Echoes of Sherlock Holmes: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon(96)
We set off, first along a winding, green-cloaked river, then up and across the most desolate moorland I’d ever seen. It was fit for the Hound, I thought with a shiver.
I dared to interrupt Mr. Burns’s silence. “Um, what exactly will I be doing at the lodge?” My contract had read “domestic assistant.”
“A bit of cooking and scrubbing, and skinning, I should think,” he added. “Whatever the wife needs.”
“Skinning?” I said. It came out a squeak.
This time he threw me an amused glance and I saw the glint of white teeth in the beard. “It is a hunting lodge, lassie. We occasionally pot rabbits for our suppers.”
That shut me up. While I was trying to decide whether I had sold myself into Dickensian slavery—or was destined to be a Scottish Jane Eyre, stuck on the moor with a dour master and a mad wife—the road ran downhill and we were again in the land of green glens and burbling streams. In the distance, the hills were a patchwork of gold and black, as if a giant quilt had been thrown over the land. I’d read that they burned the heather to encourage the grouse but I’d never imagined it looked like that.
Giles swung us off into a smaller track and soon, round the trees, the house I’d seen on the postcard came into view. The sun was slanting low across the land and the lamps were just coming on in the house. The Land Rover’s tires scrunched on the gravel drive and a moment later the front door swung wide and the mistress of the house came out to greet us.
Morag Burns was tall, red-headed, and as chatty as her husband was taciturn. She was also quite pregnant. “I thought I could do with a bit extra help this season,” she explained as her husband carried in my bag. “For obvious reasons.” She grinned and patted her belly. “None of the locals are willing to live in so we enlisted an agency to find someone. We thought your medical training would be useful.”
“I haven’t actually had any yet,” I said hurriedly, trying to avert my eyes from her bulge.
Morag laughed. “Don’t worry. I’m not due until the end of August. It’s just that we assumed anyone wanting to be a doctor would have a good head on her shoulders. And you were highly recommended.”
That gave me pause. I mumbled responses as she took me into the house and gave me a tour. My head swam with tartan. It was everywhere, in shades of red and green. Carpet, wallpaper, over-stuffed armchairs. But somehow it all worked and the effect was cozy, aided by the just-lit fires in the fireplaces.
“There are six guest bedrooms,” Morag explained. “All en suite. At the moment we just have a couple of Dutch gentlemen, but from Sunday we’re fully booked until the end of the grouse season. We do breakfasts but dinners are only by special arrangement. The local girls come in to help when there’s a big shooting party, but otherwise it will just be you and me.”
I gulped.
Morag must have seen my expression because she gave me an encouraging pat on the back. “You’ll be fine.”
And I was. My room was in the attic, but it wasn’t Spartan. I even had my own bathroom. We soon settled into a routine. I got thin, and fit, and really good at washing up and setting tables and airing linens, and at cleaning trout and salmon. The venison, thank God, went to a local processor, as I don’t think I’d have managed that.
I got used to the sound of the stalking parties’ guns booming in the hills, and to red hands, and to the fact that what Scots called “a nice day” barely got me out of my down waistcoat.
When I needed a break from the kitchen, I communed with the fish prints that lined the central hall on the ground floor. They were Victorian, Morag said, hand-colored and intricately drawn. I loved the delicate play of colors in the salmon’s scales and the cheerful polka dots on the big brown trout. Their fins seemed almost to quiver as they stared back at me with their flat, luminous eyes.
“You’re a funny girl,” Morag said, coming into the hall one day and catching me gazing at them.
I shrugged. “My godfather always told me to pay attention to detail. And they have personalities, don’t you think?”
Morag stood for a moment, hand pressing into the small of her back. “Old Spot, there”—she nodded at the brown trout—“seems to have an opinion about something.” There came the now-familiar crunch of gravel as the Land Rover pulled into the drive and we went back to work.
I’d soon begun to see that the guests were wealthy. We generally booked week-long stays, but we had one guest who had reserved for the remainder of the summer. Thirty-something and ordinary looking, with short brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, he was from some Balkan country whose name I never managed to pronounce. Unlike some of the guests, Stefan was friendly and always seemed to have time for a chat.
He was a civil servant, he said, in his slightly accented Received English, interested in learning ways his country could increase tourist revenue. He spent most of his days going out with Giles, almost as if he was an assistant, but I noticed that Giles treated him with a deference he didn’t extend to even the poshest of the other guests.
Stefan was standing in the drive one afternoon when I went out to ask him if he wanted to join us for dinner. His back to me, he seemed to be gazing at the distant moors, where if you looked just right you could see the first faint blush of purple from the heather. Summer was moving on.
“Stefan,” I called, but he didn’t turn. “Stefan,” I said again, but he stood unmoving, his hands in his pockets. It was only when my footsteps crackled on the gravel as I crossed the drive that he turned, a startled look on his face.