Chapter 23 Excerpt
from The Bonnie Road
from The Bonnie Road
Carlin Castle - Patricia Vestal
A low rumble of thunder sounded in the distance. The only light came from the glow in the fireplace. Her travel clock read midnight. Rosalind held it to her ear and heard the faint ticking. She’d been sleeping for only two hours, yet hurled deep into dreams. Her head wouldn’t clear. With blinking eyes she searched the chamber to figure out what had changed.
It was the door, the stairwell door studded with iron nail heads. Opened like the cottage bedroom door. A low roar started in Rosalind’s head, the sound of her blood pulsing in absolute silence.
Before retiring, she had quite certainly closed the bedroom door. She remembered hearing the heavy iron latch clunk into place.
She climbed from the bed, clutched her bathrobe to her breast, crossed to the door and reached a pale hand to the wood, to give it a little push. It creaked out over the spiral stair into silence as velvety as the darkness, as thick as the castle walls. The worn steps fell away into deep obscurity. Her skin prickled, and the white downy hair on her arms stood straight up. She reached into the cold stairwell, grasped the iron handle, and pulled the door back till the latch fell with a clunk, then pulled and pushed on it. Immovable.
What woman might have reached a hand to that same iron ring, six centuries ago, or gone to stand by the embers, as she did? What thoughts might have occupied her mind? Daily tasks, running the household, most likely. Would the woman have felt just as she did? The same sense of the cold and the stone and the presence of the mountains all around?
Despite Rosalind’s bewilderment at the shift in the atmosphere, the room was actually very pleasant, cozy in its simplicity. Ceiling beams had long ago been painted with images of foliage, fruit and birds, and the stone of the walls was plastered and painted creamy white. The ornately engraved headboard of the magnificent bed went all the way up to the wooden canopy above, and the mischievous faces of Greenmen adorned every post.
Rosalind was the haunting spirit, displaced from time and place, thinking of all the people who had been before, and who would come after, moving within the castle walls. She imagined a woman in the wooden chair by the fire, spinning wool, wimpled against the cold, bundled in many skirts. Children gathered, playing with carvings of animals and dolls, like those that Uncle Rab had carved, opening that cupboard to fetch some carded wool for their mother. Memories of people lingered on the stair with the futile sword, coughing in the smoke of battle, dying here, giving birth in this bed, a rough wooing among primitives? Or was their love a spark of light in medieval darkness? Voices and whisperings seemed almost audible running along the walls. Was their humor like ours? Their sorrow? Rosalind hoped they were more thoughtful than she had been with the first half of her life.
The door must not have been completely shut when she went to bed. No, she knew it was, but her certainty was going hazy. And in the dream someone had been calling her.
The rising wind was audible now, gusting in roars through the large trees around the castle. Rosalind put on her robe, and lit the candle on the bedside table. Floorboards creaked under her feet. She hesitated by the small window. On the gravel drive below, illuminated in that eternal glow from the clouds, Helen’s car had become an indecipherable shape and color.
She held the candlestick high and entered the dark stairwell, her other hand sliding over the thick banister rope. In the kitchen, the copper pots glowed and seemed to move in the candle’s flare. The light switch was by the door, and she almost touched it, when an unbidden idea arose.
She would explore the castle by candlelight.
Her heart sped up at the thought. She knew she was going to do it. All her senses heightened till she heard her breath, thunderously loud in her ears.
The kitchen doorway led into the sixteenth century wing. She gripped and turned the knob and stepped through.
The vast cavern of the great hall opened up and receded into darkness. Nothing could have prepared her for its splendor. In an instant, by the light of one candle, wooden beams and banners soared high above out of dark recesses. Huge tapestries lined the walls. The sound of the latch’s clank and the hinges creaking still sounded in tinny echoes from the far corners.
Her heel slipped off the edge of an unseen step, and she catapulted in, mind filled in that instant with irrational fears of deep wells and dungeons. The candle snuffed out, but not before she’d seen faces watching her every move. The box of matches hit the floor with a rattle.
Rosalind crouched, seeing nothing but the visual echoes of the silent company in the great hall. She gingerly moved her fingers over the place the matchbox had landed. Nothing. She put the candlestick down, wondering if she’d ever find it again, and searched with both hands along the floor. The hall’s entrance was flagstone, giving way to polished hardwood. Behind her, the doorway to the kitchen was gone, swallowed up like everything else in the darkness.
She took a step, still hunkered down, and felt a sickening crunch under her heel. She groaned, then snorted with a fearful laugh, and moved back, till the scattered and broken matches were under her hand.
Go on, or go back? Her fingers, tingling with sensation, picked out the sandpapered side of the matchbox. It was in shreds, useless. She squatted there, certain there was a solution if only she could think differently.
She scraped the head of a match across the stone. A spark leapt off and the head broke. She tried another in the gritty seam beside the flagstone. It burst effortlessly into life. There in the small pool of blinding match-light, stood the candle in its simple sconce.
She touched the match flame to the wick and lifted the candle high. The circle of light expanded and diffused. At the far end of the hall, a man floated halfway up the wall. Rosalind put a hand to her mouth to stifle a cry. They stared at one another for eternal heartbeats.
“You’re a grown woman,” she whispered. “There is a logical explanation for this.”
She steeled herself to walk towards the man. Just a few steps into the Great Hall, and more faces peered at her from either side. Portraits. She exhaled, feeling equal parts foolish and profoundly relieved. Of course there were portraits in an old castle. A flash of lightning startled Rosalind, yet also provided a second of perfect illumination. There were old tapestries as well, done in elaborate needlework between the paintings. Alastair had turned the hall into a gallery, perhaps a mix of ancestors and other works in his collection. Banners hanging from the timber beams above rustled slightly in a phantom wind as a low rumble of thunder sounded. Long tables stretched down either side of the room. In the middle of the left-hand wall a huge fireplace gaped like a doorway to hell in a medieval morality play. Swords affixed to the stone bristled in a semi-circle above the mantel.
The portrait on the far wall was of Alastair himself, resplendent in Highland dress. The tartan, predominantly light blue, green, and red, was half hidden behind an absurdly large and furry sporran. A belt for a basket-hilt sword went over one shoulder, and a tartan sash fastened with a huge cairngorm brooch adorned the other. If the somewhat stylized painting was honest, he’d been very handsome in his prime.
She pushed open the door under his dainty, stockinged feet and entered a long narrow hallway, which also contained a good number of paintings. Couches and chairs along the wall were grouped into little sitting areas. Four doors were spaced in regular intervals down the right-hand wall, and one larger double door was located on the opposite side. That would be the main entrance to the castle. A little welcome desk was placed just inside it, heaped with pamphlets and books and a box for donations.
Lightening lit the air again and the imprint of a white human skull lingered in her mind’s eye. She blinked as the thunder came closer and louder, more unnerved than bemused by her silly jitters. Even through the thick castle walls the sound of the rain came pelting down in a dull roar. A large tapestry hung on the wall to the right. Rosalind positioned the candle to see a lively medieval allegory, its central figure a skeleton. There was the skull she had seen, not her imagination. Legs and arms akimbo, it danced and played a fiddle. A line of people followed, a beggar and a king, merchants and children, all walks of life. Some joined the dance, others wept, hands covering their faces, shoulders hunched in misery. Too late, too late.
Rosalind followed the tapestry to the first door and pushed it open to a familiar smell of wax and wood and stale incense. It was the chapel. Beyond a low rail the altar was set against the far wall, on it two gleaming candlesticks on either side of a simple bronze cross.
A life-size figure knelt at the rail, hands pressed flat together in a prayerful posture, dressed in green satins, the liquid folds of her gown picked out by the candle light in a very realistic way. Rosalind wondered if it were commissioned, someone in the Ogilvy family, maybe even Alastair’s mother or grandmother.
The National Trust handbook had illustrations of the painted wooden panels in the chapel, all from the New Testament. It was difficult to see them in the candlelight, as the colors had darkened with time. Rosalind wondered why the incongruous green lady wasn't included. Maybe Alastair had placed her in the chapel as a little joke, since she was in a prayerful posture.
The pews on either side of the carpeted center aisle might hold five people each. A small window above the altar appeared like a round hole in the stonework, but when she looked more closely, the glow of the moon’s edge through storm clouds was just visible beyond the black panes of glass.
Rosalind moved down the aisle, to study the portrait more closely.
There was nothing there. Just a bare altar rail.
She stopped, certain she was looking in the right place. Yes, the vivid color of the lady’s gown, the paleness of her profile had been noticeable among the dim colors of the painted panels all around the chapel.
Her heart started racing, but puzzled incomprehension seized her mind. With a mighty act of will, she turned her back to the altar and returned to the door, to stand as she had on first entering, and raised the candle high. Nothing.
What if somebody else was in the castle?
“Hello?” Her voice sounded absurdly weak. “Is anyone there?”
Rosalind thought of all the places a person could hide. But why would a woman put on a formal dress and pray in a pitch-dark chapel? And in the absolute silence, she’d have heard such a magnificent gown rustle.
She backed out and shut the door, fighting down panic. In the space of a minute, Rosalind turned over a dozen absurd thoughts. One thing was certain. The nocturnal tour was over. As if to hurry her along, an escalating groan, then shriek and crack sounded. Rosalind cried out, and felt more than heard something huge crash and thud to the earth.
With a hand shielding the small flame, she hurried back through the great hall, under the moving eyes of its occupants, forcing herself not to look back. The hot fear did not lift until she reached the kitchen, calmed under the rude electric light. A large bolt was on the inside of the door, and she pushed it to with a firm hand, hoping this door would remain shut.
The kitchen had an old electric kettle. She filled it and switched it on. She searched the cupboards with shaking hands, and found cocoa and a mug, and made hot chocolate, pouring in a splash of cream, concentrating on each small detail of the process. As she sat and cradled the warm mug, her thoughts expanded to the spaces of the castle, both down the hall and above, to the tower rooms, an acute awareness of their lively emptiness, and beyond that of the wild mountains surrounding the castle. A tree must have come down in the wind, she thought, in this wild storm that rattled at the kitchen door and howled down the ancient chimney.
She wasn’t so much frightened anymore, but the high level of excitement refused to abate. What if it had been a real ghost? She continued to think up preferable, saner alternatives, primarily that an image from the portraits had been imprinted on her retina and in the chapel, against the frame of darkness, imposed the lady’s face and form, like seeing a phantom flash from a camera.
But there was no portrait of a lady at prayer. And she had appeared as substantial as the pews or the altar. Finally, unconvinced, Rosalind decided that trying to make intellectual sense of it was useless and even self-deceptive. The time had come to trust herself to evaluate experiences through her own faculties. She didn’t understand what had happened. She would go back in the daytime and figure it out, or allow it to reveal itself.
In the meantime, she had a more important decision to make.
Rosalind sipped her cocoa, and thought of what the people sitting there six hundred years ago dressed in when they got up at midnight, and what they drank to warm themselves. How would a woman of that time who lived in Carlin Castle make the decisions she was faced with? Angus would arrive the next day for the party, expecting her answer. She considered making a list of pros and cons, because no sooner did she arrive at a conclusion than she could think up reasons against it. She was aware that the new-found calmness held the unvoiced answer, even as her over-active thoughts flew this way and that, trying to convince her otherwise. Could she separate her desire to remain in Scotland and keep Morning Star, from Angus’s romantic influence? The scales hung in perfect balance. Something would have to be done to tip them.
When her feet got too cold, she went up the spiral stair to the bedroom. She pulled open the heavy door, and stepped in to a blast of heat and candle light. There, by the stoked fire, stood Morag.
It was the door, the stairwell door studded with iron nail heads. Opened like the cottage bedroom door. A low roar started in Rosalind’s head, the sound of her blood pulsing in absolute silence.
Before retiring, she had quite certainly closed the bedroom door. She remembered hearing the heavy iron latch clunk into place.
She climbed from the bed, clutched her bathrobe to her breast, crossed to the door and reached a pale hand to the wood, to give it a little push. It creaked out over the spiral stair into silence as velvety as the darkness, as thick as the castle walls. The worn steps fell away into deep obscurity. Her skin prickled, and the white downy hair on her arms stood straight up. She reached into the cold stairwell, grasped the iron handle, and pulled the door back till the latch fell with a clunk, then pulled and pushed on it. Immovable.
What woman might have reached a hand to that same iron ring, six centuries ago, or gone to stand by the embers, as she did? What thoughts might have occupied her mind? Daily tasks, running the household, most likely. Would the woman have felt just as she did? The same sense of the cold and the stone and the presence of the mountains all around?
Despite Rosalind’s bewilderment at the shift in the atmosphere, the room was actually very pleasant, cozy in its simplicity. Ceiling beams had long ago been painted with images of foliage, fruit and birds, and the stone of the walls was plastered and painted creamy white. The ornately engraved headboard of the magnificent bed went all the way up to the wooden canopy above, and the mischievous faces of Greenmen adorned every post.
Rosalind was the haunting spirit, displaced from time and place, thinking of all the people who had been before, and who would come after, moving within the castle walls. She imagined a woman in the wooden chair by the fire, spinning wool, wimpled against the cold, bundled in many skirts. Children gathered, playing with carvings of animals and dolls, like those that Uncle Rab had carved, opening that cupboard to fetch some carded wool for their mother. Memories of people lingered on the stair with the futile sword, coughing in the smoke of battle, dying here, giving birth in this bed, a rough wooing among primitives? Or was their love a spark of light in medieval darkness? Voices and whisperings seemed almost audible running along the walls. Was their humor like ours? Their sorrow? Rosalind hoped they were more thoughtful than she had been with the first half of her life.
The door must not have been completely shut when she went to bed. No, she knew it was, but her certainty was going hazy. And in the dream someone had been calling her.
The rising wind was audible now, gusting in roars through the large trees around the castle. Rosalind put on her robe, and lit the candle on the bedside table. Floorboards creaked under her feet. She hesitated by the small window. On the gravel drive below, illuminated in that eternal glow from the clouds, Helen’s car had become an indecipherable shape and color.
She held the candlestick high and entered the dark stairwell, her other hand sliding over the thick banister rope. In the kitchen, the copper pots glowed and seemed to move in the candle’s flare. The light switch was by the door, and she almost touched it, when an unbidden idea arose.
She would explore the castle by candlelight.
Her heart sped up at the thought. She knew she was going to do it. All her senses heightened till she heard her breath, thunderously loud in her ears.
The kitchen doorway led into the sixteenth century wing. She gripped and turned the knob and stepped through.
The vast cavern of the great hall opened up and receded into darkness. Nothing could have prepared her for its splendor. In an instant, by the light of one candle, wooden beams and banners soared high above out of dark recesses. Huge tapestries lined the walls. The sound of the latch’s clank and the hinges creaking still sounded in tinny echoes from the far corners.
Her heel slipped off the edge of an unseen step, and she catapulted in, mind filled in that instant with irrational fears of deep wells and dungeons. The candle snuffed out, but not before she’d seen faces watching her every move. The box of matches hit the floor with a rattle.
Rosalind crouched, seeing nothing but the visual echoes of the silent company in the great hall. She gingerly moved her fingers over the place the matchbox had landed. Nothing. She put the candlestick down, wondering if she’d ever find it again, and searched with both hands along the floor. The hall’s entrance was flagstone, giving way to polished hardwood. Behind her, the doorway to the kitchen was gone, swallowed up like everything else in the darkness.
She took a step, still hunkered down, and felt a sickening crunch under her heel. She groaned, then snorted with a fearful laugh, and moved back, till the scattered and broken matches were under her hand.
Go on, or go back? Her fingers, tingling with sensation, picked out the sandpapered side of the matchbox. It was in shreds, useless. She squatted there, certain there was a solution if only she could think differently.
She scraped the head of a match across the stone. A spark leapt off and the head broke. She tried another in the gritty seam beside the flagstone. It burst effortlessly into life. There in the small pool of blinding match-light, stood the candle in its simple sconce.
She touched the match flame to the wick and lifted the candle high. The circle of light expanded and diffused. At the far end of the hall, a man floated halfway up the wall. Rosalind put a hand to her mouth to stifle a cry. They stared at one another for eternal heartbeats.
“You’re a grown woman,” she whispered. “There is a logical explanation for this.”
She steeled herself to walk towards the man. Just a few steps into the Great Hall, and more faces peered at her from either side. Portraits. She exhaled, feeling equal parts foolish and profoundly relieved. Of course there were portraits in an old castle. A flash of lightning startled Rosalind, yet also provided a second of perfect illumination. There were old tapestries as well, done in elaborate needlework between the paintings. Alastair had turned the hall into a gallery, perhaps a mix of ancestors and other works in his collection. Banners hanging from the timber beams above rustled slightly in a phantom wind as a low rumble of thunder sounded. Long tables stretched down either side of the room. In the middle of the left-hand wall a huge fireplace gaped like a doorway to hell in a medieval morality play. Swords affixed to the stone bristled in a semi-circle above the mantel.
The portrait on the far wall was of Alastair himself, resplendent in Highland dress. The tartan, predominantly light blue, green, and red, was half hidden behind an absurdly large and furry sporran. A belt for a basket-hilt sword went over one shoulder, and a tartan sash fastened with a huge cairngorm brooch adorned the other. If the somewhat stylized painting was honest, he’d been very handsome in his prime.
She pushed open the door under his dainty, stockinged feet and entered a long narrow hallway, which also contained a good number of paintings. Couches and chairs along the wall were grouped into little sitting areas. Four doors were spaced in regular intervals down the right-hand wall, and one larger double door was located on the opposite side. That would be the main entrance to the castle. A little welcome desk was placed just inside it, heaped with pamphlets and books and a box for donations.
Lightening lit the air again and the imprint of a white human skull lingered in her mind’s eye. She blinked as the thunder came closer and louder, more unnerved than bemused by her silly jitters. Even through the thick castle walls the sound of the rain came pelting down in a dull roar. A large tapestry hung on the wall to the right. Rosalind positioned the candle to see a lively medieval allegory, its central figure a skeleton. There was the skull she had seen, not her imagination. Legs and arms akimbo, it danced and played a fiddle. A line of people followed, a beggar and a king, merchants and children, all walks of life. Some joined the dance, others wept, hands covering their faces, shoulders hunched in misery. Too late, too late.
Rosalind followed the tapestry to the first door and pushed it open to a familiar smell of wax and wood and stale incense. It was the chapel. Beyond a low rail the altar was set against the far wall, on it two gleaming candlesticks on either side of a simple bronze cross.
A life-size figure knelt at the rail, hands pressed flat together in a prayerful posture, dressed in green satins, the liquid folds of her gown picked out by the candle light in a very realistic way. Rosalind wondered if it were commissioned, someone in the Ogilvy family, maybe even Alastair’s mother or grandmother.
The National Trust handbook had illustrations of the painted wooden panels in the chapel, all from the New Testament. It was difficult to see them in the candlelight, as the colors had darkened with time. Rosalind wondered why the incongruous green lady wasn't included. Maybe Alastair had placed her in the chapel as a little joke, since she was in a prayerful posture.
The pews on either side of the carpeted center aisle might hold five people each. A small window above the altar appeared like a round hole in the stonework, but when she looked more closely, the glow of the moon’s edge through storm clouds was just visible beyond the black panes of glass.
Rosalind moved down the aisle, to study the portrait more closely.
There was nothing there. Just a bare altar rail.
She stopped, certain she was looking in the right place. Yes, the vivid color of the lady’s gown, the paleness of her profile had been noticeable among the dim colors of the painted panels all around the chapel.
Her heart started racing, but puzzled incomprehension seized her mind. With a mighty act of will, she turned her back to the altar and returned to the door, to stand as she had on first entering, and raised the candle high. Nothing.
What if somebody else was in the castle?
“Hello?” Her voice sounded absurdly weak. “Is anyone there?”
Rosalind thought of all the places a person could hide. But why would a woman put on a formal dress and pray in a pitch-dark chapel? And in the absolute silence, she’d have heard such a magnificent gown rustle.
She backed out and shut the door, fighting down panic. In the space of a minute, Rosalind turned over a dozen absurd thoughts. One thing was certain. The nocturnal tour was over. As if to hurry her along, an escalating groan, then shriek and crack sounded. Rosalind cried out, and felt more than heard something huge crash and thud to the earth.
With a hand shielding the small flame, she hurried back through the great hall, under the moving eyes of its occupants, forcing herself not to look back. The hot fear did not lift until she reached the kitchen, calmed under the rude electric light. A large bolt was on the inside of the door, and she pushed it to with a firm hand, hoping this door would remain shut.
The kitchen had an old electric kettle. She filled it and switched it on. She searched the cupboards with shaking hands, and found cocoa and a mug, and made hot chocolate, pouring in a splash of cream, concentrating on each small detail of the process. As she sat and cradled the warm mug, her thoughts expanded to the spaces of the castle, both down the hall and above, to the tower rooms, an acute awareness of their lively emptiness, and beyond that of the wild mountains surrounding the castle. A tree must have come down in the wind, she thought, in this wild storm that rattled at the kitchen door and howled down the ancient chimney.
She wasn’t so much frightened anymore, but the high level of excitement refused to abate. What if it had been a real ghost? She continued to think up preferable, saner alternatives, primarily that an image from the portraits had been imprinted on her retina and in the chapel, against the frame of darkness, imposed the lady’s face and form, like seeing a phantom flash from a camera.
But there was no portrait of a lady at prayer. And she had appeared as substantial as the pews or the altar. Finally, unconvinced, Rosalind decided that trying to make intellectual sense of it was useless and even self-deceptive. The time had come to trust herself to evaluate experiences through her own faculties. She didn’t understand what had happened. She would go back in the daytime and figure it out, or allow it to reveal itself.
In the meantime, she had a more important decision to make.
Rosalind sipped her cocoa, and thought of what the people sitting there six hundred years ago dressed in when they got up at midnight, and what they drank to warm themselves. How would a woman of that time who lived in Carlin Castle make the decisions she was faced with? Angus would arrive the next day for the party, expecting her answer. She considered making a list of pros and cons, because no sooner did she arrive at a conclusion than she could think up reasons against it. She was aware that the new-found calmness held the unvoiced answer, even as her over-active thoughts flew this way and that, trying to convince her otherwise. Could she separate her desire to remain in Scotland and keep Morning Star, from Angus’s romantic influence? The scales hung in perfect balance. Something would have to be done to tip them.
When her feet got too cold, she went up the spiral stair to the bedroom. She pulled open the heavy door, and stepped in to a blast of heat and candle light. There, by the stoked fire, stood Morag.
Carlin Castle Estate Map - Patricia Vestal