Chapter Four

 

 

Reddish stone, gray stone, and lumpy white pebbledash facades whizzed by the window. A pub, The Queen’s Arms written in Gothic script on its signboard. A cobblestoned alley. A Co-op grocery store, where a woman with a shopping bag stepped off the curb, then stepped quickly back as they sped past. A tea room. The smell of baking bread and frying potatoes filtered into the musty interior of the Land Rover and Jean’s stomach emitted a forlorn growl.

Then they were screeching around a hairpin turn, climbing a hill behind the village. Jean grabbed for the handle above the window. The back of Crawford’s head, covered with the brown stubble of a military-style cut, held perfectly steady.

A strain of pipe music, bravado in sound waves, rose and fell. A kilted man with hair so black it glistened even in the diffused light played a set of Great Highland bagpipes in front of a long, low building. Two teenagers held chanters to their lips and presumably followed along.

The village church was a small beige-walled and tile-roofed structure not much bigger than the vicar’s house next door, and displayed no more than a stub for a steeple. Both probably dated to mid-Victorian times, but seemed downright modern compared to . . .

Yes. Beyond a cemetery surrounded by a low stone wall lay Farnaby Priory. When the vehicle skidded to a stop, Jean was ready. She flung open her door, leaped out, and tried to check out as much as possible before any fecal matter started hitting any fans.

Like Lindisfarne, the surviving ruins of Farnaby Priory had been built in the early Middle Ages of red and silvery gray sandstone, now sculpted by time and weather into flowing patterns that seemed more Art Nouveau than Norman French. Unlike Lindisfarne, Farnaby’s remains were far from dramatic. A rectangle of roofless walls marked the church, one of them barely tall enough to retain a row of round-headed windows behind a columned arcade. What had once been the cloister was filled by a walled garden, gravel paths laid out between scraggly beds dotted with flowers and thick with weeds such as thistles and stinging nettles. A couple of rabbits raced across a shaggy plot of grass and into the shrubbery.

The other buildings—refectory, prioress’s hall, kitchens, dormitory—were marked by little more than the footings of the original walls. Several archaeological test trenches cut across grassy areas and over walls, their slumping sides softened by opportunistic plants. Maggie Lauder’s focus had moved on.

Alasdair stepped up beside her and Jean pointed to the one roof still intact, its mossy slates peeking over the windowed wall. “There’s the chapel.”

“I was thinking chapels were generally on the east. That’s on the north.”

“Depends on the lay of the land and the whims of the builders. Maggie’s trying to prove the chapel has at least an Anglo-Saxon substructure. If she’s trying to make an Arthurian connection, then she’s hoping the chapel dates back even further, to the original Celtic priory. It might. The records don’t have nearly as much about Farnaby as they do about Lindisfarne.”

“Are the records saying anything at all?”

“There are legends of an early prioress with magical powers, but I bet those are typical Celtic saint stories. All we know for sure is that the chapel isn’t a Lady Chapel—why should it be, the whole priory is dedicated to St. Mary—but a chantry chapel. A chapel endowed by somebody wealthy in honor of a dead relative or comrade or even himself, including funds to pay a cantarist, a priest, to man it.”

“A cantarist? Like the cantor in a Jewish service?”

“Yep. The root’s from the Latin for ‘sing’, cantare or something like that, although I guess chantry priests didn’t always sing or chant. The point was to offer prayers to decrease the time the honored person’s soul spent in purgatory, and to keep on offering the prayers forever. Forever arrived at the Reformation, though. I guess purgatory is pretty crowded these days.”

With eerie cries, several oystercatchers spiraled down into the nearby cemetery and settled into a circle on the grass. Next to them rose a monument in polished granite, so new the emblem of a fiddle and bow was still sharply incised, as were the dates beneath. Walter “Wat” Lauder. He had barely achieved his allotted three score years and ten.

The other half of the monument displayed a carved scroll, the words Elaine Peveril Lauder, and a birth date two years before Wat’s. The blank patch of granite yet to be engraved reminded Jean of an open grave.

“Jean,” Alasdair said. “We’re away.”

She looked around to see Tara and Crawford walking toward the priory. A human figure sat on a broken column drum in the shadow of the tallest wall. A tentative shadow, the sun now filtered by cloud and casting not the golden light of early evening but a thin gilded gleam.

Loony Lauder herself. Stepping lively, Jean and Alasdair caught up with the others at the gap in the wall that marked the church’s western door.

Maggie sat in the attitude of Rodin’s famous statue The Thinker, back curved, elbows braced on thighs, chin set on fist. Her boots, camouflage pants, and jacket resembled Tara’s. Her body, more abundant in hips and chest, did not. Neither did her face when she looked up.

Jean deleted her memory of precise features. The pale and puffy face before her resembled that of a corpse pulled from deep water. Maggie’s blue eyes, which had once sparkled with intellectual inquiry, now seemed reclusive and dull. Her brown hair, which had once been cut in a short, professional style, was now long, purplish-red, and tied in a straggling bun atop her head.

Mid-life crisis, Jean told herself. Go figure. She and Alasdair had each endured a mid-life crisis and ended up with each other. The jury was still out on what Maggie would end up with.

“Thank you for coming, Edwin. Ms. Fairbairn, good to see you again. I assume this is Mr. Cameron?” Maggie’s voice originated in her diaphragm rather than in her sinus cavities like Tara’s, but still it squealed with tension.

Murmurs of greeting and handshakes passed back and forth. “Sorry to get here so late,” Jean went on. “We got lost—er, took the scenic route—were delayed—I hear Miranda rang.”

“Quite so.” Maggie looked past the red-tiled and gray-slated roofs of the village, more than a few of them sporting small satellite dishes. She looked past the little tower atop the cliff over the sea to the smeared streak of the mainland and the much larger towers of Bamburgh. Tara crossed her arms and looked down at her boots. Crawford didn’t look at anything at all, but stood at parade rest, waiting.

Alasdair inhaled, exhaled, inhaled, and when no one else did, spoke. “I’m hearing things did not exactly go to plan the day.”

“Not half. The reporters are no doubt savaging me in their respective media. I’m an easy target.”

“I’ve been there myself, sort of,” Jean said, partly trying to establish a sisterhood, partly distancing herself from her ink-stained brethren.

If Maggie heard her, she didn’t reply. Groaning audibly, she stood up, squared her shoulders, and raised her chin, leading Jean’s eye upward, but then, most other women, let alone men, were taller than she was. Ready, aim . . . “When the balloon goes up,” Maggie stated, “anything the media’s said today will be insignificant. They’ll run mad.”

After a long moment, Alasdair asked, “Aye?”

“This morning I had a quick peek into the tomb, the better to stage the reveal, sort out the lighting and such. I don’t like surprises. I’ve never been proved more justified in that sentiment.”

A bagpipe lament, borne on a gust of wind, swelled, faded, and left a lingering resonance among the broken arches. Several black birds, crows or ravens, stirred uneasily atop the walls. One of Gallowglass’s greatest hits, Jean remembered, was “The Ravens of Avalon.”

“Well, there’s nothing for it. Come along.” Maggie strode toward a round-headed door tucked into the inside corner of the church and disappeared through it. Glancing almost belligerently over her shoulder at the others, Tara followed. Crawford paced along a step behind.

Alasdair gestured Jean on ahead. She took one step out of the wind into the shadowed stillness of the chapel and stopped dead. She’d expected it to be dank and cold. But the air of the tiny room, no larger than her and Alasdair’s living room in Edinburgh, froze her bones. It was so thick with the scents of mud and decay that she gagged. In that moment she felt not a pricking of her thumbs, but a prickle of the back of her neck. Her ghostly early-warning system. Her paranormal detector.

From behind, Alasdair’s hands grasped her upper arms. He felt it, too. Steady on.

Then the spine-tingle evaporated. The atmosphere in the room lightened to merely chill with an elusive hint of damp rot. Jean patted Alasdair’s hand—I’m okay—and he released her. His voice murmured so quietly in her ear she had to cock her head back and up to hear it. “What, or rather who, was that?”

“We’ll be finding out in due course,” she whispered back.

“Yes, dear.”

The others were picking their way around two fresh test trenches, black gashes cut through uneven flagstones, toward the largest window in the room. The bits of broken tracery lining the opening looked like thorns against the darkening eastern sky. Jean and Alasdair took up their places beside Crawford even as Tara hung back.

Maggie lifted an industrial-sized flashlight, large as a policeman’s truncheon, and trained its beam of light toward a flat box of excavation tools and a rectangular pit at the front of a low dais—access to a small vault. The last resting place of the person to whom the chapel had presumably been dedicated, set into the floor before the now-vanished altar. The pieces of the slab that had once covered the tomb now leaned against the wall behind Tara. Surely Maggie hadn’t broken it—that would have been archaeological heresy.

Maggie knelt at the edge of the hole as though in prayer. Her light illuminated a bright blue plastic tarpaulin about eight inches down. Grasping one corner, she jerked it up and back.

The body was almost a skeleton, but not quite.

In the slightly shaky beam of light—Maggie’s hand must be trembling—bone, cloth, skin, strands of hair, all were a dismal brackish brown. The corpse looked more like a child’s effort at modeling a human body in clay than the real thing.

Alasdair emitted a long sigh. Jean didn’t breathe at all. The chill that oozed down her back had nothing to do with temperature. Mortal clay, she thought. Feet of clay. Although the miasma emanating from the hole wasn’t that of clay. Mildew, mold, muck . . .

That’s why Maggie had cancelled the press conference at the last minute. That’s why she’d waited until the tide ebbed and sealed off the island before presenting the genuine, non-stage-managed reveal.

The arch of the skull resembled an obscene egg. The eye sockets, filled with mud, stared sightlessly upward. The jaw gaped open, revealing brown teeth and two gold fillings that glinted in the light.

Not medieval, then.

The arms were folded across the waist, the arm bones sinking into the body cavity, a few finger bones scattered alongside the arches of the hips. Worms. Rats, maybe. Or no more than gravity.

The feet were still encased in rubber Wellington boots, one turned upright, the other slumping to the side.

Mid to late twentieth century.

Somewhere water dripped. A sheep bawled. The accumulated steam of four breaths formed wraiths in the air. The body did not breathe, the eyes did not blink, the jaw did not move. No invisible tongue gave voice to—what? Fear? Surprise? Had the vacant eyes seen death coming, or had they been closed suddenly, without warning?

Had they closed at all, Jean wondered, or had he—she—been dumped into the tomb with eyes still open, watching as the stone slab closed off the ceiling, the light from the window, the birds flying freely beyond?

Someone had to say it. She obliged, her voice seeming shrill in the deadened air. “Do you have any idea who it is?”

The light-beam steadied. Maggie slumped back on her haunches. When she spoke her words were directed to the ravaged face in the tomb. “I think it may be my father.”