More wary than ever of Mr Gunn, Katie hoped that he wouldn’t send Sammy to bed early any more, but it happened again only a week later. He had reprimanded his son for not chewing his food properly and the boy had begun, ‘I’ve got good strong teeth, I don’t need to …’ That had been enough and Sammy was banished to his room.
Katie had remained sitting after the meal was finished, thinking that Mr Gunn would get tired of waiting for her to stand up, but when he pushed back his chair, he came and stood behind her. Her heart palpitating, she forced herself to remain perfectly still, but when his hands slid round her neck, she jerked away automatically.
‘You little fool,’ he muttered, ‘I could be a very good friend to you, if you would let me.’
He went out without waiting for an answer, but Katie was trembling when she stood up. Friendship was not what he was after, the dirty old devil, and how much longer would he pester her before he gave up?
When Sammy joined her on her walk the following evening, it occurred to her that he could help her. ‘Listen, Sammy,’ she began, ‘I can’t do anything about your father hitting you, but I want you to promise me you won’t answer him back again. That’s what makes him send you to bed early, and I’m scared he might do something bad to me if there’s nobody else in the kitchen.’
Screwing up his face in deep thought, he took some time to reply. ‘You want Sammy to be good?’
‘Very good.’
His face broke out in a wide smile. ‘I promise. I wouldn’t want him to do bad things to you.’
‘I know you wouldn’t.’ But she couldn’t help thinking that she was wasting her time – his father could send him to bed for nothing if he felt like it.
Fortunately, only the next morning Mrs Gunn announced that she was feeling much better and would come downstairs. She certainly had a little more colour in her cheeks, and after a few days she had regained her previous, rather doubtful, health and was doing more housework than she had done for some weeks prior to her mysterious illness. With his wife back on her feet, Mr Gunn had no option but to sit with her in the dining room again, and it was not only Sammy who was pleased that his father would no longer have his meals in the kitchen.
While Mrs Gunn was in bed, Katie had thought that she would never get the weekend off she had been promised, but her employer had not forgotten. ‘You’ve been here for six months now,’ she said, one day in October, ‘so I think it’s time you went home to see your grandparents. You had better take the opportunity as long as I’m feeling well enough to cope by myself.’
Katie murmured her thanks, and Mrs Gunn went on, ‘I’ll pay your fare to show my appreciation for the extra work you had to do while I was laid up.’
‘There’s no need for that, Mrs Gunn, I was glad to do it. I wasn’t expecting anything …’
‘I know you weren’t, but it would make me feel we hadn’t imposed on you unfairly.’
Very early on Friday morning, therefore, Katie set off in a steady drizzle to walk the five miles to the railway station at Huntly. By the time she boarded the train, her coat was wet, and her brown hair was plastered black against her head, dripping into her eyes, but even that did nothing to spoil her fizzy anticipation of seeing her grandfather again. She waited at Keith impatiently for the other train which would take her to the coast, thinking in amusement, when she saw her reflection in the carriage mirror, that she looked like a drowned rat, and when, at last, she caught sight of the sea, the waves glittering in the sun which had emerged from the dark clouds, her breath caught in her throat. It wasn’t long until she spotted the familiar broad outline of the Bin – the hill was a landmark for miles – and she knew that she was almost home.
Her excitement at fever pitch when she came out of Cullen Station, she ran all the way down the hill to Seatown and burst into her grandparents’ house. Mary Ann – her sleeves rolled to the elbow, corseted figure erect as ever as she stirred a pan on the hob – turned round startled by the intrusion, and Katie came to a breathless halt, disappointed that her grandmother had shown no pleasure at seeing her.
‘You should’ve let us ken you’d be here the day,’ Mary Ann said, brusquely.
This deflated Katie’s spirits even more. ‘I wanted to give you a surprise,’ she mumbled.
‘You did that right enough, coming in like a raging lion. Have you forgot your manners since you went to the Howe o’Fenty, or do the Gunns nae bother with suchlike things as knocking on folk’s doors?’
‘I’m sorry, Grandma.’ Katie hadn’t thought it necessary to knock since this was her home, and felt like a four-year-old again being reprimanded for the heinous crime of losing her handkerchief.
‘Well, you’d best take off your coat now you’re here.’ A suspicion suddenly forming in her mind, the old woman said, ‘You havena lost your job, have you?’
‘No, I’ve got the weekend off, and I haven’t to go back till the first train on Monday. Can I hang my coat up by the fire? It got wet when I was walking to Huntly Station.’
‘It hasna been raining here.’
At that moment, William John walked in from the back, his eyes lighting up when he saw his grand-daughter. ‘Oh, Katie lass, it’s good to see you.’ He opened his arms and she ran to kiss his leathery cheek. ‘How did you get here?’ he asked then, hugging her tightly, ‘And how long are you biding?’
When he learned that she’d had to walk five miles to catch the train, his smile vanished. ‘I thought you said in one of your letters Mr Gunn had a motor car. Did he nae offer to take you to the station when he was going to his shop?’
She toyed with the idea of telling them that she would not have accepted a lift if he had offered, but it would worry them to know she was afraid of the man. ‘I like walking.’
Over the fish soup – a delicacy known as Cullen Skink and made with a large smoked haddock, milk, potatoes and onions – it was William John who plied her with questions, frowning when she described Sammy Gunn as being ‘a bit simple’.
‘A daftie, is he?’ Mary Ann observed, dryly.
‘Not a real daftie,’ Katie protested. ‘He went to school, and he knows what’s going on, but his father doesn’t pay him a penny for doing the garden or all the other jobs he does.’
‘The creature likely doesna ken what money is,’ the old woman remarked, derisively.
Katie was stung into exclaiming, ‘Sammy’s not a creature, he’s a nice boy and I’m sorry for him. We sometimes go for walks together in the woods at night.’
‘Katie Mair!’ Mary Ann’s eyes blazed. ‘You dinna mean to tell us you and him are – he’s nae your lad, is he?’
Her scandalized face made the girl smile. ‘No, he’s not my lad, but his mother and father don’t bother with him and he needs a friend.’
William John shook his head. ‘Oh, Katie lass, you’ll have to watch yourself. You never ken wi’ laddies like that. If you get ower friendly wi’ him, he could …’ He trailed off, too embarrassed to say what was in his mind, then ended, a trifle lamely, ‘… He could go for you.’
Katie’s laugh was scornful. ‘Sammy wouldn’t try to kill me. He’s kind and gentle.’ His father would be more likely to try that, she reflected. She wouldn’t put it past Mr Gunn to murder somebody, he was wicked enough.
After supper, she said she was going out. ‘Just for a wee while, to get the sea air into my lungs.’ Going along the shore, she wondered if she could still confide in the Three Kings, and came to the conclusion that she would have to try. There were things she couldn’t tell her grandparents, things they would be angry about though maybe they were just in her imagination.
In the eerie, still darkness, it was easier than she thought. ‘I’ve only been away six months,’ she began, when she got near enough, ‘but it feels like years, for I don’t like the Howe of Fenty very much. Mrs Gunn’s all right to work for, though I’d to do everything myself when she was ill. I get on fine with Sammy, he’s the son, and he says he’s got a special place and all. I think he feels the same about it as I do about coming here. Grandma and Granda say I shouldn’t walk in the woods with him, but he’s my friend, and he wouldn’t hurt a fly.’
Katie paused for a moment, wondering whether to mention Mr Gunn, or if it would bring bad luck. But he was the main reason for her unease at Fenty, she couldn’t ignore that. ‘Mr Gunn’s not a nice man. He hits Sammy for the least little thing, and he wouldn’t let his wife get the doctor when she was ill. He only tried to kiss me once, and he’s never done it again, but I can’t help being scared of him.’
She stopped as if waiting for advice. At first, she’d had a sense of reassurance from the rocks, but now everything had changed. A coldness seemed to be coming from them, seeping right inside her as though they were telling her that she was right to worry, that Mr Gunn wasn’t to be trusted. On her way home, she even had the feeling that they were warning her that he was to be the means of changing her life in some way … and not for the better.
She went straight to her old bed in the back room when she returned home, saying nothing of her increased fears. If Granda knew how scared she felt, he’d want to take her away from Fenty, but her grandmother wouldn’t let him. She’d just laugh at her for thinking the Three Kings could speak to her. But they had! They’d told her to be on her guard against Mr Gunn because he meant to do her some ill.
In the morning, she shrugged off the alarming thought; her imagination had got the better of her, that was all, likely because she had been too emotional last night at being home again. What could Mr Gunn do to her, after all? As long as she made sure he never got her on her own, she’d be as safe as houses. She had nothing to fear from either him or his son, despite what her grandfather had said about Sammy.
She dressed to the accompaniment of raindrops pattering on the window pane, but she was not downcast because it was too wet to go out. It would be just like old times again, with her grandfather sitting by the fire talking to her.
After breakfast, Mary Ann busied herself making the soup for their mid-day meal, then plied her sweeping brush round her husband and grand-daughter before she took out a duster and made an exaggerated onslaught on the furniture. All the time she was working, she gave the impression that she was paying no heed to their conversation, but Katie knew that she was taking in every word.
The rain had not gone off by afternoon, and Katie offered to make the supper, but her grandmother said, sarcastically, ‘And have you spoiling good mince?’
‘I’ve been doing all the cooking for the Gunns for a long time, and none of them ever complained.’
‘Aye, well, some folks is easy pleased.’
William John put his oar in now. ‘Ach, let the lassie show you what she can do. It’s nae often you get the chance o’ somebody cooking for you.’
‘It’s nae often anybody round here does anything for me,’ she snapped, glaring at him. ‘Some folks would sit on their backsides all day.’
‘Sit down on yours for a change, then,’ he grinned. ‘What can the lassie do to spoil mince?’
His wife continued to glower at him for a moment, then plumped down on the chair Katie had vacated, pursing her lips as she picked up her mending basket from where it was kept next to the wall, and William John winked at Katie.
‘Well, now, I’m sure you canna fault that,’ he commented some time later, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘No,’ Mary Ann conceded, ‘I must say the doughballs were near as good as I make myself.’
‘Better,’ he mouthed to Katie, who had to turn away to hide a smile.
‘That was just grand,’ he said of the seven-cup pudding, and although his wife had to admit it was good, she took the gilt off the gingerbread by adding, ‘Of course, I couldna afford to make something like that every day.’
‘I wouldna want it every day,’ he laughed, ‘but it’s been a real treat, hasn’t it?’
‘Aye,’ she said, grudgingly, ‘it has that. You’ll make a good wife to some man some day, Katie.’
Coming from her grandmother, this was high praise indeed to the girl. ‘Not for a long time yet,’ she chuckled, to cover the pleasure she felt.
On Sunday afternoon, Katie and William John took a walk to the Bin, the frost-nipped air putting fresh roses into both their cheeks, and the Howe of Fenty was not brought up in their rare spurts of conversation. Man and girl were content to be in each other’s company again, free from Mary Ann’s disapproval of their closeness, and Katie felt closer to her grandfather now than she had ever done, closer even than to the Three Kings. He was like a rock himself, though his back wasn’t quite as straight as it used to be, and she could tell him things she wouldn’t tell her grandmother. He hadn’t changed much since she was a little girl; he still wore the navy ganzies his wife knitted and covered his silver hair with the same old peaked cap … at least, it looked the same one, but maybe it wasn’t.
On Monday morning, William John said he would walk to the station with Katie, and Mary Ann, cheeks more hollow than ever, came to the door to see her off. ‘Watch yourself,’ she cautioned, then muttered, as if it had been dragged out of her, ‘I’ve been real pleased to see you.’
This was so unusual that Katie’s eyebrows shot up, but she just said, ‘It’ll be another six months before I’m back, but I’ll keep writing.’
Once Katie was in the carriage, William John reached up and took her hand. ‘She really did miss you, Katie lass.’
The train moving slowly forward, he gave her hand a tight squeeze then walked away, but not before she had seen the moisture in his eyes. Sitting down, she blinked her own tears away.
When she arrived at Huntly, she was taken aback to see the gangling figure who loped forward to greet her. ‘Sammy! What are you doing here? Did your mother send you?’
He grinned bashfully. ‘I heard her saying you’d likely be back on this train.’
Katie’s heart swelled with fondness to think that he had wanted to meet her off the train when it was a ten-mile walk there and back. ‘You shouldn’t have come. It’s too far.’
The light went out of his dark eyes. ‘Are you angry?’
‘No, I’m not angry. It’s good of you, but I hope you’re not too tired to do your work when you get home.’
It had still been dark when she left Cullen, but the sun was shining now, and with the shambling boy pointing out the different trees they passed, commenting on the colours of the leaves which littered the ground and imitating the calls of the various birds they saw, Katie was amazed at how short the time seemed until they reached the track to Fenty.
Sammy hung back as they neared the house then made for his shed, and gathering that he didn’t want his mother to know that he had gone to the station, Katie didn’t enlighten her.
Since his wife’s recovery, Mr Gunn had not made any more advances to Katie, and although she was beginning to think he had just been testing her before, and that he would not bother her again, her scalp prickled with alarm when she went into the dining room that night and his weird eyes fastened on her. ‘Your holiday has done you good, Katie,’ he said, his hand touching her leg under the tablecloth. ‘You look prettier than ever.’
Unable to move away in case his wife noticed why, Katie mumbled, ‘Thank you, sir,’ gritting her teeth as she felt her skirts being pulled up.
‘Yes,’ Mrs Gunn smiled, quite ignorant of what was going on, ‘you do look better than you did when you left. It’s a pity you can’t go home more often.’
When the man’s fingers touched the bare skin at the top of her stocking, Katie could stand it no longer. ‘I’d better get back to the kitchen before the tatties boil dry.’ She pulled to the side, but kept her head up as she went out. She’d be damned if she would let him see how upset she was.
She kept well away from him when she took in the second course, twisting her body awkwardly to set the dishes within his reach, and feeling like hitting him between the eyes when she noticed his sneering smile. She would have to take care not to stand so close to him in future.
It was so unusually mild for November that Katie told Sammy when they were having dinner that she was going out for a walk later. She didn’t want to run the risk of meeting Mr Gunn by herself, though the moon was shining as bright as day, for he’d come home in a vile temper and had hit his son for nothing that she could fathom, and he had shouted at his wife for asking what was wrong with him. She had taken only a few steps into the wood when Sammy sprang out from the back of a tree. ‘There’s a rabbit’s hole down there,’ he informed her.
‘Where? Let me see.’
He pointed out several rabbit holes, showed her a clump of toadstools he had found and a thick knobbly tree he said he sometimes climbed. ‘You know everything about this wood,’ she said, admiringly. ‘I’d never have noticed any of that if I’d been by myself.’
His chest swelled proudly. ‘I know what my father does.’
‘He’s got a shop in Huntly.’
‘What he does in the wood.’
His secretive grin made her curious. ‘What does he do?’
‘With a woman.’
So that’s why Mr Gunn went out at nights, Katie thought, but it didn’t really surprise her. ‘You’d better not let him know you’ve seen him,’ she warned.
‘I see him nearly every time. He waits for her if she’s not there.’ Sammy furrowed his brows, then added, sounding quite puzzled, ‘It’s not always the same one, but he always does the same thing. The first time I saw him, I thought he was trying to kill her, but she liked it. They all like it.’
Katie tried to change the subject. ‘Did you remember to clear up all the mess from your bonfire?’
He was not to be sided-tracked so easily. ‘He puts his arms round her first, and kisses …’
‘Did you clear up the mess?’ she repeated.
‘Yes.’ He turned to face her and when he opened his mouth again, she burst out, ‘I don’t want to hear what your father does, Sammy. It’s his own business, not ours.’
He cowered away and she regretted having been so sharp. ‘I’m not angry with you, but don’t tell me any more.’
His mouth closed, but his eyes lost their look of dread. ‘I can see him from my special place.’
Katie grabbed at the opening this gave her. ‘Oh, I nearly forgot about your special place. Show me now.’
This succeeded in taking his mind off what his father got up to, and holding her hand he pulled her forward. ‘I found it when I was a little boy, and I never told anybody else, just you, because you’re my friend … aren’t you?’
‘Of course I’m your friend. What kind of place is it?’
‘Wait and see.’ He was almost skipping along in his glee, but he didn’t speak again until he drew to a halt, pointing his finger. ‘There,’ he breathed, reverently.
All she could see was a cluster of bushes in front of a broad, gnarled chestnut tree. ‘It’s a nice place,’ she said, not understanding why he thought it so special.
He dragged her on, pushing aside the bushes until she saw the hollow between the roots of the tree. Releasing her hand, he went down on his knees and crawled in backwards, looking up at her from inside. ‘There’s just room for me,’ he said, sadly.
‘Well, it’s your place,’ she reassured him. ‘If there was room for somebody else, it wouldn’t just be yours.’
‘I often come here. Sometimes, I sing to myself, sometimes I say things. Things I want to say, about Father hitting me, and bad things like that, but I say about you sometimes, all good things.’
‘That’s nice.’ She shook her head when he told her to go in after him. She couldn’t help feeling a great pity for this child-man who had no one to confide in except a tree, but hadn’t she been the same, telling all her troubles to three rocks?
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with my legs,’ Mrs Gunn observed one forenoon some weeks later. ‘It’s all I can do to walk.’
Having noticed that her employer’s gait had been somewhat stiff recently, Katie said, ‘Go back to bed, and I’ll come and rub some liniment in. If it’s rheumatics, that should help you, and a few days’ rest, and all.’
‘Yes, perhaps that would be best.’
The liniment, however, did not help, nor the days spent in bed, and Katie began to wonder if Mr Gunn had been right. Maybe the illness was just in his wife’s mind, and she was imagining she was an invalid.
Then came a day when Mrs Gunn said, ‘There’s something far wrong with me. My legs are absolutely dead this morning.’
The anxiety on her face made Katie say, ‘Will I tell Sammy to take the old bike and go and ask the doctor to come?’
‘I think you’d better. Angus won’t be pleased, but he just doesn’t understand how I feel.’
It was late afternoon before Doctor Graham appeared, and his face was grave when he talked to Katie after examining his patient. ‘It could be poliomyelitis, what people know as creeping paralysis, or perhaps sclerosis, where the cells of the muscles waste away and the whole body becomes gradually affected, or muscular atrophy, which has similar symptoms. She tells me that she has always been delicate, and that she has had spells of this before and recovered, but she says it is worse this time. Only X-rays would show what it is, but when I said I’d like her to go into hospital for a day, she told me that her husband would never agree, and she grew so agitated I didn’t pursue it.’
‘Mr Gunn’s against doctors of any kind,’ Katie ventured.
‘I’ll go to his shop tomorrow and explain the situation to him, but if he refuses to allow her to go for X-rays, I can do nothing more. She will get progressively worse, until …’ He stopped, shrugging his shoulders.
When Mr Gunn came home, Katie told him apprehensively that she had sent for the doctor, but he did not take his anger out on her. He stormed upstairs, and she could hear him shouting at his wife, still persisting that her illness was in her mind. It was all Katie could do to stop herself going up to give him a good piece of her mind, but at last the row came to an end. Fearful that in his temper he would turn on Sammy, she had given him his dinner and sent him out, but the man walked straight out at the front, slamming the door behind him.
She was not surprised when he came home next day and told her that he had refused permission for his wife to go into hospital. ‘If God means her to die, so be it,’ he ended.
She was absolutely appalled. What kind of man was he? How could he be so cruel? But he was smiling again. ‘In view of my wife’s illness, I am going to move into Sammy’s room, so as soon as you have finished in the kitchen after dinner, I want you to change the sheets and make up a bed for him in the other garret. You will be all right there, will you not, boy?’
Casting an appealing glance at Katie, Sammy nodded, and after the meal, when his father had gone out, Katie asked him to help her to move his things. The minute he saw where he was to sleep, his sullen face cleared. ‘I’ll be next door to you,’ he beamed.
She had been thankful that Mr Gunn had not taken this room himself, since there was no lock on her door, yet she didn’t like the thought of Sammy being so close. ‘You’ll be next door,’ she said, tartly, ‘and that’s where you’ll stay.’
‘But it’ll be nice to know you’re so near,’ he insisted. ‘I never had a friend before, and I like you an awful lot.’
With a rush of affection, Katie patted his cheek, and they went down to take up some more of his belongings. There was a whole pile of comics, given to him by the baker’s vanman, whose wife had been clearing out their son’s bedroom and wanted rid of them. Although they had been in pristine condition when Sammy got them, he had looked at them so often that they were now almost in tatters, yet he still treasured them, so they were shifted to his new room. There was a shoebox full of old fir cones and things he had picked up in the woods, and many other items of the kind a seven-year-old would cherish, and he carried them up as if they were the crown jewels.
The trouble was, as Katie had discovered, that his new room was much barer than hers, and storage space was limited to one old wooden trunk with an arched lid, so she stowed his clothes at one side and the rest of his things at the other. He would probably jumble them all up by rummaging through them, but it couldn’t be helped, and she could tidy it when it got too bad.
He hadn’t let her down by answering back, that was one good thing, though it couldn’t have been easy for him to be uprooted from his familiar surroundings, and what was more, he had kept sitting stubbornly long after dinner was over so that she wouldn’t be left alone with his father, who was now dining with them again.
Nevertheless, as fond as she was of him, her mind was made up. If, as the doctor had seemed to predict, Mrs Gunn should die, Katie Mair would be out of the Howe of Fenty like an arrow from a bow, Sammy or no Sammy.