From London Far (16 page)

‘Extremely so.’ Meredith found the transition as odd as the information which had preceded it. ‘There is a professional sense in which it might be called my native city.’

‘But one has so far to go in the summer.’ Miss Dorcas was evidently moved to show that despite her present insularity she too was a citizen of the world. ‘At one time my sister and I thought of domiciling ourselves in Florence. Our Uncle Archibald lived most of his life in Venice. He was a virtuoso.’

‘A very nice place to live.’ Jean Halliwell was ingenuous. ‘But who told you that your Great-aunt Patuffa’s power would not extend to the island?’

Miss Dorcas considered. ‘I think it must have been our brother, the former hereditary Captain. He advises us to live permanently in the castle. But that, of course, was money.’ Here was a subject upon which Miss Dorcas was evidently always uncompromising. ‘Florence, I suppose, would have been not expensive. But Castle Moila is unchallengeably less expensive still. Pray have a care in mounting the steps. They frequently work loose, I fear, and Tammas has even less readiness in such repairs than was his formerly. I do not doubt that you will find Mr Properjohn’s house admirably appointed.’

‘I think we ought to explain that Mr Properjohn–’ Meredith thought better of this opening and paused. ‘We are climbing, are we not,’ he said, ‘to a considerable height?’

‘The solar is my sister’s favourite room. It stands, of course, above and beyond the banqueting hall, and was constructed so as to catch the southern sun. Such places are nowadays called sun-traps, I believe. But I think I ought to explain that my sister–’ And Miss Dorcas in her turn paused on this. ‘You have known Mr Properjohn in a business way?’ she asked.

‘Neither of us has ever set eyes on him.’

‘Indeed!’ Miss Dorcas’ last doubt about the Travellers were dissipated. ‘I wonder if you would be so kind as to pause by this balistraria for a few moments? I confess to finding the winding stairtcases more fatiguing than formerly. And there is a word that I should like to say before joining Miss Macleod.’ She paused and looked up, startled, as the light from the narrow window by which they stood faded as if at a sudden eclipse. ‘Dear me, it is only one of the Flying Foxes again! This is the point at which they come closest to the castle. When the plan was first discussed we were given the impression that they would by no means swoop so low. But, of course, a certain gradient has to be maintained, and it would be expensive to give the pylons a greater elevation, no doubt. Now, what was I saying? Yes, to be sure. I simply wished to warn you that Tibbie – my sister, that is to say – is now far advanced in years, and her mind tends to dwell more and more upon the past.’

‘It is a thing very common’, said Meredith, ‘upon the approach of old age.’

‘I suppose it is.’ Miss Dorcas sounded doubtful. ‘And I must admit that I find my own girlhood returning to me more and more. Most of it was spent with relatives on my mother’s side – at Glowrie Castle. Does either of you know it, I wonder?’ Miss Dorcas was wistful. ‘There are wonderful dungeons – some of them, it is said, nearly fifty feet below the surface. We used to go there in secret and play all sorts of odd games. I know they were very exciting. But, curiously enough, I remember very little about them.’ Miss Dorcas had begun to climb again, a perplexed frown on her face. ‘Sometimes I think there was something that it is important to remember…’ She broke off and threw open a door. ‘But this is the solar. Tibbie, I have brought visitors – Travellers – whom you will be sure to welcome. They are Miss Halliwell and Mr Meredith, and have been misdirected while seeking Mr Properjohn. They have business with him, but I understand’ – Miss Dorcas added this rather hastily – ‘that they do not enjoy his personal acquaintance. Pray let me introduce you to my sister, Miss Macleod.’

The solar was a large room of undressed stone, with a groined roof and a flagged floor. Three narrow windows with deep embrasures faced south – and these, through a mysterious skill often to be found in such buildings, flooded the entire apartment with a very sufficient light. It was possible to see at once that there were threadbare patches on most of the rugs; that to sit on some of the chairs or lean on some of the tables would be to court immediate disaster; and that of the innumerable ornamental objects with which the place was crowded a substantial majority were sadly in need of dusting. On the walls were a number of steel engravings of Biblical subjects in massive mahogany frames, several ancient oleographs after Rembrandt, a number of Arundel prints (recalling Florence and Rome), several original Landseers (
the curly-headed dog-boy
, thought Meredith absently), and – dazzling distinct from all these – a Raeburn portrait over the great empty fireplace. It was on this that Meredith immediately fixed his eye. An old lady erect in a high-waisted gown, with grey hair under a filmy cap, looked directly at him with dark and penetrating eyes – with the ironic sadness, too, of one who remembers her own great beauty long departed.

A superb Raeburn… Meredith, realizing that his glance had remained longer than was civil upon what was but an inanimate object after all, turned in some confusion to greet the lady of the castle. The result was comical. His eyes flew back to the portrait and at the same time he uttered an audible exclamation of surprise. For it seemed there could be no doubt of it. The lady whom Raeburn had painted somewhere in the last years of the eighteenth century was now advancing to receive him from a corner of the room.

It was, of course, a trick of family resemblance – and partly, too, that Miss Macleod of Moila a little dressed the part. But Meredith’s impression had been so obvious that there was nothing to do but refer to it. ‘I cannot be the only one’, he said as he bowed over Miss Macleod’s hand, ‘to have been immediately struck by a resemblance–’

‘It is always remarked.’ The old lady before him had faintly flushed. ‘The portrait is of Flora Macleod – that Lady Flora Macleod who raised a regiment for Prince Charles Edward in the Forty-five. To every man who came out she offered a kiss. She was eighteen then. My brother has her portrait as taken at that time by Allan Ramsay. Her hair is dark and falls in ringlets. And in it she wears a white flower.’

‘That must be very striking, too.’ Meredith allowed himself another glance at the Raeburn – almost as if to make quite sure that it was still there. For it seemed just the sort of thing near which Mr Properjohn would affect to find a time-bomb, or for which he would send a brightly painted furniture van. And Mr Properjohn was not many miles off. Indeed, by his subordinates he appeared to be thought of as Mr Properjohn of Moila, and this island with its solitary castle was supposed by them to be the place at which he was to be met. But that might be only a loose manner of speaking, for all that one had to go on, after all, was what Jean had managed to pick up in distinctly harassing circumstances. Could it be possible that these impoverished gentlewomen were in some comparatively innocent manner his accomplices? It was evident that everything tended to strike them in decidedly an old-world guise: might they believe, then, that they had lent themselves simply to a little romantic smuggling after the fashion of the age of Scott and Burns? In a way, indeed, the activities of Mr Properjohn and his associates were no more than that – except that they operated on the largest scale, that their smuggling was
out
rather than
in
, and that they stood in some definite, if as yet undefined, relationship to certain late enemies of the King. And in that there surely lay a crucial point: the thing had been going on nearly all through the war. Incredible that in such circumstances the Misses Macleod would play any conscious part in irregular comings and goings off the coast of Scotland. The conclusion was clear. Mr Properjohn with his Flying Foxes was carrying on under their noses (or rather some way above them) a nefarious traffic of which they were entirely ignorant.

Having arrived at this view of the matter, Meredith felt decidedly better. The reckless adventure into which Jean Halliwell had led him was having an unexpectedly propitious beginning. Instead of walking straight in upon the enemy, they had come unexpectedly upon neutral territory; were perhaps even now conversing with future allies. And unless some effective spy system were in operation round about (a thing, unfortunately, by no means unlikely) they had gained this vantage-ground unbeknown to their adversaries. Indeed, if Jean had been right in her calculations as to the likely conduct of the man Bubear, Mr Properjohn even now knew nothing of the confused events which had led to, and followed upon, the death of Vogelsang. And, even if he did, he must suppose that both Vogelsang’s mysterious impersonator and the girl who had been kidnapped as belonging to Marsden’s lot had perished shortly after Vogelsang himself, as a consequence of the demolition of Bubear’s abandoned warehouse.

And now the elder Miss Macleod was speaking again – and with every appearance (despite what her sister had averred) of being perfectly well posted on the passing moment. ‘It is strange’, she said, ‘that you should have been directed to Mr Properjohn here at the castle. But we must not complain of an error, however unaccountable, which has brought us the pleasure of your company for an hour.’

This, thought Meredith, was very good. It was on the positively courtly side of courtesy (as befitted a hereditary Captain); at the same time it most decidedly excluded any rash expectation of luncheon. Nor could the intimation have been better timed, since it coincided with the entrance of Mrs Cameron bearing whisky, port, bannocks, and that peculiar species of currant cake, miraculously supercharged with currants to the virtual exclusion of cake, which most travellers associate with afternoon teas partaken of on balconies fronting Edinburgh Castle. This respectable collation must soften any disappointment felt by wayfarers hoping for more substantial entertainment later.

Meredith accepted whisky and bannock, took another good look at Miss Isabella, and decided that it was time for matters to be a little developed. In the Macleod idiom, it was time for him to open his mind – or something like his mind – to the ladies. ‘Properjohn?’ he said. ‘Ah, yes. Clearly, we have got absurdly off his tracks. And I must explain that Miss Halliwell and myself can definitely be described as
on
his tracks. The man is a malefactor, I am sorry to say.’

‘A malefactor!’ It was Miss Dorcas who responded – and in a markedly startled tone. Then she picked up a decanter. ‘Miss Halliwell, may I offer you a glass of port wine?’ She looked warily at Meredith. ‘Do I understand you to suggest that Mr Properjohn is possessed of a malign influence?’

‘A malign–?’ Meredith was momentarily at a loss. ‘Oh! I understand you. But it is not anything of an uncanny nature to which I refer. The plain fact is’ – it would be too abrupt an announcement, Meredith felt, to declare to the Misses Macleod that their territories were virtually occupied by an enemy – ‘the plain fact is that he operates a black market.’

‘Black magic!’ Miss Dorcas set down the decanter with a dangerous bang, so that a cloud of dust rose from the table. ‘Then it was Great-aunt Patuffa after all!’

‘Market
, Dorcas.’ The elder Miss Macleod was tart. She turned to Meredith. ‘These are matters on which we are poorly informed, but of which we are not ignorant. And what you say may, I suppose, be true. And yet a black market in guano is hard to suppose. Moreover, I have some reason to believe that the undertaking is entirely regular. My man of business has made inquiries, and understands that the product of these operations on Inchfarr is very well reputed in the rural community.’

It was at this moment that Meredith saw what was, after all, sufficiently obvious. The Flying Foxes carried guano from Inchfarr to the mainland – but they did this merely to provide a chain of conveyances moving the other way. The Horton
Venus
would pack into one of these great contrivances readily enough; and so, quite possibly, would that great mass of masonry which bore the monstrously purloined Giotto fresco. The system, indeed, was exquisitely simple. Because guano had to be transported from Inchfarr to the mainland, and thence despatched in lorries to a railhead or elsewhere, a regular and unchallenged traffic, ostensibly in empties, had to operate in the other direction. What happened on the farther side of Inchfarr, and how from that point onwards the smuggling process could possibly avoid detection in such times as these, Meredith was far from being able to imagine. But that was not, at the moment, his affair. All, surely, that was needed now was some substantial verification of his suspicions. Once this was achieved, Jean Halliwell and he simply could not, as a personal adventure, carry the thing any further. The law would have to be invoked. And that would be that.

In fact, it might be rather dull. Meredith looked first at Jean, who had been for the most part silent and watchful since they had entered the castle, and then at the two ladies, its wardens. None of them it occurred to him, would act much by way of sober calculation. Of Jean this was already abundantly proved. Miss Dorcas, although she spoke in the precise idiom that her far-off governess had taught her, was discernibly under the sway, if not of Great-aunt Patuffa, at least of some other influence equally out of the way; one felt that at any moment her behaviour might become decidedly odd. As for Miss Isabella, her conversation, although wholly rational so far, was altogether belied by her eye. It was an eye, Meredith told himself, accustomed to look out – and with fanaticism – upon a world of its own imagining. Something like Don Quixote’s eye… And now Meredith looked once more round this ancient chamber – so ancient as to belong rather to the heroic than to the feudal age – with its steel engravings and Victorian furniture and Raeburn portrait of the old woman who had once worn a white flower in her hair. And, doing this, he obscurely but powerfully felt something like Don Quixote’s world close – or better, perhaps, open – around him. He doubted whether that programme of a quick peer at Mr Properjohn’s proceedings followed by a rapid appeal to authority would realize itself after all. For there was something inordinate about the whole affair – there was no other word for it – and it would play itself out according to its own rules… Which was no reason for not proceeding with cautious inquiries in an orderly way. ‘Not’, said Meredith, ‘that we know a great deal about this Properjohn. Might I ask what impression he has made upon yourselves?’