“Can’t you find any intermediary but a Glasgow solicitor?”
“Why, Hugh, somehow I got in touch with a retired major or captain – Indian Army, I think – who wrote that he might do my business for me. He seemed to want his palm greased. His name was George Hare, or George Mare, or something of that sort.”
Logan rubbed his chin. “In Glasgow? There was a criminal case, if I’m not mistaken – something to do with state secrets, or vexing little girls, or some nasty affair – in Scotland, a year or two ago, with the defendant a cashiered Indian Army officer – and that sort of name. I may have a clipping about it in my files. I’m not sure, though, that the name was either Hare or Mare. A captain, I think.”
“For all I know, Hugh, this may be your man: anyway, though I greased his palm in moderation, I’ve never had a line from him since. He said he knew Lady MacAskival. So that’s a bribe down the drain. Now will you take my shilling?”
“All right: I’ll take my innocence to Carnglass.” Smiling, Logan turned back to the map on the big desk. “There still are MacAskivals in the island, then? And what sort of cousin of yours is this Lady MacAskival?”
“Call me Duncan, Hugh,” MacAskival said, “if you’ll really take up the business for me. No, there’s not a real MacAskival left in Carnglass, so far as I can learn. Lady MacAskival was born Miss Ann Robertson; her family owned distilleries, money-makers. It was a queer match when she married Colonel Sir Alastair MacAskival, Indian Army, who was old enough to be her father, or more. Sir Alastair had scars and medals, but nothing besides. Though he was chief of the Mac-Askivals – and there’s precious few of that little clan left – he was born in a but-and-ben in North Uist. I get all this from an Edinburgh genealogist. Sir Alastair’s great-grandfather ran through his property so as to keep up a fine show in London. The Great Clearance of Carnglass was in 1780 – that’s when my people were booted out, you remember – and it was the work of that old reprobate Donald MacAskival, our Sir Alastair’s great-grandfather: he turned the whole island into two big farms and a sheepwalk, on the chance of squeezing more money from the rents, and told all the crofting MacAskivals to go to Hell or Glasgow. A few had the money for steerage passage to Nova Scotia, which eventually made me president of MacAskival Iron Works. My father was a pushing Scot, and so am I – and you, too, Hugh.”
“So Ann Robertson brought money back to the Mac-Askivals more than a hundred years after the Clearance?”
“Not simply money, Hugh, but Carnglass itself. What little extra Donald MacAskival contrived to wring out of the rents after the Great Clearance did him no good. He died bankrupt; and the creditors took Carnglass. His son sank down to being the factor for a small laird in North Uist, and there the family lived on, hand to mouth, until young Alastair went out to India and got some reputation for himself along the Northwest Frontier. When he was past forty, he sailed home to Edinburgh on leave. There he met Ann Robertson, and married her, and they bought back Carnglass with Robertson money, and restored Old House of Fear.”
Logan bent over the map to find the tiny square that marked the Old House. “That’s an uneasy name, Duncan, for an ironmaster who wants peace and quiet.”
“But it’s a brave old house, Hugh. And the name is Gaelic, not English: ‘fear’ is spelled ‘fir’ or ‘fhir,’ sometimes, and it means ‘man.’ Old House of Fear is Old House of Man. Old! Why, the foundations of the oldest tower go back to Viking times. The Norsemen took Carnglass in 799 or thereabouts. But there was some sort of chief’s house – Picts or whatever they were – before then. There’s a tale in the island that Carnglass was Eden: man started there, and woman too, I suppose. But Carnglass hasn’t many living souls today. Old Donald MacAskival swept off five hundred people – MacAskivals and MacLeods and MacDonalds – in the Great Clearance, which left only thirty or forty souls, all named MacAskival, in the whole island. There still were twenty or thirty of their descendants living in Carnglass when Alastair and Ann bought it back. But Ann, Lady MacAskival, isn’t much of a hand for company, it seems; because when Sir Alastair died, in 1914, she got rid of what MacAskival crofters were left. Off they went to a smaller island, Daldour, three miles south across the Sound of Carnglass, one soaking peat-bog: if Carnglass was Eden, Daldour was Hell. And there they are still, for all I know, if they haven’t starved. Our Lady MacAskival, who’s over eighty now, lives alone at the Old House with only a handful of Lowland and English servants, according to what I could learn from Edinburgh. She never leaves Carnglass. And she doesn’t often answer letters.”
“Then she’s not even a cousin of sorts to you?”
“Not she. The chiefs of MacAskival were of Norse stock – the name’s Norse, at least. And she’s from the Lowlands. Sir Alastair and she never had children – I gather, besides, there wasn’t much love lost between them – and she has no heirs, so far as I can find. And anyway, Hugh, the odds are that I’m a Pict or a Scot, not a Viking. The island people generally took the chief’s name for a surname, though they might have no blood connection, I don’t mean to set up for chief of Clan MacAskival: my people were fishermen or crofters who got themselves killed, now and then, in MacAskival’s feuds. Old Donald MacAskival’s father was out for the Pretender in ’45, which is one reason why Donald went so deep in debt and made the Clearance. No, all I want is to live in the Old House and look across the Sound of Carnglass, Hugh. That’s the dream that I want you to buy for me.”
“The Old House is liveable, then, Duncan?”
“Sound enough, they say, though hardly anyone but Lady MacAskival and her servants has seen the inside of it since 1914. That Edinburgh man couldn’t find any photographs for me later than 1914.” MacAskival pulled open a drawer. “There they are: not very good pictures, taken the year Sir Alastair died. It seems to have been foggy that day.”
“I presume it usually is foggy in your tight little island, Duncan,” Logan said as he took up the half-dozen old prints. “There’s no inhabited island further out into the Atlantic.” Foggy, yes; and yet the great bulk of Old House of Fear loomed distinctly enough in the middle ground of the photograph. Carnglass meant “gray stone,” and the whole stern mass of masonry was of a gray that blended into the outcrop of living rock upon which the Old House was built. But the castle was not of a single period. The first photograph showed, on the left, an enormous square tower of rubble, capped by a high-pitched roof apparently sheathed with stone slabs. At one corner of this tower, a little turret stood up, perhaps covering the top of a stair in the thickness of the wall; Logan knew something about Scottish medieval architecture. To this great tower was joined a range of domestic buildings, three stories high, with dormers and crowstepped gables, also built of gray rubble: early seventeenth-century work, Logan thought. A smaller square tower closed the range. And then, abruptly tacked upon the right side of the smaller tower, commenced a mansion-house of ashlar, with small barred windows on the ground floor but very large windows of plate glass above; this was in the Scottish “baronial” style of Victorian times, yet carried out with some taste and not altogether disharmonious with the medieval and seventeenth-century buildings. A large door in the middle of this latterday façade seemed wide enough for a carriage to pass through; perhaps it led to an interior courtyard. “All this on the right is Sir Alastair’s addition?” Logan asked.
“Yes,” said MacAskival, “and the place is bigger even than it looks: there’s a courtyard behind, with buildings all round. The Robertson distilleries paid for it. When Sir Alastair and his wife bought back the island, the original castle hadn’t been lived in for seventy years or more, and the roof was collapsing but they put everything in shape and made the place twice as big. I suppose old Lady MacAskival rattles about in it now. Even though she’s one of the richest old women in Britain, income tax and surtax won’t let her keep much more than five thousand pounds’ income, and that probably only pays the servants she has left, and for her food. She has trouble finding help, by the way, I hear. It’s not everyone who wants to scrub floors in Old House of Fear.”
“And you want a white mastodon?”
“Only to die in,” MacAskival told him, cheerfully. “Every man to his