In the morning, Daisy finds a selection of cleaning materials and starts on the downstairs rooms, mopping the floors, opening windows and letting in air and sunshine. On the seaward side of the house she finds a couple of lines strung between clothes poles. She hauls some of the rugs outside and pegs them out for the breeze to freshen them. Just after her late breakfast or early lunch, a gallon of coffee and a slice of toast and marmalade, Daisy hears what she assumes is Cal’s car on the quiet road outside. There is no other traffic. Auchenblae sits on a narrow lane between high gorse hedges, blooming more or less all year round, but beginning to be dazzling at this time of year. Beyond the house, the potholed lane bends away from the sea again and narrows into a muddy track, leading only to the wishing tree. She hears the creak of the iron gates as Cal swings them open before driving in and goes to open the door for him.
Her hair is pulled back with a rubber band and she is wearing a grubby blue and white striped apron that she found hanging on a peg in the kitchen. When she first put it on, she found a tissue in the pocket. It smelled faintly of lavender and she wondered if Viola had left it there. She wishes she could speak to her grandmother. There are so many questions she would want to ask. She has found the time to pick a big bunch of budding wild flowers, campion and bluebells and frothy ground elder, and she has stuck them in a cream stoneware jug on the oak table.
Cal gets out of the car and goes round to open the passenger door. To her surprise, a shaggy, biscuit-coloured dog of indeterminate breed leaps out and starts to cavort around her, wagging his tail, play-bowing in front of her. The animal searches frantically for something to give her, finds a stick, seizes it and drops it at her feet, his tongue lolling, his head on one side.
‘Meet Hector,’ says Cal. ‘I told you I was bringing somebody with me.’
‘I thought you meant a person!’
‘Hector, she thinks you’re not a person! I can assure you he is. In fact, he’s got more personality than most people I know. He’s a recycled dog. Very suitable.’
‘Recycled from what?’
‘From the dog rescue place at Cardonald. He’d been dumped as a puppy. He looked as if he had mange, but it was just a flea allergy. Chucked out on the A77 somewhere south of Glasgow. Don’t you just love people, eh?’ He looks very fierce all of a sudden.
Hector wags his tail frantically in agreement. He genuinely does love people. He comes to be petted, then rushes off in pursuit of his stick again. His sandy coat is rough and shaggy under her fingers.
‘How are you with dogs? I should have asked you, but I figured he could stay in the car if you’re not a fan. I usually bring him with me. He does love the island so much.’
‘No, I’m fine with dogs. It’s fine.’ Last night, hearing the thud downstairs and the rustle and scurry above her head, it had occurred to her that it would be good to have a dog. The flat in Glasgow has always been too small to house anything but the most undemanding pets: the odd gerbil or goldfish, when she was much younger.
‘You can borrow him if you like,’ says Cal, suddenly. ‘I mean temporarily. I wouldn’t give him away for the world. But he can sleep here while you’re on the island if you want.’
‘I have to go home at the weekend anyway. I have a fair.’
‘Ah yes. So you said.’
‘But I’m planning to come back soon. Stay for a bit longer if I can. I needed to suss it out first. See if the place was habitable.’
‘And it is, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. It is. So I thought I might come back for a few weeks. See how I get on. But I have to keep selling things. I don’t have any other income. I have to make a living.’
‘Well, if you want to borrow Hector for a while, you’re very welcome. We can make some arrangement.’
‘Would he be OK here?’
‘He seems to like you. And he’s a very discerning chap, our Hector.’
Hearing his name, the dog wags his tail, rushes over, licks Cal’s hand briefly, and charges off to sniff the undergrowth.
‘Actually,’ says Cal, ‘he’s not so much discerning as easy. He’ll go with anyone who feeds him. He’s the most laid-back dog I’ve ever met. I have this town house at the back of the Botanics, in Glasgow, and he spends some of his time there, sleeping, or in the gardens when he can persuade somebody to take him for a walk, some of his time on the road with me, and the rest here on Garve, chasing rabbits whenever he can.’
‘It sounds like a great life.’
‘It is. He’s happier than I am. But he’s no guard dog. Although I think he’d be company for you. Just having him in the house.’ He looks around. ‘Seems to me that you have enough stock here to last you a lifetime.’
‘Well yes. But I have to be careful. I don’t want to let anything go that I might regret later.’ She frowns at him, still suspicious.
‘Oh, that’s for sure,’ he says, ingenuously. ‘No dodgy house clearance guys in here!’
She finds herself laughing. She can’t help it. He’s the kind of man who makes you laugh. ‘No. In fact, no dodgy guys at all.’
‘I don’t do house clearances, hen.’
The way he calls her ‘hen’ reminds her both of her father and her grandma Nancy. Hen, sweetheart, which is she?
‘I don’t suppose you do. Not with a shop like the one you have.’
‘It’s not mine, though. My mum and dad own the shop. I just have an interest in it and they pay me a retainer, for the buying, plus commission on sales. Quite a lot of commission sometimes. But it’s their business really. Not mine.’
They go into the house. She makes a big pot of coffee and they sit at the oak table in the living room. The back door is open and Hector stretches himself out across the doorstep in the sunshine.
‘You sound as though you don’t much like the shop.’
‘Have you ever worked in a shop?’
‘No. Only fairs. My dad’s a musician. I started off doing stalls when he had a gig. Now I do quite a bit of online stuff as well. I have a degree in history, but I worked for one of the west of Scotland auction houses for a while. It kind of gave me a taste for it.’
‘My mum worked in an auction house too.’
‘I don’t think I was on quite the same level as your mum. I was a lowly porter. Packed things, unpacked them. Made sure the punters didn’t smash them. Or pocket them. Took phone bids. They can be a grumpy bunch, dealers. Especially the old men. I expect your mum’s an expert.’
‘Have you been talking to Mrs Cameron?’
‘She was telling me a bit about you. I asked her,’ she says, apologetically.
‘Mum’s an art historian and conservator. She met my father at a private view.’
He frowns, drains his mug and holds it out for a refill. She wonders if his apparent hyperactivity is down to caffeine. ‘Have you seen his work? Do you like it?’ he asks, abruptly. The truth is that she has indeed seen some of the work and disliked it, but before she can think of anything tactful to say, he pre-empts her. ‘I don’t mind his early stuff. He used to do these strange little studies of the island. But that was before he got bitten by the urban bug. Now it’s just moody, repetitive crap as far as I’m concerned.’
She shifts uncomfortably, not used to hearing somebody criticise a parent so forthrightly. She would never be so disloyal to her own father. Besides, she loves him too much.
‘Sorry,’ he says, noticing her discomfort. ‘I get the bit between my teeth where Dad’s concerned. We don’t often see eye to eye. He’s difficult. Thinks I should knuckle down and spend a lot more time in the shop.’
‘What do you want to do then?’
‘Me? I did a course in furniture restoration. I’d like to do a lot more of that.’
‘I’d have thought your dad would approve of something like that.’
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But he doesn’t get the whole artisan thing. Despises what he calls crafts. Spent a fortune on our education, mine and Catriona’s. That’s my younger sister. And we both discovered that we wanted to go off and get our hands dirty. Catty more successfully than me. Very dirty indeed.’
‘What does your sister do?’ She doesn’t like to admit that Elspeth Cameron has already told her.
‘She escaped. Catty’s married to a hill farmer, back on the mainland. Jake Brodie. Not all that far from the ferry, which means I get to see them all quite often. Sheep farmers. Hard graft. As far as I can see, sheep mainly want to get dead and they find a hundred ways of doing it. But she thrives on it. They both do. And they have three kids as well. I like their life. Not sure I’d want to live it myself, mind you. But I do like watching them living it.’
*
A little later, he finishes his coffee, stands up and says, ‘It’s now or never, sweetheart. We’d better go and have a look at this tower.’
Hector stands up too, yawns and shakes himself. He’s ready for anything, wagging his tail enthusiastically, grinning at them.
‘There’s a door in the kitchen, isn’t there?’
‘Yes. And one outside as well, further along. The one in the kitchen will be easier.’
‘Let’s go in that way then.’ He picks up the tray and heads for the kitchen, Hector scurrying after him, his nails clicking on the floor. She follows them more slowly.
‘You’ve left the key in the door.’
‘I had a look in and then locked it again. It’s OK. It’s not too stiff.’
She watches as he turns the key in the big lock and tugs at the door. It swings open, quite quietly. No horror movie creaks this time. Hector patters inside, stops, turns to face them, tail down. He doesn’t like the look of the broad stairs, curving both up and down.
‘So where does the outside door go in then?’
‘Further along. Just before you get to the bit where the tower meets the garden wall. There must be another stair along there.’
‘So there must. The levels are a bit different then.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, you’d sort of expect the rooms in here to be on the same level as the house back there, but they aren’t. Not quite anyway. I’m wondering which came first?’
‘The tower, surely.’
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But perhaps not. This tower could be an addition. The new wing.’ He chuckles. ‘Except not that new.’
She’s intrigued, in spite of the almost constant tension in the pit of her stomach at the sheer magnitude of her inheritance.
‘I wonder what’s down there?’ She peers down the curve of the spiral.
He grins. ‘Maybe you have dungeons!’
‘It isn’t dark enough for dungeons. Old kitchens, maybe?’
Cal pushes Hector out of the way and heads down the first few stairs. She hangs back, her hand on the dog’s wiry coat.
Cal calls up to her as he goes. ‘It’s OK. There’s a doorway here. It isn’t very far down at all. It’s actually wired, Daisy. There are lights here. Bet the leccy’s a bit dodgy, though.’
Hector gazes after him, whining.
‘Go on,’ she says, patting the dog on his bum. ‘Go on down! You’ll be fine.’
He still doesn’t like it much, but when Cal calls to him, he gallops down the stairs and disappears. Daisy follows, reluctantly, but this section of stair is very much shorter and wider than she expected. There are metal light fittings with wires leading up to them, and dusty lightbulbs on the walls. Only a little way down, there is another massive oak door. It is standing open and she can just make out Cal inside, with Hector sitting next to him, panting. The room is gloomy, but not dark. She has imagined the tower to be empty and echoing, big, dark rooms, smelling of damp. Cobwebs everywhere. Large spiders, undisturbed for years. But it isn’t like that at all.
‘What is it?’ she says. ‘What’s in there? Is it a kitchen?’
‘Come in and see for yourself! I don’t think this was the old kitchen. I think that’s further down still. The stairs keep going. I’ll bet the door you can see from the outside is on this level. In fact, I can see it. So the ground must slope a bit.’
She steps into a large room with stone walls and floor, incredibly dirty windows on opposite sides shedding some light: salty on the outside, dusty and cobwebby on the inside. This room is only a little way below the level of the rest of the house. Shrouded shapes, covered in dust sheets and grubby blankets, loom at her. Cal finds a light switch – an old circular affair that makes him draw in his breath and mutter ‘not seen one of these for years’ – and gingerly presses it. There are meagre lamps on one wall. They are surprised to find that the lightbulbs appear to be working. They don’t exactly flood the room with light, but it becomes easier to make things out: tea chests, one piled precariously on top of another, old-fashioned wooden blanket boxes, a couple of metal trunks, a pile of elderly suitcases and larger pieces of furniture shrouded in dust sheets. There are a great many heaps of frames stacked face against the wall so that you can’t see at first glance whether they are empty or still contain pictures.
‘See what I mean,’ Cal says, grinning at her through the gloom. Hector is skittering about sniffing at things. ‘Hector! Don’t you dare pee on anything,’ he says, sharply. The dog, looking guilty as only dogs can, comes back, wagging his tail.
‘Oh God!’ Daisy shakes her head, between fascination and dismay. ‘I thought this would be empty.’
‘I was afraid it would be,’ he says, giving her a sidelong glance.
‘It’s all right for you. I mean, everything is quite neat in the other part of the house, or half empty, like the servants’ quarters.’
‘You thought Viola or her parents might have had a big clearout.’
‘I was kind of hoping that would be the case. I can’t cope with all this.’
‘You don’t have to do it all at once. You don’t have to do it at all if you don’t want to! Shall we head on upstairs? I think this might have been a living space of some kind, if the old kitchen and storerooms are downstairs from here, anyway.’
He points across the room to the outer wall, the one adjoining the walled garden, where a huge stone fireplace stands, quite empty. Up above it, though, there is yet another armorial panel, much less worn than those outside. They can make out a boat with a furled sail and oars, two lions and, in the top right-hand quadrant, a fish and what might be a hand, although time has reduced it to an indeterminate blob.
‘McNeill,’ she says.
‘How do you know?’
Daisy shrugs. ‘I remember stuff like that. I’m a history geek.’
‘You don’t look very geeky to me.’
Before she can respond, he heads for the stair again and she follows him. There are two more floors above this one, but, mercifully, this is the most cluttered. In the room above, they find a few more boxes and chests, and a wooden bedstead, in solid oak.
‘Wow,’ he says. ‘Would you look at this, Daisy!’
‘Is it really as old as it looks?’
‘I should say so.’ He runs his fingers over it, over the multitude of carvings. She can see leaves with birds half hidden among them, flowers – roses and thistles – and foliate heads of some kind. ‘God alone knows how they got it up here. Must have come up in bits. But why wouldn’t you use something like this if you were lucky enough to possess it?’
‘Maybe my grandmother found it intimidating. She was here on her own most of the time.’
‘I suppose so. But it would take a normal mattress. It’s big, but if you set it up it would be more chunky than anything else. A sturdy bed. Antique beds tend to be a bit smaller than our king-size things.’
‘I’m not at all sure I’d want to sleep up here, though. Not the way it is now.’
‘No. Well, there is that.’
There’s not much more in the room, except for a low and unobtrusive doorway leading to a narrow back staircase, corkscrewing off into darkness.
‘A secret stair. Maybe that leads down to the doorway at the seaward side of the house,’ she ventures.
‘Probably. I suppose they would need more than one way out in case of unwelcome visitors. You could cover this with tapestry or whatever and nobody would know it was here.’
They leave the bed behind and head upstairs again. Hector seems to have got used to the spiral stairs and happily gallops ahead of them. They find themselves in a high room, with more windows looking out onto land and sea. There’s a small stone fireplace, an oak press and a high-backed oak chair, both with rudimentary carvings of stylised oak and ivy leaves, and an empty stone closet in one corner.
‘A privy maybe. Renaissance en suite. Do you know that they used to keep their clothes in them because the smell of pee killed the bugs? Or so they thought.’
‘What a mine of information you are, Daisy!’
‘Mostly useless.’
A sudden breeze seems to have got up, a squall blowing in from the sea as it so often does. You can feel it buffeting walls and windows, finding a way into the room, the damp smell of salt and seaweed everywhere.
No, she thinks, I wouldn’t like to sleep up here at all. It would be a lonely place to be. The word comes drifting into her mind and stays there. Lonely. Somebody was lonely up here. She doesn’t know how she knows it, but it’s true, nevertheless.
Beyond this room, the stairs go on only a little way until they stop at a wooden trapdoor, which no doubt emerges onto the battlements at the top of the tower.
‘We’ll save that for another day,’ Cal says, to her relief. ‘We’d need to get a ladder up here.’
Emboldened, they head downstairs and keep going, below the level of the rest of the tower, where they find what must once have been a kitchen. There’s another enormous stone fireplace, and a little warren of other rooms branching off, storerooms probably. The whole place smells damp. It’s a basement rather than a cellar. There are windows, but they are high up in the walls and only a little light filters in. It’s a gloomy place and nobody would want to linger long here. The stone floor exudes coldness and in parts seems to be bedrock, part of the hillside upon which the tower is built, rather than any kind of flagstones.
‘No dungeons,’ she says. ‘Thank God.’
‘Do you want to look at some of the pictures?’
A sort of exhaustion seems to have possessed her. There’s so much to take in. But she agrees. ‘Why not? We have to start somewhere, don’t we?’
They head upstairs, back into the main room, where Cal hauls one of the piles of pictures away from the wall. A large and leggy spider scuttles away, making both of them jump back.
‘You too, eh?’ he says.
‘I never kill them if I can help it, but they scare me. They’re a lot worse dead than alive, though.’
Hector is very interested in the spider. He pursues it across the floor but it scuttles behind one of the tea chests. He whines at it for a little while, but then gives up and comes back to look at the pictures.
‘They only make you sick, Hector,’ says Cal, rubbing his ears. ‘Then you eat them again.’
The pictures are a mixed bunch: there are old prints, foxed landscape engravings mostly, in heavy black frames. There are a couple of Victorian woolwork pictures, cornucopias of flowers, that seem to have survived unscathed, very dusty but well framed and under glass.
‘Not my thing, but maybe yours,’ Cal remarks in passing.
‘I like them a lot. People buy them to turn into cushions sometimes. Or to cover stools and chair seats.’
There is an exceedingly ugly portrait of a military man, a print done in a beautiful and very detailed stipple engraving. It seems a waste of such an effective technique on such an ugly person. Cal has no hesitation in saying so. Daisy has been thinking exactly the same thing. ‘All the same, it’s probably worth quite a bit,’ he says. ‘Look – Bartolozzi. That’s a very good name.’
‘So it is. And I won’t mind selling it.’
She waits for him to say, ‘I could maybe sell it for you’, but he doesn’t.
There are several landscapes in oils, too grubby for it to be immediately obvious whether they are collectable or not. There are cows, drinking from a burn, and a stag on a high hill. There is a pair of pictures of Highland lochs in gilded frames. None of them seems very old or particularly interesting. But then, he slides out a smallish picture from the back of the pile. It is wrapped in black silk, from which it emerges in glorious colour.
Even in this low light, the picture is stunning.
The frame is almost bigger than the canvas, in carved and gilded wood, with scrolls and leaves and a riot of lily flowers, garlanded round it. It is clear that this has been a precious thing. It is a portrait of a very young woman, eighteen or nineteen years old perhaps, gazing straight out at the artist, pensively and with only the faintest smile. Nevertheless, she is not shy of him. There is a certain warmth in her gaze.
She has red hair, what you can see of it, because it is quite severely parted in the centre and then swept up and back into a head-dress that is floral in some way, perhaps with embroidered or ribboned flowers with jewelled centres, the edges ornamented with tiny pearls, freshwater pearls maybe, and a single pearl hanging down in the very centre of her parting. You can actually see the gentle frizz of hair that has escaped confinement, just a shadow of it on the sides of her forehead. The skill of this seems extraordinary to Daisy.
The girl has no earrings, but she does have a short necklace of larger pearls, just visible in the ‘v’ of her gown, the high white collar curving up and outwards, neatly pleated and with a tiny ornate lace trim, like tatting, along the edge, the whole thing framing her face, intensifying her prettiness. There is all the freshness of youth about her: a high forehead, wide-set, ingenuous brown eyes, straight nose, a firm rosebud mouth. Over that fresh, white, inner garment, she is wearing a vivid yellow bodice, startling in the intensity of its colour, some kind of textured silk, closely fitted, with the seams braided for emphasis and with – when you look more closely – tiny fleurs de lys embroidered onto the fabric. You can just see the way it buttons up the front, the round buttons constructed of the same braid, but this is not a full-length portrait, which is somehow tantalising. The skirt is almost certainly in the same gorgeous fabric. Her left hand is raised across her body, just below the full curve of her breast, and the hand has all the smoothness of youth about it. Beneath the edge of her sleeve, more pleated silk or satin trim peeps out, softening her wrist. She is holding a spray of white lilies, their yellow centres reflecting the colours of her gown. They are so glowing, so vibrant, that you can almost smell them.
She looks like a young woman of great character. No shrinking violet she.
It is one of the most beautiful pictures Daisy has ever seen.
‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘Look at her. Would you just look at her!’
Cal is examining the canvas but there seems to be no signature of any kind.
‘Shall we take it down into the light?’ he asks, tentatively.
‘Oh yes. Of course. We can’t leave her here, can we? Let’s take her into the light.’