‘If you’re for Tannasgan,’ he said, in a voice which matched his frame, ‘you had better get in.’
Laura’s pulse quickened. It was a fantastic quirk on the part of Fate, she felt, to have brought her, in this roundabout fashion, to the lair of the ogre of An Tigh Mor. She stepped into the boat and, almost before she was seated, the boatman had released the ring, given a hearty push off from the side of the jetty, and was rowing, with short, powerful strokes, across the choppy water.
There was a boat-house on the island. Here the bearded man tied up and handed Laura out. The house was a mere thirty yards away. The man took Laura’s wrist in a strong grasp and ran with her up to the front door, which was open.
‘Come ben,’ he said, and thrust her into the hall. ‘Mairi! Mairi! To me here! We have a guest!
A woman almost as tall as the man appeared from some lair off the side of the hall. She had the grim, almost mannish face of some elderly Scotswomen and was dressed in a black blouse of the type which used to be called a bodice, a black skirt to her ankles, and a starched white apron.
‘Ye called?’ she asked.
‘I did that. Pop this water-kelpie in the bath-tub and then bed her with two hot bricks, a dram and a basin of broth. Dry out her clothes. She dines with me tonight. Send her down at three-quarters after eight, and put out sherry on the sideboard and a bottle of champagne on the dining-table.’
Having given these orders, he pushed Laura towards the woman and went out by a door at the far end of the hall. The woman waited until he had slammed this door and then she relaxed her expression and grimly smiled.
‘Dinna fash yourself,’ she said, ‘about that one. There’s them that think him a wee bit wrong in the head and his talk, times, is wild, but use him wi’ sense and civility and dinna cross him, and he’ll eat out o’ your hand, as they say.’
‘Do you come from Glasgow way?’ asked Laura.
‘Kirkintilloch. My man, too. Come wi’ me. Ye’re soppin’ the floor.’
Three-quarters of an hour later, having soaked herself in a portable zinc bath which was so long and so deep that she concluded it had been fashioned to the individual specification of her host, Laura was between warmed sheets and also in the comfortable company of two hot bricks wrapped in flannel, a whisky toddy of almost frightening potency and a huge bowl of Scotch broth. Outside the bedroom window the rain still pelted down. Laura pulled a black woollen shawl more closely about her shoulders and breathed a short, heartfelt prayer of thanks for the situation in which she found herself.
She was left in peace until a quarter past eight, and had dozed off, when the housekeeper came in and informed her that she could not get her sodden clothes dry in such a short time, but that, although she had explained this, ‘that one’ was still determined that Laura should dine with him.
‘What’ll we do?’ she enquired. ‘He’s a gey ill chiel to cross.’
‘You had better lend me a pair of your man’s breeks,’ said Laura.
‘Awa’ wi’ ye!’ shrilled the housekeeper, highly diverted by this suggestion.
‘Well, speir at the gentleman will he lend me his dressing-gown, then.’
To her amusement the woman took this suggestion with all seriousness, went off and soon returned with the garment in question. Laura was tall and well-built, but, even so, she had to gather up trails of the blanket-cloth from which the dressing-gown was fashioned in order to make a stately descent of the stairs.
The man, it appeared (indeed, he stated it), preferred to take his meals in silence.
Laura was allowed and even encouraged to converse with him while each of them drank two glasses of sherry, and then, as he offered his arm to her to conduct her from the sideboard to her seat at the table, he gracefully observed:
‘And now, no more babbling until coffee!’
So they sat in complete silence at opposite ends of the table and consumed hare soup, boiled salmon, gigot of mutton followed by treacle tart. The man had changed his mind about the wine. Instead of champagne two bottles of Clos de Vougeot had been placed upon the table, one beside Laura and the other at the disposal of her host. They were waited upon to the extent that a grey-haired man brought each dish in and put it on the table. Her host served it, carried Laura’s plate to her, collected it when she had finished and then bellowed for Corrie. At this, the grey-haired man came in with the next course and took out the empty plates.
The dinner was a good one, beautifully cooked, and Laura, always a hearty trencherman, enjoyed it. At last the pudding plates disappeared and the man pushed back his chair and stood up.
‘There’s a kebbuk of cheese if you want it. If not, there’s coffee beside the fire, and then you may loosen your woman’s tongue,’ he said. ‘Tell me, are there werewolves in your part of the country?’
‘No. They live in the Hartz Mountains,’ said Laura.
‘They live in the Grampians; they thrive in the Cairngorms; they have been known at Leith and now they are here.’
‘So is the basilisk,’ said Laura, grinning.
‘Do you tell me that?’ He looked at her with a keen interest which caused her to wonder whether he was something more than a mere eccentric.
‘And what about the cockatrice?’ she asked.
‘But, my good lassie, they are the same creature! Where’s your education? The crowned serpent hatched from a cock’s egg, that’s the basilisk—
‘Pardon,’ said Laura, now convinced that she was in the presence of a madman. ‘A slip of the tongue. I should have asked about the salamander.’
‘I had one once as a pet, and a dear wee beastie he was until he fell into the fire—jumped into it, you might
