The Ghost of Maiden Abbey

by LORD INVERCHAPEL

AS ITS name suggested, Maiden Abbey– Tigh A chailleacha-dubha they called it in the Gaelic — had been for many centuries a nunnery, in which virgins had sought, “a fugitive and cloistered virtue.”

We may safely assume that the preposterous John Knox and his fellow iconoclasts had had a hand in the scattering of the maidens and in the laying waste of their monastic buildings. For few traces were now left of their long occupancy, excepting the clean bones of their church in the park and some few score of mossy tombstones in the kitchen-garden — some still erect, and some built into the high walls under which greengages and fig trees huddled from the wind.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century the land had passed into the hands of one Patrick Gunn, afterwards Lord Duntroyn, who had drawn on the ruins of the nunnery as a quarry from which to build himself a handsome house in the early Georgian taste, He had at the same time planted four avenues of lime trees, each one leading in a straight line to Maiden Abbey from a cardinal point of the compass. They were now great forest trees of uncommon beauty. The four avenues were appropriately known as the North, South, East, and West approaches.

There was a great gathering at Maiden Abbey in the summer of 1914 in honor of the betrothal of the daughter of the house to my brother Hamish. Lady Duntroyn had filled it with young neighbors, 1 was not there, and it was from Hamish and my future sister-in-law that I heard the present story.

Lady Duntroyn had a touch of the second sight, and delighted in trying to commune with the dead. It was she who one evening asked her guests to join her in some spirit-rapping. They were in a jocular mood, and felt, little enthusiasm for this proposal, but in order to please their hostess, of whom they were fond, they settled down at a bare mahogany table. Their gay and irresponsible chatter died down as it became clear that Lady Duntroyn was in earnest, and that some kind of spirit must be abroad, for the rappings on the table became insistent. It seemed that she had the code at her finger ends.

“Get a pencil and a piece of paper, Hamish dear. It looks as though we were going to have something worth while to record.

“Who are you?” she asked the noisy spirit.

The table rapped out the words: “I am Hector Mackay!”

“Which Mackay?” she asked, for this was important. There were many of them, and she liked to get things straight.

“Hector Mackay of the Loup.”

“A quite distinguished cadet family, my dears, she whispered across the table. “I fancy they are now extinct. She knew her Highland history.

“What do YOU want" she asked.

The answer came slowly and haltingly. I want rest. I am not yet at rest.

By this time all the company of young skeptics was alert and interested. “How can we help you.'

“Put me together and bury me again.”

“Be quick, Hamish, and get all this down! said Lady Duntroyn.

The spirit went on to explain that his head and the rest of his body had been buried in different places, and that he would like them put in one grave, in a particular grave. If his listeners took the pains to dig, they would find his head at the foot of the fourteenth lime on the East side of the North approach, a little to the North of the tree, and the rest of his body at the foot of the twentythird tree on the South side of the West approach, again a little North of the tree. They should put all this together into one grave.

Tension was now running high, and all the guests were in a state of keen excitement.

“Where do you want, to be buried?” they asked.

“Put mein with Anne Chisholm,” came the answer.

“Where is she?” The spirit made no clear reply. The question was repeated again and again, but it. brought forth nothing but the words “Look for her!” and the spirit ceased his rappings.

“Too bad, too bad,” murmured Lady Duntroyn; “the contact must be broken. That was most interesting, most dramatic. Did you get it all down, Hamish? That’s good. Now you will laugh at me, my dears, but I am going to get you all to sign what Hamish has written down. We shall see in the morning what it all means,”

2

IT WAS quite a formidable cavalcade, with Lady Duntroyn at its head, that set out from Maiden Abbey after breakfast — six young men and six young women and a couple of gardeners with picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows. The jocular and incredulous mood had returned to them, and the talk was sprightly and flippant about what should be done with the head of Hector Mackay, if indeed it were found, for it was decided by common consent to begin with the head.

The trees of the North approach were carefully numbered. There was considerable discussion about the points of the compass, and it was finally one of the gardeners who laid it down which was the East side.

There had been heavy rain in the night, and the ground was soft and spongy, but the tangle of the sturdy roots of the old tree made the digging tedious and difficult. As the work proceeded and the morning wore on, the party dwindled in number. The skeptics tended to drift away towards the tennis courts, until my brother Hamish was left, alone with the two gardeners and Lady Duntroyn, who remained as undaunted in her belief in Hector Mackay as she was concerned lest the roots of her trees should be damaged.

Suddenly Hamish’s pick sounded on something more solid than the juicy brown roots. It was a skull. It was hard to dislodge, for one of the roots of the lime tree had driven through it, pinning it to the soil. There was nothing for it but to cut the root and edge the skull out.

One of the gardeners cleaned it roughly with the sleeve of his coat, and with a deft knife gouged out the soil from the empty eye-sockets. He put it reverently on a pad of moss that Lady Duntroyn had gathered, and it was left in a wheelbarrow against the finding of the other bones, for luncheon time was approaching, and the fresh digging would have to wait until the afternoon. It was a triumphant Lady Duntroyn who greeted the truants from the digging when she found them gathered on the terrace ready for luncheon, and tried with her story to demolish their very reasonable skepticism. They were reluctant to credit it, and clamored about Hamish to have it confirmed. In the end again it was one of the gardeners who persuaded them into some kind of belief.

The skull of Hector Mackay was inevitably the main subject of conversation. “Why was his head not on his body?” “Why was his body buried in a different place?” In the excitement of last night they had not paused to ask these important questions.

In a very different spirit the second cavalcade set out after luncheon — eagerness, expectancy, and much conjecture. The unbelievers were convinced by the sight of the skull in its nest of moss in the wheelbarrow, and everyone now seemed to want to take a hand in the digging. This time the roots of the twenty-third tree on the South side of the West approach, a little Northward, were not so irksome. The diggers came on the first signs of human bones about a foot and a half below the level of the turf. The posture of the remains suggested that the body had been bundled into the ground in haste and without reverence. It was lying on its side, knees drawn up towards the barrel of the thorax.

The uncomfortable job of piecing it all together was left to the young women, who went about it in good heart, as though at work on a jigsaw puzzle, spreading the countless bones out on a piece of sacking under the able guidance of Lady Duntroyn, who was clearly something of an anatomist. The skull seemed to watch the work intently from its wheelbarrow. In the sandy soil near the bones of the left hand they came upon a slender ring of gold. Much rubbing revealed in an incised inscription the letters anu orti, of which none could guess the meaning.

Lady Duntroyn’s triumph was now so complete that she was moved to join her guests in the rebuilding of the skeleton. This work ate up the summer afternoon, and it was not until dusk was drawing in that the search was begun for Anne Chisholm amongst the tombs in the kitchen-garden. They found her stone all askew amongst the gooseberry bushes. In spite of the lichens and mosses her name was clear enough, for the mason who cut it had not skimped his work. The Latin inscription that accompanied it was almost indecipherable, but a little careful scraping produced the date Anno Domini 1561.

As they dug to make room for Hector Mackay to find his rest they came upon traces of a coffin, of which the timber had been in part preserved by the peaty subsoil. Amongst its fragments they gently laid the bones of Hector Mackay, somewhat jumbled now by their shifting from the sacking on which they had been pieced together.

That evening Lady Duntroyn insisted upon recalling the spirit of Hector Mackay. It rapped out the words: “At rest now. I thank ye, I thank ye,” and seemed anxious to break off and be gone, but as the contact weakened there came two more words, now very clearly: “Manu forti.” Hamish wrote them down. Here were the missing letters in the inscription on the ring. A scrutiny of Innes’s History of the Clans (Edinburgh, 1811) showed these Latin words to be the device, the enseinyie, on the oriflamme of the Mackays.

I wish that I had had the good fortune to be amongst Lady Duntroyn’s guests and to take part in the adventures at Maiden Abbey. But, as it is, I am dependent for the telling upon Hamish and my sister-in-law. Nevertheless, I am disposed to accept, it as it stands, for they are two truthful people who related it when it was fresh in their minds. I think that I have set it forth in all faithfulness. As it stands, it is incomplete and unsatisfying. Important gaps yawn in it. What, for instance, had been the relationship between Hector Mackay and Anne Chisholm? Had he disturbed her “fugitive and cloistered virtue”? We mav assume that he had, and that this was the reason of his killing. But who killed him, and why? Why had his head been cut from his body and been buried in a different place?

These things we shall never know, for his spirit has found the untroubled rest it sought and will never speak to us again.