CHAPTER 9

 

Julianne took a hot bath at Hy MacDonald's house, or as much of one as she could get for the ten pence the heater took. She emerged from the tub wearing a T-shirt and jeans that belonged to Hy, the jeans a little big and held up with a woven band he'd bought at a crafts fair and thought might come in handy as a guitar strap. "Willie," she said, "I just wanted to thank you for—you know—helping me get away from that guy."

Willie waved his hand negligently and looked uncomfortable. He thought it was all very well that she thought he was good wolf-scaring material, but he actually much preferred the role of the wolf. Why should she need protecting anyway? She was a grown woman and had been away from her mama for quite a while.

She saw his impatient expression and added, "I was caught off-guard. I thought those folks would be fine since Torchy took me to them. I know you're getting close to her, Willie, but she's got really strange energy, y'know?"

He did know. Maybe he was mad at Juli partially because he was mad at Torchy, trying to make lion food out of him when he thought they had been getting along so well. Damn, it always seemed to be something with women, and sometimes he wasn't sure which kind griped him more, the ones like Torchy who were wild and sexy but treacherous as rattlers or the kind like Julianne who said they were independent and wanted to make up their own minds but still expected a guy to risk his neck defending them. He missed the fact that Juli had just been warning him about Torchy, not realizing that the redhead had already betrayed Willie. Juli thought that in warning him she was paying him back, somehow protecting him.

When Willie didn't respond, she smiled uncertainly at Hy MacDonald, who came out of the kitchen with a tray full of fresh drinks. Hy hadn't heard her. He was preoccupied with an entirely different issue.

"I wish I could be of more help," Hy was saying. "It's been very good to see you. I needed someone to keep me from drinkin' alone, y'know. But the timin' is a wee bit awkward as I've got this new job. Taxes have hit me very hard and my brother has pulled quite a few strings to get me on the North Sea oil rigs. I'm hoping, of course, to pick up a bit of change entertaining on the side but we'll see how that goes."

"But don't you see?" Gussie asked him. "It's the same thing that was happening to us at home. It's these—these critters trying to run you folks away from the music just like they did us."

The banjo, propped up in the corner, played a tune Gussie recognized as some old Irish exile song, one of those with the general theme of "the landlord wants his rent, the tatties have gone bad, you're pregnant once again, and I'm outta here, my lassie-o."

"Yes, I do see," Hy said. "But I don't much fancy bein' one of the first casualties, like Hawthorne and Nedra and them, d'ye see? I can let you look through my record collection and books if that will be any help at all, and take you 'round to Sir Walter Scott's old place, since that's where you said the Randolph couple planned to go. There's tour buses in and out all the time so I'm sure you could pop back up here on one of them. You might find it all very interesting anyway. Sir Walter built his estate from the lands once roamed by Thomas the Rhymer—his turf, I suppose you could call it. And there's all the auld lit'rary places from the books thereabouts, and the Wizard's grave over at Melrose." He cast a rather nervous glance at the banjo mumbling to itself in the corner of the living room. "Perhaps your instrument could get old Michael Scott to exhume his magic book for you and give you a wee hand, eh?"

 

* * *

 

Gussie Turner stepped into the entrance hall at Abbotsford as reverently as if she were entering a church. She stared up at the wooden ceiling and the carved wooden rafters with the little coats of arms in the middle and the miniature shields on either side where the rafters connected to the walls. She looked beneath her feet at the pretty octagonal tiles in five different colors of stone. She studied the carved wooden walls and the suits of armor and more little shields all around her. She peered closely at all of the doodads Sir Walter had placed very carefully around his house: the bust on the pretty shiny carved table, which she saw was of William Wordsworth himself, the fancy clock, and the two skulls on either side of it on the mantel above the very elaborately carved fireplace that had a genuine brass grate all backed by blue and white tiles that looked like those Dutch dishes, the kind with willow trees on them. The carvings above the fireplace looked like the naughty ones from temples in India and a row of uncomfortable-looking but very grand chairs that might have come from some ritzy church's business office ranked along one wall.

A lady about her own age with an expression that tried to be friendly but didn't succeed very well was sitting behind a desk. Her clothes, which looked like what high-school girls used to wear in the winter before the schools changed the rules to let them wear blue jeans, were a matched beige sweater set—short-sleeved sweater and a cardigan with little pearl buttons, and a red tartan skirt with pleats. Gussie wanted to ask her if that was the Scott tartan but felt shy because she figured the lady probably got asked that all the time and Gussie didn't want to seem so much like a tourist.

"My, this is a nice place you got here," she said instead.

The lady showed her teeth. "That'll be two pounds, mum. And please sign the buke and be sure to visit the gift shop in the old stable."

Gussie was glad Hy MacDonald had let them stop at a bank. She forked over her two pounds and was signing the guest book when Willie strode in with his air of everything-can-start-now-that-I'm-here, clutching the banjo. Julianne wandered in beside him. In this setting, in Hy MacDonald's oversize T-shirt, she looked so wan that she could have gone drifting through the garden and passed for the lady in white in her nightgown.

Must be the setting, Gussie decided. Everybody looked like they belonged in a Gothic novel.

"Ah'm afraid ye canna bring yon instrumunt in he-er, sir," the lady said. "Might scratch the polish or bump somethin' ov-air, y'see."

Willie looked like he was going to tell her off for a moment, then he turned on the charm and said sweetly, "Why, ma'am, I promise to be real careful, but this is a special sort of an instrument you see."

"Can ye no leave it locked in yer auto?" the lady asked.

"Our ride just went back to Edinburgh," Gussie put in.

The banjo began frailing "Wassailing" in a minor key. Gussie remembered the words that went, "Oh, Master and Mrs. da da da da da Pray open the door and let us come in. Oh, Master and Missus who sit by the fire pray think of the traveler who walks through the mire."

"You see that, ma'am?" Willie asked, turning around to show the banjo playing itself to her. "I never touched fret or string. Have you ever seen a banjo do that before? Why, not only would I be careful not to let the banjo scratch your furniture or knock anything over, but I would be certain not to knock any of that stuff against this very valuable instrument."

"Ah'm sorry, sir. I dinna mak t'rules."

"I'll take it with me, Willie, while you look around," Gussie said. "I need to go find postcards to send Lettie and Mic and Craig Lee to let them know we're okay."

He gave it to her and she walked back out the big heavy front door and back into the yard. The banjo began thrumming "Stewball" as she turned toward the direction the lady—a docent, they called people who watched museums and such—where the docent had showed her the old stables were.

The truth was, she was glad to be alone and just have some time to think her own thoughts. She had always wanted to come and see England and especially Scotland and now that she was here she was rushing around so much that she hadn't had any time to think about what she was seeing. She whirled around and leaned back on her heels and shaded her eyes, looking way up and all around at the cobbled-together mansion that had belonged to Walter Scott. It wasn't a very tall house, only a couple of stories, but it had two castle-like towers, one with a cone roof, one with those square toothy things, crenellations she thought they were called, and little bitty towers flanking the main entrance door. A whole raft of chimneys jutted above the main building, with more chimneys all around, and all of the gables and such had serrated fronts. The whole thing was done mostly in one color of brick with stone trimmings around the sides and windows and it had a castle-type wall around what would have been the driveway anywhere else but she guessed was a kind of courtyard here. She went beyond the wall to find the stable beside a couple of churchy-looking buildings.

The brick and stone all looked as cold and wet as only those materials can look on a dismal day, and she was glad to be able to stop in at the little tourist shop, and the song the banjo was humming very softly in her hand made her think she could still smell the horse manure.

There were warm-looking wool plaid scarves that said they were Scott and Douglas tartans, ruler-sized strips of color slides of the local sights, postcards of every tourist attraction in the Scottish Borders.

She lingered over some of these. On the road, the van had passed signs advertising these sights on the way from Edinburgh but Hy MacDonald had been in too big of a hurry to play tour guide. But nearby there was Linlithgow Castle where Mary Queen of Scots was born and Hermitage Castle where she nearly died riding to find her lover. All around were the Eildon Hills where True Thomas met the Fairy Queen. There were battlefields like Falkirk and Bannockburn and coming up from Carlisle they'd passed by Flodden Field—she remembered songs about all of them, victories and defeats. The banjo, as if it had somehow been looking through the cards with her, would do a soft bar or two of each as she picked it up to look at it. The lady in the shop looked around as if searching for a radio but she was behind a counter and Gussie carried the banjo low, her hand circling its neck above the fifth tuning peg.

Shoot, they hadn't even gotten to see Edinburgh Castle where they kept the crown jewels of Scotland Sir Walter had rescued from their basement hiding place, nor Mons Meg the cannon that he had also brought out of obscurity. This place actually didn't look much different from other farmland she'd seen except there were more stone houses than any place she'd ever been except maybe New Braunfels, Texas, and most of the houses there weren't so big. In Missouri there were lots of stone fences just like here. They didn't have anything else to do with the rocks they dug up from the pasture. But this place was so crammed with history that it seemed like something important had happened three layers down on every scrap of dirt. It boggled the mind.

If she was going to see that fancy house, she decided, she had better get her postcards and go. But beside the coffee mugs that said Abbotsford, Home of Sir Walter Scott in tasteful rust against cream with a little drawing in rust-colored paint, there was a rack of books, paperbacks of the Waverly novels, which she had read a long time ago, and something called The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Seeing the word "minstrel," she snagged it and paid for it and rushed out to show the others the ballad book she had found.

Out in the open air she cracked it open to peek at it, as if afraid the songs would leak out, and saw to her disappointment that it was not a collection of ballads but one long poem by Sir Walter Scott. Oh, well. It would give her something to read during future traipsings around.

She took a step toward the main entrance door and then remembered that the old dragon in the hall wasn't any more likely to let her in with the banjo than she would Willie. Gussie didn't figure once Willie got to looking around in that fascinating old place he'd remember to stop anytime soon to come out and take charge of the banjo.

She sighed and started to find herself a bench in the garden to sit down and look at her book, and noticed that one of the other doors was a little ajar. That wouldn't be very honest, now would it, sneaking in like that?

She thumbed through the first part of her book but a breeze came up, whipping up the rose petals shed by the bushes nearby, and riffling the pages forward. When she returned to the book, she found herself staring at a passage that said, "Now slow and faint, he led the way/ Where, cloistered round, the garden lay/The pillared arches were over their head/And beneath their feet were the bones of the dead." My, my, she couldn't have put it better herself, she thought, shivering in the breeze and resisting the temptation to lift her feet up lest she be walking on anybody's grave. The open door creaked and waggled back and forth as if beckoning her. The banjo nudged her with "Onward, Christian Soldiers."

Well, what the hell, she had paid her money, hadn't she? And she would be careful not to bump the banjo against any of the fine furnishings. Like Willie said, it wasn't only to avoid hurting Sir Walter's treasures, but because if she wrecked the banjo they'd all be up the creek without a paddle.

 

* * *

 

The ghost held the door open until the older lady with the banjo had entered then bowed her in with a playful flourish. Guests! He was entertaining again. Not the crude gawkers who came daily to his hall but people who felt like old friends—almost as if they could have been his characters, many of whom he freely admitted had been based on friends.

The golden-haired lass was clearly a tragic heroine if ever he had seen one, more than a little fey and quite charming. The man was roguish and venturesome and reminded him in bearing and attitude of his old friend James Hogg. But it was with the older woman, the one carrying the banjo, that he felt a most peculiar affinity. He had always done a good job portraying her type. He didn't do very well with women by and large, according to his critics, except for his peasant women, the mothers, the witches, the midwives and widows. This woman was of that sort—he fancied her a slightly aged version of Jeannie Deans, his heroine in The Heart of MidLothian, who had walked in a day and a night to London to save her sister's life. But, he saw with approval, this was no mere ignorant peasant crone but an educated woman. She carried one of his books in her hand—one of his first, by gar! Perhaps she would like him to sign it?

He could feel the emotions of these people and to some degree read their thoughts, as he had not wished to do with the tourists. He had known at once that these were the people whose journey had caught his attention across time and space—the instrument the woman carried had harped him from the dead. He liked the look of them. They seemed to him worthy wights. Noble ladies and gentlemen, if a bit on the scruffy side, on a noble quest. He wasn't sure exactly what it was—they were tired and their thoughts and feelings were not particularly congruous—but he felt certain their cause was a good one.

As he held up his hand to bow Gussie in he fretted to see how the light pierced clean through his fingers, even on this drizzly chilly day when the wind worried the petals from his roses and rhododendrons into a mosaic of pink, violet, and white that the gardeners for the Trust would all too soon tidy away.

In his lifetime there had been a great deal of gruesome fascination with the subject of how contact could be made with the dead, but he couldn't recall that anyone had ever addressed the problem that perplexed him now, which was how to directly contact the living.

 

* * *

 

Julianne Martin was wondering about making contact too. The longer her deafness continued, the more it became disorienting instead of merely inconvenient. Of course, the others remembered to look at her and make themselves clear when they were speaking directly to her. But it dawned on her now how much conversation is not face-to-face but casual, remarks thrown over the shoulder, overheard conversations between two other people not meant to exclude her specifically but simply not remembering that she could no longer choose whether to enter into the exchange or not. The absence of sound, which had always been her most important sense, made her feel as if she had become a ghost herself—or as if others had become ghosts, or television images with the volume turned off.

She felt half ashamed and half angry at the irritation she had seen in Willie's face when she thanked him for helping her with the Gypsy. She really had been betrayed by Torchy, whether intentionally or not. Maybe those people were great friends of Torchy's and she got along fine with them, but they were rougher than Julianne was used to, even when her hearing had been intact. Surely that was easy enough for Willie to understand. It couldn't be that hard for him to put himself in her place.

She had always been able to handle all but the most drunken and belligerent advances by herself, sometimes even making the guy see her as a person, even a friend, but Torchy must be a little twisted, judging from the company she kept, because that business with the Gypsies had been a whole other kind of scene. Juli had felt so panicky—so suddenly aware of all the nuances, all the signals she was missing that meant the difference between defusing the situation and escalating it to violence.

Under normal circumstances, if she had to, if she should remain deaf . . . (No, she wasn't going to think about that. She wasn't going to put that energy out there and manifest that reality.) But if she had to, she would eventually learn to do something else and become one of those differently abled people who become so remarkable that they have miniseries made about them. If she lived through this or didn't get abducted and sold to white slavers or spend the rest of her life in prison or something. After all, if she had a friend who was going through this, she'd tell them that they were expecting a little too much of themselves to think they could run away from the law and contend with lecherous lion-handlers and save folk music for posterity while they were like, in their adaptation phase. Oh, well. This was probably just another one of those profound experiences Lucien talked about where the universe was trying to teach you something. She just hoped it wasn't teaching her that in loosening her hold on what mattered most to her it was preparing her to leave this plane of existence.

Perish the thought, my dear! a reassuring little voice echoed inside of her in the way that her late husband George's always did. That gave her courage. She missed George and wished his spirit had been able to hitch a ride with Sam's in the banjo. She had heard those superstitions about ghosts not being able to cross flowing water and supposed it might apply to the ocean too. Probably the banjo making a corporeal body for the spirit to inhabit had enabled Sam's successful crossing. Whatever. The little voice encouraged her and she skipped forward, and passed Willie as he paused to pantomime looking thoughtfully at the book-lined walls of Sir Walter Scott's study.

The plush seat of the wingback chair at the writing desk made from the wood of ships from the Spanish Armada sank with a sigh.

 

* * *

 

The Debauchery Devil felt picked on. Really, the way the other devils delighted in spoiling her fun, you'd have thought Torchy was a mortal instead of one of them. They resented her glamorous past and all the perks of her particular specialty, she'd always known they did. But that was no reason to go spoiling a whole long car trip. She had planned some really special stuff for the Randolphs, the big mocha man, and the half-breed bitch. But with Julianne loose and spreading goodness-only-knew-what stories, Willie MacKai alive and un-lionized, and the banjo still functioning, little Torchy Burns really needed the lot in the van to assist in raising her credibility level.

"So, Torchy, just where did you take Willie anyhow?" Anna Mae asked.

"Oh, I can hardly bear to speak of it, ducky," Torchy said, pretending to be faint. "It was too awful. I was just going to take him back to see these new cars that were hooked on to the train? They belonged to some friends of mine who run a circus. Well, halfway through the next car back of ours who should I see but the coppers waiting to arrest us? So naturally, I pushed Willie ahead of me into the next car. It was dark and while we were feeling around, trying to find a way into the next car where I was sure my friends would be waiting, I'm afraid he sort of accidentally blundered into the lions' cage." She bit at her thumbnail and twined a curl of her red hair around one red-nailed finger, trying to look contrite and embarrassed. "Well, then of course I went for help and who should I meet but the little blond gel, Juli. She was lying low too, you see, having gotten separated from you, dearie," she said to Anna Mae. "So I popped in with her where my friends were and asked them to help me get Willie away from the lions.

"That particular band of Gypsies have always been such charming people, so—colorful, you know. One can't believe all the stories one hears, now can one? But there have been some changes in their politics lately and my old chums aren't in charge anymore. Fellow who was running things was an ugly young stud who informed me quite rudely that they were most particular what they fed their lions and asked me not to interfere. He sent some fellow to go tend to Willie and the lions and dismissed me rudely, saying they'd take care of Juli. Well, naturally I was quite suspicious and I came looking for help, which was when I saw darling Brose being abducted by the bobbies."

"Gussie went after Willie," Anna Mae said.

"Oh, yes, I knew that," Torchy said smoothly, "and I saw that she had him away from the lions so I thought I should try to help darling Brose by using my influence and here we are!" She finished brightly, then looked pouty. "I do so hope you'll convince Willie and Juli and Gussie that I was only trying to help in my small way."

Privately, she thought, You'd damn well better convince them since I'm going to all the trouble to restrain myself from making this road turn into a tunnel that bores straight into the heart of a sacred fairy knowe and watching your silly faces as the end of the road closes off and the road goes down and down and ever down so that you're lost in the world of my ken and kin.

"We know you didn't mean no harm, honey," Brose said, patting her on the shoulder gingerly. He didn't sound awfully convinced; in fact, he sounded quite wary of her actually, but it would have to do. Maybe later, when she had the protection of the ashes of the written ballads, she could toy with them all a bit. Nothing as prosaic as another car crash. Some nice terminal sexually transmitted diseases for the younger ones and perhaps Brose the good shepherd could be devoured by a wolf if one was handy. Enough time for that later. She could call out the Hounds of Hell, the Hound of the Baskervilles, or Huckleberry Hound for that matter, whenever she liked, it was all just a matter of the proper timing.

She had found out at devil central that Willie and the others were at Abbotsford so she decided to fool her traveling companions by doing the unexpected and being genuinely helpful, much as it pained her, and so, faithful as a triple-A road map, she gave them the very best directions for the very fastest, straightest roads and short cuts that truly would lead to the estate and not into some bog or hidden tarn on a deserted moor.

"You're pretty helpful all of a sudden," Ellie said suspiciously, "and awfully sure Gussie and Willie really are at Abbotsford."

"Oh, I rang up at the station, after I got out of the loo. I described them to the lady at the manor and she said they were there. So it's all come out all right, you see. Just so there are no hard feelings about the misunderstanding. I had rather thought we'd all end up meeting at The Plastic Card because that's where I told the Gypsies to bring Juli—before they became so rude I mean."

"Gee, how convenient this all is," Ellie said with an edge in her voice.

"Don't knock it," Faron said. "What I wonder is how they got away from the cops."

"Torchy found out we were cleared," Brose said. "The Irish dude turned his sorry self in."

"God, that is convenient," Ellie said.

"Yeah, for somebody," Anna Mae replied sourly.

"I do try," Torchy said modestly. "You're just sour because you've had such a rum go lately, poor dear, but cheer up. Not long now and we'll meet the others at old Wattie Scott's and we shall all be reunited and partying in some pub before you know it."

Her cheery pronouncement served mostly to shut everybody up and they rode for a time in silence.

As they crossed into Scotland they left the broad highway for the scenic side roads leading to Scott's Borders. A dank rain drizzled from a curdling sky onto a road as twisty and slippery as a fresh-caught haddock. If another car should come, either it or the van would have to leap one of the stone fences that veined the fields like the lines of some huge jigsaw puzzle or drive into freshly clawed muddy land waiting to be reforested. The plowed land was invariably flanked by neat little evergreen trees planted in precise rows about two feet apart.

"Sheep raising and Christmas tree farming are big business around here, huh?" Brose asked Torchy.

"Christmas tree farming indeed," she said sadly. "That, my dear man, is what the government is doing to try to replant the great Caledon Forest that once covered all the lowlands and borders of Scotland." She bit off saying any more. She was not at all in accord with the rest of the devils about this particular development. The Greed and Avarice Devil and horrid old Threedee were proud of this sort of thing but it didn't appeal to her. Her job could be done as easily in forest as in pub and she missed the leafy cover . . . among other things. The new chemical developments were fun for a while, but although the drugs caused plenty of misery, their devotees didn't take them seriously enough. Oh, the addicts were well and truly caught but they were never quite—awed.

In her younger days, when things were simpler and she depended on grandiosity for effect and, often, poteen or whiskey for a mere catalyst, her victims and disciples alike had feared her, longed for her, and were in awe of her power and beauty. Aw well, ducks, her Torchy Burns self told her, we're none of us these days what we once were. Nowadays, the only entities that received the sort of admiration she had once attracted were those bogeys who operated under the auspices of the Superstition Squad. It was the fault of the damned board. Back when each devil was either an independent or, at times, an interdependent operator, when life was primitive and the pickings were easy, people were in awe of all sorts of things. But then someone got the bright idea for the board.

The board was very modern. Very keen on statistics. Statistics could be manipulated even more easily than people, who could be manipulated by statistics. Anything to seem rational. Rationality, the board claimed, wooed people into thinking that the forces of the Opposition were not just ineffective, but nonexistent. The Debauchery Devil didn't think that was much fun. She much preferred her ranting and raving religious television stars, who were, like musicians, among her best people. Just one of them, she firmly contended, did more to drive the general populace away from the Opposition than a whole academy full of scientists or a whole computer full of statistics.

She supposed she was rather an old-fashioned girl in her own way. She much preferred the good old days when she alone, not some silly movie star, could so enchant a mortal that the poor sod would wander around forever pixilated after experiencing, and then being denied, her intoxicating world. After a bit of what she had had to offer, mortals were simply too depressed to face their simple little lives again.

The problem was, her present position didn't allow for such magical opportunities and that got her a bit down. It simply wasn't very personal, when those you led down the garden path had to be led through the mouth of a bottle or the end of a needle. Not at all like seeing one's own razzle-dazzle reflected in the eyes of one's victims. She missed their society, their attempts to woo her with milk and bread, poetry and yes—music. She missed having people she had never summoned dream of her, pine for her, yearn for a glimpse of her, half fearing, but willing to give up lives and sanity not for some silly potion brewed in a sterile laboratory but for the unearthly glitter of her own eyes, to be caught in the web of her hair and enthralled by the cadence of her voice.

But she was lucky, she supposed, (and who better to be lucky? one of her names was Lady Luck—her gamblers called her that) to still have a job of any sort. She who had once been queen of the underworld, spirit of the forest, guardian of the rivers, was now the empress of street corners and casinos. But she still had followers, and it kept a girl going.

The underworld was a total bust now, of course, drilled by mines and such. These spriggy new forests, while rather touching, were hardly tall enough or thick enough to hide even one pair of lovers six miles into the woods without passersby being able to see bare flesh through the trees. And that ambitious upstart of a demon, sponsored by the Expediency Devil, the one called PW (Pollution and Waste, which sounded grandiose to her for such a grubby kid) had hold of her waters.

So here she was, with this crummy assignment, doing in her own disciples. It wasn't even much of a challenge. Music was an addiction all by itself and once she separated the musicians from the music, they'd be easy enough prey. Even Willie, who seemed as if he should have been quite easy to overcome because of his drinking, still kept from sinking into the pit that was Torchy's particular corner of her particular hell because of the music. Without it, in he'd go so deep he'd never hit bottom.

Torchy had absolutely no idea what was keeping Julianne together now that the music had been stripped from her. If only the silly thing could hear herself try to sing now that she could no longer hear, that would probably do her in! Of course, with all of her mystic tendencies, she'd undoubtedly end up on the streets as one more crazy baglady. You couldn't get most people to believe that the supernatural things the girl saw were real, even though they were.

Gussie was one of Torchy's very special minions, a bartender, and she was older than dirt and probably wouldn't last long enough to worry about anyway.

Brose might survive the loss of music as long as there were animals and nasty little juvenile delinquents for him to help, but the other devils could no doubt take care of parting him from those outlets as well.

Once Gunn's mind was safely wiped of the music, she could safely be tucked into a prison for her radical organizational tendencies—either that or taxes. You could always count on the Accounting Devil to come up with something in that department.

As for the Randolphs—well, Torchy thought she might do a very special song for Faron—not the kind the other devils were trying to erase, one of her very own, the kind she did when she went for a little swim. It should be irresistible to a serious collector. And his poor wife would be so upset she'd eat herself sick or else she'd try to compete with Torchy's unattainable allure by starving herself thinner and thinner until she died of anorexia.

Torchy yawned. It was all very dreary, actually. Mortals were so—well—mortal. A shame about the music having to go—their love of the music had lifted this lot out of the ordinary, however fleetingly, and she would miss that.

Of course, old as she was, nobody had ever told Torchy Burns about it not being a good idea to count her chickens before they were hatched.

The van drove up the long gravel and dirt drive leading to the manor house.

"Maybe we're too late," Brose said. "Looks to me like they're about to close."