The Boggart (2 page)

He flittered away to the kitchen, which was indeed empty. In the sink, half filled with water, was a saucepan lined with congealed porridge. The Boggart reached for this pan and then decided against it; he was a fastidious creature, and disliked the idea of spraying gobbets of wet porridge all over the walls and floor. Instead he took half a dozen clean — though dusty — metal pots, and hurled them all around the kitchen with a sound like that of a car crashing into a wall.

He waited, grinning, for sounds of reaction from the MacDevon. But the castle was silent. The Boggart was disappointed, but not impatient. He could wait. He helped himself to an apple from the bowl on the kitchen table, and sat on the back of a chair, nibbling. The rays of sunshine which had been slanting through the kitchen's one small window disappeared, as a cloud bank swallowed the sun. The kitchen grew dark, and the Boggart felt lonely. Finishing his apple, he flittered to the MacDevon's bedroom, and like a small cloud of smoke he drifted in through the partly open door.

Nobody was there. The early sunshine must have wakened the MacDevon too. The Boggart made his way to the living room, smiling with anticipation, and began first to whimper and then to yowl like a cat in the corridor outside. Changing shape again, he trickled through the gap under the door and into the room, and looked up. Then he paused.

The MacDevon was sitting in his chair, smiling a little, with his eyes closed, and the dog Fergus lay across his feet, snoring gently. The fire in the hearth was cold ash. The Boggart looked at the two still figures and felt suddenly nervous. He made a loud abrupt cat sound.

Fergus stirred, and raised his head, but the MacDevon did not move. The old dog got shakily to his feet, and nudged with his muzzle at the limp hand lying on the MacDevon's knee, but still the MacDevon did not move. Then Fergus's animal instinct told him what had happened, and he put back his head and howled a wailing eerie howl, and hearing it, the Boggart knew that the MacDevon was dead.

He stayed there all day in the room, staring at the MacDevon, without stirring, without making a sound, as if by stillness he could prevent the passing of time. In his heart he felt a terrible ache, the ache he had sworn he would never feel again. The old dog Fergus howled and howled, a long ululation of mourning, as the sun rose and crossed the sky and began to sink to the west. Over on the mainland Tommy Cameron, walking home from the school bus, lifted his head and heard a faint murmur of the howling carried on the breeze. But Fergus was inside a room with ancient stone walls two feet thick, and the sound was not distinct. Tommy decided it was the passing of a flight of geese.

As the castle grew dark, Fergus's howls changed to whimpers, and at length he put his head down again on the MacDevon's feet, and slept. All the night long the Boggart stayed silent in the room, keeping vigil, fighting the pain of loss. When the darkness was eased by a growing light in the narrow windows of the room, and birds began faintly to chirp outside, the Boggart stirred himself and went to the kitchen to fetch food and a bowl of water for the dog.

But Fergus only raised his head, whimpered a little, and laid it down again on the MacDevon's feet. He would neither eat nor drink. He was a very old dog, held in life only by the thread of his devotion to his master, and without that he had no wish at all to live. So very soon he drifted into a deep sleep where his breathing grew gradually slower and more faint, and the Boggart knew that he had chosen not to wake up again.

Night fell, and Castle Keep was in darkness once more. The Boggart found candles and matches, and he lit a candle in every window of the great square grey home of the last MacDevon. In his misery he wanted to sleep as Fergus slept, but he was a boggart, and boggarts do not die. Out of an anguish of loneliness and loss he howled into the night as the dog had howled, keening a lament for his friend. And gradually the sound of his mourning changed, and became a chilling echo of the time he had felt another loving grief, centuries before. So all night long Tommy Cameron and all the other villagers tossed in their safe mainland beds, as they heard through their sleep, echoing over the water from the castle of the MacDevon, the plaintive wail of a single bagpipe, the creaking of a cart, the slow muffled shuffling of many feet, and the unending steady beat of a drum.

     
E
MILY PUT HER HEAD
around Jessup's door, ignoring the large computer-generated banner reading DEATH TO ALL INVADERS. “Get up, Idle,” she said.

Her brother pulled the sheet over his ears and made a snarling sound.

“It's ten o'clock!” said Emily. She bent down and let loose her secret weapon, the black kitten Polydore, known as Polly. The kitten gave a small mew of delight and rushed at Jessup's bed. It leaped lightly onto his pillow and began burrowing down under the sheet. Jessup shrieked.

Polly flew through the air and made a four-point landing on the wooden floor. She slid a little way, looking reproachfully at the bed.

Jessup surfaced. “Get her out of here! She'll shed hairs in my computer!”

“You'll just have to train her not to,” Emily said unfeelingly. It was their first day home in Toronto after two barefoot seaside weeks in a cabin on Prince Edward Island, and nobody was pleased with life. Their parents had both disappeared to work, with very bad grace, and Emily and Jessup were grumpily contemplating three dusty city weeks before school began. The most maladjusted of all the members of the family was Polly the kitten, who could not understand why she was surrounded by furniture instead of being out chasing grasshoppers and crabs beside the sea.

Emily surveyed her young brother's bedroom, which as always seemed to her unnaturally tidy for the room of a ten-year-old. It was so full of sleek electronic equipment — computer, keyboard, printer, neat piles of discs — that the bed looked out of place. She said, “Get up, and I'll make you scrambled eggs.”

“Yay!” said Jessup, jumping out of bed.

“And take a shower.”

“No way. I'm not dirty.”

Emily had opened her mouth to argue when the telephone rang downstairs. She sprinted down to her parents' bedroom, with the kitten bounding after her. It was a sore point with both Volnik children that they were not yet allowed their own phone extension on the third floor, which was their own private domain.

The voice at the other end of the line offered her an overseas cable for her father. Emily scrabbled for pencil and paper.

“A cable?” said Jessup, behind her, pulling on a T-shirt. “Nobody sends cables any more. Tell them to fax it to Dad at the theater.”

“Shush.” Emily was carefully taking dictation, her ear pressed to the telephone. She hung up. “Anyway the theater doesn't have a fa. . . .” Her voice trailed away, as she stared at what she had written.

Jessup peered at the paper. “ ‘You have inherited Castle Keep from Devon MacDevon,' ” he read. “ ‘Please call reversed charge six-two-one-five-seven-eight-zero-three-three-five, Scotland. Signed Mac something.' Mac what?”

“Maconochie. They spelled it out for me.”

“A castle?” Jessup said.

Emily let out a small mad giggle. “It's like a card in Monopoly. ‘You have inherited a castle. Advance to Park Avenue. If you pass Go collect two hundred dollars.' ”

“A
castle
?”

“I'm calling Dad.”

But their father's line was busy. Quite forgetting the scrambled eggs, they shut a protesting Polly in the kitchen and ran through the leafy summer streets to the theater.

Robert Volnik was the artistic director of the Chervil Playhouse, a small lively theater which presented six plays a year in a converted Toronto broom factory. Having begun his career as an actor, he still appeared in one or two of these productions — “to use the muscles,” he said — but spent most of his days reading scripts, attending meetings and trying to raise money. Though he was a passionate amateur gardener he seldom had time to work in his tiny city garden, and reluctantly bribed Emily and Jessup to do the weeding instead. He was a stocky, cheerful man with thinning brown hair and a grey beard; his wife Maggie was lean and graceful and slightly taller than he, especially when wearing high heels. With a friend as partner, she ran an antiques shop called Old Stuff. Maggie and Robert had raised Emily and Jessup in a rather absentminded way, treating them always as if they were small but grown-up colleagues on much the same level as the actors at Robert's theater or the customers at Maggie's shop.

Robert sat now in his small office, its walls papered with posters and photographs, and blinked at Emily over his half-glasses. “Castle Keep?” he said. “I thought a keep was part of a castle.”

“It is,” said Jessup promptly. “It's the tower, the strongest bit.”

Emily whacked impatiently at the cable lying on Robert's desk. “Dad! Call them up!”

Robert looked down again at the piece of paper. “Mom!” he said. “That's it. It must be my mother's side of the family. She was Scottish, she came over when she was three.”

“I thought she came from Edinburgh?” Jessup said.

“She did.” Robert sighed wistfully. “I've always wanted to go there. Think of all the plays I might find at the Edinburgh Festival!”

Emily tugged distractedly at a strand of her long fair hair. Robert and Jessup were like squirrels; they would chew their way methodically through the shell of any problem, leaving a neat pile of little fragments, before arriving at the alluring kernel inside. It was the women in the Volnik family who were more direct. Maggie and Emily dealt with most matters as a sea gull deals with a clam: Choose a rock, fly up high, drop the clam on the rock, and thwack! It's open!

She picked up her father's telephone and dialed for the operator. “Hello? Can you tell me how to call Scotland, please? And what does reversed charge mean?”

“Collect,” said the operator crisply. “Give me the number, eh?”

Robert said, “But Mom was an only child. Didn't even have any cousins that I ever heard of.”

“Maybe it's Edinburgh Castle!” Jessup said, his eyes gleaming.

In Emily's ear a very Scottish voice said, very faintly, as if it were on the moon, “Mr. Maconochie's office. Halloo?”

Emily handed the telephone wordlessly to her father.

A large, elderly golden retriever ambled into the office and butted at her legs. She reached out and patted him. “Hi, Fred.”

Fred made the strange grunting, whining noise that was his usual greeting.

“Out!” said Robert, his brow furrowed as he tried to listen to Scotland.

They took the retriever out into the lobby. Fred was the theater dog. He belonged to Louise Spring, the general manager, a busy, bouncy lady with cropped white hair. Since Louise seemed to work sixteen hours a day at the Chervil Playhouse, Fred was always there too, wandering in and out of offices, dressing rooms and rehearsals. Once he had wandered onstage, during a school matinee of
Julius Caesar
, just as the conspirators were about to murder Caesar. He had barked loudly, tugging at Brutus's toga as he raised his dagger for the stabbing, and Caesar, dying, found himself uttering the line, “Et tu, Brute?” into Fred's warm anxious brown eyes. The audience of children had cheered, delighted, but Fred was thereafter tied up in Mrs. Spring's office during performances. As a consolation he was added to the list of technical staff in the theater programs. “Security Guard,” it read, “Fred Spring.”

Fred nuzzled Emily's hand, and then paused, sniffing at it with distaste.

“What's the matter?” she said to him, hurt.

“It's Polly,” Jessup said. “He's never smelled cat on you before. Thinks you've gone over to the enemy.”

Fred gave Emily a look of disgust and ambled away to someone else's office. Jessup and Emily peered cautiously around their father's door.

Robert was sitting staring into space.

“Are you all right?” said Emily.

Their father turned his head toward them, but he still seemed to be somewhere else. “It's a castle in the Western Highlands of Scotland. On a little island, part of a place called Appin.”

“Robert Louis Stevenson!” said Jessup in delight.

“What?”

“His book,
Kidnapped
. Mrs. Stewart's reading it in class. Appin is where David Balfour and Alan Breck hide from the rrrrrredcoats in the heatherrrrrr.” He rolled the
R
s theatrically, trying to make his father smile.

But Robert wasn't smiling. He looked harassed.

“Mr. Maconochie is a lawyer,” he said. “He was Devon MacDevon's lawyer. That's the old codger who's popped off in the castle. Mr. M. says that MacDevon was my grandmother's brother and that I'm his only heir. And he wants me to go over there.”

“We're rich!” said Emily in awe.

“How can I go to Scotland?” said her father plaintively. “We've only just come back from the cabin. I've got meetings — and the grant proposals to write — and no, we're not rich at all, Mr. Maconochie says the castle's falling down. Nobody in their right mind will want to buy it.”

“Buy it?” said Jessup, horrified. “You've inherited our ancestral home! You surely don't want to sell it already!”

Their father looked even more worried. “Well, that's the trouble,” he said unhappily. “No, I don't.”

“T
HEN YOU MUSTN'T,
” Maggie said firmly. “We'll manage. Rent out the deer-hunting rights, or something.”

“There's no land,” Robert said. “Just the castle.”

“Falling down,” added Emily.

They were all sitting in the late sunshine on the back steps of Maggie's shop, eating take-out Chinese food with chopsticks out of leaky cardboard cartons. Maggie's partner, a chubby, grey-haired lady known to the children as Aunt Jen, sat with them, spooning up yogurt. Aunt Jen was always on a diet, which never seemed to have any effect. She and Maggie were working late, taking inventory (or as Jen described it, “counting the stuff”), so Robert, Emily, and Jessup had brought them dinner and the news.

“This guy was your great-uncle?” Aunt Jen said, licking her spoon hungrily. “He must have been ancient.”

“And lonely,” Robert said. “He lived there all on his own, Mr. Maconochie said. No wife, no children, no anyone. One sister, but she ran away to Edinburgh when she was young and married someone from the wrong clan, so that was the last he heard of her. He never even mentioned her, except in his will. Mr. Maconochie had to track her down — and he found she emigrated to Canada in 1923, with her husband and three-year-old daughter.”

“Grannie!” cried Emily, entranced. She could faintly remember her grandmother, as a fragrant, soft-cheeked presence who had died when she was five.

“The three-year-old, yes. My mom. Mary Campbell, who married Peter Volnik from Estonia.”

“Almost as romantic as her Canadian son marrying an English girl from Manchester,” said Maggie in her lingering English accent, smiling at her husband. Robert leaned sideways behind Jessup, and kissed her on the ear.

“You're dripping shrimp foo young down my neck,” Jessup said coldly.

“And in the third generation, romance dies,” Robert said, sitting back. “Pass the fried rice, Jessup.”

Aunt Jen dug her spoon into the fried rice as it went by. She said, “Whether or not you keep this ancestral pile, you know, you do have to go over there.”

Robert groaned. “I can't afford to!”

“Fares are getting lower, this time of year.”

“It's the time I can't afford. Money's no problem, for once — Mr. Mac said the estate could pay.”

“That means you, if it's your estate.”

“Oh well,” Robert said.

Aunt Jen stole another spoonful of rice. “Maggie should go with you. The castle might be full of antiques. I'd mind the store.”

“What about us?” said Jessup plaintively.

Inside the shop, a loud buzzer sounded, indicating that someone had come through the front door. Emily and Jessup shot to their feet, looking hopeful.

“Oh Lord,” said Aunt Jen. “Customer. I forgot to close up.”

Maggie looked at her children, and grinned. “The double act, eh? Okay — but keep it short.”

They scurried indoors. Emily glanced at her hair in the mirror, and peered down to make sure Jessup's T-shirt was tucked into his jeans. Then she opened the pass door and the two of them went side by side into the shop. Being crammed with furniture, it looked like a very crowded living room, with a few eccentric patches like the row of four grandfather clocks against one wall, or the cluster of six chandeliers in a corner of the ceiling.

A tall thin man with a lot of dark hair was bent over a table, reading its price tag. Emily took Jessup's hand. It was a signal; at once they began speaking in unison.

“Good evening.”

The tall man straightened abruptly. “Good evening,” he said. He wore a charcoal-grey business suit, very well cut, and a tie.

“Welcome to Old Stuff,” said Emily and Jessup together.

“A Greek chorus,” said the tall man coolly. “How very suitable for an antiques shop.”