From London Far (28 page)

She looked up again and across to the mainland. Nothing moved. The Flying Foxes were stationary. Only the line of pylons which bore them could be felt by the imagination as a hostile force advancing – this because of their direct and purposeful stride towards the castle in a mathematical line which the wandering Carron served to emphasize.

There was a pylon just beyond the causey. And the nearest of the great suspended cages was not more than a dozen yards away; it hung at the level of these battlements like a coach on some invisible big dipper or scenic railway, hovering before a downward plunge. And such a plunge was just what it would, in fact, take when the endless conveyor-belt of which it formed a unit moved again. Jean frowned and turned to circle the keep. Here the system dipped and swooped down through the courts of the castle to a lower level, as if in a hurry to reach the sea. Jean remembered a visual impression from earlier in the day. Within the anchorage the Foxes ran so low that the little
Oronsay
, had she crossed their path, would have fouled their cables with her funnel, but in order to cross the open channel to Inchfarr they rose again and were borne on pylons markedly taller. Why, then, should they ever dip lower than need be? Surely this extra fall and lift was a meaningless addition to the footpounds, or whatever might be the proper technical term, required to move these heavy contraptions between Inchfarr and the other terminal point some way back upon the mainland?

Jean descended from the keep and made her way to that perilous spot on the western side of the castle from which she and Miss Dorcas had watched the arrival of Captain Maxwell. It was a mere ledge of turf beneath a mouldering but gigantic bastion of stone, and in the fading light she trod with care. Clouds were banking in the west against a red afterglow that grew deeper and burning as she watched, and above was an immeasurable dome of lustreless steel. The gleaming white of Inchfarr had changed to a dark floating presence, insubstantial as a phantom wreck on ghostly waters, and the anchorage was deepest indigo shot with fire. Of the little landing-stage, set in fullest shadow beneath the cliff, nothing could be seen. No gull cried. No sound of lapping wave rose from below. Jean looked again at the sunset, almost as if the pervading silence might there be broken by the crackle and roar of flame. And against that vast conflagration the clouds were swelling, falling apart, and dissipating themselves, like the members of some vast animal body sprawled amid cremating fires. Jean shivered and turned back. The castle, black and immemorial and tumbledown about her, seemed no longer a place of security. Its bulk, the endlessness and variousness of its lurking recesses and dizzying coigns, the grotesque disproportion between its massive enduring strength and the few lives, feeble and burning to the socket, that it harboured: these things oppressed her suddenly, so that she felt as if the gathering darkness was coming down like a physical weight. And then she heard a bell.

Ring the alarum-bell. Murder and treason! Banquo and Donalbain!
… But this, no doubt, was no more than Mrs Cameron summoning to dinner. Jean hurried through the dark courts, at last forced to acknowledge to herself that night had come. Was there a chance that Meredith had returned while she had been restlessly prowling?

But Meredith had not returned, nor Shamus either. The Misses Macleod were alone in the solar, and both might have been described as
en grande tenue
. The hereditary Captain showed bare and ancient shoulders beneath a flowing cloak of threadbare velvet. And in her hair was a white flower – such as the Lady Flora had worn, Jean remembered, when painted by Allan Ramsay as a girl. Miss Dorcas was in a black gown bespangled with sequins, so that if in the uncertain light of the solar one looked at her with narrowed eyes she was strangely metamorphosed into the appearance of a distant city, glittering in the clear air of some sub-tropical night. But if the light in the solar was feeble it was sufficient to reveal the disconcerting absence of any sign of a meal. Was this, then, to be partaken of in some more formal apartment? Jean had scarcely asked herself this question when the man Tammas entered in a costume which could be obscurely distinguished as including white stockings, outcrops of lace, and wisps of golden braid. He carried a lantern which he proceeded to elevate in a solemn manner in air. Miss Isabella took Jean’s arm. Miss Dorcas fell in behind. Tammas made a bow and uttered some formula in the Gaelic tongue. Whereupon the procession wound its way from the solar – the Landseers, the Arundel prints, the Biblical engravings, and the Raeburn looking impassively down the while.

They were out in the open air – which, after the fashion of the Islands, was at once muggy and chill. Jean looked upwards and saw that only in the eastern sky were there stars; she looked behind and saw Miss Dorcas uncertainly drifting – a sort of Rio de Janeiro become mysteriously unstuck and eddying beneath the Corcovado in a velvet night. Where were they going? The Misses Macleod were a little mad. Tammas was more than a little mad. Mrs Cameron was given to religious enthusiasm and so, in Jean’s view, was on the thither side of sanity also. Was it possible–?

The party entered the banqueting hall. This vast chamber, Jean very well remembered, was substantially open to the sky. It contained nothing but benches and the solitary piece of furniture which the late hereditary Captain had neglected to take with him upon his remove: an oaken table some forty feet long. Of this, one end appeared to be more exposed to the elements than the other; grass was sprouting from various clefts and fissures and the intervening surfaces were covered with lichen and moss. The other end showed a snowy tablecloth and gleaming silver, lit by a handsome Aladdin lamp.

It would be difficult to decide whether these preparations could properly be described as for an
alfresco
meal. Certainly they were for a chilly one, and Jean wondered whether the lesser evil would be tepid soup or no soup at all. It is characteristic of an aristocratic culture to sacrifice comfort to style, and Versailles and Schönbrunn are as little designed for a rational cosiness as is the boiled shirt into which the sahib proverbially changes in the jungle. But seldom, surely, could the principle have been carried further than in this resolute frequentation of a family dining-room which had been definitively blitzed centuries ago.

Miss Isabella had taken the head of the table, and was looking round her as if puzzled by some unidentifiable gap or hiatus in her surroundings. Then her brow cleared. ‘Of course!’ she said. ‘We no longer
have
a chaplain. Dorcas, is not that so?’

‘Certainly it is so, Tibbie.’ Miss Dorcas had moved some way from the lamp-lit table in order – Jean suspected – to eject a stray hen. Her voice, therefore, issued mysteriously as from a distant coruscation of lights – Cape Town from the sea, Adelaide from the Mount Lofty ranges. ‘I dare say that with the money from Inchfarr a decent man of moderate learning might have been obtained. But the bathroom and the hot water seemed to come first.’ She turned to Jean. ‘Our Uncle Archibald, who was a virtuoso and lived in Venice, was insistent upon sanitary standards not then readily procurable in that beautiful city. He used to remark that godliness came next to cleanliness, and the force of the epigram has remained with me all my life. May I ask if you hear squeaking?’

‘Squeaking?’ Jean was startled, but considered it polite to listen intently. ‘Well – yes, as a matter of fact I do.’

‘Tibbie, Miss Halliwell hears squeaking.’ Miss Dorcas was highly pleased. ‘The sound comes, of course, from the bats in the belfry.’

‘The belfry?’

‘The alarm bell used to hang directly above our heads. Have you ever remarked that it is of belfries that bats are peculiarly fond? But we are delighted that they should be audible to you. As you no doubt know, the sound is commonly not distinguishable by older people. It is a long time since my sister or I has heard it.’ And Miss Dorcas spread out a table napkin with complacency. As some would count among the pleasures of their table a consort of viols and be solicitous that their guest should adequately hear the music, so were the Misses Macleod, it appeared, disposed to feel about Moila’s bats.

Jean looked at what Mrs Cameron had placed before her. It was soup – and by some hidden resource scaldingly hot.
Ring the alarum-bell… Banquo and Donalbain
… For the first time in her life, Jean felt the possibility of hysteria rising within her. Helplessness was its cause. For here she sat, consuming bean soup in one of the more ruinous parts of this ruined castle, while Miss Dorcas discoursed on the virtuosity of her Uncle Archibald and the acoustic properties of bats – and while the chances of Meredith’s ever returning to Moila grew more slender with every tick of the clock.

She wondered whether the old ladies, who had been convinced earlier in the day that the castle was indeed besieged and Meredith embarking upon a dangerous military operation, now remembered anything about the matter. Or was it only Miss Isabella who had held these romantic views? Jean watched Tammas, resplendent in his livery, but smelling distinctly of calf, take away the soup while Mrs Cameron brought forward herrings baked in a plentiful oatmeal. Yes, it was Miss Isabella who went in for a sort of time travelling, while Miss Dorcas confined herself to imaginary prowlings in cellars and caverns… Abruptly Jean realized that she must be uncommonly sleepy to have to set about disentangling things in this way. Perhaps it was the Island air – this and the fact that only under the roof of Meredith’s Mrs Martin had she known a full night’s sleep for some time.

Tammas was now pouring out what proved to be claret – and it seemed that the proper way to drink this was with the addition of hot water from a silver jug. Jean looked carefully at the jug – it was so very old as to merit an archaeologist’s attention – and saw that it was swimming slightly before her. So was Miss Dorcas, who now looked like Cairo when one comes in by air at night. Probably the claret, even thus curiously diluted, would make her sleepier still. Or was it a bogus sleepiness – a mere neurotic trick to dodge the strains of the evening? This was so humiliating a notion that Jean plunged into random speech. ‘I was very interested in the sheep,’ she said. ‘I mean at the way in which they came up from the anchorage. It was almost as if there was a way through the bowels of the earth.’

‘But there is!’ Miss Dorcas was animated. ‘A fissure winds from the landing-stage through the heart of the cliff and emerges through an outcrop of rock in the base-court. Through it Magnus Barelegs came–’

Miss Isabella lifted her head.
‘A furore Normannorum’
, she said in a high voice,
‘libera nos
.’ For seconds she looked apprehensively but commandingly round her dusky domain. Then her eye fell on Mrs Cameron. ‘Ah,’ she continued mildly, ‘a gigot. Tammas, let the ashet be placed here.’

‘–when he fired the castle. Almost nothing was left.’

Jean looked as grave as she could at the mention of this ancient calamity.
Deliver us from the fury of the Norsemen.
And let us have a
gigot
on an
ashet
, thereby unconsciously demonstrating that even on this barbarian fringe of Europe our culture is substantially French. And Jean, much as if she were Meredith himself, was so pleased with this little history lesson that for some moments she scarcely attended to Miss Dorcas continuing to describe this curious and fatal back door to Castle Moila. Indeed, it was the hereditary Captain who roused her by speaking once more in that strident voice which betokened her sliding back among her ancestors. ‘But it ought to be sealed. Dorcas, there is a grille at the entrance to the Seaway. Has it not been closed and bolted? The enemy may find it as Magnus did.’

‘The enemy, Isabella?’

‘To be sure, child! Have you no memory, no wits? Do you not recall that our guests are pursued? That one of them even now is ventured out among the foe? The portcullis is down; why, then, is not the grille to the Seaway closed?’

And why not, indeed? thought Jean. It was a material point, and in a siege it would be Miss Isabella who would have her wits about her. But now the old lady was looking round the hall in a puzzled way once more. Was she again thinking of the missing chaplain?

‘Dorcas,’ said Miss Isabella, ‘where is Black Malcolm?’

‘Black Malcolm, Tibbie?’ By this more than commonly well defined piece of madness on her sister’s part Miss Dorcas seemed to be put decidedly to a stand.

‘But, to be sure, we no longer
have
a bard. These are straitened times.’ The hereditary Captain turned to Jean. ‘I should like’, she said in her milder voice, ‘to tell you what it occurred to me to say this year when signing my name to the Marquis’ breeches.’

‘I should like to hear it very much.’ Jean, who was without the key to this (in fact) wholly rational statement, took it as a sign that Miss Isabella’s condition was rapidly deteriorating. Or perhaps it was the claret and water.

‘But unfortunately a sufficiently forceful translation of the Gaelic – one, that is to say, suitable for our table and your years – fails to suggest itself to me… Hark!’

Jean hearkened. At first she could hear nothing but the squeaking of the bats. Then she heard a creaking – which she ascribed to the shoes of the man Tammas as he advanced down a stone corridor bearing whatever was designed to follow the gigot. A bat flew down out of the darkness and fluttered across the table – a contingency which Jean had for some time expected, and by which she was correspondingly not at all alarmed.

But now the hereditary Captain had sprung to her feet. The incongruous light of the Aladdin lamp showed a glint of battle in her eye. She leant forward and spoke in a tense whisper. ‘I hear them,’ she said. ‘I hear the long ships. They are nosing their way into the anchorage.’ Her voice sank till it was barely audible. ‘The Viking ships. The ships of Olaf the White. They are rowing with muffled oars. But – hark! – the rowlocks creak as they swing.’

And again Jean hearkened, while Miss Dorcas fiddled uncomfortably with her claret and Mrs Cameron delivered herself audibly of the Lord’s Prayer. There could be no doubt now that the mysterious creaking was coming from somewhere far out in the night. And it might indeed have been oars – many oars creaking down the sides of a long black ship…