The Wild Island Read online

  'Wait downstairs then.'

  He went.

  It was while Jemima was in the process of tying her dark blue silk kimono tightly round her that she found the note. It was written on a scrap of paper which looked like a fly-leaf torn hastily from an old book. She recognized the handwriting from the note which Clementina had shown her. It said quite simply. I’ll be back. H.B.B.'

  And that was all. Which got her precisely nowhere, except to inform her that the Colonel's departure had evidently - if unflatteringly - been voluntary. It was not even all that unflattering if you took into account his avowed intention, not yet carried out, to return. As for his departure being voluntary, that was not exactly a surprise: deep sleeper as she might be, particularly under certain agreeable circumstances, including the unaccustomed draughts of whisky, she could never have believed that Colonel Henry had been abducted literally from her side without waking her.

  So why had he gone voluntarily into the power of the Red Rose? And who had summoned him? And how ?

  Later in the drawing room, over coffee for two made by

  Jemima and drunk happily but not particularly gratefully by Ben, she said, ‘And since then, no word?'

  'You were our last hope. Mum said I should check first.' Ben's tone changed. 'He wasn't - of course it sounds silly - I suppose he wasn't taken forcibly from here, was he?' For a moment Jemima did not understand why he sounded embarrassed. She looked down. He was holding one of the Colonel's silver gilt buttons in his hand; he was not exactly extending it towards her, more twisting it in his hand. He had, presumably, found it on the hearthrug or thereabouts.

  'No, nothing forcible took place here,' replied Jemima in her most even voice. Their eyes met. Behind Jemima's ironic regard lurked the ghost of a smile. Ben Beauregard returned it.

  'Then I'd better tackle my fair cousin Clementina in her castle lair. No, correction, in our castle lair.'

  Jemima took a decision.

  'No, we'll both do that. I have one or two questions to ask Queen Clementina myself.'

  She did not at this point care to mention the commission given to her by Clementina Beauregard, and, it had to be said, tacitly accepted by Jemima Shore: a commission of investigation into the murder of Charles Beauregard in which Henry Beauregard was the prime suspect. Now not only was Henry Beauregard vindicated by his transformation into the victim but, as regards the second local death - the apparently accidental death of Bridie Stuart - Jemima was beginning to have hideous doubts as to whether Clementina herself might not be implicated. The presence of the dog Flora could not be easily dismissed. The girl was surely crazy enough for anything, with her accusations, her obsessions, and now her involvement with the more way-out form of Scottish Nationalism, including a possible kidnapping.

  Charles Beauregard had taken drugs; during Jemima's one and only encounter with Clementina, the girl had depended on nothing more lethal than a vast quantity of Rothmans cigarettes in a very short time. That proved nothing. The habit of drug-taking was easily inculcated.

  In jeans, brown cowboy boots and a thin cream-coloured jersey under her white Burberry, Jemima hoped she would present a formidable aspect to Queen Clementina.

  It was, however, Castle Beauregard which presented the formidable aspect. Seen from the shores of the loch, as they drove up the winding path to its eminence, it began to remind her of the castle in the Disney film Snow White, the first film she had ever seen and thus she supposed inevitably one of the, formative visual influences in her life.

  Whoever built it had not spared a Victorian/mediaeval detail. Quite apart from the flowering and springing buttresses and turrets, there was even a drawbridge and a portcullis. From the battlements hung a flag together with various other trophy-like objects of indeterminate nature.

  'Imagine building this!' exclaimed Jemima. 'One wonders what the original castle looked like.'

  'The site of the old Castle Tamh was slightly different. To the north: like all old Scottish dwellings, seeking shelter from the wind, as well as the enemy. Where the garden now is. The old castle itself was knocked down in the sixteenth century. The Frasers or some local despots came and blitzed it during one of their endless feuds. A heap of masonry was all that remained on the site. Bonnie Prince Charlie and Sighing Marjorie are supposed to have trysted in the ruins - before Culloden, when her father was still alive and too busy chaperoning her for any hanky-panky to take place at Eilean Fas. By now all the stones have been used for garden seats and grottoes and sun-dials, etc etc, in the white rose garden.'

  He paused and said very angrily, stepping on the accelerator of the Land-Rover, 'Red rose garden. But it won't be for much longer. We'll change all that. The white roses will be back at Castle Beauregard next summer. Even if it costs a packet to replace them. You'll see.' As Colonel Henry had said, he would be back. The Beauregards had a taste for return. .

  'Tell me about the Beauregard Armoury. Young Duncan mentioned it,' Jemima said to change the subject.

  'Collected by my great-grandfather,' replied Ben.4 Worth a fortune.' Jemima noticed with curiosity that the value of absolutely anything was never far from Ben's conversation: the relic no doubt of his poverty-stricken over-brothered childhood. Or was it a Scottish characteristic? But she had never heard Guthrie Carlyle make a single reference to the monetary value of anything - only to the artistic value of anything and, late at night after a good deal of red wine, to the moral value of everything.

  'God knows what Clementina and her gang of local layabouts led by Lachlan have done with the guns,' he concluded. 'Sold them no doubt.'

  As if in direct and contradictory answer to Ben's offhand remark, there was a sharp crack, and then another, a sound more like an explosion than a bullet. At what seemed to be one and the same moment, the Land-Rover slewed violently to the left and into the ditch beside the narrow road leading up to the Castle. Jemima was jolted violently and ended up falling across Ben Beauregard.

  There was the sound of running feet and a group of men appeared, surrounding the Land-Rover. Among them Lachlan was prominent. He went to the driving seat. Another man, whom Jemima vaguely recognized, opened the door of the Land-Rover from the left and made a grab towards her. He had red hair and a thin face, paler than the rest of his associates -or perhaps it was the hair which emphasized his pallor.

  The familiar rose-and-bloodstained t-shirts were back in force. But it was symptomatic of the new violence of the occasion that there were no flowers now behind their ears. There was one much older man present, inappropriately dressed in a t-shirt. Jemima suddenly recognized Young Duncan.

  At the wheel Ben Beauregard was struggling violently, and so frenetic were his gestures that Jemima was terrified the already listing Land-Rover would heel over completely. Above their heads the portcullis gate yawned; could those heavy iron spikes which fringed it actually be for real ? There was another flag, a placard with something written on it in

  Gaelic, and a dangling heavy object supporting another placard.

  'Aye, Lachlan, tie him up and take them both into the Castle,' said the red-haired man in a tone of authority. 'Then we'll pull up the drawbridge.' Jemima suddenly remembered him as the somewhat mysterious figure who had entered and left St Margaret's by the side door on the day of the funeral.

  'Leave us alone,' cried Jemima, desperately beginning to struggle in her turn as she saw some hefty ropes being applied - not gently at all - to Ben Beauregard. One of the ropes, intentionally or not, was drawn across his mouth and acted as a kind of gag. 'Leave him alone. You're tearing him. Oh God. Wherever is Colonel Henry ?' she added in a voice more like a wail than a cry. 'Colonel Henry would soon sort you all out.'

  'Aye, you may well ask that, Miss Jemima Shore,' commented Lachlan, 'seeing as you have now joined the ranks of his numerous wummin and strumpets.' There was a note of vicious prurience, a horrid gloating delight in his voice. He came around the Land-Rover to her side and, taking her two hands, jerked them quite savagely behind her. H
is eyes, small, cold and blue, gazed at her in a way which was both disapproving and covetous. The respect he had shown to her on all previous occasions had quite gone. He addressed her, Jemima thought suddenly, in a confused mixed image, as John Knox might have addressed the woman taken in adultery. Half disapprovingly. Half lustfully.

  'How dare you touch her?' Ben's voice under the rope was glottal, strangled, but still violent.

  'If we were mindful to touch her, which we are not, there's no' a thing you can do about it, Mr Ben Beauregard,' said the red-haired man in a voice full of contempt. 'It's the Red Rose is in power here, not the laird, I'll have ye know.'

  'In the absence of Colonel Henry, where is Miss Beauregard herself?' enquired Jemima in the coolest voice she could muster. 'I demand to be taken before her.'

  The men exchanged looks. Lachlan whispered with the red-haired man. There appeared to be some form of divided command.

  'Aeneas and I agree that we'll take you to her,' said Lachlan.

  'And what's going to happen to Mr Ben ?' pursued Jemima.

  Lachlan, the man called Aeneas and the rest, even Young Duncan, favoured Berrwith a sardonic quizzical stare. There was a short laugh from someone.

  'Him. Aye, mebbe we'll send him to join his father,' said one of them.

  'And where might that be?' The pretence of boldness had made Jemima actually feel bolder. By way of reply, Lachlan jerked his thumb upwards.

  With a feeling of total nausea, Jemima realized that the heavy object revolving slowly in the wind above them, hanging upright from the battlements, was in fact a body: a body wearing a jacket of black velvet on which no doubt there were silver buttons, a body wearing a kilt. Colonel Henry Beauregard would not after all be able to keep his promise to her to return.

  CHAPTER 14

  Danger

  Rope serrating the corners of his mouth, Ben Beauregard continued to stare upwards at the body of his father swinging above their heads from the portcullis. To Jemima, he seemed extraordinarily cool.

  'It's the dummy,' he said, his voice strangled but still audible. 'The dummy from the castle attic. Uncle Carlo and Dad had it made for target practice when they were boys. She dressed it up. A shabby trick.'

  Jemima found she was trembling violently. Tears had begun to form in her eyes. She wanted to control them.

  'It's maybe a dummy, a grand stuffed body, but it's a warning to you all the same,' commented the man called Aeneas grimly. 'So shall all the lairds hang one day from the battlements when the Red Rose reigns over Scotland. And the Scottish people shall enjoy the freedom of their own land: with no lairds to harry them and drive them from their crofts.' It sounded like the beginning of a speech.

  'A new Scotland under the rule of their new sovereign her Majesty Queen Clementina,' added Lachlan quickly, rather too quickly, interrupting him.

  'Up the Red Rose,' chimed in Duncan, 'and may the White run Red. Colonel Henry was ever a reasonable man. I'm sure he'll be joining the Red Rose any day now and giving us our lodges for our own. There's no one I'd sooner work for than the Colonel, if I owned my own wee lodge.'

  Relief was gradually calming the trembling of Jemima's limbs. Her mind too was regaining its alertness. It was clear to her that even within the gun-laden party now marching towards the vast baronial door of the Castle there were three shades of opinion. While Aeneas, surname and origins unknown, concentrated on the land-for-the-people aspect of Scottish independence - in Jacobin as well as Jacobite terms -Lachlan had from their first meeting shown a kind of romanticism, even reverence, of a very different order. As for Young Duncan, Jemima remembered his fervent recitation of the slogan of the Red Rose on her original journey up the valley. What she had then taken for sycophancy was evidently conviction of a sort. But Young Duncan's conviction was strictly from the point of view of his own prosperity. He had no further axe to grind, no animus against his employer Colonel Henry and no particular reverence for Queen Clementina.

  The man called Aeneas equated the Red Rose with the Red Flag - social revolution, in short. For Lachlan Stuart, son of the dead Bridie with her Beauregard loyalties, the two flags were worlds apart.

  So must the earlier army of Prince Charles Edward Stuart also have been divided, into revolutionaries, romantics and self-seekers...

  The sight of the enormous entrance hall to Castle Beauregard obliterated these thoughts for the time being. Here was the Beauregard Armoury in all its martial splendour. Circles, whorls and cascading spirals of guns and other weapons were pinioned to the walls. Guns were not the sole weapons displayed. Gleaming knives, long pikes, vicious-looking bayonets demonstrated the long history of the art of war. The few weapons of defence exhibited - a shield or two from an earlier age - looked oddly out of place. The martial spirit as interpreted by the Beauregard Armoury was pre-eminently one of attack, not defence.

  Here and there the elaborate artistry with which the armoury had been arranged on the walls had been despoiled. A number of guns were missing from their positions as the spokes of a series of rising wheels directly abutting the general's picture. These were the guns in the hands of Lachlan, Aeneas and their companions which continued to menace Ben and Jemima as they trod warily through the hall.

  The impression of mediaeval vastness did not fade as the party left the hall and began to ascend a broad stone staircase, on the walls of which huge flags of indeterminate royal and Scottish nature were hung. No expense of royal Victorian spirit had been spared in building this fantasy palace.

  Lachlan stuck a thumb in the direction of a narrow arch giving a glimpse of descending stone steps.

  'That way to the dungeon.' hesaid. After a moment Jemima realized that he was not joking. As they reached the crest of the great staircase, two portraits dominated the entrance to what was presumably the Great Drawing Room. Or the Great Library. It scarcely needed the gold label affixed to the ornate frame to inform Jemima that here was the founding father of the Beauregard family - if you believed the legend - Bonnie Prince Charlie himself.

  Only, this portrait was in itself a Victorian fantasy. Magnificent in tartan, many different shades and patterns of it combined, bedizened with sporran, plaid, dirks and daggers, Celtic brooches and the rest, as well as Victorian whiskers, moustache and beard, his Majesty King Charles III (as the label termed him) was depicted as a portly nineteenth-century Coburg, more an Edward VII than an eighteenth-century Stuart. The background of the picture contained a large red velvet throne and a couple of dogs, too lean for labradors, straining at leashes held by a couple of tartan-clad retainers. No, thought Jemima, life up the Glen for Bonnie Prince Charlie was never like this; but the picture would do very nicely on a whisky bottle.

  There was a companion piece, equally splendidly Victorian in its concept and execution. Here Sighing Marjorie - for it could be no other - with flowing chestnut hair, a baby in her arms, delicate white gown and tartan shawl, cowered over a waterfall while a force of red-coated soldiers stood rather woodenly by. The background of this picture consisted of a vivid impression of Castle Beauregard at sunset. Looking at the leading soldier's stolid expression, Jemima was irresistibly tempted to caption it: 'Go on, jump then.'

  Entering the Great Library, her first surprise was to rediscover immediately the red velvet throne featured in the Prince's picture.

  Clementina Beauregard was seated negligently on it, her pale face and hair set off by the crimson canopy louring over her head. She was smoking the stub of a cigarette. The curtains, heavy, somnolent-seeming plum-coloured curtains, were still drawn. The room was full of smoke and had a recognizable semi-sweet reek. As the heavy oak door to the library swung open, the sound of aRolling Stones record, not in its first youth and played very loud, blared in their faces.

  In all this noise and smoky darkness, for a moment the fairylike delicacy of Clementina provided a strange contrast. Yet there was a hint of fancy dress in her own costume. On second thoughts, she did not look so out of place in the Great Library after all.
In spite of the hour, Clementina was wearing a long red dress of panne velvet, too big for her and slightly Edwardian in cut, with a type of bustle and tight leg o' mutton sleeves from which most of the buttons were missing. She also wore a black hat, even more dilapidated, but with traces of grandiose feathers and flowers on its brim. Ropes of pale pink pearls hung down across her tiny bosom, which swelled out the red velvet hardly perceptibly. Some of the pearls were peeling or had lost their pinkness altogether.

  Above her loomed another vast portrait, this time of an imposing female rather than a male. Built on a far ampler scale, this former Beauregard beauty was wearing identical costume to that of her descendant Clementina, seated beneath her imperious gaze. Did this adoption of the semi-regal outfit of her ancestress indicate that Clementina had decided to put on some sort of show to receive her captives ?

  If so, the impulse had passed. Clementina's eyes were fixed unwaveringly on Ben. She did not seem to take in the presence of Jemima. Swiftly, she knocked rather than switched the record player into silence. It was lying on the corner of the dais to the throne; there was a morass of records, none of them looking particularly well cared for, within reach.

  'So, Ben, come to take over, have you?' she said in a voice which was considerably slowed down from her usual frenetic diction. 'Castle first, then the island, and last of all pretty cousin Clementina.' Her voice trailed away. She took a brief drag on the cigarette stub in her fingers. From the smell of the room, clinging round the dark drawn curtains and recesses of the library, not strongly but unmistakably, Jemima guessed that she had been smoking the marijuana for hours, maybe all night.

  Lamps with dark green pleated shades illuminated the library and there were other pictures to be seen among the books. The exquisite fair-haired lady over the fireplace, a romantic post-war portrait with the Castle in the background -John Merton perhaps? - was so strikingly like Clementina as to be readily identifiable as Leonie Beauregard. There were photographs as well. One pair of portraits, carefully juxtaposed, demonstrated the rakes' progress of the Beauregard twins. On the one hand a carefully posed picture, unmistakably by Cecil Beaton, showed them as soulful and curly-haired angels at their mother's knee: Charles in frilly shirt and satin page's trousers, Clementina in high-waisted flounced dress and sash. The second portrait, by David Bailey, showed a couple of unadorned faces, placed close together, the expressions both pagan and mocking.