‘What can’t be cured must be endured, or even embraced – which makes for a happier life in the end, don’t you think, Mrs Gilver?’
I nodded, absently. I was still puzzled by his reluctance about Jock Christie, but there were many more puzzles besides.
‘What of the Howies?’ I asked him. ‘Are you adamant about not going to the police?’
‘No good would come of it,’ said Mr Tait. ‘And a great deal of harm.’
‘They kidnapped Lorna when you get right down to it,’ I reminded him, although he surely could not need reminding. ‘And they killed the kitten. They should be punished.’
‘Oh, they will be, I’m sure,’ said Mr Tait.
‘Where will they go now? What will they do?’
‘I neither know nor care,’ said Mr Tait. ‘Mischievous, muddle-headed women the pair of them and those husbands no more use than… Ah, but I suppose I should find some charity in myself even for the likes of the Howies.’
‘They really believed it, you know,’ I said to him. This was still a struggle for me to comprehend. ‘They thought that putting a girl back in the chamber – whether the same girl or another one – would bring back the good times to Luckenlaw.’
‘Fools the pair of them,’ said Mr Tait. ‘I don’t know where they got their ideas, for they didn’t understand the first thing about it.’
I was eyeing him, speculatively.
‘And what if they did?’ I said. ‘What would they think then?’
He eyed me just as thoughtfully before he spoke.
‘I suppose I owe you an explanation,’ he said at last. ‘And doesn’t our contract bind you to silence on whatever I tell you?’
‘It does, as would yours with me if you were that kind of minister.’ We both smiled.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘there are those who think the Howies brought all the trouble with them. They were the ones who gave Luckenheart Farm to a boy on his own and changed its name. There are those who think none of it was anything to do with the girl in the chamber at all.’
‘I rather got the impression,’ I said, ‘that those people who seemed most concerned about Luckenheart – the farmers’ wives, you know – did believe in that girl.’
‘Oh, they did, they did, they do,’ said Mr Tait. ‘They thought she was causing the bother with the dark stranger. I’m talking about the other trouble. Are you familiar with the five elements, Mrs Gilver?’
‘Earth, air, fire, water and… I can never remember the other one.’
‘Ether,’ said Mr Tait. ‘Spirit. Well, there are those who looked at the blight and the fluke, the dry wells and the burned-out house and saw it as a punishment for what had happened at Luckenheart Farm.’
‘And Luckenheart Farm itself?’ I said. ‘Do you mean there was bad… ether there? That the place had a bad spirit?’ I spoke rather tentatively, unable to believe that I could be having this conversation, with a minister of the kirk, in Fife.
‘No spirit at all,’ said Mr Tait. ‘The place was dead with just that young boy who didn’t belong here. Although there was no harm in him, none whatsover. So that was the trouble – for those who believe it.’
‘But they thought the girl who had been buried in the law was the cause of the dark stranger?’
‘Until you found out about all the bread and bonfires and eggs and flowers and all that nonsense.’
‘I worked out the last smell in the end,’ I told him. ‘The first day I ventured out for a walk at Gilverton, it hit me. Stubble turnips.’
‘Wonderful winter fodder,’ said Mr Tait. ‘I’m quite with Hugh there.’
I shuddered. It has always been one of the least pleasant features of country life in the depths of winter as far as I am concerned – the smell of half-frozen turnips strewn in the bare fields for the sheep to nibble, rotting slowly there until spring.
‘It was a jack o’ lantern I could smell,’ I said. ‘For Hallowe’en. Candle wax and smouldering turnip. Eggs in March, flowers in April, bonfire smoke in June.’
‘Easter, Beltane and the Solstice,’ said Mr Tait. ‘Yeast in August and corn in September.’
‘Corn for the Autumnal Equinox,’ I said. ‘But what was the yeast in August for?’
‘Lammas bread,’ said Mr Tait, but he sounded very scathing. ‘That was just like those Howies, making a pantomime of what they didn’t understand.’
‘What do you imagine they did exactly?’ I asked him.
‘Oh, they probably just cobbled together some little ceremony out of their books, some blessing or what have you.’
‘In their motor car?’ I said, but actually it did make some kind of sense; I had always thought the timing was odd on that first night when Vashti Howie had reported seeing the stranger. If they had drawn into a hedgerow to sprinkle seasonal foodstuffs around, it would have used up a good while. This thought immediately sparked another.
‘The change of direction,’ I said, smacking my hand against my forehead. ‘At first the stranger was coming from the north and then from July he suddenly started coming from the south. The only thing that changed in July was that the Howies joined the Rural. Vashti Howie always drove on the main road, never round the lanes. There was a solid, physical clue there all along, that was nothing to do with strangers or devils or any of it.’
‘I was sure there would be,’ said Mr Tait. ‘That’s why I needed you, my dear, to unearth the solid clues.’
‘I was so distracted by all those men,’ I said, ‘out of their houses and refusing to say where they’d been. Do you know what they were doing at Jock Christie’s all those nights their wives were at the Rural?’
‘I do,’ said Mr Tait, and a rich chuckle burbled up from deep inside him. ‘You were right enough, my dear. Their wives wouldn’t have turned a hair at cards or drinking, but this…!’
‘What?’ I said, leaning forward in my seat.
‘It started when Jock Christie came,’ said Mr Tait. His tone was sepulchral, but I could tell he was teasing me. ‘He’s lured them all in one by one and now they’re planning something big. Utterly in thrall to it, they are.’
‘“It” being?’ I asked, smiling back at him.
‘The “new ways”,’ said Mr Tait. ‘They’re clubbing together to buy a tractor. And a potato sorter and a steam thresher. That young Christie and his college ways have turned their heads completely.’
‘The more I hear, the less I can believe it,’ I said. ‘Mr Hemingborough and Mr McAdam embracing science? I thought they were such stick-in-the-muds.’
‘Now, wherever did you get that impression?’ said Mr Tait, his eyes very wide. For once, he did not seem to be teasing.
‘I don’t really know,’ I said, casting my mind back over the case trying to remember. ‘Aha! That’s it. It was because they taunted Miss Lindsay about setting up the Rural. It seems odd, somehow, that they should be so down on new ideas for women if they’re so keen on new ideas for men. But they shouted names at her in the street, you know.’
‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ said Mr Tait. ‘There was an altercation, certainly. And names were used. But you’ve got the thing entirely about face, my dear. They were berating Miss Lindsay for the wasted opportunity, you see. They thought the Rural could achieve great things, wanted their wives to join and learn some modern ways. Bessie McAdam has a cousin whose Rural has had talks on “incubators for poultry farmers” and “the Education Bill”.’
‘So what were the names?’ I asked.
‘Well, I believe it was the night of the home-made hair tonics and egg-cosies from four continents that made Tom Hemingborough see red in the end. He called Miss Lindsay a feather-brain and a coquette.’
‘A coquette? Morag Lindsay?’ I was laughing again now.
‘Och, he’ll have heard it on the pictures,’ said Mr Tait. ‘He probably doesn’t know what it means. So you see, it’s all of a piece, really. The wind of change must sweep through every farm and through the Rural too, if those five men have anything to say about it.’