‘Tamhas McBride travelled a lot on business, leaving his wife at home,’ Charles continued with his mouth full, brushing sugar from his beard. ‘But she seemed contented enough out there in her big house, according to the letters she sent her younger brother.’
‘That would be Mick’s great-great …’ she paused, trying to calculate.
‘Great-great-grandfather, that’s right. William Drummond. He was ten years younger than his sister and studying theology in Edinburgh – he was intended for the kirk, like his father. William and Ailsa corresponded regularly. Everyone assumed there would soon be a McBride heir and that would keep Ailsa occupied. But they had been married less than a year when Tamhas was drowned. He was on board a ship that went down during a storm in the Atlantic, all hands lost. On his way back from America, as it happens.’ He added this with an encouraging nod, as if it would give her some sense of participation in the story.
‘And he haunts the place?’ She tried to sound light, but it came out nervous and over-excited. Charles chuckled, as you might humour a child.
‘I’ve never heard of Tamhas giving anyone any trouble from beyond the grave.’
‘Then …?’ Zoe found she was gripping her mug tighter.
He uncrossed his legs, leaned back in his chair and recrossed them the other way around.
‘Tamhas McBride’s death was only the beginning. After she was widowed, Ailsa became reclusive. She dismissed all the staff except one maid for housework and laundry, and a woman from the village who came in once a day to cook – despite the fact that Tamhas had left her a rich woman.’
‘She stayed in the house?’
‘Apparently she would walk every day along the cliffs, or sit on the beach drawing – the same scenes over and over, the sky and the sea.’
Zoe felt an odd chill.
‘How do you know all this?’
‘Mick Drummond inherited a remarkable trove of letters and photographs when his father died last year,’ Charles said, running a moistened finger around the edge of his plate to mop up any stray crumbs. ‘Passed down through the generations, though his father had kept them hidden away. There was an unspoken agreement in the family to leave the story buried, though God knows I did my best over the years to persuade old Mr Drummond to part with those papers, without success. Mick offered them to me, knowing my interest, on condition I didn’t publish anything without his permission. He said he had no time for poking through the past.’
‘Does Mick’s family still own the island?’
‘No – I’m afraid the Drummonds have rather fallen from their former glory. The land has all been sold off piecemeal over the decades – most of the centre is National Trust Scotland now, thank goodness, so it’s protected. But he owns the cove where your house is. The McBride land, as it’s known. He either can’t or won’t get rid of that.’
‘So did you find anything good in the letters?’
‘Oh, a great deal. Plenty relating to the McBride case, which has taken on all the colour of a melodrama over the years. I plan to write a book based on the letters one day, but Mick was adamant he didn’t want anything made public yet. I’m hoping he’ll change his mind, of course, but once he’d decided to do up the house, he was afraid any kind of publicity about the case would frighten people away.’ He took a gulp of coffee. ‘Or, worse, attract them. The wrong people. Haunted-house nuts, psychic researchers, amateur detectives – you know the kind.’
‘So it is haunted?’ She pointed at him, triumphant, as if she had tricked him into admission. Charles merely gave her his quiet smile.
‘I’m coming to that. Most of what I’m telling you I’ve gleaned from William Drummond’s letters.’
‘Ailsa’s brother.’
‘Yes. Young William was a prolific correspondent, it seems – first with his father and sister, and later, after the reverend died, with the solicitor who took over the McBride estate. One of the chief subjects of his letters is his sister’s welfare.’
‘So what happened to Ailsa?’
‘Well, at first she kept to herself. Stayed away from the village, turned down all social invitations. Of course, she had become an intriguing prospect, as you may imagine – a wealthy widow living alone in a large house, relatively young, certainly young enough to remarry. As soon as a decent interval had passed, the suitors began paying court. She spurned every advance, according to the maid. Burned letters unopened.’
‘Perhaps she was still grieving her husband,’ Zoe murmured.
‘Perhaps,’ Charles said evenly. ‘She saw her father occasionally, but much less than she used to, and not at all once he became too ill to make the journey out to her. Eight months after Tamhas was drowned, the Reverend Drummond also passed away, from pneumonia. Ailsa McBride finally emerged for his funeral – the first time she’d been seen in the village since they buried her husband – and shocked everyone by turning up in an advanced stage of pregnancy.’
‘Wow.’ She stared at him, eyes wide, the mug halfway to her lips. ‘Was it her husband’s?’
‘Naturally, that’s what everyone wanted to know. But no one quite dared to ask her directly and she never offered an explanation. She wrote to her brother of her “poor fatherless child”, but in the same letter she says “his father will always be watching over him”, which sounds like a sentimental reference to her dead husband. But here’s the bombshell.’ He paused for effect, raising an eyebrow over the top of his cup. ‘Ailsa McBride gave birth to a son nearly eleven months after her husband was buried.’
‘Whoa.’ Zoe sat back. ‘Naughty Ailsa. Unless they miscounted?’
‘The dates are there in the church records. Ten and a half months after the burial. And Tamhas had been away for the best part of two months before he died. You can imagine, in a village like this, the gift that would have been to the gossip mill. But that was the point at which she truly became an outcast.’
‘She doesn’t sound like someone who would have cared too much about that,’ Zoe said.
‘Apparently not. She kept to the house after her son was born. Dismissed the maid, saying she intended to care for the child herself, which of course was unheard of for a woman of means at the time. The maid was less than delighted – there was little work available on the island. It’s my view that much of what was passed down had its roots in malicious rumours put about by the maid in anger at losing her position.’
‘Like what?’ Zoe sat forward, intrigued.
‘Oh, that there was something wrong with the child. Ailsa didn’t send for a midwife – only the maid was present in the house when the child was delivered, and she swore it was stillborn. Ailsa never had the boy baptised either – you can imagine the scandal of that. The cook continued to visit every day but she said she never once heard the child crying, nor ever saw him, though Ailsa was always sewing clothes for him. This went on for a couple of years. This cook said Ailsa McBride was growing stranger and stranger – more remote, as if she was in another world most of the time.’
‘Losing her mind, you mean?’
‘That’s what the new reverend implied in his letter to William Drummond. Though you must remember how quick people were to diagnose madness in women in those days. But even that was principally among educated people. Rough-hewn island folk jumped