A Falcon for a Queen Page 6

  I was relentless, even though I could see that each word seemed to scar him as it came. ‘How long?’

  ‘Three or four days. He was nursed devotedly. Mistress Sinclair did not sleep in all that time ‒ as I did not, even though I went to my bed. But the wound, and the exposure … Stronger men than William have gone down before such things.’

  ‘But the wounding? How did it happen?’

  ‘He could not talk when we found him. His gun had been fired. He did not know about guns ‒ how to treat them, how to handle them when walking in rough places. He shot himself.’

  ‘He shot himself!’

  He sighed. ‘’Tis too easy to do when a man walks with a loaded gun in rough places. Those who should know better have done it. Could I blame him too much? But I did blame him. Folly, it was! A life wasted … my grandson’s life.’

  I held tightly to the glass. ‘Did he recover consciousness at all? Did he never speak of how it happened?’

  ‘There were periods when he talked ‒ but they were wild words, not to be understood. And Mistress Sinclair told us not to encourage him to talk, for it took his strength. What was the use to question him, or blame him ‒ then? It was better to leave him in peace.’

  In peace. The words on the scroll gave no impression of peace. ‘It was up there he died? In the tower room?’

  ‘Aye. I had had him put there when he first came to Cluain. I wanted him to know the feeling of being master of it ‒ to be able to look over lands that he could call his own. And when Mistress Sinclair suggested preparing another room on the lower floor while the search was going on, so that it should be easier to nurse him, I would not permit it. I did not want him to wake to some strange place. He had his few things there ‒ I would not let her touch or tidy them. All the time the search was on she kept a fire high, and the bed warm and ready. She had her medicines ready, and she is better than any doctor in that way. But it was not to be. He came, and he was gone, so quickly. I had come to believe that the dearest desire of my heart was to be given to me. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. I knew then that I would have no joy in my old age.’

  ‘Why vengeance?’

  He rubbed his hand wearily over his eyes. ‘Do not ask, Gurrl. Is there any man who has not done that on which judgement will be passed? Who shall not pay in the end?’

  ‘God is merciful. He is a God of love as well as vengeance. My father always taught us that.’

  His lips twisted in a bitter disclaimer. ‘A comfortable philosophy for those who can let themselves believe it. For those who think they are without sin. The past is not undone. It is forever.’

  My hand went forward and I let my fingers play over the figure of the Queen on the board, held frozen, it seemed, by that perpetual check from the Knight, held forever.

  ‘There is the future, too,’ I said quietly. ‘The future is not yet written. It lies with us.’

  ‘When William went I knew there would be no future. I did not care.’

  ‘I care. I am William’s sister, and a part of him still lives with me,’ I cried. ‘He would never have let me believe that there is no future.’

  ‘There, Gurrl, do not take on so. Perhaps you’re right ‒ perhaps so. But finish up your dram with me, and take yourself off to bed. It’s rest you need. And do not be afraid of your room and your bed because it was the place where William died. I would not have put you there myself, but Mistress Sinclair had made the arrangements …’

  I finished the last of the whisky in a quick, angry swallow, and did not choke on it. ‘I will never be afraid of any place where William was. And if he died there, then I am that much closer to him. My father also taught us that. Love is stronger than fear.’ I thrust my chair back from the table, and reached for the candle. He almost let me go, but as I lifted the latch, the commanding words came.

  ‘Wait, Gurrl!’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Do not be in such a hurry. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps there is a future, though I cannot see it myself. It is not in my ken.’ Now his tone altered to a persuasive pitch it had never possessed before. ‘Kirsty …’ My name for the first time. ‘Kirsty, find and wed a man that I can feel would have been William’s equal. Find that man, Kirsty, and Cluain shall be yours.’

  My hand trembled violently; the shadows darted all over the room. ‘That is an impossible bargain! You are asking something of me I have no way of knowing that I can fulfil. A man! ‒ what man? And why should the man I marry have to be measured against William? Every man has a right to be himself, not another man’s shadow. No ‒ there can be no such bargain, Grandfather.’

  But he did not believe me. ‘Go to your bed. In the morning you will see. In the morning you will see that Cluain is worth the having.’

  ‘In the morning ‒ in the morning I may leave!’

  He merely shrugged. ‘Please yourself.’

  In the quiet of the house the sound was very loud as I pulled the door dosed, and let the latch fall.

  She was waiting for me. She stood on the first step of the spiral stair within the tower. She had probably been watching through the slit window the pale light that had come from our candles into the garden. She held her own lighted candle, and she must have stood there for a long time, for it was burned nearly to its end, as mine was. I went towards her, and she did not step down, so that I was forced to raise my face to hers.

  ‘Mistress Sinclair …?’

  She did not wear her black to bed. A plain white shift, severely buttoned to the throat, was partly covered by a long red plaid. Her hair was unbound, the black streaked with shining silver; it softened the stark good looks, made her seem younger ‒ no, not younger, but without age. The roughened hand clenched and unclenched the plaid across her breast.

  ‘You have been speaking together for a long time,’ she said at last. And then, as if she could not hold the words back, ‘What about? ‒ what about?’

  ‘My business, Mistress Sinclair.’

  ‘What business?’ Her eyes were wild, anguished.

  ‘Please step aside, Mistress Sinclair. I wish to go to my room.’

  Her hand let go the plaid, and reached out and clutched my wrist with fierce strength. ‘Tell me ‒ what business?’ The candle jerked with her pull, and the hot grease splattered down on my hand. I smothered the exclamation of pain.

  ‘Step aside!’

  She had not anticipated my own strength. Now my hand reached up and caught her shoulder, and pulled her down off that first step. The way ahead was clear, and I went quickly, gathering my robe so I would not trip. Still she would not leave me. When she recovered I could hear her coming after me, a few steps behind, but at least the twist of one spiral away. The candlelight pursued me, and told me how close she was. I reached the door of my room and flung it open. But she was there before I could close it properly. I put the weight of my shoulder against it as she grasped at the latch.

  The haunted, staring face was almost witch-like now, the beauty gone in a look of madness. For a moment longer she pushed against the door, and the insane, silent struggle continued. Then at last she seemed to crumble, as if some force had deserted her. She stepped back; the pressure came off my shoulder, and the door crashed against its frame. It was held open just by the thickness of the massive iron latch. Through the tiny space I heard her whisper, a plaintive, almost pleading sigh.

  ‘It is not yours …’

  I should have slammed the door shut and found safety. But I needed answers. ‘What? ‒ what is not mine?’

  ‘Cluain. Cluain is not yours!’ It was a wailing, sobbing protest.

  She was mad ‒ quite mad. I lifted the latch and it fell into place. Then I slid the bolt home with trembling fingers. I turned and leaned against the door, and breathed a sigh of thankfulness that for the moment I was beyond her reach. My body sagged as I waited for my heart to cease its pounding. Then, when I did not hear her steps retreating, I listened more intently. The whisper reached me through the stout planks of
the door, and the words were accompanied by an eerie scratching, as if her nails clawed at the wood.

  ‘Cluain is not yours.’

  The intensity of the words struck me with terror. I gasped, and my body slid down the door until I was crouched on the floor. I laid down the shrunken stub of the candle, and rubbed my hand where the grease had burned, and her terrible, plucking fingers had dug into my flesh. But she heard me, and she must have bent also. The whisper came again, close to my ear. ‘It is not yours!’

  I stayed there, unable to move. I did not know how long. I watched the candle begin to drown in the pool of its own grease … slowly, slowly. The wild hammering of my heart would not shut out that horrible whisper. ‘It is not yours!’

  Then the flame flickered erratically, and died. At last I heard the soft footsteps in retreat down the stairs. But the words would not leave me.

  I was stiff and cramped before I had the strength to gather myself up and find my way by the light of the last embers of the fire to the desk where a new candle stood ready. When it flared up and steadied, I went back to the chest and once more sought the box in which I had brought William’s few things. I carried the scroll and the candle and went to the bench before the fire; I took time to lay a few sticks of kindling on the embers, and I huddled there for some time, listening ‒ listening and hearing nothing. The smell of peat was the smell of Cluain, its fires and the essence of its golden, smoky whisky. I held my hand before that small blaze, but it seemed to have no warmth.

  At last I made myself turn and take up the scroll. It had a slender bamboo rod at each end, and a red silk ribbon with which to hang it. Every knot of the bamboo, every fine line of the drawing was now more familiar to me than any other thing I had ever owned. How many hundreds ‒ perhaps thousands ‒ of times had I searched and examined and studied it. Its message had always been unclear, but now I thought I knew the terrible, desperate urgency with which William had sought to communicate.

  His mind had been clouded with fever and drugs. How had he managed to escape her surveillance long enough to stroke these characters with his brush? How had he managed, on that injured leg, even to drag himself as far as the desk? In a moment of lucidity ‒ or in a fevered return to the lessons of his childhood, he had gone back to the language he had struggled to master in preparation for a lifetime in China. What William did, I also had always to follow, and I had tried to learn it as well. Had his wits been sharper than they had supposed, his strength greater, so that he had written it deliberately in a language that no one in this household could read? But he had known, when he dipped the brush in the vermilion ink ‒ and the pain of this seared me as if I had thrust my hand into the fire ‒ he had known by then that this would be his last message. And he had written it with the hope that my father and I would read it. It was a message he had never been able to complete.

  I had puzzled over it so long, convinced that it was my own lack of scholarship that defeated me. But the translator had done nothing to help my bewilderment. He had shaken his head. ‘Young Master has forgotten his lessons. He does not take trouble any more. The characters are untidy ‒ mean little.’ I had known my first frustration all over again. There are thousands of characters in the Mandarin language ‒ and a thousand implications contained within each character. Chinese etiquette demands that nothing shall be said directly. How impossible to set down a simple, urgent message. We puzzled over it, the translator and I ‒ he so much more expert, and yet so much more inhibited because of that. He had hardly dared say the words that had been my first reading of the characters.

  ‘Your esteemed brother ‒ he can hardly have been well.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  He shrugged. ‘Untidy ‒ not like him. Confused. The reading is not clear.’

  ‘Tell me ‒ tell me what you think he says!’

  His elegant scholar’s finger followed down the characters splashed on the edge of the stiff parchment; his anxious eyes had looked sideways at me.

  ‘I think he says …’

  ‘He says what?’

  ‘I think he says … “She has killed ‒”’

  Chapter Three

  I

  The morning had an overwhelming normality about it. Morag woke me bringing the jug of hot water. Impossible, except for the splatter of candlegrease around the door, to believe what had happened the night before. I came up from sleep as if it had been a comfortable womb ‒ slowly, with reluctance. Only the fact that I had to get out of bed to slide back the bolt brought Mairi Sinclair to mind.

  ‘Och,’ Morag greeted me, ‘there’s no need to be bolting doors around here. Who’s to come in?’

  She must consider me foolish and silly. ‘I ‒ I didn’t think.’

  ‘It’s that heathen place you’ve come from. Well, let me tell you, there’s nothing at Cluain to be afraid of. Well, now, there’s your water. Mistress Sinclair said to let you sleep a mite longer this morning, because you would be tired after your journey. But she doesn’t like to be kept waiting too long with washing the dishes, so I’d hurry if I were you …’

  The cheerful patter continued while she stripped back the bedclothes with quick, competent movements; obviously everything was performed with great thoroughness at Cluain. Morag was well trained, but her chores didn’t interfere with her talk. She talked of everything that came to mind ‒ the red Chinese robe, exclaiming at its beauty, and how strangely it was fashioned; the fineness of the day, the sun already high and beginning to have warmth; the sky was washed a clear blue. ‘A great growing day, it is, mistress …’ And then she added, with a touch of wistfulness as if with memories of a summer childhood when household duties had not pressed so urgently. ‘A day to be running in the meadows. Mistress Sinclair will be out in the hedgerows gathering her wild flowers …’ With her words I heard the soft sigh of the breeze, the cries of the birds, the river in full spate after last night’s rain. The world of Cluain about me was fair and beautiful; it was as my grandfather had said it would be. There was no mist and no mystery. As I washed, even the sight of Ballochtorra perched on its crag seemed a part of memory, a sort of drawing of a fairy-tale castle in a child’s picture book … there would be a princess with golden hair. I dressed, and kept telling myself that last night had been a dream, the confusion of fatigue and whisky. But as I went again to the door, the spots of grease declared quite plainly that it had been no dream. On the spiral stair, though, they had been removed. There was no evidence now of that insane struggle.

  The dining-room was empty but my place was laid. There was hot porridge in a tureen, fish cakes, rashers of bacon, fried eggs ‒ all kept hot over spirit lamps. Angus Macdonald ate a hearty breakfast, if this was his usual fare, and for a lone man he lived in some style. But I was not hungry; I took some fresh brown bread and a pot of honey, and tea. As I ate, I thought about Mairi Sinclair. What gifts the woman had, and how perversely she displayed them. The bread would be of her baking; she must supervise the dairy which provided the sweet, rich goodness of the butter. The honey was the best I had ever tasted ‒ I thought of the bees droning lazily over the herb garden, giving the honey its wild, aromatic flavour. I thought of the lean herds of China, and the sleek cattle I had seen yesterday; I thought of the spiced, exotic dishes the Chinese ate, and the plain goodness of the food here. It should have come from the hands of a plump, comfortable, house-proud woman, gossiping as Morag did. And I kept remembering the haunted, anguished face of the woman the night before, afraid of something much more than the invasion of her kingdom by another female. She did not fear just for her place here, but for Cluain itself.

  But whatever graces and gifts she had, she had another side, and I must both face it and ignore it. I would have to go in to her in the kitchen now, and wait to see how she reacted to me. Was last night some aberration she would prefer forgotten? ‒ or would we continue as we had left off? And between us, forever, stood those unforgettable words on William’s scroll. One day I would charge her with th
em ‒ with them, and nothing else. And she might shrug her shoulders, indifferent and calm, and claim it was the ramblings of a fevered brain. And what did they mean, after all, and who was accused? I sighed, now more puzzled than at any time since I had first deciphered the characters. Knowing Cluain and the woman had made nothing easier or more clear.

  For a while after I had eaten I wandered uncertainly about the room, lingering over the small task of loading the breakfast dishes on the tray, trying to spin out the time before I dared to face her in the kitchen ‒ her own, indisputable domain. But there was so little in this room ‒ so bare, so stark. The last century and a half might not have been, if one could believe one’s eyes. No picture of my grandmother, or my mother; no sewing basket, no writing table, no animal by the hearth. Outside the birds sang and the herbs waved; inside it was static, a set piece. I paused before the table which held the chess set. Last night’s game, and its moment of revelation, might never have been. I fingered the White Queen in a moment of disbelief; but it had happened ‒ it had. Then my hands moved on to the Bible. It probably was very old; the leather was drying out, even with the polishing. The brass corners and clasp shone. Then I tried to open it. It was, as I should have known, locked.

  It was then I took up the big silver tray and started for the kitchen.

  The dining-room opened into a passage, and the kitchen door was opposite. Close by was a door that led to the garden, and on the other side the passage twisted out of sight around the curve of the tower. A door back there would lead down to the river, and the path I had seen from my window going around to the stables and the distillery. On the stone floor, beside a bench, was ranged a neat row of boots. Tweed coats and capes hung in a line above them. As in all farms, few of the household entered by the front door and crossed that shining wood surface. I steadied the tray on one hand, and reached for the latch of the kitchen door. Instinctively I had drawn in my breath, making myself ready to look into Mairi Sinclair’s face.