Lament for a Maker

3

The faded terrestrial globe stirred, revolved: my finger traced the long route from Australia through Suez to Southampton.

‘It’s in the blood, and by the great God he will…!’

We walked down the gallery, our lanterns and torches playing before us on the long line of dead Guthries. I paused, picked out a sixteenth-century portrait by a Flemish artist, then swung round to a late eighteenth-century laird by Raeburn. It was the same face looked down on us. Softly I said: ‘What for would it not work, man? What for would it not work?’ We stood in silence for a moment. ‘Gylby, can you repeat the end of Dunbar’s poem?’

And Noel Gylby recited:

‘Gud Maister Walter Kennedy

In poynt of dede lyis veraly,

Great reuth it wer that so suld be;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.

‘Sen he has all my brether tane,

He will nocht let me lif alane;

Of force I mon his nyxt prey be;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.

‘Sen for the deth remeid is non,

Best is that we for deth dispone

After our deth that lif may we;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.’

There was another and longer silence. ‘Ranald Guthrie,’ I said at last, ‘has a pretty art in turning medieval piety to irony. Death threatens; best so to arrange for it that one continues to live. That’s his reading of Dunbar. And, somewhere, Ranald is alive now. It was his brother Ian – Richard Flinders the Australian surgeon – who died. Ranald’s story we shall piece together. But the whole story of Ian we shall never know.’

Wedderburn seemed to struggle for words – was forestalled by a startled cry from Sybil Guthrie. There was a scuffle in the darkness; I lowered my lantern and saw that Mrs Hardcastle’s all too potent poison had accounted for yet another rat – a great grey creature that had grotesquely dragged itself to die at our feet. For a moment I thought it was one of Gylby’s learned rats, with its little message attached. Then I saw that it was a rat more learned than that. Clutched in its mouth, as if seized to staunch its final agony, was a small black notebook.