Stirling…”
“Not that, silly.” She was laughing prettily at me. “What I really want to know is, are you and Jo lovers, Lovejoy?”
« ^ »
—— 11 ——
That stopped me. She was rolling in the aisles laughing.
“Your face!”
Women really nark me. “You’re sly.”
“Oh, whist, man! I guessed when I heard you’d been telling George MacNeish about his old things. And you couldn’t take your eyes off my old father’s mulls.”
These are peculiarly Scottish containers for snuff, made of horns, silver, sometimes bone or stone. It’s easy to pay too much for these, because usually they’ve bits missing. The complete ones have a decorative chain holding tiny tools—a mallet, scoop, prong—also of silver, and of course it’s these that have casually been nicked or lost.
Mulls come in two sorts, the larger table mull with casters for use after posh dinners, or the personal mull. Antique dealers invent wrong names, being too thick to learn the right ones, and call the portable sort a “baby” mull, it being small. I’d never even seen a matching pair of snuff mulls before. But Shona had such on her mantlepiece, lovely horn and silver shapes with all the accoutrements. I’d only given clandestine glances, but should have remembered that women can always recognize a drool.
She was enjoying herself. “Handed down. Family.”
“From about 1800,” I said with a moan of craving.
She fell about. “Well, you can’t have them,” she said at last, recovering. “Jo said you’re a terror for old things.”
“Jo said I was coming?”
“Yes. She’s been ringing every couple of days.” Shona grimaced at me. “That’s why I suspect you and she of —”
“None of your nosy business.”
She hugged herself as they do. “I like you, Lovejoy. Secretly, I’m glad you won’t tell.”
“Only women gossip about lovers.”
She thought a bit before beginning an argument about diarists. I was too impatient to listen. “Where did you get the bureau from?”
“The one Jo said got lost? Oh, a place I know.”
“A place with antiques?” I asked evenly. I’m not devious like other people. I honestly say exactly what I mean practically always.
She gave me a look, women being of a suspicious nature. “Very well,” she said at last, some decision made. “You’ll come up to Tachnadray with me tomorrow.”
Tachnadray? I said great, never having heard the name. For the sake of propriety, off she went to kirk and I went to read Untracht’s monograph on jewelry. Each to his own religion.
That evening I had a demure supper ritual in the hotel lounge served by Mrs. MacNeish.
It was like a barn. Dead fish and stag heads on wall plaques and sepia photographs of ancient shooting parties proudly dangling dead birds. I’d have to send somebody up here to buy these exhibits on a commission job. Someone else. I’m not a queasy bloke; I just can’t rejoice in extinction. Mary MacNeish laid up for major surgery. I’d never seen so much crockery and cutlery in my life. I told her cheerfully, “Just met Shona.”
“Aye, I heard,” Mrs. MacNeish said.
We bantered a bit while I tried to keep my knees together and hold off the slab cake till the starting gun. Politeness is a killer. Also, something wasn’t quite right. In the woman’s prattle a discordant note was sounding. You can always tell. The publican’s wife was open-faced and friendly, but she was having her work cut out to stay so when Shona was mentioned. Yet Shona was pally and really something to see. I wondered if it was me, and like a fool put it out of my mind.
During the gluttony I had the sense not to mention Tachnadray, and eventually returned to reading Untracht’s methods of inlaying silver strips in English boxwood bracelet carving. Maybe for once I should have thought deeply instead.
Next day I consulted the Register of Electors. They’re those cob-webbed, yellowing, string-hung pages of local names in every village post-office-cum-stores. Pretending idleness—nothing new—I found that Tachnadray listed umpteen McGunns, plus one ectopic: plain James Wheeler. Yet even here somebody had inked in the McGunn surname, converting him to clan. Odd, that. Amending electoral rolls is illegal, even if you changed your name lawfully. I checked its date: Printed twenty years previously, and that ink had faded. I wondered if Lovejoy McGunn sounded better than Ian, then decided to let ill alone.
Shona brought Jamie’s van about ten o’clock. She drove as fitted her personality, with good-humored extravagance, and asked if MacNeish’s pub was comfortable.
“Grand parlor,” I said. “Are those places only used for funerals? It felt like the dust covers were just off.”
Shona laughed. “In the Highlands the best room’s always kept for occasions, Lovejoy.”
“Tachnadray got one too?”
She sobered swiftly. “How much do you know, Lovejoy?” We turned uphill inland.
“This Tachnadray’s where the antique came from?”
