Charlie Robertson had spent his entire working life on the Kilblane estate. When he’d retired as head gamekeeper back in 2015, Sir Ewan had presented him with a silver watch and made a rambling but heart-felt speech about Andy’s knowledge of, and love for, the wild places. So it had been a shock after Sir Ewan died, when Charlie got a letter from the new estate factor, telling him that he’d have to quit his cottage. The estate was putting the cottage up for sale: someone from Edinburgh or London would likely buy it as a holiday home.

Charlie mentioned it to Willie Forbes, the postie, when Charlie asked Willie into the cottage to stand on a chair and change a light bulb for him. And then Willie mentioned it to the minister in the village. The minister was a nervous young man who’d previously served in the Castlemilk housing scheme in Glasgow: he explained to Willie that, once Charlie had actually been evicted, he’d then qualify for a council flat. The minister and Willie both knew what Charlie’s life would be like in a council flat in the town; Willie reckoned he’d be ‘like an auld lion in a circus.’ They agreed it was a bad business: Charlie would be much better off staying with a member of his family, but he’d never married and had no close relatives.

And that was how matters stood, on a warm spring day, when Charlie took a stroll up the glen, to see the primroses in full yellow bloom beside the burn as it tumbles and splatters over the boulders. Buoyed in spirit, on his return to the cottage he decided to open yet another official-looking letter that Willie had delivered two days previously. It was from a London solicitor and its contents took Charlie back fifty-odd years…

#

As the estate’s under-keeper back then, young Charlie had been despatched to look for the ponies that would be needed for the next day’s shoot. The head keeper had predicted (wrongly) that they would’ve taken shelter in Glen Ducheron (aka Gleann an Dubh Choirein, the Glen of the Black Corries). Charlie had wasted the whole afternoon walking the length of the glen without seeing so much as a hoof print. It was dusk as he returned to the mouth of the glen, and the track back to the shooting lodge. That was when he heard frantic shouting, but could see no-one. Then he spotted an arm waving above the dead bracken on the bankside of the Ducheron Burn. It was a woman, unable to stand: she had smashed her left knee when she’d slipped on a rock, trying to cross the burn. She was wet through and shivering.

Charlie took off his coat, wrapped it round her, and told her he’d hurry off to the lodge where there was a phone. She begged him not to leave her. Was it the hours of loneliness she’d already endured, the throbbing pain, or the sinister bellowing of the rutting stags that had drummed through the glen all afternoon? Maybe all three: at any rate, she was insistent and Charlie complied.

A few yards away downstream was a mature spruce plantation; Charlie quickly gathered two branches for a leg splint and a stouter branch for a crutch. In the early evening dark, huddled together for support, they set out on the two-mile walk to the lodge. The path, at first, was uphill, but at least it wasn’t uneven or stepped. Charlie’s auntie was the local midwife and so he knew about the soothing importance of distracting questions and chatter. He learned that her name was Millie and that she was a postgraduate archaeology student.

They paused for a breather. ‘And what were ye doin’, out on the estate in the middle o’ November?’

‘Well, there was once a Roman camp down at Callander…’

‘Ah, ye were lookin’ for the Roman ford?’

Surprised out of her pain and exhaustion, she looked up at him. ‘Yes, that’s right! How..?’

‘Well, yer no’ the first tae come lookin’. Robbie, the head gamekeeper, told me that a couple o’ Edinburgh professors were here afore the war, lookin’. The Romans made a cuttin’ in that steep bank beside the burn and lined the cuttin’ wi’ stanes. There’s a lot o’ history in these glens, if ye ken where tae look.’

The moon was now up and he saw her smile and give a vigorous triple nod. They set off again.

When they reached the lodge, the housekeeper phoned for an ambulance, put them in front of the kitchen range and fed them warm milk and oatcakes with loganberry jam. Away from the moonlight, Charlie could see that Millie’s eyes were brown.

A few days later, he received a letter from Millie (sent care of Mrs Laing, the housekeeper), with her repeated thanks and apologies, plus two pounds to pay for dry-cleaning Charlie’s coat. He kept her letter and wrote a letter in return, but got no further reply.

#

And, as Willie the postie told his audience in the public bar of The Drummond Arms Hotel, that was that.

[dramatic pause]

Until Charlie got the letter from the solicitor telling him that the Archaeology Professor had died and left Charlie her wee house in London, which the solicitor had valued at in excess of nine hundred thousand pounds.

So, that was why Charlie was buying his cottage off the estate. Willie had got a lot of quiet enjoyment out of telling the story to the new factor’s wife, when he’d delivered a parcel to the factor’s house that morning.

Biography:

Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).