Free Lament for a Maker by Michael Innes Page A

transparence of them. Uncanny it was and the schoolmistress minded the daft speak of how he would whiles pray to the idols of the coarse old heathen; she fair louped it round the first twist among the larches and I doubt she didn’t stop once, any more than wee Isa had done, on the first of the miles that took her clear of Castle Erchany. But at least she bore her spoils with her: never had such fuel for claiking been brought down the glen before.
    And that was the last anyone but myself in Kinkeig heard of Ranald Guthrie before the tragedy. It was the night of the twenty-eighth November Miss Strachan spent at the meikle house. It was on the tenth December, just before the great snows all but closed the glens entirely, that Christine Mathers came to me with her story.

 
     
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    It was seldom Christine came down to Kinkeig. After all, beer at the Arms and gossip in the kitchens and maybe a bit sprunting [1] about exhaust the attractions of the place except on the Sabbath. And Guthrie would never let Christine sit under Dr Jervie; he had small use for the kirk and less for our minister. For a bit after his coming, when he’d got to know the affairs of his parish right well, the minister walked up to Erchany and got a bit talk with the laird and hinted it was a pity to breed up so fine a quean as Christine so lonely as he did and so much the mark for idle talk. Perhaps it was because Dr Jervie was a scholar and he respected that – scholar himself that he was – that Guthrie didn’t set the dogs on him as he did on the last minister – who was but an empty pulpit-thumping billy enough with neither matter nor doctrine to him, ’tis true. But he listened coldly and coldly bowed Dr Jervie out at the end, and ever after if they met in a lane the laird would walk unheeding by. He had never, sure, been seen in the kirk, nor Christine nor the Hardcastles either – and as for Tammas I doubt if the poor daftie had ever heard there is such a thing as the Shorter Catechism.
    Christine, I say, came seldom to Kinkeig, and when she did it was to visit Ewan Bell the sutor. She and I had been long acquaint, for the first nurse that Guthrie ever got for her was my own sister’s child. There was a pony-carriage at the meikle house then and the laird, who had some mellower years during the childhood of the quean, let them drive about much as they pleased, and often they came down to visit Uncle Ewan, for I was that to the bairn as well as to my right niece. A childless and unmarried man, I grew right fond of little Christine Mathers. And when she grew and Guthrie got Mistress Menzies to the house, the weak-minded gentle fine-bred lady he kept to give Christine her strange and lonely breeding, whiles she would still come to see me, bringing maybe her troubles at Erchany and maybe just her questions about the world. Then as she grew again and her maidenhood came to her and she saw the strangeness of her life, a Miranda islanded with a black-thoughted Prospero, she became a secret quean, and with a growing sorrowfulness too, deep at the heart of her. Whiles she still came to see me, but her contacts now all mute: curled on a table, she would give herself to the scent and the texture of my bit leathers, as if she drew from them the strength one can draw from raw strong things. And now her comings had been rarer, she would look at me as if she might open her heart, but in the end nothing would she speak of but idle matter of the day. Dreaming she would sit, toying with a bit leather, all opening into womanhood as simply and resistlessly as the flower of the heather on the braes. Fine I knew what had happened long ere the schoolmistress brought the unlucky name of the lad to Kinkeig.
    You must know something of the Guthries and the Lindsays – a little more, maybe, than you’ll find in Pitscottie’s Chronicles . It won’t keep you long from meeting Christine – it’s not a treatise on Scottish feudalism I’m writing – and I warned you