O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker Read Free Book Online Page B

pine and delicate silver birch, swaying and tossing over grass so green and fine that only harebell and wood anemone could grow there without seeming crude, even blasphemous.
    Once this forest had been the hunting ground of a Scottish king, in the days when Scotland was divided into several kingdoms. A lord called the Mormaer and his family lived then at Auchnasaugh and their son had joined in a plot against the king; for this he was executed, but his parents were exonerated and the king continued to come to Auchnasaugh to hunt the deer. The Mormaer ’ s lady concealed her bitter grief, but from the day of her son ’ s death she wore only the colour green, a colour which the king and his courtiers associated with wanton merriment but which was for her, as for the Greeks and Egyptians, the colour of life and of death, of youth, of love and victory. And so one day, as the king called his hounds aside and plunged his dagger into the quivering throat of a young stag, grounded and bleeding among the moss and the harebells, the Mormaer ’ s lady, hidden in a larch tree in her larch-green dress, hurled her son ’ s hunting spear and transfixed him. Then she was off, leaping and swinging through the high tree branches, on through the forest for a day and a night until she reached the coast and the cliffs and flung herself a hundred feet down into the boulder-strewn breakers. The hounds, who hunted by sight, not scent, saw nothing but their master lying dead beside their quarry and returned to mauling the stag. Over the years occasional travellers claimed to have seen this lady as a flicker of green, gone as the sun passed behind cloud, high in the forest, and she was sometimes invoked by workmen called to deal with the manifold woes of Auchnasaugh – the boiler and its pipes, the crumbling battlements, the damp and the roof. They did not enjoy working in this cold and lonely place and would leave abruptly after one of them had met her vengeful figure stalking the stairs. Janet would have liked to have met her too, but as the ancient Auchnasaugh had long since been burnt to the ground and buried and the current one stood two miles away from its site she felt there was no chance. Indeed, for her Auchnasaugh was a place of delight and absolute beauty, all her soul had ever yearned for, so although she could understand that many a spirit might wish to return to it, and she hoped that in time she too might do so, she felt the circumstances and mood of such visitations could only be joyous. She had no fear of its lofty shadowed rooms, its dim stone passages, its turrets and towers and dank subterranean chambers, dripping with verdigris and haven to rats. So running now down the narrow twisting road through the forest, she looked forward to the moment when it dropped to the dark, secret glen, where the great hills rose steeply on each side and halfway up one of them, hidden by its trees, stood the castle.
     
    *
     
    Hector and Cousin Lila were in the drawing room. Hector had a glass of sherry in hand and Lila was refilling a tumbler from the whisky decanter. Vera peered in through the tall window making gestures at the decanter and the cupboard. She had been cutting the pink roses, which clambered up the front of the central tower and clawed at the windows on wild nights. Roses, azaleas and rhododendrons all grew well at Auchnasaugh, but nothing else did. Vera had planted an orchard at the back, next to the washing green, when they first came there five years ago, and soon all but one of the trees were dead, scorched and blasted by the winds and frozen by the five months of winter snow. The survivor stood, twisted and tortured, producing a few black-spotted leaves each year, a maimed reminder of that pretty dream of apple blossom, a girlish aspiration, an echo of the douceur de vie of the southern regions of Vera ’ s upbringing. ( ‘ Edinburgh suburbs ’ , said Hector when in a bad mood.)
    ‘ Come in for a moment, Janet, and play