Chapter and Hearse by Catherine Aird

something he hadn’t thought about until now: the burden of living with military mistakes.
    â€˜Always knew his own mind, did your father,’ she said.
    *   *   *
    â€˜A complete mystery,’ he announced to the East Calleshire Regimental Association at dinner on their last evening in Lasserta.
    â€˜We may never know what really happened.’ He paused and gave a little, rather patronizing, smile. ‘I’m afraid that war’s like that – full of unsolved enigmas that have to be lived with.’
    â€˜And Anthony Eden?’ enquired the Ambassador with genuine interest. ‘What action did you say he should have taken at Suez?’
    â€˜Done a deal with Nasser,’ said Colin Stubbings unhesitatingly.
    â€˜Reached a compromise?’ translated Heber-Hibbs.
    â€˜Bought into the action more like,’ cackled Stubbings. ‘Saved a lot of trouble. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.’
    â€˜Ah…’ said the Ambassador.
    â€˜Costs less,’ said the representative of the new generation. ‘Nothing wrong with a bit of baksheesh anyway, is there?’
    â€˜Well…’ temporized the diplomat.
    Stubbings smirked at Heber-Hibbs. ‘As long as you keep it secret. That’s what’s important.’ He winked and added, ‘For more than thirty years, mind you…’

Handsel Monday
    Sixteenth-century Scotland
    The little girl lay motionless at the foot of the east turnpike stair. She was sprawled, head downwards, just where the bottom step fanned out into the great hall of the castle. How long she had been lying there, tumbling athwart the first three steps, the Sheriff of Fearnshire did not yet know. All he knew so far was that the child’s cheek felt cold to the touch of his ungloved hand.
    Quite cold. She was dead.
    The air too was cold, bitterly cold, just as cold as it had been the last time that Sheriff Rhuaraidh Macmillan had come to Castle Balgalkin. To make matters worse – if they could be any worse than they already were, that is – it was snowing hard today as well. The cold, though, was the only thing that Sheriff Macmillan had so far found that was the same on this visit as it had been the last time he was at the castle.
    Then – it had only been the Monday of last week, although now it seemed much longer ago – the whole of Fearnshire had been en fête for the feast of hogmanay. Or should, he mused as he took off his other glove, he start thinking of hogmanay by its French name of hoguinane now that everything in Scotland was being influenced by a queen from France?
    That day – Hogmanay, he decided obstinately – there had been, as there was every year at Castle Balgalkin, a great ceilidh – and he wasn’t going to change that good old Gaelic word for any French one – to celebrate the ending of the old year and the coming in of the new one. And that night, in the best Fearnshire tradition, the Laird of Balgalkin himself had answered the door to the first-footers.
    Rhuaraidh Macmillan moved his hand from a cold cheek to the girl’s outflung arms, the better to see her hands.
    Today it was all very, very different. For one thing, when the Sheriff had arrived there had been no welcoming Laird at the door of the Castle Balgalkin. ‘The ancient place of the stag with the white head’ was what the desmesne had been called in olden times – Scottish times, not French ones. He wasn’t surprised: this winter alone had been hard enough to bring any number of stags down off the hills in search of forage.
    Macmillan lifted a limp little hand and started to examine small fingers with surprising tenderness.
    On New Year’s Eve, only the week before, Sheriff Macmillan and his lady wife had been acclaimed as they had arrived from Drummondreach by a piper who had taken up his bagpipes as soon as he saw the couple get near to the castle. There had been