He looked up at her and smiled. ‘How did you know what I was thinking?’
‘I always know.’
‘I miss my family. It has been so long since I saw them.’
‘I know.’ She stroked his face. ‘But we’ve done something neither of your brothers have achieved.’
‘We have?’
‘We have given your mama three lovely grandchildren, Tom.’
‘I wish she could see them now.’
‘She will. When you have your first position at the bar we shall have the money to go to Edinburgh. Is the other letter from David?’ Her sharp eyes had missed nothing.
He picked it up, slid his finger under the seal and unfolded the sheet of paper. It was sent from Kirkhill. ‘I am sorry to have to tell you that our old sennachie, Duncan, died this last week. He had been ailing for some months and kept to his chamber. He was very insistent that I tell you and that you be reminded of his final instructions to you. It must be a long time since you saw him, Tom, but he always had your well-being particularly at heart.’
Thomas looked up. His eyes were full of tears.
‘What is it? What does he say?’
‘Duncan, our sennachie, is dead.’
‘But you saw him only a few days ago. You told me.’ She put her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, Tom. Was he a ghost?’
He nodded slowly. ‘I should have realised. I should have listened.’
She stepped away from him, studying his face. ‘Tom, I know you have this ability to see things beyond this world but it always scares me.’
He reached out to her, winding his arms around her waist, clinging to her, burying his face in her skirt. ‘It scares me too.’ He glanced up at her through his tears. ‘It’s a gift, Fanny, something I’ve been chosen for, to use for the good the knowledge brings, but sometimes I don’t understand the messages I’m being given. Duncan could have, would have, taught me more if I’d listened to him, but I was always too far away, always in too much of a rush to learn from him.’
She hugged him more tightly. ‘That is all part of your talent, my darling.’ She put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him away so she could study his face. ‘It would be easier with your family around you, I know that. Your mother is such an inspiration to us all, but especially to you. We could move to Edinburgh, Tom. To be near them all.’
‘No need. I have Anne and Isabella to hold me steady here.’ He gave her an impish look. ‘I mean to rise in the law, Fanny. I love my brothers dearly but in Scotland I would be eclipsed by them as I always have been. The earl, who will always be the earl, and the lawyer so many years ahead of me and already a rising star of the Edinburgh bar. No,’ his grin widened into a smile. ‘We will leave Scots law to Harry. I am going to make English law my future. There are enough Erskines in Scotland already. London is where this one is going to make his mark.’
45
‘You still haven’t told me why you’re here.’ Ruth greeted Harriet at the door in astonishment, glancing beyond her to the borrowed car and then standing back as Harriet pushed in past her.
‘Is Finlay here?’ Harriet headed for the kitchen.
‘No, he’s gone into town.’
‘Good, because we need to talk.’ Harriet stopped in the middle of the room, her back to Ruth. Her fists were clenched as she turned to face her. ‘I’ve done something terrible.’
‘Go on.’ Ruth eyed Harriet’s face with a sinking heart.
‘I went to see Malcolm Douglas. I’m sorry. I was angry. I wasn’t thinking straight.’
She waited for Ruth to say something. The silence stretched out between them as Ruth closed her eyes and sighed. ‘Go on,’ she repeated. ‘You’d better tell me what happened.’
‘I wanted to protect you.’
‘From what?’
‘I don’t know. I just felt he was bad news.’
She stepped back as Ruth walked past her and went to sit at the worktop. ‘I think you needed a far better reason than that to go and see him.’
‘I know.’ It was a whisper.
‘So, what was it?’
‘It just didn’t sound right, OK?’ Harriet was almost shouting. ‘So much secrecy, so much pseudo modesty. Not charging. Keep it quiet and don’t tell anyone. Having secret sessions with you all alone in the woods. It sounded dangerous. Creepy. And I’ll bet he’s spying on your work as well. You know he’s writing about William Pitt?’
‘Yes, he told me.’
‘I saw some stuff on his desk. You know Erskine and Pitt hated each other. They were on opposite sides politically. Has he asked to read any of your notes?’
Ruth didn’t reply.
‘He has, hasn’t he.’
There was another silence, then, ‘I thought I could trust you, Hattie.’
‘You can.’
‘So, what happened?’
‘This was our thing and he’s taking over. He’s deliberately sidelining me.’
‘Why on earth should you feel that?’ Ruth rubbed her forehead. ‘You know as well as I do that we couldn’t cope.’
‘No. We needed an expert on psychic stuff, not a bestselling historian.’ The words were so loaded with venom they sounded like an insult.
‘I’m not writing a history book. Even if he does write about Thomas, it wouldn’t matter.’ Ruth slid off her stool. ‘Hattie, you’re sounding unhinged.’
‘D’you fancy him?’ Harriet hadn’t moved. ‘You do, don’t you.’
‘No! For God’s sake, Hattie!’
‘He’s a good-looking man. I wouldn’t blame you. Is he married?’
‘I have no idea if he’s married. It never occurred to me to ask. I do not fancy him, as you put it.’ Ruth was furious. ‘I never had you down as having a jealous streak.’
‘And I’m not. Usually.’ Harriet took a deep breath. ‘I haven’t told you the worst yet.’
Harriet saw Ruth’s shoulders tense as though warding off a blow. ‘Tell me.’
‘He said he can’t trust you any more because you spoke to me. He doesn’t want you to contact him again.’
‘Ruth?’ Fin had returned at lunchtime. He walked into the kitchen and threw his keys down on the worktop. Reaching into the cupboard he produced two tumblers and set them down next to the keys then he called again. ‘Ruthie! Where are you? I have good news.’
When she eventually came downstairs he could see she had been crying. Without a word he poured her a whisky and put it into her hands, folding her fingers round the glass. ‘Take a slug of that then tell me.’
When she had finished he gave a small sigh. ‘What is it with women?’ he said. ‘This always happens. They tell each other everything, then they wish they hadn’t. It invariably ends badly.’
She gave a watery smile. ‘So speaks the expert on female psychology.’
‘Why d’you think I never married?’ He put his hand over his mouth. In mock remorse. ‘Don’t answer that. So, what do we do? Have you rung Malcolm?’
She shook her head.
‘Maybe a dignified silence is best for now.’ He sipped his drink thoughtfully.
‘You haven’t told me your good news,’ she said at last.
‘Max has got me a wonderful tie-in. A book to go with the TV series.’ He kissed his fingertips. ‘Fantastic deal.’
‘That’s great.’
‘It is. Let’s drink to it.’ He raised his glass. ‘Where has Harriet gone?’ he asked after a moment.
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Would it help if I had a word with Max? He can always explain to Malcolm—’
‘No!’
‘OK.’ He glanced at her under his eyebrows. ‘Lunch? Food always helps in a crisis, in my opinion.’
‘Which explains your less than sylphlike figure.’
‘Ouch. There’s no need to be nasty just because Harriet has dissed you.’
‘Sorry.’ She took a gulp from her glass and spluttered. ‘This is strong!’
‘That’s for the best.’ He heade
d for the pantry. ‘Now, let’s see what food we can rustle up to cheer madam out of the vapours.’ He glanced towards the window. ‘You haven’t seen any more of Timothy and his sister, I take it?’
‘No.’
‘Then let’s be thankful for small mercies.’
She watched listlessly, every now and then glancing at her phone, which stayed resolutely silent, as he busied himself at the counter, collecting a chopping board, some mushrooms from a pottery bowl on the windowsill, a bottle of olive oil and a jar of Arborio rice, slicing onions with small assured strokes of his knife, sweeping them into his pan on the stove, filling the kitchen with luscious smells.
‘I am so lucky. There must be a million of your adoring fans who would give their right arm to eat the food you prepare,’ she said.
‘Indeed, you are lucky. So you’re going to eat it.’ He opened the fridge and brought out several packages. ‘I fear it’s Max’s proximity to wonderful shops that dooms my potential for being a sylph,’ he muttered, almost to himself.
She smiled. ‘What happened to self-control?’
‘Not in my job description.’
‘What am I going to do, Fin?’ She held her hand over her glass as he picked up the bottle for a refill.
‘I suggest you do nothing. You have plenty to occupy you. You’re researching the life of Thomas Erskine, for your own interest, and it’s no one else’s business but your own. Whether you see Harriet again is up to you.’ He collected a bottle of wine from the counter with two glasses. ‘Don’t look at me like that. You have had only the smallest dram and now a wee glass of wine will do you no harm at all. I know Harriet’s your oldest friend and all that, but friends, real friends, don’t act like this. What was she thinking of?’
‘She thought she was saving me. Apparently.’
‘From what?’
‘She said Mal was a charlatan. And that he was out to spy on my work.’
‘That makes no sense. We went to him; he didn’t know what we wanted; he certainly didn’t know what your interest was.’
‘He did ask to read Thomas’s letters last time I saw him.’
‘To help find out who the ghoul is?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘There you are then.’
‘But supposing Harriet’s right? Supposing there’s historical stuff here that Mal doesn’t know about. He would be interested, wouldn’t he?’
‘Of course.’ He poured the wine and sat down again. ‘Forget them both for now. One or other of them will come back to you eventually and then you will have to respond. My guess is that that response will be instinctive. You’ll say what you really feel. Until that happens, don’t give it a thought.’ He edged a glass over towards her and reached for his own. ‘So, who was the Whig and who was the Tory?’
She smiled. ‘Thomas was a Whig.’
‘Ah, pity. I always had rather a soft spot for eighteenth-century Tories. They supported Bonnie Prince Charlie. Much more romantic.’
‘Thomas’s family seem to have had Jacobite leanings. But like so many Scots families, they were pragmatic. They kept their views to themselves.’
‘So they didn’t spoil their job opportunities.’
She gave a wry smile. ‘Cynical but sensible.’
‘My history is a bit shaky. Was Pitt a Tory then?’
‘I think so. But not a Jacobite.’ She sat staring into space for a while as he stirred the pan, then almost visibly shook herself out of her reverie. ‘So, what are you, Fin? Twenty-first-century Tory or are you a Whig as well?’
‘I’m not sure there is such a thing as a Whig these days. But it’s immaterial. I don’t do nowadays politics. Far too fraught.’
‘That’s what I think too.’ She picked up the wine glass and took a sip.
‘It won’t be Mal,’ she said after a long pause.
Fin frowned. ‘What won’t?’
‘Who comes back to me. I made a promise and I broke it. He only made one stipulation about helping me. Just one. And I blew it.’
Fin spooned steaming risotto onto her plate. ‘Didn’t you tell me that he has already taught you what to do if the bad guy comes back?’
‘He told me what to do, but not how to do it. I need to strengthen my spiritual core.’
‘Like Pilates?’
She smiled again. ‘Something like that.’
‘So, perhaps you don’t need him any more anyway.’
‘Perhaps not,’ she sighed.
Thomas
In January 1776 I became what was known as a Fellow Commoner of Trinity College, Cambridge. As, at the same time, I was studying at Lincoln’s Inn and was a pupil successively of two top counsel, I exercised my right, as the son of an earl, not to attend lectures or take an examination to obtain my degree. But I had to pay for everything, even the bedmaker who looked after my rooms, and those rooms were a haven of peace after the chaos of my home life, so when I could I took time to travel to Cambridge and go to a few lectures, where I studied English composition, and I am sorry to say I felt not a moment’s guilt in leaving Fanny and Abi to take care of my family while I enjoyed those short interludes of the kind of academic rigour I could only dream of when I was a boy.
I was leading an exhausting double life. I found it hard to study at home, reading late into the night and growing ever more cross and irritated with the children and their noise. Abi would take them out all day, attempting to tire them out, but at night when I was sitting with my candle and a tankard of porter, trying to read, one or other of them would begin to cry. Though I would clamp my hands over my ears to block out the sound, I could hear Fanny’s urgent whispers as she endeavoured to soothe them, and the patter of Abi’s feet as she ran up and down the stairs on her pittance of a wage, which sometimes was nothing at all. Even though my door remained closed I lost the thread of my reading and would have to go back to the beginning of the page yet again as the ink scattered droplets across the page or dried on the nib of my pen.
One day when I came home with my usual package of cheap meats for our supper, the house was empty and I found a note from Fanny on the table. ‘I have found the perfect solution. The children and I are staying with my cousins near the Fleet Ditch. We are welcome there and we will return home when you go up to Trinity again. Call in on your way to Lincoln’s Inn and we will kiss you good morning. Enjoy the peace, my darling.’
I smiled with relief and fervently kissed the note. My perfect wife who understood all and everything about me had solved our problems at one brave stroke. Her cousins, the Moores, lived in a chaotic crowded house at the foot of Ludgate Hill. They were successful jewellers and the most charming and kindly people who used to refer to me as ‘our Tommy’. I had no idea how they would accommodate Fanny and Abi and the children, but I tried not to think about it beyond giving thanks to the Almighty and blessing them all as I spread out my books and in a fit of extravagance lit a second candle as I ate her and Abi’s portion of cold cow’s heel and tripe with my own.
I would not have been so joyful had I realised that Fanny was again with child and that living where she now did she was going to be walking daily into the stamping grounds of Andrew Farquhar. And neither of us remembered the fetish, tucked in a drawer in Kentish Town, where it could protect neither my family nor me.
46
Malcolm was lying staring up at the ceiling. When he was a child he had chosen a fourth-floor room in the tower as his bedroom and he used it still, in spite of its vaulted stones and narrow staircase. It had a larger window than the bedrooms on the floor below, inserted by a previous Douglas before some petty bureaucrat had invented the concept of grading buildings, forbidding alterations to one’s own house, and it gave a view across the treed valley with its broad river and up to the wild hills beyond. The version of the window story he preferred was that an ancient enemy had created the casement by lobbing a cannonball through the wall. Job done. Building alteration. Perfect. He levered himself out of bed and went to look out, pushing t
he casement open and leaning with his elbows on the broad sill. One of the great things about living in a castle: thick walls meant wonderful windowsills.
The night was still and cold. Somewhere in the distance an owl hooted as it hunted along the river. He was thinking about Ruth. The overriding thought in his head when he had awoken so suddenly was that she was in danger and that he hadn’t helped her. He had spent his time telling her what was wrong with her, poor woman, but he hadn’t given her the tools to deal with her problem and he hadn’t concentrated on the scariest part of her predicament, the lascivious ghost.
Harriet would have gone straight over to see her and told her what a narrow escape she had had and he had been unfair, he knew that. He shouldn’t have expected or even asked Ruth to keep the fact of his involvement secret. He sighed. He had remembered Harriet, of course he did. He gave a wry smile. The woman sold a hell of a lot more books than he did, and they were popular. Readable, if her reviews had been anything to go by.
The owl hooted again, closer this time.
The dogs were waiting as, having pulled on sweater and jacket, he let them out into the icy dawn and headed for the woods.
Lighting the small wood burner in the chapel, he sat down and waited for his thoughts to settle as the first light began to creep in through the small windows.
It was mid morning when he reached the Old Mill House. He rang the doorbell and waited, wondering if he should have phoned. Finlay opened the door.
‘I need to see Ruth.’
‘Does she need to see you?’ Fin folded his arms.