The Unbelievers (28 page)

“Sir?”

Allerdyce could hear the sergeant's perplexity. What do I say, he asked himself? Is it too banal to tell McGillivray that I've seen the light, literally and morally?

“Nothing, Sergeant. Just that I'm seeing things more clearly than I did before.”

“You still need help, sir.”

“Yes, yes of course.”

He let McGillivray start to lead him back into the house. As they paused at the threshold of the French windows Allerdyce spoke.

“Sergeant?”

“Yes, sir?”

“It would be my very great privilege if you would agree to serve with me again.”

“And it would be my honour, sir.”

“Thank you, Mr McGillivray. And may we be granted a fresh opportunity to protect the innocent and detect the guilty.”

“Amen to that, sir.”

Editor's note: The letter which follows was found, undelivered, in a post office in the Ukraine in 2009. Its recipient was in fact in transit from the south of the Russian Empire to the northern port of Archangel at the time of the letter's dispatch.

 

 

Dalcorn House
9 November 1917

To: Dr Elsie Inglis

Scottish Women's War Hospital

C/o His Britannic Majesty's Consul-General

Odessa

Russia

 

My dear Elsie,

 

I think you will be very proud of me. I have followed your excellent example and given full use of Dalcorn House to your colleagues for use as a hospital. My only stipulations are that I should be allowed to retain my own modest apartment for as long as I require it, and that the hospital is solely for the treatment and convalescence of men of non-commissioned rank. I hold them to be the victims of this insane carnage. I believe the officer class – the aristocracy of this country, of Germany and of Russia – to be responsible for the holocaust which has overtaken Europe and I will not allow their admission to this house where their victims lie in agony.

I write, though, not simply nor chiefly to invite your praise. I am writing to tell you that I am about to die. A cancer has spread from my wasted womb throughout my body and my doctor says that in the next few days, when the pain goes beyond what I wish to bear and I have made a full disposition of my affairs, she will administer a fatal dose of morphine which will draw my life comfortably to a close.

Do not grieve for me, Elsie. I have lived for nearly eighty-three years and with my death the chief business of my life will, at last, reach its final and most satisfactory conclusion.

I think I know you well enough to believe that nothing I can say to you will shock you. If I tell you things which could, before this last illness, have seen me arraigned on capital charges I do so not out of any religious or superstitious feeling that I need to make some form of confession for the good of my eternal soul, but for the simple reason that I believe that, now that I cannot be harmed further, my actions deserve to be recorded and remembered.

I did not grow up with any notion that I should be the inheritor of the title and property of the Dukes of Dornoch, and my path towards that was a crooked and obscure one.

What I did grow up with though, Elsie, was a hatred for the hypocrisy and oppression which I saw every day. I believe we share that passion to redress injustice – it is a great blessing that you have been able to do so in the saving of lives, but for some of us our mission has had to be accomplished by the taking of life.

For as long as I remember I have burned with a hard anger against the cruelties of men. One of my earliest memories is of looking out of the window of my nursery at the back of the big plantation house in Louisiana. My black maid had just dressed me, and I stood at the open window hearing the deep, rhythmic singing of the slaves as they toiled in the fields. I saw my father ride up from the fields on his great black horse. He stopped outside the back door and shouted for his valet – Sam, a kindly man who was married to my nurse. He had to call twice before Sam ran out to take the reins of the horse. As my nurse and I watched he cursed the poor man and thrashed him over the head and shoulders with his horsewhip before dismounting and coming in.

I saw tears in my nurse's eyes as she turned me away from the window. My father ran upstairs to the nursery – as his only child I believe he was fond of me, even though I was a girl. He still had his horsewhip in his hand. He stood at the door, staring at the nurse and for a moment I thought he was about to beat her too until she remembered to curtsey and cast her eyes to the floor.

In retrospect, I believe that was the moment at which I realised that I was part of a class whose whole existence was oppression.

As I grew up I longed to escape. The life which was planned for me would have seen me marry the eldest son of a plantation owner, some bland young man of pleasant manners who would, without thought, kiss the hand of a lady in deference only minutes after having seen to the lynching of a disobedient slave. Our plantations would in due course be united by inheritance, to create an even greater wealth.

I thought that one day I might leave the house forever and find my way to New York or Boston, somewhere where a woman could live by her abilities and choose who or whether to marry. My dreams were interrupted, however, by a new proposal which my father found too advantageous to resist.

For over a century, since the failure of the Jacobite cause, my family had been sundered. On each side of the Atlantic Ocean the Bothwell-Scotts prospered from land and other peoples' labour, separated both by distance and by hereditary enmity. Now, it was proposed that I should marry William, Duke of Dornoch, the head of the Scottish branch of the family. His mother said that no dowry would be required – which pleased my father greatly – and that it would surely be to the advantage of the family that the wealth of both sides would finally be united when I inherited the plantation. The proposal, of course, did not need to say that as a married woman I would be deemed incapable of holding property independently, and that everything would therefore be vested in my husband.

And so I was sent, effectively as high-quality breeding stock, to Scotland. I had mixed feelings on my departure. It was not a change which I had chosen, but there was a strong relief in escaping from the heat and oppression of the plantation. On the voyage I relished standing on deck, the fresh wind blowing salt on my face, and imagined that I might enjoy living in the wild, passionate land of Rob Roy and Flora MacDonald.

Those two weeks crossing the Atlantic were the nearest thing to freedom which I was to experience for years. When I arrived in Scotland I was immediately put under the strict supervision and instruction of William's mother, who trained me in the vapid arts of hospitality and household management with which I was to occupy myself while producing an heir for the family. I was disappointed too in William who seemed from the outset to be resentful of me.

I endured a relationship which veered from disinterest to aggression. In one of his fits of sexual aggression I became pregnant.

For a few weeks William's behaviour to me was almost considerate. That changed when, on going into his dressing room to tell him that I had felt the child's first quickening, I found a telegram which he had left on a table. I picked it up and read it – ‘I must see you. The well at midnight.'

Rather than confront my husband directly I went into the grounds that night to spy on him. I hung back in the darkness beneath the yews and saw him conversing with a hooded woman. He appeared to hand something over before walking away.

I had struck up some friendship with my husband's valet, Warner. He was a thief and a rogue but intelligent, and I think he hated the aristocracy as much as I did. I'd seen him, once, slipping a couple of William's cigars into his pocket when he thought no-one was looking. I told him I'd seen him, and he knew his job depended on me not telling.

I thought Warner, if anyone, would know if William had some mistress he was meeting or bribing. I summoned him and reminded him of his obligation to me. Of course, he claimed not to know anything but when he saw that I was quite determined to see him dismissed without a reference his resolution broke. At length he told me that he thought William had an illegitimate daughter and that it could have been her. He begged me to believe that he knew no more than that and never to let William know that he'd said any such thing.

I confronted William, saying that I'd been restless at night because of the child and had taken some fresh air in the gardens, where I had seen him with a woman. He denied it. I also said I'd heard talk below-stairs about whether he had a daughter. He said any such thing was a lie. I stood my ground and challenged him again. He grabbed me, thrust me against the wall, and slapped and kicked me before storming out leaving me, curled foetally around my unborn child, weeping and bruised on the floor.

That was when my contempt for him burned into hate. What, I thought, can I do which would most hurt him? What are the things which are most important to him?

The answer was clear. Money and heredity.

Well, I thought, I'm going to make sure I get all his money and cut off his heredity.

There is only one death for which I feel any guilt, Elsie. That poor unborn baby had committed no sin. It had lied to no-one, evicted no crofter, cut the wages of no miner. But it was the seed of William's heredity and it had to die. By rights it should have died from its own father's assault, but I had to do the deed myself with an oxytocic of aloes and tansy. I am grateful at least that William believed the miscarriage to have been the result of his actions and that his shrivelled conscience was affected. I made sure, with herbal infusions and douches of alum and sulphate of zinc, that I never conceived again. Perhaps my womb is suffering now as a result of the abuses I subjected it to, but I did what I had to.

William's death was easily enough accomplished. A telegram like the one I had already seen, an unwitnessed meeting in the grounds by the well, and a single shot from my little derringer – such a neat, ladylike little pistol – and let him fall down the well. I knew, indeed planned, that he would be discovered, but had already worked out my longer scheme for attributing guilt.

I did pause for reflection after William's death. His brothers had not afflicted me as directly as he had, so was it fair that they should die? On the other hand, each of them was an oppressor of their fellow man in their own way, with the exception of poor, weak Arthur. And until they had all died I would be a pensioner of the family, reliant on their charity for my comfort and subsistence.

Any indecision which had afflicted me was quashed by Brigadier Frederick Bothwell-Scott's decision, as soon as he inherited the title and estates, to expel me from Dalcorn House. He treated me with a contempt which even William had not been guilty of and would have exiled me permanently to Dornoch Palace, the last aristocratic house before the Arctic Circle, had it not been for Arthur's intervention. I was determined that they all had to die.

It never ceases to astonish me how intelligence and rank are so seldom related, and how easy it is to manipulate a man's mind through his passions. It was simplicity itself to make Frederick believe that I had become attracted to his choleric stupidity. From having wanted to get rid of me, he quickly came to regard me as his lover, or whore. I visited him in his apartments at Edinburgh Castle and led him practically to the point of abandon before insisting that he go to his private lavatory to wash his male member so that I could offer him a further pleasure. Unfortunately for him his ablutions were terminally interrupted when I took the sword from his desk and thrust it through his heart. It was a joy, Elsie, to see his expression fade from expectation to horror as he died, his member still erect.

George was the most intelligent member of the family. Of course, I knew he'd been attracted to me for a long time. To be honest, of all the brothers he was the one I found most sympathetic. He was no radical – if you scratched his veneer of reason you found the prejudices of his class – but you could at least have an intelligent conversation with him. His fascination with photography, and with the supposed spirit world, smoothed my path. I pretended to be able, like him, to hear the whispers of the spirits and to hear their message that he should re-engage with life, mourn his wife a little less and seek a new relationship. The job of persuasion was aided by my offer to sit as his photographic model to help him develop his art. I have to confess that I took some pleasure in the afternoons when we'd drink together, I'd undress for the camera and pose artistically, and then we'd make slow love on the floor of the studio. I always knew, though, that it had to end as soon as I'd set Arthur up to bear the guilt.

Poor Arthur. I felt that he was somehow predestined to be the sacrificial victim for the sins of his family. He'd suffered at their hands, as a child, almost worse than I had. When he told me of the beatings and humiliations he'd received I suppose I felt sorry for him, but only to the extent that perhaps nature feels sorry for the weaker species which fall by the wayside while the strong evolve. He was so pathetically in love with me that sealing his fate felt like killing a puppy. I do like to think that I brought some hope and pleasure to his constrained life before he died.

It was a careful task to make sure that the pathways of suspicion led to him. The pattern of teasing messages accompanying each death – the last one in handwriting copied from a letter he'd sent me. The fact of his being the direct beneficiary of his brothers' deaths. The careful deconstruction of the frail edifice of his beliefs, and my anonymous message to the prosecution counsel about that. The fuelling of his anger and jealousy against George. As I hid in the darkroom during Arthur's last visit to Rock House and heard his anger I hoped that Arthur would finish my task himself, but it sufficed that he had put himself in a position where that could be believed. A single shot from me finished the job.