‘Just so.’
‘But how long had she been there?’ I said. ‘I thought you said the chamber was sealed.’
‘Oh it was, it was,’ said Mr Tait. ‘I’ve misled you, I think. When I say body I should more properly say skeleton. The skeleton of a girl. And as to how long she had been there, there was no telling. Hundreds of years anyway. That much the scientists could say at a glance, for her poor bones were as light as a bird’s and as soft as biscuits.’ I shuddered. ‘Their phrase, Mrs Gilver, not mine. And it’s only a small part of their… callousness, will we call it? Detachment is kinder, perhaps. Because of course they wanted to take her away to their laboratories and try to find out more about her, but I put my foot down.’
‘You did?’
‘They called on me when they found her, and after that I felt I had a say in the matter, as minister of the parish. I felt it was my duty to the poor child to see that she had a decent burial at last.’
‘I don’t suppose there was any thought of trying to find out what happened?’ I said. ‘The police?’
‘They came along,’ said Mr Tait. ‘They wrote in their notebooks. But seventy years is the rule for starting up with a murder inquiry, you know, and this body was hundreds of years old, maybe even a thousand – nobody really knew.’
‘Couldn’t you tell from the style of her clothes?’ I said. ‘Or had they rotted away?’
‘I try to hope that they had rotted away,’ said Mr Tait. ‘Certainly there were no clothes to be seen.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said feebly.
‘And they say she was only a child. Perhaps twelve or thirteen.’
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ I said. ‘Even if it was a thousand years ago, one doesn’t like to think of a child of thirteen…’
‘Indeed not,’ said Mr Tait. ‘I suppose that’s partly why I was so determined to get the poor girl buried. I thought it would be the final indignity to have her taken away to some laboratory and…’
‘I agree,’ I said, grimacing at the thought of it. ‘And so she’s buried here? At Luckenlaw?’
‘She is,’ said Mr Tait, with a hard edge to his voice. ‘And so we come to the crux of the matter. She was buried in the face of some opposition.’ I wondered at that for a moment.
‘You mean there was a worry that she might be much older than a thousand years. Too old for a Christian graveyard?’
‘That’s rather a sophisticated line of argument for those who were doing the arguing, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘It was more a feeling that if she had been killed and denied burial in the first place it must have been for good reason.’
‘Surely not,’ I said. ‘That’s horrid.’
‘Roots run deep in a place like this,’ said Mr Tait. ‘Some of those making the most noise about it were no doubt thinking that if their own ancestors had decided she was to be dishonoured then who were they to gainsay it now.’
‘But if she were a thief or a murderess or something dreadful like that, she would still have been buried. Somewhere, surely.’
‘Ah, but that’s not what they were imagining at all,’ said Mr Tait. ‘This is what I’m trying to tell you. There were those – and this was only a few years ago, remember – who thought the bones should be burned at the stake, who wondered why she hadn’t been dealt with that way in the first place. They thought my giving her rest was a sign that I had been taken in by the devil himself. Yes, my stock fell sharply over that business. And it has stayed rather depressed in some folk’s estimations ever since. So, when Mrs Fraser came to tell me about her recent ordeal and I tried to reason with her – tried to get something as trifling as a description from her – I’m afraid she took it as more evidence that I had lost my way.’
My head was reeling. The only time in my life before I had felt so dizzy was when I had been persuaded to dance the Viennese Waltz after drinking two glasses of champagne at a hunt ball and had had to go and stand on the terrace for fear I might disgrace myself, and, while young men in high spirits can be expected to whirl their partners around without a care, I had never dreamed that a minister of the kirk sitting in his study in a manse in Fife could make my head swirl in just that way again. Witches, lucky chambers, ghostly strangers? I needed some fresh air.
Miss Lindsay was in the school playground again, waving off the last of her charges for the day, and when she saw me she raised her arm higher to include me in the salute. Here was quite another kettle of fish. Here was respite and a return to cool sanity after the unexpectedly torrid session in the kitchen at Balniel and the staggering interview with the good Reverend, so I turned my steps into the school lane passing the last of the stragglers and presented myself just as Miss Lindsay was drawing the gates closed. Hospitably – for who could blame her if she had wanted nothing but peace and quiet after a long day with a roomful of children; I should have been lying down with vinegar paper had it been me – she threw the gates wide again and invited me in.
‘Still among us, Mrs Gilver,’ she said. ‘Come away in and have a cup of tea.’
Minutes later we were ensconced in her sitting room, where a kettle was already beginning to pipe and a tray of biscuits, which I can only assume she had thrown together with schoolmistressly competence either before breakfast or over luncheon, was scenting the air and making my mouth water. Not that Miss Lindsay seemed the domestic type overall. The sitting room was well provided with books and dust and rather sparse when it came to the lacy covers, china rabbits and framed studio portraits of loved ones which I had always imagined the home of a woman who lived alone might boast, extrapolating from the knick-knacks which had cluttered up the tops of our dressing tables at school. She did not strike me as the sentimental type either. She might wear a heart-shaped brooch on her black cardigan jersey, as Lorna did too, but there was no rose nor ribbon here.
‘I’ve had the most extraordinary afternoon,’ I said, dropping into a sofa, rather lumpy and needing a cushion but a far more comfortable perch than Mrs Fraser’s kitchen chair or the seat in Mr Tait’s study, since it seemed unlikely that the devil and his minions would be joining us here for tea – china tea too, I noticed, as Miss Lindsay spooned it into the pot. ‘It began as an attempt to ensure satisfaction for my audience next month. I meant to ask around and form an idea for the content of my talk.’ As usual at the mention of the talk, even from out of my own mouth, my insides made their presence felt. I ignored them and went on. ‘But my choice of informants conspired against me. I went to Mrs Palmer at Easter Luck and then to Mrs Fraser at Balniel and I’m afraid that poor old household budgets didn’t stand a chance.’
Miss Lindsay, proffering a cup and a biscuit, gave a slight sigh and rolled her eyes wearily.
‘I can imagine,’ she said. ‘At least I can imagine what Mrs Fraser had to say. She’s a pillar of the kirk and she’s one of those who to use the local parlance “wid dae little for God if the devil wiz deid.”’
‘What do you make of it?’ I asked her.
‘The “dark stranger”?’ she said with emphasis almost so heavy as to be ironic. I thought this was a bit much since she was the only one of the entire Rural Institute who was not required to walk home after the meetings and so have to face him. ‘I can’t say I’m surprised, but it’s rotten luck just the same and if I got my hands on the scoundrel, I wouldn’t be responsible for what happened to him.’ Her annoyance, dismissal of the man as a scoundrel and desire to give him a good punch on the nose were just about the first normal reaction to the entire affair I had come across since I got here.
‘Who do you think is behind it?’ I asked her. ‘Have you any idea?’
‘Oh, a husband, I’m sure,’ said Miss Lindsay. ‘Or a father. Even a little band of them perhaps. Who knows how organised they might get to win the day.’ And as quickly as that, I discovered that Miss Lindsay had just as many peculiar ideas, albeit of quite a different stripe, as anyone else. ‘They want to stamp us out, you see,’ she went on. ‘You’ve no idea the trouble we had to get the Rural up and running, Mrs Gilver. Just to secure one evening a month – one a month! – away from the children and chickens and mending.’