life, smiled and said: 'Bother me? Not much. They don't talk to you or look at you. There's no eye-contact. They just do their own thing.'
But after that he couldn't seem to relax, and by the time the red-robes had come out of the tea shop and found themselves a table he was ready to move on. And B.J. noticed as they drove away how the frown was back on his face ... how he kept staring into his rearview mirror long after the tea shop sign had disappeared into the distance behind them ...
The roads were good and traffic light to nonexistent, but after their near-accident B.J. was taking it easy. If there was even the suspicion of a scenic 'short-cut' she would take it. And the closer she got to her destination the slower she went, stopping off at the slightest excuse -for the view, or a chance to dabble her feet in cool water over rounded pebbles - whatever. They even pulled off the road and slept for an hour, cuddled up on a patch of heather in the lee of tall rocks, where Harry had to fix a blanket over a couple of dead branches for shade. He'd done so protesting that there was hardly enough heat in the sun to bother with it, but B.J. was 'afraid of sunburn.'
Finally, as they covered the last few miles to Inverdruie, the light began to fade, the mist crept up from the streams and writhed in the copses, and the wooded slopes took on a cloaked, mystical look out of legend. The lights of cottages clustering at junctions and crossroads twinkled like elf-fires, while the backdrop of the mountains, black against an indigo V of starstrewn sky seen through the pass, might easily be the fac,ade of a gigantic set on some cosmic stage.
The gloaming,' B.J. commented, as she pulled off the road and turned tightly behind Auld John's cottage, parking the hire car in the shadows of birch and rowan.
'In which,' the Necroscope whisperingly answered, 'all the Jocks go a-roaming!'
The wee lads and lassies, aye!' Laughing lightly, she got out of the car. (Ah, but if only her heart were as light as her laughter.)
And what about his ... ?
Harry didn't quite know what to make of Auld John, but then he didn't quite know what to make of anything right now.
His heart seemed to spend most of its time in his mouth (which was why he made jokes whenever he could), and his nerves were stretched to breaking. He supposed it was some kind of paranoia, the latest attack of this ridiculous persecution complex.
But Auld John was ... something else. B.J. had told Harry that the old gillie used to work for her uncle - the one with the hunting lodge -and that while he was very respectful and trustworthy he was also very proper. And maybe just a bit peculiar? Understatements on all counts, Harry thought.
The old man didn't grovel but he came close. And not just to Bonnie Jean but also to the Necroscope. Bowing and scraping, he was very nearly obsequious - almost like a cringing dog who wants so badly to be petted but thinks he might be kicked. But as for proper: no doubt about it!
When Bonnie Jean went up to her tiny garret bedroom, the old man stayed downstairs with Harry; in B.J.'s absence he referred to her as 'the wee mistress: a verah special lady!' Well, and so she might have been once upon a time, Harry supposed - when she'd used to stay at her uncle's lodge ...
After a while B.J. called Auld John upstairs and for ten minutes or so Harry could hear them talking but couldn't make out what was said. Then Auld John came down again and offered him a nightcap - 'A wee dram shid put ye away nicely, aye! A guid nicht's sleep cannae hurt a man.' Maybe not, but the Necroscope refused anyway. If he was climbing tomorrow, he would need a clear head.
And when Auld John took Harry upstairs, he made a point of showing him the toilet, directly opposite the Necroscope's tiny room. 'Just so's ye cannae be mistaken ... ye ken?' Yes, he kenned well enough. And the wee mistress's room was at the other end of the corridor, with all those creaking floorboards in between. Wherever Auld John was in the house, he'd be sure to hear those boards.
But in fact they didn't creak once. B.J. was far