Bitterhall by Helen McClory (story books to read .txt) 📕

that my relative committed some horrible deed – I don’t even know for sure who it was that was murdered, I’d have to delve into local records, if I can figure out where is “local” – or writing my book on him even if he didn’t do it whatever he might have done wherever. But also, I’m stuck for a very stupid reason.’

‘Oh?’

‘Diary’s gone missing.’ He made a vanishing shape with his hands.

I came away from the house of the MacAshfalls with a short-burning curiosity and a promise to help Mark publicise his book somehow if it came about – he assumed I must know the right kind of contacts. I forgot about all this until a few months later when the book materialised before me in the Minto house, in the grasp of the man who my heart was at that time choking on. And I stole it myself, and read, and didn’t tell Mark I’d found it, obviously. Though my own reason for getting stuck was. Well. You know.

Diary

James Lennoxlove told me his story. I saw right away why Mark was suspicious, even without the sudden and unlikely name. The entries seemed intent on stuffing in the details of a life as much as possible but without any sense that they were something a person would write. Best comparison I could make was that they were like the fluffy mini-series my grandmother used to love: well-made and sumptuous but not like the way people would have actually lived. Aristocratic lifestyle porn.

According to Lennoxlove, he was a friendless young man, living in a manorhouse of honey brick in the East of Scotland, with most of his forty rooms overlooking wide butter-coloured oat fields and an ancient wood where his father had taken him hunting. He saw fairies, he said, once by a bridge near a ruined churchyard, but provided a way to shrug this off by saying it was while he was on some tonic for a migraine. Lennoxlove wrote for his readership (whoever that might be was unclear) unreal thickets of smoke-like mists trailing over coursing grounds, and drew attention to the curling steam off a horse’s back and the thick spongy quality of the paper his lover used to write to him, that kind of thing. The sheer volume of detail made the eyes water. The foxes’ tails hanging dripping blood from the servants’ windows. A huge book of accounts that had landed on a child’s foot, leaving them lame. Memorable was the duel he fought with his brother over ‘some jest’, naked except for their swords, on a moorland, both giving up immediately due to the cold. Nothing dull happened to him, even as nothing happened. BBC costume drama, like I said.

From twelve to eighteen, I used to keep a diary. Days don’t happen the way James’ days did. Lots of ‘nothing important happened today’ and football scores and how I’d got fucked off with my best friend at the time and we’d fallen out because he had said something dismissive about my favourite band. James Lennoxlove had no friends at all to bitch about, no attachments barring his brother, and, later, the lover who he only seemed to be with hunting in the woods – and in the inn, which got honestly wrenching in the superfluous detail, not just the encounter that happened there, but the beds and aspect of the room and the sound of feet creaking over the boards outside. If it had been today he would have featured threadcounts and the wifi quality in amongst the descriptions of humping (which were weirdly vague, but I suppose about right for the time).

But I couldn’t stop reading and chuck it as a wholesale lie. There was some point to it. And like Mark said, something that drew you in: his lies were beautifully crafted and winking, I thought. I don’t have time to read many books these days but I know the difference between ornate fakery for a laugh and trying to muddy things for a secret reason of some kind, a hidden narrative that leads somewhere. A hidden motive. I pride myself on picking up on these things. And the façade holds, I think, up until the point where Lennoxlove reports how he went to the Hogmanay ball and saw the murder in the stable, then it sort of – crumbles. And I imagined everyone would have got that. Now I wonder.

Lennoxlove talked about seeing the glint on the knife and feeling the heat rising from the wound – he couldn’t have felt that from across the room. He could perhaps see the light on the knife but it was as if that was all he could see – the point of focus of his eyes trained down to just that as if to avoid – as if not to see – the man murdering or the victim, I still don’t know. And at one point he wrote ‘I must keep going, I thought, as I rushed and then I turned and I made strides for my horse.’ I must keep going at what? Leaving the stable? There’s a problem there, right, with the order of the words. I would tell Mark, I thought, reading it the first few times. I would go to him and give it to him. James Lennoxlove was his relative – he implied direct ancestor – and he would want to know and to have the time to choose what to do with the information.

I held onto the book though, fidgeted with my ideas of it. Not doubting myself exactly but looking for enough proof to show – before I went accusing a stranger’s great-whatever-grandad. Daniel was always above me in our house, wandering, looking for it. He would be embarrassed – the thought ran through me like battery acid in the chest, that idea, that Mark knew Daniel had taken it – I did not know they were good friends; I imagined a scene and