‘They don’t carry ribbons in their pockets any more, Hugh,’ I said. ‘Even you didn’t carry rib-’
‘Just a figure of speech,’ said Hugh. ‘Don’t quibble. He has had a caravan of village girls following him around since he was old enough to wink at them and if we don’t get him married off in short order I can quite imagine that someday it will be a caravan of village fathers, with shotguns. Which would you rather?’
Grant was rolling stockings in a kind of paroxysm of embarrassment of which Hugh was sublimely unaware.
‘He is too young,’ I said. ‘And she is too old. If you’re worried about shotguns’ – I glanced at Grant but Hugh did not so much as follow my eyes – ‘then threaten him with your own. Oh, how I wish he would just join the army and get rid of his high jinks with his brother officers where he can do no harm.’
‘He’s not joining the army,’ said Hugh, rather shortly. ‘Not now. Not soon and I fervently hope not ever.’
I frowned at him. ‘Why not? One would have thought you’d more quickly shove him into your old regiment than up the aisle with a fading beauty of questionable past.’
Grant was now, frankly, loitering. My case was packed and the drawer she was tidying out was perfectly tidy already.
‘If it comes to conscription then of course he shall go. They shall both go. But I will not encourage them into the vanguard.’
I shook my head at him. Hugh is a doom-monger of the very highest order. He was convinced that a nine-day strike a year or two ago was the coming of the revolutionary hordes and managed to get me thoroughly rattled despite my long experience of his dramatic premonitions (not to mention my long experience of my country not going in for revolutions much these days). His latest conviction, a mere ten years after the Great War ended, was that more of the same was on its way and from the very Hun that we had so thoroughly squashed. I do not pretend to follow the domestic politics of Bavaria with the interest my husband manages to muster, but I knew enough to be sure that this was his hobby-horse and nothing more sinister than that; more akin to campfire tales of ghosts when everyone is safe and cosy than a cool appraisal of the state of the world.
‘Goodnight, Hugh,’ I said.
‘Something to consider,’ he answered, making no move to leave my open doorway.
I stood and put my hand to the back of my neck as though to unfasten a button there, which did the trick. With a curt goodnight he left me.
‘Master’s right, you know,’ said Grant. ‘Madam.’
‘About the gathering clouds of war?’ I said, unfastening my dress buttons since I had all but started anyway.
‘About Young Master Donald,’ she replied. ‘I caught him up a tree with Eliza McManus once, gazing at her like the crown jewels.’
‘Eliza McManus!’ I shuddered. She was the daughter of a blacksmith, as broad as she was tall, with a red face and gaps between all of her front teeth. ‘How did Eliza McManus get up a tree?’
‘This was years ago, before she got so… sturdy.’
‘So they were children,’ I said. ‘Stop scare-mongering.’
‘Nanny said to me once that Donald said to her – in his bath – that when he grew up he wanted to be a daddy.’
‘How sweet. This correspondence is now closed,’ I said. ‘What am I wearing tomorrow?’
‘Leave off wrenching at those buttons and I’ll tell you,’ said Grant. ‘Madam. Turn around and let me at them before they all end up on the floor.’
It was a bright grey day when we arrived at Portpatrick the following afternoon (in Scotland, one must learn to make these distinctions), with a great deal of massing and thinning cloud scudding across the sky on a stiff breeze and, although the sun did not actually break through at all and there was no hint of blue from hilltop to horizon, every so often one could tell that it was getting towards evening from a patch of diffuse light gleaming far out to sea. The station was at the top of the hill and did not run to a taxi, so we descended to the village proper in a cart driven by the porter, a man of dour mien who kept up a droning monologue all the way, in such an impenetrable Wigtownshire brogue that it might as well have been the rumble of thunder.
At the bottom, the cart swung round onto the main (practically the only) street, a straggle of cottages, shops and one or two grander captains’ houses snaking along, all facing the harbour. A fleet of small fishing craft were moored for the night, tied together and jostling as they bobbed in the high water, looking like a flock of chickens settling on their perches, with a little squawking and a little shoving but cosy enough and used to the proximity. A few of the men were still at work on their nets in the lee of the far harbour wall and some of their wives were scrubbing out crates beside them, bent double, shoving their brushes back and forth with a steady rhythm. The sound of the clogs on the cobbled ground as the women rocked back and forth, back and forth, seemed to keep time with the clink of the painters, and the soft knock-knock of the boats themselves, making one great percussion section out of the whole scene.
‘Delightful,’ I said, standing up in the cart as it drew to a stop and spreading my arms to encompass all of the view. It was not in my nature to be so expansive but the last fifty miles from Dumfries to here had been spent on a tiny ancient train with very dark upholstery and very very small windows from which the view was of bleak high moors and glowering valleys, so this sight of the sea was as welcome as a toddy.
I breathed deeply in hopes of ozone, but was met instead with the sharp rich smell of fried fish and vinegar from somewhere nearby.
‘Fish on Friday,’ said Alec. ‘I’m ready for my dinner, Dan; I don’t know about you.’
At this the dour porter let fly a stream of bitter invective, no more decipherable than his previous offerings in its detail but crystal clear as to its broad intent. Alec and I hurriedly descended and stood on the pavement while he tugged our suitcases out of the back of the cart and dumped them onto the ground.
‘Let’s go in and try for a cup of tea at least,’ I said, nodding at the hotel – not much more than an inn really – where we had alighted. ‘Then I think I’ll set off and try to find this school. Eh-hem, I say, Porter? Do you know where St Columba’s is?’
This innocent question set him off worse than ever, a torrent delivered at top speed and high volume of which I understood not a word, but since he was no longer holding the pony’s reins and had finished unloading, this time the words he spat out were accompanied by wild gestures. He shook his fists and jabbed the air with his fingers and, as our gaze followed the way he was so emphatically pointing, up above the roofs of the cottages, up the face of the cliff, all the way up to the headland, we saw a squat grey building, hunched above the village, glaring down. I could not believe – once it was noticed – that it had gone unnoticed before. Almost it seemed to be looming, although in fact it was set back safely with a terrace and a narrow strip of garden, but I wondered if I was alone in wanting to retreat lest it topple from its perch and flatten me.
‘I take it they don’t start with a kindergarten,’ Alec said. ‘I shouldn’t want my precious tot running around up there.’
‘Eleven and up,’ I said. ‘What a supremely unwelcoming facade. Or maybe it’s very different when approached from the carriage drive. One can only hope so.’
But when I came at it after tea – leaving Alec to stroll the harbour and the single street or so of the town – it was up the cliff path under its cold grey gaze after all, since it appeared that to make a more conventional entrance would involve me in a tiresome round trip, much longer but somehow just as steep-looking. I was wearing stout shoes, for Grant has got into the spirit of my new venture rather splendidly, even sewing extra pockets in my new tweed coats ‘for clues and what have you’ as she informed me (although none of our cases has yet produced the traditional cigar butt, scrap of unusual cloth, or hair ribbon snagged on a bush and wound around with one long red waving hair, a perfect match for the crowning glory of our chief suspect and therefore her swift undoing under our scrutiny). Stout shoes notwithstanding, though, it was a scramble and I was panting when I gained the terrace. I stopped, meaning to catch my breath, and was still looking down at the rooftops and watching Alec, ant-like, making his way round the harbour, when a voice behind me made me jump.