Christmas cards, she had a vision of the daftie Tammas, coming louping through the snow from Erchany and yammering murder; it would be just a week before he did that same certain enough, but she hadn’t let on at the time, thinking it a fell unchristian fancy. Mistress McLaren the smith’s wife, that was; she must be said to have a talent for what the stationy calls publicity.
If an unco silence had fallen upon nature with the snow those weeks there were plenty of human tongues in Kinkeig to make good the deficiency. The less work always the more gossip, and there must have been even more claiking than usual about the meikle house. Castle Erchany is far enough from Kinkeig, but it’s the laird’s house and forbye the nearest gentry house barring the manse by many a mile, so it’s a natural centre for idle talk. It would be that were it owned by the dreichest and quietest folk in Scotland – which it’s not. The Guthries have ever had a way with them that catches the eye and sets folks either crying out or whispering: their valour of the shining kind, their treasons showing lurid in the discovery, their births at a strange term, a rape or a romance keeking out from behind their canny wivings, violence or madness or some unlikely ecstasy casting flare or shadow over their end. Many old families have as much colour to their stories as the Guthries, but few have as much colour that have contrived too to hold what they have through the centuries. The Guthries have been at Erchany since long before the Reformation – and, Reader, I warn you that back beyond the Reformation with them you and I must presently go. But for the moment my best course seems by way of Ranald Guthrie and the bogles. It was with this that the chief gossip of those weeks began.
Ranald Guthrie was near-going: how near-going few in Kinkeig knew. For though all knew about the bogles – it was the fashion he treated the Gamleys and not the bogle business itself set folk talking – that was far from giving the measure of his meanness. I had long known myself that his meanness was next to madness – ever since the time his American cousins had tried to prove it on him. Since my mind is on it we’ll take that affair first.
It was a couple of years back that two English creatures, gey shifty-eyed folk under their little bowlers, came speiring round Kinkeig about Guthrie, getting the billies to talk over a dram at the Arms and wheedling the women – who needed little encouragement to haver anyway – by giving pennies to the bairns. And one of them came in on me bold as brass and asked could I remember anything peculiar about any dealings I’d had with Guthrie? and I believe the chiel would have crackled a pound note at me had I not looked at him fell stern. Fine I knew Guthrie to be peculiar: only the week before he’d sent a pair boots to sutor – with the laces all frayed and knotted so that I’d put new laces in and thrust the old inside when the boots went back to him. And the next day down came the daftie Tammas with the old laces in one hand and the silver to pay my bill in the other – less one halfpenny for second- hand laces returned: had I not written
That was sensation enough for Kinkeig: a motor full of medicals in black coats and lum hats, as if they were holding themselves ever ready to attend their patients’ funerals; three from Moray Place in Edinburgh and a fourth, a full-fleshed gawpus, from Harley Street in London. They took up Dr Jervie – fell unwilling he was, but his brother was a colleague of one of the Moray Place lot and that gave them a handle – and away they went up the glen to Erchany. What happened there most folk had from Gamley, who happened to have come up for orders from the home farm. The doctors got into the house and bided about half an hour – the time, no doubt, it took Guthrie to discover what they were nosing after. Then there was hell let loose – with Cerberus well to the fore, for this time certain it was the dogs Guthrie unleased. And syne out of the house and across the moat came the medicals, scraiching and roaring, the London one holding himself behind where the fiercest dog – a tink mongrel enough – had taken a great collop out of his dowp. Into the cars they got and were driven to the manse, the fat one greeting as if he were no more than a bairn sore skelped by his nurse. And later in the day – standing by Dr Jervie’s sideboard, poor chiel – he wrote a long report for the American cousins. Ranald Guthrie, he said, had had a warm and affectionate nature fatally warped during the trauma of birth. And it was a great pity he had never been given a bit plasticine – or even a good patch of glaur for mud pies – during his early and formative years, for that might have made all the difference. As it was, he had a fell unpleasant way with him and was subject to severe nervous disturbance, but he was no more certifiable than the folk who had fee’d the doctors. And as for prognosis, he gave it as his considered opinion that Mr Ranald Guthrie might very well grow worse, and the American cousins have some hope yet. On the other hand he might very well grow better, or for that matter he might very well remain the same. And there the Harley Street medical left off, adding a bill at a guinea a mile from London, and a claim for damages to a like amount – though the tink mongrel had taken only what he could well spare, gross slummock that he was, and who would grudge a Guthrie dog a bold bid for a square meal? Anyway, that was the end for the time being of the American cousins trying to get control of the Guthrie affairs. Guthrie had served them a gey queer turn, it appeared, and it was this had put the attempt in their heads.
This and a bit more I had from Dr Jervie, us running the kirk session together and so having a bit talk at times over the graver affairs of the parish. More than once our thoughts had turned to the folk at Erchany, for the minister was fell anxious about the quean, Christine Mathers. But that will come: it’s the bogles I’m on the now – a bogle, you must know, being no more than what the English call a scarecrow.
Well, all Kinkeig knew how Guthrie was fair haunted by the bogles in the fields roundabout; fair haunted, that is, by the thought some feckless chiel might have left a bittock silver in the pooches when breeching and jacketting the sticks. An unco sight it was to see the laird striding his own parks from bogle to bogle, groping ghoul-like among the old clouts for those unlikely halfpennies. About he’d go and back again, visiting the same bogle three times, maybe, in the same day; so that folk said it was plain daft. But the Harley Street slummock said No, that was just neurosis,
What Guthrie did on his own land he did on the tenants’ land too, and there were some made jokes about poaching and pooching and others said the pooching rights should go with the shooting rights in the leases. The strange thing was that Guthrie had as much respect for other people’s property as for his own, and you could see he knew it an unco thing, prowling his tenants’ land to such an end. For on the home farm he’d stride to it as if it were as natural a part of a landowner’s tasks as giving a look to the dykes and fences. But off his own ground he’d stand canny in a lane ten minutes maybe, giving a look here and a look there with his great eyes, the eyes folk said had a glint of gold in them, and then he’d loup warily over the dyke and be up to the bogle as quick and quiet as a futret. Uncanny it was, this strait need to do so daft a thing: you’ll realise the uncanniness of it the better if you remember he was not the first Guthrie to wear boots; dirt as he was in most folk’s speaking there was yet gentry plain in the presence of him. When the bairns mocked at him, as whiles they did the few times he came near a dwelling, never a sign of seeing them would he show – let alone give a bit swipe at them or curse as a common billy would do – but kept all his glowering looks as he strode past for some invisible devil of the middle air. So there was the more talk when he turned out the Gamleys.
The site of Erchany had been chosen long since for the strength of it, the land about right tough and stony, the home farm no more than a splatter of oats and turnips amid the larch woods. Rob Gamley was called grieve, he and his two grown sons tended the land together and had the farm-house and a wage for their labour. Gamley had a young wife, his second, and by her two bairns, the children of his old age that he fair doated on. Twins they were, a bonny boy and girl, spoilt maybe and wild enough for certain: and it was over no more than an impudent prank of theirs that the trouble came. For one day late in October they were playing together some way from the house when they saw the laird making across the next field and giving a bit poke here and there with his stick, rational enough. But fine the bairns knew what he was after, for straight in front was a brave new bogle their father had set up but the day before. And wee Geordie Gamley, a fair nickum for sure, slipped through the hedge and up to the bogle and hid behind it with his hands in the pooches of the jacket of the thing. Along came the laird and out came Geordie’s fists from the pooches as it might have been the very arms of the bogle, and he waved them before the laird and cried out the old rhyme:
Nickety-nickety, nick-nack,
Which hand will ye tak’?
Alice in the lithe of the hedge laughed out blithe and wild, Geordie ran back to her laughing and fleering and away the two of them skedaddled as fast as their legs would carry them, for you may be sure they were right scared of Guthrie and his evil eye for all the bold trick they’d played him. But Guthrie went straight to the meikle house and got a bit silver and syne went over to the farm; there he put the silver on the table in front of Gamley,
