Lament for a Maker

12

The evening of the day Tammas came – Monday the twenty-third it was – saw a bit stir in Kinkeig. For long after ’twas thought the roads were closed for that fall, when the gloaming was falling in shadows of grey and silver over the snows, there came a wee closed car ploughing and slithering into the village from none knew where: it had missed the North Road through Dunwinnie maybe and was seeking it again. Folk got no more than a keek at it through their windows, for everyone was indoors that weather – all except the bairn Wattie McLaren, that had run out from his tea to have a look at a snow man he and the other bairns had been making that morning. The wee car stopped; it was a young wife was in it, Wattie said, and she called out to him Was she right for the road south? And then maybe she misunderstood Wattie – which is likely enough – or the bairn told her a right mischievous falsehood he was frightened to own to later. Anyway, the wee car gave a snort and a shake, its back wheels slithered a minute before they got a bit bite in the snow, and then it turned right and held up the glen for Erchany.

Meanwhile Mistress McLaren – and you know enough of her to known she hasn’t much sense – had missed Wattie from among her bairns – and she has enough of them, Will Saunders says, to be a right grand example to her own sows – and out she went to find him, just in time to see the red tail light of the wee car disappearing over the first brow of the hill. And at the same moment there came a great blast of a trumpet that put Mistress McLaren – who is fell religious in a gossiping way – in mind, she said, of the Herald Angels: a devout and seasonable thought, it can’t be denied. But it was nothing but the horn of another car, one near as big as a house this time and with a solitary slip of a lad in it, and with chains to its wheels that put it in a better way than the other against the snow. No doubt it had gone astray through following the wee machine in front, and I know now that when the lad called out to the smith’s wife it was to ask Was he right for London? Mistress McLaren, you needn’t be told, had about as much chance of picking that up aright as if the loon had asked her was he right for Monte Carlo; she took it into her head he was asking Which way had the wee car gone? – always liking to think, Will said, that the loons are after the lasses. So she pointed, right pleased, up the darkening road to the glen and away went the great car with a roar for Castle Erchany. Most folk thought it unlikely the cars would get there, and equally unlikely they’d get back; the greengrocer Carfrae had a bit joke, you may be sure, about their helping keep each other’s engines warm that night in the solitude of the glen.

After that nothing more that anyone knew of came through Kinkeig. A wind got up that night that swept the yet falling snow along as if it grudged the fine flakes of it their resting place on the mantled earth; all Christmas Eve it blew the fallen snow into great drifts all these lands about. On Christmas morning the wind fell but whiles the snow came softly down still; going early past the kirk I could scarcely hear the bell for the early service Dr Jervie likes to hold, so muffled was the tolling of it in the fall.

It was when the few folk in Kinkeig that will admit Christmas a Feast of the Kirk were at service that Tammas came again, and clearer than the tolling bell I heard the great cry of him as he breasted the last rise, crying the awful death of his master Ranald Guthrie of Erchany.

And here, Reader, I lay down my wandering and unready pen and you’ll be hearing, I think, what the English lad Noel Gylby, him that was in the great car, wrote to his quean in London. But you and I will meet in with one another again ere the story’s told.