When cups and plates were distributed and the women had resumed their seats like so many starlings resettling after a shot, Mrs Dudgeon, unclamping her jaw with almost visible effort, spoke again at last.
‘I didnae mean to be rude,’ she said and she swept us all up in a desperate but determined look, ‘but I would do just anything for a bit of time to myself. Just tonight, maybe, and then anybody that wants to come can come back tomorrow.’ The starlings were ruffled again and several of them broke out at once.
‘Away, Chrissie. We’d nivver leave ye on yer own at a time like this.’
‘Bet’s through with him now, and when she goes hame, Tina’s to stay till Izzy’s got them settled and then she’ll be through and Bet’s wee Betty here’ll be back in the morning.’
‘Aye and then me the morn’s nicht.’
‘I’d be happy to stay awhile and let yous all away,’ said Joey Brown, sounding anything but, although she spoke stoutly.
Mrs Dudgeon waited with her eyes squeezed shut until they had subsided, then she looked around wildly, at the crowd of women in her room, out into the woods, a hard stare at the sideboard and then back out of the window again. The tension crackled around her like lightning; I could almost smell it from my seat at her side, and unable to bear it any longer, I rose and took my cup and plate to the table where I laid them down on the good damask cloth. They were snatched up immediately and borne away.
Cad was talking again now, of Mr Dudgeon and the excellent work he had done on the castle roof. Murmurs of quiet agreement came from the women:
‘Aye, he was a good man richt enough.’
‘We were blessed who knew him, it’s true.’
Mrs Dudgeon, eyes closed again and fists tight, endured the lapping of the talk and said nothing.
‘That’s a thought, Chrissie,’ said the woman called Tina, at last. ‘You were asking, sir, if there’s anything you could do?’
‘Anything at all. Name it,’ said Cad.
‘Well, someone’ll need to take thon,’ she gestured to the envelope on the sideboard, ‘to the toon hall.’
Cadwallader blinked at me for a translation.
‘Someone has to take the doctor’s certificate to the registrar’s tomorrow and register Mr Dudgeon’s…’ Thankfully Cad was nodding along with me by then and I could lapse into a gentle silence before the end.
‘Of course,’ said Cad.
‘Not tomorrow,’ said Mrs Dudgeon. ‘And it has to be a relative.’
‘Surely there’s someone,’ I said. ‘A male relative?’
‘I’ll do it,’ said the widow.
‘A brother-in-law?’ I insisted.
I looked around the bevy of sisters, thinking that surely one of their husbands could get some time off his work.
‘Donald would do it if I asked him,’ said Mrs Dudgeon. ‘But I just want to take care of it myself.’ She was working herself up again. ‘I’ll do it myself, first thing Tuesday.’
‘Well, it’s for you to say, Chrissie,’ said a voice. ‘But if you ask me, you’d better get it over and then your mind’ll be easy.’
Mrs Dudgeon threatened to laugh or perhaps to shriek at this, and I could not quite see how anyone looking at her now, half-mad with anguish, could foresee ease for her any time soon.
‘I can’t go tomorrow because it’s closed,’ she said at last through gritted teeth.
‘No, it’s never,’ said a young woman – Bet’s wee Betty, I think. ‘The morn’s Monday, Chris.’
‘Aye but the days jist run in together at a time like this,’ said another, reaching out and patting Mrs Dudgeon’s arm.
‘It’s closed this Monday for the August Bank Holiday,’ said Mrs Dudgeon. ‘I ken it was last weekend,’ she almost shouted this over the voices raised in denial, ‘I ken it was last weekend, but they stay open the bank holidays to let folk that’s off their work get their business done and they close the next. It’s closed.’ She was almost shouting and had to take three or four huge, groaning breaths before her voice was back under her command. When she spoke again, she sounded exhausted. ‘I’ll have to go on Tuesday. Tomorrow it’s closed.’
‘We’ll take care of everything,’ said one of the sisters, laying a hand upon Mrs Dudgeon’s shoulder. ‘We can look out his papers and someone’ll go with you.’
‘What papers?’ said Mrs Dudgeon, clutching at the woman’s hand.
‘Just his birth certificate,’ I told her, ‘and his marriage certificate and passport. Or no, sorry, I suppose he wouldn’t have a passport, but the other two…’
‘You never need to take all them,’ said Mrs Dudgeon. ‘Mr Faichen never told me you needed all them.’
‘Haven’t you got them?’ said one of the sisters. ‘Have you lost them, Chrissie?’
Mrs Dudgeon put her head in her hands and began to rock back and forward.
‘We can look them out for you, Chris,’ said a soothing voice. ‘We’ll find them.’ She was beginning to moan as she rocked and I glanced at Cadwallader in trepidation.
‘Mrs Dudgeon,’ he said, loudly. ‘I shall telephone the registrar himself, at home tonight if I have to, and ask whether it matters that Robert’s birth certificate is lost, and if it does, I shall take care of it all. I’ll pick you up in the motor car on Tuesday, whenever you like, take you there, and bring you home.’
Mrs Dudgeon stared at him for a moment and then spoke.
‘Or let me walk home by myself?’
The sisters set up a new protest at this, but Cad had the right idea.
‘Or let you walk home if that’s what you want,’ he said, nodding.
At that, we rose to go, while the sisters rallied around Mrs Dudgeon, the starling rustle starting up again:
‘… the doctor…’
‘Just so’s you get rest…’
‘… do yourself harm if you go on like…’
‘Goodbye, Mrs Dudgeon, ladies,’ I said, but we were quite forgotten and we let ourselves out.
‘Not to say I wouldn’t be half mad if that lot were buzzing round me,’ said Cadwallader, stopping on the doorstep, ‘but…’
‘Yes, I hope they do get the doctor,’ I said. ‘A state of nerves like that can’t be sustained for long without trouble. It would only take one more thing to tip her right over the edge.’
‘And not a big thing,’ said Cad. ‘Did you see how she took the news of having to look out a mere certificate?’
‘But you were wonderful,’ I told him. ‘Very calming. Well done. Only, you’re not really going to let her walk three miles home from the registrar’s all alone, are you?’
‘Of course not,’ said Cad. ‘But I thought if someone didn’t stop shushing her and start agreeing with her, she was going to have a fit.’
‘Still keen to be laird of the estate?’ I asked him. ‘Now that you see what it entails?’
‘Absolutely,’ he said firmly. ‘You said yourself I was wonderful back there. Although, it certainly does have more to it than I could have dreamt of, when I used to sit in the lawyer’s office in Manhattan signing papers and dreaming.
‘It’s all in such a godawful mess, Dandy. Not just the castle falling down around us, but farms running at a loss, rents unpaid for decades on the town properties, untold complications from some failed mining speculation back in the boom years. And now, just as I was beginning to get on top of it all, I’ve lost my carpenter.’ He sighed. ‘I must remember to get on to someone this evening and find out about this certificate question. Who do you think I should ask?’
That was more like it, I thought. For the first time since I had met him Cad sounded just like a husband; moaning about rents and business failures for one thing, and for another giving his word that he would attend to some matter then promptly turning to the nearest female to sort out the details for him. He was learning at last.
I regaled Alec with it all over a drink together in the drawing room later. He had been hanging around purposelessly for much of the day since, for all the beer shops and alehouses in Queensferry, there was only one establishment calling itself an hotel which could therefore offer refreshment on the Sabbath. There he had taken himself and, telling the landlord with hand on heart that he was a genuine traveller come down from Perthshire that morning, he had been supplied with a pint of seventy shilling ale at the counter in the lounge bar. Only then had it struck him that the labyrinthine licensing laws ensured that none of his fellow drinkers could possibly be a local man with anything to tell him of the Burry Man’s day.