The Three Kings Read online

  Since his wife’s recovery, Mr Gunn had not made any more advances to Katie, and although she was beginning to think he had just been testing her before, and that he would not bother her again, her scalp prickled with alarm when she went into the dining room that night and his weird eyes fastened on her. ‘Your holiday has done you good, Katie,’ he said, his hand touching her leg under the tablecloth. ‘You look prettier than ever.’

  Unable to move away in case his wife noticed why, Katie mumbled, ‘Thank you, sir,’ gritting her teeth as she felt her skirts being pulled up.

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs Gunn smiled, quite ignorant of what was going on, ‘you do look better than you did when you left. It’s a pity you can’t go home more often.’

  When the man’s fingers touched the bare skin at the top of her stocking, Katie could stand it no longer. ‘I’d better get back to the kitchen before the tatties boil dry.’ She pulled to the side, but kept her head up as she went out. She’d be damned if she would let him see how upset she was.

  She kept well away from him when she took in the second course, twisting her body awkwardly to set the dishes within his reach, and feeling like hitting him between the eyes when she noticed his sneering smile. She would have to take care not to stand so close to him in future.

  It was so unusually mild for November that Katie told Sammy when they were having dinner that she was going out for a walk later. She didn’t want to run the risk of meeting Mr Gunn by herself, though the moon was shining as bright as day, for he’d come home in a vile temper and had hit his son for nothing that she could fathom, and he had shouted at his wife for asking what was wrong with him. She had taken only a few steps into the wood when Sammy sprang out from the back of a tree. ‘There’s a rabbit’s hole down there,’ he informed her.

  ‘Where? Let me see.’

  He pointed out several rabbit holes, showed her a clump of toadstools he had found and a thick knobbly tree he said he sometimes climbed. ‘You know everything about this wood,’ she said, admiringly. ‘I’d never have noticed any of that if I’d been by myself.’

  His chest swelled proudly. ‘I know what my father does.’

  ‘He’s got a shop in Huntly.’

  ‘What he does in the wood.’

  His secretive grin made her curious. ‘What does he do?’

  ‘With a woman.’

  So that’s why Mr Gunn went out at nights, Katie thought, but it didn’t really surprise her. ‘You’d better not let him know you’ve seen him,’ she warned.

  ‘I see him nearly every time. He waits for her if she’s not there.’ Sammy furrowed his brows, then added, sounding quite puzzled, ‘It’s not always the same one, but he always does the same thing. The first time I saw him, I thought he was trying to kill her, but she liked it. They all like it.’

  Katie tried to change the subject. ‘Did you remember to clear up all the mess from your bonfire?’

  He was not to be sided-tracked so easily. ‘He puts his arms round her first, and kisses …’

  ‘Did you clear up the mess?’ she repeated.

  ‘Yes.’ He turned to face her and when he opened his mouth again, she burst out, ‘I don’t want to hear what your father does, Sammy. It’s his own business, not ours.’

  He cowered away and she regretted having been so sharp. ‘I’m not angry with you, but don’t tell me any more.’

  His mouth closed, but his eyes lost their look of dread. ‘I can see him from my special place.’

  Katie grabbed at the opening this gave her. ‘Oh, I nearly forgot about your special place. Show me now.’

  This succeeded in taking his mind off what his father got up to, and holding her hand he pulled her forward. ‘I found it when I was a little boy, and I never told anybody else, just you, because you’re my friend … aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course I’m your friend. What kind of place is it?’

  ‘Wait and see.’ He was almost skipping along in his glee, but he didn’t speak again until he drew to a halt, pointing his finger. ‘There,’ he breathed, reverently.

  All she could see was a cluster of bushes in front of a broad, gnarled chestnut tree. ‘It’s a nice place,’ she said, not understanding why he thought it so special.

  He dragged her on, pushing aside the bushes until she saw the hollow between the roots of the tree. Releasing her hand, he went down on his knees and crawled in backwards, looking up at her from inside. ‘There’s just room for me,’ he said, sadly.

  ‘Well, it’s your place,’ she reassured him. ‘If there was room for somebody else, it wouldn’t just be yours.’

  ‘I often come here. Sometimes, I sing to myself, sometimes I say things. Things I want to say, about Father hitting me, and bad things like that, but I say about you sometimes, all good things.’

  ‘That’s nice.’ She shook her head when he told her to go in after him. She couldn’t help feeling a great pity for this child-man who had no one to confide in except a tree, but hadn’t she been the same, telling all her troubles to three rocks?

  ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with my legs,’ Mrs Gunn observed one forenoon some weeks later. ‘It’s all I can do to walk.’

  Having noticed that her employer’s gait had been somewhat stiff recently, Katie said, ‘Go back to bed, and I’ll come and rub some liniment in. If it’s rheumatics, that should help you, and a few days’ rest, and all.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps that would be best.’

  The liniment, however, did not help, nor the days spent in bed, and Katie began to wonder if Mr Gunn had been right. Maybe the illness was just in his wife’s mind, and she was imagining she was an invalid.

  Then came a day when Mrs Gunn said, ‘There’s something far wrong with me. My legs are absolutely dead this morning.’

  The anxiety on her face made Katie say, ‘Will I tell Sammy to take the old bike and go and ask the doctor to come?’

  ‘I think you’d better. Angus won’t be pleased, but he just doesn’t understand how I feel.’

  It was late afternoon before Doctor Graham appeared, and his face was grave when he talked to Katie after examining his patient. ‘It could be poliomyelitis, what people know as creeping paralysis, or perhaps sclerosis, where the cells of the muscles waste away and the whole body becomes gradually affected, or muscular atrophy, which has similar symptoms. She tells me that she has always been delicate, and that she has had spells of this before and recovered, but she says it is worse this time. Only X-rays would show what it is, but when I said I’d like her to go into hospital for a day, she told me that her husband would never agree, and she grew so agitated I didn’t pursue it.’

  ‘Mr Gunn’s against doctors of any kind,’ Katie ventured.

  ‘I’ll go to his shop tomorrow and explain the situation to him, but if he refuses to allow her to go for X-rays, I can do nothing more. She will get progressively worse, until …’ He stopped, shrugging his shoulders.

  When Mr Gunn came home, Katie told him apprehensively that she had sent for the doctor, but he did not take his anger out on her. He stormed upstairs, and she could hear him shouting at his wife, still persisting that her illness was in her mind. It was all Katie could do to stop herself going up to give him a good piece of her mind, but at last the row came to an end. Fearful that in his temper he would turn on Sammy, she had given him his dinner and sent him out, but the man walked straight out at the front, slamming the door behind him.

  She was not surprised when he came home next day and told her that he had refused permission for his wife to go into hospital. ‘If God means her to die, so be it,’ he ended.

  She was absolutely appalled. What kind of man was he? How could he be so cruel? But he was smiling again. ‘In view of my wife’s illness, I am going to move into Sammy’s room, so as soon as you have finished in the kitchen after dinner, I want you to change the sheets and make up a bed for him in the other garret. You will be all right there, will you not, boy?’

  Casting an appealing glance at Katie, S
ammy nodded, and after the meal, when his father had gone out, Katie asked him to help her to move his things. The minute he saw where he was to sleep, his sullen face cleared. ‘I’ll be next door to you,’ he beamed.

  She had been thankful that Mr Gunn had not taken this room himself, since there was no lock on her door, yet she didn’t like the thought of Sammy being so close. ‘You’ll be next door,’ she said, tartly, ‘and that’s where you’ll stay.’

  ‘But it’ll be nice to know you’re so near,’ he insisted. ‘I never had a friend before, and I like you an awful lot.’

  With a rush of affection, Katie patted his cheek, and they went down to take up some more of his belongings. There was a whole pile of comics, given to him by the baker’s vanman, whose wife had been clearing out their son’s bedroom and wanted rid of them. Although they had been in pristine condition when Sammy got them, he had looked at them so often that they were now almost in tatters, yet he still treasured them, so they were shifted to his new room. There was a shoebox full of old fir cones and things he had picked up in the woods, and many other items of the kind a seven-year-old would cherish, and he carried them up as if they were the crown jewels.

  The trouble was, as Katie had discovered, that his new room was much barer than hers, and storage space was limited to one old wooden trunk with an arched lid, so she stowed his clothes at one side and the rest of his things at the other. He would probably jumble them all up by rummaging through them, but it couldn’t be helped, and she could tidy it when it got too bad.

  He hadn’t let her down by answering back, that was one good thing, though it couldn’t have been easy for him to be uprooted from his familiar surroundings, and what was more, he had kept sitting stubbornly long after dinner was over so that she wouldn’t be left alone with his father, who was now dining with them again.

  Nevertheless, as fond as she was of him, her mind was made up. If, as the doctor had seemed to predict, Mrs Gunn should die, Katie Mair would be out of the Howe of Fenty like an arrow from a bow, Sammy or no Sammy.

  Chapter Four

  1923

  The winter had been long and hard, Katie having to scrape the frost off her skylight window every morning, and even off the downstairs windows sometimes. The gales had blasted against the panes with such force that it was a wonder to her that they hadn’t been blown in, but the only casualty had been the outhouse where Sammy kept his gardening tools. He had gone out one morning to check that everything was as it should be, and had run back in shouting that his shed roof was lying round the side of the house. He had been determined to take out the ladder there and then to fix it on again, and it had taken all Katie’s powers of persuasion to convince him that he could just as easily be blown down.

  After another night of hurricane-force gales, he had gone to the woods to make sure that his special place had come to no ill, and had come back to say that a lot of trees were lying on the ground, concluding with pride, ‘Mine’s still standing, though.’

  When the blizzards began, usually starting late in the evening and continuing through the night – sometimes all the following day, too – Katie had been astonished by the sheer volume of each fall. With Cullen being on the coast, she had never seen drifts like there were at Fenty, reaching halfway up the ground-floor windows or higher. Every morning for more than a week, Sammy had been ordered to clear the snow from his father’s motor car and dig out a way up the track to the road, but more than once it had proved an impossible task. On those occasions, Mr Gunn had stayed upstairs all day and only appeared for meals, his face so sour that Katie was glad when he went back to his room.

  On one such day, she heard him yelling at his wife before he even came down for breakfast. ‘I swear I’ll make you pay one day, Marguerite,’ he stormed. ‘You have put me through years of hell with your frigidity.’

  Not knowing what frigidity meant, Katie strained her ears but she couldn’t hear what the woman was saying until she raised her voice in fear-filled entreaty. ‘Please, Angus, not again! No, no! I can’t stand any more!’

  Sure that Mr Gunn was trying to kill the woman, Katie was halfway upstairs when he came out of the bedroom, his face dark with anger until he noticed her and did his best to suppress his heavy breathing. ‘My wife will not require any breakfast today, Katie,’ he said, his voice trembling and pitched a fraction higher than usual.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she murmured, ‘but I’d better go up and see if she needs anything else.’

  On the same step now, he gripped her shoulders with both hands. ‘Leave her!’ he thundered, his long fingers digging into her so deeply that she had to grit her teeth so as not to cry out, ‘or I shall …’ He broke off and flung her from him. ‘You are just the same as she is!’

  He propelled her downstairs and stood at the front door until she returned to the kitchen. ‘You had better watch your step, my girl!’ he snarled. ‘I am quite capable of dealing with you as well as Marguerite!’

  His glittering eyes, cold and hard, were boring into her and it was some minutes after he went out before she stopped shivering. What did he mean – deal with them? Was he going to kill them? He looked mad enough for it when he was angry … and which of them would be his first victim?

  Thinking that Mrs Gunn would not want her maid to know about her troubles, Katie waited a while before she went to see if the poor woman had suffered any ill effects. It was almost eleven o’clock, therefore, when she carried up a cup of tea, and she had to hold back a cry of dismay when she saw the marks on her employer’s face and the ugly bruising coming up on her arms.

  Looking up at her as if beseeching her to say nothing, Mrs Gunn muttered, ‘Wasn’t I silly? I fell out of bed and Angus had to come and lift me back. I hit my head on the table and banged my arms, but they’re not so sore now.’

  Katie was astonished that the woman was covering up for her husband after what he had done, but if that was what she wanted, it would be best to play along with her. ‘Would you like me to rub some ointment on your arms to take the sting out? Or put a cold cloth on your face?’

  ‘No, no, I’m fine. I just got a bit of a shake-up.’

  It was that brute of a man who needed the shake-up, Katie thought as she went back to the kitchen. How could he hit a helpless woman? But she could not interfere between husband and wife, not unless Mrs Gunn was prepared to tell the truth about her injuries. If it wasn’t that she felt so sorry for the poor creature, she would pack her things and leave the Howe of Fenty right now.

  Katie worked off her anger by scrubbing and polishing, but when Mr Gunn came in at lunchtime from wherever he had been – likely trudging through the snow to simmer down – she felt it bubbling up again, and was tempted to throw a pot at him. Not appearing to notice any difference in her manner towards him, he smiled at her when she set down the tureen.

  ‘I think it will not be long until the thaw comes, thank goodness,’ he said, with no trace of shame or repentance. ‘We will be back to normal in a day or two.’

  Back to normal? Katie was amazed that he could be so calm. What did he think was normal? He wasn’t normal, that was one thing sure.

  That night, Sammy was again at the receiving end of his father’s anger – for coming in without knocking the snow off his boots – but took the thump on his ear without a word, although it made his head rock. Biting back what she wanted to shout, Katie was thankful that he had not been sent to bed, and the meal was eaten in total silence.

  While the long, cold snap lasted, Katie had tried to keep the fire in Mrs Gunn’s room burning twenty-four hours a day, even when it meant that she had to get up in the middle of the night to refuel it. Having no fireplace, her garret room was like an ice-house, but she was young and healthy and survived the hardship with not even a slight cold.

  But the snows had gone at last, the gales had died down and suddenly there were snowdrops everywhere, their little white heads bowed as if in grateful prayer that they were hidden no longer. The daffodils and narcis
si blossomed, then the tall tulips, red and yellow, swaying in the more gentle breezes. Katie happened to say one day that she loved tulips best of all the spring flowers, so Sammy brought in a huge bunch for the kitchen, and kept renewing it until the plants were exhausted of blooms.

  With the advent of spring, life at Fenty returned to its previous normality, as Mr Gunn had predicted, although Katie considered it most abnormal. The atmosphere in the house made her feel uneasy, especially when he was there, even if he had calmed down since the day he attacked his wife. Mrs Gunn was no better, but then again, she was no worse, which was a blessing. Katie had given up any hope of getting her weekend off at Easter, for how could she leave the poor soul with nobody to look after her except a husband capable of anything in his tempers … even murder?

  After being cooped up inside for so long, Katie was glad to get out for a walk again in the evenings, and Sammy was usually hanging about waiting to join her. He told her one night that he would take her to see something nice, and she exclaimed with delight when he led her to a small clearing carpeted by pale yellow primroses.

  ‘Would you like to see something else nice?’ he beamed.

  ‘Oh, they’re lovely,’ she said, when he took her along the river and showed her some willow trees heavy with dangling, fluffy catkins. ‘My Granda used to call them lamb’s tails.’

  He giggled at this, but she could tell that he was proud to have given her some pleasure; a little friendliness was all he needed to make him happy. During their walks, he named the insects and animals they saw, and the different wild flowers – Nature Study seemed to be the only part of his schooling to have penetrated his dull brain, probably because it had appealed to him – but when he was at home he didn’t say much and was withdrawn and unresponsive when his father was in the kitchen with them.

  He was sitting by the fire one rainy afternoon, looking lost because he was forced to be indoors, so Katie tried to think of a way to cheer him. ‘Why don’t you go upstairs and speak to your mother for a while?’ she said, at last.