They visited the West Sally Port and then were taken to the dungeon prison of the ninth Earl of Argyll before his execution. Lastly they were taken to inspect the quarters of the French prisoners of Stevenson’s St Ives. When they were taking leave of their conductor, he said, looking keenly at Laura:
‘Mrs Gavin, what did you see in Argyll’s prison?’
‘Nothing really, I suppose,’ said Laura. ‘I have a grandmother who’s supposed to have the Gift, but I don’t think I’ve inherited it.’
‘Well, I won’t press you. I’ll merely say this: many people firmly believe that parts of the Castle are haunted, so, if you did see anything, you’re in good and honest company.’
‘It wasn’t a ghost,’ said Laura. Neither of her hearers urged her to say any more, neither was she herself at all certain that the impression she had received was anything but the result of too lively an imagination; for, in the dungeon from which the noble Argyll had gone to a felon’s death, she had thought for a horrified moment that she saw the face of the man who had been run down and killed at the road-crossing. She might have dismissed this as a nervous fancy, although nervous fancies were entirely foreign to her nature, but she thought she also heard a groan.
She soon threw off the effects of what she felt was a piece of childish nonsense, the result of a certain amount of delayed shock, and she and Dame Beatrice went to the hotel for lunch and then visited the Edinburgh Zoo. When they were on their way back again, Laura said:
‘Do you really think I could visit his cousin at Gàradh? I’ve heard about those gardens.’
‘I do so wish you would go, child. I am sure you would enjoy your visit, and I should very much like you to meet Mrs Stewart, who is an old friend of mine. Look here, suppose I give you a letter of introduction? Then you can please yourself whether or not you go. The gardens certainly are worth seeing and I think you would find the coast scenery and the drive to Gàradh very fine. There is only one eye-sore, to my mind, along the road you would probably take, and that is the newish hydro-electrical plant near a small place called Tigh-Osda. Apart from that—and you may not object to it, of course, it provides not only electricity but employment—it is an interesting and mostly a very beautiful road.’
‘I’d love to go,’ said Laura, ‘and, although I’m not shy, I’d like a letter of introduction to prove my bona fides, don’t you know.’
‘Your face is your fortune,’ said Dame Beatrice absently, recollecting her own last visit to Gàradh, ‘but I’ll write the letter tonight’
Chapter 2
Two Houses in Wester Ross
‘By perilous paths in coomb and dell,
The heather, the rocks and the river bed.’
John Davidson
« ^ »
DAME BEATRICE not only wrote the letter but rang up Mrs Stewart of Gàradh and it was arranged that Laura was to call on her, the date of the visit to be arranged by telephone later so that Laura did not need to be tied in advance to any one particular day.
‘Won’t she think that a bit thick?’ Laura suggested, for she was at hand while the call was being made. Dame Beatrice put the point, and then replied:
‘She says good gracious no. She has no plans for the next fortnight and will be delighted to see you at any time. You are not to dream of spoiling your holiday. So there you are.’
The following days, therefore, found Laura (in her own expression) ‘stooging round the Highlands in a hired Tin Liz’ and thoroughly enjoying her freedom. She devotedly loved her husband and her small son, but it was a welcome change to be a grass widow and mother for a bit.
She left Edinburgh for Inverness, but stayed a night on the way at Pitlochry and another at Kingussie. In Inverness she put up at an hotel where they knew her, and on her first evening she saw a shabby man take a good-sized salmon out of the River Ness right under the hotel windows. This she regarded as a splendid omen for the success of her trip. Every diner left the table to see the fish taken, and, the ice thus being broken, Laura, who was a sociable soul, found plenty of people to talk with over coffee in the lounge.
Before dawn on the following day she crept quietly out of her room, left the hotel by a side door she had used for early-morning excursions on previous visits, retrieved the hired car from its lock-up garage and drove along the shores of the loch in the hope of seeing the Monster.
This attempt to add herself to the small but convinced band of Nessie Spotters was doomed, like all her former ones, to disappointment, although she drove all the way to the western end of the loch and parked there until hunger drove her back to the hotel for a very late breakfast.
It was all very well, she thought, bearing the learned gentleman a certain amount of resentment, for Dr Maurice Burton to scrutinise all the evidence for Nessie’s existence and then attribute her energies merely to expanding gases in a waste of vegetable matter, but what of the stories of swimmers tossed out of boats who had found their art of no avail and whose bodies had never been recovered? What of the stories of divers who refused to speak of what they had seen in the depths of the loch, when they had been sent down to salvage those bodies? What of the unimpeachable evidence of many accredited eyewitnesses? As for the discrepancies in their accounts of the actual appearance of the Monster, well, Laura had heard her husband’s opinion of the way in which witnesses in police court cases could fail to identify—or could wrongly identify – people whom they had seen far more clearly and at much closer quarters than anyone had ever seen the elusive Nessie.
Yet Dr Burton, reflected Laura, comforting herself with the thought, seemed to have ended his researches with a divided mind. He was even prepared to accept the hypothesis that there might exist some sort of amphibious creature, nocturnal, on the whole in its habits and looking rather like a longnecked otter, a creature so far unknown to zoologists. On the whole, perhaps such an animal was rather more delightfully terrifying than the completely aquatic and apparently purposless Nessie herself.
Laura enjoyed her late breakfast, decided to spend the morning shopping, loitering and writing letters, have lunch at the hotel and then make her way to Freagair and hope to put up there for the night If the one hotel at Freagair could not take her, there was always Strathpeffer.
The hotel at Freagair had a room for her. She ate Scotch broth, trout and good Scotch beef for her dinner, refused the sweet and asked for roes on toast, drank a half bottle of undistinguished Burgundy and went to bed in good time, having decided upon an early start for Gàradh so that she would be able to call upon Mrs Stewart before lunch.
She arranged to return to the hotel for the following night, breakfasted at eight and was on the road by a quarter to nine. She had been warned that after the first ten miles the road was single-track all the way to Crioch and, a mile out of that resort of wide and shining sands, single-track again to her destination. There were passing places, but it could take a long time to make the full journey.
Laura, however, was lucky. There was very little traffic, the hired car behaved well and the road was extremely beautiful. The morning was sunny, although not particularly warm, and although the narrow road needed concentrated attention, she was aware of green hills to her right, a sluggish, broad river bordered by rough pasture to her left, and beyond the shallow valley there were the mountains. A single-track railway line ran alongside the river.
Later, on the right, she passed a smallish loch with islands, one of which was wooded, another of which had been built on (she had a glimpse of a white house) and the rest were no more than rocks.