I’m here to tell you, all a fellow really needs for a full life is regular meals, a place on the hearth rug, and the occasional scratch behind the ears. If the cook finds it in her heart and menu to dispense a few sardines come tea time, then that simply crosses the t’s in contentment.
So imagine my disgust one afternoon when I was awakened from the all-too-rare sunbath by a caterwauling of human voices. I sat up, stretched, smoothed my whiskers, and cantered off toward the main staircase. My elder colleague, Jasper, was already poised behind the balusters, tail wrapped tidily around his forefeet, eyeing the proceedings with the air of a judge regarding the worst sort of miscreant.
“I say,” said I, as I took up a position beside him, “how’s a chap to get his eighteen hours of peaceful slumber when all Hades breaks loose in the entrance hall?”
“Ah, there you are, young Bingo,” Jasper returned. “I regret to say that the humans have encountered a spot of bother. One moment they were sitting about in languid poses, digesting their midday repast and discussing current events. In the next moment Mrs. Arbuthnot burst through the door shrieking fit to singe one’s ears. By the by,” he added, “this fellow Lindbergh looks to have completed his flight, although if he wished to fly I should think a short trip amongst the trees, nabbing the odd bird on his way, would be much more sensible than this crossing the ocean business.”
Nodding in agreement, I inserted my head between the balusters, all the better to see the scene below.
Even at a low volume, Mrs. Arbuthnot’s voice could rattle the cups in their saucers. Now, in full cry, it made the veritable welkin ring. “Where is that constable! It’s only a moment’s cycle ride from the village—are you sure you rang the correct number, Violet?”
“I spoke to the man myself, Sadie, and he promised to make all possible haste.” Lady Mompesson’s alabaster complexion had become a shade of mauve that contrasted poorly with her gray hair.
“Constable?” I queried Jasper.
“I regret to say that Mrs. Arbuthnot has suffered a theft,” he returned.
“Good heavens!”
As if to acquaint the entire household with her dilemma, Mrs. A. yelled, “Stolen! The Eye of the Tiger, the Arbuthnot family heirloom! My late husband’s great grandfather brought it home from India!”
“Oh, ah,” said Lord Mompesson, his moustache quivering as though it had been blessed with the acute sensitivity of a cat’s whiskers. “Green, was it? Whacking great emerald set in little gold doodahs?”
“I wore it last night at dinner.” Mrs. A’s glittering eye skewered poor Lord M. like a lepidopterist a butterfly.
Celia Mompesson, slender limbs and golden curls all a-tremble, stepped forward to have a go at soothing the savage. “I’m sure it’s all a misunderstanding. Perhaps you’ve mislaid it . . .”
“Mislaid a priceless jewel, child? I think not! I put it away in my jewelry box when I retired, and this morning before I came down for breakfast I placed the box in the wardrobe. This afternoon I found the box there but the necklace gone!”
“A bit thick, what?” I said to Jasper.
He applied a quick lick to his impeccably groomed black fur. “Positively glutinous, young Bingo.”
The bulging eye of the Arbuthnot rejected Celia as small game, and turned toward the lanky form of Freddie Quirk, leaning with an unconcerned air against the library door. “You there. Quirk. Your room is next to mine. You never came down to breakfast this morning—the younger generation, lying abed til all hours—did you see or hear anything?”
Freddie stood up and straightened his tie, which of was a spiffing horseshoe design. Beside me Jasper shuddered, obviously not appreciating the man’s sartorial qualities.
“Well,” said Freddie, his already long face elongating to where you’d expect him to be wearing horseshoes himself, “a bit difficult, isn’t it, to keep one’s eyes on the next room at the same time they’re closed in sleep. Although . . .” His face corrugated in thought.
Celia clasped her hands, eyeing the man as though he were a star of the cinema, when in reality he looked to me like the sort of human gumboil she often had lounging at her feet. I mean to say, she’ll eventually marry and leave the house, but there’s no need for such a kind, gentle girl, a dab hand with a ball of yarn or a paper tied to a bit of twine, to rush too quickly from the parental embrace, is there?
“I do believe I heard something, a door shutting or a heavy tread, as of the footsteps of a substantial sort of person, that penetrated even my sweet dreams.” Here Freddie smiled a smile of exceeding fatuousness at Celia, who simpered so hideously in return I promised myself I’d turn a blind eye and cold shoulder on her next overture with paper and string.
At this critical juncture the doorbell rang. Without standing on ceremony—the butler stood with the rest of the domestic staff, huddled in the back hallway like chickens over whom has passed the shadow of a hawk—Lord M threw open the door.
Not unexpectedly, a uniformed officer of the law stood upon the doorstep. “Police Constable Rupert Worple,” he announced. “What’s all this then? A robbery, you say. . . “ His eye fell upon the beauteous Celia. He whisked his hat off his head, revealing a face equipped with granite jaw, clear gaze, and intelligent brow.
Mrs. A stepped into his line of sight like an elephant lumbering into the gunsights. “I’ve been robbed of a priceless necklace!”
The officer reeled back a pace, then collected himself. “Has anyone left the house since you last saw your necklace?”
“No, not a bit of it,” offered Lord Mompesson. “I was just having a word with Thatcher about the wine cellar and saw all the servants, including Mrs. Arbuthnot’s maid, gathered in the kitchen.”
Ah, the kitchen, I repeated to myself. The domain of Mrs. Beecham. She was, I understand, the despair of the scullery maid, who in the course of her duties had to clear away the bits of meat, fish, and other comestibles that came flying from Mrs. Beecham’s expert hands as she worked. But, I ask you, should an artist be expected to keep tidy like lesser mortals? I think not.
“Well then,” said P.C. Worple, “if you’d be so good as to collect the servants here in the hall, and show me the scene of the crime.”
“Thatcher,” Lord Mompesson called to the butler. “See to it.”
“Very good, my lord.” Thatcher’s slicked-back hair and lipless face gave him the appearance of a snake, if not in the grass then amongst the carpets. A fine specimen of a butler he might be, but he regarded the odd hairball, deposited discreetly upon the fringes of the Persian, with a very cold eye, which rather soured my view of him, if you take my meaning.
He began chivvying the staff, including the rotund figure of Mrs. Beecham in her capacious but far from clean apron, and the scrawny one of Mrs. Arbuthnot’s maid from their lurking place.
Meanwhile the other humans started up the stairs. I tried to remove my head from between the balusters and found it stuck. “Jasper. . . .”
“Allow me, young Bingo.” With the slightest pressure of his teeth, Jasper seized the nape of my neck and pulled me forth like a cork from a bottle. I paused for a moment to smooth my fur back into place. I fancy that its golden color, not to mention the hint of a ruff at my throat, gives me a resemblance to the king of beasts, and no aristocrat should let himself be observed in disarray.
Here came all the pairs of feet clomping up the staircase. Celia paused to tickle my ears—I re-thought my ill-considered impulse to give her the cut direct—and to my surprise, the young Lochinvar of the law offered his sturdy hand to Jasper’s discerning nose.
“Come along,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, as Freddie led the way down the corridor in the manner of a hound after a fox—if humans had had tails with which to express themselves, one would have been able to see it upraised in excitement behind him.
Jasper wrinkled his nose. “P.C. Worple smells of soap and toast, a good honest smell. But which of them is scented with that heavy floral odor?”
“That’s Mrs. Arbuthnot’s perfume,” I answered. “Offends the old nostrils like flowers left too long in the vase without a change of water, what? I caught a snootful when she turfed me out of her wardrobe this morning, just as I was settling down for the odd eighty winks on her silk peignoir.”
“Neither Celia nor Lady Mompesson would deign to pour such an offensive odor upon themselves. Lord Mompesson’s bay rum is quite refreshing, considering . . .” Here Jasper paused, as though putting action to word and considering indeed.
I left him to his cogitations and whiskered down the stairs. The servants were standing about babbling, although not as a brook, merrily. Thatcher stood aloof, displaying his habitual stuffed-frog expression. I slipped between him and the others and aimed for the back hall, thinking that perhaps some morsel of provender had been left unguarded in the kitchen when the Arbuthnot balloon went up. But I was distracted from my purpose by an odd smell.
One of the humans had a bit of an air. It was not Mrs. Beecham, the old dear, who smiled benignly down upon me as I passed. She was scented with her usual glorious fragrance—kipper, beefsteak, and the finest Stilton. Not for nothing does Lord Mompesson resemble a bowl of jelly caught in a stiffish breeze.
Mrs. Arbuthnot’s maid, Dolly, stood wringing her hands, her long, thin face set in such deep lineaments of concern that it resembled one or two thoroughbreds of my acquaintance. As her hands met and twisted, they emitted the spicy odor of nutmeg. I’m here to tell you, nutmeg is not one of my favorite flavors—it falls far short of poached salmon or day-old mouse—but I’d not pass up the chance to nip a bit of apple pie from Celia’s lovely fingers. Delicately, mind you, never being so inconsiderate as to bite the hand that feeds me.
Nutmeg, it occurred to me as I trotted on down the hall toward the kitchen, was rarely served with breakfast. I cast my tongue’s memory back over the array of silver salvers on the sideboard—warm enough to burn the inquisitive nose, I’d discovered once in my impetuous youth. Kedgeree, kidneys, bacon, poached eggs. No nutmeg.
And why should a lady’s maid be scented with food at all? This was something to be considered. No need to call on Jasper’s deductive abilities. I could solve this mystery myself.
I altered my trajectory and oiled through the half-open door of the pantry. Here amongst the teapots and platters the odor of nutmeg was gaggingly strong. In fact, I discovered by inspecting the sole of my foot, a few grains lay upon the floor. Pulling a face—really, the things one is forced to do upon occasion—I licked the offending bits away and then turned my attention upwards.
It was the work of but a moment to leap upward and land with my usual grace and dignity upon the shelf. The tins and bottles were lined up in good order, like the soldiers standing to attention in one of Lord M.’s photographs, waiting for the sergeant major to send them into culinary battle. Pepper, mustard, nutmeg. . . .
The solution to the robbery flashed upon me at this point, entire and complete. Dolly had purloined her mistress’s jewel and tucked it away, here in the pantry, to be retrieved at her convenience. No wonder the maid’s face was etched so deeply with anxiety. It was not anxiety for Mrs. A—indeed, I failed to feel much anxiety for Mrs. A—but for herself.
I nudged the tin of nutmeg to the edge of the shelf and let it fall. Gravity being what it is, the ensuing explosion was most gratifying. The lid of the tin shot out one way, the body another, and the darkish brownish nutmeg spilled across the floor. I sneezed.
When I opened my eyes again, I saw humans standing in the doorway. Celia lifted me from my perch. “Why Bingo, you silly creature. What have you done? I’ve never known you to put a paw wrong!”
My indignation at being accused of clumsiness was mollified by her embrace. I nestled against her bosom, purringly pleased with my own sagacity. And there are those who say that Bingo has nothing but wax between his ears.
For a long moment P.C. Worple regarded my position, somewhat enviously, I wot. Then, with a shudder as though shaking himself to duty, honor, and country, he squatted down. Withdrawing a pen from his pocket, he lifted something shiny from the fragrant mess. Not the Eye of the Tiger, the big emerald, the object of desire, more’s the pity, but a raggedy-looking gold chain.
The Arbuthnot squealed like a train approaching a crossing. “My necklace! The jewel’s been ripped from its setting! Infamous, I tell you, infamous!”
“This is Mrs. Beecham’s pantry,” said Thatcher, his voice dripping doom. “Mr. Quirk averred that he heard the footsteps of a heavy person. Mrs. Beecham must have slipped into Mrs. Arbuthnot’s room whilst the household was at breakfast and stolen the jewel. I’ve always known her to be an untidy and frivolous person, but a thief—I’m shocked, I tell you. Shocked!”
From the hallway, Lord and Lady Mompesson expressed various doubts and disbeliefs. I could almost hear Lord M.’s avoirdupois deflating. “. . . utter foolishness to imagine a cook of the caliber of Mrs. Beecham would desert her post in the kitchen to go thumping about in people’s bedrooms . . .”
My whiskers went from jaunty to crestfallen, and the purr was stopped in my throat as by a choking hand. The entire sequence of events, set in train by my rashly following up the scent of nutmeg, rose before me like Hamlet’s father’s ghost.
Once, when Mrs. Beecham went on her well-deserved but much-lamented holiday, Thatcher had employed a relative as a cook. The female Thatcher was lean, pale, sharp, and shared the Thatcher family’s disdain for the feline species. She provided Jasper and me with nuggets of noxious brown stuff from a bag labeled, for all I know, “kibbled gravel for terrace restoration.”
Never trust someone who’s lean, pale, and sharp. Their moral faculties tend to be undernourished. We’d have a pretty thin time of it ourselves if Mrs. Beecham were clapped into chokey, and Thatcher’s relative became our cook-in-residence.
“I’ll have a word with Mrs. Beecham,” said P.C. Worple. Celia, her lovely face furrowed, set me upon the floor, and the humans tottered en masse back toward the entrance hall.
I was dashed low at that point, I’m here to say. The sight of Jasper sitting alone in the hall, in the manner of a bit of flotsam left upon the beach by a retreating tide, did little to warm the old cockles. I sneezed again.
“Bless you, young Bingo,” said Jasper.
“Bless us both,” I retorted, and proceeded to tell him of my ghastly vision of future kibble.
He cocked his head to the side. “I doubt matters will come to that. May I ask what led you here to the pantry, and why you knocked the nutmeg onto the floor? With all due respect to Miss Celia, you hardly did it by accident.”
“Well, the dear girl can’t always be right, can she? Look at that loathsome clot Freddie!
“Of Mr Quirk, more in a moment, but first. . . .”
“Oh, ah. Yes. I smelled nutmeg on Dolly’s hands, and thought that was a dashed rummy sort of thing, a lady’s maid quaffing the nutmeg and all.”
“Rummy it is, young Bingo.” Jasper blinked his amber eyes gravely. “I have encountered a similar conundrum. You may remember how I followed the humans to Mrs. Arbuthnot’s bedroom. I was able to slide through the door unobserved by all but Mr. Quirk.”
“The loathsome clot,” I observed.
“Indubitably. He detected my presence and went so far as to label me ‘filthy beast’, at which time he urged me from the room with his foot, much in the manner of a man moving a hassock. I naturally increased my weight proportionally, so that he had to exert more effort than he’d originally intended, and was at last reduced to leaning over and taking hold of my body.”
I shuddered at the very image.
“It was however, at that moment I detected upon his hands the same floral odor as that in Mrs. Arbuthnot’s wardrobe.” Jasper licked his sleek flanks, cleansing them of the befouling touch.
I pride myself upon my quickness of mind. I pounced on his meaning as though upon one of Celia’s bits of yarn. “You mean to say he stole her bottle of scent?”
“No,” said Jasper, with only the faintest trace of asperity in the angle of his ears, “I mean to say he stole her necklace whilst she was at breakfast with the rest of the humans.”
“But, but, I found the necklace here. . . .” I stopped to reconsider. “I found the setting of the necklace is all.”
“Indeed, young Bingo. Hidden by the hands of Mrs. Arbuthnot’s maid.”
Voices came from the entrance hall, Mrs. Beecham’s raised in protest, P.C. Worple’s calm and cool. It fair gave one the pip to see the old dear distracted from her duties in kitchen. We definitely needed to find some means of preserving the old status quo.
But I didn’t need to inform Jasper of this. “The question,” he said, “presents itself in two parts. Firstly, why were the jewel and its setting separated? And secondly, where is the jewel now?”
Jasper in full ratiocinative flow is an inspiring sight. “I hope you intend to point to Thatcher as the culprit.”
“As Mr. Thatcher passed by me just now, I took the precaution of sniffing at his hands. They smelled of nothing but freshly-ironed newsprint. I rather suspect that he is merely taking advantage of the situation. No, we have the culprits before our noses—Freddie Quirk and Dolly. Dolly Quirk, I should think. Surely you’ve taken notice of the resemblance between her and the man I believe to be her brother.”
Well, yes, I had noticed they each had a face like a horse, but I hadn’t actually taken notice of it, if you catch my meaning. “They’re a family of thieves, then, stealing the ocular fixtures of tigers and all.”
“So it appears. I daresay Dolly told Freddie that Mrs. Arbuthnot would be visiting Mompesson Hall, whereupon he began chatting up Celia . . .”
“A human chap could hardly avoid chatting up Celia.”
“. . . so as to be invited for the same weekend. Then he absconded with the jewel, removed it from its setting, and passed the setting on to his sister whilst the other humans were at their morning feed. Unlike either Mrs. Beecham or Mr. Thatcher, the perfidious young woman had a valid reason to be moving about amongst the bedrooms before making her appearance in the kitchen—during the course of which, she hid the aforementioned setting in the pantry.”
“To stitch up poor old Mrs. B, do you think?”
“Not necessarily. I expect the Quirks intended to sacrifice the gold setting to draw attention away from themselves and to someone in the household. What they did not intend was for it to come to light quite so quickly. They meant to be far away, with the jewel—or with the proceeds from its sale, rather—when some unwitting bystander or perhaps even an officer of the law opened the tin.”
“So Freddie intended to leave Celia high and dry. Tchah!” I said scathingly.
“I daresay Miss Celia would have had the good sense to see past Mr. Quirk’s blandishments, not to mention his haberdashery. Really! I ask you!”
Jasper hadn’t asked me, but this wasn’t the time to debate the whys and wherefores of human clothing. “So what now? Freddie and Dolly can still make their getaway, free and clear as the birds and whatnot.”
“Then we must endeavor to stop them. Or him, as I rather suspect it is he who has the jewel.” Jasper looked at me.
I looked back. “There’s but one thing to do. If it—what’s that expression of yours?”
“If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly.”
“Couldn’t put it better myself.”
“Then let us position ourselves in the entrance hall.”
Passing Thatcher on the way—the man looked like a thundercloud searching for a place to rain—we arrived in the hall just as the other humans were drifting away into various rooms. It appeared as though P.C. Worple, who obviously had a functioning brain cell or two, had taken Mrs. Beecham into Lord M’s study to discuss the matter in a civil fashion, rather than cuffing her ever so capable hands and bunging her straight into chokey.
The Mompessons themselves had gone to ground in the sitting room along with Mrs. Arbuthnot, whose tally-ho had at last dropped to an economical volume. Probably they had requested a restorative, hence Thatcher’s mission kitchenwards. The other servants, including, I supposed, the inglorious Dolly, had disappeared. As had the equally inglorious Freddie. . . .
No. Here he came, walking in what he no doubt fancied was a stealthy gait across the upper landing of the staircase, but which to my alert ears sounded like the thud of hoofbeats. He was tucking something away in the inside breast pocket of his jacket.
“Allow me, young Bingo.” Jasper shimmered up the stairs.
Freddie started to descend the main flight, his eye darting jerkily to and fro. Halfway down, he encountered Jasper. Or rather, Jasper encountered him, making a quick, expert figure eight through his legs between one step and the next.
Freddie’s fall was a thing of beauty and a joy forever, flailing arms and legs and a cry that would strike terror into the heart of a banshee. The cataclysm caused humans to pop out of doorways like an array of cuckoos from their clocks, eyes bulging and mouths open, and gather around the human form now sprawled upon the tiles of the floor.
Jasper shimmered back down the stairs, planted his forefeet upon Freddie’s shirt front, dug his claws into the objectionable tie, and then, with a quick fillip of his paw, extracted the something from Freddie’s jacket and sent it skittering across the floor.
The object was shiny and green, like a great scarab beetle going on about its business. It was but a small matter for me to show the prowess I’d achieved under Celia’s tutelage. I pounced, corralled the stone, and brought it to rest beside P.C. Worple’s sensible shoes.
He leaned over and picked it up. “What the . . . Mr. Quirk!”
Freddie groaned. “Filthy beast tripped me up, all of a purpose”
“Don’t be daft,” Mrs. Arbuthnot told him. She snatched the stone from Worple’s hand and held it aloft, so that it caught the afternoon sunlight and flashed like a veritable—well, it was an emerald, dash it all. “The Eye of the Tiger! My family heirloom!”
“Freddie!” said Celia, her lovely complexion flushing a color that would have embarrassed a rose.
“Oh no, Freddie!” yowled a female voice. A rush and stumble amongst the reconvened huddle of servants, and then Thatcher, his meaty hand clasped around her arm, dragged Dolly forward.
“Dolly!” exclaimed Mrs. A. “And you came to me with a good reference from Mr. Quirk here . . . Oh. I see.” Her jowls sagged.
Lady Mompesson patted her arm. “There, there, Sadie. All’s well that ends well.”
Lord M. harrumphed. “Blighter, scoundrel, ought to be horsewhipped, uses me, uses my daughter. Uses my cook, for the love of—beyond the pale, I tell you.”
“Very true,” I said to Jasper.
He stretched and flexed his claws. “If I do say so myself.”
P.C. Worple hoicked Freddie to his feet. “Well then. A mighty fine pair of cats you have here, Lord Mompesson. Lady Mompesson. Miss Celia. . . .” His clear blue gaze stopped at her pink cheeks and hung there.
She smiled at him, a wild surmise lighting her face.
Smoothing her apron, Mrs. Beecham paced past them all and headed down the hall toward the kitchen. “Jewel thieves. Police. It’s all upsetting to the digestion. What we all need is a good tea, that’ll set us to rights.”
Jasper and I cantered on after her, not too quickly, but close enough.
She glanced over her shoulder with a conspiratorial smile. “There you are, you rascals. Funny how you should turn up just when I was thinking of opening a tin of sardines.”
Ah yes, I thought, life is good.
Beside me Jasper murmured, “Very good, young Bingo. Very good.”
“Sardines for Tea” first appeared in Kittens, Cats, and Crimes, edited by Ed Gorman, Five Star, 2003.
I’m very much a cat person. And I love the works of P.G. Wodehouse, especially his Bertie Wooster and his Mulliner stories, which are laugh-out-loud funny not just for the stories themselves, but for the way he tells them.
Jeeves has always seemed superciliously feline to me, so it wasn’t a huge leap to recast him and Bertie as cats. And there’s nothing like an Agatha Christie-style country house mystery.
Robert Dudley, Master of the Queen’s Horses, was a fine figure of a man, as long of limb and imperious of eye as one of his equine charges. And like one of his charges, his wrath was likely to leave an innocent passerby with a shattered skull.
Dudley reached the end of the gallery, turned, and stamped back again, the rich fabrics of his clothing rustling an accompaniment to the thump of his boots. Erasmus Pilbeam shrank into the window recess. But he was no longer an innocent passerby, not now that Lord Robert had summoned him.
“You beetle-headed varlet!” his lordship exclaimed. “What do you mean he cannot be recalled?” Soft answers turn away wrath, Pilbeam reminded himself. “Dr. Dee is perhaps in Louvain, perhaps in Prague, researching the wisdom of the ancients. The difficulty lies not only in discovering his whereabouts, but also in convincing him to return to England.”
“He is my old tutor. He would return at my request.” Again Lord Robert marched away down the gallery, the floor creaking a protest at each step. “The greatness and suddenness of this misfortune so perplexes me that I shall take no rest until the truth is known.”
“The inquest declared your lady wife’s death an accident, my lord. At the exact hour she was found deceased in Oxfordshire, you were waiting upon the Queen at Windsor. You could have had no hand . . .”
“Fact has never deterred malicious gossip. Why, I have now been accused of bribing the jurors. God’s teeth! I cannot let this evil slander rest upon my head. The Queen has sent me from the court on the strength of it!” Robert dashed his fist against the padded back of a chair, raising a small cloud of dust, tenuous as a ghost.
A young princess like Elizabeth could not be too careful what familiar demonstrations she made. And yet, this last year and a half, Lord Robert had come so much into her favor it was said that Her Majesty visited him in his chamber day and night . . . No, Pilbeam assured himself, that rumor was noised about only by those who were in the employ of Spain. And he did not for one moment believe that the Queen herself had ordered the disposal of Amy Robsart, no matter how many wagging tongues said that she had done so. Still, Lord Robert could hardly be surprised that the malicious world now gossiped about Amy’s death, when he had so neglected her life.
“I must find proof that my wife’s death was either chance or evil design on the part of my enemies. The Queen’s enemies.”
Or, Pilbeam told himself, Amy’s death might have been caused by someone who fancied himself the Queen’s friend.
Lord Robert stalked back up the gallery and scrutinized Pilbeam’s black robes and close-fitting cap. “You have studied with Dr. Dee. You are keeping his books safe whilst he pursues his researches in heretical lands.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“How well have you learned your lessons, I wonder?”
The look in Lord Robert’s eye, compounded of shrewd calculation and ruthless pride, made Pilbeam’s heart sink. “He has taught me how to heal illness. How to read the stars. The rudiments of the alchemical sciences.”
“Did he also teach you how to call and converse with spirits?”
“He—ah—mentioned to me that such conversation is possible.”
“Tell me more.”
“Formerly it was held that apparitions must be spirits from purgatory, but now that we know purgatory to be only papist myth, it must be that apparitions are demonic, angelic, or illusory. The devil may deceive man into thinking he sees ghosts or . . .” Pilbeam gulped. The bile in his throat tasted of the burning flesh of witches.
“An illusion or deception will not serve me at all. Be she demon or angel, it is Amy herself who is my best witness.”
“My—my—my lord . . .”
Robert’s voice softened, velvet covering his iron fist. “I shall place my special trust in you, Dr. Pilbeam. You will employ all the devices and means you can possibly use for learning the truth. Do you understand me?”
Only too well. Pilbeam groped for an out. “My lord, whilst the laws regarding the practice of magic are a bit uncertain just now, still Dr. Dee himself, as pious a cleric as he may be, has been suspected of fraternizing with evil spirits . . . my lord Robert, if you intend such a, er, perilous course of action as, well, necromancy . . . ah, may I recommend either Edward Cosyn or John Prestall, who are well known in the city of London.”
“Ill-nurtured cozeners, the both of them! Their loyalty is suspect, their motives impure. No. If I cannot have Dr. Dee I will have his apprentice.”
For a moment Pilbeam considered a sudden change in profession. His beard was still brown, his step firm—he could apprentice himself to a cobbler or a baker and make an honest living without dabbling in the affairs of noblemen, who were more capricious than any spirit. He made one more attempt to save himself. “I am honored, my lord. But I doubt that it is within my powers to raise your . . . er, speak with your wife’s shade.”
“Then consult Dr. Dee’s books, you malmsey-nosed knave, and follow their instructions.”
“But, but . . . there is the possibility, my lord, that her death was neither chance nor villainy but caused by disease.”
“Nonsense. I was her husband. If she had been ill, I’d have known.”
Not when you were not there to be informed, Pilbeam answered silently. Aloud he said, “Perhaps, then, she was ill in her senses, driven to, to . . .”
“To self-murder? Think, varlet! A fall down the stairs could no more be relied upon by a suicide than by a murderer. She was found at the foot of the staircase, her neck broken but her headdress still secure upon her head. That is hardly a scene of violence.”
Pilbeam found it furtively comforting that Lord Robert wanted to protect his wife’s reputation from hints of suicide. . . . Well, her reputation was his as well. The sacrifice of a humble practitioner of the magical sciences, now—that would matter nothing to him. Pilbeam imagined his lordship’s face amongst those watching the mounting flames, a face contemptuous of his failure.
“Have no fear, Dr. Pilbeam, I shall reward you well for services rendered.” Lord Robert spun about and walked away. “Amy was buried at St. Mary’s, Oxford. Give her my respects.”
Pilbeam opened his mouth, shut it, swallowed, and managed a weak, “Yes, my lord,” which bounced unheeded from Robert’s departing back.
* * * * *
The spire of St. Mary’s, Oxford, rose into the nighttime murk like an admonitory finger pointing to heaven. Pilbeam had no quarrel with that admonition. He hoped its author would find no quarrel with his present endeavor.
He withdrew into the dark, fetid alley and willed his stomach to stop grumbling. He’d followed Dr. Dee’s instructions explicitly, preparing himself with abstinence, continence, and prayer made all the more fervid for the peril in which he found himself. And surely the journey on the muddy November roads had sufficiently mortifed his flesh. He was ready to summon spirits, be they demons or angels.
The black lump beside him was no demon. Martin Molesworth, his apprentice, held the lantern and the bag of implements. Pilbeam heard no stomach rumblings from the lad, but he could enforce Dr. Dee’s directions only so far as his own admonitory fist could reach. “Come along,” he whispered. “Step lively.”
Man and boy scurried across the street and gained the porch of the church. The door squealed open and thudded shut behind them. “Light,” ordered Pilbeam.
Martin slid aside the shutter concealing the candle and lifted the lantern. Its hot-metal tang dispelled the usual odors of a sanctified site—incense, mildew, and decaying mortality. Pilbeam pushed Martin toward the chancel. Their steps echoed, drawing uneasy shiftings and mutterings from amongst the roof beams. Bats or swallows, Pilbeam hoped.
Amy Robsart had been buried with such pomp, circumstance, and controversy that only a few well-placed questions had established her exact resting place. Now Pilbeam contemplated the flagstones laid close together behind the altar of the church and extended his hand for his bag.
Martin was gazing upward, to where the columns met overhead in a thicket of stone tracery, his mouth hanging open. “You mewling knotty-pated scullion!” Pilbeam hissed, and snatched the bag from his limp hands. “Pay attention!
“Yes, Master.” Martin held the lantern whilst Pilbeam arranged the charms, the herbs, and the candles he dare not light. With a bit of charcoal he drew a circle with four divisions and four crosses. Then, his tongue clamped securely between his teeth, he opened the book he’d dared bring from Dr. Dee’s collection, and began to sketch the incantatory words and signs.
If he interpreted Dee’s writings correctly—the man set no examples in penmanship—Pilbeam did not need to raise Amy’s physical remains. A full necromantic apparition was summoned for consultation about the future, when what he wished was to consult about the past. Surely this would not be as difficult a task. “Laudetur Deus Trinus et unus,” he muttered, “nunc et in sempiterna seculorum secula. . . .”
Martin shifted and a drop of hot wax fell onto Pilbeam’s wrist. “Beslubbering gudgeon!”
“Sorry, Master.”
Squinting in the dim light, Pilbeam wiped away one of his drawings with the hem of his robe and tried again. There. For a moment he gazed appreciatively at his handiwork, then took a deep breath. His stomach gurgled.
Pilbeam dragged the lad into the center of the circle and jerked his arm upwards, so the lantern would illuminate the page of his book. He raised his magical rod and began to speak the words of the ritual. “I conjure thee by the authority of God Almighty, by the virtue of heaven and the stars, by the virtue of the angels, by that of the elements. Domine, Deus meus, in te speravi. Damahil, Pancia, Mitraton . . .”
He was surprised and gratified to see a sparkling mist began to stream upwards from between the flat stones just outside the circle. Encouraged, he spoke the words even faster.
“. . . to receive such virtue herein that we may obtain by thee the perfect issue of all our desires, without evil, without deception, by God, the creator of the sun and the angels. Lamineck. Caldulech. Abracadabra.”
The mist wavered. A woman’s voice sighed, desolate.
“Amy Robsart, Lady Robert Dudley, I conjure thee.”
Martin’s eyes bulged and the lantern swung in his hand, making the shadows of column and choir stall surge sickeningly back and forth. “Master . . .”
“Shut your mouth, hedge-pig!” Pilbeam ordered. “Amy Robsart, I conjure thee. I beseech thee for God his sake, et per viscera misericordiae Altissimi, that thou wouldst declare unto us misericordiae Dei sint super nos.”
“Amen,” said Martin helpfully. His voice leaped upward an octave.
The mist swirled and solidified into the figure of a woman. Even in the dim light of the lantern Pilbeam could see every detail of the revenant’s dress, the puffed sleeves, the stiffened stomacher, the embroidered slippers. The angled wings of her headdress framed a thin, pale face, its dark eyes too big, its mouth too small, as though Amy Robsart had spent her short life observing many things but fearing to speak of them. A fragile voice issued from those ashen lips. “Ah, woe. Woe.”
Pilbeam’s heart was pounding. Every nerve strained toward the doors of the church and through the walls to the street outside. “Tell me what happened during your last hours on earth, Lady Robert.”
“My last hours?” She dissolved and solidified again, wringing her frail hands. “I fell. I was walking down the stairs and I fell.”
“Why did you fall, my lady?”
“I was weak. I must have stumbled.”
“Did someone push you?” Martin asked, and received the end of Pilbeam’s rod in his ribs.
Amy’s voice wavered like a set of ill-tempered bagpipes. “I walked doubled over in pain. The stairs are narrow. I fell.”
“Pain? You were ill?”
“A spear through my heart and my head so heavy I could barely hold it erect.”
A light flashed in the window, accompanied by a clash of weaponry. The night watch. Had someone seen the glow from the solitary lantern? Perhaps the watchmen were simply making their rounds and contemplating the virtues of bread and ale. Perhaps they were searching for miscreants.
With one convulsive jerk of his scrawny limbs, Martin scooped the herbs, the charms, the candles, even the mite of charcoal back into the bag. He seized the book and cast it after the other items. Pilbeam had never seen him move with such speed and economy of action. “Stop,” he whispered urgently, “Give me the book, I have to . . .”
Martin was already wiping away the charcoaled marks. Pilbeam brought his rod down on the lad’s arm, but it was too late. The circle was broken. A sickly-sweet breath of putrefaction made the candle gutter. The woman-shape, the ghost, the revenant, ripped itself into pennons of color and shadow. With an anguished moan those tatters of humanity streamed across the chancel and disappeared down the nave of the church.
Pulling on the convenient handle of Martin’s ear, Pilbeam dragged the lad across the chancel. His hoarse whisper repeated a profane litany: “Earth-vexing dewberry, spongy rump-fed skainsmate, misbegotten tickle-brained whey-faced whoreson, you prevented me from laying the ghost back in its grave!”
“Sorry, Master, ow, ow. . . .”
The necromancer and his apprentice fled through the door of the sacristy and into the black alleys of Oxford.
* * * * *
Cumnor Place belonged not to Lord Robert Dudley but to one of his cronies. If Pilbeam ever wished to render his own wife out of sight and therefore out of mind, an isolated country house such as Cumnor, with its air of respectable disintegration, would serve very well. Save that his own wife’s wrath ran a close second to Lord Robert’s.
What a shame that Amy Robsart’s meek spirit had proved to be of only middling assistance to Lord Robert’s—and therefore Pilbeam’s—quest. No, no hired bravo had broken Amy’s neck and arranged her body at the foot of the stairs. Nor had she hurled herself down those same stairs in a paroxysm of despair. Her death might indeed have been an accident.
But how could he prove such a subtle accident? And worse, how could he report such ambiguous findings to Lord Robert? Of only one thing was Pilbeam certain: he was not going to inform his lordship that his wife’s ghost had been freed from its corporeal wrappings and carelessly not put back again.
Shooting a malevolent glare at Martin, Pilbeam led the way into the courtyard of the house. Rain streaked the stones and timber of the facade. Windows turned a blind eye to the chill gray afternoon. The odors of smoke and offal hung in the air.
A door opened, revealing a plump, pigeon-like woman wearing the simple garb of a servant. She greeted the visitors with, “What do you want?”
“Good afternoon, Mistress. I am Dr. Erasmus Pilbeam, acting for Lord Robert Dudley.” He offered her a bow that was polite but not deferential.
The woman’s suspicion eased into resignation. “Then come through, and warm yourselves by the fire. I am Mrs. Odingsells, the housekeeper.”
“Thank you.”
Within moments Pilbeam found himself seated in the kitchen, slurping hot cabbage soup and strong ale. Martin crouched in the rushes at his feet, gnawing on a crust of bread. On the opposite side of the fireplace a young woman mended a lady’s shift, her narrow face shadowed by her cap.
Mrs. Odingsells answered Pilbeam’s question. “Yes, Lady Robert was in perfect health, if pale and worn, up until several days before she died. Then she turned sickly and peevish. Why, even Lettice there, her maid, could do nothing for her. Or with her, come to that.”
Pilbeam looked over at the young woman and met a glance sharp as the needle she wielded.
The housekeeper went on, “The day she died her ladyship sent the servants away to Abingdon Fair. I refused to go. It was a Sunday, no day for a gentlewoman to be out and about, sunshine or no.”
“She sent everyone away?” Pilbeam repeated. “If she were ill, surely she would have needed an attendant.”
“Ill? Ill-used, I should say. . . .” Remembering discretion, Mrs. Odingsells contented herself with, “If she sent the servants away, it was because she tired of their constantly offering food she would not eat and employments she had no wish to pursue. Why, I myself heard her praying to God to deliver her from desperation, not long before I heard her fall.”
“She was desperate from illness? Or because her husband’s . . . duties were elsewhere?”
“Desperate from her childlessness, perhaps, which would follow naturally upon Lord Robert’s absence.”
So then, Amy’s spear through the heart was a symbolic one, the pain of a woman spurned. “Her ladyship was of a strange mind the day she died, it seems. Do you think she died by chance? Or by villainy, her own or someone else’s?”
Again Pilbeam caught the icy stab of Lettice’s eyes.
“She was a virtuous God-fearing gentlewoman, and alone when she fell,” Mrs. Odingsells returned indignantly, as though that were answer enough.
It was not enough, however. If not for the testimony of Amy herself, Pilbeam would be thinking once again of self-murder. But then, his lordship himself had said, a fall down the stairs could no more be relied upon by a suicide than by a murderer.
The housekeeper bent over the pot of fragrant soup. Pilbeam asked, “Could I see the exact staircase? Perhaps Lettice can show me, as your attention is upon your work.”
“Lettice,” Mrs. Odingsells said, with a jerk of her head. “See to it.”
Silently the maid put down her mending and started toward the door. Pilbeam swallowed the last of his soup and followed her. He did not realize Martin was following him until he stopped beside the fatal staircase and the lad walked into his rump. Pilbeam brushed him aside. “She was found here?”
“Yes, master, so she was.” Now Lettice’s eyes were roaming up and down and sideways, avoiding his. “See how narrow the stair is, winding and worn at the turn. In the darkness . . .”
“Darkness? Did she not die on a fair September afternoon?”
“Yes, yes, but the house is in shadow. And her ladyship was of a strange mind that day, you said yourself, Master.”
Behind Pilbeam, Martin muttered beneath his breath, “The lady was possessed, if you ask me.”
“No one is asking you, clotpole,” Pilbeam told him.
Lettice spun around. “Possessed? Why would you say such a thing? How . . . What is that?”
“What?” Pilbeam followed the direction of her eyes. The direction of her entire body, which strained upward stiff as a hound at point.
The ghost of Amy Robsart descended the steps, skirts rustling, dark eyes downcast, doubled in pain. Her frail hands were clasped to her breast. Her voice said, “Ah, woe. Woe.” And suddenly she collapsed, sliding down the last two steps to lie crumpled on the floor at Pilbeam’s feet, her headdress not at all disarranged.
With great presence of mind, Pilbeam reached right and left, seizing Martin’s ear as he turned to flee and Lettice’s arm as she swooned.
“Blimey,” said Martin, with feeling.
Lettice was trembling, her breath coming in gasps. “I did not know what they intended, as God is my witness, I did not know. . . .”
The revenant dissolved and was gone. Pilbeam released Martin and turned his attention to Lettice. Her eyes were now dull as lead. “What have you done, girl?”
“They gave me two angels. Two gold coins.”
“Who?”
“Two men. I do not know their names. They stopped me in the village, they gave me a parcel and bade me bring it here.”
“A parcel for her ladyship?”
“Not for anyone. They told me to hide it in the house was all.”
Pilbeam’s heart started to sink. Then, as the full import of Lettice’s words blossomed in his mind, it reversed course and bounded upwards in a leap of relief. “Show me this parcel, you fool-born giglet. Make haste!”
Lettice walked, her steps heavy, several paces down the hallway. There she knelt and shoved at a bit of paneling so worm-gnawed it looked like lace. It opened like a cupboard door. From the dark hole behind it she withdrew a parcel wrapped in paper and tied with twine.
Pilbeam snatched it up and carried it to the nearest windowsill. “Watch her,” he ordered Martin.
Martin said, “Do not move, you ruttish flax-wench.”
Lettice remained on her knees, bowed beneath the magnitude of her defeat, and made no attempt to flee.
Pilbeam eased the twine from the parcel and unwrapped the paper. It was fine parchment overwritten with spells and signs. Beneath the paper a length of silk enshrouded something long and hard. Martin leaned so close that he almost got Pilbeam’s elbow in his eye. Pilbeam shoved him aside.
Inside the silk lay a wax doll, dressed in a fine gown with puffed sleeves and starched stomacher, a small headdress upon its tiny head. But this was no child’s toy. A long needle passed through its breast and exited from its back—Pilbeam’s fingertips darted away from the sharp point. The doll’s neck was encircled by a crimson thread, wound so tightly that it had almost cut off the head. A scrap of paper tucked into the doll’s bodice read: Amy.
Again Pilbeam could hear the revenant’s voice: A spear through my heart and my head so heavy I could barely hold it erect. So the spear thrust through her chest had been both literal and symbolic. And Amy’s neck had been so weakened it needed only the slightest jolt to break it, such as a misstep on a staircase. A misstep easily made by the most healthy of persons, let alone a woman rendered infirm by forces both physical and emotional.
It was much too late to say the incantations that would negate the death-spell. Swiftly Pilbeam re-wrapped the parcel. “Run to the kitchen and fetch Mrs. Odingsells,” he ordered Martin, and Martin ran.
Lettice’s bleak eyes spilled tears down her sunken cheeks. “How can I redeem myself?”
“By identifying the two men who gave you this cursed object.”
“I do not know their names, master. I heard one call the other by the name of ‘Ned’ is all.”
“Ned? If these men have knowledge of the magical sciences I should know . . .” She did not need to know his own occupation. “Describe them to me.”
“One was tall and strong, his black hair and beard wild as a bear’s. The other was small, with a nose like an axe blade. He was the one named Ned.”
Well then! Pilbeam did know them. They were not his colleagues but his competitors, Edward Cosyn, called Ned, and John Prestall. As Lord Robert had said, they were ill-nurtured cozeners, their loyalty suspect and their motives impure.
Perhaps his lordship had himself bought the services of Prestall and Cosyn. If so, would he have admitted that he knew who they were? No. If he had brought about his wife’s death, he would have hidden his motives behind sorrow and grief rather than openly revealing his self-interest and self-regard.
God be praised, thought Pilbeam, he had an answer for Lord Robert. He had found someone for his lordship to blame.
At a step in the hall Pilbeam and Lettice looked around. But the step was not that of the apprentice or the housekeeper. Amy Robsart walked down the hallway, head drooping, shoulders bowed, wringing her hands.
Lettice squeaked in terror and shrank against Pilbeam’s chest.
With a sigh of cold, dank air, the ghost passed through them and went on its way down the hallway, leaving behind the soft thump of footsteps and the fragile voice wailing, “Ah woe. Woe.”
* * * * *
Pilbeam adjusted his robes and his cap. Beside him Martin tugged at his collar. Pilbeam jabbed the lad with his elbow and hissed, “Stand up straight, you lumpish ratsbane.”
“Quiet, you fly-bitten foot-licker,” Lord Robert ordered.
Heralds threw open the doors. Her Majesty the Queen strode into the chamber, a vision in brocade, lace, and jewels. But her garments seemed like so many rags beside the glorious sunrise glow of her fair skin and her russet hair.
Lord Robert went gracefully down upon one knee, his upturned face filled with the adoration of a papist for a saint. Pilbeam dropped like a sack of grain, jerking Martin down as he went. The lad almost fumbled the pillow he carried, but his quick grab prevented the witching-doll from falling off the pillow and onto the floor.
The Queen’s amber eyes crinkled at the corners, but her scarlet lips did not smile. “Robin, you roguish folly-fallen lewdster,” she said to Lord Robert, her voice melodious but not lacking an edge. “Why have you pleaded to wait upon us this morning?”
“My agent, Dr. Pilbeam, who is apprenticed to your favorite, Dr. Dee, has discovered the truth behind my wife’s unfortunate death.”
Robert did not say “untimely death”, Pilbeam noted. Then Her Majesty turned her eyes upon him, and his thoughts melted like a wax candle in their heat.
“Dr. Pilbeam,” she said. “Explain.”
He spoke to the broad planks of the floor, repeating the lines he had rehearsed before his lordship: Cumnor Place, the maidservant overcome by her guilt, the death-spell quickened by the doll, and behind it all the clumsy but devious hands of Prestall and Cosyn. No revenant figured in the tale, and certainly no magic circle in St. Mary’s, Oxford.
On cue, Martin extended the pillow. Lord Robert offered it to the Queen. With a crook of her forefinger, she summoned a lady-in-waiting, who carried both pillow and doll away. “Burn it,” Elizabeth directed. And to her other attendants, “Leave us.” With a double thud the doors shut.
Her Majesty flicked her pomander, bathing the men and the boy with the odor of violets and roses, as though she were a bishop dispensing the holy water of absolution. “You may stand.”
Lord Robert rose as elegantly as he had knelt. With an undignified stagger, Pilbeam followed. Martin lurched into his side and Pilbeam batted him away.
“Where are these evildoers now?” asked the Queen.
“The maidservant is in Oxford gaol, Your Majesty,” Robert replied, “and the malicious cozeners in the Tower.”
“And yet it seems as though this maid was merely foolish, not wicked, ill-used by men who tempted her with gold. You must surely have asked yourself, Robin, who in turn tempted these men.”
“Someone who wished to destroy your trust in me, Your Majesty. To drive me from your presence. My enemy, and yours as well.”
“Do you think so? What do you think, Dr. Pilbeam?”
What he truly thought, Pilbeam dared not say. That perhaps Amy’s death was caused by someone who intended to play the Queen’s friend. Someone who wished Amy Robsart’s death to deliver Lord Robert Dudley to Elizabeth’s marriage bed, so that there she might engender heirs.
Whilst some found Robert’s bloodline tainted, his father and grandfather both executed as traitors, still the Queen could do much worse in chosing her consort. One could say of Robert what was said of the Queen herself upon her accession, that he was of no mingled or Spanish blood but was born English here in England. Even if he was proud as a Spaniard. . . .
Pilbeam looked into the Queen’s eyes, jewels faceted with a canny intelligence. Spain, he thought. The deadly enemy of Elizabeth and protestant England. The Spanish were infamous for their subtle plots.
“B-b-begging your pardon, Your Majesty,” he stammered, “but I think his lordship is correct in one regard. His wife was murdered by your enemies. But they did not intend to drive him from your presence, not at all.”
Robert’s glance at Pilbeam was not encouraging. Martin took a step back. But Pilbeam barely noticed, spellbound as he was by the Queen. “Ambassador Feria, who was lately recalled to Spain. Did he not frequently comment to his master, King Philip, on your, ah, attachment to Lord Robert?”
Elizabeth nodded, one corner of her mouth tightening. She did not insult Pilbeam by pretending there had been no gossip about her attachment, just as she would not pretend she had no spies in the ambassador’s household. “He had the impudence to write six months ago that Lady Robert had a malady in one of her breasts and that I was only waiting for her to die to marry.”
His lordship winced but had the wisdom to keep his own counsel.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” said Pilbeam. “But how did Feria not only know of Lady Robert’s illness but of its exact nature, long before the disease began to manifest itself? Her own housekeeper says she began to suffer only a few days before she died. Did Feria himself set two cozeners known for their, er, mutable loyalties to inflict such a condition upon her?”
“Feria was recently withdrawn and replaced by Bishop de Quadra,” murmured the Queen. “Perhaps he overstepped himself with his plot. Or perhaps he retired to Spain in triumph at its—no, not at its conclusion. For it has yet to be concluded.”
Lord Robert could contain himself no longer. “But Your Majesty, this hasty-witted pillock speaks nonsense, why should Philip of Spain . . .”
“Wish for me to marry you? He intended no compliment to you, I am sure of that.” Elizabeth smiled, a smile more fierce than humorous, and for just a moment Pilbeam was reminded of her father, King Henry.
Robert’s handsome face lit with the answer to the puzzle. “If Your Majesty marries an Englishman, she could not ally herself with a foreign power such as France against Spain.”
True enough, thought Pilbeam. But more importantly, if Elizabeth married Robert then she would give weight to the rumors of murder, and might even be considered his accomplice in that crime. She had reigned for only two years, her rule was far from secure. Marrying Lord Robert might give the discontented among her subjects more ammunition for their misbegotten cause, and further Philip’s plots. Whilst Robert chose to ignore those facts, Pilbeam would wager everything he owned that Her Majesty did not. His lordship’s ambition might have outpaced his love for his wife. His love for Elizabeth had certainly done so. No, Robert Dudley had not killed his wife. Not intentionally.
The Queen stroked his cheek, the coronation ring upon her finger glinting against his beard. “The problem, sweet Robin, is that I am already married to a husband, namely, the Kingdom of England.”Robert had no choice but to acknowledge that. He bowed.
“Have the maidservant released,” Elizabeth commanded. “Allow the cozeners to go free. Let the matter rest, and in time it will die for lack of nourishment. And then Philip and his toadies will not only be deprived of their conclusion, they will always wonder how much we knew of their plotting, and how we knew it.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” said Lord Robert. “May I then return to court?”
“In the course of time.” She dropped her hand from his cheek.
He would never have his conclusion, either, thought Pilbeam. Elizabeth would like everyone to be in love with her, but she would never be in love with anyone enough to marry him. For then she would have to bow her head to her husband’s will, and that she would never do.
Pilbeam backed away. For once he did not collide with Martin, who, he saw with a glance from the corner of his eye, was several paces away and sidling crab-wise toward the door.
Again the Queen turned the full force of her eyes upon Pilbeam, stopping him in his steps. “Dr. Pilbeam, we hear that the ghost of Lady Robert Dudley has been seen walking in Cumnor Park.”
“Ah, ah. . . .” Pilbeam felt rather than saw Martin’s shudder of terror. But they would never have discovered the truth without the revenant. No, he would not condemn Martin, not when his carelessness had proved a blessing in disguise.
Lord Robert’s gaze burned the side of his face, a warning that matters of necromancy were much better left hidden. “Her ghost?” he demanded. “Walking in Cumnor Park?”
Pilbeam said, “Er—ah—many tales tell of ghosts rising from their graves, Your Majesty, compelled by matters left unconcluded at death. Perhaps Lady Robert is seeking justice, perhaps bewailing her fate. In the course time, some compassionate clergyman will see her at last to rest.” Not I, he added firmly to himself.
Elizabeth’s smile glinted with wry humor. “Is that how it is?”
She would not insult Pilbeam by pretending that she had no spies in Oxfordshire as well, and that very little failed to reach her ears and eyes. And yet the matter of the revenant, too, she would let die for lack of nourishment. She was not only fair in appearance, but also in her expectations. He made her a bow that was more of a genuflection.
She made an airy wave of her hand. “You may go now, all of you. And Dr. Pilbeam, Lord Robert will be giving you the purse that dangles at his belt, in repayment of his debt to you.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” His lordship backed reluctantly away.
What an interesting study in alchemy, thought Pilbeam, that with the Queen the base metal of his lordship’s manner was transmuted to gold. “Your Majesty. My Lord.” Pilbeam reversed himself across the floor and out the door, which Martin contrived to open behind his back. Lord Robert followed close upon their heels, his boots stepping as lightly and briskly as the hooves of a thoroughbred.
A few moments later Pilbeam stood in the street, an inspiringly heavy purse in his hand, allowing himself a sigh of relief—ah, the free air was sweet, all was well that ended well. . . . Martin stepped into a puddle, splashing the rank brew of rainwater and sewage onto the hem of Pilbeam’s robe.
Pilbeam availed himself yet again of Martin’s convenient handle. “You rank pottle-deep measle! You rude-growing toad!” he exclaimed, and guided the lad down the street toward the warmth and peace of home.
“The Necromancer’s Apprentice” first appeared in Murder by Magic, edited by Rosemary Edghill, Aspect/Warner, 2004, and was reprinted in The Adventure of the Missing Detective and 19 of the Year’s Finest Crime and Mystery Stories, edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, Carroll & Graf, 2005, and in The Best Paranormal Crime Stories Ever Told, Edited by Martin H. Greeberg, Skyhorse Publishing, 2010.
The assignment for this anthology was to mix mystery and fantasy. Again, I dithered for awhile. Then I saw a period etching in The Idiot’s Guide to Ghosts and Hauntings (there’s an Idiot’s Guide to just about everything) depicting Elizabethan sorcerer John Dee speaking to a ghost, i.e. committing necromancy. Aha!
Just as some of the characters in Tudor history are larger than life—how Robert Dudley managed to die in bed is beyond me—some of the events are stranger than fiction. For example, writers and historians have been puzzling over Amy Robsart’s death for 450 years now. All I had to do was use Dee to give a supernatural twist to the story.
Except, I discovered, Dee himself wasn’t in England at the time of Robsart’s death. No problem. Inventing an assistant for him was great fun. So was getting some actual spell-casting of the time from The Oxford Book of the Supernatural. As for generating colorful curses from a website—one from column A, two from column B—what could be easier?
Everyone mentioned in the story, except for Pilbeam, Martin, and the maid, Lettice, were actual historical characters, including the two cozeners.
Kate had always threatened to run away, and now she’d done it. She’d run until she reached the end of the Earth. . . .
Well no, she thought, second-guessing herself yet again. This hotel wasn’t at the end of the Earth. The Earth went on forever, round and round, until you passed yourself struggling along the road. What she’d come to was the end of her wits.
Through the window of the lounge she saw a green lawn stretching down to a bay, where jagged black rocks looked like spears thrust into the silvery sand of the beach. On a promontory to the left stood a ruined castle, its broken walls and towers rising from the rock the way memory, desire, and regret rose in the back of Kate’s mind. From the far horizon rose the humped peaks of the Outer Hebrides, blue against the only slightly less solid blue of the sky. Huge white and gray clouds sailed overhead.
Behind her dishes clattered. Kate looked around. Of course she’d ordered tea. Here, tea was as much medication as beverage.
The waitress was a young woman with the ample figure of a Mediterranean mother-goddess figurine. A name tag reading “Lucy” clung to the fabric above her breast like a skier poised for a downhill run. She set the tea tray down with a smile.
Kate picked up the metal teapot and almost dropped it. “Whoa, it’s hot!”
“Oh aye,” Lucy agreed, and started collecting the empty cups from the next table.
Her fingertips tingling, Kate poured, added milk and sugar and started to drink. Steam rose from the cup, misting her glasses. No, she’d scald her mouth. Better wait.
She pulled her notebook out of her purse and opened it to the first page. A blank page, each ruled line like the bars of a cell. She held her pencil poised above the paper, waiting for inspiration, or, failing that, gravity, to pull it downward.
“You’re a writer then?” asked Lucy.
“No, not really.”
“Getting the words down, that’s magic.” Lucy vanished out the door.
Magic, Kate repeated silently.
She’d spent years nurturing the dreams of others. Her own had been set aside, if not forgotten, reduced to a few words furtively jotted down on the back of the grocery list or a note from the school. Those words that managed to rise above the level of furtive had earned a handful of rejection slips which she’d hidden away like her kids tried to do with a bad report card.
Now, the children were grown and the husband shed, all very politely, very civilized—there was nothing wrong with the marriage, its shelf life had simply expired. Now Kate had come at last to Scotland, to the island of Skye, chasing the myth and legend she craved—Dunvegan, with its stories of fairy flags and pipers playing unearthly music, or Dunscaith with its stories of a warrior queen.
And here she was at an ordinary little hotel on the farthest rim of the island. Here she was just as trapped as if she’d stayed home.
Outside the ocean was a sheen of sunlight on indigo. Waves ran in to the beach, one after the other, paling to green and then, as the elements of air and water mingled, becoming a creamy froth licking at the sand. The ocean’s rhythmic murmur mingled with the rattle of crockery from the nether regions of the hotel. Kate imagined a housewife having sex and planning the next day’s meals at the same time.
With a wry shake of her head she tried the tea again. Its milky-sweet heat warmed her body. Thirstily she drank the pot dry. Then she put the still-virgin notebook away.
She found Lucy installed behind the front desk in the hall—she wasn’t just waitress, it seemed, but owner, operator, and presiding genius as well. “How much for the tea?”
“Two pound.”
Kate handed over two heavy pound coins, like the coins the ancient Greeks would put on the eyes of the dead so their souls could pay for the ferry into Hades.
“Thank you,” said Lucy. “Are you away, then?”
“Yes, thanks,” Kate returned, with more certainty than she felt. “Where’s the rest room, please?”
“Eh?”
“The lavatory? The loo?”
“Oh. Just there.” Lucy nodded toward a sign on the wall reading brusquely, “toilets”.
Kate found the ladies’ off a back corridor. The toilet had a tank high on the wall, activated by a pull handle. In the US it’d be draped with a velvet rope, for exhibition only, not for use.
This was meant to be used. Had been used, as a matter of fact—shit smeared the inside of the bowl. How odd for a women’s toilet. It was the male of the species who usually marked his territory so casually, unafraid to make a mess. The female of the species, now, was a lot more squeamish about squatting down and confessing to mortality.
What if Lucy was the next woman to come in here? What if she thought it was Kate who’d left the toilet so dirty? Kate pulled the handle, but even the rush of water couldn’t wash away the consequences of appetite.
When she walked out of the front door of the hotel the cold sea wind hit her cheeks like a slap. Thanks, I needed that. The afternoon sun hung in the northern sky. The islands on the horizon were more dream than real. Now what? Should she take a ferry across to that horizon or keep on cleaning toilets?
Music ebbed and flowed on the wind like the tide on the beach, aching like a broken heart. Kate looked around, past the black and white sign reading “Kilcolm Hotel” to the castle on its headland.
Human figures moved through the ruins. A piper must be playing there, like the costumed pipers who played outside Urquhart Castle or in Glencoe. It was a fair exchange—they were hungry for the tourist bucks, marks, francs, yen, and the tourists were hungry for a mythical past.
The shrill music was ancient, wild, uncanny, both a banshee’s wail and Ulysses’ sirens’ compelling call. Turning away from the parking lot and the beach, Kate followed a muddy path upward. To her right the breakers foamed around stones sharp as teeth. Ahead of her rose the walls of the castle, stained with the same lichens and bird-droppings as the bedrock. She couldn’t tell where one ended and where the other began. Maybe the castle hadn’t been built but grown.
White seabirds whirled above the ruins, screeching brashly. The music stopped. Kate stepped through the shadow of an archway onto a green lawn no larger than the hotel lounge.
Around her the walls rose from battered parapets to a three story tower, its windows dark slits, its roofline a serrated edge against the sky. Pinkish-purple foxgloves sprouted from crannies where the rock had shifted and split. The icy wind couldn’t quite overwhelm the castle’s miasma of mud, mold, and seaweed. Well, not all castles could be Camelot, edited again and again over the years.
At the base of the tower two men equipped with hard hats and clipboards huddled beside an arch traced in stone—oh, a filled-in doorway. Several people stood braced, figurehead-style, on top of the walls. Below them the cliff fell sheer to the sea. Back home a place like this would have railings and warning signs. If someone slipped and fell you might get hit with a lawsuit. You had to be careful. If you took risks, you could get hurt. And if you did get hurt it was always someone else’s fault.
Music burst behind Kate’s back. The rush of sound pulled every follicle on her body erect. In a spasm of something between terror and delight, she spun around.
There was the piper, standing beside the gate just where sun met shadow. His short-cropped red hair rippled in the wind and his red and green kilt fluttered around his knees. Strong knees, solid thighs, calves curving smoothly into thick woolen socks and sturdy boots—his clothing was not costume but everyday wear.
His body was so lean and wiry Kate was surprised he could expel enough air to inflate the bag nestled against his denim jacket. But Gabriel’s trumpet would probably emit fewer decibels. He was playing a lament, an intricate, almost tuneless series of notes in a minor key. Each note lingered so long, drawing itself out thinner and thinner, or else darted somewhere so unexpected, Kate felt unbalanced. She took an abrupt step forward.
The corner of his mouth tilted slightly even as his lips stayed firm on the mouthpiece. Long eyebrows arched up and down, one after the other, above startlingly blue eyes. Embarrassed at staring, she found two more pound coins and dropped them into the shortbread tin at his feet with a sound like that of an anchor chain rattling down.
He glanced at them, the sunlight glinting off the gold hoop in his ear, then looked up and winked. Kate essayed a weak smile. His eyes smiled back. She felt the reverberation of the drones in her stomach and the melody of the chanter down her back, as though the piper was fingering her spine instead of his instrument.
She forced herself to make an about-face and walk away across the tongue of turf enclosed by the ruined walls.
A uniformed guide ushered two people through the gate. “So where is this?” demanded the middle-aged man in a flat American accent. His toad-like shape was remarkably similar to that of the elderly woman who held his arm. Mother and son, probably. “Anything happen here?”
“This is Dunshian Castle,” the guide recited. “Here a chief of the MacDonalds forced his daughter to marry a chief of clan MacLeod. She had two sons, MacDonald’s only grandchildren. One day the MacDonald and his son-in-law returned from the hunt. The daughter cooked and served them up a feast, there, in the hall...” He gestured toward the tower. The two faces turned upward, maybe imagining a long torchlit room hung with tapestries when even at its finest this castle’s hall would have been barely warmer and dryer than its dungeon. And yet its occupants probably sat there saying, “Life can’t get any better than this.”
“When they’d eaten,” the guide concluded, “the daughter, the wife, the mother told the men she’d served them up her sons. Then she threw herself out the window onto the rocks below.”
The tourists’ eyes glittered. “Is that true?”
“Oh aye, that it is.”
Sure it was true, Kate thought. A true story, even if the events had never actually happened.
“Then there was Hugh MacDonald, accused of plotting against his cousin. The cousin locked him up in a dungeon with a plate of salt beef and a pitcher. Hugh ate the beef and turned to the pitcher. It was empty. They say he went mad from the thirst before he died of it. But he never confessed.”
The tourists grimaced happily. There was nothing quite so entertaining as a ghastly event that happened to someone else, reminding you life could always get worse.
The piper ended his lament with a long drawn-out note like a moan, the sound fading and dying. Birds shrieked. One of the men by the blocked door tapped his trowel against the stone. Kate wondered if they were archaeologists, in quest of the physical rather than the metaphysical past.
“Then,” guide said, “there was the wee woman tourist who saw a ghostly army marching across the grounds of the hotel, just there.”
“Oooh,” said the mother. But that was a little close to home. “It’s getting late, we need to be going, we have dinner reservations in Portree.”
“Right,” said the guide, pulling a set of car keys from his pocket.
Kate didn’t know about her compatriots, but she’d never pass another golden-arches-type McDonald’s without remembering Dunshian and its gastronomical horror stories. There was more to eating than fueling the flesh.
The piper launched into a reel. In the music was the coil and swoop of the sea birds, the melody returning again and again to the same double note of affirmation, joyful in spite of—or because—of its minor key. Kate had to keep herself from breaking into dance step.
Even the lumpish tourists shuffled a bit as they headed toward the gate. The guide said, “A piper was playing for a wedding on a Saturday night. The guests feasted and danced. When it came midnight and the Sabbath, the minister warned them to stop. They didn’t. And the guests turned to stones, all standing in a circle round the tall one that’s the piper.”
With a dubious glance at Dunshian’s far-from-petrified piper, the tourists vanished out the gate. They didn’t throw any money into the tin. Kate groped in her handbag—you had to pay the piper. You had to recognize the power and magic of music, even if, like the mythical minister, you were jealous of it. Even if you thought you had to protect your flock from their own instincts.
The piper’s stiff fingers bounded up and down the chanter like the legs of a ballet dancer. Kate threw another coin into the tin and again his eyes smiled. A ray of sun struck through the gate even as shadow of the walls reached greedily eastward. The archaeologists consulted in low voices over a roll of paper that flapped in the wind like a sail.
Kate had had some vague idea of going back to Sligachan or Portree herself tonight. The hotels were bigger, with more amenities, but also with more of her own countrymen, like the tourists in the chauffeured car. Portree was closer to where Skye was tied to the mainland by a graceful and yet stern concrete span. This is the world, it seemed to say. Make the most of it.
She’d made the most of the drive up the coast, stopping at cliffs and waterfalls and amazing geological displays—rock, good solid rock, sustaining the springy turf like bones sustained the flesh—but she wasn’t sure she wanted to tackle that same narrow road in the dusk. . . .
Stop rationalizing. She liked it here, where the craggy hills were softened by brush-strokes of purple heather and the wide horizon was closed by the blue peaks of a mirage. This place even had a soundtrack, the birds, the sea, the music of the pipes.
The piper segued into “Amazing Grace”. Whoever had first thought to play that old hymn as a pipe tune was a genius. The simple tune cut like a knife and Kate mouthed the words, “Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me . . .”
“Thank you,” she said, although she knew he couldn’t hear her. And yet his eyes crinkled in reply.
She walked back to hotel with every microscopic hair in her ear canals still waving to the music, even when the music died to a low resonance of wind and sea. A smell of peat smoke hinted at evening, dinner, a comfortable bed. Yes, she needed to go to ground for the night. She retrieved her suitcase from the trunk of her car and went back into the hotel.
Lucy was in the dining room counting out packets of butter. She looked around with a broad grin. “Needing a room, are you?”
“Yes, please,” Kate told her.
“No problem. Number 3, end of the hall. Just fetch the key from behind the desk, there, I’ve soup boiling over in the kitchen.” Wiping her hands on her apron, Lucy hurried into the back.
Feeling like a member of the family, Kate found the key and lugged her suitcase up the narrow, twisting stairs. Number three was small and spare. The bed sagged in the middle but its sheets were bleached to dazzling whiteness. A dressing table sat in front of the window, its discolored but polished mirror turning its back on the view. The bathroom was wedged into a corner, so tiny Kate could touch toilet, shower, and sink without moving a step.
She laid out a bar of soap and her toothbrush, making her mark not in shit but in cleaning implements, and took a quick shower. The stall was the size of a coffin. She’d have felt trapped by her body as surely as she felt trapped by her mind if she hadn’t been able to look through the door and see how behind the mirror the landscape opened out broad and free.
Defiantly she toweled off in front of the window. If a Peeping Tom was outside he was getting the sight he deserved.
Kate sat down in the dining room expecting the food to be either boiled or microwaved, prudent and tasteless. But what Lucy set down on the starched white tablecloth was a tomato soup enlivened by curry, flaky salmon fresh from the sea, baby vegetables ripped untimely from the earth, and whole-grain bread. Dessert was a bowl of strawberries bursting with flavor. Lucy hovered holding a pitcher. “Cream?”
Appetite is shameful, Kate thought. Appetite is evidence of the physical, of the primitive. Taking pleasure in the appetite is the original sin. She should play it safe and stay on her diet. But it was too late. She’d admitted to hunger. “Yes, please,” she said, and Lucy poured a stream of thick, rich cream over her strawberries.
Kate ate, feeling deliciously guilty, and licked her lips like a cat licking its whiskers. Were those silk flowers on the table? She touched one silky petal. No, they were real roses, damp and pink as her own flesh.
A speaker in the corner of the room emitted a mumble of muzak, the original melody smoothed into margarine, artificially-colored, artificially-flavored. What Kate wanted was the throb of the pipes. She wanted music with the power to break her heart and the magic to heal it. She wanted. . . . Well, never mind what she wanted. A nightcap would have to do.
She threw down her napkin, got up from the table, and walked across the hall to the bar.
Glasses and bottles gleamed on one side of the room. A diminutive but fierce fire gleamed on the other. A young couple in the corner were talking in a language that wasn’t Scotspoken English or even Gaelic with its gutturals soft like thistledown. They sat close together, unabashedly groping each other. Honeymooners, no doubt. Enjoy it while you can.
Kate turned toward the bar and stopped dead. The piper stood there, wiping a glass with a dishtowel. Now he was dressed in a demure white shirt and a tartan tie which matched his kilt—oh yes, Kate saw with a peek over the bar, he was still wearing the kilt. And the earring, too.
No longer compressed around the mouthpiece, his lips curved like the outline of the islands on the horizon. “Hello there, Kate. What’s your pleasure?”
She almost told him. Instead she managed a return smile—no wonder he’d recognized her, when she dropped three pounds into his kitty—Lucy must’ve told him her name. . . . It was wanting the truth, not appetite, which was the original sin. “A glass of that Lagavulin, please. The sixteen-year-old. I guess it’s old enough to drive.”
Stupid joke, but he kept on smiling as he drew off a shot of the golden liquid and set it before her.
His red hair was smoothed flat now and his eyes were less blue than gray in the electric light. It was the flicker of the firelight that sculpted the planes and angles of his face. He had good bone structure beneath his taut, fair skin, like Skye itself had good bone structure below its soil.
“Thank you.”
“No problem.” He jotted her name on a notepad, starting a tab.
“Kilcolm Hotel,” was printed at the top of the pad. “‘Kil’ means cell, doesn’t it? Like a hermit’s cell?”
“Oh aye, some old hermit set up here, ages ago. A saint, they say, saints being a bit thicker on the ground then than they are now. Might even have been Columba himself, running away from Ireland after fighting a war over a manuscript.”
Fighting a war over a manuscript. That was a good one. “No wonder saints saw visions. Sensory deprivation.”
Kate turned around, intending to sit down at a table. Through the door beside the fireplace she saw the lounge, and through the lounge’s windows she saw the sunset. Clear tints of amber, pink, and blood-red scarlet flowed across the sky. Each of the islands was edged with gold. They were Tir nan Og, the Celtic Otherworld. Not Hades, the Underworld, but the Otherworld.
She sipped the whisky. Its first fiery rush polished the cream from her tongue, leaving it tingling. Her mouth and nose filled with peat smoke and sea spray, earth and heaven fused. Her stomach glowed.
“No,” said the voice behind her. “Sensory overload.”
She looked back around, and for one quick moment felt her fingers playing in his hair and along the edge of his kilt. Hoping he’d think the red in her face was from the wind and the sun, she dropped her eyes to the nameplate on his breast pocket. “Alexander.”
“Oh aye. Not so great, though.” He started wiping another glass.
I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Kate pulled up a stool and sat down. One drink and she was already dizzy. Sensory overload. . . .
And what was here for a young man? Her kids always hung out in shopping malls, but there wasn’t a mall for miles. This place looked back, not forward. It was a place of long, harsh memories. It was the place where middle-aged women came to lick their wounds.
“Are you having a good holiday?” Alexander asked.
It’s not a holiday. She said, “Yes, thank you.”
“Dunshian’s a fine old castle. Good job it’s at the end of the road, no one’s robbed the stone. But then, when it was built there were no roads, only the sea. It was the guardian of the straits, then.”
“Not just a tourist attraction?”
The blue-gray eyes targeted her again. “The guide this afternoon, he was laying on all the old stories for those tourists, wasn’t he? The true stories, not the prettied-up ones.”
“I’m sure he was also feeding them the romantic guff about Flora MacDonald and Bonnie Prince Charlie and Over the Sea to Skye.”
“Flora’s grave is just down the road. That’s real enough. What’s the harm of a bit of romance, of tales that’ve become more real than the reality, when there’s a grave at the end of the road?”
Kate had no answer for that. She drank again. The flavor flared in her mouth like the sunset blazed across the sky. “Even Flora and Charlie’s reality—they met, they took a boat ride, they parted—even that’s more palatable than those grim stories from the castle. The same stories you get in Greek mythology, Medea murdering her sons by Jason, or Tantalus never able to drink from the pool he stands in, or even Prometheus, chained to a rock with birds tearing at his guts because he stole the fire from the gods. . . .” She wasn’t sure where that bit about Prometheus had come from.
The dishtowel squeaked faintly on the glass. “Such stories are our myths of origin. Our Dreamtime. Stories, music—and songs, the words and the music together—they feed the soul the way food feeds the body. Greek, Norse, Celt, your stories need taking seriously.”
Either that made perfect sense or she was finding truth in the bottom of a glass. Kate poured the last of the whisky down her throat and sighed. “I figured you modern Scots were trying to outrun your past and only got dragged back into it because of the tourists. Packaged heritage. Shrink-wrapped wishful thinking. Passion served up with an order of fries.”
“Packaged passion rehydrated by the listener’s own body fluids.” He smiled again. A Mona Lisa smile, mysterious and distant. “Thank you for contributing to the band.”
“You play in a band?”
“Oh aye. A few of the lads, guitar, drums, my pipes. One of the few instruments that’ll hold its own with an electric guitar.”
“Rock music? Really?”
“Folk-rock. Rock ‘n’ reel. Forward into Scotland’s past.”
“Where do you play?”
“Here and there. Mind you, we don’t make more than a few bob.”
“You could move to Edinburgh or even London, get a larger audience.”
“But that takes a few bob as well.”
So here was yet another youth with ambition but no money. And Kate was middle-aged with money but no ambition. . . . No. That was a lie. Her ambition was choked, pent up, impacted, just as her soul was plugged by emotion. By poetry and music and stories left dried and stored. She was tongue-tied and ashamed—of what? Of having stories to tell? Or of being afraid to tell them?
Yes, she wanted to tell him, follow your dream. But she was hardly setting a good example. Maybe she could be a cautionary tale.
Alexander was drawing off another whisky. Whisky, usquebaugh, the water of life. She hadn’t asked for another one. She must look thirsty.
He set the glass down before her and this time didn’t add it to her tab. “We’ve named the band ‘Keridwen’ after the mother goddess with her cauldron of inspiration. One of the old pagan spirits that never went away in spite of the iron swords and the iron fists that tried to stamp them out.”
“That tried to stamp out the music. That burned the pipes and the fiddles and turned the dancers to stone.” Kate sipped. She’d half expected her tongue to be numb, but no, it was extraordinarily sensitive, so that each word came out burnished brightly. “I thought Keridwen was the crone, or at least the mother, not a young woman like a muse.”
“A wee lass playing a harp is no muse for this country. You need a strong experienced woman, a proper muse for the creative heavy lifting, eh?”
“An experienced woman. You think?” The whiskey leaped in her mouth, in her stomach, like the fire on the hearth. “Oh for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention!” But Shakespeare had lived in smooth, green lush England, not Caledonia, stern and wild.
She could feel Alexander watching her like she could feel the warmth of the fire or the cold wind off the sea. The oleaginous muzak was doubly annoying now, when what she wanted to hear was the skirl of his pipes. “Where did you study music?” she asked.
“I learnt to play from my grandfather. My parents weren’t so keen on the old songs and the old tales, wanted something fashionable. I suppose the tourists are like me, in a way, after digging out their roots. What once was lost but now is found.”
Odd, somewhere in the recesses of Kate’s auditory canal she really could hear the pipes, slowly building behind the muzak.
“You should’ve heard me practicing, for years I was scaring the jackdaws from their nests. The neighbors went about with their eyes all screwed up, painful like. It’s hard to hide your mistakes when you’re playing the great highland pipes.” With a small chime Alexander put the glass back into its rack and chose another. His long, strong fingers traced its rim round and round, then plunged inside. Kate could see her own distorted reflection in the bowl.
“You’re a writer, then?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, even though she’d denied it earlier today, like Peter denying Christ. “Well, I took a couple of writing courses. One instructor had us writing for the local newspaper, small and safe. The other gave us formulas for stories. I sent out a few, but never sold any. The classes were all just theory, not practice . . .” She almost said, like sex, where practice rarely meets the imagination. “Then I tried journaling. But why write about my life when what I want is to get beyond my life? I keep hearing David Balfour whispering behind my back . . .”
“David Balfour from Kidnapped?” Alexander asked.
“From the sequel, actually. When long, long after Culloden, after the Jacobite cause had crashed and burned and Charlie was back in France, Alan Breck says he’ll go on fighting. And Balfour tells him not to bother, no one wants him to go on, it’s all over.”
“Ah well, David Balfour was always a bit of a prick, I’m thinking.”
Kate surprised herself with a laugh.
“Oh aye, Alan should’ve given up the war. That’s history for you, dead cold. But you’re making your own history, aren’t you? You’re telling stories. Tales that’re more real than the reality.”
Kate couldn’t believe she was talking so openly and honestly. It was like toweling off in front of the window. But shameful as the flesh was, it wasn’t as shameful as raw emotion. . . . The whisky had loosened her tongue. She should’ve known better, letting herself get drunk, not just on alcohol but on Alexander’s voice, like the whisky mellow and tart, acid and smooth.
She stroked the smooth glass and the polished wood of the bar. No, her fingertips weren’t numb either. And she really could hear the pipes, ranting to a rock beat, backed by the high, pure soprano of a penny whistle and the alto keening of a fiddle, not quite on key, not quite off, and a snare drum like her own heartbeat beneath the music. The notes looped round and round and came out where they went in, Celtic interlace in sound. She wanted to leap up and pump her fist in the air. Or pick up a sword and kill an Englishman. Or vault over the bar and embrace Alexander.
She looked up. He was still watching her, his eyes the silvered indigo of the sea. Humoring a paying customer, no doubt—got a live one here, help pay for the band. But while there was humor in his expression it was wry rather than mocking. Slight creases at the corners of his mouth made her wonder suddenly if he was as young as she’d thought.
The couple walked across floor entwined. Kate hoped they could make it upstairs. She didn’t want to find them going at it on the staircase. It was hard to remember what it was like to be that turned on. Even though something was melting down through her gut right now, something more than alcohol, more than music. She laughed again.
Alexander looked from the couple back to her with a knowing grin. Kate didn’t blush. Her face was already hot with whisky. The lad, the young man, the piper—he was reading her mind. She’d had too much to drink, too much to think. “Good night,” she said, and discovered to her surprise she could still stand up.
“Good night,” said Alexander.
She walked a more or less straight path from the room, met the muzak, bland and unthreatening, in the hall, and left it behind as she climbed the staircase.
Outside her window the sun was a rosy gleam in the southwest and the sky was Prussian blue, clear and deep. Kate hoped to see a ghostly army marching across the parking lot, a parade of disembodied souls, figments of memory. But she saw nothing but sheep grazing on the hillside below the black crest of the castle. Out of a harsh land, strength. Out of a long memory, beauty. . . . Was it Plato who’d said memory was the mother of the muses?
Yes, she liked it here, this land where past and present interlaced, where the rueful acceptance of necessity didn’t dull the imagination but whetted it. Even if she was seeing the world not through rose-colored glasses but whisky-colored ones. “Thanks, Alexander.”
Kate turned out the bedside lamp and watched the long, slow twilight fade into darkness. The sheets warmed to her body and emitted the faint aroma of sea air. She was just teetering unbalanced on the precipice of sleep, a moment away from that long glide into nothingness, when she heard the pipes again, remote but insistent.
The music drew her out and down. Rocks split the foaming surf below her, teeth around a gaping mouth. What the . . . She hit, hard, the breath knocked out of her, and the waves rolled her over and pulled her down. But instead of the hollow ring of deep water she heard music swelling around her, music that danced and marched and cried all at once.
You have to pay the piper. Not the Highland pipes but the pan-pipes—the great god Pan, no greeting card cherub but the ancient spirit of madness and terror—panic at the wilderness of sea and stone and wind-tortured hillsides—an old pagan spirit that never went away, that grew and changed and survived. And summoned Kate into the wilderness.
She lay on her bed, on the beach, the shit-splattered walls of the castle leaning disapprovingly over her as inside old MacDonald feasted on his own future—what liquid would ever wash that taste from his mouth, not whisky, not water, not blood itself. . . .
Help me, release me, let me out, let me go, said the resonant voice in Kate’s ear.
Express appetite, she heard herself reply, and you turn to stone, to stand for all eternity as a warning to others.
Appetite isn’t easy, only natural.
The stones stood up from the earth, stones, rocks—music that rocks, that reaches right down into your gut and twists—music that reverberates in the marrow of the bones where fear hides. Not the fear of mortality, because fear is mortality. The fear of making mistakes, of going too far, of revealing yourself, of stepping over the edge of the earth—or out of the banqueting hall window—and falling into ice-cold blood-warm currents of the body, blood, sweat, tears, semen, milk, whisky.
Kate was thirsty. She opened her mouth to drink. To speak. And he was there, his kisses insistent as his music, music that would wake the dead and set them to dancing, help me release me let me out let me go.
She wasn’t sure who she was or where she was. What she knew—what she recognized as if out of deep memory—was his smoke and salt scent in her nostrils and the tart-sweet taste of his tongue in her mouth. His eyes were a tender green, like the sea at the base of the cliff where the rock plunged smoothly into the water and filled it. His body in her arms was too too solid flesh, hot, hard, smooth, real as the imagination is real.
Kate heard her own voice catch in a gasp of both terror and delight. Keridwen and her cauldron, there was anatomical symbolism for you, the feminine cauldron of creativity, of inspiration, the cauldron that needed to be properly stirred.
And she gave tongue to her delight and her terror, kissing his eager mouth and devouring his in return, just as she devoured his music and spoke her truth to his body. No more hiding, no more shame. Eat, and speak out.
Help me release me let me out let me go.
Let him out? But she was letting him in. . . . She let go and slid down a waterfall, sparkling, fragile as glass, strong as rock. And then the music was gone. Silence deep as the sea echoed in her head. The dungeon walls closed around her. She stood over his body, a woman warrior, and raised her sword. “Let me out, I’ll confess it all, every word of it, let me out!”
The sword was his body. With it she cut, she slashed, she stabbed. The stones of the wall fell before her. They weren’t bleeding, it was her own hands bleeding where she clutched the sword. Let me out let me out. . . .
Her eyes opened. Was that steam in the cool room? No, a bright light was shining in her eyes. Slowly Kate sat up, her heart hammering, the sweat pooling between her breasts and thighs.
No, it wasn’t that bright a light at all. The creamy circle of the moon hung in the window behind her mirror, through her looking glass. The curtains moved gently in a draft like a sigh of satisfaction. But Kate knew she’d never be satisfied. She’d always want more.
“Where are you?” she whispered to the room.
All she could hear was the thrum of the wind and the waves.
“Who are you?”
But dreams don’t wear nameplates.
Suddenly she heard, small and distinct, the sound of her door shutting. Kate stumbled from the bed and across the room. The door was locked, the bolt thrown, just as she’d left it.
The cold draft teased her naked body and goosebumps rose on her skin. She couldn’t remember taking off her pajamas. Throwing herself back into the bed, she yanked the covers up to her chin. They were damp, scented with whisky as though she’d exuded it like sweat. No, she hadn’t seen anything, but she’d felt everything.
She expected to lie there awake the rest of the night, watching the moon cross the window. But it was when she woke up the next morning she realized she’d fallen into a profound dreamless sleep. She stared at her crumpled face in the mirror and told herself she’d been asleep all along. She’d had a dream so vivid it was a hallucination. Or a vision. Sensory overload or alcoholic fantasy, or Alexander playing his pipes downstairs, it didn’t matter.
Alexander. Wow, I didn’t know I had it in me. . . . She laughed. No need to be embarrassed about a dream. What was safer than a dream?
This dream strained against the borders of her mind. She was pregnant with it. If you were pregnant, you couldn’t act as though you’d never had sex.
In the dining room the young couple were feeding each other small bites of toast. Kate smiled at them. They didn’t know, did they? They were too young for the creative heavy lifting.
Hungrily she ate everything Lucy set before her, rich, fat food, eggs, bacon, sausage, toast with butter and a sweet-tart smear of marmalade. “I heard Alexander playing his pipes after he got off work last night,” Kate commented. “Have you ever heard Keridwen play?”
Lucy stopped dead with the teapot in mid-air. “Eh?”
“Or was that a demo tape he was playing last night? You had to have heard it, the great highland pipes aren’t shy.”
“It was quiet as the grave here last night—I’m sorry, don’t believe I ever caught your name.”
“Kate,” Kate said automatically, and set down her fork. Her stomach tightened, embracing the food.
“No one named Alexander works here. You’re not thinking of Angus, are you? My husband, he minds the bar in the evenings.” Lucy gestured toward a dark, heavy-set man who was just emerging from the back hall carrying a mop and bucket.
“Good morning,” he said politely as he passed. “Hope you slept well. A dram of Lagavulin makes a right fine nightcap, and no mistake.”
Kate opened her mouth and shut it again. What was she going to ask—was I talking to you last night or was I sitting nursing a whisky and staring into the fire? She glanced over at the honeymooners. They wouldn’t have noticed a brass band in the room. . . . They wouldn’t have noticed a rock band, either, even if its lead musician was a piper.
Rock. There was a double meaning for you, either stone and immutability or music shaking the listener to his roots. “Is there a piper who plays at the castle ruins?” she asked.
“No,” Lucy said. “There’s a fine old ballad about one, though. A piper from Dunshian was called to play for the Queen of Faerie, thought he’d stayed there for just one night but when he left found he’d been there two hundred year or more.”
“Of course. Dunshian. Dun means ‘fort’, right? And ‘Shian’ means ‘Sidhe’. The Sidhe. The fairies.”
“That’s the story, right enough. More tea?”
“Ah, no, no, thank you.” Kate felt as unbalanced as she had when listening to Alexander play yesterday. If she pinched herself would she wake up? She hoped not.
Your stories need taking seriously. But that was one story Alexander hadn’t mentioned. The Sidhe, not Disney pixies but the ancient and powerful fair folk. Elementals. Figures from the Dreamtime, summoned by human desire.
No, Lucy and Angus weren’t playing an elaborate joke on a tourist. The dream had really happened—and the word “real” would never again have the same definition. You had to believe in something beyond reality or there was no point to story-telling, was there?
Kate got up from the table and walked outside, following the sound of the waves, the wind, the seabirds, and the elusive music of the pipes. The music which called to battle and lamented the fallen all at once.
The pied piper—no, the pied piper led children away. This piper was leading her onward. But this time the music didn’t grow louder and louder as she approached the castle, and no piper guarded the gate.
The archaeologists worked at the blocked archway, carefully pulling the stones away. The taps of their hammers sounded like snare drums. She stood with her hands jammed in her pockets, watching and waiting.
Behind the door was a dark cavity. One of the man trained a flashlight into it. “Holy shit!” he exclaimed.
The other man stepped forward. So did Kate. For just a moment she caught the stench from the open door, every stink mortality could yield. Then a gust of wind scoured away the reek of decay and sea spray coated her glasses so that her eyes blurred.
But she could see what the men were seeing, illuminated by the gleam of the flashlight. A human skeleton lay on the rich loam like a sleeper lying on a bedspread. Matted fabric lay across the leg bones and a bundle of sticks and more fabric lay inside the curve of his left arm. Next to his skull, next to his eye sockets staring blindly upward, a gold earring glinted like a wedding band.
“How long has this doorway been blocked up?” asked one man.
Another answered, “Two, three hundred years maybe.”
“Suppose he’s been there since 1745? After Culloden the English passed laws banning the pipes, said they were instruments of war.”
“They banned the kilt, too, wanted to erase our identity.”
“Was this one a rebel then, are you thinking?” The men exchanged shrugs.
Kate stepped back and turned away, but not before she caught a quick whiff of something aromatic as whisky. The odor of sanctity, probably, said to cling to a saint’s bones. Where did saints come from but the Dreamtime? There were saints who stayed detached in the face of madness and murder and there were saints who passionately desired to ease the wounded souls of man—of woman—kind. . . . Alexander was no more a saint than she was.
Kate pulled a tissue out of her pocket, wiped her glasses, and put them back on. There, she could see. See that the young man, no matter what his name had been, had just as likely been walled up alive because he wasn’t a rebel. Because he didn’t make plots. Because he never confessed but kept quiet and safe. If he’d spoken out no cell could’ve held him.
Kate’s heart swelled, filled every cell of body, strained to burst. Help me release me let me go let me out. . . . “Yes,” she said.
Without looking again at the fragile bones she walked down from the castle and away from the threshold where this world met—no, not the next, for Faerie, the Otherworld, was this world too, created and nurtured by poets and musicians.
Inside the hotel she could hear Lucy singing the ballad about the human piper who stayed too long in Faerie. But what about the corresponding ballad, the story of the fairy piper who stayed too long in this world?
Kate walked into the lounge and sat down. She opened her notebook to its virgin first page. She took out her pencil. It was time to leap from the window, not into eternity of death but into the eternity of the story.
The pencil was a chanter. It was a magic wand. It was a taut male body in her hand. Faintly at the edge of awareness Kate heard the pipes playing. “Thank you,” she said, and she touched her pencil to the page.
She’d always threatened to run away, and now she’d done it. She ran until she reached the end of the Earth. And then she stepped off its edge and flew.
“The Muse” first appeared in Realms of Fantasy Magazine, Shawna McCarthy, editor, Volume 8, Number 3, February 2002.
This is the one story in this collection that was written on spec. That is, written from the heart, with any thought of actually selling it secondary. Fortunately, sell it I did. The bonus is that it appeared in the same issue of Realms of Fantasy that printed photos from the (at the time) new Lord of the Rings movies.
This story was inspired by a real place, Duntulm Castle on the northern coast of Skye and the hotel just beside it. The older of twin Dunasheen Castles in my novel The Blue Hackle owes a bit to Dunshian.
My husband and I have been to Skye twice, both times in brilliant sunshine. I’m not sure what we did to please the infamous Skye weather fairies, but we’re very grateful.
On our first visit we only stopped for tea at the hotel, where the women’s toilet, was, alas, as described. Why this appealed to my muse I don’t know, unless the answer is in the story. On our second visit, after the story had been written and published, we stopped at the castle. Imagine my awe and delight, not to mention the fairy fingernails tracing down the back of my neck, to find a cairn just outside the entrance with a plaque reading: This cairn is to commemorate the MacArthurs, hereditary pipers to the MacDonalds of the Isles.
A short Gaelic verse was printed below, translated as: The world will end, But love and music endureth.
To which I can only add, Amen.
One of the basic skills of short-story writing is focusing tightly on one situation, one setting, and one group of characters, keeping the story immediate rather than sounding like the synopsis of a novel. It goes without saying that a mystery short story, historical or otherwise, will not have nearly as many red herrings or as intricate an investigative process as a mystery novel will have.
I use one strong point of view to tell the story, and through this person’s thoughts and observations drop in just enough description to set the scene. The problem with historical short stories is that setting the scene is a bit trickier. I have to clue the reader in to the time and the place very quickly with, say, “The Luftwaffe was hammering the dockyards at Bristol again.” I can’t tell the entire history of the period in a short story.
I introduce secondary characters with just one quick identifier, not a full backstory. I try to limit the number of characters to those needed for the plot, ignoring all the others who would have been there at the time. Because my stories tend to be longer ones, between 6000-8000 words, I do have some leeway.
In “The Necromancer’s Apprentice,” I focused on historical characters Robert Dudley and Queen Elizabeth I, and on Erasmus Pilbeam, my imaginary magician and sleuth, and his assistant. I did not introduce the plethora of courtiers, diplomats, and other figures who would have attended the queen at court. Since Pilbeam’s investigations are secret, keeping him away from the court wasn’t difficult.
In “A Mimicry of Mockingbirds” the protagonist is Thomas Jefferson as a young man living in Williamsburg, Virginia. Again, I’m dealing with several historical characters as well as my imaginary ones, but by having Jefferson interact with only one person at a time—until the “who done it” revelation, at least—I was able to keep the story in focus.
Two of my stories ended up with a mob of characters: “The Rag and Bone Man” and “The Eye of the Beholder.”
In the former, a pilgrim is murdered during a visit to the shrine at medieval Walsingham Priory. Here I had to not only set up the members of the pilgrim group, but also the prior and his staff. One pilgrim is identified as Isabella, “the king’s mother”. Tempting as it was to give her entire back story—and quite a story it is, if badly mangled in the film Braveheart—what was important to the story was that she was still wealthy and influential in retirement, and that she was a member of the French royal family.
In the latter story, I have a group of recovering WWII airmen at a stately home turned hospital near Glastonbury. My protagonist is an American, enough of a fish out of water that he can notice and comment on the things the reader needs to know. I chose one or two other people out of the wounded airmen and hospital staff to play major roles and kept everyone else in the background.
In any short story I imagine myself as a movie cameraman, focusing on a character or a clue and letting everything else fuzz out behind the main actors. Even if those blurry shapes are intriguing historical details or characters, if they’re outside the scope of the story, then they’re out!
Postscript: The above essay is reprinted with permission from How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries: The Art and Adventure of Sleuthing through Time, by Kathy Lynn Emerson, Perseverance Press, 2008.
Among many other novels, Lillian Stewart Carl is the author of the Jean Fairbairn/Alasdair Cameron cross-genre mystery series: America’s exile and Scotland’s finest on the trail of all-too-living legends. It begins with The Secret Portrait (“Mystery, history and sexual tension blend with a taste of the wild beauty of the Highlands: an enjoyable tale.” Kirkus Reviews) goes on through The Murder Hole, The Burning Glass, and The Charm Stone (“Carl's well-crafted fourth Jean Fairbairn/Alasdair Cameron mystery takes Jean, a journalist for travel magazine Great Scot, and Alasdair, a former detective, from Edinburgh to historic Williamsburg, Va.” Publishers Weekly), and culminates in The Blue Hackle (November 2010). A short novel, The Mortsafe (December 2011), picks up the couple’s adventures.
With John Helfers, Lillian co-edited The Vorkosigan Companion, a retrospective on Lois McMaster Bujold’s science fiction work, which was nominated for a Hugo award.
Her first story collection, Along the Rim of Time, was published in 2000. Most of Lillian’s novels and short stories are available in various electronic formats.
Her books are available in both print and electronic editions. Here is her website. Here is her Facebook Group Page. Here is a listing of other Smashwords books.