The House of Secrets

All day the burn continued its ice-cold career down from Sgurr Domhnuill, towering frost-shrouded up the narrow, rising glen behind the house. But it was only at night, if one woke in the great bedroom that one noticed its voice. In daylight there were other claims upon one’s senses—the still, profound blue of the mountain bordered, endless sea-loch and its tributary inlet, the burning ambers and citrons of the autumn-smitten trees, and, in breath-taking contrast, the snow that lapped some thousand feet or so of the summits at the entrance to to that glen whose very name symbolises treachery and tragedy—Glencoe. Surely, one felt, no southern summer, no tropic island, could glow with more intensity of colour than this chill northern region on a sunny day of late October.

But nightfall used to come early, when all that splendour was withdrawn, and the old house with its long, one-sided avenue of gigantic beeches came into its own. Up that shadowy alley, past the nameless mound at the gate, crowned with forest trees, no one of the neighbourhood would venture after dark, the place was reputed to be so haunted. Indeed, though there are no official directions in the Post Office Guide on the subject of spectres, it was a matter of course that telegrams arriving after dusk were not delivered until next morning. For anyone could feel that house and avenue were ghost-thronged; and, waking in the night, when the rats in the walls galloped and revelled with such vigour, it seemed almost impossible that an ardent longing to see something of what had happened under that old roof should not be gratified. For what of the two brothers, one of whom, so the tale went, had stabbed the other in the drawingroom—what of the unexplained soldier, clad so oddly in a black uniform, whom a maid had seen, even more oddly clasping his foot in his hand, in the conservatory—what of the unseen comings and goings along the passages, to which the present occupants of the house were by now habituated? And what, above all, of the apparition which a child had seen at evening by the mound near the gate, no longer than a month before?

There had been some tinkers camping by the ferry, and the compassionate mistress of the house had been giving them milk, to fetch which, every evening, came a silent little boy of ten with his smaller sister. One evening he never appeared to claim her gift; but next morning there came a child quite transformed. Words bubbled from his lips in his desire to tell her what had happened to him the previous day, when he had started up the avenue as usual, but had never arrived at the house.

It seems that when he had got through the gate and come abreast of the mound, he perceived there in the dusk a table under the trees, laid for two people, with a cloth and knives and forks and bread, and with two chairs set. By it was waiting a lady, whom the little boy took to be someone belonging to the house (with whose other inmates he was not of course familiar). Thinking she wished to speak to him, he approached; and then only did his childish mind become aware of something strange. He was suddenly afraid, put his wee sister behind him, and then fled with her to the gate and back to the ferry, where he bade his mother come and see what he had seen at the big house. The tinker’s wife came; but there was nothing under the trees, neither table nor lady awaiting a guest. And indeed neither was likely on a cold September evening; nor, on the other hand, was the apparition at all a probable one for a little boy to have imagined or invented—something sheeted or headless, perhaps, would have been more probable. Unfortunately, when the mistress of the house went down to the ferry to interview the boy’s mother, she found the nomads already gone, and so no further details could be elicited, nor was any explanation forthcoming of that table laid for two underneath the autumn trees, nor of the shadowy lady waiting for the shadowy guest.

But if these wraiths could not be identified, there was one of a different kind who could. It was a little lady in grey who used to flit about the house at night, not very many years ago. She was, if one may coin a term, a ‘dream ghost’—the apparition of a living person asleep. One summer the then tenant of the house, Lady X, let it for the shooting to a certain Mr B. She mentioned the little lady who would come into the rooms at night. “Dear me,” said Mr B., “if she comes to see me I shall give her a chair and ask her to talk to me.” He did not know that he already shared a room with the ‘ghost’. It is not unusual to have dreams of wandering night after night through the same house, often in a rather worried state of mind, looking for a room or a passage that one cannot find. Mrs B. had a constantly recurring dream of a house in a beautiful situation of which she knew every room, and she would come down to breakfast in the morning and say, “Children, I have been dreaming of my house again. I wonder where it is!” The hardened reader will probably guess that at the first sight of the house which her husband had rented that autumn in Scotland she cried out in surprise, “But this is the house of my dreams!” The same reader will not, perhaps, be so prepared for the fact that Lady X., meeting her shooting tenants at the gate, exclaimed in equal amazement, “But this is the little lady who haunts the house!” And indeed, when Mrs B. was shown over it, she, who had been there so often in dreams, proved to be acquainted with every room, and even asked about a staircase which no longer existed, having been walled up on account of disuse.

And what of the phantoms of days more remote who must surely have haunted Ballachulish House[1] for a while, even if they do so no longer? For it was probably in one of these rooms, perhaps in the diningroom, so charmingly proportioned and recessed, that, on the twelfth of February, 1692, Major Robert Duncanson sat penning that letter which can still be seen, in which he passed on the murderous orders he had just received from Inverlochy. He was writing to Lieutenant Robert Campbell of Glenlyon, some few miles away in Glencoe, who had already, with his men, lived as a guest for nearly a fortnight among the destined victims. “You are hereby ordered to fall upon the Rebells, the McDonalds of Glenco, and putt all to the sword under seventy, you are to have a speciall care that the old Fox and his sones doe upon no account escape your hands...” And very early next morning Duncanson himself went forth under these beeches, in the wind and the drifting snow, with his own four hundred, to bear his part in the massacre of the unsuspecting little tribe whom Stair and Breadalbane had resolved to exterminate.

Out of this door, too, just sixty years later, walked on a mid-May morning one of the chief personages in that drama the memory of which is still so living in that countryside—the ‘Appin murder’. Surely, therefore, this old Stewart house knows the secret of secrets, which has been well kept ever since, handed on as it has been from generation to generation—the secret of the identity of the man who in the late afternoon of May 14, 1752 shot Colin Campbell of Glenure, the Government factor on some of the forfeited estates, in the wood of Lettermore not two miles away. It was certainly not the man whom a Campbell jury found guilty and who was hanged for it, James Stewart of Acharn. Nor was it ever brought home to the man, who though never captured was charged along with him,[2] of whom he had been the ward. He was a friend of the absent son of the house, and had spent the night there as the guest of its septuagenarian master Alex[ander] Stewart; and he had left it some five or six hours before the crime to go fishing in the very burn which clamours now at night. We know so much about his exterior that we can see him on the threshold as in a picture—a tall man of thirty marked with the smallpox, slightly knock-kneed and roundshouldered with very black hair and full black eyes. He wears a dun-coloured great coat, and under it a short black one with white metal buttons, trews and a blue bonnet, “having laid aside his French clothes, which were remarkable.” We know all about them too, almost to satiety, since the mention of that “long blue coat, red waistcoat, black breeches and feathered hat”,[3] recurs on welnigh every page of the trial which ended in the gallows near the ferry here and the windswayed skeleton of James Stewart of the Glen.[4] The fisherman leaving the house who never brought back his catch—who never came back at all, bears a name very familiar to us. He is Alan Breck Stewart.

But he is not the engaging Alan Breck of Stevenson whom we know and laugh at and love—the little man of thirty-five or so, with light eyes, who made so dramatic an appearance on board the brig Covenant of Dysart, but a man five years younger, who had managed to waste his substance, the ‘desperate foolish fellow’ of whom his unfortunate guardian wrote. To us Stevenson’s little Alan is so much the more likeable and real that this tall, blackavised stooping young man who really lived, who slept in some room of this house and carried his fishingrod out of the door, seems thrice a ghost, whereas he was so fond of averring that he ‘bore a king’s name’ seems flesh and blood. But both were about Lettermore that day,[5] and both carried fishing-rods.

And late that night a maid servant called Donald Stewart, nephew and son-in-law to Alex[ander] St[ewart] the owner of the house, and told him that Alan Breck Stewart wanted him, and Donald found Alan a little above the house on the brae, whereupon Alan declared his intention of leaving the country at once, not only because he was sure to be suspected of the murder, though he declared he had had no hand in it, but also because, having seven years ago deserted from the Hanoverian army, he had no wish to court enquiry.[6] Thereafter having recovered his ‘French clothes’ he vanished, was seen several times in Rannoch, and then flitted back to France, whence another acquaintance of ours [from ‘Catriona’ this time] James Mor MacGregor Drummond, desired earnestly to kidnap him and return him to justice—of course for a reward.

Many years afterwards a maid servant found a gun in a hollow elder tree up in Gleann a’ Chaolaid behind the house.[7] She brought it to old Mr Stewart (for he lived to be ninety) and on seeing it he exclaimed “Janet, that is the black gun of the misfortune!” But that brings us no nearer to knowing who pulled its trigger. Probably, though there is no proof that Alan Breck fired the shot, he knew quite well who did, and may even have had his part in what was most likely a concerted affair. Yet if the house were asked about this, or the burn, which sounds so talkative, they would very likely reply, like R.L.S’s Alan: “I’ve a grand memory for forgetting, David.”[8]