CHAPTER 10

 

Meanwhile, inside Sir Walter's mansion, the docent was saying, "I'm verra sorry but we'll be needin' to close up." She glanced disapprovingly at the banjo, which Gussie passed to Willie as if it were a hot potato.

"What a wonderful place," Gussie said, oozing downhome charm. "I do wish we had time to stay longer and see the books more closely but I suppose it really is time to go."

Willie and the banjo were already at the door, Julianne trailing behind him. As Gussie reached the doorway, however, she felt a pressure on her shoulder: "Please," Sir Walter's ghost said. "You mustn't go, just as it's getting dark. Yon instrument has called me from my grave and you canna just go off without explaining this whole thing to me. It's simply not the done thing at all, dear lady."

He was standing in front of Gussie, his hand touching her. The docent called to her to come along and she tried to step forward.

"No, truly, I'm afraid I must insist—" the ghost said. And that time, in the gathering gloom, as headlights cut the fog rising from the Tweed that flowed so near the dining-room window, Gussie heard him. She stepped back inside the house.

The docent, oddly, did not seem to notice and somehow forgot to click the key in the lock and the bolt onto the padlock. Juli and Willie, far ahead of her on the path, Willie pacing with his head in the air and Juli stopping to sniff a rose, failed to notice that Gussie wasn't with them.

The docent strode ahead of them as if in a trance. A car door thunked shut in the parking lot and five pairs of footsteps coming met hers going on the walk. As the docent tripped past the last person, a certain redhead, the docent thrust her bosom forward and caused the plaid of her pleated skirt to swish back and forth as her walk changed to an undulating sway.

Torchy Burns laughed her bawdy laugh. The docent's old man would get a kick out of that little good deed of hers.

"Willie, luv, there you are!" Torchy caroled. "Where did you go? I waited and waited for you."

The banjo resumed playing "Whiskey in the Jar."

"For the devil take the women, Lord, you never can believe 'em," Willie recited the lyrics to himself.

But as Willie passed Juli, the banjo played "The Star of County Down" and Anna Mae said, "I wonder what it wants to tell us by playing 'The Parting Glass.'"

"Isn't that 'Rollin' Down to Old Maui'?" Brose asked. "Maybe it thinks we should all bug out of here and go to Hawaii. I'm for that."

Faron cleared his throat. "We may have a problem here."

"Buddy, we already got one," Willie said. "In case you hadn't noticed. Where the hell have you folks been?"

"We could ask you the same question, MacKai," Anna Mae Gunn said.

"Now that's funny," Willie said, looking slitty-eyed at Torchy, who was beaming back at him just as innocently as she could, which was to say, not very. "I'd think our little native guide could have told you about my close encounter with her pussycat friends and siccin' those ethnic rape-artists on the Widah Martin, which, I want to tell you, I almost got myself knifed tryin' to rescue her."

He might as well take the credit for his good intentions if not his actions. Julianne couldn't hear him to contradict him and Gussie—now just where WAS Gussie?

Torchy rocked her high heel back and forth and looked at the towers and stones of Abbotsford with the mist rising around it like it bored her half to tears. "Well, now that we're all together and you've found each other, can we go somewhere and get warm and have a little drinkee? This place is creepy, don't you think?"

She thought the last was a masterful stroke. Of course, if anybody should know creepy, she should.

"We came here looking for the ballads," Faron said. "Did you get a look at any of Sir Walter's books, Willie? Did you notice a copy of the Minstrelsy or maybe Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry ?

Willie shook his head. "Naw, that stuff's all under lock and key. There was a copy of Field and Stream in the men's room though. No—wait—I think Gussie might have gotten a copy of one of those books in the gift shop. Had something to do with minstrels anyway. She was reading out of it as we looked at the house."

"You won't find out anything very important about your songs here, ducks," Torchy said pettishly. "Everybody knows the old scribbler was a terrible one for changing things around. Why, they claim he made up ever so many of the songs he 'collected' himself."

The imposing front doors of Abbotsford's hall swung open and Gussie stood framed in the doorway, asking in an offended tenor with a broad burr, "Who in the world would so besmirch my honor as to accuse me of such a thing? It was that Ritson, wasn't it? Brilliant man but frightfully literal-minded."

And to their surprise, Gussie strode forward in a lordly manner, knelt gallantly before Torchy Burns, took her hand and kissed it. "Your Majesty. I can't tell you how honored my home is by your visit."

Before the nonplussed Torchy could do more than nod majestically, Gussie had likewise kissed Julianne's hand. "I'm so sorry for your recent tragedy, my dear," Gussie said, still in the tenor that was much lighter and more quavery than her own husky alto.

Julianne stared down at her. "Gussie?" she asked, then stared hard at her friend as Gussie's image blurred and her white hair rearranged itself, her hazel eyes brightened to blue, her sweat suit took on a more formal and tailored cut and her bosom seemed to be merely the ruffling of a shirtfront.

"I'm in here too, Juli," Gussie's voice called, and the image wavered so that they saw Gussie through the blur. "But I'm sort of giving somebody a lift. I know you may find this a little hard to believe, but—"

The banjo keened the chords to "The Unquiet Grave."

"Well, hell, if you can accept that Sam Hawthorne is influencing that banjo, maybe you can accept that Walter Scott wants me to get you to take us to Melrose Abbey to see if we can't have a powwow with another spook who's not only a relative of his but a wizard."

"Oh, well, if that's all he wants, darlin', we should humor him by all means," Willie said with a hard glare at Gussie/Scott. "I was just a little concerned there that he was going to make you throw up pea soup or some weird shit like that."

 

* * *

 

Willie drove the van this time and Gussie huddled in the passenger seat. Brose, Anna Mae, Julianne, Ellie, and Faron were in the back. "Ah, my worrud, this carriage is a marvel," Sir Walter's ghost said of the van. "And I can only hope, my dear Mrs. Turner," Gussie said to herself in her tenor voice, "that the personal nature of my intrusion isn't causing you discomfort or embarrassment."

"Oh, no, sir," Gussie's alto voice assured him, "no trouble at all. You just come on in and make yourself at home. If you got any questions at all, just ask."

"Most magnanimous of you," the ghost voice said.

"Shucks," Gussie's voice said. "We're in a state of emergency. They used to teach me in Sunday school that the body is the temple of the holy spirit—well—usually my own holy spirit—but since your holy spirit needs a place to light while you try to help us out with this thing, I figure my body just got requisitioned for a while."

"Very sensible. Now then, would you care to explain the nature of your difficulty to me?"

It was a long story to squeeze into a short van ride, but fortunately with the ghost's mind and Gussie's so close, she found she was able to sort of silently fill him in as the others talked.

He heaved a sigh as three of them stopped talking simultaneously and said, "Ah well, then, I see now why the skirlin' of yon instrument called to me. 'Tis a verra dangerous matter when foreign folk seek to destroy a people's spirit by taking their songs—did you know that in Scotland it was once as forbidden to play the pipes as it was to wear the tartan because it spoke of Scottish pride? And in Ireland the English burned not only harps but harpers who were the living memories of Ireland. You folk stand in the stead of those pipers and harpers in your own country and this instrument is a wise and powerful thing indeed to lead you here to win back your songs. But how to do it, eh? It may well be that the trip to Melrose Abbey will avail us nothing, the Wizard Michael being dead more years than I and so, perhaps, deader, ye ken?"

"Oh, uh-huh," Brose said, not having the foggiest idea what he said. "That makes sense."

The banjo had been playing "The Unquiet Grave" over and over for the last thirty minutes. "Sometimes I wish there was a way to turn that thing off," Willie said.

"At least it keeps time with the windshield wipers," Ellie said philosophically.

"Makes it sound like a martial tune, doesn't it?" Faron said. "As if the lover died in battle."

Willie switched on the lights and two moon-pale beams gleamed through the raindrops to illuminate rain-slicked cement. Fog rolled across the road in gauzy swaths. Julianne sneezed and huddled back, smashing into the shattered instrument cases.

"Lovely night, isn't it?" Sir Walter's ghost said conversationally.

"Not very," Ellie said. The banjo played "Cold Haily Windy Night" again.

A patch of fog completely enveloped them and Gussie thought, 'Here we go. Back into the Twilight Zone again. As if what's happening now is what you might call normal.'

And Sir Walter answered her thought, 'Ah, yes. Thrilling, isn't it? Haven't had such fun since I was a bairn. Would you mind terribly sticking your arm out the window so I might feel the rain?'

She was starting to comply when the van plowed through the fog and emerged in front of the spires, arches, towers, and ruined walls of Melrose Abbey silhouetted against the dark and roiling night.

"Do we have to get out of the car?" Julianne asked plaintively. "It's so cold."

The ghost offered to lend her his jacket until Gussie reminded him that he didn't have one anymore and neither did she.

Willie was slamming the door to the van after everyone had emerged before any of them realized Torchy was no longer with them.

"I thought she was right behind me," Ellie said.

"All I need is that redhead mad at me for leavin' her behind," Willie said.

"It's her responsibility to mention it if she needed to go to the bathroom or whatever," Anna Mae said. "We have more important things to do than wait around for her."

Ellie craned her neck looking up. "This place is BIG!"

Faron shrugged. "Mostly it's old. The Oral Roberts Power of Prayer building in Tulsa is bigger. This is more impressive though. This feels real."

"Wh-where do you think this guy is, Gussie—I mean, Sir—?" Ellie asked.

"In his grave as he's been lo these last four—excuse me, madame," the ghost said to Gussie. "Can you inform me of the century?"

"Twentieth," Gussie said. "At least, it was when we left Tacoma."

"Lo these seven centuries," Sir Walter said.

"Then, excuse me," Brose said, "but unless it's the Scotch version of Memorial Day and you want to put a boo-kay on his grave, what the hell are we doin' here?"

"Easy, Brose," Anna Mae said. "We've had pretty good luck with ghosts so far and maybe this relative of Sir Walter's ghost can help."

"Well, so what, we wait another century or two for him to get around to seeing us or do we go hunt him up?"

"The Wizard Michael Scott was a man of muckle importance," Sir Walter said. "He was in high courts and the counselor to kings. I'd rather imagine he stands on the formalities and will rise at midnight in the customary way. At least, that's what the stories all say. I myself have nevair met a speerit before, except for me, that is, and I don't seem to have done the thing conventionally."

"What time is it, Anna Mae?" Willie asked.

"Ten-thirty."

"Let's look around," Faron suggested.

"Do we climb over a gate or something?" Willie asked.

But Julianne, who had wandered ahead of the rest of them, walking in widening circles to keep warm, stood shivering by the abbey door. "It's unlocked," she called in a voice growing ever more toneless and nasal as her deafness alienated her from the sound of her own utterances.

"Aha," Sir Walter's ghost said. "As I supposed, we're expected."