Shadow of the Serpent

‘William?’ she called. ‘The kidneys will congeal on your plate and I cannot be held responsible.’

He straightened up. For a moment he looked like a predator cheated of its quarry.

‘I shall arrive,’ he announced, stood back, then delivered the final coup d’etat. The axe chopped in and, after some hesitation, as if yet holding on to its green life, what had once been a proud growth of nature crashed to earth, shuddered like a stricken animal, then was still.

All four people watched, then Gladstone raised his right fist in the air like a triumphant pugilist.

‘The arm of the Lord is bared for work!’ His resonant tones echoed in the silence.

Catherine Gladstone shook her head in exasperated amusement and disappeared back inside.

William rolled down his sleeves and, with measured tread, approached Jane Salter who held out the frock- coat for him to don as if he were a medieval knight who had just slain the dragon. He nodded a dignified thanks.

‘Have you partaken of breakfast, Miss Salter?’ he asked.

Prescott concealed a slight shudder of distaste. For some reason the old man had a soft spot for this desiccated creature who had attached herself to the campaign in the last few months. A volunteer. An amateur.

‘I rose early and broke my fast with some bread, Mr Gladstone,’ she replied, her voice low-pitched, a pleasant and merciful contradiction to the rest of her as far as Prescott was concerned.

William’s face, which was deeply fissured in lines like the cracked side of a cliff, frowned in some concern, the mouth down-turned to indicate gravity of situation.

‘Bread is not enough. We shall need all our strength in the days ahead.’

His right hand, he felt, might blister up tomorrow, but it was worth the pain. With suffering came release.

He glanced back at the felled and fallen tree.

‘The Tories are incorrigible, impotent for reformation, a parasitic growth. But they will cling. You cannot cut them down without sinews of iron.’

He shot out his sleeves in a strangely flamboyant gesture, perhaps even in the manner of a Mississippi gambler, but the faint smell of his morning soap, the disinfectant odour of phenol, discouraged further comparison.

Prescott had thought Gladstone’s flight of fancy a mite overburdened but William’s fierce gaze precluded any niceties of discrimination. The statesman turned and stomped off towards Dalmeny House.

‘Fuel in the boiler, Miss Salter,’ he called back. ‘Politics is a field of Christian action. Action cannot sustain itself without fuel in the boiler. Although …’

He came to a halt as if struck by a sudden insight.

‘What Mr Disraeli nourishes himself upon these days is open to conjecture, wouldn’t you think?’

Gladstone suddenly emitted a harsh laugh and then continued on his way pursued by a rather flustered Prescott.

‘I have mapped out your timetable for the day, sir.’

‘And I shall observe it, sir, but I must warn you that at the hour of five I address the good people of West Calder and I shall need a quiet interlude for preparation. I have a long speech fomenting and I feel …’

He turned back again and looked at the woman who was watching them both.

‘I feel … not unlike a loaf in the oven.’

His mouth quirked in what might even have been the ghost of a smile. She lowered her gaze and the same ghost crept across her lips.

He resumed his march and Prescott though longer in the legs, struggled to keep up with the energetic steps of the older man as they breasted the hill.

Jane Salter observed them leave, then walked slowly over to peer down at the tree. The sap was still flowing and the axe had been driven into the bark so that it stood up at an oddly phallic angle, which she affected to ignore.

The second time this week William Gladstone had cut a sycamore down. It gave him life, he said.

Fuel in the boiler.

19

As Tammie glowr’d, amazed, and curious,

The mirth and fun grew fast and furious.

ROBERT BURNS, ‘Tam o’Shanter’

Constable Mulholland was not a happy man. His Aunt Katie had once put it in a nutshell.

There’s the lion’s mouth, go on make a name for yourself.

Of course you had to hear the underlying scathing tone to fully appreciate, but the meaning was clear, the advice infallible, and his own inspector hell-bent on ignoring such nuggets of wisdom.

They were on the wrong side of Princes Street for a start, out of their parish. They had headed over the North and South bridges towards Guthrie Street. For God’s sake, Walter Scott had been born in that street! It was no place for entertaining weird notions about – notions he couldn’t even bring himself to think on, so full of the danger of demotion were they. Fearsome notions.

But just because some female had landed up in the inspector’s shanty and some big Highland sergeant had kicked the bucket thirty years before, a death Mulholland had never heard brought to mention till near this moment, here they were in a respectable sitting room where they had no right to be, on the point of discussing events they had no conceivable right to be on the point of discussing.

It was a parlous state of affairs.

The big woman had made them a decent cup of tea right enough. Lapsang Souchong. A Chinese brew. Smoky as a tinker’s fire. It appealed to the connoisseur in Mulholland but McLevy was near choking on the stuff, a measure of some compensation to the constable.

She had received them cordially so. Now she waited.

Her hair had once been chestnut brown, thick and lustrous. Now it lay in white scallops on her head. The eyes were steady upon them. A dispassionate gaze.

Seen every side like a nail in the slaughterhoose, thought McLevy. Her name on the paper he had read in the moonlight. Eileen Marshall.

‘You were nurse tae Helen Gladstone, were ye not?’ he began formally.

Mulholland sighed. Here we go.

‘I was indeed, God rest her soul.’

Eileen had a deep almost mannish voice and, unlike many women of McLevy’s acquaintance, a stillness of carriage not induced by whalebone.

‘When did you last see her?’ he asked.

‘Dead or alive?’ she answered.

A hint of graveyard humour in the hazel eyes.

McLevy half-smiled in response, this might make up for the hellish tea which had left a taste in his mouth like chimney soot. The Chinese have much to answer for.

‘Alive, if you please, ma’am.’

He noticed that her hands, placed peacefully in her lap, were big-jointed and strong. No wedding ring. Like himself. Still in the stream.

‘I nursed her till she was cured and then she later withdrew to a convent in the Isle of Wight and thence to Germany, where, after many years, she died,’ Eileen replied somewhat carefully.

‘Cured? Of what ailment?’

His eyebrows rose in what was almost a parody of the inquiring investigator. From Joanna Lightfoot he had a