by Robin Hardy
'Mary Hillier asked me a very odd question yesterday. She said: "Does Sir Lachlan believe in the old religion? Oh I know he loves the rituals of it. But does he really believe the sacrifices we make will do any good?"'
'And what did you say?' asked Lachlan.
'"Of course he does," I said. "How can you possibly doubt it?".'
'The right answer surely?'
'Is it?'
'If I am a Rabbi, Jehova is my God. If I am a Mullah, Allah the merciful is He. If a Christian, Jesus is my Lord. Millions of people worldwide worship the sun. Here in Tressock I believe the old religion of the Celts fits our needs at this time. Isn't that all you can ask of a religion?'
'You haven't answered my… Mary's question.'
'Oh, I think I have,' said Lachlan, returning to his breakfast.
The Hunt
THE CROWD OUTSIDE the inn was so big that it spread right down the street in both directions. But of course it was not just the people who took up all that space. Almost everybody had some kind of horse. Immediately outside the front door of the inn was a roped-off area where Lachlan, Delia, Murdoch and other senior members of the Tressock community were gathered. All three, like almost everyone else, were already mounted. Donald Dee, Carl and Paul were close by, eagerly discussing tactics for the coming ride. No one doubted that this Laddie was going to be a real challenge. Circulating among the crowd were several young women carrying trays of Stirrup Cup. Their horses, by special dispensation, were tethered at the back of the inn, where Lolly was in charge. No one ever wanted to miss the 'off', although inevitably it tended always to be a bit ragged, the beautiful hunters of some getting away a lot faster than the shire horses and ponies of others.
Inside the inn, in the main bar, Steve sat drinking coffee with Peter.
'I'm glad to see the sun god has decided to shine on you guys today,' joked Steve.
Peter just smiled at this, because both were now listening to a speech Lachlan was making to the crowd outside. With the windows open to the spring sunshine, they could hear him clearly enough.
'In just a few moments, my friends,' he was saying, 'I will introduce you, those of you who have not already met him, to your Laddie. This year we are exceptionally lucky to have elected a man who is both handsome and an excellent horseman. He is a really good man, worthy to be your Laddie…'
Steve heard a commotion at the back of the bar. Some double doors, used in summer as an entrance to the patio and garden at the rear, were being opened. Through these, a rather skittish Prince was led into the bar by Lolly. Other horses were being held by Anthea and another groom outside on the patio.
Prince seemed uncomfortable in the bar and Lolly did her best to calm him as Steve came to greet her with a kiss on the cheek. She seemed to be controlling herself carefully as she gave him a quick peck of a kiss back.
'Good to see you, Lolly. Are you coming with me, Lassie?' He asked this with an attempt at a Scottish accent.
Lolly opened her mouth to answer, but oddly no words came. After a few seconds she managed to say: 'Wish I could. No, Paul and Carl are escorting you out of the village. Then when the church bell starts tolling…'
A curious gulping sound came from her, interrupting her sentence, which Steve didn't notice because he was in the act of mounting Prince. Peter McNeil, spotting Lolly's hesitation and guessing it was caused by an emotion which he would never normally have expected of her, quickly, loudly said: 'Lolly!'
'You were saying,' said Steve, now mounted, checking his stirrup lengths, '…when the church bells ring. Hey, I thought you didn't use the church anymore.'
'Just for this,' said Lolly, relieved to have found her voice again. 'We use the church bells just for this. So when they toll…'
'Toll? Isn't tolling for a funeral?'
'No, in this part of Scotland we use toll and ring interchangeably,' said Peter.
'I was going to say,' added Lolly, 'that when they toll – ring – whatever – dig your heels into Prince's flanks and ride like hell – because, after that, the whole town is after you, Laddie.'
Lolly squeezed Steve's thigh, the involuntary farewell gesture of a lover, and hurried out to where her horse awaited her on the patio. Anthea thought she saw tears in her eyes.
'They are waiting to greet you, Laddie,' said Peter McNeil, opening the front door of the inn. Steve nodded and rode Prince out into the sunshine and the hubbub outside. His appearance was greeted with a wild cheer that seemed to go on for several long minutes. Trying to make itself heard above the din was the voice of Lachlan:
'People of Tressock! Here is your Laddie! All hail the Laddie!'
There was a further roar from the crowd.
Paul and Carl had wheeled their horses around so they now flanked Steve on either side. A fiddle and an accordion and a kettle drum, all played by mounted musicians, were attempting 'The Ride of the Valkyries', which Steve only knew as the Apocalypse Now theme. Lachlan leaned forward and shouted to Steve:
'These lads will now escort you out of the village. The bells will ring and then you will be on your own. Remember what I told you yesterday. They can come at you from any direction. Now turn and wave to the crowd.'
Lachlan waited while Steve waved. Then he said: 'Go! Go! Go!'
The crowd parted for Steve, Paul and Carl, as they made for the
bridge. Paul and Carl could only join in the hunt when the bells had finished ringing and the rest of the field had joined them.
The bells began their toll, Steve dug his heels into Prince's flanks, and he took off, accompanied by a great roar from the assembled crowd.
He made for the Laird's Hill. His plan, such as it was, consisted of seeking cover as soon as possible in a place where he could watch his pursuers and see what routes they were taking. He had the advantage of riding a black horse. He figured that with this bright spring light, and the deep shade among the pine trees which lined one side of the Laird's Hill, he could enter the wood lower down and then ride up amongst the pines till he had reached a vantage point close to the top of the hill. If he had Prince stand well back from any patches of sunlight on the fringe of the wood, he would be able to see and not be seen.
This manoeuvre worked well enough. He saw the Tressock Pack (as he thought of them – although there were of course no dogs, only humans on horses, with a few straggling on foot behind) split into three groups. One, in which he was pretty sure he could see Lachlan and Delia, was heading alongside the Sulis River. Another, led by Carl and Paul, was coming straight up towards the Laird's Hill. A third, in which he thought he could identify Lolly and her friend Anthea, seemed to be riding right around the Laird's Hill, putting themselves behind him.
Steve decided to break cover now. It was hard to ride at any speed in the wood. He would make straight for the peak of the Laird's Hill, another vantage point. From there he should be able to see the King's Island and who, if anyone, had a chance of getting there first. Prince was jumping obstacles with ease and seemed hardly affected by the steepness of the climb. Steve felt glad he had accepted this challenge. In a short life spent almost entirely on or around horses, he had never had so much fun as this, never come near to riding an animal of the superb quality of Prince.
Steve had been right in identifying Lachlan and Delia in the group riding along the banks of the Sulis. Bella and Danny were just ahead, with dozens of others stretched out behind. These groups had some of the best horses and they surged over fences, hedges and walls like a continuous wave.
'Aren't you glad we went through with it, Delia?' asked Lachlan, remembering her attack of nerves when they were heading for Glasgow Cathedral.
'Very glad,' she agreed. 'You were right. Once it gets this far, I absolutely love it. But picking them up is the hard part. I always rather dread that. Dangerous, too.'
'Wouldn't be any fun if it was risk free,' said Lachlan. 'I see he's making for the peak now. A good move. Who's that coming at him just across from the pine woods?'
It
was too far for Lachlan or Delia to see. Their quarry had disappeared over the brow of the hill.
Beame and Beth
BEAME, WHO HAD been busy readying all his taxidermist paraphernalia for the preparation of the Queen of the May, was climbing the winding stone staircase to her room. Still kilted – it was part of his butler's uniform – he was a threatening figure to view from the rear as he mounted the stairs. His hairy piano legs protruded from a kilt that left the mottled backs of his huge thighs on view, while in his right hand he held a large veterinarian's syringe, like a gunslinger at the ready.
Nevertheless, like many corpulent men, he was remarkably light on his feet. His entry into Beth's room was virtually noiseless. The lovely girl lay flat on her back, her arm folded over her brow, her breathing irregular, showing that she was near to awakening. In his concentration on reaching Beth, Beame somehow forgot the cat. He had just calculated that one more long step would bring him to Beth's side, when his foot hit the dead Magog and he staggered forward, only saving himself from falling by reaching out with his free hand to the side of the bed.
Beth woke from a dream about Steve. They were back in Texas at the Cowboys for Christ church and Steve had decided to be 'born again' which meant being ritually immersed in the big zinc cattle trough kept in the front of the auditorium during a service. Being born again would mean he could resume with the Silver Ring Thing after whatever his lapse had been (Beth had not wanted to know) and a sopping wet Steve, re-emerging from the trough, was able to continue with their mission as if nothing much had happened. But Steve was hyperventilating, staggering against her, as he stepped from the trough. She opened her eyes with a start.
The huge head of Mr Beame, snorting like a hog, was only feet from her face. He seemed to have collapsed by her bed. She smothered a desire to scream. There must be some rational explanation. He was picking something he had dropped up off the floor. It was an ominously large syringe and he picked it up from beside the shattered glass. Magog lay there, clearly a very dead cat. Surely, she thought, this is just a nightmare. Soon I'll be awake. But as he regained his balance, Mr Beame, an unmistakably, hideously real Mr Beame, looked her straight in the face:
'Just lie very still, Miss,' he said, his face screwed into a repellent smile. 'I'm just going to give you a shot and you'll wake all nice and peaceful for your coronation. Looking your best you will after this.'
'No!' she yelled. 'No shots!'
But a great hairy hand had covered her mouth and he was hunting for a vein in her arm. She snatched her arm away and her hand connected with the broken glass beside the bed. Grabbing the stem of the glass she drove its jagged lip upwards hoping somehow to stop him using the syringe. Her hand struck with a desperate speed and force, up under his kilt, not stopping till the jagged glass connected with his soft ganglia.
The sound of his howling, his shrieks of pain, must have penetrated and echoed around the thick stone walls of the castle's guest tower. In an instantaneous reflex, the syringe had fallen from hands that now clutched protectively at his groin.
Beth, barefoot and clad only in her terry towel robe, was running, running, whimpering with fear, for the spiral staircase that led down from the tower to the kitchens. She had a good lead on Beame. After a couple of long minutes' delay, while his agony receded to mere acute pain, he too was running down the stairs, leaving a trail of blood behind.
The sound, as it were of a wounded beast, had reached the kitchen and Daisy, the cook, knowing that Beame had been going up to start 'preparing' the Queen, sensed a real crisis and rushed to the foot of the spiral stair. It was standing there that she was suddenly aware of a human projectile in the shape of Beth hurtling towards her. Daisy spread her arms in a futile attempt to stop her. But Beth was charging, leading with her head like a good all–American girl who has watched her share of football plays. Daisy went down like a ninepin and Beth was through the kitchen and out into the vegetable garden beyond, before Beame reached the foot of the stair.
The kitchen garden had been freshly planted where the young leeks had been harvested, and the soft loam was kind to her bare feet. Not so the gravel path that followed and led out to a wicket gate and some fields bordering some beech woods. Beth was relieved to be running on grass now, moving parallel with the extraordinary row of phallicshaped trees, which she had not noticed the evening before when arriving with Delia in the car. She made for the woods. There she could hide, she hoped, and think. She looked around as she reached the edge of the wood, but Beame didn't seem to be following her. Indeed, no one was in sight.
The great beech trees in the grounds of Tressock Castle had seen hunts in medieval times, when the town had been no more than a hamlet, in which the hunters, following French horns, were armed with bows and arrows and the dogs had been great shaggy Scottish wolf-hounds and talbots, breeds now as extinct as the feudal lairds that bred them. But a slim, shivering American girl, naked but for a terry towel wrap, would have been the rarest quarry they had ever seen.
Beth crouched amid a bed of tall ferns, resting her aching feet, which were grazed and sore from running on the old crumbling beech nuts that carpeted the floor of the wood. Never had she needed her God so desperately. Never had her faith in Him been so tested. She spoke to Him, a she always did, in the tone of someone who is half afraid that their listener is, if not slightly deaf, then perhaps distracted by His many other legitimate preoccupations. The God who noted every sparrow's fall was very hard for Beth to visualise.
Now her desperation cancelled any lurking disbelief she may have had. God simply had to help her and she prayed to Him in the fervent belief that He would not, could not, fail.
'Dear God,' she prayed aloud. 'Please don't forsake me. I am so afraid. Please give me courage. If I'm in mortal danger, and I know I am – then so is Steve. Please protect us both from all harm, dear Jesus. Amen.'
The sound of her own voice trailed away and the only noise that remained was the rustling of the beech leaves in the canopy above. She started to feel her courage returning. The desperate aloneness of her position was ridiculous. A mad butler had attacked her and a misguided cook had tried to help restrain her from escaping him, but that didn't mean that the whole world had gone crazy. In the town there must certainly be plenty of sane people who would come to her rescue, shelter her, call the police. Her hosts, the Morrisons, would surely be appalled and furiously angry if they knew what had happened to her. The sooner she reached them, the sooner she would be safe and could make sure Steve was safe too. But to make for the castle right now was out of the question. Feeling like a kid playing some weird hide and seek game, she moved cautiously among the beeches, always watching out in case someone in that obscene avenue of trees might be Mr Beame or the cook.
No one appeared except for a man in a small red truck with a crown and 'Royal Mail' written on the side of it, heading towards the castle. She knew that Lachlan was a big deal industrialist boss but if this was a royal truck, the driver should be someone she could trust. She had only to wait for him to come back. She waited, intending to run out and signal him as he approached the castle gates. But, disappointingly, having stopped at the castle's front entrance and presumably left his letter, message, whatever, he drove away down a second drive she had not known existed towards some outlying buildings, and on from there. By this time she had made her way half a mile through the woods, and parallel to the Willies Walk, until she reached the castle gates. She peered up the street and saw it to be completely empty, not a person and almost no cars and, eeriest of all, no sounds of human habitation, no noises whatever, except the distant cawing of the ravens in the ruined church belfry.
To Beth's enormous relief she saw that her prayer seemed to have been answered. For only thirty yards away was a cottage with a blue light outside its front door and a sign, clearly readable even from that distance: 'Police Station'.
The Hunt Continues
STEVE SAW LOLLY coming toward him over the Laird's Hill. She was
riding on terrain that she knew much better than he, and there were obstacles aplenty on the far, or northern, side of the hill. Still, he could now see his objective shimmering in the steamy atmosphere surrounding the island. The rocky throne was clearly visible through the haze. He realised that he was in danger of being cut off by Lolly. She was shouting at him:
'Steve! Stop! Stop! I've got to talk to you.'
She was wheeling just ahead of him. He had to pull Prince up so sharply that the horse reared up in protest.
'No way! Lolly, I mean to win this game and you're just trying to distract me. Ain't that right?'
'No, Steve. This is a trap. Ride for that silver birch wood down there. There's a track all the way to Probast. You'll be safe there. Just don't go near that damned island.'
The sound of fifty or more horses came thundering from the pine wood. In little more than a minute, they'd be breaking cover just behind Steve. He could see that they were unlikely to beat him to the island with the lead he already had. Yet what to make of Lolly's warning?
'Trap?' he shouted back at her. 'Part of the game, isn't it? Why are you telling me this? Ain't you, like, the decoy?'
Steve laughed out loud at the thought she might have been sent just to distract him. Well she sure as hell had distracted him the day before in that pool. But not today.
The horses he'd heard in the wood were now bursting out into the open. Seeing them, Lolly turned her horse toward the birch wood. She shouted to Steve: 'Follow me! Ride, man, ride! It's your only chance.'
Steve hesitated; calculated that the group coming out of the pine wood behind him would be all round him in no more than a minute or two if he stayed where he was. He ignored what he felt sure was a deliberate trick by Lachlan in sending Lolly to distract him. The Laird had never denied that all this was a game. Obviously one that the Tressock folks took very seriously, but a game all the same. The throne on the island remained the goal. He rode straight at it.
