Bareback

by John Burke

  ‘Ah. And the Black Knowe Ladle.’ Brown bent with slimy reverence over the large goblet. ‘Thinking of reviving the old custom, Sir Nicholas?’

  Again Nick was at a loss, but Brown was only too anxious to enlighten him. Apparently it had been a Torrance tradition that the ladle should be handed full of ale to anyone entering the house, be he of noble birth or the most humble messenger. ‘You’d have a lot of friends if you reintroduced that. But then,’ said Brown with what he supposed to be an endearing grin, ‘you’ll no doubt make a lot of them anyway. We’re all so glad to see a Torrance back among his ain folk.’

  Before the man could turn his gloating attention to the reivers’ lances on the wall and other warlike gear, Nick said: ‘I’ll bear in mind what you’ve said, and go into the question of insurance.’

  ‘Whenever it suits you, Sir Nicholas. I’ll be waiting to hear from you. But don’t risk leaving it too late. I’d be happier in myself, now, to know you’re settled in with an easy mind.’

  ‘I’ll go into the matter. I’ll be in touch.’

  Nick went down to show the man off the premises. As the Escort started and Brown went in for a lot of waving friendly farewells, Nick contemplated the slope below the tower, the rise to the cairn, and the pattern of cloud shadows racing like runnels of dark water into gullies and down the hillside.

  When he was quite sure that Brown and his car were well out of sight, he folded the Common Riding pamphlet into his pocket and went out for a walk.

  *

  A breeze rustled across the moss as if whispering sly commands to the swirling shadows. There was a tune in there that he half recognised: disconnected notes, rising and then sighing down, which ought to assemble themselves into something coherent, given time. A yellow flicker of asphodel caught the sun and then lost it again. On the wind came a tang of sour grass which he couldn’t identify. Out of sight a whaup uttered an urgent warning, though no visible creature was stalking it or poised to swoop on it from the blue, cloud-flurried heavens.

  He set out along his own stretch of the historic ride, wondering if there had ever really been a flesh and blood girl who had ridden a horse bareback furiously from the Border – and what had she been doing in that No Man’s Land in the first place? Avoiding a dank patch of peat bog, he went round the hill below the Hagg Mound cairn and down the slope towards what looked at first like a lopsided lump of rock tilted up from the ground. The pamphlet identified this as the Pictish Stone, another marker on the Common boundary route.

  Beside it there appeared to be a taller stone or maybe a dark tree trunk, leaning towards it. Only when it was too late to turn back, if he had wanted to, did it move and show itself as a human being.

  This one he recognised at once. Another face from that meeting in the Tolbooth.

  ‘Professor Makepeace, I think? Making sure the route has no unexpected hazards?’

  Makepeace jotted a last few words in his notebook, and turned to face him. He looked satisfied, as if he had just managed to solve another of the confusions of the historic Ride to his own satisfaction, if not to everybody else’s. ‘Sir Nicholas. I’d been thinking of telephoning to ask for an appointment, when you’re not too busy.’

  Another one. But at least he had proposed to phone and not simply show up on the doorstep.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve established that the bounds have been wrongly delineated for the last four centuries, and Black Knowe needs shifting two miles to the east?’

  ‘Nothing as drastic as that. I merely wished to offer my services to you in a semi-professional capacity.’

  Another one, thought Nick again. He found it hard to imagine what Makepeace might be selling.

  ‘You’ll be aware, of course, that you have to open to the public Wednesday and Thursday afternoons through the summer?’

  Yes, that had been explained. It had been put to him in a convoluted way by that awkward, stammering little solicitor on his inheriting the baronetcy that in consideration of a relaxation of inheritance tax, he must allow public access to the hall and its treasures on two afternoons a week.

  ‘It’s only a suggestion,’ said Makepeace, without any movement in that rock cliff of a face, ‘but I would be glad to offer my services as guide. I assume you weren’t thinking of giving up your own afternoons in that capacity?’

  ‘I hadn’t really got round to thinking about it.’

  ‘I believe I am well acquainted with the provenance of all the items on display. I could answer any questions which visitors might come out with on the spur of the moment.’

  Which you, he was implicitly saying, could not do.

  ‘I may very well take you up on that, Professor.’

  ‘Whenever you’re ready. But the administrators will probably be making enquiries fairly soon.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch.’

  Everybody seemed to know more about the Torrance home than he did himself. But then, they had all been here longer than he had.

  He walked on until he could look down on the wide but shallow burn through which riders would splash boisterously on their way to the races and drinking bouts, and through which the Bareback Lass would ride on the final day.

  It was silly to doubt the legends. They were an integral part of this rolling landscape, sunk deeply into it: a truer part of it than he was, or might ever be.

  He took a roundabout route past what the pamphlet identified as the Hanging Tree and back through the town. A couple of elderly women gossiping on a corner turned to look at him and then went on gossiping at a more frenzied pace. The butcher, standing in his shop doorway, raised his hand in what might have been a friendly wave or a vague imitation of respectful forelock tugging.

  There was an antiquarian bookshop with a For Sale notice in the window, directing the buyer to Archibald Ferguson, Solicitor and Estate Agent of 18 Roxburgh Street. Within there was still a large array of books, and a copy of a trade magazine lay on the desk – a fine mahogany desk rather than a counter suggestive of vulgar commerce – as if the proprietor had just walked out to the post office and would be back in a few minutes.

  There was a voice at Nick’s shoulder. ‘Sad, Sir Nicholas, very sad. Sorely missed.’ It was that bloody man Brown again, anxious to gush more information. ‘Dear old Seb Cameron was a great benefactor to this town. He was the one who found most of the old records of the original Ridings. And the manuscript of the song. You know about the Kilstane Song?’

  ‘It hasn’t crossed my ken so far.’

  ‘Well, now, I did think that might be something you’d have been knowing about. You being a musician yourself, Sir Nicholas.’

  ‘Word travels fast.’

  ‘Aye, we’ve got very attentive ears in Kilstane. Come to think of it, now, what we could do with is a music shop. I wonder if you’d be showing an interest in these premises?’

  ‘I doubt it.’ Nick began to walk away.

  ‘If ever you need any professional help . . .’

  Nick turned the corner as briskly as possible, and found himself walking past the solicitor’s office. Through the window he could see that sad, hunched little man standing above a woman at a desk, shuffling papers through his hands.

  No doubt the solicitor, the butcher, the bank manager and the postman already knew more about him than he would know about them. Like Brown, they were already picking up scraps of information and fitting them into their own picture of him.

  Even in the sharpest of Border breezes, this place could prove suffocating.

  *

  As Nick went back into the tower, the vague music he had heard out on the moor seemed to follow him. Even when he had closed the heavy door, it was still trapped in his ears and his head. Only when he reached the foot of the stairs did he realise that it was coming from above, and was louder here than outside.

  It was the sound of the clarsach, the small harp in the hall.

  Nick climbed the stone flight and went quietly in through the open door. A ripple of arpeggios was
as gentle as the rippling of the burn at the foot of the slope, leading into a plaintive melody that belonged to Black Knowe just as surely as the quaich and the goblet and the legends belonged.

  In the window seat, a girl with long flaxen hair and a slim, graceful neck was bowed over the clarsach. Against the light she could well have been the ghost of some maiden from a romantic tale, conjured up from a misty past.

  Nick could not bring himself to interrupt. He waited until the last golden echo had died away in the roof rafters, then said amiably: ‘You’re not really supposed to touch that, you know.’

  She stood up, clutching the harp to her. Away from the background haze of light through the window, her face was not that of a ghost but of a living young woman with a complexion almost as pale as her hair, and very clear blue eyes which blinked for a moment in uncertainty.

  ‘Oh, but I’ve touched it often enough.’ At first it came out defiantly. Then she looked full at him, ‘Oh, dear. You’d be Sir Nicholas?’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m Fiona Robson.’

  He would not have expected the Robsons to have produced such a fine-spun, graceful daughter. Where Mrs Robson was so thin as to be scrawny, Fiona was delightfully slender. Where the mother was clumsy-footed, the daughter seemed to float. Mr Robson was a thickset, jowly Tynesider twice the size of his wife. At the time when Black Knowe was built, it would have been treason for an Englishman to take a Scottish wife; which hadn’t stopped a number of them from taking sonsy little Roxburgh girls into their beds. Today it was commonplace.

  Nick said: ‘You play beautifully. Are you thinking of a musical career?’

  As she shook her head, the flaxen hair brushed across her face and fell back again. ‘Just that a few of us play together. Or we did. We had little concerts when . . . that is . . .’

  ‘When my uncle was away?’

  A faint blush tinged her cheeks. ‘Aye. He was no fond of music.’ Before Nick could say anything, she went breathlessly on: ‘Perhaps you would consider allowing regular recitals here?’

  ‘I’ll have to give it some thought.’

  How many variations on that remark was he doomed to make? And how many more suggestions were there going to be for revivals of this and that? Goblets filled with free ale, the hall filled with music . . . You wouldn’t associate Fiona Robson with beer swilling, though. Rather he would match her complexion and the whole air of her to a cool white wine: a cool, clear Pinot Gris, say, with the faintest petillance.

  Her blue eyes were disconcertingly appraising him. ‘Your father was a musician.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A gey fine one,’ she said. ‘The Torrance Quartet – I have their discs of Mozart’s Haydn quartets.’

  ‘So have I.’

  ‘But of course. Though my brother Colin tells me your own musical interests are rather different.’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘What sort of?’ Already she was taking subtle control of the situation, smiling a shy yet slightly mocking smile.

  ‘Mainly studio work.’ He always said this when questioned. It sounded a bit better than admitting that you spent most of your time as a session musician covering for rich pop stars who would have been utterly at a loss if left on their own, without amplification and without professional musicians unobtrusively working away behind them.

  ‘There is plenty of music out of doors, of course.’ Her head tilted as if she had unexpectedly heard distant voices or melodies beyond anyone else’s range. Her pale lips parted again in that faintest of smiles. In half profile there appeared a beautifully classical line from her brow down her fine, aquiline nose. ‘The pipes will be out for the Riding. And there are the Riders’ Ball, and the Pipers’ Ball – which used,’ she said with a demure lowering of her eyes, ‘to be held in the hall here, many years ago.’

  More revivals?

  Nick tried a knowledgeable smile of his own. ‘The Riding seems to take over the whole town – and Black Knowe had better not be left out?’

  ‘My brother Colin will be the Callant this year,’ she said. ‘My parents are so proud.’

  ‘I didn’t know he’d been chosen yet. I gathered the other evening that the Lass had been named, but it’s up to her to choose –’

  ‘Oh, it will be Colin. Kirsty chose him long ago. When they were quite little. I knew.’

  ‘You watched them? Little sister stirring it up?’

  ‘No need to watch. I have always known.’ She was staring at the Lely painting. Although she must have seen it many times before, the near nakedness of the girl seemed to entrance her. Her breathing quickened. ‘If I were to ride like that . . .’ It was little more than a whisper.

  Nick felt his own breath doing disturbing things. ‘You haven’t been the Lass yet?’

  ‘Nor ever will be. Nobody will elect me. Not the right sort of family.’

  ‘But you’ve just said that Colin, your brother –’

  ‘Colin will be named by Kirsty, not by a committee.’

  ‘But Kirsty herself? I didn’t get the impression her family –’

  ‘She was your cousin’s daughter. And still calls herself Torrance, though her mother married again.’

  ‘So she’s . . . the right sort.’

  ‘She will do.’

  ‘But surely in this day and age –’

  ‘Nobody,’ said Fiona placidly, ‘is going to select me. So I shall never have the opportunity to choose my own Callant.’

  Chapter Three

  Archie Ferguson showed his visitor out, told Miss Elliot she needn’t stay any longer, and went back to his inner office. Sir Nicholas Torrance had raised a large number of questions which could not all be answered from existing documents. One thing had been established, though: the income from his grandfather’s and uncle’s investments would be only just enough to maintain Black Knowe, even with the concessions agreed on the works of art and relics. Sir Nicholas had spoken of moving electronic equipment into the tower and working on backing tracks and commercials from there, but the solicitor did not understand the jargon or what was entailed. He remained curious about how the new owner would manage his affairs; and whether, like so many of his predecessors, he would soon find it necessary to live and work elsewhere, visiting his property only rarely. Kilstane had been used to doing without the Torrances for quite some time. It might well go on doing so.

  Archie tidied up the papers on his desk and began summoning up the courage to go home.

  Making sure Miss Elliot had left, he unlocked the bottom drawer of the desk and reached for his bottle of whisky. He took a long swig, stooped to put the bottle back, and then decided to leave it for another moment or two on the blotter.

  There had been a time when he was reluctant to go home because the place was so empty when he got there. Now he wished it were empty again.

  After his first wife’s death, Archie Ferguson had postponed the house’s vacancy by immersing himself in work, using long hours in the office to numb the ache of loneliness. There was no financial need to overwork. Janet, daughter of his late senior partner, had left him a comfortable legacy and there were no children to be looked after. Right from the start theirs had been a marriage of convenience rather than a romantic one, but it had been truly convenient: they had been comfortable together, and he was conscious of a chilling void after Janet had gone.

  In spite of that, how could he have allowed himself to be drawn into another marriage – and with the demanding, anything but restful Hannah Craig? Now Hannah Ferguson. She had kept telling him how much she had depended not just on his legal skills during her divorce from Sandy Craig, but on the warmth of his friendship. ‘It’s meant so much to me.’ At his most vulnerable, Archie had let himself be persuaded of the need to fill that void left by Janet. He soon came to realise that the only gap Hannah wished to fill was financial, not emotional. From telling him how much she relied on him, she soon came to berate him for not getting her a big enough settlement and for charging her
too much for ‘all that legal jiggery-pokery’. The warmth she claimed to have felt soon suffered a reduction in calorific value.

  Archie looked at the level of whisky in the bottle, told himself he didn’t really need another; and took a long swig. He began sucking a peppermint as he locked the outer door behind him.

  When he had been on his own, he had kept up a steady pace homeward, in no hurry but not interested in anything to either side of him. Nowadays his pace was slower, and he spun out the time, dawdling past shop windows. You might well suppose the town existed only for this forthcoming festivity. There were tea towels of the Bareback Lass, picture postcards of the statue, booklets of coloured photographs in the newsagent’s and the Post Office, and in Ian MacKenzie’s shop a tray of tartlets in the shape of the Reiver’s Quaich. Even in the abandoned bookshop there were musty pamphlets of past Common Riding race fixtures and photographs of past years’ Lasses and Callants. You couldn’t help speculating whether the ghost of the late Sebastian Cameron might not come drifting across those other dusty memories.

  Passing the Tolbooth, Archie knew that behind the magistrates’ bench they would this evening be unfurling the Women’s Institute embroidery of the seductive rider. That had been one of the minutes of the meeting which he had scrupulously followed up and could tick off his list.

  In more rancorous moments he had secretly allowed himself to wonder what would happen if the whole thing were ever proved to be a sham. Half the economy of Kilstane would collapse if the basic legend was rubbished. But of course it would never happen, any more than a miracle would happen to remove Hannah swiftly and painlessly from this world.

  On the corner beside what had been the Museum but was now called the Heritage Centre, he waited for the traffic lights to change. A youth making a dash for it was almost run down by a car turning below the Victorian clock tower.

  You were always hearing about people getting run over. There had been correspondence in the Kilstane Mercury about traffic calming along this very street. A moment of inattention, and you could step out in front of a lorry. And Hannah was so overbearing, so ready to walk out and give any approaching car one of her withering glares, expecting it to stop within a matter of inches.