‘One and one make two and two makes true love,’ I reminded her. She smiled again.
‘I don’t think that is a skipping song,’ she said mildly. ‘Now that I reflect on it, I’m sure it’s something my mother used to sing to me. My father too, once she had passed away. Will you stay and eat with us, Captain Watson?’ Alec nodded. ‘Well, then I’ll just step into the kitchen and make sure there’s enough to go around.’ She leaned over and looked at the sleeping kitten in his lap. ‘Good to see her feeling better, isn’t it, Mrs Gilver? I hope now you’ll forgive yourself for the mishap.’ And she glided out.
‘What did you tell them?’ said Alec, giving the kitten’s head a reluctant nudge with the side of his finger, and setting off a noise like a swarm of angry bees. Even he could not be reminded that the little thing had been nailed to a road and not feel some tenderness.
‘I said I had run over her in my motor car,’ I told him. ‘I don’t suppose she’d have got away with a flattened tail if I really had, but no one has questioned it.’
‘Not even Lorna?’ said Alec. ‘Who knows the truth?’
‘She must imagine,’ I said, ‘that I’m hiding the nasty story from her out of politeness.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Alec. ‘Could she possibly be so calm, if you’re right, if it was her? She’s acting, this morning, as though…’
‘The harbour is in sight and the wind’s behind?’ I said. ‘I think that backs my theory up, don’t you? And if it weren’t for the kitten’s tail, I’d almost be inclined to say that it’s run its course and we should just walk away from it.’
‘A minister’s daughter casting spells?’ said Alec, looking rather shocked, for him. ‘Causing such a rumpus that a girl gets dug up from her grave to quiet it down again? How could you walk away from that?’
Viewed that way, I was rather shocked at myself. Perhaps I had been so long at Luckenlaw among the demons and spirits and the talk of the devil, with Mr Tait nodding genially at it all and calling it harmless, that my instincts had deserted me.
‘Well anyway,’ I said, hoping I sounded less sulky than I felt at being chastised by him, ‘there is also the fact of the kitten’s tail. It can’t be got away from.’
‘And that’s where I start to doubt again,’ said Alec. ‘I simply can’t see Lorna Tait doing that.’
‘She was desperate,’ I reminded him. ‘I had bundled away all the other ladies and I was going to park right outside the manse door and get into the hall in one mighty leap. She must have known that.’
‘And where did she get the kitten? Did she have time to plan it all when she realised you were ferrying the others?’
‘Plenty,’ I said, ‘and there are always kittens in the country, if you know where to look.’
‘All right,’ said Alec. ‘I give in. It was Lorna. Now what? We’re not going to the police, are we, and she will know that we don’t want a scandal for her father. So I don’t see what just telling her she’s undone will achieve. How are we going to convince her never to do such a thing again?’
‘There’s only one way I can think of,’ I said. ‘We have to show her that it hasn’t worked. And there I think we are in luck. If she were to set her sights on some little curate or clerk and he happened to succumb to her advances, then she might well turn back to her spell book for the next thing her heart desired. But I think we can guess who her intended is, can’t we?’
Alec nodded, looking as unenticed as a dog faced with bathwater.
‘I feel dreadful about the poor Howies,’ I said. ‘They’ve put such toil into Lorna’s party and we’re going to knock the wind out of Lorna’s sails and deliver a broken woman to them. They’ve spent your rent on it, you know.’
‘I don’t think we do have to,’ said Alec. ‘I would bet that the birthday party is probably exactly the night that Lorna plans to… How do you think it’ll work? Oh God, don’t tell me she’s going to give me a little bonne-bouche full of hair to nibble on.’
‘I don’t expect so,’ I said, shuddering. ‘I rather think she’ll fashion herself something and wear it. She’ll be irresistible to all around, don’t you know, but it’ll be you she’s aiming it at.’
‘I think you’re right,’ said Alec, nodding slowly. ‘I think that’s why she’s been so worried about her father getting a frock made for her. It never did seem all that likely, if you ask me, but because she dreaded it, it looked all the more certain.’
‘Yes, I wondered at that assumption too,’ I said. ‘Although I suppose if the ladies she saw trooping up and downstairs were known seamstresses, it could just about have been plausible. That’s all done with, by the way. Mother’s room is open again. I tried the handle this morning.’
‘Right,’ said Alec. ‘Quick, here she comes, what have we decided? You tell Mr Tait all is well, go home and wait for the party. I think I’ll take off too, in case she goes off at half-cock before the big night and I fluff it because I’m not ready. Then on Birthday Night I’ll reel her in and drop her like a brick.’ He said this with rather too much relish, and I had to concentrate very hard on the poor kitten not to feel a little sorry for Lorna again.
The Howies were the sort of people who throw parties simply by asking everyone they know and then standing back and laughing. Some raffish-looking chums were there, the Taits were there, the tenants were there – including the innocent Mr Christie – as well as a large contingent of SWRI ladies, resplendent in starched ruffles and witch-heart brooches and sipping uncertainly at their drinks as they stood around the room in little flocks. Captain Watson was there, naturally, and so was Hugh.
I had been thrown into a panic by Hugh’s insistence that he come with me; Alec could hardly just leave by the window this time since our plan depended on him being there to soak up Lorna’s affections, but I was reassured.
‘I’m planning an outfit that will keep Hugh pinned against the opposite wall,’ Alec said. ‘I’ll wear a hat with a big brim and… wait for it… I’ve grown a goatee. Barrow’s been topiarising me every morning. Wait till you see.’
He was right, both about Hugh and about the goatee being well worth seeing. Hugh stared coldly across the ballroom at the spectacle of Captain Watson and said in a hostile murmur without moving his lips:
‘He’s never from Fife.’
‘No, indeed,’ I said. ‘That’s the artist who ran off to be inspired instead of coming to the chamber with us all that day.’
‘Good thing he did,’ said Hugh. ‘I shouldn’t have been so ready to carry him out when he fainted, which I expect he would have. What a creature.’ And he turned his back resolutely on Alec for the rest of the night, although facing the wall brought him little comfort, for the Howies’ ideas on decoration combined Nicolette’s penchant for excessive ornament with Vashti’s rather slapdash theatricality and the ballroom was a perfect circus as a result.
The peeling painted walls were hidden behind towering stalks of dry hogweed hung with tinsel and what looked like stuffed hummingbirds. The bottoms of the stalks were poked into little heaps of wet sand to hold them steady so that, as the evening wore on and feet stepped into the sand heaps, the hogweed started to list and flop about and the dance floor under our feet began to feel gritty. The little supper tables – actually packing cases as one found out with a painful clunk if one tried to get one’s feet under them – were covered with swathes of fuchsia-pink art silk, torn roughly from the bolt and fraying already, and the centrepieces were an odd collection of old bottles, slapped over with gilt paint and stuffed with feathers and beads on sticks in lieu of flowers, which would admittedly have been prohibitive in November. The room was lit by purple candles raging away smokily in wall sconces and in vast iron candelabra hung from the ceiling too, melting in great dollops all over anyone who happened to stand underneath and leaving permanent-looking wine-coloured stains on their shoulders. Through it all, Lorna Tait sailed like a great pink iceberg, looking as out of place in her setting and as pitifully unromantic in her over-trimmed frock as it was possible to be, but exuding confidence like a lighthouse.