Bury Her Deep

18

Which woman, was a question for Alec and me to thrash out together, and no one could have been more surprised than we at where our thrashing led us.

‘Nonsense!’ Alec cried, when I said the name. ‘Snaky, shimmering, gliding over walls and ditches? It can’t be.’ He was still a little disgruntled after his long sojourn in the field hedge at Luckenheart Farm. ‘Ow! What are you planning to do with this thing, Dandy?’ The kitten, its bandaged tail sticking straight out behind it like a tiller, had launched itself at Alec’s trouser leg and now hung there, its ears flat back and its eyes rolling with devilment.

‘I’m taking her home,’ I said. ‘And if you were wearing proper suiting instead of striding about looking like Ali Baba her claws wouldn’t have gone through to the skin. Besides, you’re wrong about the snakiness, Alec dear. It’s because everyone thought he was a man. He was wiry for a man, sinuous for a man. Think about pantomimes or fancy dress parties.’

‘What about them?’ said Alec.

‘Simply how the leanest, lithest man you can imagine looks an absolute hulk when he puts a dress on. Believe me, Alec. We have our culprit.’

‘Even if I can persuade myself about the silhouette,’ he said, ‘I still need convincing. So go on and convince me: Lorna Tait.’

‘Ssh!’ I said, glancing at the door. We were after all in Lorna Tait’s own sitting room. I leaned forward and spoke softly. ‘First of all, now we know it’s a love charm, we have to ask ourselves who is the most lovelorn woman in Luckenlaw? There is a fair selection of spinsters, to be sure, but not many who seem desperate enough to cast spells. Secondly, we already suspected that Mr Tait knew who it was, but didn’t want to make the official discovery. And he kept Lorna in the dark about what I was up to for no very convincing reason, when it comes right down to it. If Lorna is the stranger then all of that makes sense. Mr Tait has been masterminding the whole case like a puppeteer because he wanted his daughter stopped without it all getting out into the open. Consider the scandal – a minister’s daughter dabbling in the occult. No matter what he says about the harmlessness of the old ways, it would be absolutely incendiary. And it explains why he might have tried to stop a romantic entanglement with a young minister, which he once hinted at to me.’

‘I’m not so sure any of that makes sense,’ said Alec. ‘If he wanted Lorna frightened enough to chuck it in, why would he keep your investigation secret from her?’

‘Well,’ I said slowly, ‘maybe that’s not it after all. Maybe he knew what it was all about – the love charm – from the beginning, and knew it was going to run its course and then be over, but he wanted to be able to say he had tried to stop it in case it came out at a later date. He wanted to be able to show that he was not turning a blind eye or even in cahoots with her.’

‘I suppose,’ said Alec.

‘And that’s not all. Remember, dear Alec, how Mrs McAdam, who certainly knows more than she’ll ever say, put Lorna Tait squarely in centre-stage when I spoke to her. She bemoaned the influence of the suffragettes, saying that it was only because they were Lorna’s friends that they were irreproachable in Mr Tait’s opinion. She said much the same about the Howies – that they were pestilential, but they were Lorna’s friends, so they had to be borne.’

‘I’m not sure I understand what that’s got to do with it,’ Alec said. The kitten, having scaled his legs and attained his lap, was now curled up sleeping, with Alec resolutely ignoring it, arms folded above the purring little mound.

‘How you can gush so over a puppy and not be even a bit enchanted by her, I’ll never know,’ I said.

‘When did I gush over a puppy?’ said Alec, shooting a look at my feet where Bunty had settled for a nap, forcing me to sit in a position which would give me cramp any minute.

‘I forgot,’ I said. ‘It’s Barrow who feeds Milly all the treats and titbits. Sorry. Anyway, returning to Mrs McAdam: she thinks Lorna is over-indulged by her father. Do you see?’

‘Sort of,’ said Alec. ‘But how did the smells alert her? Speaking of which, has light dawned about last night’s yet?’ I had described as best I could the waxy, fetid smell of the stranger, but I could still not put my finger on it. ‘It didn’t actually remind you of Lorna in any way?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It reminded me of home.’

‘Home?’

‘Well… something very familiar and not particularly pleasant.’

Alec sat for a while, thinking.

‘It was probably Annie Pellow that Mrs McAdam picked up on,’ he said at last. ‘She was the only one of the lot who said there was a smell she couldn’t identify, wasn’t she? Bluebells and cowslips and something else?’

‘But her something else was spicy,’ I reminded him. ‘She thought it was a flower. No one could have believed that stink from last night was a flower. Of the vegetable kingdom perhaps, but not a flower.’

‘Anyway,’ said Alec.

‘Anyway,’ I agreed. ‘Whatever it was that revealed the truth I am convinced that this was the example of Mr Tait indulging Lorna that made Mrs McAdam blow her top. They had been putting it all down to Providence, stoically enduring the attacks – more than enduring, if you think about it, joining up just in time so that they would be the ones who suffered, Mrs Torrance in time for July, all the mothers come September – and then it turns out to have been a lot of silly nonsense that Mr Tait could have quashed if he had just put Lorna over his knee and slippered it out of her.’

‘Very well,’ said Alec, ‘if that’s what was really going on – and it does have some sense to it, I’ll grant you – answer me this. What did they think was going on? Why did they join up in time to have their hair pulled out? Who are “they”, anyway?’

I shook my head, stumped.

‘Just Mr Tait’s ladies,’ I said at last. ‘The first ranks of his parishioners, the inner circle of kirk elders, perhaps. I say, Alec, do you think it could be something as blameless as that that was going at Jock Christie’s house last night? An elders’ meeting? Parish Council?’

‘The minister would be there and it would be at the church,’ said Alec. ‘Not under cover of darkness at the remotest possible farm and all in deepest secret. It can’t be that. Why would you think so?’

‘Well, I noticed that Mr Hemingborough passed the plate around at the Sunday service, that’s all. So he must be the beadle. And remember the beadle has got to be in the know, because he must have seen the mess left behind by all the grave-digging that night.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Alec. ‘And you reckon that the first ladies of the kirk might volunteer to be victims of the stranger just to keep it amongst themselves and avoid a scandal? It doesn’t seem likely that they would go to the trouble when it’s really nothing to do with them.’

‘Oh Alec, in a place like this everything is to do with everyone. Remember how put out Mrs McAdam seemed about the Howies letting Luckenlaw Mains to an outsider? Almost as though she felt personally affected.’

‘Hm,’ said Alec. ‘I have to disagree with her there. I can see that the other four farms belong to Luckenlaw but the Mains has always seemed supernumerary anyway.’

‘Supernumerary?’ I echoed.

‘I’ve always felt it shouldn’t be there.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘When I’ve been doing my endless painting,’ he said. ‘Think of the map. Over, Hinter, Easter and Wester. With the law in the middle and the manse and kirk at either side of the entrance way. I’ve been painting it as though from an aeroplane, you know – all very throbbing and significant – and that damned fifth farm just mucks the whole thing up.’

‘Do you think a true artist would knock it down and turf it over just to make a tidy picture, then?’ I said, laughing.

Alec laughed too.

‘A true artist would be able to paint the picture so it didn’t look like a lollipop,’ he said.

‘And anyway,’ I told him, ‘five is a far luckier number. It says so in a skipping song, so it must be true.’ I could hear footsteps approaching and in a moment Lorna appeared in the sitting-room doorway. ‘Lorna dear, I’ve just realised,’ I said, ‘we didn’t hear the numbers song last night amongst the others.’

‘I’m sorry?’ said Lorna. She looked as serene as a lake on a still evening today, and I took that as proof. Yesterday she would have been put out to see Captain Watson ensconced with me, but this morning, knowing she had her three times three hairs to twist together and pull him to her, she was invincible.

‘One and one make two and two makes true love,’ I reminded her. She smiled again.

‘I don’t think that is a skipping song,’ she said mildly. ‘Now that I reflect on it, I’m sure it’s something my mother used to sing to me. My father too, once she had passed away. Will you stay and eat with us, Captain Watson?’ Alec nodded. ‘Well, then I’ll just step into the kitchen and make sure there’s enough to go around.’ She leaned over and looked at the sleeping kitten in his lap. ‘Good to see her feeling better, isn’t it, Mrs Gilver? I hope now you’ll forgive yourself for the mishap.’ And she glided out.

‘What did you tell them?’ said Alec, giving the kitten’s head a reluctant nudge with the side of his finger, and setting off a noise like a swarm of angry bees. Even he could not be reminded that the little thing had been nailed to a road and not feel some tenderness.

‘I said I had run over her in my motor car,’ I told him. ‘I don’t suppose she’d have got away with a flattened tail if I really had, but no one has questioned it.’

‘Not even Lorna?’ said Alec. ‘Who knows the truth?’

‘She must imagine,’ I said, ‘that I’m hiding the nasty story from her out of politeness.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Alec. ‘Could she possibly be so calm, if you’re right, if it was her? She’s acting, this morning, as though…’

‘The harbour is in sight and the wind’s behind?’ I said. ‘I think that backs my theory up, don’t you? And if it weren’t for the kitten’s tail, I’d almost be inclined to say that it’s run its course and we should just walk away from it.’

‘A minister’s daughter casting spells?’ said Alec, looking rather shocked, for him. ‘Causing such a rumpus that a girl gets dug up from her grave to quiet it down again? How could you walk away from that?’

Viewed that way, I was rather shocked at myself. Perhaps I had been so long at Luckenlaw among the demons and spirits and the talk of the devil, with Mr Tait nodding genially at it all and calling it harmless, that my instincts had deserted me.

‘Well anyway,’ I said, hoping I sounded less sulky than I felt at being chastised by him, ‘there is also the fact of the kitten’s tail. It can’t be got away from.’

‘And that’s where I start to doubt again,’ said Alec. ‘I simply can’t see Lorna Tait doing that.’

‘She was desperate,’ I reminded him. ‘I had bundled away all the other ladies and I was going to park right outside the manse door and get into the hall in one mighty leap. She must have known that.’

‘And where did she get the kitten? Did she have time to plan it all when she realised you were ferrying the others?’

‘Plenty,’ I said, ‘and there are always kittens in the country, if you know where to look.’

‘All right,’ said Alec. ‘I give in. It was Lorna. Now what? We’re not going to the police, are we, and she will know that we don’t want a scandal for her father. So I don’t see what just telling her she’s undone will achieve. How are we going to convince her never to do such a thing again?’

‘There’s only one way I can think of,’ I said. ‘We have to show her that it hasn’t worked. And there I think we are in luck. If she were to set her sights on some little curate or clerk and he happened to succumb to her advances, then she might well turn back to her spell book for the next thing her heart desired. But I think we can guess who her intended is, can’t we?’

Alec nodded, looking as unenticed as a dog faced with bathwater.

‘I feel dreadful about the poor Howies,’ I said. ‘They’ve put such toil into Lorna’s party and we’re going to knock the wind out of Lorna’s sails and deliver a broken woman to them. They’ve spent your rent on it, you know.’

‘I don’t think we do have to,’ said Alec. ‘I would bet that the birthday party is probably exactly the night that Lorna plans to… How do you think it’ll work? Oh God, don’t tell me she’s going to give me a little bonne-bouche full of hair to nibble on.’

‘I don’t expect so,’ I said, shuddering. ‘I rather think she’ll fashion herself something and wear it. She’ll be irresistible to all around, don’t you know, but it’ll be you she’s aiming it at.’

‘I think you’re right,’ said Alec, nodding slowly. ‘I think that’s why she’s been so worried about her father getting a frock made for her. It never did seem all that likely, if you ask me, but because she dreaded it, it looked all the more certain.’

‘Yes, I wondered at that assumption too,’ I said. ‘Although I suppose if the ladies she saw trooping up and downstairs were known seamstresses, it could just about have been plausible. That’s all done with, by the way. Mother’s room is open again. I tried the handle this morning.’

‘Right,’ said Alec. ‘Quick, here she comes, what have we decided? You tell Mr Tait all is well, go home and wait for the party. I think I’ll take off too, in case she goes off at half-cock before the big night and I fluff it because I’m not ready. Then on Birthday Night I’ll reel her in and drop her like a brick.’ He said this with rather too much relish, and I had to concentrate very hard on the poor kitten not to feel a little sorry for Lorna again.

The Howies were the sort of people who throw parties simply by asking everyone they know and then standing back and laughing. Some raffish-looking chums were there, the Taits were there, the tenants were there – including the innocent Mr Christie – as well as a large contingent of SWRI ladies, resplendent in starched ruffles and witch-heart brooches and sipping uncertainly at their drinks as they stood around the room in little flocks. Captain Watson was there, naturally, and so was Hugh.

I had been thrown into a panic by Hugh’s insistence that he come with me; Alec could hardly just leave by the window this time since our plan depended on him being there to soak up Lorna’s affections, but I was reassured.

‘I’m planning an outfit that will keep Hugh pinned against the opposite wall,’ Alec said. ‘I’ll wear a hat with a big brim and… wait for it… I’ve grown a goatee. Barrow’s been topiarising me every morning. Wait till you see.’

He was right, both about Hugh and about the goatee being well worth seeing. Hugh stared coldly across the ballroom at the spectacle of Captain Watson and said in a hostile murmur without moving his lips:

‘He’s never from Fife.’

‘No, indeed,’ I said. ‘That’s the artist who ran off to be inspired instead of coming to the chamber with us all that day.’

‘Good thing he did,’ said Hugh. ‘I shouldn’t have been so ready to carry him out when he fainted, which I expect he would have. What a creature.’ And he turned his back resolutely on Alec for the rest of the night, although facing the wall brought him little comfort, for the Howies’ ideas on decoration combined Nicolette’s penchant for excessive ornament with Vashti’s rather slapdash theatricality and the ballroom was a perfect circus as a result.

The peeling painted walls were hidden behind towering stalks of dry hogweed hung with tinsel and what looked like stuffed hummingbirds. The bottoms of the stalks were poked into little heaps of wet sand to hold them steady so that, as the evening wore on and feet stepped into the sand heaps, the hogweed started to list and flop about and the dance floor under our feet began to feel gritty. The little supper tables – actually packing cases as one found out with a painful clunk if one tried to get one’s feet under them – were covered with swathes of fuchsia-pink art silk, torn roughly from the bolt and fraying already, and the centrepieces were an odd collection of old bottles, slapped over with gilt paint and stuffed with feathers and beads on sticks in lieu of flowers, which would admittedly have been prohibitive in November. The room was lit by purple candles raging away smokily in wall sconces and in vast iron candelabra hung from the ceiling too, melting in great dollops all over anyone who happened to stand underneath and leaving permanent-looking wine-coloured stains on their shoulders. Through it all, Lorna Tait sailed like a great pink iceberg, looking as out of place in her setting and as pitifully unromantic in her over-trimmed frock as it was possible to be, but exuding confidence like a lighthouse.

I was lucky enough to witness her first full assault on the Captain.

‘Are you a dancing man?’ she asked, coming up to where Alec and the Howies were standing, after a turn around the floor with her father to a military two-step. (The Howies had had to take what they could get by way of a band.)

‘Not as a general rule,’ said Alec, bowing over the hand that she held out to him as elegantly as though she were trailing it off the back of a punt in summer. He looked up again and fixed Lorna with such a liquid gaze that I felt a sudden flash of worry. If the love charm actually had potency he would be on one knee promising undying devotion before she had cut the cake. ‘I should be honoured to dance with you tonight,’ he said.

Lorna’s eyes, already dewy from tender feelings, or perhaps smarting from the kohl pencil into which one of the Howies had persuaded her, melted yet further at that.

‘Only not to this, darlings,’ said Vashti, glaring at the band. ‘Honestly, Niccy, I thought you had spoken to them.’

‘I have,’ Nicolette said wearily, ‘but they’re terribly set in their ways. Country dances now and slow ballroom after supper to aid the digestion.’

‘How revolting,’ said Vashti. ‘I’m going over to put my foot down. It’s one thing to have to do without the black bottom but this is only one step up from the Grand Old Duke of York. Come with me, Lorna darling. They wouldn’t dare refuse you on your birthday.’

‘Hurry back,’ called Alec plaintively as Vashti swept Lorna off towards the stage where the troupe of elderly gentlemen were puffing away at their accordions and scraping their fiddles, with feet tapping. Nicolette made a strangled sound in her throat and rushed off after them.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ said Alec. ‘Was I too much?’

‘Not at all,’ I assured him. ‘You almost had me convinced it was working.’

‘So why the chortles?’ he said. ‘Why is it that Nicolette finds me so endlessly diverting, Dan?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘the thing is, she doesn’t believe you’re an artist. She thinks you’re an… aesthete of a more general kind.’

He looked down at himself, the oyster-coloured trousers and the soft lemon-yellow shirt with the rolled collar.

‘Ah,’ he said, grinning. ‘Is that what Lorna thinks too?’

‘I doubt it’s a subject which Lorna has ever pondered.’

‘Good,’ said Alec. ‘We don’t want Lorna declaring the experiment null and void. Have you spotted it, by the way?’

‘What? The love charm?’

‘Mm. It’s in her hair, aptly enough. A tiny little waffle of plaited strands. I only noticed it because she keeps fingering it. Otherwise it’s fairly unobtrusive.’

Lorna was returning, the Howies like a pair of handmaidens just behind her, and now that Alec mentioned it, she did keep putting her hand up to the back of her head as she sailed along.

Alec met her with his arm outstretched and ushered her reverently into the middle of the floor as the elderly gentlemen wheezed into a waltz.

‘Dandy?’ said Hugh, suddenly at my side. ‘Care to dance?’

I managed not to let my mouth drop open in astonishment, and ignoring the Howies’ titters – their husbands had shown their faces briefly and retired to a bridge table in another room with a pair of friends – I let Hugh lead me onto the floor.

‘What did you find to say to him?’ he asked me, nodding over at Alec, who was swishing around the floor as though he were a dancing instructor, with his chin in the air and his arms high and rigid in that silly pose that makes all men who adopt it look like broken umbrellas.

‘This and that,’ I answered airily. ‘I was asking how his painting of the local landscape goes on.’

‘Why?’ said Hugh. ‘Is he any good?

‘Awful,’ I told him. ‘If there were one of his efforts hanging in one’s house, one would never go outside again, for fear it had all come true.’

‘Now look, Dandy,’ said Hugh, confirming what I had suspected: this invitation to dance was just an excuse to boss me around about something or other without interruptions. ‘We’ve come and done our duty. When can we go?’

‘We haven’t even had supper yet,’ I said. ‘We haven’t sung Happy Birthday.’

‘Well, conjure up a headache then,’ said Hugh. ‘If we left now we could get home tonight and I could be back at work in the morning. It so happens that I’m extremely busy just now and this dance has put me out considerably.’

‘Well, you have the headache then,’ I said. ‘They’re your friends and it was your idea that I got mixed up with them in the first place.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Hugh. ‘What a fool I’d look, falling out over a headache at nine o’clock in the evening.’

‘Yes, well. It’s just the same for me,’ I told him. ‘So we’ll be here until midnight, or until at least six others have left before us, whichever comes first.’ It was our habitual agreement whenever Hugh wanted to get away from a party, which was often.

This one certainly was a challenge, though, and had I not needed to stick around to help with the bringing down of Lorna’s little magic show, I should have been as eager as Hugh to get out of it. The Rural ladies enjoyed it well enough, once they had stopped trying to fit in and instead decided to treat it as an extended social half-hour. They paired up with their particular chums and got very hot and dishevelled, carrying out complicated patterns in the eightsome reel – the band, having made an exception for Alec and Lorna’s first waltz, had since reverted.

After supper, rather heavy and tepid, and very far from the exquisite little salty nothings that help down the champagne at the parties of one’s imaginings, Hugh and I were sitting amidst the candle wax at one of the tea chests and eyeing the plates of birthday cake which lay before us when, at the other end of the room, I saw Alec slipping in through a door in the panelling and closing it behind him. He stepped over a toppled hogweed stalk and sauntered around the dance floor towards us. As he approached, Hugh turned away almost rudely and fixed his gaze upon the far horizon so Alec was unobserved by any but me as he flashed his eyes and jerked his head at the door by which he had entered.

‘I give in,’ I said to Hugh. ‘I’m going to get my wrap.’

‘Should think,’ muttered Hugh, and he banged his legs audibly on the tea chest as he rose to bow me away.

Slipping out of the ballroom into the draughty corridor beyond, I paused and wondered where to begin seeking Lorna but, as soon as the noise of the band was cut off by the door shutting, I could hear her. An ugly, hacking, gulping noise as painful to listen to as it must have been to produce was coming from across the passageway. I stepped over and knocked softly.

‘Is anyone there?’ I said.

‘Go away,’ Lorna sobbed.

‘Lorna?’

‘Please go away,’ she said, and no matter what she had done I felt a pulse of anger at Alec. Surely he could have let her down gently? How could he have done this to her and then sauntered back that way? I pushed the door open and crept inside. It was a kind of glorified cupboard, perhaps a linen store, and Lorna was perched on a little stool at the back of it, with her head on her knees and her arms wrapped around them.

‘Mrs Gilver, please,’ she implored me, raising her head and seeing who it was, ‘leave me. Don’t even look at me.’ The kohl pencil was streaked down her cheeks like clown’s paint and her elaborate party coiffure was unravelled over her shoulders. On the floor in front of her lay a little brown lump like a disembodied patch of darning.

‘My dear Lorna,’ I said, feeling an absolute heel. ‘What has happened? Come now, you shouldn’t cry on your birthday – it’s the most fearful bad luck.’ This was hardly the most opportune angle to take with her and the sobbing redoubled as soon as I had said it.

‘Come, what’s happened?’ I asked again.

‘I thought he liked me,’ she said. ‘He acted as if he liked me.’

‘Who did, dear?’ I said, kneeling in front of her and trying to do a bit of mopping.

‘C-captain,’ she managed to get out.

‘Has he been nasty to you?’ I said. ‘Shall I fetch your father?’

‘No!’ wailed Lorna. ‘And he hasn’t been nasty. He’s just… He asked if he could speak to me on my own and I thought… So we came in here, and then he said it was a most delicate matter and he hoped he wasn’t going to shock me.’

Oh, Alec, I thought. What did you do?

‘Then he said he had come to Luckenlaw to paint but almost immediately he had realised that Providence must have sent him here to meet his heart’s desire, and if only he could be sure that his affections were returned he would be the happiest man alive.’

I waited, while a fresh bout of weeping swept over her. Time was I should have been thrown into confusion by watching people weep, but it is something of which a detective has to do a surprising amount, at least the way my cases seemed to unfold anyway. Presently she gulped, blew her nose and resumed.

‘And then he asked me if he could be so bold as to press me into service for him. He asked if I would speak to the lady and see if she returned his affections. He said he could not bear to approach her and be turned down, because he thought it would kill him.’

‘Who was it?’ I said, genuinely keen to hear.

‘Effie Morton,’ shrieked Lorna.

‘Miss Morton, the bishop’s niece?’ I blurted. ‘I thought she was an old maid?’

‘She is,’ Lorna cried with an hysterical bleat in her voice. ‘She’s forty-three and he loves her.’

I brought all my self-command to bear to keep from laughing, for really it was not at all funny.

‘Well, Lorna dear,’ I said at last, when she seemed to be growing calm. ‘I think Miss Morton is welcome to him. If he came badgering you for favours, on your birthday, if he was that full of his own concerns on what should have been your special night, then he is just the kind of selfish… nincompoop you can well do without.’

‘You sound like Hetty McCallum,’ Lorna said, smiling unsteadily, and she took a deep shuddering breath. ‘There are worse people to sound like, I suppose.’ She gave me a brave look. ‘There are worse people to be like, I suppose.’

‘Come, come,’ I said. ‘He is not the only, or even the best, young man in the world. And you are a lovely girl with plenty of time left to meet a better one.’ Right now, of course, she was quite freakish, with rivulets of kohl and ravaged hairdressing, but there were no mirrors in this linen cupboard.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I believed and I tried and I failed and that’s the end of it.’

I sat regarding her, wondering whether to leave it there since she had obviously learned her lesson or whether, for the kitten’s sake, to make a point of it, birthday night or no. In the end, I decided to be thorough instead of kind, and so – if I were going to be as rigorous when I viewed my own actions as when I was viewing hers – one might say that everything that happened after that could be laid at my door.

‘You believed?’ I said, drawing myself away from her a little. ‘You tried? My dear Lorna, you don’t mean to tell me it’s been you making this silly hair-piece, do you?’ Her eyes darted to the floor and then fixed on my face. ‘Oh yes, I know about it,’ I said. ‘I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of it for your father. Do you really mean to tell me it was you?’

Her chest was rising and falling at an alarming speed. She hesitated, rubbed her face with her hands and then, finally, nodded.

‘I should never have believed it of you.’

‘I know,’ she groaned, dropping her head back to her knees again. ‘I’ve been a fool.’

‘That’s putting it rather kindly, if you ask me. Nailing a kitten to the ground by its poor little tail is far beyond foolish.’ She had gone quite still, shrinking into herself. ‘As is digging up a soul that deserves her long-awaited rest.’ I could hear that my voice was hard but I could not turn it gentle again. Lorna looked up at me, white behind the clownish streaks.

‘What?’ she said.

‘All right,’ I assured her. ‘I’ll believe that wasn’t you.’

‘What are you talking about?’ she said.

‘Your father has been keeping rather a lot of horrid little secrets from you, Lorna,’ I told her. ‘But I think you should know. Someone in thrall to the old ways of spells and luck dug that poor girl’s bones up out of her grave.’

‘My father always said the old ways were harmless.’

‘Well, they’re not. This dabbling you’ve been doing, all in the name of love, has its ugly side, and if you dip a toe in it you can easily end up lost to goodness for ever.’ She was nodding faster and faster.

‘They dug up a grave?’ she said. ‘My father knows?’

‘He has handled it all most sensitively,’ I said. ‘He is a lovely, kind, charming man and you should be glad that you have the chance to spend your years with him. Believe me. Marriage is not… the only way to a happy life, you know.’

‘They dug her up out of her grave?’ said Lorna, still unbelieving. ‘Why?’

‘To put her back where she belonged. In the chamber. To put things back as they should be.’

‘But that’s…’ She stopped talking and simply shook her head very fast, as though trying to shake off the idea the way a dog shakes off water. I stood up to leave her. If she could be as horrified as all that then she was surely not lost to decent feeling. The kitten was an aberration, the desperate act of a lonely, muddled girl, but she would come right in the end.

I hesitated at the door.

‘Will you be all right?’ I asked her. ‘You’re sure you don’t want your father?’

‘I’ll be fine,’ she said.

Her voice had an odd, strained note in it, but I told myself that anyone’s voice would sound peculiar after such upsets and weeping, and so I walked away.