Free Lament for a Maker by Michael Innes

distress?’
    It didn’t comfort Miss Strachan any to find that she had to deal with the English travelled Guthrie, him that was all black irony and politeness; she’d sooner have had the Guthrie Lindsay had been dealing with, the laird who affected more of the Scots than the gentry have allowed themselves this century past. She gave a bit snivel – we may suppose – as she replied: ‘Oh Mr Guthrie, sir, I’m the schoolmistress at Kinkeig and I was riding by when the storm came and–’
    ‘I am very glad,’ said Guthrie – and standing outlined in the doorway he gave, she could see, a bit bow – ‘I am very glad the farm has given you shelter. But I think you cried out? You have been alarmed? Our hospitality has been at fault?’
    She could feel his louring eye, black shadow though he was, and the awful edge to his smooth words fair unnerved her quite. ‘It was a rat, Mr Guthrie,’ she cried; ‘I was sore frightened for a minute by a rat.’
    ‘Ah yes,’ said Guthrie. ‘The rats are troublesome round here. As it happens, I have just been dealing with one myself.’
    At that horrid speak the schoolmistress fair felt her blood go chill in her veins; she was that miserable that had she dared she would just have sat down and grat. And some further snivel she must have given, for the next words she reported of the laird were: ‘You are over-wrought; let me take you to a less disturbed asylum.’ The word ‘asylum’ really suggested to her muddled head for a moment that she was to be handed over to the daftie, she would have juiked past him if she could and out into the storm and the night. But the laird advanced with his heavy courtesy, like Sir Charles Grandison in Richardson’s fine novel, and fair handed her out of the loft as if it had been a ballroom. In the open she got another turn, for darkling as it was she could see his face as pale as Pepper’s Ghost and across it the great weal of a blow from an open hand. All the way round the arm of the loch and to the meikle house, where the laird wheeled her bicycle with one hand and armed her with the other like she had been the Duchess of Buccleuch, she could hear dinning in her lug his last words to the Lindsay chiel: ‘You’ll pay.’ And then at the meikle house he suddenly tired of his play and summoned the Hardcastle wife and said: ‘Provide for this young woman for the night.’ With that he gave her a cold bow and went his own gait, and the schoolmistress was probably as mortified by her sudden drop from ‘madam’ to ‘young woman’ as by anything had happened to her that awful day – though for that matter ‘young’ was a word of charity she might be grateful for: you must remember Guthrie hadn’t seen her in a full light.
    Nor did Miss Strachan see anything more of Guthrie save for a glimpse of him in the morning. She was up at keek of dawn, the rats had given her fient the wink of sleep all night and the supper she’d been offered was that meagre that long before she could decently get up she’d nibbled as much of the rest of her chocolate as the vermin hadn’t snatched from her bedside. Fell eager to get away she was, the storm had abated, and her best plan, she thought, was to trudge back to Kinkeig wheeling her machine – there would be no riding it, certain, with the track the way it was. So she wheedled a bit bread and treacle out of the old witch of a wife Hardcastle, said ta-ta to her right willingly, and away down the path she went. You must know that the path goes hard by the neck of the loch that comes close up to Castle Erchany, the same that they used to fill the moat from in the olden time. And there was Guthrie staring down Loch Cailie at the watery angry sunrise, intent as if he expected a message dropped for him from the chariot of the sun. And sudden as the schoolmistress looked he raised both arms and held them, hands outspread, against the lift like as if he were trying to see the blood coursing through the