I could only follow. As I jumped I heard Christine say: ‘I’ll get rope.’

  Lindsay was only seconds ahead, but he had luck or an access of strength that took him up the farther side of the moat more quickly than we could manage. When we reached the edge of the lake he was already some way out on the ice, crawling forward flat on his stomach. Without pausing he called back to us ‘Not another man on the ice…get a rope across as quick as you can.’ And then he called out ahead: ‘Guthrie, can you hold on, man? I’m coming.’

  I knew he was right. If Guthrie, as seemed likely, had been stunned as he went through, our best chance of getting him out was to put as little strain as possible on the surrounding ice: an extensive break-up might make rescue impossible even on this last narrow neck of loch. For the moment we could only stand and watch, prepared to do what we could should Lindsay too come to grief. And once and again the ice cracked ominously. I kicked off my shoes and began to strip. We were likely to be diving before it was over.

  Christine came running up with a coil of rope. ‘All there is,’ she said quietly. ‘And not good.’

  I glanced at the rope and then back to Lindsay: he was about half-way to his goal. ‘Better test it,’ I said, ‘and know what we’ve got.’ Rapidly Gylby and I paid it out yard by yard put what strain on it we could. It seemed sound but I had little trust in it: it was common wash-line stuff. And much too short to span the whole arm of ice. With luck it would reach just to where Guthrie had gone through.

  We heard Lindsay’s voice – confident, absorbed. ‘Hold on, man, and you’ll be as right as rain. Do you think it’s this that Loch Cailie’s for on a brave w
inter night?’

  Christine beside me gave a little gasp, stared rigidly out across the ice. ‘He’s seen him,’ I said. ‘And there’s nothing for it: I must take out the rope.’

  Gylby said: ‘I’ll be lighter on the ice.’ But I was already crawling in the wake of Lindsay. Guthrie was apparently conscious and clinging to some sufficiently strong rim of ice; Lindsay had almost reached him; I thought it likely I could get the rope to them. Only once did I feel the ice crack, and but for a strange intermittent tremor in it I should have had comparatively little fear. Lindsay’s voice came back to me. ‘I’ve got him. Let me have the rope from as far away as you can manage.’ I got cautiously to my hands and knees and threw the rope. The ice cracked beneath the movement but when I got down again on my stomach it was steady under me. And again Lindsay’s voice came back ‘Got it. Get back and all pull gently when I say.’

  I got back as quickly as I could, feeling the tremor in the ice grow as I crawled. Lindsay’s hail came before I had reached the shore. For a moment we pulled against a dead weight – and certainly a weight for which the rope had never been designed. Then it moved. Lindsay’s voice came in triumph. ‘He’s out! Long and steady.’

  I was aware that the tremor in the ice was now a faint vibration in the air, the ghost of a low moan. And just as we had got the almost inert body to safety it rose in pitch. Wind from up the loch. Lindsay’s voice came, rapid and controlled: ‘Rope again – if you can.’ A second later, sharp against the murmur of that swift and treacherous wind, came the splintering repercussion of a widely breaking surface.

  ‘Lindsay!’

  There was no reply. I took one look at Christine Mathers and ran out over the now working ice.

  6

  The chill of that water is still in my bones. And more, I should think, in Noel Gylby’s. He was seconds behind me; he worked for an hour after he had hauled me out. But what haunts my memory with a dragging irony is the small scale of it all. Daylight showed how narrow is that last arm of the loch. It is not even very deep. And we were struggling with floating fragments of ice that a boy could pick up and pitch against a stone. Yet I do not think we failed to make every effort we could. In that sudden flaw of mountain wind the numbing water and the driving ice made a little Arctic hell. And from up the loch a powerful undercurrent was pulling, threatening again and again to draw us under an unbreakable barrier. It was days before the body of Neil Lindsay was recovered.

  My head was injured; and because of that joined to exhaustion I must have lain unconscious for some time. When I recovered I found Wedderburn with a brandy flask and Ewan Bell the cobbler bending over me. I struggled up and asked a question.

  Wedderburn shook his head. ‘I am afraid there is no hope. He is drowned.’

  ‘Miss Mathers?’

  ‘Miss Guthrie and Jervie have taken her back to the house.’ I turned round and saw lying near me the body of the rescued man. It stirred as I glanced. My mind through its unconsciousness had still, I think, been working in terms of mere accident and danger. It was now flooded by the knowledge of tragedy. And my face must have shown this. For Wedderburn said: ‘At least, now she need not be told until some proper time.’

  I staggered to my feet impatiently. ‘Ranald Guthrie,’ I said; ‘you reckon without him still.’

  Bell strode over to the prostrate figure and held up a lantern. He moved an arm, a hand into the light – a hand from which a couple of fingers had been amputated long ago. ‘Ian Guthrie,’ he said. ‘Ranald is dead.’

  ‘Dead! You are sure?’ My head still swimming, I stared at him stupidly.

  The old man straightened up. ‘Certain. I killed him.’

  PART SEVEN

  A CONCLUSION BY EWAN BELL

  1

  Yesterday I had a letter from Christine. The postmark – Cincinnati, Ohio, – that seemed outlandish but a year since is grown familiar now: wonderful it is how even an old man will get used to change.

  Fient the change, though, could you find in the Kinkeig folk. Mistress Johnstone herself brought the letter over from the post-office and stood about for near ten minutes, fell interested in other folk’s old shoon. ‘Read your letter, Mr Bell,’ she said, ‘and never mind me.’ And half an hour later in came the schoolmistress, her nose maybe a ghost of a bittock longer than the wintry day she went up the glen to the meikle house. Would I take a ticket, she was wondering, for a right trig play the bairns were to give in the church hall, choke-a-block it would be with self-expression and child psychology, and the whole written by the dux, a genius he was for certain, wee Geordie Gamley? And would there be any news from the world coming into Kinkeig these days?

  And a week or two ago I had another letter from America, the postmark less familiar: San Luis Obispo, Cal. You could scarce, Mrs Johnstone said, look for anything more heathenish than that. And would it be from a black man, now? I opened the letter and said no, it was from a schoolfellow settled in those distant parts. Which was true enough. For he well remembered, Dr Flinders wrote, the two of us sitting under the old dominie, the time he came to the village school before being sent to Edinburgh. An unco thing for a man to write who was born in Australia when I was twenty. But Mistress Johnstone knows nothing of that.

  Christine’s letter yesterday I took over to the manse and Dr Jervie and I read it together. I think he’s aged, the minister, this past year; certain his hand was trembling as he laid the letter on his desk – the letter that said Sybil Guthrie had told her the truth about Neil. And for a time he bided silent, looking out over the warm garden and the glebe where the harvest, heavy and yellow, was drawing on. ‘And time mellows everything, Ewan Bell,’ he said.

  I put the letter back in my pocket. ‘Do you think,’ I said, ‘that one day she might find a man?’

  ‘And why not, Ewan? Maybe after Neil Lindsay Christine could never marry in the Scottish gentry. And never after Neil Lindsay another crofter lad. But now she’s in a new world. And see how already she’s opening to the strangeness of it, coming out of her shell to watch and puzzle and criticize. One day she’ll see not the strangeness only but the beauty and then–’ He stood up. ‘But it mayn’t be in our time, old friend.’

  And today I’ve tramped up the glen. Eighteen months have passed since I first took pen to set this narrative in motion. I have a fancy to end it in the shadow of Castle Erchany.

  2

  John Appleby, that clever London man, would have it that the Guthrie case defeated him. He neglected, he says, the single element that changed its whole composition at the last. There was one question, he insists, he forgot to ask. But the reader will have seen that he did ask it – and would have asked it again that night but for the speed things happened with. Who was it slipped out of the schoolroom in front of Hardcastle and the lad Gylby when they were on their way to the tower? You know the answer, Reader. It was Ewan Bell.

  Long I’d chewed over that strange letter the daftie brought me from Christine. But, old man and slow that I am, it was Christmas Eve before I saw that at the heart of it, unknown perhaps even to Christine herself, was an appeal. Nor perhaps did that truth of it rise clear in my own mind, for when I started up the glen in the gloaming I told myself it was only because I must bid the quean goodbye. But deep down I recognized the appeal and deeper still I must have felt the danger: I wouldn’t otherwise have attempted a road that was danger and daftness itself.

  I reckoned to reach the meikle house by about eight o’clock and trust for the night to Guthrie’s hospitality or to a pallet like the schoolmistress had thought of in the loft at the farm. Only in such a reckoning I was thinking of myself as a younger man. By some freak of nature I reached Erchany alive through the storm that night, but it wanted only half an hour to midnight as I plodded up the last stretch of the drive, the storm lantern I had brought with me giving but the smallest glimmer in that yet driving snow. There was a light in the schoolroom; I climbed down to the moat and then, with some difficulty, up to the little terrace. Mr W
edderburn was right in spying in me the ruins of an athlete; but it seems I keep a bit of muscle still.

  I wonder now that I took this secret road to Christine; no doubt it shows how strong was my instinct that Guthrie was an enemy. She let me in by the window and I could see she was right glad that I had come. She had a bit suitcase – no bigger than Mistress McLaren’s Sabbath handbag it looked – beside her, and a mackintosh over a chair. I said ‘Surely you’re not going tonight?’

  She nodded. ‘It’s uncle’s way. And Neil says we can get fine to Mervie. He’s up with uncle in the tower now and we’re to go straight away when he comes down. It will be all right, don’t you think, Ewan Bell?’

  She was too much in love, I suppose, to allow herself more than a troubled suspicion that it must be all wrong, that there was something crazy and sinister at the core of it. I said: ‘I’ll just be going up to see them, Christine. And when your Neil comes down away with you and write to me some day.’ And at that I kissed her. It was my idea, I believe, to act as a rearguard when they were gone. My mind didn’t stretch to the notion that it was their very getting away that might be fatal to them.

  Christine said: ‘Go by the little stair and you’ll more likely avoid Hardcastle.’ And she found me a key in case the door at the bottom was locked.

  I slipped from the schoolroom – it was when Gylby and Hardcastle glimpsed me – and held for the little stair. It’s something to remember that after all that trudge from Kinkeig I got up the little stair quicker than they got up the big one. And right different the story would have been had I lingered on the climb.