Fortnight of Fear by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online Page B

tawny port sauce; or her pigeon breast stuffed with pecan nuts and apples; then you don’t deserve to be a carnivore, like the laird himself.

LAIRD OF DUNAIN
    â€œThe tailor fell thro’ the bed, thimbles an’ a’
    â€œThe blankets were thin and the sheets they were sma’
    â€œThe tailor fell thro’ the bed, thimbles an’ a’
    Out onto the lawns in the first gilded mists of morning came the Laird of Dunain in kilt and sporran and thick oatmeal-colored sweater, his face pale and bony and aesthetic, his beard red as a burning flame, his hair as wild as a thistle-patch.
    Archetypal Scotsman; the kind of Scotsman you saw on tins of shortbread or bottles of single malt whisky. Except that he looked so drawn and gaunt. Except that he looked so spiritually hungry.
    It was the first time that Claire had seen him since her arrival, and she reached over and tapped Duncan’s arm with the end of her paintbrush and said, “Look, there he is! Doesn’t he look
fantastic
?”
    All nine members of the painting class turned to stare at the Laird as he fastidiously patroled the shingle path that ran along the back of Dunain Castle. At first, however, he appeared not to notice them, keeping his hands behind his back and his head aloof, as if he were breathing in the fine summer air, and surveying his lands, and thinking the kind of things that Highland lairds were supposed to think, like how many stags to cull, and how to persuade the Highlands Development Board to provide him with mains electricity.
    â€œI wonder if he’d sit for us?” asked Margot, a rotund frizzy-haired girl from Liverpool. Margot had confessed to Claire that she had taken up painting because the smocks hid her hips.
    â€œWe could try asking him,” Claire suggested – Claire with her straight dark bob and her serious well-structured face. Her husband, her
former
husband, had always said that she looked “like a sensual schoolmistress.” Her painting smock and her Alice-band and her moon-round spectacles only heightened the impression.
    â€œHe’s so
romantic
,” said Margot. “Like Rob Roy. Or Bonnie Prince Charlie.”
    Duncan sorted through his box of watercolours until he found the half-burned nip-end of a cigarette. He lit it with a plastic lighter with a scratched transfer of a topless girl on it. “The trouble with painting in Scotland,” he said, “is that
everything
looks so fucking romantic. You put your heart and your soul into painting Glenmoriston, and you end up with something that looks like a Woolworth’s dinner-mat.”
    â€œI’d still like him to sit for us,” said Margot.
    The painting class had arranged their easels on the sloping south lawn of Dunain Castle, just above the stone-walled herb gardens. Beyond the herb gardens the grounds sloped grassy and gentle to the banks of the Caledonian Canal, where it cut its way between the north-eastern end of Loch Ness and the city of Inverness itself, and out to the Moray Firth. All through yesterday, the sailing-ships of the Tall Ships Race had been gliding through the canal, and they had appeared to be sailing surrealistically through fields and hedges, like ships in a dream, or a nightmare.
    Mr Morrissey called out, “Pay particular attention to the light; because it’s golden and very even just now; but it’ll change.”
    Mr Morrissey (bald, round-shouldered, speedy, fussy)was their course-instructor; the man who had greeted them when they first arrived at Dunain Castle, and who had showed them their rooms (“You’ll
adore
this, Mrs Bright … such a view of the garden …”) and who was now conducting their lessons in landscape-painting. In his way, he was very good. He knew how to sketch; he knew how to paint. He wouldn’t tolerate sentimentality.
    â€œYou’ve not come to Scotland to paint The Monarch of the Glen,” he had told them, when he