Mrs Hardcastle peered nervously about her. Her whisper grew hoarser. ‘Hardcastle’s fell unkind!’
I believed her. At the same time I felt that a recital of the domestic infelicities of the Hardcastles would be singularly lacking in charm and I banged the billiard balls quite violently as a possible distraction. Their music, however, had ceased to compel; the unsightly old person advanced unheeding and laid a claw-like hand on Sybil’s arm. ‘And for why?’
Neither of us felt capable of dealing with this idiomatic demand. But Mrs Hardcastle scarcely gave us time to answer. Her voice sank yet farther to an impossible croak. ‘It’s the rats!’
We both said blankly: ‘The rats!’
Mrs Hardcastle’s affirmative nod this time involved not her head merely but her whole body: if I remember aright, witches and bad fairies indulge just such emphatic bobs in pantomime. ‘I’m right fashed I didn’t think to warn you last night. There’s a terrible number of rats in Erchany.’
Variations on a theme. Come, Muse, let’s sing of rats. And Mrs Hardcastle went on, a horrid and growing conviction in her voice: ‘It’s the rats. For years now they’ve been working on my man. The rat-nature working on him! I think they go through his head at night, squealing – the coarse creatures. He’s half-turned to rat now and he feels it. It makes him fell unkind. What will become of us? I lie in bed at night, Miss, and whiles the rats go squealing through my head and whiles my man. But more and more my man’s like a great grey rat, and what will become of us when I can’t any longer tell man from rat?’
Mrs Hardcastle, you will agree, has a knack of posing awkward questions that would do credit to a nineteenth-century Scandinavian play. At the same time she plainly has, as an imaginative psychologist, a touch of genius, and her conversation, if somewhat limited in range, has powerfully reinvoked the atmosphere that was so heavy about us last night. I was just going to explore her views on the influence of the Erchany rats on the moron Tammas when Sybil said abruptly: ‘Mrs Hardcastle, has the doctor come?’
Interesting that the doctor had continued to puzzle Sybil as well as myself; more interesting that the question drew a complete blank. ‘The doctor, Miss?’
‘I thought you were expecting a doctor last night.’
‘Faith, Miss, we never expect anyone at Erchany. Dr Noble at Dunwinnie is the family doctor, but he hasn’t been here these two years – not since Miss Christine sprained her wrist. There were some doctors a year or two back – the same I told you of – and it was but a sad welcome the laird gave them. Were you expected?’
The question suggested that outside the rodent sphere the good Mrs Hardcastle’s perceptions are dim. We said our arrival was singularly unpremeditated. Whereupon she looked from one to the other of us doubtfully before turning again to Sybil. ‘I just thought that seeing you are a kinswoman of the laird–’
But at this point Sybil, whose interest had been waning and who was rolling the balls vigorously about the table, hurled a ball clean over the cushion and into the pit of old Mrs Hardcastle’s stomach.
‘Oh, Mrs Hardcastle, I’m most terribly sorry–’
Mrs Hardcastle picked up the ball and looked at Sybil with great respect. Her voice took on its familiar hoarsest tone. ‘Faith, Miss, were you after one of the rats? There’s a terrible number of rats in Erchany.’
With that, Diana, I think you’ve made the grand tour of Mrs Hardcastle: other facets there may be, but as yet they have not revealed themselves.
Which reminds me I rather want to make the grand tour of the castle. It seems a rambling place, added to from time to time in a fashion more or less in keeping with its medieval character. The oldest part, plainly, is the central keep or tower; I gather that the laird has his own set of rooms there and seldom comes out of them. So his indisposition may be a polite fiction. Still, if he is supposed to be keeping his own rooms, unwell, one can’t very decently explore in that direction. It will be dinner or supper time presently, and I am waiting with the futile bored impatience with which one waits for a meal in a dull hotel. I look forward, it must be confessed, to another appearance of Christine, and perhaps I can make the beguiling mysteriousness of the place serve as amusement for another twelve of twenty-four hours. But I am so annoyed that I am not far on the other side of the Tweed!
Christmas eve at night – and my birthday. Shall I hang up my stocking for the owls to nest in and the rats to gnaw? What sort of presents, I wonder, come to Castle Erchany this season? I look out of my window and see that there is a lull in the gale; the gloaming is falling over a landscape wonderfully still, peaceful, white. Noel, Diana, Noel!
Your
NOEL.
3
Christmas morning
Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night! My scribblings of the last two days have proved an induction to real tragedy. Mr Ranald Guthrie of Erchany is dead.
It is all so fantastic – as well as rather horrible – that I really doubt if I can change the key in which I have been writing. Erchany is still the enchanted castle; only the enchantment has grown murky as one of great-uncle Horatio’s poems, and the enchanter – great-uncle Horatio’s sometime crony – is with Roull of Aberdene and gentill Roull of Corstorphine. Strange that as he walked down the corridor the other night Guthrie was chanting his own lament!
Our plesance heir is all vane glory,
This fals warld is bot transitory,
The flesche is brukle, the Feyind is sle;
Timor Mortis conturbat me.
Onto the ded goes all Estatis,
Princis, Prelotis, and Potestatis,
Both riche et pur of all degre;
Timor Mortis conturbat me.
He spairis no lord for his piscence,
Na clerk for his intelligence;
His awfull strak may no man fle;
Timor Mortis conturbat me.
Art – magicianis, and astrologgis,
Rethoris, logicianis, et theologgis…
But to work – which is getting down on paper an account of what has happened. It may be useful; and it is still my journal for you, Diana. It will be some hours more before the world – doctors, police, lawyers – can get to Erchany; and I don’t at all know how soon after that I shall get away. It is the unpleasant fact that I am involved in what may be an affair of murder. A strange Christmas Day.
I have first to persuade you – and myself – that while the sheets preceding have been an expedient for beguiling the time they are in no sense romancing. They give events accurately, and they give quite accurately too my own perhaps temperamental reactions to events. Nevertheless, I had better give a paragraph to recapitulating without fancy.
Miss Guthrie and I arrived at Erchany, unheralded and with every appearance of sheer accident, late on Monday evening. Hardcastle was rather stealthily on the look out for a doctor. We were politely enough received by Guthrie into what appeared to be the household of a confirmed miser – though with curious elements of expense in the supper. The make-up of the household was noteworthy: the anomalous factotum Hardcastle a striking scoundrel, his wife weak minded, the odd boy halfwitted, the laird himself powerfully witted and perhaps powerfully mad – I am over the line of facts here, for I would cut a poor figure trying to speak of Guthrie’s mental condition in a witness-box. But an undoubted fact, if a mysterious one, is the sense of strain and waiting – a sort of electric current flowing round and between Guthrie, his niece Christine Mathers, and certain unknown outside persons or events. A further fact was Hardcastle’s warning about the dangerousness of a certain Neil Lindsay. After that there are merely matters of impression. First, something about Sybil Guthrie’s attitude to her kinsman’s household and the way in which Guthrie told her his American cousins had ‘sent friends’. To this, as you will hear presently, I hold a key. Second, the way Christine told her uncle he was ‘in two minds’. And third, the way Guthrie said to me: ‘I am glad you found your way here.’ These utterances were charged; they stand – somehow – full in the picture; I give them the status of enigmatic facts. There may, of course, be other points of equal significance buried in my narrative but at the moment I can’t dig them out.