Page 107 of The Affairs of Ashmore Castle

Speen merely laughed and went on his way. Rose had been noticing William’s air of abstraction for a while now, but this afternoon she had taken in the flowers for the dining-room table to find he had laid it for dinner with cutlery in the wrong places and half the things missing. And when she had spoken sharply to him about it, he had merely looked at her as if at someone waving from a distant field. She had had to physically drag him to a place-setting and point out with jabs of the finger what was amiss, and even then he had only said vaguely, ‘Oh, yes,’ and begun slowly to shuffle things into the right places. No shame or embarrassment. In previous times he would have blushed to the tips of his ears to be caught out and berated.

‘But he doesn’t look ill,’ Rose mused, watching Speen’s back recede down Piccadilly.

‘Who don’t?’ demanded Cyril, scuttling out of the silver room with refilled salt and pepper pots.

‘William,’ Rose said. ‘He’s not been himself lately.’

Cyril sniggered. ‘He’s not sick,’ he said derisively. ‘Gurt lummox is in lu-u-urve!’

‘Don’t speak about your superiors like that,’ Rose corrected him automatically, but Cyril, who modelled himself on James Hook, and more recently on Speen, was unreachable. They’ve ruined that boy, she thought, moving on towards the nap closet. She remembered when he had first come, a scrawny little fellow with ears at right angles and a scared deference for everyone older and taller than him – which was everyone below stairs. If he wasn’t careful he’d be making himself unemployable before too long.

William, rearranging the knives and forks with one degree less randomness since Rose’s intervention, moved in a dream. Tabby had introduced him to a new world of sensation which was so bewitching he could think of nothing else. For much of the time, he could hardly think at all. He had fallen in love many times, generally with every new maid as she arrived in the household, but it had always been a cerebral adoration, carried out at a distance, with the occasional foray into stumbled words of hope or a posy of flowers shyly thrust into a little hand in passing. He had felt a great yearning inside him, but for what he couldn’t have told you. He had been very strictly brought up by his widowed mother, and she had discouraged him from making friends with other boys, with the result that he had not absorbed the basic facts and misconceptions that were commonly swapped in secluded corners along with purloined cigarettes. He knew females were different, and in a wholly delightful and mysterious way, but that was as far as it had gone.

After the first time with Tabby, in the hayloft of the Dog and Gun’s stable, when he had been staring at her breathless and bedazzled, she had said to him, ‘There! Now you’re a man!’

Sometimes he felt like a man (and he understood, a little, the boastfulness and swaggering of men who presumably had long practised this occult art) but just as often he felt like a helpless fly in a spider’s web, or a soap bubble rushing down a drain, or a bird that had jumped out of the nest for the first time and was wondering if it really could fly. Tabby was a sorceress before whom he abased himself, yet because she was a female, she remained to him a delicate, lovely creature he wanted to nurture and protect. On the whole his instincts were properly manly. He had fantasies of coming upon her besieged by gypsies whom he sent to the right-about with well placed fists or a large stick, after which she swooned into his arms, gazing up at him and whispering, ‘My hero!’

But while she had him by the heart, the Thing They Did had him by an altogether more ancient part. He couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t get enough of it. He wanted to be doing it all the time. He risked his job, and discovery, to get Tabby alone so that they could do it, and she seemed a willing collaborator. In barns, lofts, haystacks, behind hedges, even once standing up behind a tree, anywhere they could be unseen for a few moments – and he was so excited by her, it only took a few moments. Sometimes she would only do a Thing with her hand, but even that took him to the edge of a precipice of ecstasy over which he was only too willing to tumble.

He knew, dimly, that what they were doing must be kept secret, that it would not be approved of by his mother or the rector or any of those grown-ups he was accustomed to respect and fear. But he couldn’t think of it as wrong. Tabby was his goddess, and a goddess couldn’t do wrong. She was a lovely member of that loveliest phylum, womankind. Whatever she did must be good.

So he drifted through his work in a dream, and when, as today, he was alerted to the fact that he had made a mistake, he couldn’t make himself care. Compared with being in love with Tabby, it was as inconsequential as a gnat on a bullock.

Maud Stainton went straight to Scotland from Cowes, as had been her husband’s habit. In his case, it had been out of an eagerness to be fishing and shooting, and she had tolerated the weeks in Kincraig on the Spey because she had to, and because she did at least get to spend time with her adored brother Fergus, and with several cousins she never otherwise saw.

This year, she went for a rest. The months of continuous parties, balls and engagements – most of them in a foreign language – had been a strain, though the exercise had been undertaken from a sense of duty, and she regarded it as having been completely worthwhile. But she was tired now, and needed a rest before the whirligig started up again. And she gauged that Rachel was also tired, and needed time to step down from the merry-go-round and breathe.

Fergus, Lord Leake, liked to entertain at Kincraig, but he was lazy and preferred to leave the trouble of organisation to others. So while he had invited friends and relatives to stay for the sport, he did very little more than order his butler and housekeeper to arrange beds and food for them, and his head ghillie to arrange for them to go out after whatever fish or game they fancied. Balls and parties he left to other local families. A wealthy bachelor earl never lacked for invitations, and those in his house party would always be included; but there was no need for anyone actually to go if they didn’t care for it. Maud emphatically didn’t care for it. It suited her to stay at home and rest, to talk or listen to such company as didn’t bore or annoy her, and to take a solitary walk every day for exercise.

The weather was perfect – soft autumn sunshine, golden light, a gentle warmth; a little misty in the mornings, chilly enough in the evenings to be glad of a log fire. She walked every afternoon, enjoying the autumn smell of leaves and woodsmoke, the low light on the purple hills, the golden ripples across the lake, and went home invigorated to tea, the best meal at Kincraig. Mrs McArdle was a dedicated baker, and always produced a grand spread of Scotch pancakes with cream and heather honey, scones, flapjacks, gingerbread, Melting Moments, Dundee cake, petticoat tails, butter tart, marmalade cakes, raspberry buns. She had very little interest in other forms of cooking, and what the sportsmen had managed to bag during the day supplied the other meals, prepared with the minimum of disguise. But Maud had never had much interest in food, so being faced mealtime after mealtime with the same grilled fish innocent of sauce followed by a pellet-speckled game bird served charred with boiled potatoes and cabbage hardly impinged on her.

After dinner she was happiest listening to Fergus talking about his very dull life, or recounting incidents remembered from childhood, or playing hand after hand of bridge with the sort of players who didn’t care for conversation with their cards, followed by an early night, safe in the knowledge that whatever Rachel was doing, someone else – or rather a number of someones – was watching over her.

Rachel had also been to Kincraig often enough to know that it was best to fill up at tea time. And she, too, was tired from the long strain of engagements, though in her case being ready for a rest did not mean she wanted to stay at home and have early nights. Local balls and parties suited her exactly, because the young people she met were either cousins or people she had known all her life, the dances were all jolly Scottish country dances, and the other entertainments were parlour games or card games intended to amuse. She didn’t have to impress anyone, she didn’t have to be elegant and superior, she didn’t have to fear doing the wrong thing and incurring a curled lip, she didn’t have to wonder if any of the young men she whirled about with was calculating her qualities as a wife. She could romp, both indoors and outdoors, with dear, friendly people who just wanted to have fun. There were picnics and carriage rides, long walks with packs of dogs, boating on the loch; she let her hair down and hitched her skirts up, and forgot she was a dignified young lady, knowing that for a little while, her mother didn’t care what she did.

And when, after a series of lighthearted races, she and the cousins flopped down in the heather to catch their breath, and her handsome cousin Angus dropped down beside her, what he tried to do was not kiss her but stick a prickly bit of heather down her neck.

It was all very refreshing.

Alice decided to call the pony Cobnut for its colour. Axe had no objection. When it came to naming things, he hadn’t much imagination.

‘He’s doing so well,’ she said. ‘He’s quite a different pony. I think he must have belonged to somebody who was fond of him, don’t you?’

‘Never thought about it,’ Axe said.

‘Oh, but you see the way he watches us, not anxiously, but in a friendly way. And the way he pushes his nose into me when I first arrive. He’s been somebody’s pet. I wish I knew his history,’ she added. ‘Why did they part with him? And how did he come to sink so low? I wonder if he belonged to a little girl, and she died in a tragic accident?’

‘You ought to write books,’ Axe said, amused, ‘making up stories like that. What happened, then, when this little girl died?’

‘Oh, her parents were so upset they couldn’t bear to look at him, because he reminded them so much. So they sent him in to market, and he was bought by a dealer, who sold him to a tradesman, who worked him too hard until his health broke down. And then each time he was sold he went down a bit, until he ended up with that wretched man you bought him from.’

‘The way you tell it, it sounds like real,’ said Axe. ‘It’s a treat to listen to you.’

Alice was stroking the pony’s head. ‘If he did belong to a little girl, he’ll be broken to saddle. Have you tried to ride him?’

‘Now, how d’you think I could do that? He’d collapse under me, with my weight.’

‘Shall I try him, then?’