My Bones Will Keep
Gladys Mitchell
Bradley 35
A 3S digital back-up edition 1.0
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Contents
Chapter 1: Edinburgh
Chapter 2: Two Houses in Wester Ross
Chapter 3: A Visit to An Tigh Mór
Chapter 4: Death of a Laird
Chapter 5: At Inversnaid
Chapter 6: The Piper’s Tune
Chapter 7: Auld Acquaintance
Chapter 8: Married and Single Grants
Chapter 9: Young Grant’s Story
Chapter 10: Loch Na Gréine
Chapter 11: The Big House Again
Chapter 12: Discoveries and Theories
Chapter 13: Story told by the Corries
Chapter 14: Story told by the Grants and Others
Chapter 15: The Meaning of Coinneamh
Chapter 16: The other Side of the Herring-Pond
Chapter 17: Following the Death of a Salamander
Chapter 18: Young Grant Comes Not Quite Clean
Chapter 19: The Prodigal Son
Chapter 20: Tannasgan Changes Hands
Chapter 21: Treasure Island
Chapter 22: The Last Word
Magna Print Books Litton Yorkshire
First Published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd 1962
Large print Edition by Magna Print Books 1977
by arrangement with Michael Joseph Ltd, London
©Gladys Mitchell 1962
ISBN 0 86009 059 0
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the copyright owner.
Printed and Bound by Redwood Burn Ltd. Trowbridge and Esher
DEDICATION
This book is for Mary and Jimmy Orr, with much love
‘If music be the food of love, play on!’
Shakespeare
‘Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the Memory.’
Shelley
‘We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams.’
O’Shaughnessy
I hear in the tunefu’ birds,
I hear her charm the air. ’
Burns
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Not all the place-names in this book will be found on any map of Scotland.
I hope that the Scottish National Trust will forgive me for restoring their beautiful gardens at Inverewe to private ownership.
My Bones Will Keep
Chapter 1
Edinburgh
‘…famous alike for its romantic history and the surpassing beauty of its natural situation.’
Muirhead’s Blue Guide to Scotland, 1949
‘…a penniless lass wi’ a lang pedigree.’
Old Saying (possibly Glaswegian)
^ »
THE hotel overlooked West Princes Gardens. Laura was admiring the view from her bedroom window. Away to the right stood the Episcopal Church of St John, where Princes Street and Lothian Road made a right-angle. Beyond it, and a part of the Gardens, or so it appeared, was St Cuthbert’s; and here and there, although they were not readily identifiable from the hotel windows, were the statues erected to the memory of the faithful departed—the poet Allan Ramsay, the surgeon Sir James Simpson and the visionary who promoted the ragged schools, Doctor Thomas Guthrie.
On the other side of the railway, which appeared to cut the Garden in two, there was the dominating feature of the view. This was the castle, built so high on its formidable eminence that from where Laura stood it was almost impossible to decide at what point the work of man and the work of nature met, so entirely did the castle buildings and defences seem to be part of the rock on which they stood.
She knew all about the Castle. She had been familiar with it, on and off, since the age of four, when she had stomped on sturdy legs, hand in hand with parent or uncle, across the bridge over the moat, past the effigies of Bruce the Scot and Wallace the Welshman, to the portcullis gate and up the narrow, sloping road towards the King’s Bastion.
Memory and imagination carried Laura farther. Most of what she knew of Scottish history had been learned upon these occasions, for that rabid Scottish Nationalist, her Uncle Hamish, after whom she had named her young son, had been wont to embark enthusiastically upon stories of Scottish kings, Scottish plotters, Scottish institutions and Scottish heroes, until an intelligent and imaginative child could see the builders of the Wall of Antoninus, Saint Ninian’s church at Whithorn, the landing of Saint Columba at Iona, the murder of Duncan by Macbeth.
She saw, and deeply felt, the humiliation of William the Lion, compelled, as a prisoner, to acknowledge the supremacy of the ill-tempered, energetic, wrong-headed Henry II and she rejoiced in the long-term revenge of William when he formed the first Scottish alliance with France. She sorrowed over the death of the four-year-old Maid of Norway and thrilled to the story of Bannockburn.
The tales were endless, but Uncle Hamish was a born raconteur and carried the child’s mind along with his as they stared in fascination at Mons Meg or visited the bomb-proof vault in which the Honours of Scotland repose serenely within their iron cage. Many a time they stood on the King’s Bastion, after visiting the Scottish War Memorial and Queen Margaret’s tiny Norman chapel, while the man pointed out the Forth and its bridge, the Lomonds in Fife, and the Ochil Hills famed in ballad. Out to the west were Ben Ledi and Ben Lomond, magic names in a child’s Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.
‘ “Yea, in my mind these mountains rise,
Their perils dyed with evening’s rose;
And still my ghost sits at my eyes
And thirsts for their untroubled snows.” ’
Since that time Laura had seen most of the mountains of her native land, but, grand, aloof and sombre as she had found them, she had never recaptured the ecstacy with which she had first seen the shadowy corries, the proud, defiant peaks, from the supreme vantage point of the King’s Bastion.
She shrugged off these infantile sentimentalities and began to plan a pilgrimage round Edinburgh itself when she was released from her duties for an afternoon. In imagination she saw herself climbing the two-hundred-feet-high monument to Sir Walter Scott; visiting the Royal Scottish Academy and the Raeburns in the National Gallery; revisiting Lady Stair’s house and the Thistle Chapel in St Giles; avoiding a visit to John Knox’s house, for her detestation of the scourge who had ranted about the ‘Monstrous Regiment of Women’ was unrelenting; standing in the full force of the wind on the Waverley Steps; above all, traversing the narrow and ancient wynds, closes and courts of the Old City and hoping zestfully for the adventures which, in Edinburgh, had never come to her except mentally, inspired by her uncle’s stories.
She had visited, in her thoughts, George Heriot’s School, where a cousin of hers had been educated before going on to the University, and was on her imaginary way to the Greyfriars churchyard, when there came a tap at the door. Laura, coming to herself and recognising her employer’s knock, went to the door and opened it.
‘What ho, Mrs Croc. dear!’ she said. Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, wearing tweeds which did not suit her, cackled harshly, waved a skinny, yellow claw and came into the room. She was consultant psychiatrist to the Home Office and was in Edinburgh to attend a Conference, not a government-sponsored affair, but, in the words of Laura, ‘A get-together of the psychiatric squares for gang warfare and personal combat.’ Dame Beatrice had been asked to read a paper on Some Aspects of the Politico-Criminal Mind and, with a fearful and wonderful leer at Laura, who had brought her the telephone message, she had consented to express her views to a possibly hostile assemblage. Now here she and Laura were, with the Conference fixed for two days ahead.