My Bones Will Keep

Chapter 1

Edinburgh

‘…famous alike for its romantic history and the surpassing beauty of its natural situation.’

Muirhead’s Blue Guide to Scotland, 1949

‘…a penniless lass wi’ a lang pedigree.’

Old Saying (possibly Glaswegian)

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THE hotel overlooked West Princes Gardens. Laura was admiring the view from her bedroom window. Away to the right stood the Episcopal Church of St John, where Princes Street and Lothian Road made a right-angle. Beyond it, and a part of the Gardens, or so it appeared, was St Cuthbert’s; and here and there, although they were not readily identifiable from the hotel windows, were the statues erected to the memory of the faithful departed—the poet Allan Ramsay, the surgeon Sir James Simpson and the visionary who promoted the ragged schools, Doctor Thomas Guthrie.

On the other side of the railway, which appeared to cut the Garden in two, there was the dominating feature of the view. This was the castle, built so high on its formidable eminence that from where Laura stood it was almost impossible to decide at what point the work of man and the work of nature met, so entirely did the castle buildings and defences seem to be part of the rock on which they stood.

She knew all about the Castle. She had been familiar with it, on and off, since the age of four, when she had stomped on sturdy legs, hand in hand with parent or uncle, across the bridge over the moat, past the effigies of Bruce the Scot and Wallace the Welshman, to the portcullis gate and up the narrow, sloping road towards the King’s Bastion.

Memory and imagination carried Laura farther. Most of what she knew of Scottish history had been learned upon these occasions, for that rabid Scottish Nationalist, her Uncle Hamish, after whom she had named her young son, had been wont to embark enthusiastically upon stories of Scottish kings, Scottish plotters, Scottish institutions and Scottish heroes, until an intelligent and imaginative child could see the builders of the Wall of Antoninus, Saint Ninian’s church at Whithorn, the landing of Saint Columba at Iona, the murder of Duncan by Macbeth.

She saw, and deeply felt, the humiliation of William the Lion, compelled, as a prisoner, to acknowledge the supremacy of the ill-tempered, energetic, wrong-headed Henry II and she rejoiced in the long-term revenge of William when he formed the first Scottish alliance with France. She sorrowed over the death of the four-year-old Maid of Norway and thrilled to the story of Bannockburn.

The tales were endless, but Uncle Hamish was a born raconteur and carried the child’s mind along with his as they stared in fascination at Mons Meg or visited the bomb-proof vault in which the Honours of Scotland repose serenely within their iron cage. Many a time they stood on the King’s Bastion, after visiting the Scottish War Memorial and Queen Margaret’s tiny Norman chapel, while the man pointed out the Forth and its bridge, the Lomonds in Fife, and the Ochil Hills famed in ballad. Out to the west were Ben Ledi and Ben Lomond, magic names in a child’s Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.

‘ “Yea, in my mind these mountains rise,

Their perils dyed with evening’s rose;

And still my ghost sits at my eyes

And thirsts for their untroubled snows.” ’

Since that time Laura had seen most of the mountains of her native land, but, grand, aloof and sombre as she had found them, she had never recaptured the ecstacy with which she had first seen the shadowy corries, the proud, defiant peaks, from the supreme vantage point of the King’s Bastion.

She shrugged off these infantile sentimentalities and began to plan a pilgrimage round Edinburgh itself when she was released from her duties for an afternoon. In imagination she saw herself climbing the two-hundred-feet-high monument to Sir Walter Scott; visiting the Royal Scottish Academy and the Raeburns in the National Gallery; revisiting Lady Stair’s house and the Thistle Chapel in St Giles; avoiding a visit to John Knox’s house, for her detestation of the scourge who had ranted about the ‘Monstrous Regiment of Women’ was unrelenting; standing in the full force of the wind on the Waverley Steps; above all, traversing the narrow and ancient wynds, closes and courts of the Old City and hoping zestfully for the adventures which, in Edinburgh, had never come to her except mentally, inspired by her uncle’s stories.

She had visited, in her thoughts, George Heriot’s School, where a cousin of hers had been educated before going on to the University, and was on her imaginary way to the Greyfriars churchyard, when there came a tap at the door. Laura, coming to herself and recognising her employer’s knock, went to the door and opened it.

‘What ho, Mrs Croc. dear!’ she said. Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, wearing tweeds which did not suit her, cackled harshly, waved a skinny, yellow claw and came into the room. She was consultant psychiatrist to the Home Office and was in Edinburgh to attend a Conference, not a government-sponsored affair, but, in the words of Laura, ‘A get-together of the psychiatric squares for gang warfare and personal combat.’ Dame Beatrice had been asked to read a paper on Some Aspects of the Politico-Criminal Mind and, with a fearful and wonderful leer at Laura, who had brought her the telephone message, she had consented to express her views to a possibly hostile assemblage. Now here she and Laura were, with the Conference fixed for two days ahead.

Laura’s part, so far, had not been assigned to her, so she mentioned her plans, and then, referring to the Conference, ventured to ask for instructions.

‘Oh, that!’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I meant to tell you.’ She accompanied this obvious lie with another cackle of eldritch mirth. ‘I thought, though, I’d better wait until you had rid yourself of your beloved encumbrances so that you will be free to do exactly as you please as soon as we have coped with my notes.’

‘Do you mean it’s all for nothing that I’ve ordered my husband to spend his leave fishing for barracuda, and parked my son on his long-suffering grandparents? What are you at, Mrs Croc.?’ demanded her secretary. ‘I was sure I should sit through the Conference and keep you supplied with over-ripe tomatoes to chuck at your chosen foes. I was looking forward to it.’

‘No, no, I shan’t need you, and I can supply my own tomatoes. In other words, just come and go as you please. I expect you can find ways of amusing yourself, can you not?’

Laura affected to be stunned.

‘You don’t need me? Not for a whole fortnight?’

Dame Beatrice waved a claw.

‘Don’t get into mischief,’ she said. ‘It is some time since I was in Edinburgh. Go along out and enjoy yourself. Tomorrow you can take me sight-seeing.’

Laura wasted no time. Basely abandoning the programme she had planned, she took a bus to Linlithgow and studied the inscription on a fountain: Micheal is kind to Strangers. Then she went to visit the Church of St Michael, but, returning to the High Street after an early tea, she tripped on an unexpected double kerbstone and took a heavy fall.

People rushed to her assistance. Laura tried to tell them that she had suffered no hurt, but kindly hands insisted upon helping her to a seat under a tree and kindly Scottish voices asked her where she wanted to go. As the only place which Laura wished to visit was Linlithgow Palace, she announced this, and therefore (so extraordinary is the common reaction against a show of courage), she was abandoned on the spot by her well-wishers and undertook a somewhat limping pilgrimage alone.

‘St Michael is kind to strangers?’ thought Laura, hopping painfully up to the chief apartments of the palace in the wake of more active visitors. ‘Oh, well, we’ll wait and see.’

By the time she had seen the Great Hall and the chapel, and, in addition, the room in which Mary, Queen of Scots, was born, she had forgotten St Michael and his kindly interest in strangers and was anxious only to catch the bus and get back to the hotel.

It was a distance of seventeen miles and Laura was sure that she would be back in good time for dinner, as she had promised. When she got off the bus her injured leg not only hurt but had stiffened, so she decided to take a taxi instead of walking the comparatively short distance to the hotel. There were no cruising taxis, but she knew where there was a rank close at hand. To reach it she had to cross the road and it was while she was standing with a fair number of people on an island in the middle of the street, waiting for a stream of traffic to go by, that (her hearing being abnormally acute) she heard a man’s muttered words: Ready? The blue car this side. He’s going to cram past. Now’s our chance.

Suddenly there was an exclamation, followed by women’s screams, a screeching of brakes, and, next to Laura, a fainting girl. In the street the blue limousine, unable to pull up in time, discharged its chauffeur and a portly gentleman, the only other occupant, to gaze helplessly at a man’s body which lay in the roadway. A policeman came up. Laura and another woman took charge of the fainting girl, both glad of any excuse not to have to look at the mess in the road.

‘Terrible! Terrible!’ said a man nearby. ‘It was sheer suicide. What way should a body be doing a thing like that?’

‘But, of course, it wasn’t suicide,’ said the shattered Laura to Dame Beatrice when, having walked after all, she had rejoined her employer at the hotel. ‘It was murder. I’m certain of that.’ She recounted the mutterings she had overheard. ‘The only trouble is that I haven’t the faintest idea who said it. There were quite a pack of us waiting to cross and, as soon as the words were out, the deed was done. I waited and told the policeman. He made a note of my name and address but said that it was undoubtedly the man’s own fault and that the words I’d heard “held nae significance,” as the other people he had questioned after the ambulance had driven off had all been perfectly certain that the man had simply thrown up his arms and chucked himself under the wheels. So what do I do?’

‘It seems to me that you have done what you could,’ Dame Beatrice replied. ‘Besides, the policeman may have been right, you know. The words you overheard may have had no bearing on the matter at all.’

Laura tried to take comfort from this thought. On the following morning they went to Holyrood.

‘So that’s that,’ said Laura, when they had visited the Picture Gallery with its somewhat oddly conceived portraits of the Scottish kings from the brush of Jakob de Wet. From him, Laura suggested, may have stemmed the legend that the Scots are a mean, ungenerous, parsimonious, cheeseparing race. Dame Beatrice asked why and was informed that de Wet had been commissioned to produce one hundred and ten works of art (and pay for his own materials) in return for the average sum of two pounds four shillings per portrait.

‘No wonder they’re lousy,’ said Laura. ‘Let’s go to the Zoo.’

‘The Castle first. I like the view out to the Forth.’

‘Have you ever been into the dungeons?’

‘Yes, I was shown them once, but I believe that there is no general admission for visitors.’

‘I’d like to see them. I specialise in the macabre. What’s interesting about them?’

‘Well, if your injuries of yesterday will stand up to it, we will go and see. I know the mother of one of the senior officers of the Black Watch and the great-aunt of a captain in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. We should be able to bluff our way through.’

There proved to be no need for this. As they got out of the car on the Esplanade at the top of Ramsay Lane, a middle-aged man in the uniform of the Scots Guards saluted Dame Beatrice and exclaimed:

‘Well, well! It’s been a long, long time!’

‘Alastair McClennan!’

‘The same. And when are you going to Gàradh again to see my cousin Margaret Stewart? She talks often of you in her letters.’

Dame Beatrice introduced him to Laura and mentioned the latter’s desire to inspect the dungeons. She had seen the dark hole which had formed the sixteenth-century prison of the Countess of Glamis, Laura explained, but not the dungeons under the Old Parliament Hall nor (for it seemed a time to strike while the iron was hot) the West Sally Port.

‘Before I take you to see that, Mrs Gavin,’ said he, ‘you must promise me two things: first, to sing “Bonny Dundee” – for, as doubtless you are aware, it was from there that Viscount Claverhouse left Edinburgh in order to raise the Highlands to fight for the Stuart cause—’

‘Although why anybody should want to keep James II of England on either throne is more than I can fathom,’ said Laura. ‘What else must I do?’

‘You must persuade Dame Beatrice not to leave Scotland until she has visited my cousin at Gàradh—unless you’ll go and visit her yourself? I know you’d be more than welcome.’

They visited the West Sally Port and then were taken to the dungeon prison of the ninth Earl of Argyll before his execution. Lastly they were taken to inspect the quarters of the French prisoners of Stevenson’s St Ives. When they were taking leave of their conductor, he said, looking keenly at Laura:

‘Mrs Gavin, what did you see in Argyll’s prison?’

‘Nothing really, I suppose,’ said Laura. ‘I have a grandmother who’s supposed to have the Gift, but I don’t think I’ve inherited it.’

‘Well, I won’t press you. I’ll merely say this: many people firmly believe that parts of the Castle are haunted, so, if you did see anything, you’re in good and honest company.’

‘It wasn’t a ghost,’ said Laura. Neither of her hearers urged her to say any more, neither was she herself at all certain that the impression she had received was anything but the result of too lively an imagination; for, in the dungeon from which the noble Argyll had gone to a felon’s death, she had thought for a horrified moment that she saw the face of the man who had been run down and killed at the road-crossing. She might have dismissed this as a nervous fancy, although nervous fancies were entirely foreign to her nature, but she thought she also heard a groan.

She soon threw off the effects of what she felt was a piece of childish nonsense, the result of a certain amount of delayed shock, and she and Dame Beatrice went to the hotel for lunch and then visited the Edinburgh Zoo. When they were on their way back again, Laura said:

‘Do you really think I could visit his cousin at Gàradh? I’ve heard about those gardens.’

‘I do so wish you would go, child. I am sure you would enjoy your visit, and I should very much like you to meet Mrs Stewart, who is an old friend of mine. Look here, suppose I give you a letter of introduction? Then you can please yourself whether or not you go. The gardens certainly are worth seeing and I think you would find the coast scenery and the drive to Gàradh very fine. There is only one eye-sore, to my mind, along the road you would probably take, and that is the newish hydro-electrical plant near a small place called Tigh-Osda. Apart from that—and you may not object to it, of course, it provides not only electricity but employment—it is an interesting and mostly a very beautiful road.’

‘I’d love to go,’ said Laura, ‘and, although I’m not shy, I’d like a letter of introduction to prove my bona fides, don’t you know.’

‘Your face is your fortune,’ said Dame Beatrice absently, recollecting her own last visit to Gàradh, ‘but I’ll write the letter tonight’