Chill Page 10

  “But he hasn’t,” Fiona protested. “It’s Charles. He’s making you believe his lies.”

  “That’s enough Fiona.”

  “But Samuel is my friend!”

  Mrs Morton softened slightly. “All this nonsense has to stop. Samuel has to learn to get along with the boys, without all these arguments.”

  “He has tried. It’s Charles who doesn’t like him.”

  “I won’t have you telling tales, Fiona.”

  “But it’s true!”

  “That’s enough!”

  “If you say so!” Fiona scowled, and stomped off to her room to brood.

  “That’s exactly where you should be, madam!” Chris Morton shouted after her daughter. “You need some time alone to think about the consequences of your actions. And there’ll be no more jaunts with Samuel for a while.”

  But her sons did not get off lightly either. Having dealt with Fiona, she rounded on them angrily.

  “And you two needn’t stand there smirking. Locking your sister up in the summer house in these freezing conditions. Have you any idea how dangerous that could have been? When were you planning to let her out?” Her fury knew no bounds. It was a very black household that day, with everyone banished to their rooms and Chris Morton looking as sour-faced as Samuel had ever seen her. He decided to make himself scarce. It felt as if the whole of Dunadd lay under a dark cloud, and he wondered if it was his fault. Everyone had been getting on fine before he came along. Now everything was ruined.

  Back at the cottage Isabel watched him as he took off his boots in the narrow flagged kitchen.

  “Things not exactly going well between you and the boys at the moment?”

  Samuel shrugged. “You could say that!”

  “Try to be patient with them,” she murmured. “They’ll come round eventually.”

  “I have been patient. I mean, I am being.”

  She sighed. “There’s something bothering those boys.” She put her book down on the arm of the sofa. “Maybe it’s something to do with their father’s death.”

  “Is that my fault?”

  “No, but …” she looked out of the window, and sighed again. “If only it would stop snowing long enough for the roads to clear. Then we could get you all off to school. It’s like a pressure cooker at the moment. You just need some distraction.”

  “S’pose,” he mumbled, disappearing down the corridor to his room.

  Isabel stared after him. Being his usual communicative self, she thought as she stared into the heart of the stove.

  Samuel felt wretched and lonely. Fiona was not allowed out to see him, and he missed her badly. He had no one to discuss it all with, the questions and thoughts that were buzzing around his head. He still had the ebony box in his possession, the worn leather bag, the ring and the tartan safely stowed away inside it, along with the pages of the journal. What if the Mortons suspected something, and realized it had gone missing from its usual place in the library? Did they even know about it? Samuel wasn’t sure. There had been so much dust on the lid when he first discovered the box that it looked as if it hadn’t been touched in years. He thought about going down to visit Lynns Farm on his own, without Fiona, but he couldn’t do that. He would just have to wait until he could arrange to see her again.

  Later that afternoon, as he was collecting firewood for the stove, he heard a footstep behind him and spun round. He thought at first it might be Fiona, but Sebastian was standing there, looking sheepish.

  “What do you want?” Samuel said.

  “Look, I’m really sorry about what happened at the waterfall, you know.”

  Samuel turned his back, and continued to pick up firewood.

  “It’s a pity we can’t all just be friends, really,” Sebastian went on.

  “That’s rich,” Samuel muttered. “Coming from you.”

  Sebastian looked awkward. “I suppose that did come out a big wrong. Look, I just wanted to say … Charles gets so worked up about things, that’s all.”

  “I’ve noticed!” Then he looked Sebastian in the eye. “Why do you always do what he says all the time?”

  Sebastian lowered his eyes. “He’s my brother. He gets easily offended.”

  “So you let him bully you?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “What is it like then?” Samuel asked. “I just don’t get it.”

  Sebastian sighed. “Charles doesn’t trust anyone. He’s frightened all the time. Our father’s death, and the way he died, well, it frightens him. If I turned against him as well, he’d never get over it.”

  “He would,” Samuel said. “In time. People always do. Anyway, you can’t let him bully you all your life.”

  Sebastian ignored this. “He’s right about the farm, though. You shouldn’t go there alone. Or with Fiona. It’s dangerous.”

  Samuel turned away from him.

  “You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?” Sebastian added. “Like try to go to Lynns Farm on your own?”

  “Of course not,” Samuel lied. But he was making his plans. If Fiona wasn’t allowed out to see him, he would have to go alone.

  “Looks like we might be able to get you to school soon,” Isabel remarked later that day, glancing out of the window.

  Samuel looked up, his heart sinking.

  “School?” he said.

  “Yes. You remember. That building with classrooms? I’ve been listening to the radio. Looks like a thaw might set in before the end of the week. Thank God! I’m beginning to forget what the rest of the world looks like.”

  Samuel looked crestfallen.

  “It’ll be good for you,” she went on. “You’ll make new friends. It’ll take your mind off things.” By “things” she was clearly referring to his troubles with Charles and Sebastian. She didn’t know all of the details – Chris Morton had not spoken to her about it yet – but she could make an intelligent guess as to how things stood.

  So their long winter of isolation was coming to an end. And perhaps he would never have time to find out the truth about Catherine Morton after all.

  Samuel was sitting in his room the next morning, trying to read. He couldn’t concentrate, his mind wouldn’t focus. Suddenly, there was a knocking sound on his window. He sat up on the bed and saw Fiona’s face peering in at him from beneath a brightly-striped woolly hat.

  “Quick. Let me in!” she mouthed through the glass. He flung open the window, and a pile of powdery-dry snow fell into his room.

  “Help me up,” she grunted, as she hauled herself in over the window sill.

  “I thought you were grounded!”

  “I am, but I couldn’t stand it any more. We’re going to Lynns Farm today, and that’s that. I’ve made up my mind. You weren’t thinking of going on your own, were you?” she added then, glancing at him suspiciously.

  “Of course not,” Samuel said.

  “Because I’d hate to think I was missing out on anything. And anyway, it wouldn’t be safe on your own.”

  “I know. That’s what I was thinking. That’s why the thought never crossed my mind.”

  Her eyes narrowed, and she cuffed him round the head.

  “What was that for?”

  “It’s good to see you again,” was all she said.

  Samuel grinned. “You too.”

  “If Mum finds out I’m missing, I’ll be in big trouble.”

  “She can’t keep you locked up forever.”

  “I don’t know. My family are good at that. Listen, if we want to go to Lynns Farm, I reckon we should go now.”

  They kept to the trees as they made their way down to the waterfall. They crossed the lane, and then climbed the wide five-bar gate into the fields beyond. The wind still carried the sting of the arctic in it, and their faces froze.

  The roar of water travelling beneath ice met their ears. The Wharry Burn had cut a rocky gorge into the hillside at this point, and they avoided this, knowing how dangerous it could be for a person who didn’t
know the moor well. In the deep snow you could walk right off the precipice without realizing it was there.

  Fiona kept glancing nervously over her shoulder.

  “What if anyone’s followed us?”

  “They won’t.”

  “You’re right,” she said, trying to take courage. “Besides, they wouldn’t dare do that to me again.” When Samuel saw her blue eyes flash with fury like that, he could believe it.

  “You’re really scary when you’re angry, did you know that?” Samuel murmured.

  They skirted the side of the ravine, and slid down the sloping bank beside the waterfall.

  They went right to the water’s edge, beneath the waterfall itself, and stared up at it.

  Samuel thought of the last time he had been here. He shivered with cold.

  “Can you believe we sometimes swim here, in the summer?” Fiona said.

  “Imagine doing that now!”

  “No thanks!”

  Around them the land rose up steeply so that they were in a dip of the moor, surrounded on all sides by high ridges, almost like a room with walls. Samuel kept looking up as he had done last time, half-expecting to see soldiers or figures on the crest of the hill, or more likely her brothers re-appearing.

  “It’s strange how I always feel watched here,” he said, looking around. “There’s something about this place.”

  “This is where the Government army camped the night before the battle,” Fiona said. “There’s an atmosphere here, isn’t there?”

  Samuel looked up at the high ridges and nodded.

  “And what was it all for?” she went on. Neither side had claimed a victory in the end. After a day of pointless fighting and massive loss of life, the Duke of Argyll didn’t even bother to turn up the next day to renew the fighting. His men simply drifted off, unwilling to fight another day.

  Fiona bent down and kicked aside the snow to reveal a ring of stones that had formed the site of an old campfire.

  “That was us last summer, before you moved in,” she said. “Me and the boys camped out here one night. We had a fire and cooked sausages. It was great fun.” She looked sad for a moment, as if she was remembering a time when she had got on better with her brothers than she did at the moment. Something had come between them. Life had soured at Dunadd.

  “It’s my fault, isn’t it?” Samuel said, looking guilty.

  He couldn’t help thinking that the three Morton children had been wandering this moor for years before he came along. They were born here, and knew no other life. This was everything to them, everything they had ever known.

  Fiona shook her head. “This place is a million times better since you came.”

  But still she looked sad about her brothers.

  “Are we going to visit this Lynns Farm or not?” she said, goading them into action.

  “Should we have phoned first?” Samuel said as they followed the course of the Wharry Burn. “Let him know we’re coming? After all, your mother says he’s a bitter, cantankerous old man.”

  “It’s probably best he doesn’t know. We’ll just turn up.”

  “That’s true. And if he doesn’t like it, we leave.”

  “And the shotgun?” Fiona added, almost jokingly.

  “We’ll worry about that one later.”

  They looked up at the horizon where a weak winter sun was climbing steadily into the sky. Lynns Farm lay somewhere beyond the waterfall, in a hollow, so that it was impossible to see it at all from the road.

  As they made their way beside the burn, a figure watched them from above. Had they turned their heads they would have seen him standing there, dark against the snow. Charles watched them, and again he suffered the strange vision he’d seen earlier, like a flashback or some long-buried memory from a time before. A horse with an unknown rider, pounding its way towards the ravine …

  The waters of the Wharry Burn babbled and gurgled beneath the ice, as Fiona and Samuel made their way into the gully.

  Finally the farmhouse came into view, a small low-lying whitewashed building with several chimneys and low eaves. It lay in shadow, as if the sun rarely got this far beyond the trees. No birds sang. It seemed a very dark and secretive place, as if no postman, milkman or delivery van ever came here.

  The farmyard looked neglected and deserted, broken bits of machinery and farm equipment lay around, unused. The windows of the house were blank and staring, and Fiona and Samuel surveyed the gloomy scene in silence, wondering what to do next. They left the cover of the trees and began to walk forward. They had to pluck up courage to cross the empty yard towards the house, in full view of those windows. Suddenly a big black vicious-looking dog emerged from an open door and hurled itself towards them, snarling and gnashing its teeth. It was yanked back on its chain, having run as far as it could. The children stood rooted to the spot.

  The figure of an elderly man appeared from the shadows, and squinted his eyes to see what the noise was about.

  “Quiet, dog,” he growled in a low voice, and the dog instantly fell silent.

  The two groups regarded each other in silence across the empty farmyard.

  The man spoke first. “What do you want?”

  “We’re from Dunadd. The house up on the hill?”

  The man looked at them suspiciously. “Oh aye? And what are you doing here?”

  “We came to see a Mr MacFarlane.”

  “You’re looking at ‘im.”

  “Oh good. You see, we … we’ve come for a reason …”

  “Have ye now?” was all he said in reply.

  “We need to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “Well, it’s a bit difficult really …” Samuel began.

  “Ach, it’s not that mother of yours again? Thinks she owns the whole moor. Well, I’m tellin’ ye now, she doesn’t own this bit of it.”

  Fiona cut in, deciding it was best to get straight to the point. “My mother doesn’t know we’re here, Mr MacFarlane. We have a ghost at Dunadd, a weeping woman who paces the corridors.” Mr MacFarlane appeared to be listening intently. “Samuel has heard her, and a figure has been seen up at the windows of Dunadd.”

  “Aye. I’ve seen her.”

  Fiona and Samuel stared at him.

  “When?”

  “When the family’s been away in the past. At first I wondered if it was maybe Mrs Hughes cleaning. The figure just stands there at the drawing room windows, a woman in a long blue gown.”

  “That’s her,” Samuel said.

  “We found some pages of a journal belonging to a girl called Catherine Morton.”

  The old man looked up, his eyes glinting. He seemed intrigued by this.

  “And a little leather bag in our library,” Fiona went on, “an old relic of some kind which we thought might be connected to her. It contained a ring wrapped in a piece of Jacobite tartan.”

  Mr MacFarlane didn’t seem at all surprised by this news, and merely nodded. “You’d better come in,” and he led the way into his dark farmhouse, into a low-roofed kitchen with blackened beams on the ceiling.

  They pulled up chairs at a big wooden table, and Mr MacFarlane proceeded to fill a kettle for tea.

  “So it’s the past ye’re wanting to dig up now, is it? To find out some of the secrets they don’t discuss at Dunadd? I guess that after all these years you Mortons had been hoping they’d be forgotten, hey?”

  “Forgotten? What secrets?”

  Mr MacFarlane sighed and said: “You’ve never heard about it then? Aye, I wondered ….” He took a deep breath. “It’s a love story, I suppose. A tragic tale. A Morton woman from Dunadd fell in love with a MacFarlane from Lynns Farm about three hundred years ago. It could only end in tragedy of course, and that’s exactly what happened.”

  “I’ve never heard this story before,” Fiona said uncertainly.

  Mr MacFarlane gave a bitter laugh. “Have ye not?”

  He laughed again. “Ach, well, I suppose it’s only to be expected.”


  “What is?”

  “It’s what the Mortons would have wanted, for the story to disappear without trace, but your weeping woman wouldn’t leave them alone. She cannit rest until her story is resolved and the family make amends.”

  “Amends for what?” Fiona cried, confused.

  “For forbidding her to love a common farmer, and killing her into the bargain.”

  A shocked silence fell, and Mr MacFarlane turned his back on them and began to pour boiling water into a teapot.

  “Does my mother know about this?” Fiona repeated dumbly.

  Mr MacFarlane watched her in silence.

  “What type of a ring was it you found?” he asked instead.

  “It’s silver, twisted into a lover’s knot, with a Celtic pattern engraved on it. Very simple and beautiful.”

  He nodded again, sagely. “Aye, that’s the one.” Then he poured cups of tea and took his place at the table with a great sigh.

  “So you found a journal then?”

  “Not the whole thing. We found some pages torn from it. It was written by a twelve-year-old girl, Catherine Morton.”

  Mr MacFarlane shook his head in amazement. “That’s her! I never knew there was a journal,” he whispered in awe. “I’d like to see it, if I may?”

  Fiona and Samuel nodded, relieved that the old man was proving to be not nearly as terrifying as they’d imagined. “There’s a story in my family, passed down through the generations,” he began. “An ancestor of mine in 1714 or thereabouts, fell in love with a Morton woman from the Dunadd estate. She was Catherine, the youngest child of the laird, Sir Charles Morton. Patrick MacFarlane worked as a stable boy at Dunadd and they’d become close as children, running about the moor together all day long, to the horror of Catherine’s parents. When they grew up, they fell in love.”

  “What happened to them?” Samuel asked.

  “The Mortons found out, and she was punished.”

  “How was she punished?” Fiona asked timidly.

  “She was locked up in Dunadd, prevented from ever leaving the house again, even for a breath of fresh air. Before that the pair used to meet in secret on the moor. They were married secretly by the waterfall. Patrick gave her the ring and swore they would be together one day and live on Sheriffmuir, enjoying it like they always had as children. Ach, well, life wasn’t as simple as all that. Catherine had two very headstrong brothers who helped to enforce their father’s will. They followed her one day to their secret meeting place by the waterfall. She was dragged home to Dunadd, and Patrick was severely beaten.”