‘In that case, we had better all stay together, and abandon the rest of society,’ said the resourceful hero. Even Deborah smiled at his efforts.
‘I’m not sure I want to abandon the rest of society.’ Beatrix bowled her turn and returned to join Murray at the window. ‘I like having visitors.’ She scanned the drive below the window, as if willing a visitor to appear, and as if by magic, one did.
‘Here’s Mr. Tibo arriving already, Deborah,’ she called. Deborah came up to see.
‘Oh, dear: he’s so fastidious. But he knows what Father is like.’
‘Is he here on business?’ Murray asked.
‘Not really, though I’m sure Father will drag him away for some obscure purpose or other. It’s just after Mr. Leckie’s funeral yesterday – and he’s all on his own now, for Mr. Leckie was the closest to family he had, I think. Mother asked him to try to cheer him up, but I’m not sure that a castle infested with the remnants of solander goose and herring is the best place to cheer up.’
‘It might put his own problems into perspective,’ Beatrix suggested, straight-faced.
‘Oh, well – of course Mother isn’t back yet. We’d better go down, Bea. Boys, will you put the bowls away? All of them: the last time there was one left behind, and Grisell nearly broke her ankle.’
Tibo, too, was so well wrapped up against the weather that by the time Murray had overseen the boys’ disposal of the carpet bowls, he had only just appeared in the drawing room. He apologised at once for his muddy boots, but looked blank when Deborah countered with an apology for the smell of the goose. Deborah was about to explain when Lord Scoggie himself, the villain of the piece, arrived to greet the guest.
‘Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!’ he cried. Tibo smiled weakly, and bowed. It occurred to Murray that he did not look as if he had slept easily: the precision of his clothing and hair looked like the frame of a painting which was unaccountably smudged. His ankle, hurt at the boxing lesson, still seemed to give him pain.
‘The weather as bad as ever?’ Lord Scoggie persisted, as they all sat down.
‘Indeed – the wind has dropped, but the rain is as heavy as ever.’ He looked awkward at having echoed Lord Scoggie’s own phrase, and stopped.
‘Perhaps you should have stayed at home,’ suggested Major Keyes. ‘For your own health,’ he added, a little too slowly.
‘Oh, but I was out anyway. I have been – all over the village.’ He looked somehow confused.
‘Oh, have you been to see the Farquhars?’ Lord Scoggie asked quickly. Tibo met his eye.
‘Aye, I have.’ A little nod passed between them, and Murray, thinking back to the meeting with the fishermen in the library, deduced that the Farquhars must have sent their daughter back to her pig-eating husband. Then he saw Tibo’s face changed, preparing them for what he had to say next. ‘ Hugh Farquhar’s boat did not come back last night.’
‘Oh, no,’ Lord Scoggie breathed. ‘He was out in the storm?’
Tibo nodded.
‘The fleet was turning back, making a run for home, but he decided to stay behind. Joe Baillie says he felt he had lost time over the matter of the pig. He was trying to make up for it.’
‘Young fool,’ said Lord Scoggie sadly.
‘How are the family?’ asked Deborah, her mother’s daughter.
‘How you would expect them to be,’ said Tibo, his face drawn. ‘He was their only steady moneymaker – old Mr. Farquhar has not been able to go out for a few years, now, and the next boy is young yet.’ He sighed, watching as one of his hands flicked at a mote of dust on his breeches. ‘I spoke to Joe Baillie: there were five others on the boat, the usual crew. He has a list of the names for the minister.’
‘I’ll speak to him, and to Joe, myself, too.’ Lord Scoggie, whatever his faults, always did his duty, though he did not expect to take any pleasure from it. ‘And the village will be a boat down, too, for anyone else fishing. A bad day, a bad day.’
‘Worse, too, in that Joe Baillie blames the bad luck on the matter of the pig left by the harbour. I doubt things will get worse between uphill and down before they get better.’ Tibo seemed to be able to find nothing to cheer himself today, but there was still a look behind his eyes that said he did not have his mind wholly on this conversation: he was still confused by something, something to do with the village, and on one level at least he was trying to sort it out.
The rest of the company were silent, waiting for the tea to arrive and break the spell of melancholy. The two girls sat disconsolate on the sofa, their needlework abandoned on their laps. Murray sat on the window seat, unable to think of anything to say or do. Major Keyes made an effort to break the silence.
‘Joe Baillie, eh? Is he still on the go?’
The look Lord Scoggie cast him at this point would have stopped a lesser man, but that at that point the drawing room door opened and Lady Scoggie came in, pushing at her hair to rearrange it after its confinement under a damp bonnet. Murray remembered Major Keyes mentioning that in her youth, Lady Scoggie had been one for routs and parties, and wondered if she had been so careless of her appearance then – he somehow doubted it.
‘Ah, Mr. Tibo, already. You’ll have brought the bad news, then, I take it?’
‘About Hugh Farquhar’s boat? Yes, my lady.’
‘Terrible, isn’t it?’ She sat, drawing her shawl around her. ‘I went to see the Crichtons – you know their middle boy was on the boat – to see if they were in want of anything, but they barely know, yet. He was to be married at the end of the season. And I visited the Farquhars – very tense, all of them. It was almost as if they expected him back. Very sad.’
‘Is there no good news in this part of the world?’ Keyes asked, of Tippoo as much as anyone else. He held the dog’s chin and patted its head affectionately. The dog gazed up with devotion. Murray looked away.
‘Oh, mother – I meant to say, but we seem to have been so busy,’ Deborah said suddenly. ‘I spoke to Geordie Kinkell the other day outside his cottage, and he mentioned that his wife is not well. Have you been to see her?’
‘Not well, really?’ Lady Scoggie was unusually vague. ‘I think the minister mentioned something of the sort. I shall find time to call in, no doubt.’
‘I could go instead, if you have too many others to attend to, Lady Scoggie,’ Beatrix offered. ‘I am not sure that there is much that can be done for her, from the way Geordie Kinkell spoke of her.’
‘No, it’s good of you to suggest it, dear,’ said Lady Scoggie, ‘but I should be able to manage. A bad case, you say?’
‘I think so. You had the same impression, didn’t you, Deborah?’
‘Yes, I think so, too.’
Lady Scoggie looked, for a moment, almost wistful. Puzzled, Murray looked away from her and over to where Lord Scoggie and Tibo were sitting near the fire. They were not looking at each other, but in such a way that Murray had the clear impression that it was deliberate. Lord Scoggie knew of Mrs. Kinkell’s illness – Geordie himself had told him in Murray’s hearing – but he made no comment.
In the distance the doorbell rang.
‘That will be the Boothams,’ said Deborah, jumping up and then remembering that her mother was there, for once. ‘Did you notice – any kind of smell in the place when you arrived, Mr.Tibo?’
‘A smell?’ He looked completely bewildered.
‘A fishy sort of ... stench.’
‘Deborah!’ said her father. ‘Are you referring to that excellent goose?’
‘Father ...’ But before she could think of anything to say, the Boothams were announced.
The room lit up with their presence, and even the boys, who had been playing cards at the table, stood of their own accord and did not have to be glared at. Lady Scoggie reminded Naismyth about the tea.
‘A filthy day to be out,’ Bootham remarked when they were all seated again. ‘You have heard the bad news from the village?’
‘Our maid has been inconsolable all morning,’
Mrs. Bootham added. ‘She was betrothed – handfastit, I believe she called it: would that be right? – to one of the dead fishermen. Such a tragedy!’
‘Very much so,’ agreed Lord Scoggie warmly. ‘They were to marry at the end of the season. There is such a risk with these things.’
‘She was really quite beautiful in her grief,’ Bootham remarked, ‘sitting all in white, her black hair loose, apron to her wide eyes.’
There was an awkward little silence at this, as no one seemed quite to know how to respond. Fortunately the tea arrived, and Lady Scoggie took her place beside the urn to pour. It was probably her unaccustomedness to the position that caused the cups to rattle more than usual on their saucers.
‘And I hear another sad accident happened in the neighbourhood on Saturday,’ Mrs. Bootham began again. ‘I am sorry neither of us said anything when we met you on Sunday, but we had no idea at that time. Mr. Leckie, was it not? Your assistant, Mr. Tibo.’
‘Quite right. A very unfortunate accident, though it occurred during some foolish activity,’ said Tibo.
‘When is the funeral to be? We should like to pay our respects.’
‘It was yesterday.’
‘Oh!’ Mrs. Bootham blushed and looked very surprised.
‘Such matters are attended to more swiftly here than they are in England,’ Lady Scoggie explained to her.
‘Then I am heartily sorry we missed it,’ said Mrs. Bootham.
‘Aye, extraordinary the length of time they wait in England,’ Major Keyes came into the conversation, though if he had hoped to ease Mrs. Bootham’s embarrassment he was unsuccessful. ‘I remember when I first lived down there – well, I was quite shocked. And in the summer, too, in all that heat down in the south.’
‘Where have you been stationed, Major?’ Bootham asked smoothly, aiming to divert Keyes away from any more intimate detail of English funeral practices.
‘Oh, here and there, here and there,’ he said. ‘I’ve been in Dover for a fair while, and before that Chelsea, of course, getting myself patched up, and before that India, for a few years, though of course that was a bit hotter, but then they burn their dead there, before they even have time to cool. They say it’s religion, but half of it is disease, you know.’
‘And before India?’ Beatrix put in hurriedly.
‘London, Miss Beatrix, at the Tower. That was the time you were there, too, wasn’t it, Livvy?’ He grinned at his cousin. ‘You’d have been the toast of the town, too, if my lord Scoggie here hadn’t had the sense to marry you before you visited the capital.’
‘You flatter me, cousin,’ said Lady Scoggie, with a very pale imitation of a smile in return. ‘Lord Scoggie was very busy travelling between Edinburgh and London at the time, weren’t you?’ Lord Scoggie smiled and nodded. ‘I stayed with your mother, I remember, Alec.’
‘I should love to visit London,’ said Deborah. ‘It must be so exciting. I saw Edinburgh once, but that was when I was a child, and barely old enough to appreciate it.’
‘There is no glory in London, my dear,’ said Lady Scoggie with a sigh. ‘It is in the end a very wearing city, and very dirty.’
‘I think you can have forgotten the galleries, and the society, and the gardens and the river,’ said Philip Bootham, and smiled at her. She did not meet his eye.
‘No, not at all, Mr. Bootham, though I doubt they are all very different from my day. No doubt you and Mrs. Bootham know it well, but I no longer have the inclination for such things.’
‘Then perhaps one day your husband will take you, Miss Scoggie,’ Bootham turned his smile to Deborah. ‘If you find yourself there, be sure to let me know, and I shall be happy to guide you amongst the best of artistic sights.’
‘You are very kind, sir,’ said Deborah, blushing appropriately at the suggestion that she might have a husband in the foreseeable future.
Murray was a little behind Mr. Bootham, and could not see his face, but as he looked over at Deborah his eye was caught by Beatrix beside her on the sofa – Beatrix who had been immersed in the bow wave of Mr. Bootham’s smile. He caught his breath. Her face was illuminated, bright as the moon reflecting the sun’s light. Oh, no: he suddenly realised. She is in love with Mr. Bootham. Oh, dear Beatrix, he thought, and if he could have shouted it he would have. Don’t make a fool of yourself, dear Beatrix.
Mr. Bootham had glided on, impervious, and was now deep in conversation with Lord Scoggie about poetry. Tibo was listening with half an ear: Keyes, Murray noticed, was torn between feeling shy with the ladies, and feeling unread with the gentlemen. He sat somewhere in between, feeding titbits of cake to Tippoo under the table.
‘What verse do your boys read?’ Bootham asked Lord Scoggie, nodding in their direction.
‘Not a great deal at this stage, truthfully,’ said Murray, drawn in by Lord Scoggie. ‘They know Burns and Fergusson, of course, and Shakespeare, though Robert prefers the more violent bits. Milton, Dryden, and Spenser we have studied together. The usual, along with some Latin verse.’
‘And what of the modern poets?’ Bootham asked, as if he had expected no better.
‘Oh, yes, but you are a modern poet, are you not, Mr. Bootham? Like Shelley and Southey, perhaps,’ said Lord Scoggie eagerly.
‘It is a great time to be a poet,’ said Bootham. ‘The worlds of art, science, politics, all in turmoil, all crying out for reform, for cleansing – it is thrilling.’
‘You’ll have come across the new Edinburgh Review, then?’ said Tibo, cutting across the look of shock that always appeared on Lord Scoggie’s face when political reform sneaked into the conversation.
‘There’s a review in Edinburgh? How splendid!’ said Bootham happily.
‘A little Whiggish, perhaps.’ Tibo tried to sound balanced. ‘I hear it’s growing very popular, with a certain class of intellectual.’
‘My dear,’ Lady Scoggie interrupted gently. Lord Scoggie turned courteously to his wife. ‘Mrs. Bootham turns out to be an accomplished performer, as well as an artist. Shall we ask her to play and sing for us?’
‘Oh, delightful, delightful!’ Lord Scoggie managed to look pleased, though it was generally recognised amongst the family that there was more music in the library fireirons than there was in him. The rest of the family were not much better, to Murray’s perpetual sorrow, and he heard of Mrs. Bootham’s talent with mingled joy and dread. He had managed not to look at her directly since she had arrived, and that would be all the harder if she were seated centrally at the pianoforte.
Family and guests rearranged themselves to look attentive. Out of the corner of his eye, as he pretended to make sure that the boys were sitting still and behaving themselves quietly, he saw a flurry of pale silk as she made her way to the piano stool, and Beatrix hurried to turn the pages for her. She felt quickly over the notes, as if greeting the keyboard, charming it, then began to play and sing something by Mozart.
Murray closed his eyes. It was beautiful. He could feel something inside him, parched from want of music for over a year, stretching and growing again and basking in the cool, quenching draught of notes, filling every part of him, making him alive again.
But at the same time it was frightening. She sang like a siren, alluring, tempting, telling him to open his eyes and gaze at her again. He felt the need to see her, to hear her sing again and again, for the rest of his days. Oh, where was Odysseus with the wax and a sturdy mast when you needed him?
He made himself open his eyes as the song came to an end, and glance around him at the others. Lord Scoggie was nodding his head in time to some rhythm heard only in his head, and Deborah was not much better, however carefully taught. Tibo had the decency to sit still with a blank look on his face that could be interpreted in almost any necessary way. Major Keyes looked as if he thought it was all very well, but where were the drums? Only Lady Scoggie gazed as abstractedly at Mrs. Bootham as she would have expected, though it did not look as if her mind was on the music.
‘Please, plea
se delight us with something more!’ said Lord Scoggie, and Tibo echoed the plea. Mrs. Bootham needed little encouragement, and sang a tune from the Beggar’s Opera, with similar effect. Murray listened to around five bars, before he could bear it no longer and rose to walk over to the window, where he tried to find something to distract himself.
A cure was effected by Deborah’s performance straight afterwards, while Mrs. Bootham retired in triumph. Deborah played just as much as she had to, with as much feeling as an automaton and considerably less accuracy. Murray tried very hard not to be seen wincing, though he was by now well used to the Scoggies’ performances. He knew, too, what would come next. It did.
‘Mr. Murray? Mr. Murray is very musical, you know, much more so than I can appreciate!’ said Lord Scoggie. ‘You will play and sing for us, too, Mr. Murray, will you not? I’m sure the ladies would like a rest.’
There was never so much attention given to male soloists, anyway, in society, he reminded himself, as he dug through the music books on the piano. And when you can command the singer to perform, as if it is part of his normal work for which you employ him, then why should you pay any attention? You simply set him going, like the automaton he had thought Deborah, and turn away to play cards.
He knew the Scoggies preferred Scottish tunes to foreign composers like Mozart – they were not alone in that – and so he ferreted out ‘The Yellow-hair’d Laddie’ as a compromise. It was a folk song, but J.C. Bach had written variations on the tune, and he could perform both unexceptionally as a background to the general conversation. He sat at the piano and began.
It was a pleasant tune, and his only qualm, once he had begun and it was too late, was that the yellow-hair’d laddie who, according to the song, sang so beautifully that ‘silvans and fairies unseen danc’d around’, conjured up visions of the Boothams again. He seemed to be the only one who thought so, though, and as he had expected the music was not much listened to. Playing his way quietly through the variations, he found himself watching the company again, seeing how they had split into further conversation.
Beatrix was playing cards with the boys, keeping them amused, though he saw again that her attention was really on Mr. Bootham. His hair was as pale as if he powdered it: only the shine as the light slid on it from newly lit candles said that the colour was real. Mrs. Bootham indoors did not wear a married woman’s cap, but her hair, too, glinted. She was talking with Lady Scoggie, or seemed to be answering Lady Scoggie’s interested questions. Bootham himself was now talking with Lord Scoggie and Major Keyes, though what subject they could possibly have in common was beyond Murray’s imagination, and he could not quite hear them. Keyes was doing a good deal of the talking there, but in turn he was watching Tibo and Deborah, who, despite Tibo’s painful ankle, were standing by the window, a little aside from the rest of the company, and appeared to be in the middle of a very serious conversation. When Murray glanced round, both were frowning, and he caught, briefly, Beatrix’ eye as she noticed the same thing. She looked puzzled: it was enough to distract her for a little at least from the dangerous Mr. Bootham.
Knowledge of Sins Past (Murray of Letho Book 2) Page 18
