Master of Glenkeith (23 page)

“But I could make you love me, Tessy!” he had protested with the utmost confidence. “I could make you love me provided you are not in love with someone else.”

She had told him that she was, indeed, in love with someone else, and Nigel had let her go.

Putting her letter to Andrew in her pocket, she went downstairs, telling Hester that she was going for a walk. Time enough to tell her that she was leaving Glenkeith in the morning.

“I may go as far as the village, or up on to the moor,” she said.

She chose the village, taking the finished drawing of Sandy Ross with her to give it to his mother.

It would be difficult to say good-bye to Isobel because she, too, had been kind. Not in the same was as Luigi and Maria and Daniel Meldrum, but quietly and generously, offering the hospitality of a humble home to someone whom she had liked instinctively.

She thought of the letter in her pocket and how to get it to Andrew without asking Hester to deliver it, for she did not trust Hester.

She could post it, of course, but even then Hester might recognize her handwriting and withhold it from Andrew if she considered the action justified.

There must, surely, be some other way. She thought of Isobel Ross and smiled.

Isobel was ironing at the kitchen table when she reached

the cottage.

“I’m late this week,” she excused herself, going to fill the kettle for a cup of tea as soon as she saw who her visitor was. “It wasn’t a good drying day on Monday and I had to take Sandy to the dentist in Ballater on Tuesday. It set me back, but he was that bothered with the toothache I couldn’t let the poor bairn suffer a minute longer!”

It was a lengthy speech for Isobel, and she set aside the iron to put a tray on the table.

“Please go on with your ironing,” Tessa begged, “and let me make the tea for you.”

Isobel regarded her in evident consternation.

“I couldn’t be letting you do that,” she said. “I’m glad to see you coming to the house, but I couldn’t be letting you serve yourself or you wouldn’t come again.” Tessa bit her lip.

“Isobel,” she said, “I’ve come to say good-bye.”

“Good-bye? But you can’t be going away, not so soon after the old man’s death! I thought you had come to Scotland to stay for good?”

“I thought that, too,” Tessa confessed, “but things have changed for me.”

She could not tell Isobel how much they had changed. All she could tell her was that this must be good-bye between them.

“I’m going to London,” she said. Somewhere along the road from Glenkeith she must have made up her mind about that. “I’m going to work there.”

Isobel regarded her with frank amazement.

“Do you want to go?” she asked. “Will you like it better than Glenkeith?”

“No, Isobel.” It was impossible for Tessa not to tell the truth about her feelings on the subject. “But I’ve got to go. I’ve got to look after myself now that Mr. Meldrum has died. There’s nothing for me to do at Glenkeith and I can’t go on being a burden to—to the people there.”

Isobel put the kettle more firmly on the fire, anchoring it on the hook which hung from the chimney.

“I—wish you could have stayed here,” she said. “The bairns are all so fond of you.”

Tessa put Sandy’s portrait on the table beside her chair.

“I’d like you to have this,” she said, “but I’d like to keep the watercolour I did of the cottage. It will remind me of Scotland.”

Isobel took the portrait in her hands, looking at it for a long time before she spoke.

“It’s such a bonny likeness,” she said. “Are you sure you want to part with it? It must be valuable.”

Tessa smiled.

“Only to you, Isobel. I have a long way to go yet before I can call myself a successful portrait painter.”

The kettle spluttered and boiled over and Isobel infused the tea.

“There’s something I would like you to do for me,” Tessa said.

Isobel’s blue eyes met hers across the hearth.

“I will do anything,” she said.

Tessa felt for the letter she had written to Andrew, holding it fast in her pocket for a moment as if, once she had relinquished it, she had let Andrew go for ever.

“It’s something I would like you to give to Andrew Meldrum,” she explained. “I want to be quite sure that he will get it into his own hands. It’s a letter, and I don’t even want to entrust it to the post.”

She had not been looking directly at Isobel for the past few seconds, but when the silence between them deepened and the whole room seemed dominated by the loud ticking of the wall clock above their heads, she looked up and all but gasped at the expression on Isobel’s face.

The high colour of the countrywoman which characterized Isobel Ross had faded and her whole face looked pinched and grey, while her eyes seemed to be fixed beyond Tessa on some distant scene which she had hoped to forget.

If she had almost managed to forget it, Tessa’s question

seemed to have brought it back more vividly than ever and with the utmost violence, shocking her into a distress so great that for a moment she could not speak. “Isobel,” Tessa said gently, “what is it?” The older woman looked at her and suddenly the floodgates of her misery were opened. For twenty-three years Isobel Ross had buried a secret in her heart and only now did she feel that she had any right to tell it.

It was not an easy thing to talk about. Her native reserve made it difficult for her to find words, any words, and this was a situation she had long dreaded. She was no coward, however, and she set about it as best she could, stumbling here and there, seeking the phrases that would not be too colloquial for Tessa to understand, finding words more easy to come by once she had started.

“It happened long ago,” she said. “Before you were born. I was seventeen then and your mother had come to Glenkeith as a bride the summer before. She was lovely. I can remember her, so different from us all, with her fine, white skin and the fashionable clothes she wore. Straight from Paris, folk said they were. They caused a lot of talk in the neighbourhood, especially since Fergus Meldrum was a widow man with a boy of four to bring up, but nobody could have said that she wasn’t kind to wee Andrew, as he was in those days.” Tears were standing in Tessa’s eyes, but she motioned Isobel to continue. This was what she knew about her mother, but surely there was more to tell?

“The new Mrs. Meldrum came about the village a lot,” Isobel went on, “helping with the bairns because she loved them, and in the same way as you have done she came here often to take her tea with my mother.”

“Yes,” Tessa whispered. “Yes, go on, Isobel.”

“They were friends, I could say. There never was a body as gentle as your mother and she even tried to speak kindly of Hester MacDonald, who was up at Glenkeith in these days, too. She went back there when Andrew’s mother died and her own man left her. Later on he was killed in a drunken brawl, but he wasn’t so bad that a decent girl couldn’t have kept him straight, my mother used to say. Someone with an understanding way with them and the patience to help him. But Hester MacDonald saw her chance to go back to Glenkeith and be mistress there again and she took it.” There was a brief silence in which Isobel poured out their tea. “One day,” she continued, “your mother came here in great distress. She could not tell my mother what was wrong, but she asked her to see that a letter she had written to her husband reached his own hands and was not passed to him by Mrs. MacDonald.” Isobel sat down, gazing into the fire. “My mother had seven children and one of them ill with the fever at the time. She had a great deal to do, but she made the promise readily enough. Perhaps she tried to reason with your mother, but she may have been too shy for that, thinking that it wasn’t her place. Anyway, she took the letter and entrusted it to me.”

Some of the colour had crept back into Isobel’s cheeks, but it ran out of them again as she drew in her breath for the final confession.

“On the way to Glenkeith,” she said, “I met Colin. He was working there at the time and he told me that Mr. Meldrum had gone to Aberdeen for the day and would not be back till late. There was a fair at Ballater that night and he asked me to go with him. He had never asked me out alone with him before, though I had known him all my life. I forgot all about the letter till the following morning, and when I reached Glenkeith with it in my hand Fergus Meldrum was dead.

Tessa pressed her hands over her lips to try to still their trembling.

“He—killed himself?” she whispered.

Isobel shook her head.

“No. Oh, no! It was nothing like that,” she said. “He was found at the foot of a quarry, it is true, and there were some bitter-hearted folk who wondered why his young wife should have left Glenkeith that day of all days, but it was established at the post mortem that he had tried to save himself. His hands were torn where he had grasped at the whins as he fell and his fingernails were full of earth where he had dug them into the quarry side as he went down. He had evidently gone after some sheep he had seen straying into danger on his way back from Aberdeen.”

Tessa sat staring into the heart of the fire long after Isobel’s voice had ebbed into the silence of the room. It was almost dark outside and the children would soon be coming in from school, making further confidences an impossibility, but she could not bring herself to say anything.

It had not needed the ring of truth in Isobel’s statement to convince her of her mother’s innocence, but it might help Andrew.

It was Andrew of whom she thought most, but how she was to convey the truth to him was another matter. She could not go to him and say that she must stay at Glenkeith because her mother was innocent of the crime he had taxed her with. Andrew did not want her to stay at Glenkeith, and she had no real claim on him. He was going to marry Margaret.

“What did you do with the letter, Isobel?” she asked. “My mother’s letter. Did you give it to Mrs. Mad-Donald?”

Isobel shook her head.

“I kept it,” she said, still looking humiliated and ashamed. “In the hubbub of Mr. Meldrum’s death my mother must have forgotten it, I think, and that same day my brother was taken to Aberdeen to the hospital because the fever was worse, She never asked about the letter, and I suppose she thought I had delivered it safely enough. My brother died a few days later and she was in a great state about it. He was her favourite, her only son. All the rest of us were girls and my father had set great store on the boy. They almost worshipped him, and maybe that wasn’t what God meant.” She got up and crossed to a mahogany chest of drawers where the firelight glinted on finely wrought brass handles as she stood considering where her treasure lay. “I’ve kept it,” she repeated, “all these years.”

Tessa sat waiting, staring down into the orange flames where the fire leapt in the dark maw of the grate. Her mother’s letter might quite easily have been consigned to these flames long ago by a frightened girl, but Isobel had kept it and soon she would be holding it in her own hands.

She saw Isobel searching in a drawer, bringing out a box which she laid on the table on top of the ironing sheet. It contained many treasures: a faded spray of heather that had once been white; a piece of orange blossom yellowed by the years; a baby’s shoe; a coloured hair ribbon fraying at the edges; a paper fan and a wooden whistle such as a child might find in a Christmas cracker. And, beneath them all, a letter.

“It’s here,” Isobel said, putting it into Tessa’s hand.

She stood uncertainly for a moment, untying her apron and putting it back on again, and then she looked at the clock.

“The bairns will be coming in from the school,” she said. “I’ll leave you to read it by yourself.”

Tessa had not been sure till that moment whether she should open her mother’s letter or not. Whatever lay within its yellowing pages, whatever news it contained of faithlessness or faithfulness, it had not been the cause of Fergus Meldrum’s death and she knew that she would be looking straight into another woman’s heart if she did open it.

But the woman was her mother! If there was any right attached to this, surely it was her own?

Shaken by the certainty, she slit the flap of the envelope. It felt dry and brittle in her hands and there was a mist of tears before her eyes as she looked down at the closely-written page and read a heartbroken girl’s appeal for her husband’s love.

If you love me (Veronique had written), you will come for me, but I can’t go on living at Glenkeith while your sister, Hester, continues to poison everything that exists between us by her bitterness and hateful insinuations and her constant references to your happiness with your first wife. I know you loved her, Fergus. I know you were ideally happy with Andrew’s mother and I would not have had it otherwise, but we have been happy, too, or so I thought. Andrew could be as much my son as he was Eleanor's. I love him because I love you, but Hester is doing everything in her power to poison the boy’s mind against me. She has done it now, in many ways, although he is so young—only four! It is not the way for a little boy to be brought up. There are so many other things (the letter went on), which you know about, and many you will never hear of the little everyday meannesses which Hester knows so well how to use.

If Hester continues to live at Glenkeith, Fergus, I cannot. Your father has offered her the cottage at Rose-hearty and a small allowance, but only you could persuade her to accept it. Only you can make her see, Fergus. I love you. I must have loved you all my life, but I can’t stand up to your sister, Hester.