After the Armistice Ball

by Catriona McPherson

  By ten o’clock, dressed in a warm coat in case I ended up sleeping in the motor car, I was huddled in the porch of the side door plucking up the nerve to start walking. The stable block is just around the corner of the billiard room and across the yard and it was a trip I made daily without thinking, being generally too impatient to wait for my little Austin motor to be brought round. Now though, as I set off, the carriage house doors seemed to dwindle into the distance and the yard stretched endlessly in front of me. The stone chippings too crunched explosively under my tread, like horses eating apples, and my neck grew stiff with the effort not to peer around me.

  Alec had urged me to take his hired motor but my own, ramshackle as it might be, was at least familiar and was small enough for me to roll it out of the garage with one foot on the running board and one on the ground. This I soon did, then hopped in and pulled the door to without slamming it. I hoped against hope that it would continue to roll down the gentle slope of the yard and the back drive and that I should not have to start the engine until safely away from the house. It was agonizingly slow at first, barely moving. I could hear individual stones on the drive popping under the tyres as I inched towards the first of the gates, then gradually we gathered some speed, hurtling down the bumpy drive and shooting at last out of the gates on to the road and away.

  It was light by the time I pulled off on the moor above Gatehouse, but too early for visiting, and I thought anyway that my mission would be the better for waiting until I had rested. Now, sick and gritty-eyed with exhaustion, I did not feel I could rely on myself to navigate the extraordinary interview I hoped was to come. I walked around the motor car a few times until my back and neck began to ease and then got into the passenger side, curled up and closed my eyes.

  Awakened by the sound of a cart clopping past on the road beside me, I opened my eyes on to dazzling brightness and felt sure I had slept away the morning, but a glance at my watch told me that it was only just seven o’clock. Melting hot in my thick coat, still screwing up my eyes against the glare, and with my throat so dry that it clicked when I tried to swallow, I started the car and began the descent towards the town. Fearing to drive down the main street and pass Dr Milne on an early call, however, I veered off to the west at the fork in the road and from there picked my way among the criss-crossing lanes towards the sea until I arrived at my destination, stopped the car and let myself in at the gate. The cabbages looked in very good heart, I noticed as I made my way to the front door, hardly any slug holes at all.

  I saw through the kitchen window that Mrs Marshall was dispensing porridge to an astonishing number of assorted large sons and small grandchildren and she came to the door with the ladle still in her hands. She cried out in delight at the sight of me and lifted her arms like a runner breaking the winning tape (causing flecks of porridge to leap off the ladle and spatter the floor around her). I wondered for a moment why my appearance should cause such immoderate joy, and then I remembered that the last thing I had promised was to tell her when naughty Cara was found and brought home again. My face must have betrayed something of what I felt because hers fell, and her mouth was turned down at the corners as she nodded me towards the parlour and returned to the kitchen.

  ‘Just leave they plates and get on with you,’ I heard her say. ‘Jock, Willie, your pieces are ready standing at the back door. Peggy, tie your ribbon or you’ll lose it. Jean, put the wee one’s boots on his right feet before you go. And don’t any of you come through the room, mind. Granny’s busy.’ She sidled back into the parlour and sat opposite me.

  ‘Mrs Marshall, I’m so very sorry,’ I began. ‘But I don’t have time to tell all just now.’

  ‘From your face, I don’t think I want to hear it,’ said Mrs Marshall. ‘Just tell me, was she in thon fire, after all?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘She is dead, I’m afraid, but she didn’t die in the fire. I’m sure of it.’ I felt a fraud and a heel at the relief that suffused her face, slackening the drawstring purse of her mouth and softening the swimmy old eyes in their baskets of wrinkles.

  ‘So what are you after?’ she asked, in a bright voice.

  ‘I need to speak to whoever it is around here who lays out corpses,’ I said. ‘I don’t mean the undertaker.’

  ‘You mean Nettle Jennie,’ said Mrs Marshall.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I expect I do.’

  ‘I’ll tell you where to find her, madam, and glad. She has a wee hoose on the Cally estate up by Gatehouse, just on the edge. But you mind out for yourself when you go there.’ I looked at her enquiringly.

  ‘The thing is, you see, madam, Nettle Jennie is a witch.’

  I had anticipated as much. For all that reading the Bible and feeling glum were still the only Sunday pastimes in the respectable homes of Scotland, one only has to mention felling a rowan tree or eating a wild mushroom to realize that St Columba did not make a very thorough job of it. And I have no call to be superior for my legs were trembling as I approached Nettle Jennie’s house. It was a tiny building, but with something about it that hinted at a nobler purpose than a worker’s cottage sometime in its history. Small wonder, though, that the local witch was welcome to it: it was gloomily situated on the banks of a slow-moving burn surrounded by large trees, and midges were dancing in the air and rising from the ground in front of me as I made my way through the long grass to the door.

  Almost too grotesque to be anything but comical was the way the door swung open as I approached it and a disembodied voice said: ‘I’ve been expecting you.’ Almost, but not quite, and I was equally balanced between trepidation and amusement as I bent my head under the lintel and entered.

  The interior was dark but while the darkness of Mrs Marshall’s cottage rooms came from the thick walls and tiny windows, here it arose from walls panelled with black wood and from the fact that, although there was a large arched window of leaded diamond panes set in the end wall, most of the light from it was blocked by a collection of stoppered bottles, one jammed into each diamond, wedged right in if they fitted, held in by putty and string if not. The effect was that of a home-made stained-glass window, and it was this thought which led to the realization that Nettle Jennie’s house had once been a chapel. I wondered if this added to or detracted from the lore. It seemed rather macabre to me. The woman herself as well, once my eyes adjusted to the dimness, was revealed to be satisfyingly to type. Thick, grey hair in a plait, the creased dark skin of a gypsy and eyes set so deep in shadowed sockets that their light was the dull gleam of velvet rather than any kind of shine. Set against all of this, however, was her blue work dress and clean white pinny, and her voice – clear and sweet, and pure Galloway in its vowels. She had been at work on some greenery, piled on newspaper on her table, and she returned to it now, stripping leaves from branches and separating them into piles. Not having been asked to sit, I leaned against a cupboard and watched her.

  ‘I saw you at the inquiry,’ she said. ‘And I heard you were asking questions.’

  ‘I dearly wish you had come to me then,’ I said. ‘What a lot of bother it would have saved.’

  ‘That’s not my way,’ said Nettle Jennie. ‘I keep myself to myself and people come to me. They wouldn’t come if they thought I’d go running with tales.’ I could see the sense in this, but I slumped with disappointment.

  ‘I don’t suppose then,’ I said, ‘that you would be willing to be a witness. To come to the police, I mean.’

  ‘Well, now me and the police, we keep our distance, see? Suppose you tell me what it is you want to know.’ She nodded towards a chair at last and I sat, while she carried on with her picking over of the stems and branches. Every so often she would put one of the leaves into her mouth, as I have seen Mrs Tilling do shelling peas in the yard in the sunshine. The leaves might have been spinach for all I knew, but still it made me shiver.

  ‘Well, the little kitchen maid who died at Reiver’s Rest,’ I began.

  ‘Was no kitchen maid, for a start,’ sa
id Nettle Jennie. ‘That’s the first thing.’

  Hallelujah! At last, for the first time in all these months, there was someone else besides Alec and me who was willing to say so.

  ‘I worked that out,’ I said. ‘She was Mrs Duffy’s daughter. But anything you can tell me from having seen her will be invaluable. Next, I think she was murdered, and here is where I very much hope you can back me up, because I have no proof of it at all, beyond my conviction.’

  ‘That’s not so easy,’ said Nettle Jennie. ‘She’d tumbled down, the poor lass, no mistaking that. But whether she fell or was pushed, how would you know? How could you say?’

  ‘You don’t think she jumped then?’

  ‘Made away with herself? Is that what they told you?’

  ‘They told me as big a heap of nonsense as they told everyone else. But it was one of the possibilities. She was trying to miscarry the baby, you know, and she jumped too far. Isn’t that what they told you?’

  Her hands stilled for the first time and rested amongst the leaves.

  ‘What?’ I said. She shook her head at me.

  ‘That wee lass couldn’t have been trying to get rid of a baby,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There was nothing there to get rid of.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I asked and she bridled.

  ‘I’ve brought enough into the world to know,’ she said. ‘Aye, and seen to it that plenty never arrive.’

  ‘But I know she was pregnant,’ I said. ‘The doctor told me.’

  She snorted.

  ‘The doctor! What did he tell you?’

  ‘He said it was as easy for him to tell if a girl was – I can’t remember the expression he used exactly – but as easy for him as for me to tell a man from a woman. And “tell-tale marks of pregnancy”. I know he said that.’

  ‘Aye, she had the tell-tale marks of pregnancy all right,’ said Nettle Jennie, and she watched me, laughing at my irritation with her air of mystery. Something was ringing bells, right at the back of my mind. I squinted up at the cloudy green and brown patchwork of her home-made window and remembered sitting in another church, looking at stained glass, listening to the minister. Man that is born of woman, he had said, reminding me of Alec stuttering while he tried to say ‘with child’. And suddenly I had it. Suddenly I could remember precisely the words that Dr Milne had used. Those ‘tell-tale marks’ had said to the doctor – and should have said to me – not that the girl was pregnant when she died but that sometime in her past she had borne a child.

  Cara had had a baby. For, of course, there are no clear marks of being newly pregnant beyond the obvious change in one’s outline. On the other hand I very vividly remembered how cheated I felt after the first time (no one having even hinted at it) to find that I had changed quite markedly and, it appeared, permanently. Even when the baby was safely in the nursery wing with Nanny and there were several shut doors between him and me I could not lie in my bath and pretend it had not happened, not unless the water were very heavily dosed with bubbles and those horrid marks, looking like little pink anchovies draped all over my bosom and stomach, were deeply submerged. This then was what Cara dreaded Alec seeing on their wedding night.

  ‘But why would Dr Milne be so sure she was pregnant again?’ I said at last.

  ‘Give a dog a bad name and hang him,’ said Nettle Jennie. ‘That’s all he would have seen. The doctor.’ This accorded perfectly with what I knew of Dr Milne.

  ‘Could you tell from looking at her how long ago it was?’ I asked.

  Nettle Jennie shrugged.

  ‘Three, mebbes, four years. Something like that. Now, I’m not being rude, but can I ask you just to step into my garden while I do something here. These are my grandmother’s recipes and there’s no one knows them but me.’

  What an old fraud, I thought, as I hurried out. Grandmother’s recipes, indeed. As if I cared what she did with her vegetation. But I was grateful for the chance to think.

  All kinds of things began to drop into place. Lena must have known about this baby; she must have been instrumental in bundling Cara away to have it quietly somewhere. And this must be the hold she had over her daughter. Yes! This must have been the power she wielded to make Cara take the diamonds to be sold. I wondered whether her father knew about it. Not, I rather thought. Whether Clemence knew? Not, again. Lena always prided herself so on protecting Clemence from the sordid things in life. This would have been top of the list of things to protect her from. So Lena must have handled it all. Perhaps she had got a little cottage all on its own somewhere, just as she had the next time she had something to do that better had not be seen. With a rush of certainty, I thought of the pictures of Cara, beaming and golden – glowing, as they say – against the setting of some unknown cottage somewhere. A cottage Lena had tried to copy at Kirkandrews years later. I thought of Sha-sha McIntosh telling me about the crêpe-de-Chine dress ‘fearfully baggy’ from countless ages ago. Four years would be countless ages for one so young, I was sure. But who was Cara smiling at in those beautiful pictures? Not her mother, certainly. Her lover? Had her mother allowed him to visit her? I could not see Lena letting this happen for the sake of love’s young dream. But she might, I supposed, if it gave her a hold over the boy as well as the girl, whoever he was.

  This much I was sure of. Cara’s secret was this baby from years ago. And this was what she had to tell Alec. Now I could see why none of the other options would help her. Postponing the wedding could not get rid of those dark rings and pale stripes. Seducing Alec would only bring discovery sooner. And this was what Lena found out that night at the cottage, what drove her to fury. But wait. That could not be. Had I not just worked out for myself that Lena must have known all along? She could not have managed Cara’s confinement and have been shocked into madness by its sudden discovery. Here were echoes again of that feeling that Lena was split down the middle. Could she be? Could her rigid respectability, her obsession with keeping the vulgar at bay, have led her to that special kind of forgetting that Austrian doctors tell us of?

  Nettle Jennie was at my elbow suddenly, holding out a glass of some pale cloudy liquid. It might have been lemonade, I suppose, but I declined.

  ‘Like I’m saying,’ she began, ‘I don’t meet trouble halfway. I stay out of things, but this time . . . I don’t know.’ She drifted into silence for a while and then began again. ‘That was her own lassie? That was her own wee lassie she did that to? I might could come to the police with you, if you thought it would help put her away.’

  ‘But you said you weren’t sure it was murder,’ I said, puzzled.

  ‘Not that,’ she said. ‘I mean what she did after.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I said. ‘What did she do to her . . . after?’ I was not sure that I wanted to hear this.

  ‘There was some things could not be helped,’ said Nettle Jennie. ‘Her feet, like, were soft and there was nothing could be done about that, but she ground dirt into them, split the nails and dirtied them. She scrubbed her wee fingernails away to nothing, but she couldn’t put calluses where no work had put them. She rough chopped her hair at the ends and greasied it up, bit of dirt, but I could tell it was good healthy hair underneath it all, even combed all up the wrong way into rats’ tails.

  ‘She grubbied her neck for her, put dirt in her ears. I cannot be sure, but I think she went out to the closet and got muck to put in her mouth. I never smelled anything in my life like the smell of that wee girl’s mouth when I laid her out. But she couldn’t do anything about her bonny white teeth. Cover them in night soil, make them smell so bad the doctor wouldn’t go near, but it all came off with a swish of water.’ Nettle Jennie shook her head and clicked her own strong yellow teeth together.

  ‘I’ve been to plenty a corp I wished I had gloves for, I can tell you. Years of dirt, ground in. Linens never been off them for months. But this one was all wrong.’ She turned to me suddenly plaintive, a look of real pain in her eyes. ‘W
hat did she do that for, eh?’

  ‘It fooled the doctor,’ I said.

  ‘But how could she do that to her own wee girl? Soil in her mouth? How could she?’ I was startled. I should have thought that one in her occupation would be past such sensibility. She drew herself up.

  ‘I’m a woman just like you,’ she said, with such remarkable appositeness that I wondered whether she might be a witch after all. ‘I do what I have to do, for it must be done by someone. But I couldn’t do it for one of my own, not as tender and as gentle as I am. And as for back-combing the hair on the head you’ve just smashed in, on the neck you’ve just broken –’

  I put out my hands to try to block her words, and she stopped at last, turned abruptly and went back into her house. I followed.

  ‘What you’ve just told me only confirms it, but I thought so anyway,’ I said, standing in the open doorway. ‘She is mad.’

  ‘She must be,’ said Nettle Jennie. ‘If that’s what happened.’ She looked slyly at me and repeated it. ‘If that’s what happened.’ Facing the sunlight, her hooded eyes were easier to read and I saw an unpleasant look there now – cunning and taking some pleasure in the cunning. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ she said. I nodded. ‘We could find out,’ she said in the same slightly wheedling tone. ‘We could ask the wee lassie.’

  ‘What do you mean? How could we ask her?’ I said, thinking of ouija boards and upturned glasses.

  ‘I’m sure she would tell you. She knows you’re trying to help her.’

  She looked up at her curious window, pointing at the row upon row of odd bottles. Medicine bottles and scent bottles, beer bottles and oil bottles all corked or stoppered with scraps of rag. I moved towards the window and peered at them.

  ‘They’re empty,’ I said. ‘What do you mean she would tell me?’

  ‘They only look empty,’ said Nettle Jennie, right behind me. ‘She could tell you with her dying breath.’

  I turned, to see her smiling at me. She mimed breathing out, emptying her lungs, then she bent as though to kiss an imaginary face and mimed sucking in hard. Lips pursed shut, she plucked an empty bottle from the shelf at her side, blew into it and waved it at me, one strong brown thumb over the neck, cackling.