The Devil’s Promise

Suddenly Jamie stood up, lunged forward and grasped my hand. “Come on, there’s something I wish to show you!”

He led me through the Great Hall to the door on the right-hand side of the fireplace. Beyond it was a flight of stone stairs leading downwards, so ancient that a hollow had been worn in the centre of each tread. At the bottom of the stairs was another stone-floored passage, wider than the one that led to the library. It was so dark I could hardly see my feet. Jamie’s fingers enclosed mine very tightly.

The passage ended in an arched door studded with nails. Jamie lifted the iron latch, and we entered a small room where scarves and hats hung on hooks, and several pairs of boots lay on their sides to dry off after cleaning. Plainly, we were at the back entrance of the house, in the boot room.

“MacGregor has been busy this morning, as you see,” said Jamie. He dropped my hand; he needed both of his to put his boots on. “If there’s one thing he can’t stand, it’s a neglected pair of boots. If you leave your dirty ones here, they’ll be immaculate by the next time you need them.”

“Butler?” repeated Jamie, looking up from his boots with more incredulity than my question deserved. “No! There has never been a butler at Drumwithie in my lifetime. Bridie does everything indoors.”

He straightened up and went to the enormous oak door in the outside wall. The bolt was so large it took both his hands, and some strength, to shift it. “He likes to say his job is three ‘gs’ – groom, gardener and gillie. That is, what you would call a gamekeeper.”

The day was sunny, but a breeze blew Jamie’s hair this way and that as we stepped outside. “If MacGregor had been here last night,” he went on, “he would have driven you and Father from the station and taken your box up to your room, but he was down in Drumwithie, getting drunk, as he does every Saturday night. Saturday is his half-day off. I never mind driving the trap on a Saturday if it is needed. Indeed, I enjoy it. Have you not got such a man at home?”

“Well … not really. The estate at Chester House is farmland, so the game is managed by the tenant farmer. My father was never fond of shooting anyway.” I shaded my eyes with my hand. “But we do have a butler. His name is Jarvis. And we have a gardener and a groom. It must be hard work for MacGregor to do all those jobs himself.”

Jamie stopped so unexpectedly, I almost walked into him. He was grinning like a madman, his face transformed, not into a delighted child this time, but into a clown. Without a word, he positioned his arms above his head in a graceful arc and began to dance a Highland fling. He looked so ridiculous, jigging in his yellow trousers and Chinese waistcoat, with his hair bouncing and his booted feet pointing, I burst into laughter. Then I laughed more as he began to sing, in broad Scots, to a well-known Scottish tune:

“Och a Scotsmon can dae three-ee times

The wurrk of ony Englishmon.

He gruims, he garrdens, guarrds the deerr.

He puits all comerrs un theirr place,

And is hame in time for hus beerr, ho!”

I was laughing so much my ribs were beginning to ache. “Stop!” I begged breathlessly.

He obeyed me, dropping his hands to his hips. His face was serious again. “You look wonderful, Cat,” he said.

The untidy outline of his head was blurred; laughter had made my eyes water. Why did he say I looked wonderful? He had used the same word about Yeats’s poetry. Mystical, wonderful, sublime. I knew I was none of those things: I was wearing last year’s grey summer dress with a black ribbon round my throat, my usual woollen stockings and black boots. I was not, as Mother would put it, “got up smart”.

And if my clothes did not look wonderful, neither did my hair. Attacked by the same breeze that had tangled Jamie’s, it had come loose and flapped in curtains around my cheeks. It was straighter than I liked, and I had to curl it with papers when I wished to look nice, but last night I had fallen asleep without putting them in. I was certain I looked untidy; the mirror in the hallway at Chester House had often shown me exactly what my hair looked like on my return from a walk, on days less windy than this.

Furthermore, I realized to my embarrassment, I had violated the first rule of acceptable behaviour for a lady, especially one in mourning: I had gone outside without a hat.

“I do not look wonderful,” I said, putting up my hand to tidy my hair. It was unsuccessful; the wind blew it over my face again as soon as I took my hand away. “You pulled me out of the house so quickly, I did not even put on my hat.”

I straightened my shoulders. “I thought you brought me out here to show me something. It will be time for luncheon before we have taken two more steps.”

He put his head on one side. “My dear Cat, do you not recognize a compliment when you hear it?”

“Of course I do,” I told him. “But, please, do not say such things. They make me uncomfortable.”

“Very well. But I shall not be uncomfortable should you wish to give me a compliment. I absolutely adore compliments!”

I did not return his smile. After a moment he resumed walking, forwards this time, until he turned abruptly right, between two hedges. “This is Anne’s Garden, as we call it,” he announced. “It was made by my mother when she was first married, and she always tended it. I used to help her sometimes when I was small. MacGregor does it now, of course.”

I followed him down some steps to a pretty hollow, carpeted with grass and criss-crossed with paths. Alpine plants tumbled over a rockery, and wrought-iron tables and chairs had been placed to take full advantage of the panorama. I went to the waist-high wall at the garden’s edge and gazed at the view. A haze hung in the late morning air; the horizon shimmered. From the pines that covered the mountainside rose a scent like no other – medicinal, sweet, harsh yet pleasant. The scent of Drumwithie.

I looked back at the house. One of my bedroom windows overlooked the hillside we had driven up last night and the other the wooded glen. This garden was at the side of the castle, above a sheer drop from the rock on which Drumwithie sat. It was a dramatic place and a disturbing sight. I wondered whether, given the choice, I would have made a garden in a position with a more tranquil aspect.

I followed him past the rockery and round the corner, our backs to the view. Between patches of thinning grass, the soles of my boots encountered ancient cobblestones.

“This well is our only source of fresh water,” Jamie told me. It was an ordinary-looking well, a hole in the ground surrounded by a low stone wall. Unsure what he expected me to say, I remained silent. “The spring rises in the caves beneath where we are standing,” he continued. “There is a pool down there that feeds the well.”

He put one knee on the wall, leaned over and gazed into the water. This cobbled space was sheltered from the wind and shaded by pines. His green eyes looked darker in this light, almost the colour of the trees themselves.

I frowned, confused. His tendency to spin his mood on a sixpence was unnerving. “What caves?”

He took off at a fast pace, back towards the boot room. “Need a lantern!” When he emerged he was holding a glass-sided carriage lamp. “The caves in the rock, under the castle,” he explained. “In ancient times people lived in them and Grandmother told me they were used for storage until about a hundred years ago. They are particularly well-preserved, my father says.” He lit the lantern and blew out the match. “‘The finest caves in Christendom, Jamie!’ I can hear him now, the pompous oaf.”

“Do not speak of him like that!” I had encountered several pompous oafs among my parents’ acquaintances, but Doctor Hamish was not one of them.

“I will speak of him however I wish. Now, follow me and mind your step. I would not like to have to carry you home on my shoulder.”

The entrance to the caves was low and almost hidden by undergrowth. Jamie crouched and pushed it aside. “Go on,” he urged. “It’s quite safe.”

I stepped into a narrow space with a flat stone floor. When Jamie held the lantern up, it showed the slime-covered rock of the ceiling. “Ugh!” I exclaimed. “How damp it is in here!”

A smaller cave led off the first one, and from that, a staircase hewn from the stone. “Up here,” said Jamie. His voice echoed in the gloom. I wished we had stayed in the garden; I instinctively shrank from these caves, “fine” or not. Above were trees and sky; here there was only rock, and damp, and impenetrable darkness.

I followed Jamie through a labyrinth of passages, some smoothed by human hands, others so rough and low we had to stoop almost double. Several times I stumbled on loose stones, but Jamie hauled me to my feet without a word and we continued.

His favourite cave had what might be called a window – a narrow slit where two boulders met. Someone had hollowed out a primitive seat beside it. “I used to come here a lot when I was a boy,” he said. “And I still come sometimes to get away from Father and to think about Mother.” He breathed deeply in, and out again. “It was down here that she was found. She tried to drown herself in the pool that feeds the well. If MacGregor had not noticed trampling of the plants at the entrance, she would have succeeded.”

I could not think what to say. Into my head came the memory of a painting that had hung on the Art Room wall at St Giles’s College. It was a reproduction of a famous work by Sir John Everett Millais, depicting Ophelia, the girl in Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, lying in the stream where she had drowned herself. Miss Gunter, the art mistress, had talked a lot about the brush technique and the school of artists Millais belonged to, and medieval influences on British painting of the last century. But all I had thought about was poor Ophelia, with her thin gown floating on the water, her rippled hair decked with flowers. She looked as if she were lying on a bier. In my schoolgirl’s imagination she was not a fictional character, but a real girl like me. How could someone so young have been driven to such an act?

There was a sudden shriek. I started violently, unconsciously grabbing Jamie’s arm. “What was that?”

“Oh!” The caves were making me nervous. How could Jamie bear to come down to the place where his mother had almost died? “Er … are there any more caves or is this the last one?”

“No, there are more.” He held the lantern so that we could see each other’s faces. “This glen is ancient landscape, carved out of the rock in the Ice Age. It probably contains more caves than have yet been discovered. The reason Father thinks our caves are so fine is their geological significance, which, being a scientist, he is very proud of. But I am more interested in their history. How did ancient people, without modern tools, hew the stone? They had water, from the spring, but how did they cook their food and keep warm? There is nowhere for smoke to escape.”

I listened, but I could not pretend I shared his interest. I was beginning to be overtaken by loathing of the place. “Shall we go back up now?” I asked.

“You used to be able to get into another cave,” he went on, ignoring my request, leading the way yet further into the darkness, “from the side of the glen. But the entrance has been blocked for years. Sometimes the land shifts and trees fall.”

From my window in the tower I had seen the huge trees that grew out of the glenside, twisted with age, some almost horizontal, their roots clinging to the mossy earth, apparently defying gravity. Some had fallen, and their carcasses lay at the bottom of the glen, tossed there like bodies in a paupers’ grave.

“Well, if it is the place… I mean, I do not understand why you want to take me there, or go there yourself.”

“Does it not occur to you,” he said, tight-lipped, “that this is the last place on earth that witnessed my mother as she was, before her mind disintegrated completely? The day she came down here and entered the pool, she had spoken to me at breakfast about geography. A map I had drawn had impressed her. Everyone else was out. I was at my books, doing Latin verbs in the library. It was an ordinary Wednesday. And then it wasn’t. It was the worst Wednesday of our lives. Now, shall we go and see the pool?”

I could have given way and followed him meekly. But I did not. His story had horrified me – the thought that this woman, the wife of a respected doctor and the mother of a fourteen-year-old boy, could descend to this dark place and slip, like Ophelia, into the freezing water, made me shudder. So I did what Jamie himself had admired me for: I bared my claws.

“No,” I told him firmly. “I do not wish to look at the pool, ever. In fact, I never want to come down to these horrible caves again.”

I thought he would sigh, turn and lead the way back up into the sunshine. But he did not. He committed what I thought must be an act of madness. He hurled the lantern against the wall of the cave, smashing the glass and extinguishing the light. I heard it clatter to the floor, but I could see almost nothing. The only light now was the greyish glow from the slit between the boulders. “What are you doing?” I screamed. “How will we find our way back ?”

“I can find my way back perfectly easily,” came his voice, now farther away. “You, though, who consider the caves horrible, and won’t go and see the pool where my mother tried to die, can stay here for ever, for all I care.”

His tone was perfectly measured; he was not agitated in any way. I stumbled in the direction of his voice, but the farther I went from the window-slit, the less light there was. And then I realized he was not there. He had gone back down one of the passages and was making his way out, along a route he knew so well he could follow it in the dark.

Panic gripped me. “Jamie!” I screamed. “Come back! I will go with you to the pool!”

Silence. But not quite silence. A faint swoosh, like the hem of a woman’s gown brushing a carpet, came to my ears. I put my hand over my mouth to stop myself from screaming again, and strained my ears. Any noise, however small, must come from the entrance to the cave, so I must follow it.

Nothing happened for a moment. Then I heard the sound again. It was followed almost instantaneously by another sound: the plink-plink of dripping water. Relief rushed through me. I must be standing near the water at the bottom of the well. The pool I had refused to visit must be farther away, and water from it was intermittently falling over stone – swoosh – and splashing into the well water – plink-plink. Hoping that, since the well was open to the sky, enough light would filter down to allow me to see my surroundings, I groped my way along the wall in the direction of the sounds.

I was right; the wall of the cave ended abruptly, and I came upon the well. The surface of the water was disturbed now and then by the influx of fresh water from the pool, which in turn was fed by the spring. Plink-plink, bubble-bubble. Comforted by the sound, I craned my neck to look up the stone-lined shaft to the round hole at the top, from where Jamie had gazed down at this very water. I was not so far from civilization, I told myself. I had no intention whatsoever of making my way back through the pitch-blackness of the caves, but if Jamie did not come back, and I could not make anyone hear my cries for help, I could climb up the iron ladder bolted to the side of the well.

I called up the shaft. All I heard was the echo of my own voice, then the silence again descended. I waited for a few moments, in case Jamie came back. But my fear was increasing. I had to get out.

I piled my skirt and petticoats untidily into the waistband of my drawers. It was fortuitous, after all, that I was not “got up smart”. Trying not to look into the black depths, I reached for the iron ladder and gave it a tug. It was secure. I stood on the first rung. It held my weight. I muttered words of encouragement to myself, trying to blot from my memory the moment when Jamie had smashed the lantern. Then I lifted my face towards the circle of daylight and began to climb.

OPHELIA