To the Hilt Page 11

  “Do you think so?” Himself asked politely, good manners and jocularity in his voice. “I would argue with you, of course, and I would defend my right of ownership ...” He paused provocatively.

  “Yes?” she prompted.

  He smiled sweetly. “To the hilt.”

  chapter 6

  “A1,” Himself asked thoughtfully, as we walked back from seeing Zoë Lang out to her taxi, “how far would you actually go in defending the Honor of the Kinlochs?”

  “Up to and including the hilt?”

  “I’m not joking, Al.”

  I glanced at his heavy troubled face.

  “The answer,” I said, “is that I don’t know.”

  After a pause he asked, “Would you have given up the Hilt to the four men who attacked you if they’d told you what they wanted and had used more than their fists?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But how much urge did you have anyway to tell them where to look?”

  “None,” I said. “I didn’t like them.”

  “Al, be serious.”

  “They made me angry. They made me feel futile. I would have denied them anything I could.”

  “I don’t ask for you to suffer to keep that thing safe. If they attack you again, don’t let them hurt you. Tell them what they want to know.”

  I said with humor, “You wouldn’t have said that two hundred years ago.”

  “Times change.”

  We went peacefully into his house and into his dining room, where the black cube containing the King Alfred Gold Cup still lay on the table. We checked briefly to make sure that the gold prize was still inside, and I ran a finger over the faint indentations of Bede’s Death Song: Consider the evil one does on earth, because a reckoning awaits.

  Was it good or evil, in changing times, to pay for physical relief on earth with one’s eternal honor?

  Where did common sense begin?

  At what point did one duck the scream?

  I had no need to ask such questions aloud. Himself—my august uncle, my hereditary clan chief—was the product of the same ancient ethos and conditioning that I had received from his brother, and I had willy-nilly inherited the mainstream Kinloch mind, stubbornness and all.

  Himself and I reenclosed the black cube in its drawstring bag and replaced it in the cardboard box with the copies of Dickens on top. I restuck it all as best I could with the wide brown fastening tape, though the result couldn’t be called secure, and we put the box back in the sideboard for the want of anywhere better.

  “We can’t leave it there forever,” my uncle said.

  “No.”

  “Do you trust Dr. Lang?”

  I was surprised by the question, but said, “I would trust her to be true to her beliefs.”

  “Think of somewhere better for the Cup, Al.”

  “I’ll try.”

  At his own request I hadn’t told him to the inch where to find the Hilt, though he knew it was somewhere at the bothy. After much consideration we had, as a precaution against us both inconveniently dying with our secret untold, like Henry VIII’s evaders, entrusted Jed with the basic information.

  “If you have to,” Himself had said to him, “dig around and pull the bothy apart stone by stone. Otherwise, forget what we’ve told you.”

  Jed couldn’t of course forget it, though he had never alluded to it since except to say once that he felt overwhelmed by our faith in his loyalty. If Jed had been going to betray us to the castle’s administrators he could have done it at any time in the past two years, but instead had taken the game of hide-and-seek into his own private world in enjoyment, and it was certainly the basis of the solid friendship between the two of us.

  Jed came back to the castle late in the afternoon, still with my gear in the trunk of his car, wanting to know if he could drive me home to the bothy.

  “No,” Himself said decisively. “Al will stay here tonight. Sit down, Jed. Get yourself a drink.”

  We were by then in the room my uncle considered his own private domain, a severe predominantly brown room with walls bearing stuffed fish in glass cases and deers’ antlers from long-past battles on the hills. There were also three of my paintings of his racehorses and one painting of his favorite gundog, much loved but now dead.

  Jed fixed a glass of whisky and water and sat down on one of the elderly hard-stuffed chairs.

  Himself as usual made the decisions. “I see Al seldom enough. He will stay here tonight and tomorrow night to please me, and on Monday morning you can take him to the bothy and the police station, and anywhere else you care to. I’ll be fishing the Spey next week. I have guests Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday and Friday I’ll be out on the moor with the guns ...” He outlined his plans. “James returns from sailing tomorrow. He’ll be staying on here. His wife will take the children back to school ... All clear, Jed?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jed and he discussed estate affairs for a while and I listened with half an ear and tried to imagine a good temporary home for Bede’s Death Song engraved in gold.

  I had asked Zoe Lang to read the poem aloud in Anglo-Saxon, and with enjoyment she had done so, her love of the old language giving the words shape and meaning and new life. I couldn’t understand a syllable, but I could hear the throb and the pulse and the strong alliteration, and when I commented on it she’d told me a shade patronizingly that all Anglo-Saxon poetry had been written to be spoken, not read. The excitement, even the intoxication, she said, was engendered by the rhythmic beat as much as by the vivid imagery of the words. The poems describing battle could set sword arms twitching. “The Dream of the Rood” would make a Christian of an atheist.

  Himself and I had listened respectfully, and I thought how much the outward appearance of age could color one’s expectation of a person’s character. I wanted to paint her as young, vibrant, fanatical, with the ghost of the way she looked now superimposed in thin light gray lines, like age’s cobwebs.

  I strongly sensed a singular individual powerful entity that might have intensified with time, not faded. We were dealing with that inner woman, and should not forget it.

  If I underpainted thickly in Payne’s gray mixed with titanium white, I thought, and then brought the essential person to glowing life with strong bone structure in a faithful portrait, no color tricks or linear gimmicks, and then scratched down into the gray for the unthinkable future ... then with a steady hand and a strong vision I might produce a statement of terrible truth ... or I might finish with a disaster fit only for the bin. To have the technique and the courage wasn’t always enough. Apart from vision as well, one needed luck.

  Hide King Alfred’s Gold Cup ... my mind wandered back to the task in hand.

  Hiding the Cup, for all its worth in gold, wasn’t in the same sphere as hiding the Hilt. Ivan might prize the Cup for reasons of his own, but as a symbol it wasn’t entangled with history and an earl’s beheading and generations of clan honor. The King Alfred Gold Cup had been fashioned a thousand years after the great king’s days of glory: a tribute to him, undoubtedly, but never his own property.

  The King Alfred Cup might be worth killing for ... but not suffering for, or dying.

  And yet ... I asked myself again if I would have given the demon-walkers that cup if I’d known what they were looking for, if I’d had it to give, and I thought quite likely not. Anger ... pride ... cussedness.

  Mad, weird, ridiculous Alexander.

  The problem with hiding anything in the castle was that Himself was rarely in residence, while the administrators were not only in and out all the time but were also actively hunting treasure. In the family’s private wing lived a full-time overall caretaker with his housekeeper wife, a conscientious worker who eviscerated private cupboards in the name of spring cleaning. The sideboard in the dining room wouldn’t shelter even a peanut for long. The discovery on the premises of a golden wonder, even if not the Hilt, would have leaked into informed circles like burst pipes. If
hiding the Cup involved hiding also any awareness of its existence, as I supposed it did, then the castle was out.

  The castle grounds were out also, thanks to an efficient gardener.

  So where?

  Any thoughts anyone might have had about a peaceful evening were at that point blasted apart by the earthquake arrival of my friendly cousin James—who had listened to a gale-and-rain weather forecast and decided to run for port a day early—along with his boisterous family, who habitually lived fortissimo at Indy-car speed.

  When the invasion stampeded upstairs to arrange bedrooms I telephoned my mother and asked after Ivan. Things were no worse. There had been no further agitated crises in the brewery’s affairs: insolvency had gone into hiatus for the weekend.

  “And Patsy?” I asked.

  “Not a sound from her since yesterday morning.”

  “My uncle Robert sends his regards.”

  “And ours to him,” my mother said.

  James, red-haired and freckled, wandering by with gin and tonic in fist, asked amiably how the “old boy” was doing.

  “Depressed,” I said.

  “Father says someone decamped with the brewery’s nest egg.”

  “Nest egg, chickens, battery hens, the lot.”

  “What a lark, eh? How long are you staying?”

  “Till Monday.”

  “Great. Father’s always saying we don’t see enough of you. How are the daubs?”

  “In abeyance,” I said, and gave him a lightweight account of the trouble at the bothy.

  “Good Lord!” He stared. “I didn’t think you had much there worth stealing.”

  “Jeep and golf clubs, and bits and pieces.”

  “What rotten luck.”

  His sympathy was genuine enough. James would always summon nurses to patch up one’s wounds.

  “Did they take your pipes?” he asked, concerned.

  “Luckily they’re in Inverness. The bag had sprung a leak.”

  “Are you entering the contests this year?”

  “I’m not good enough.”

  “You don’t practice enough, that’s all.”

  “The winners are nearly always army pipe majors. You know that. Why do you bother to say it?”

  “I just like to encourage people,” he said, beaming; and I thought that that in truth was his great gift, to make people feel better about their lives.

  The piping contests, held every fall, took place from the far north all the way south to London. I had once or twice tried my hand in a piobaireachd competition, but it had been like a novice downhill skier taking on Klammer or Killy, an interesting experience memorable only for not having made an absolute fool of oneself.

  Besides, I had political problems with some of the pibrochs, the ancient laments for the deaths and defeats of history. I couldn‘t—wouldn’t—play “My King has landed at Moidart,” because the king that had landed was Prince Charles Edward, rightful king of England by descent, but disqualified (since Henry VIII’s quarrel with the pope) because of being Roman Catholic. Prince Charles Edward landed at Moidart in the Western Isles to begin his fateful march towards London, a thrust for the Crown, however understandable, that had led to the ruination of Scotland. In the wake of Prince Charles Edward’s defeat at Culloden the English, to remove the threat of a third upheaval (the 1715 and 1745 rebellions having been barely unsuccessful), had notoriously chased the Scots from their lands and had tried to wipe out nationhood by outlawing the speaking of Gaelic, the wearing of the tartan and the playing of the pipes. Scotland had never recovered. Sure, the tartan, the pipes and the slightly sentimental allegiances had crept back, but they were tourist attractions contrasting affectedly with the drab slab functional housing round the commercially regenerated modem city of Glasgow.

  The direct descendant of Mary, Queen of Scots, had brought ruin, still unresolved, to most of Scotland—though even at Culloden, sixty percent of those fighting against the Bonnie Prince had been Scots themselves, not English—and although to please my uncle I guarded the lethal gift to my ancestor, I couldn’t feel anything but fury for the inept, selfish, vain and ultimately fainthearted prince. I played laments for those he’d damaged. I played laments for the damage he’d done. I never felt love for the man.

  Saturday evening passed in the chaos indigenous to James’s family, and in the morning when I went downstairs in search of coffee I found Himself in the dining room looking around him as if in bewilderment at an empty cardboard box, old faded leather-bound copies of Dickens, an empty black cube with white satin lining and a gray drawstring duster bag all lying about haphazardly on the floor.

  The sideboard door stood open. The King Alfred Gold Cup had gone.

  There were squeals from the kitchen next door. Children’s voices. High.

  Dazedly my uncle opened the connecting door and I followed him into the large unmodernized kitchen, an expanse of black and white tiling still called, on old castle plans, the “cold preparation room.” Shades of old vegetables, I thought. Food nowadays mostly arrived at the castle in caterers’ vans, wrapped in film and ready to heat and eat.

  James was leaning against the sink, coffee mug in hand, indulgent smile in place.

  His three unruly children—two boys and a girl—scrambled around on the floor, all of them wearing large saucepans on their heads with the handles pointing backwards. Spacewatch good guys, we were told.

  The King Alfred Cup also stood on the floor, upside down. Himself bent from the waist and picked it up, finding it heavier than he expected.

  “Hey,” objected his elder grandson, standing up to face him, “that’s the galactic core of M.100 with all its Cepheid variables in those red stones. We have to keep it safe from the black-hole suction mob.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” his grandfather said dryly.

  The boy—Andrew—was eleven years old and already rebellious, hard-eyed and tough. If time took its normal course he would one day succeed James as earl. James might be open to soft persuasion but I wanted to know for sure about his son.

  I said, “Andrew, if you had a favorite toy, something you really valued, and someone tried very hard to take it away from you ... suppose he even threatened to hurt you if you didn’t give it to him ... what would you do?”

  He said promptly, as if he thought the question feeble, “Bash his face in.”

  My uncle smiled. James said with mild protest, “Andy, you would talk it over and make a deal.”

  His son repeated stalwartly, “I’d bash his face in. Can we have the Cepheid monitor back?”

  “No,” his grandfather said. “You shouldn’t have taken it out of its box.”

  “We were looking for something worth fighting for,” Andrew said.

  James defended them. “They haven’t done it any harm. What is it, anyway? It can’t be real gold.”

  Himself thrust the Cup into my arms, where its weight again surprised. “Put it away safely,” he said.

  “OK.”

  “It’s a racing challenge trophy,” my uncle explained unexcitedly to his son. “I can’t keep it for more than a year and I need to give it back without dents in.”

  The explanation satisfied James entirely and he told his children to look for a substitute galactic goody.

  On an impulse I asked him if he would like to spend some of the day playing golf. We both belonged to the local club, where, with varying success, I quite often walked after the elusive white ball, but there were seldom days when we could go out together.

  He looked pleased, but said, “I thought you said your clubs were stolen.”

  “I might buy some new ones.”

  “Great, then.”

  He phoned the club, who found a slot for us in the afternoon, and we drove over in good time for the pro shop to kit me out with better clubs than the ones I’d lost: and for good measure I acquired snazzy black-and-white shoes with spikes on, and gloves and balls and umbrellas: also a lightweight blue waterproof bag to carry things in
and a trolley like James’s to pull everything along on wheels. Thus reequipped, I went out with my cousin into the wind and rain, which had arrived as forecast, and got happily soaked to the skin despite the umbrellas.

  “Will you paint this?” James asked, squelching on wet grass.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “You’re not really as weird as we all think, are you?”

  I putted a ball to the rim of a hole, where it obstinately stopped.

  “I paint frustration,” I said, and gave the ball a kick.

  James laughed, and in good spirits we finished the eighteen holes and went back to the castle for the nineteenth.

  My hands-on relationship with golf was essential to my work, I’d found. It wasn’t that I had much skill, but in a way the failures were more revelatory than success: and I particularly liked to play with James, who laughed and lost or won with equal lack of seriousness.

  The only really warm room in the whole castle complex (apart from the caretaker’s quarters) was the home of the vast hot water tank, where ranks of airers dried out the persistent Scottish rains. James and I accordingly showered, changed and left all our wet things steaming, including my sopping new shoes and golf bag, and then ambled back to the dining room for tinctures.

  James’s children were in there. The King Alfred Cup, though still in its white satin nest, lay in full glorious view on the polished table under a chandelier’s light.

  “You didn’t say we couldn’t look at it,” Andy objected to his father’s mild rebuke. “We couldn’t find anything else worth fighting a space war for.”

  I said to James, “What about the Hilt?”

  “Oh yes.” He thought it over. “But we’d only see the replica, and anyway, I can’t let the children through into the castle proper. I promised Himself I wouldn’t.”

  “Let’s ask him,” I said: so we found him in his own room and asked, with the result that all of us, Himself, James, James’s wife and children and I, walked the length of the Great Hall and stood round the grilled glass cage, staring down at its floodlit treasure.