Christ. He was listening to himself. By the time she sat back to sip more tea, he'd swear the Duchess had developed a significantly deeper voice and an accent not unlike his own.
Ah, this is just a sophisticated act. This is a classy stage routine.
'No it isn't,' the Duchess said crisply.
He almost dropped his cup. 'What... ?' His hand shook.
'No, it isn't ... going to rain,' the Duchess said sweetly. 'Although it was forecast. But then forecasts are seldom reliable, I've found.'
He guessed she'd never been to college. He guessed she hadn't always talked so refined. He guessed her life-story would make more than one mini-series.
Then he guessed he'd better start keeping a tighter hold on his thoughts until he was someplace else.
'I'm not a fortune-teller, you know,' she said, like some women would say, what do you think I am, a hooker?
'I, uh ... Moira never said you were,' Macbeth said uncomfortably.
'I appear to be able to do it. Sometimes. But I don't make a practice of it.' She poured herself more tea. 'So why did I let you in here?'
Macbeth didn't know.
'Because I'm worried about the child,' she said. 'That's why.'
He said, 'I can understand that.'
'Can you?'
'I'm, uh, a Celt,' he said, and she started to laugh, a sound like the little teaspoon tinkling on the bone china.
'To be Celtic,' she said, 'is more an attitude than a racial thing. Like to be a gypsy is a way of life.'
'What about to be a psychic?'
Her face clouded. 'That,' she said, 'is a cross to bear. She'll tell you that herself. It's to accept there's a huge part of your life that will never be your own. It's to realise there are always going to be obligations to fulfil, directions you have to go in, even though you can't always see the sense of it.'
'That's what she's doing right now?'
The Duchess nodded. 'She has things to work out. Oh, I don't know what she's doing and I wouldn't dream of interfering, she's a mature person. But I am her mother, and mothers are always inclined to worry, so I'm told. I was only thinking - coincidence - just before you arrived, I wish she had someone who cared for her. But she's a loner. We all are, I fear. We learn our lesson. We don't like other people to get hurt.'
'You're saying you think Moira needs someone with her?'
The Duchess shrugged her elegant shoulders. 'Someone looking out for her, maybe. When Donald told me there was a man at the gate asking after Moira, I wondered if perhaps ...'
Then she gave him the kind of smile that was like a consolatory pat on the arm. 'I don't really feel you're the one, Mr Macbeth.'
Sometimes, when he interviewed would-be film-directors, there was one nice, bright-eyed kid he could tell was never going to make it. And trying to let the kid down easy he'd always start out, 'I don't really feel ...'
'Look, Duchess ...' Macbeth felt like he was about to cry. This was absurd. He started to tell her about the night at the Earl's Castle, about Moira singing 'The Comb Song', and how it ended.
'Yes,' the Duchess said impatiently, 'I know about that.'
'So am I right in thinking Moira caused all that, the deer heads and stuff to come crashing down?'
The Duchess looked cross. 'The question is ... pouff! Irrelevant! How can anyone ever really say, I did this, I caused this to happen? Perhaps you are a factor in its happening, perhaps not. I'll tell you something, Mr Macbeth ... nobody who's merely human can ever be entirely sure of the ability to make anything happen. Say, if you're a great healer, sometimes it works ... you're lucky, or you're so good and saintly that you get helped a lot. And sometimes it doesn't work at all. I once knew a woman called Jean Wendle ... but that's another story ...'
She lay back on the chaise and half-closed her eyes, looking at the wall behind him. 'Or, let us say, if you're a bad or a vengeful person, and you want to hurt somebody, you want to curse them ... in the movies, it goes ... zap, like one of those, what d'you call them ... ray guns, lasers.'
He heard a small noise behind him, turned in time to see a plate, one of a row of five with pictures on them, sliding very slowly from the wall.
The plate fell to the floor and smashed. Macbeth nearly passed out.
From a long way away, he heard the Duchess saying, 'Doing damage, harming people is much easier but that's unpredictable too. Sometimes people dabble and create a big black cloud ...' Throwing up her arms theatrically,'... and they can't control where it goes.'
Numbly, Macbeth bent to pick up the pieces of the plate. Maybe he'd dislodged it with the back of his head. The ones still on the wall had pictures of Balmoral Castle, where the Queen spent time, and Glamis Castle, Blair Atholl Castle and the Queen Mother's Castle of Mey.
He held two pieces of the broken plate together and saw, in one of those shattering, timeless moments, that they made up a rough watercolour sketch of the familiar Victorian Gothic facade of the Earl's place.
'Accidents happen,' the Duchess said. 'Leave it on the floor.'
Macbeth's fingers were trembling as he laid the pieces down. He needed a cigarette more urgently than at any time since he quit smoking six years ago.
'I never liked that one anyway,' the Duchess said.
Doubtless psyching out that Macbeth could use more hot tea, and fast, she filled up his cup and added two sugars.
He drank it all. She was offering him an easy way out. She was saying, what just happened - the plate - also, the skulls on the wall ... this is kids' stuff ... this is chickenshit compared to what a person could be letting himself in for if he pursues Moira Cairns.
Mungo Macbeth, maker of mini-series for the masses, thought maybe this was how King Arthur laid it on the line for any mad-assed knight of the Round Table figuring to go after the Holy Grail.
He'd often wondered about those less ambitious knights who listened to the horror stories and thought, Well, fuck this, what do 1 need with a Holy Grail? Maybe I should just stick around and lay me some more damsels, do a little Sunday jousting. How could those knights go on living with themselves, having passed up on the chance of the One Big Thing?
He said, 'Earlier, you said ... about when a guy gets to wondering how much his life has really been worth and if there isn't more stuff in Heaven and Earth than he's reading about in the New York Times ...'
The silent girl who'd brought the tea came back and took away the tray.
After she'd gone, he said, 'Duchess, why? I only met your daughter once, never even ... Why? Can you tell me?'