I should not have thought so, I considered to myself, looking around as we left the last farmhouse behind and bumped onto a rutted track. Moors on both sides rose gradually to form high hills, the Gallow Hill to the west and to the east the beginning of the Eildons which rolled on for many miles, stark and roadless.
‘No wonder the pump house does such a roaring trade,’ Alec said, craning to look out, ‘if this is the other option.’ I drew off the track beside a cottage and, following our noses, we crossed a small meadow towards a little three-sided stone bothy, its fourth wall open to the path, no bigger than a dovecote and not nearly so tall. I could see a railing across its open side, presumably guarding the well. Bunty went a short way into the trees to attend to her concerns of her own.
‘Reminds me of a crypt,’ Alec said. I could see a figure moving in the shadows and I shushed him.
‘Good afternoon,’ I cried.
‘Efternuin,’ said a voice. I had expected a well-keeper to be something out of Grimm, bent and ancient and not quite of this world (I have no idea why), but the figure emerging was a youngish man, neatly barbered, neatly dressed and neatly booted. ‘Come to tak the watters, have you?’ he said. He nodded towards a stone shelf set into the wall. ‘Aye well, there’s the cups and there’s the box for your pennies.’ The water at the well was a bargain compared with town prices, it seemed. I was just about to suggest that he might serve us our draughts – for what other purpose had he? – when I noticed that one sleeve of his coat was stitched shut at the elbow and tucked neatly into his pocket. Alec noticed at the same moment as did I and we both rushed forward to help ourselves, becoming a little tangled on the way.
It was not, anyway, a question of letting down a bucket into the depths and hauling it up again, for the well had steps leading down and the water was so high that one could fill a cup just by stooping, or if even that were too much like work one could hold the cup out to a pipe which stuck right out of a fissure in the rock. I tried not to wonder at the nature of the many deposits, black and shining with slime, which grew upon the rock, the pipe, the stopcock and even the steps. I just straightened, held my breath and drank. It was disgusting; not more disgusting than before, but in a different way. On the one hand, it was stronger, more disagreeably eggy, but on the other it was sparkling instead of cloudy and made one think of liver salts.
When I had finished, the well-keeper held out his hand for the cup, took it, held it against his body and wiped it vigorously with a cloth before setting it back on the stone ledge for next time. I dropped my penny in the wooden box which was nailed up by the shelf and then gave him a shilling too.
‘What about her?’ I asked. Bunty, after rejoining us, had lolloped down the steps and plunged her muzzle into the well to start lapping. ‘Stop it, B. Come away!’
‘Ocht, she’ll no’ drink ower much,’ said the well-keeper, and right enough Bunty lifted her head almost immediately and shook it, snuffling, trying I assume to drive out the nasty taste. She came back up the steps and sat down beside me, subdued and puzzled.
‘Where was that then?’ Alec said, as he handed back his own cup in turn. I took this to be a formulation familiar to soldiers for the young man glanced at his empty sleeve.
‘Amiens,’ he said. ‘You, sir?’
‘Missed that one, thank God,’ Alec said. ‘I was at St Quentin when the music stopped.’
‘Must have taken you a whiley to get hame fae there,’ said the young man. I was pretending to find items of endless interest in the rocky wall of the spring.
‘Well, you know,’ Alec said. ‘It wasn’t so bad once the rations started up again.’
‘Aye!’ said the young man with feeling. I had always rather scorned Alec’s deep and serious concern with the menu for every meal and with any opportunity to eat that came along in between them. If he had once been starving, though, I supposed it was a very different thing.
‘So will you sign the wee book?’ said the well-keeper. Alec caught my eye and I could see the flash even in the dim light of the well house. He seized the book eagerly from its place on the shelf and read down the page, turned back and read again.
‘Does everyone sign?’ he said, looking up.
‘As can,’ said the keeper.
‘Only…’ Alec turned to me.
‘We’re interested in finding out if someone we know came up here while she was visiting the town,’ I said. ‘She insists she did, but I suspect her of sticking to the pump room and giving herself airs, you know.’
‘And her name’s no’ in there?’ asked the young man.
‘Can’t spot it,’ Alec said. ‘A Mrs Addie. Lady in her sixties. Edinburgh.’
‘When was this?’ said the young man.
‘A month ago,’ said Alec. The well-keeper was shaking his head.
‘I’d mind of an old lady all alone, no fae here,’ he said. ‘Sure and I would.’
‘You seem very certain,’ I said.
‘That’s why I’m here,’ he replied. ‘You’ll no ken Yellow Mary, eh no? Not being local.’
‘I think I might have heard of her,’ I said.
‘She was my granny,’ he said. ‘Fell in the well and drowned. That was when they started paying a well-keeper again.’
‘Why was she called Yellow Mary?’ I asked him.
‘When they drug her oot,’ he said. ‘Yellow and puffed up like a toadstool she was. I’ll never forget the sight of it. Days in this water’ll dae that to you.’
‘And when was this?’ I was calculating furiously. If he was thirty and remembered the day his grandmother died, the longest ago it could be was twenty-five years or so. I felt the cup of water shift inside me. I had assumed a ghost of long ago and to think that I had drunk water a woman had drowned in in my own lifetime was much more disgusting somehow.
‘A year past Christmas,’ he said. I rather thought even Alec blanched a little at this news. Certainly he shot a glance at the black well water and the mossy walls. It was only too easy to believe that some of this depthless vat had been there a year past Christmas, at least a cupful anyway.
‘Aye, it was terrible,’ the young man went on. ‘The Laird was dead against lanterns, up on the hills. Said it feart the birds, stopped them nesting. And so Granny was coming home in the dark and tripped and tumbled and in she went. And the Laird felt so bad, he built this new wee housie and in the summer when the visitors are here I’ve a job pays me better money as I would get at anything else I could manage.’
‘But isn’t it terribly dull?’ I said.
He smiled at that, a sudden bonny grin that made him look as young as Teddy, and beckoned us around the far end of the well house to where he had set up a little lean-to with an old armchair and a box for a table. There was a spirit lamp and a kettle, just keeping warm. And open on the chair was a volume of – I squinted – Walter Scott.
‘Beats workin’,’ he said, still grinning. ‘There’s four bairns in the house. I’m better off out here.’
‘Good for you, Mr…?’ I said.
‘Milne,’ he supplied.
‘And although I’m sorry to hear about Mrs Milne – was she your father’s mother?’ He nodded. ‘At least some good has come of it.’ I gave him another shilling, Alec gave a folded note of a denomination I could not see and we made our way back to the motorcar.
‘One down, two to go,’ I said, throwing it into reversing gear. ‘Golly, I never thought about turning when I drove up here.’ Bunty, who is always delighted when I am reversing, stuck her snout into the crook of my neck and poured out her love for me, in deep groans.