The House of Lyall (56 page)

‘This is very difficult … perhaps we should have coffee … No, I think something stronger is called for.'

She watched him crossing to a tall filing cabinet and taking out a gill of whisky. Back at his desk, he produced two glasses big enough to hold a generous dram, not the little tot she had expected. ‘Oh, just a mouthful for me,' she protested, as the amber liquid gurgled out of the small bottle. ‘I'm not a drinker.'

‘You're going to need it,' he warned.

Deciding to leave the whisky until she did need it, if at all, she looked at him searchingly. ‘Why did you bring me here? What is so secret that you can't tell me in front of Ruairidh?'

Graham fortified himself before saying, ‘I wasn't sure if he knew.'

Her brows came down, yet her eyes remained clear. ‘Knew what?'

‘I may be wrong in doing this, but I thought he should know about your two children.'

Her whole face closed now. ‘I am afraid you have made a mistake, Mr Dalgarno. My only daughter died some years ago.'

Seeking the nerve to carry on, he took another sip. ‘It was not … er … it was Ruth and Samuel I meant.'

If he had hoped to see signs of shame or guilt, he would have been disappointed. Her eyes showed only perplexity. ‘Ruth and Samuel? I don't understand.'

Bracing himself, Graham said, as calmly as he could, ‘I have in my desk, Lady Glendarril, two birth certificates which name you as the mother.'

Her cheeks blanched but she did not look away. ‘Oh, my God. How did you find out about that?' Before he could answer, she burst out, ‘But I only had one baby, a boy who died hours after he was born!' The grief she had thought she had mastered for ever surfaced without warning, and she bent her head to hide her distress.

‘I knew it!' Graham erupted, making her raise her streaming eyes. ‘I knew your mother-in-law had told you that your babies were dead. It
was
her, wasn't it, and you never saw the bodies?'

She shook her head and lifted the glass of spirits to her lips. Its fiery content burned its way down her gullet and enabled her to accept what she realized he was telling her. ‘They gave me something to knock me out, and when I came round, she said the baby had died and it was best all round. She pretended to be sorry, but before the birth, she'd forced me to agree to having it adopted … and I never got to see him. Nobody told me I'd had twins. What did she do with them?'

‘As far as I can make out,' Graham said gently, ‘she asked Andrew Rennie to do the dirty work for her. I do not know the full story, but it seems your son was adopted, but your daughter was just fostered. When I first learned of the money which had been paid out over a period of years for maintenance, I gave Lady Marianne full credit for providing for them, but it had likely been Andrew's idea, not hers.'

Draining her glass, Melda said, her voice low and quivering, ‘I can't believe there were twins and they're still alive, and you talk as if you know what had happened to them …'

He lifted the whisky bottle again and poured what was left into her glass. ‘Drink it!' he ordered, as she gripped her lips to show she didn't want it. ‘I do know what happened to them, in fact …' He hesitated, then said softly, ‘I kept searching through all Andrew's papers looking for information about Samuel, and I could find nothing until I took out the newspaper which I thought was lining the bottom drawer. It was an
Edinburgh Evening Citizen
dated October 1943, and I was about to dispose of it when it dawned on me that it must have some significance for Andrew to have kept it. It had! A small announcement inside stated that Samuel Fernie, only son of John and Margaret Fernie of Clermiston, had been posted as missing.'

Her gasp of dismay made him shake his head ruefully. ‘I'm sorry, your Ladyship, I should not have come out with it like that.'

‘It's quite all right. It's better that I know –'

‘No, no, he is still alive! I looked up the Edinburgh telephone directory to see if there were any Fernies listed in Clermiston – on the outskirts of the city – and struck lucky with my second call. Samuel, or Sam as they call him, had been taken prisoner at Salerno, was transferred to Stalag 77 in Germany when the Italians gave up, and repatriated after the war ended.'

‘Oh, thank God he wasn't killed,' Melda said, in a small voice. ‘I don't think I could have borne to hear of his death a second time. Does he still live in Edinburgh, or does he work somewhere else?'

‘With the money provided for his further education, Sam had gone to university in order to get a degree in medicine, but the war started before he graduated. Being a red-blooded Bruce-Lyall, although he was not aware of it, he gave up his studies and joined the Army Medical Corps. After the war, what he had seen in the prison camps – the helplessness and hopelessness of the captured Allied servicemen – made him vow to become a preacher if God spared him, so when he came home he went back to university and eventually gained his MD. He is now touring the Army of Occupation in Berlin, but Mrs Fernie, his adoptive mother, promised to write to him straight away, so it should not be long until we hear from him.'

It crossed Melda's mind that, in view of the calling of her real and adoptive fathers, it was strange that her son should have been drawn towards both medicine and the ministry, but it would probably send her mother-in-law over the edge into the madness she had wrongly attributed to all men of the cloth. But that was a bridge to be crossed later …

‘And now, Mr Dalgarno, what about … Ruth?'

‘She has only recently learned that she was fostered, your Ladyship.'

‘If she's angry at me for giving her up, you'll have to –'

‘Andrew had told her what happened, and she's a very understanding person. I think … I know that you won't be disappointed in how she has turned out … and she is desperate to meet you.'

‘As I am to meet her.'

‘Good! Shall I take her to Castle Lyall tomorrow?'

The alarm which flooded her face made him say, ‘No, I shall have to give you time to adjust, and I can see you are still suffering from the shock I gave you. Get that Scotch down, it should help.' While she obeyed, grimacing at each sip, he wondered why she had suddenly changed her mind about an early meeting.

‘It's not that I don't want to see Ruth,' Melda muttered, as if she knew what he was thinking, ‘but I have to prepare someone first.'

‘Does Lord Glendarril not know …?'

‘No, I'm sorry to say, he doesn't. His mother threatened to tell him. I'd been going with soldiers from the camp if I ever said anything to him.'

‘But surely, if he loved you, he'd have known they were his?'

‘I was frightened to risk it. I was very young, and I couldn't stand up to her. To tell the truth, I was grateful to her at first for whisking me off before anybody in the glen noticed I'd been a bad girl. I wouldn't have been allowed to marry Ruairidh if it had come out we'd had …'

‘Didn't you ever feel like telling him after the war, the second war, that is? It's not such a crime nowadays.'

‘It's still a disgrace, even yet, but it's not telling Ruairidh I'm worried about, it's my father. He knows nothing about this, and he'll be very hurt that I didn't tell him.'

‘And your mother?' Graham prompted.

‘My mother died about three years ago – she didn't know, either – and Ruairidh managed to get Dad to give up the house they moved to when he retired and come to live with us. I wouldn't be surprised if my mother-in-law had told him the whole thing any of the times Ruairidh and I were in London. She had always liked to make trouble, and she was acting really strangely for days before we left.'

She took out her handkerchief and dabbed her eyes. ‘I'm sorry to get upset like this, Mr Dalgarno. I loved Uncle Andrew as much as my husband did, but – you'll find this hard to believe – it's Marianne I feel sorry for. In spite of all she did to me, all the nasty things she said over the years, I couldn't help but admire her, because she stuck to her guns, no matter what. If she got something into her head, nothing would shift it.'

Melda decided not to tell the solicitor about Marianne's obsession about ministers, not yet. She would, one day, if only to help him to understand why her mother-in-law had not let her keep her first two children.

Gathering up her gloves and handbag, she said, ‘I'd better go home now, but I'll let you know when to bring … Ruth to the castle.'

After shaking her hand, the solicitor saw her down to her car, and stood until it went round the corner into Bon Accord Street and out of sight.

Contrary to her usual habit of sitting in front with Gilchrist when they were going home, Melda sat in the back, unable to make any small talk, unable to think of anything other than the momentous news which Graham Dalgarno had sprung on her. If it hadn't been for her father, she would have been overjoyed at finding another daughter to replace Dorrie. Her death had sent Melda into the lowest trough of her entire life, when she had sobbed for days, and kept thinking that it was terrible that she'd given birth to two children and not one was left alive – she hadn't known then that she had actually given birth to three. She'd been too distraught to speak to her mother-in-law, in case she attacked the woman in her misery. Marianne, of course, had also been at a low ebb, with Hamish having died so recently.

And now? Was she to be the cause of
her
father's death? He was quite frail these days – he hadn't been properly well since her mother's fatal heart attack, and she suspected that he would never get over the most recent shock he'd had. Apparently he had been away for the weekend visiting a friend in Montrose, and had returned on the Sunday evening about seven. Not finding Marianne anywhere in the west wing, he had gone to the rose garden, where she often took a stroll on a Sunday afternoon or early evening, and had been appalled, when he rounded the wall, to see two bodies lying half on the path and half in the pond. That would have been enough to give him a heart attack without him hurrying to see if he could do anything. Fortunately, Marianne had been able to raise her head out of the water before she lost consciousness – so she told them later – and, apart from being unable to get up off the ground, had suffered only superficial injuries, and shock.

First making sure that there was nothing he could do for Andrew, Robert had managed to lift Marianne to a sitting position and then rushed to telephone Dr Addison, the man who had taken over when he himself retired. And when, Melda recalled, she and Ruairidh arrived back on the Monday morning, both old people were in bed. It was strange that, despite Marianne's usual indomitable spirit and Robert's extra years, he had been up and about again days before she even stopped weeping. She had obviously cared very deeply for Andrew Rennie and seemed to blame herself for his death.

On arriving at the castle now, Melda hurried up to her mother-in-law's bedroom, her heart turning over at the sight of her father sitting by the bedside with one of Marianne's hands clasped between both of his. How pale and drawn they both looked, she thought, their silver heads only inches apart, their sunken eyes gazing fondly at each other. It was so unusual – they were inclined to be rather hostile as a rule – that Melda took a quick step forward in the belief that the old woman was dying.

Both turned slowly towards her now. ‘Marianne's been telling me about your twins,' her father said, his voice trembling. ‘It's taken her some time to get me to believe what she did to you, and I still can't understand why you didn't come and tell me at the time.'

Feeling like the young girl she had been then, Melda stuttered, ‘I was s-scared to t-tell you.'

‘But your mother and I would have stood by you.'

A shaking hand crept out from under the counterpane now, coming to rest on top of the other three. ‘Too late to discuss the rights and wrongs of it now,' Marianne muttered. ‘Everything that happened at that time was down to me. It was all my fault, and you shouldn't blame Melda or Andrew or anybody else, Robert. Just be glad that the two poor infants were taken care of. Ruth, the one who came to see me, is quite pretty, a bit like Ruairidh but with auburn hair more like I used to have, and she said nothing about her sister.'

Melda opened her mouth to correct the error, then closed it without saying anything. She couldn't help the shaft of perverse pleasure that shot through her at the idea of the surprise Marianne would get when she found out that the other twin had been male … a male who would be heir to the title since his parents' marriage had made him legitimate.

A grandson of Duncan Peat, whose very name her mother-in-law still hated with the same intensity as of old! And above all, a minister himself!

But her satisfaction was short-lived. She had a momentous task ahead of her – to confess to Ruairidh what she had never had the courage to tell him before, just because she had been too afraid of what his mother might do. Well, it wasn't Marianne she was afraid of now – what had she to fear from a frail woman in her seventies? – it was Ruairidh's reaction. Waiting in the drawing room for his return from the mill, she felt so chilled that she switched on the small electric fire which was kept handy for those days when it wasn't cold enough for a coal fire. What would he say? Would he despise her for being such a coward? Could he possibly forgive her? Or would he be so angry at the deception that he would turn her out?

When she heard the low purr of the Bentley – Gilchrist always drove him to and from the mill – her heart thudded, her whole body stiffened in preparation for the battle she believed would come. He entered the room, smiling as he always did.

‘What have you been doing with yourself today?' he asked brightly. Her silence made his expression change. ‘Is anything wrong, Melda? Has Mother been more difficult than normal, or have she and your father had another difference of opinion?'