Lament for a Maker

1

24th December

Diana darling: Leaves – as Queen Victoria said – from the Journal of my Life in the Highlands. Or possibly of my Death in the Lowlands. For I don’t at all know if I’m going to survive and I don’t know – I’m kind of guessing, as my girlfriend here says – where I am. YES, I have a girlfriend, a most formidable and charming and rather mysterious American miss, and we are staying at a castle somewhere in Scotland and I have a feeling – kind of feel – that our throats may be feudally cut at any time by the seneschal, who – mark you! – bears the most appropriate name of Hardcastle, no doubt with underlings (though I haven’t yet seen them) Dampcastle, Coldcastle and Crazycastle – a whole progeny of Crazycastles would be by no means out of the way. And we kind of feel – Miss Guthrie and I – that we are presently to be besieged, no doubt by the paynim knights Sansjoy, Sansfoy and Sansloy – and if you say, Diana, that the paynims are out of the Scottish picture I retort that I’ve had a quite awful night and a little inconsistency must be allowed.

Don’t be furious, Diana, that I shan’t be in town for Christmas after all; it’s not my fault. Listen. I’ll tell you about it. By way of apology, all about it. It is – and promises to be – amusing.

I got away from Kincrae and the horrors of my aunt’s unseasonable sojourn there – do you know, positively, icicles were depending from the noses of those melancholy stags’ heads in the hall? – I got away quite early yesterday morning, and though the roads were shocking I reckoned to get to Edinburgh last night (where there is a tolerable hotel) and tonight to strike off the north road to York, and then to make town in excellent time for our Christmas dinner – just as I wired.

But I’d got it wrong. The snows have been tremendous and even on the Highland road – where the snowploughs have been out – I was losing time on schedule badly. I had luncheon – a bit dinner you’d be wanting? the pothouse keeper said wonderingly – Lord knows where, and at the end of it my eye was already on my Edinburgh dinner. So I stepped on it – but still the going was bad. I had to catch the William Nuir at Queensferry; otherwise it meant round by Stirling and in late. Diana, you know what I did. I stopped and got out the map and saw it would be ever so much quicker such a way. Alas!

The route was all right, I think; it was the snow undid me. I was running along nicely on chains at about forty m.p.h. when the snout of the car went down and the tail went up, just like a launch dropping into the trough of a wave – only the feel wasn’t that of water but of cotton wool. In about three yards I had come from that forty m.p.h. to a dead stop, and without a jolt or a tremble. That is how snow behaves in Scotland: its ballistic properties quite different, it seems to me, from the Swiss variety. But that’s by the way. What had happened was I’d breasted one of those enormously humpy bridges (left about, I believe, by Julius Caesar) and there was a great drift on the farther side and down I’d sunk.

Luckily there was a group of North Britons in the centre foreground, bringing hay, they said, to the beasts; very kindly, they brought the beasts to me and yanked the car out backwards, and away I drove the way I’d come, the incident having put me back – as Miss G. says – two hours and ten shillings.

We approach Miss G. now – again at about forty m.p.h. and in the progressive municipality of Dunwinnie. I stopped there for petrol, Miss G. had stopped for gas – and we got it from the same pump, ladies first. You know, I always feel embarrassed when I’m out with the car in the society of smaller cars, and Miss G. has a fleeting appraising glance that said puppy! in a quite devastating sort of way. So I followed her modestly out of this Dunwinnie and – having heard her make competent inquiries about the south road – I followed her again all humbly second to the right. Unfortunately, Miss G. had tripped on it.

But she could drive. It was a narrow road – suspiciously narrow – and I didn’t overtake her. We did about ten miles and then, turning into some nameless hamlet, I lost her: by this time it was nearly dark. I didn’t like it a bit; for miles the road had been virgin snow and I was next to certain I was lost in the heart of Scotland. So I stopped to inquire: the village seemed deserted – like sweet Auburn – and I thought I’d have to go thumping on people’s doors, when suddenly the figure of an old wife started up magically at my elbow. Of course I ought to have grabbed my map, said ‘My good woman, what little place is this?’ and then worked it out for myself. Instead, I asked her for the south road; I may even have asked her for London – habit, you know, creeping in with fatigue. Anyway, she seemed a most reliable old party, pointed at once and with immense decision to a turn among the cottages ahead – and away your devoted mutt went.

About a mile on I picked up Miss G.’s tail light, and I was still humble enough to feel momentarily encouraged: my cousin Tim, who was Third Secretary or something at Washington, says they really are a most fearfully efficient race. Of course Tim himself is so nitwitted – But I wander.

Point is, I was wandering; a few miles on there could be no doubt of it. Miss G. had tripped and I was tripping after her – plunging and slithering rather through anything up to two feet of snow. I think I’d have turned back if there had been any turning, which there wasn’t, the road being no road clearly, but the most miserable of tracks. Besides, the admired Miss G. was still ahead – I can’t imagine how she kept going – and likely to be much worse landed than I was: if need be one could survive the night in my car. Gallant gentleman, you see, chugging chivalrously along behind. And presently I came upon her.

Came upon her is the word. I had done, I suppose, six miles; I could just pick out her tracks with my headlights and I was following them rather than the occasional posts that marked the track, when very much the same thing happened as at the humpy bridge. Or began to happen. Down went my nose and up went my tail – and then there was the most appalling crash. In the stillness that followed, and as my wits were coming back to me, a female voice said gratefully: ‘Well, that’s just sweet of you, stranger.’ Miss G.’s voice.

Sybil Guthrie – we may as well get a little more familiar – Sybil Guthrie had missed the track, gone over a bank, turned on her side, and crawled out. I had followed her over – a little higher up for the Rolls had come down with a splintering concussion dead on top of her car. But I hadn’t overturned and there I sat like a fool; I might have killed her. Anxious to do the right thing, I said solicitously: ‘Are you hurt?’ She said: ‘Yes, really offended,’ and then she added more cheerfully: ‘Of course, if we’re on fire there’s plenty of snow. Does snow put out fires, though?’

But we weren’t on fire. We sat each on a front wing of my car – the whole wreck seemed quite securely wedged – and warmed our hands on the radiator as we considered. Sybil – a nice girl – Sybil said she thought the village we’d gone finally wrong at was called Kinkeig; she’d been through it before and there was a pub if we could get back to it. Would that be best?

Quite proper instincts, you see, despite that appraising eye; out in the snow I was promoted from puppy to guardian St Bernard at once. So I edged myself into the spot-light and looked uncommonly responsible and grave.

It had been snowing off and on all afternoon but at the moment – and apart from the fact that darkness had fallen – visibility was good. And as I edged myself I saw, far away but unmistakable, a single light. ‘I think,’ I said, ‘we’ll make for the house straight ahead. Have you a small suitcase?’

It is unlikely – don’t you think? – that Sybil was unimpressed; with just such brevity do the heroes speak. And, anyway, I thought I was saying the right thing; the village couldn’t well be less than six miles, whereas the light – though lights can be enormously deceptive at night – could scarcely be more than two. Would you have dubitated or debated, Diana? Sybil just made a dive and yanked a suitcase – a small suitcase – out of the remains of her car. ‘Hieronimo,’ she said,

‘’tis time for thee to trudge.’ A pleasant literary lady – as a Sybil should be.

The light must represent a dwelling and some sort of shelter; the danger was that we should lose it as we advanced. I left my spotlight on and directed it at a pretty prominent tree – which gave us a base we could probably get back to in an emergency – and then we set off. But not before the admirable Sybil had produced a healthy electric torch. Really, she might have come prepared for the whole affair.

What ensued was a sort of vest-pocket version of The Worst Journey in the World. It was dark, it was cold and there was, of course, snow. Indeed, ‘I’ll say this is snow’ was the only remark Sybil made en route. Sometimes we fell into it in all sorts of diverting ways, like people in the Christmas number of Punch. One would think it was a passive sort of stuff, snow. I assure you that time and again it positively surged up and buffeted us.

There were anxious periods while a hill or a line of trees was screening the light; there was a more anxious moment still when the light began to rise oddly in the air and I felt it might be twenty miles away after all and on top of a mountain range. Fifty yards further, however, and a blackness gathered round it more lustreless than the blackness of the sky. A vague bulk was defining itself; a few seconds more and we had succeeded in interpreting it. What was before us was a solitary light burning near the top of a high tower.

‘Childe Roland,’ I said, ‘to the dark tower came.’

It was a trifle obvious – not at all up to Hieronimo – and I was quite glad that the words were drowned, somewhat alarmingly, by a sudden tremendous baying of hounds. But at that the obvious came to Sybil also. ‘Sir Leoline,’ she said, ‘the baron rich–’

‘Hath a toothless mastiff bitch–’

‘Which,’ Sybil said severely.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Which, not bitch.’

‘We’ll look it up.’

In the circumstances, you will say, a fantastic and foolish colloquy. And at this moment, as if to mark disapproval, the light went out. The hounds, however, carried on.

Rather nicely and chastely Sybil felt for my hand. ‘Mr Gylby,’ she said – we had exchanged names – ‘I’m just a mite disheartened.’ So I gave a firm clasp – not the vulgar and suggestive thing you’d call a squeeze – and said in my brief way it was lucky the light hadn’t gone out half an hour earlier. At that it appeared again for a moment, lower down and to the left. It vanished again and reappeared yet lower to the right. Someone was coming down a winding staircase.

I took a few steps forward and flashed the torch about the building; it gave sufficient light to show we had come upon something pretty sizeable. I was cheered by that; on such a night the gentry ought to do us proud; and I lowered the torch to see if we had been stumbling through a garden or along a carriage drive. What I saw made me give a little yelp: I was standing on the edge of an abyss. ‘Moat,’ said Sybil. She put a hand on the torch and flashed it to the left. ‘Drawbridge.’ I think she was rather thrilled; it was my turn to be a mite disheartened. I knew these castles: there would be icicles depending from the noses of the trophies in the hall – just as in the one I’d escaped from that morning. ‘Will you dreadfully mind,’ I asked, ‘sleeping in the haunted room?’ To which she replied briskly: ‘I’m not psychic, Mr Gylby,’ and added: ‘Look!’

Low down and over to the right there had appeared a crack of light. Cautious exploration along the edge of the moat revealed a second bridge – non-drawable – and over this a little postern door had been opened an inhospitable inch. We crossed, our feet crunching in the snow. At our nearer approach the hounds revved up, but still no more than an inch of candlelight showed through the door. So I knocked. Whereupon a plebian voice said: ‘Is that the doctor?’

They’d got us wrong. ‘We are two people,’ I explained to the chink of candle-light, ‘that have had a motor accident.’ For it seemed fair enough to put it as strongly as that and I was all out to strike the note of pathos. But the information was not a success. The chink vanished. The door shut.

Sybil said: ‘I’ll say!’ I won’t say what I said. But as I was saying it there came a development – nothing less than a great clanking of chains. Sybil said: ‘The Ghost!’

You will agree, Diana, that the days of keeping women in happy ignorance are over. I said: ‘The dogs.’

But hard upon this agitating situation things ameliorated rapidly. A gentleman’s voice made itself heard – presumably rebuking the churlish custodian – and then the door was flung open and the same voice said: ‘Please come in.’

So in we went, each clutching a suitcase as if the place were a hotel. Our host had hold of Sybil’s in a flash and said with the sort of heavy courtesy distinguished old persons can manage: ‘Welcome to Erchany. My name is Guthrie.’

Said Sybil in her most fetching American: ‘How strange! My name is Guthrie too.’

Mr Guthrie of Erchany gave her a quick look with an eye that gleamed in the candle-light. ‘An additional occasion,’ he said, ‘for such hospitality as we can contrive. First, we must find you rooms and a fire.’

All just as it should be and hardly worth so lengthily writing home about (darling, darling Diana!). All as it should be – and strange therefore that I received the immediate impression that this Mr Guthrie is mad. I think he is mad, and what’s more I thought he was mad before I had really viewed his Mad-as-a-Hatter’s Castle.

It was something in his eye, I believe, as he first looked us over in that uncertain glimmer from his candle. Perhaps it is merely that he is a mathematician or a chess-player, for I had the oddest feeling as he looked at us that he was really plotting us on an invisible graph or giving us our places on an invisible board. Perhaps, again, I was just feeling a bit of a pawn: one does after all that snow. But whatever the cause of my first impression, the feeling has grown on me since. And the dogs were the next thing that helped.

Of course one is careful to keep one’s dogs in good condition through the winter and all that, but these dogs – the two that accompanied us in search of rooms and a fire – are starving: something quite out of the way in a country gentleman’s house. I was devoutly thankful their less domesticated companions – still giving tongue in some court nearby – hadn’t been loosed off at us as first planned. And at that I glanced round for the retainer who had so unkindly received us. For a moment the laird of Erchany seemed to be quite alone, and then I became aware of a ruffian skulking in the shadows. This proved presently to be the Hardcastle I’ve mentioned; he looked ready and willing to brain us for our small change, and he was introduced with ceremony as the laird’s factor. A factor, you know, means an agent, and his employment usually implies considerable estates. So it is odd that the laird’s factor is undoubtedly a sort of butler and odd man as well – and odd that the laird himself appears to be in the deepest poverty.

Erchany is the strangest place. A wind had been rising during our walk, a really cold night wind that added considerably to the general discomfort. But when there is one wind outside there are about twenty winds in Erchany. One was blowing straight up the long corridor we were first led down, and on the floor a worn and tattered carpet was working like a sea, flowing towards us in little billows like some surface in a dream. A crosswind was blowing snowflakes through broken panes in a long line of windows, and these were caught by some further current and quite weirdly sucked up the staircase we presently ascended. It is a beautiful staircase, stone and with a great balustrade of fretted stone that must be the work of French medieval craftsmen, on each landing rampant monsters in stone with what I take to be the Guthrie motto: Touch not the Tyger. Not, Sybil whispered, homey – but impressive in a gloomy way. And that, incidentally, might describe our host, a tall, gaunt, aloof person, with strongly marked features and heavy – haunted, I was going to write – lines round the mouth and eyes; an intimidating old man even to a back view, which was all we had at the moment as he led us down a rather windier upper corridor, the cut-throat Hardcastle padding along with the suitcases behind. We met nobody – unless a scuttling rat or two be worth mentioning – until we came to a couple of facing doors: Miss Guthrie to the right, Mr Gylby to the left. And on the threshold the laird of Erchany paused: Was I, by chance, related to Horatio Gylby? It always pleases me to acknowledge great-uncle Horatio, that eminent fin-de-siècle professor of bad living and worse verse – so I said Yes, and that I had been his favourite great-nephew. Whereupon old Mr Guthrie looked at me with a sort of absent interest, and murmured that once they had exchanged their compositions. So I suppose he is a poet. One wouldn’t think of Erchany as a canary cage, or that the local owls have anything in the way of rivals as melodists. I now conclude that when the good laird gives me that peculiar chess-player’s look he is simply searching for a rhyme for Gylby.

Sybil’s room is rather nice; it seems to stand ready as a guest-room, which is somehow unexpected. A bed as broad as a battlefield, snowy sheets – not the right association for our comfort at the moment, this – and everything tolerably shipshape, with the only broken window pane neatly patched with brown paper. But in my quarters the establishment crashes badly: flutterings in the gloom of the ceiling; scamperings in the dirt of the floor; the bed undraped but not, alas, untenanted; the Erchany winds here playing unaccountably at slow motion and eddying in a stately saraband about the room. Guthrie, it must be said, did look round a little doubtfully. ‘Hardcastle,’ he called, ‘get your wife.’

Diana, Mrs Hardcastle; Mrs Hardcastle, Miss Diana Sandys! Don’t mind staring, Diana – I think the old lady’s next to blind. And isn’t she a beauty? No doubt Hardcastle, who can’t be more than fifty, took her for the sake of her old-age pension – or perhaps she made a little fortune as the Bearded Lady in a circus. If these appear brutal remarks think of a fine gentlemanlike Renaissance poet having a good go at describing a witch; that will serve for the rest. Come to think of it, Laird Guthrie may very well be an enchanter and keep a witch or two on hand. I wouldn’t put it beyond him indeed. But I suspect Mrs Hardcastle has a kind heart: in a fumbling sort of way she made fires, brought really hot water, brought towels, even thought to bring soap – albeit of the kitchen variety – and a certain amount of bedding for my uninviting couch. And after that Guthrie said with a bow that we should meet for supper at nine.

We met – and at this point you meet Christine. I haven’t at all got Christine yet, but in her way she is as striking as Guthrie, who seems to be her uncle. Striking perhaps in a temporary fashion – by which I mean that last night at our curious supper she was a pretty girl looking beautiful. And than that there is only one more absolutely beautiful thing: a plain girl looking beautiful. But don’t worry, Diana, if you’re out of the running for the absolute degree. You’ll do. Indeed you will.

A pretty girl, as shy as a village girl and with a soft Scottish accent that chimes charmingly with Sybil’s; a shy, smouldering girl with the manners – or manner – of an old-fashioned fine lady and seemingly quite without acquaintance with the world: this is Christine. A Scottish Miranda I thought as I watched her at that meal. And the notion grew on me – for she was Miranda in Miranda’s first great scene, listening dutifully enough to the talk of Prospero, but the whole of her far away, straining out it might be over a stormy sea where she knew that fate was working for her. If this is rhapsodical or extravagant remember I am writing – at break of dawn – from an enchanter’s castle.

In a lofty hall – like the staircase, it is on a scale that would make you think Erchany a much bigger place than it really is – the enchanter sat at one end of a tremendous great table and Christine at the other, Sybil and I islanded one on each side, and all of us in need of much more warmth than came from the small fire in the fireplace – a fireplace within which we might all have huddled round the embers and been a good deal more comfortable than we were. The villain Hardcastle had withdrawn – the Hardcastles, it seems, live in a separate part of the house – and the meal was served partly by his decrepit old wife and partly by Christine; so I was confirmed in my impression that the domestic resources of Erchany are limited. And indeed there are everywhere signs of either the most improbable poverty or a pathological parsimony. For instance, the whole of these proceedings were lit by a quite inadequate tallow candlepower; I think Guthrie may have looked the more sinister, Christine the more beautiful and Sybil the more enigmatic – did I tell you Sybil looks enigmatic? – as a result of being never out of a half shadow. I was just preparing to accept the theory that the land owners in these parts are unusually picturesque examples of the new poor when Mrs Hardcastle tottered in with the first course. Diana dear, it was caviare, and served on silver plate.

This was what the North Britons appear to call a scunner – and the whole meal was equally surprising: it was much as if the Guthries, having prospered in the city, had returned to hold an expensive picnic amid the ruins of their former feudal greatness. I am afraid I looked from the tumbledown hall to the lavish canned eats, and from the eats to the emaciated dogs, and from the dogs to Mr Guthrie of Erchany with ill-concealed bewilderment, for I noticed Christine regarding me with the same sort of absent interest her uncle had displayed in Horatio Gylby’s kinsman – absent interest tinged with amusement. She was speculating, I imagine, on just how well or ill the polite young Englishman would carry off the peculiar situation in which he found himself.

For it was not, you will apprehend, a very comfortable meal. Guthrie occasionally uttered a courteous remark or inquiry: what was the state of our cars; had we friends near, and would they know we had come up the Erchany road? But in the main he was silent, either staring over our heads in some profound abstraction, or occasionally dropping and narrowing that chess-player’s eye on us in a way I found myself liking less and less. I believe Sybil was aware of it; as you know she has an eye of her own, and I had a feeling she was beginning to pay him back in his own coin – anyway, she was studying him thoughtfully enough. It was Christine who chiefly bore the social burden: very nicely in her shy way. But she too had an eye, Miranda’s eye, dilated in search of things to come. It was her eye, no doubt, directed my ear to the clock.

It is a big grandfather clock, nearly old enough to be in keeping with the hall, and with a loud and – as you would think – peculiarly slow tick. You know how competent actors can build up an illusion of overwhelming suspense, of mere, sheer waiting? I suddenly found the clock doing all that for me. In other words I found myself projecting upon an elderly and impersonal scientific instrument a mounting and urgent sense of impending catastrophe. A trick of fatigue and insufficient nourishment, I told myself – and turned conscientiously to tinned plum pudding and a generous brandy sauce. But the clock still ticked in the same menacing way. By the time Christine had taken Sybil out of the hall I was next to hypnotized by it: had it suddenly gesticulated with both its hands and cried out Sleep no more, Macbeth does murder sleep! I should have been scared indeed but not surprised. And though suggestible, you know, I’m not wantonly goofy. It was Erchany was all strung up and waiting, and I was just getting the vibrations.

But presently I had what you may think a lucid interval – a simple and rational explanation of the tension in the air. Somewhere in the house there must be someone pretty seriously ill. Had not Hardcastle, when he opened his little door so cautiously, called out to ask if we were the doctor? What they were waiting for was medical aid through these appalling snows, and our arrival must be a disappointment which had been politely masked. There seemed only two objections to this: first, the grudging and almost conspiratorial way in which Hardcastle had opened that inch of door (but that might be just his nature); second, if the emergency were sufficient to cause marked strain, it would have been natural to inquire whether Sybil or I was by any chance surgically given (but perhaps we look rather young). This idea lasted me about five minutes, and was shattered by Guthrie himself. ‘Mr Gylby,’ he said as we rose from table, ‘the snow may detain you some time and you must excuse our very simple way of living. Apart from a lad out in the offices, my niece and myself with the two Hardcastles form our entire household.’

I made suitable noises about the trouble to which Miss Mathers – Christine, that is – was being put. Whereupon Guthrie foraged an unbroken box of cigars, held open a door and said with gravity: ‘I am glad you found your way here.’

I am not sure whether the inner jolt I felt at that moment was mysteriously occasioned by these innocent words, or whether it was the result of the simultaneous appearance of the unspeakable Hardcastle, who seemed to have been hovering on the other side of the door, and who now came shambling forward much like one of the less pleasing devils of Hieronymus van Bosch. He appeared to be on the spot by arrangement; perhaps he comes every night at this hour for orders – certainly Guthrie wasted no time in giving him an order now. ‘Hardcastle,’ he said peremptorily, ‘if the lad Lindsay comes – though I don’t think he can get up in the snow – you must let him in. I’ll see him once again.’

Hardcastle slowly drew a hand from behind his slouching back – I rather expected an open razor – and gave a dubious rub at an unshaven chin. Then he said – with what I took to be an effort at the surly fidelity characteristic of retainers in the best Scottish fiction – ‘If you’ll believe me, laird, the lad’s black dangerous.’

‘What’s that, man?’ The laird had stopped and was glaring at his factor with what looked, in the dusky corridor, downright malignity.

‘I say Neil Lindsay means mischief.’

The solicitous vassal turn or whatever it was cut, it seemed, very little ice with the laird. ‘Lindsay,’ he said dryly, ‘can come up to the tower. Mr Gylby, the ladies.’

And on we went. My responses were becoming sluggish; we were half-way down the corridor before it occurred to me to doubt whether Guthrie had been quite as unmoved by the curious soothsayer-business as he had appeared. I think it may have been that I was not unmoved myself: the incident gave me something I had been searching for. I had dubbed the Erchany atmosphere suspense; I now suspected I might equally well have dubbed it fear. But who was afraid – and of what?

I had got to this point in my meditations – you will say I was badly in need of bed and sleep – when I nearly jumped out of my skin. Guthrie had said aloud: ‘Fear.’ Or rather he had said it in Latin: ‘Timor…’ Softly but distinctly he had murmured: ‘Timor Mortis conturbat me.’

A glance at him showed he had forgotten my existence – at that I remembered I believed him mad. And striding down the corridor with his eye fixed somewhere near the ceiling he continued to recite.

‘Clerk of Tranent eik he has tane,

That maid the anteris of Gawane;

Schir Gilbert Hay endit has he;

Timor Mortis conturbat me.

‘He has Blind Hary, et Sandy Traill

Slaine with his schour of mortall haill,

Quhilk Patrik Iohnestoun myght nought fle;

Timor Mortis conturbat me…’

Diana, you have never assisted at anything half so weird as the spectacle of this uncanny Scottish gentleman walking wrapt down his windy crumbling corridor, chanting that tremendous dirge of Dunbar’s!

‘He hes tane Roull of Aberdene,

And gentill Roull of Corstorphine;

Two bettir fallowis did no man se;

Timor Mortis conturbat me…’

We turned a corner and the wind blew the words away from me, so that they became only a murmuring. At the same moment the candle spurted and I had momentarily a better view of his face than I have yet had in this murky house. And I swear the fear of Death was really stark on him.

The second corridor seemed interminable. At length we halted before a door, and I guessed that Sybil and Christine were on the other side. Guthrie was immobile, the rhythm of his murmuring had changed, he was looking at or through the door with an expression that now, I thought, held something of exultation. And then he cried out – but softly – ‘Oh my America, my new-found land !’

Once more, it was a scunner. And so was the succeeding moment. His hand fell to the latch of the door, and instantly his mind flicked back to me. He gave me a polite smile and said: ‘I usually spend half an hour here with my niece.’ I believe he can have had no recollection whatever of that chanting progress down the corridor. In other words, he seems almost a case of dissociated personality: two distinct Guthries, you know, playing hide and seek like twins in a stage farce. I was developing this picturesque thought – the miserly Guthrie A who starved his dogs and wouldn’t repair his windows, the lavish Guthrie B who stuffed tinned caviare – I was developing this for some time after we had joined Christine and Sybil in what is called the schoolroom. It suggested another possible explanation of Hardcastle’s calling out about the doctor: the laird was having a bout of this mild madness and the household was waiting quietly to smuggle in a leech. Not perhaps a brilliant idea – but that phrase of the indescribable Hardcastle’s was beginning to worry me. Is that the doctor? I have decided that if Erchany holds a secret the key to it is in the explanation of that question.

Diana, if this rambling recital is interesting no doubt you will want to interrupt here and say: ‘Guthrie expects the dangerous Neil Lindsay; Hardcastle expects the mysterious doctor: surely they are likely to be one and the same person – Dr Neil Lindsay, who is not necessarily expected in a professional way? What about his being, say, an undesirable suitor of your romantic Christine?’

On this nice point I can give you no reasonable satisfaction. That Christine has a lover – that she is in the state of having nothing but a lover on her whole horizon – I readily agree. And the lover may be Neil Lindsay – or he may be Hardcastle’s ‘doctor’. But that these two are one I somehow don’t believe: something in the abominable Hardcastle’s voice in speaking of them forbids it. Time may show.

It is time perhaps to say a word on time. It is now eight o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, 24th December; these dedicated pages, dear Diana, have occupied me for just three and a half hours – including pauses to relight the candle. For the wind has been rising steadily and this room is a very hall of Aeolus: giant winds bumping about on the ceiling, baby winds gamboling like cinquecento putti and trying out their tender voices beneath the bed. My last night’s fire is a remote memory; it is quite fiendishly cold; I am sitting by the window – that being no colder than anywhere else – in a sort of igloo made of feather mattress, hoping for some sort of present summons to breakfast. Outside, the still falling snow is being drifted quite terrifically and I see hardly a chance of getting away for days. There was some talk last night, though, of the miraculous prowess as a snow traveller of Erchany’s odd lad. So, if I am stuck, there is just a chance of getting a wire away to you by him. It must be long past dawn now, but visibility still poor, the sky is so leaden. From this window I see just dim, whirling whiteness. Only left-centre is there a break, a dark gleam that has been puzzling me for the last twenty minutes. It is as if the snow were melting away from a surface of hot dark steel: I believe it must be water – the frozen arm of a loch that curls right up to the castle – and this howling gale driving the ice clear of snow.

No sign of life or breakfast – so I add a few further notes on last night. The schoolroom where Christine had her learning – she has seldom if ever been away from Erchany, I gather – is now a pleasant, rather bare, species of den – Miranda’s corner of the cave, furnished with a few elegant mementoes of Milan: in this case a really beautiful Flemish cabinet and some Indian bird-paintings that deserve a better light than the couple of candles that seem the standard illumination in public rooms in Erchany. When Guthrie and I entered we found Christine and Sybil sitting side by side on a low stool beside the fire, apparently on the way to becoming friends. They both got up: Sybil’s glance, I noticed, came straight to Guthrie; Christine’s was lingering with something like puzzlement on Sybil. I remember wondering how we were all going to get on together without the help of eating and drinking.

Formality was our refuge. I was handed, more or less on a plate, to Christine, and presently found myself conscientiously developing a vein of subdued gaiety – embodied earlier in this budget, my dear – on my day’s adventures. I don’t think Christine is normally the sort that wouldn’t relish a young man abruptly pitched out of the world into Erchany on a winter’s night, or that she hasn’t the wit and will to prick and quicken the gaiety of such a one with mockery. I am a sociable person; I meet dozens of young women in a year; and half a dozen, perhaps, are right for something like interesting personal relations. One knows at once, does one not? And Christine is right: very shy though she is, we ought to have been reacting to each other in from eight to ten minutes. Do you observe, Diana, the note of pique creeping in? She was quite charming, but if you imagine a political duchess thinking out a difficult manoeuvre at a party while being quite charming meantime to a stray young man who may be of middling importance in thirty years’ time, you will get the effect almost exactly. Exactly – because Christine, though a slip of a rural lass, has an old-fashioned poise that is very engaging: I am consumed with curiosity as to how she has been brought up here. Point is, though, that there we sat, and there I went through my tricks, and that she registered just the right interest and amusement, and put in just the necessary number of words of her own – and that all the time she was profoundly unaware of me. Occasion, as I say, for slight pique.

Christine – I perhaps wearisomely reiterate – is waiting: waiting as brides must have waited when the world was younger. Undoubtedly, it is a lover!

And Guthrie is waiting too: only his waiting I just can’t guess at – perhaps he has a date with the ghosts of Clerk of Tranent and Sir Mungo Lockhart of the Lea. But, in a way, he was putting up even a better show than the competent Christine; his taciturnity was gone, he was leading the conversation with Sybil and doing her really proud in point of courteous attention. I suppose his craziness to go with a great sense of what is owing in a laird of Erchany. When my attention drifted to them he was showing Sybil a case of curios – gold coins and medals mostly – which he had fetched from another room. Christine made an excuse of my momentarily drifting eye to move me across the room; I’m terribly afraid that – tête à tête – she’d had enough of me.

Guthrie was handing a little medallion affair to Sybil. ‘You recognize,’ he said, ‘the device?’

I recognized it at once from the creatures on the staircase. It was Guthrie’s crest. Sybil took it, handled it delicately, and said nothing.

‘The family crest,’ said Guthrie. ‘It has occurred to me, my dear young lady, to wonder if we may be related?’

Guthrie, of course, is the sort of old person who can say my dear young lady: nevertheless, I obscurely felt the bland phrase give – paradoxically – edge to the question.

Rather unexpectedly, Sybil gushed. ‘Mr Guthrie, wouldn’t that be just wonderful! I know my father was terribly proud of his Scotch connections. And I’d just love to think I was related to a romantic old place like your castle. It must be terribly old?’

You mustn’t think Christine has extinguished my admiration for Sybil: I think Sybil quite remarkable, will-o’-the-wisp though she has been to me. And now I opened my eyes rather wide, for her reaction to Guthrie’s polite suggestion was just a little too good to be true. But if my eyes opened I believe Guthrie’s narrowed. Punctiliously, he answered his guest’s question. ‘It is old. There are thirteenth-century foundations.’ And then he went on carefully: ‘We have connections, I know, in the United States. Families like ours do not care to lose sight even of distant branches.’

‘Mr Guthrie – how exciting! And I am sure they love to come and visit Erchany.’

‘They have not visited me.’ And I think Guthrie smiled. ‘Not, that is, as far as I know.’ There was a pause. ‘But a year or two ago they sent – friends.’

Christine was not rubbing shoulders with me; I must have sensed, rather than felt, her shiver. I know I glanced round at her quickly. And I believe I caught on her face what I had already caught on her uncle’s: fear.

Guthrie waiting and Christine waiting – but not perhaps for the same thing. Guthrie afraid and Christine afraid – again not perhaps of the same thing. Here, in a word, is my preoccupation – almost my anxiety – of the moment; here – Diana – is the Mystery of Castle Erchany!

Sybil was not very oncoming about her family and Guthrie did not press her beyond his first polite suggestion of relationship. Instead his conversation drifted to his childhood, oddly, I thought – for though the picture of the elderly laird entertaining his guests with the golden memories of an Erchany infancy was pretty enough, it yet seemed false to the basic reserve of the man. Presently he was inviting Sybil’s memories in exchange and it occurred to me rather sleepily that he was going after her family again in a ferreting way. But his interest seemed actually to be more general; he might have been a student of American social history, interested in the trend and tone of American life some twenty years ago. Sybil comes from Cincinnati, Ohio – I gathered that much – and I’m not sure there isn’t something peculiarly hypnoidal about the words. Cincinnati, Ohio…Cincinnati, Ohio: beautiful, sleepy cadences I found myself drifting away on. And then I woke up with a jerk.

Guthrie had moved over to the dying fire and was standing before it with a small log in his hands: I think he didn’t want to provide more firing than need be. And as he hesitated Christine said: ‘You seem to be in two minds.’

Not much, you will say, to wake a chap up – rather less than the little crash with which the log immediately fell among the embers. But the remark held all the temper I had been expecting in Christine: into the words she was putting, I knew, a whole desperate situation and she was getting from them the fierce relief that a flash of wit can give. Whatever she felt Guthrie to be in two minds about was something that was vital to her.

And after this I remember, as they say, nothing more. We sat for some time longer, Sybil and myself waiting for bed and Guthrie and Christine waiting for I don’t know what – but certainly something as immediate as a step in the corridor or a cry in the night. But by half-past ten the charm of the mysterious had waned and I was glad when we were reconducted up the great staircase to our rooms.

I spare you details of the horror of the night – the more willingly as Mrs Hardcastle has just put her head into the room and said: ‘Won’t you be wanting your breakfast?’ The rats had certainly wanted their supper, as had a variety of lesser vermin too: meditate the discomposing effect of these before you judge hardly of my disjointed notes on Castle Erchany. I slept for a couple of hours or so and was awakened perhaps by a rat taking an exploratory nibble at my toe, perhaps merely by the owls in the snow-laden ivy by my window. Normally I rather dote on owls, but the owlishness of the Erchany variety is something overpowering. I counted several varieties, all hooting depression or despair, and at least one the note of which was strange to me – a high long-drawn-out too-ee that really froze the blood. The dogs threw in a howl from time to time; it was hard not to believe they were wolves – or werewolves, it might be – in the spell of the enchanter. And, always, there was the wind. In still weather Erchany must be full of whisperings: in a storm it is full of great voices, crying words and phrases one just can’t catch. Perhaps after all I shall get away this morning, and to Edinburgh later in the day, and to town by an early train tomorrow.

Believe it, Diana, that the most heroical efforts will be made by your lover

NOEL.