But Christine’s mind had turned another way. ‘Mr Bell,’ she said, ‘why did little Isa Murdoch leave us? Has there been a story going round about that?’
It was a question I’d been fearing, this. Christine had enough to fash over these days without a bit more worry about the daftie Tammas, and yet if she didn’t know of the unchancy way he’d turned on Isa it seemed but right to warn her. But syne she settled this by saying: ‘Was it just Tammas?’
‘Partly that. But partly it was she was driven to hide in your uncle’s gallery and heard him murmuring his verses and talking strangely to the air. She was easily frighted. But Christine, did you ever hear of your uncle holding in with any folk called Walter Kennedy and Robert Henderson?’
At that it was her turn to stare like an owl – but only for a moment. Then she laughed as clear as clear: right sweet it was to hear her. ‘Oh Uncle Ewan Bell,’ she cried, ‘did you ever hold in with Geoffrey Chaucer?’ And at that her spirits suddenly came on her wildly; she jumped up as if the worry were gone from her entirely and fell to pacing up and down my bit shop, her hands clasped behind her and her eye on the middle air like as if it was Ranald Guthrie himself. And then she chanted:
‘He has done petuously devour,
The noble Chaucer, of makaris flouir,
The Monk of Bery, and Gower, all thre;
Timor Mortis conturbat me.
‘In Dumfermelyne he hast tane Broun
With Maister Robert Henrisoun;
Schir Iohne the Ros enbrast hes he;
Timor Mortis conturbat me.’
Christine turned at this and laughed again. Then she went on in her own right voice, grave and sweet:
‘Gud Maister Walter Kennedy,
In poynt of dede lyis veraly,
Gret reuth it were that so suld be;
Timor Mortis conturbat me…’
I laid down my awl. ‘So that was who!’ I said. ‘Folk in a poem.’
Christine nodded. ‘Quoth Dunbar when he was sick. And quoth my uncle in his gallery – also sick, maybe.’ And syne she chanted another verse:
‘Sen he has all my brother tane,
He will naught lat me lif alane,
On forse I man his nyxt pray be;
Timor Mortis conturbat me.’
And at that she came and sat down beside me, sudden as heavy-thoughted as before. ‘Dunbar’s Lament for the Makers, that he made when he knew another poet, and that himself, was going to die. Uncle often chants it now, and no doubt Isa heard him.’
I remembered then Isa had said Guthrie’s verses seemed to have a run of Scottish names to them and then a bit of foreign stite forbye. So Dunbar’s poem it must have been, and the names Kennedy and Henderson she’d thought to hear through her swoon were no more than echoes from the poem again. And fine I could have solved the mystery myself and without Christine joking at me about Chaucer had I only had the wit to think, for Dunbar’s poems have been familiar to me long enough, and stand on my shelf indeed in the right learned and elegant edition of Dr Small.
And that was the end of my talk with Christine that day, for syne she looked at the clock and picked up her bonnet and was away through the snow that briskly that I guessed Neil Lindsay was somewhere at the end of her journey. Rambling and inconclusive the talk had been; I had an uncanny feeling at the last of having been left groping for I didn’t know what in the shadowy rooms and crumbling corridors of Castle Erchany. That evening I sat by my bench long into the gloaming, never thinking to put up the shutters and take a dander to the Arms; the thing was working on me and I wanted solitude.
Strange that young Neil Lindsay, looking to break from the traditions of his folk and make a new life in a new land, should concern himself with the old bitterness of the Lindsays against the Guthries. And stranger that Guthrie, a scholar and once a poet, whose meditations must be of time and change and the nature of things, should have any thought for that past and narrow hate against the Lindsays. For if the latterday Lindsays, common folk and poor, might maybe take Ranald Guthrie as a type of those that have all and in taking more have beggared the simple folk of Scotland, and but add to that real resentment the colour of a long-past history, what was that to Guthrie – a rich man in the security of his possessions, that should never heed or mind the common envy of the poor? Was the laird doing more than treat Neil Lindsay’s suit as any man, proud of his lineage and his lands, would treat the suit of a crofter billy to one that lived as a daughter in his house?
But Christine thought her uncle was mad or maddened; and unco it was I should be right troubled by her thinking what near all Kinkeig had long thought. The thing was that Kinkeig was ever prepared to think and say any stite that had a spice to it, whereas Christine was a level lass and douce, and one that had learnt from Mistress Menzies and Guthrie to use words exactly. She meant what she said of the laird, and that her feeling was something she could scarce give convincing reason for didn’t make it trouble my mind the less.
Sudden it came to me I hadn’t asked her if she knew of any word lately from the American Guthries: might they not be worrying the laird after all – and the cool quean that had come that night to the Arms one of them? For it was clear that if Guthrie’s conduct these past months was to be accounted for there was more required than the matter of Christine and her Neil Lindsay. The parting with the Gamleys, the orders from Edinburgh, all that Isa Murdoch had seen and heard at the opening up of the meikle house and in the gallery: these seemed to be happenings before Guthrie had learnt who it was would be courting Christine, or that any was courting her. And I thought of the medical books the laird was pouring over, and of how he had fallen to beguiling himself with wee puzzles carven out of wood. And I thought of him cleaving his way in a fury into his long-deserted gallery, and of how he had wandered there, and of his standing at Isa’s last keek at him staring out over Loch Cailie. And ever Christine’s voice came back to me, hard as if she were facing deadly danger, saying her uncle was mad. And then, searching for the pattern that must be in all this, I seemed to hear the voice of the laird himself, crying out in the Latin refrain of that old Scottish poet that he was harried by the fear of death – nay, of Death himself.
At that I went ben and found the book and blew the dust from it and turned to the poem.
Lament for the Makaris
Quhen he was seik
I that in heill wes and glaidnes,
Am trublit now with gret seiknes,
And feblit with infirmitie;
Timor Mortis conturbat me…
And I read through that hundred-line lament for the dead poets of Scotland to the end:
Sen for the deth remeid is non,
Best is that we for deth dispone
Eftir our deth that lif may we;
Timor Mortis conturbat me.
11
It was a hard winter. Looking back on this prologue to what befell at Erchany I see the figures of it whiles driven helpless before the great storm that caught the schoolmistress, whiles sharp-etched on the memory in gestures as extravagant as the leafless star-hung trees showed in the long nights of black frost; and ever the fatal hurrying story of them punctuated by the falling and melting curtain of the snows. When the Thoughtful Citizen got his papers through the drifts – which he didn’t always – he would come ploutering down to the Arms and tell us the Fleet Street chiels had said things were right hard in Scotland, there were tremendous snows, and the season was a record just as he’d said. It was the stationy himself was a record, Will Saunders put in – a right cracked one and would to God he’d run out of needles or break a spring.