Chapter Two

 

 

Rebecca dreamed she was sitting in the upholstered seat of a tour bus, tied up like a Christmas package. Outside the window, green countryside lapped at the walls of a pink-beige castle. She had to have something inside that building. Urgently she banged her head on the glass. She wasn’t tied, she realized; Ray’s arms held her, his voice whispering soothing condescensions. The bus roared away in a cloud of exhaust. The castle—Dun Iain? Craigievar?—disappeared behind ribbons of asphalt and slipped forever from her grasp.

The roar of the bus grew louder. Rebecca swam suddenly from sleep, her mind clutching one thought: that prayer was not for deliverance from the wrath but from the greed of the Campbells.

The noise was a vacuum cleaner. The housekeeper was here. Rebecca fought off the smothering embrace of the blankets and sat up. So much for the romance of sleeping in a canopied bed. Claustrophobic, that’s what it was. After all, the original purpose of a canopy was to protect the sleeper against zoological paratroopers from a thatched roof.

She should never have drunk that tea. Michael had brewed it strong enough to dissolve a spoon, assuming she would dilute it with milk. She hadn’t, and had gulped cup after cup of the scalding stuff over sandwiches and banalities. When they’d adjourned next door, to the room which was fitted out with reclining chairs and a TV set, her eyelids had fallen to half-mast. She’d left Michael watching an old episode of M*A*S*H, replaced the two light bulbs, and gone to bed.

But then, perversely, her eyes had popped open. The house had creaked and sighed, the wind had moaned around the turrets, and Michael had clomped endlessly up and down the staircase and across the ceiling above her head, his footsteps as ponderous as her own heartbeat.

Ray smiled from his photo beside her bed, his bland, Slavic face bisected by stylish glasses. He’d paid more than his half of that tour of Great Britain; if it hadn’t been for him, she’d never have set foot there. Better to be shipped about like a package than never to have been there at all.

She threw back the covers and groped for her slippers and her glasses. The window overlooked a static vista of central Ohio, the sky smudged with cloud and the maples tossing in the wind. Under that pewter sky their leaves were less crimson than splotches of dried blood. . . Rebecca laughed at herself. What an image. Get away from Ray’s dampening influence for a day and already her imagination had become overactive.

Nikes, jeans, and a Pringles of Scotland sweater made a suitably efficient outfit. She pulled her hair into a ponytail, embellished it with a scarf, and considered the effect. Without its framing waves her face seemed pinched; the cheeks that yesterday had been fashionably hollow looked this morning as though they’d been sucked dry by a vampire. Her brown eyes were as disproportionately large and dark as those of Elspeth Forbes gazing from her portrait just over Rebecca’s shoulder.

The woman’s necklace was gaudy but gorgeous, garnets and jet centering on a fiery gem that looked like the Hope diamond. The Hope was rumored to have brought bad luck to its wearer, and Elspeth’s slightly dazed, slightly desperate expression looked as if she believed hers, too, to be cursed. The biography didn’t say why she died so young. Of homesickness for her native Dundee, possibly, or from a broken heart. Rumor had it she’d been married off to the much older John Forbes after an unhappy love affair with a fellow Scot.

Rebecca inserted contacts into her eyes and gold studs into her earlobes. She applied light touches of blush, eye shadow, mascara, lipstick. There, she looked healthier. Cosmetics were expensive, but it was self-respect to look as nice as possible.

She headed for the staircase. A middle-aged woman was halfway up, lugging a vacuum cleaner and a basket of cleaning paraphernalia. “Let me help,” called Rebecca.

The woman jumped and clutched at the breast of her flowered blouse. “Sweet Jesus, girl, don’t sneak up on a body like that!”

With a distinct sense of deja vu—this hadn’t been funny the first time—Rebecca bared her teeth in an innocent smile and said, “I’m sorry. I was just on my way downstairs. I’m Rebecca Reid.”

The woman peered up at her through blue horn-rimmed glasses. A red slash of lipstick emphasized the downturned corners of her mouth. Judging from the creases in her cheeks, that disapproving frown was her usual expression. She released her blouse and with an elaborate sigh said, “Dorothy Garst. You’re the schoolteacher from Missouri?”

Rebecca stepped back as woman and machine arrived on the landing with a clash of metal against stone. “From Dover College.”

“Aren’t you the lucky one, getting to work with Dr. Campbell. Isn’t he a case? I’d always heard Englishmen weren’t very friendly. And that haircut!”

“I wouldn’t let him hear you call him English,” Rebecca replied, slightly dizzied. “Has he been here long?”

“A week. I keep hoping he’ll start talking to where I can understand him, but he hasn’t yet.”

Michael would probably have to be tortured to make him give up one rolled “r”. “He’s quite a change from Mr. Forbes, isn’t he?”

Dorothy leaned forward, nodding curtly. Her gray perm, set like cement on her head, didn’t budge. “Not much of a change, no. Neither one of them wants me to touch anything. How can I clean the place properly if I can’t move things? But no, it was ‘Leave that whatsit alone, Dottie’, when old James was alive, and now it’s “Leave that whatsit alone, Mrs. Garst’.”

“Some things that don’t look valuable are,” said Rebecca placatingly.

“Old books that attract mice and pictures of people in funny clothes?” Dorothy’s washed-out brown eyes narrowed into slits. “I bet you’re here to look for the Forbes treasure.”

“Treasure?”

“Mr. James kept going on about how his father had brought a treasure back from England. . .”

“Scotland,” Rebecca murmured.

“And hid it somewhere in the house. But if you ask me. . .”

Rebecca didn’t. She explained, “The obviously valuable pieces, like jewelry, are in the bank. There aren’t any pieces of eight, I’m afraid.”

“If you ask me,” continued Dorothy without taking breath, “he was just touched in the head. Senile, you know. He didn’t act like he was rich. He paid me, and Phil Pruitt, the caretaker, and Phil’s son Steve, who does some gardening, but he never went out and got himself anything nice from the new Wal-Mart. Kept living here with all this junk. If he’d had him a room over at Golden Age Village, he wouldn’t have fallen down these ridiculous stairs. Right here’s where Phil found him, end of August.” She seemed disappointed when Rebecca wasn’t startled.

“He was here alone at night?”

“Ah. . .” Dorothy straightened and stepped back, her eyes sliding away. “He—er—he didn’t want anyone here with him.”

“He must’ve been in good health, then, and could do for himself.”

“Not really. He’d gotten pretty feeble and hadn’t been out of his room by himself in two months. A nurse came in every day to check him over and keep him tidy. Though how anyone could stay clean in this dusty old place. . .” Dorothy adjusted her glasses and peered critically at a wonderful Landseer landscape hanging in the stairwell. “Well, I tried to help.”

Rebecca frowned. “If Mr. Forbes was that decrepit, what was he doing on the staircase?”

“He’d gone soft in the head,” insisted Dorothy. “No telling what he thought he was doing.” Grasping her vacuum and her basket she headed on up the stairs, presenting Rebecca with a vision of her rear end like a sausage encased in pink double-knit slacks. “I’d better get going—still got the rooms up above. I did yours yesterday. I have a system, a rotation pattern. . .”

That voice had enough vinegar in it to etch tracks in the stone steps. Fortunately the vacuum roared into life and blanked it out. Rebecca shook her head, half amused, half appalled. So the local gossip was that there was a treasure here. Romantic fancies, no doubt. Forbes’s stocks and bonds weren’t nearly as interesting as some mythical trove.

The old man had fallen down these very stairs and died there, alone, in the darkness. . . All right, Rebecca thought, she certainly wasn’t going to be intimidated by that macabre image. She turned and climbed up to the fourth floor. And it was the fourth, despite Michael’s calling it the third; when in Rome do as the Romans, or the Americans, do.

Through the door on her left she saw a bedroom littered with cast off T-shirts, papers, and books. The History of Scottish Second Sight lay open on the unmade bed, Michael’s idea of light bedtime reading. There was no corresponding picture of a woman on his bedside table. The lawyer, Adler, had mentioned to her that the young Scot was single.

Scrubbing sounds emanated from an adjoining bathroom; Dorothy was removing toothpaste and whiskers from the sink just as Rebecca had once cleaned for her brothers. She was the only daughter, after all. One thing she’d always appreciated about Ray was how tidy he was. Not only did he wipe out the sink, he even hung his dirty shirts back in the closet.

A large bedroom was straight ahead and a small one to the right. The floor above had the same plan, except that here, on the level of the turrets, the rooms bulged into oblong protuberances filled with furniture. Every available space was distended with richly draped beds and cluttered tables, cabinets, and shelves, every wall was hung with tapestries and artwork. Impassive painted eyes followed her at every step.

On the next floor, the sixth, a long room stretched completely across the building. Couches and tables arranged on a hardwood floor proclaimed this to be a ballroom. A scrapbook lying on a chair held faded sepia photos of bustled ladies and boatered men picnicking in Dun Iain’s fantastic shadow. Beyond the long room was a warren of smaller ones. Servant’s quarters, probably. Nowhere did Rebecca see any signs of Dorothy’s mice. No wonder Darnley the cat was so sleek and self-satisfied.

It was lighter up here, the walls thinner and the window embrasures not as deep. From one of the overhanging turrets the parking area seemed a long way down, Rebecca’s and Michael’s cars and Dorothy’s Fairlane looking like miniatures on an architectural model. The only noise this high up was the murmur of the wind and Rebecca’s own footsteps, each producing a faint but precise squeak from the old floorboards.

And it was cold, bone-chillingly cold. Rebecca fantasized about vats of hot coffee. Just a few more doors. Behind two were rooms crammed with piles of crates, boxes, and old books. A third opened onto a straight staircase. Light and an icy draft spilled down the steps. Ah, the roof. A sudden explosive burst of beating wings and swooping shapes made her leap back, slam the door, and stand against it, swallowing her heart back into her chest. Nesting blackbirds, she assured herself. Not an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

Rebecca rubbed her hands together as much in glee as to warm them. What a place! The corners were subtly curved, the walls met at eccentric angles, alcoves hiccuped at odd places. The ceilings were glorious confections of molded plaster like wedding cakes, and most of the walls were wood-paneled. The house itself was a treasure.

And had she really seen unique and wonderful artifacts tumbled indiscriminately with pure rubbish, or was she just wishfully thinking herself into hallucination? Even the famous Curle portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, hung on the wall by a bed draped and canopied in crimson silk. Forbes Senior had been a magpie collector, buying on whim and leaving his acquisitions strewn about without any discernible order. Junk, Ray would’ve said, just as Dorothy had. What did he know? This wasn’t his field, it was hers.

Dun Iain was a modern Pompeii, a labyrinth of walls and rooms and passages drifted with the remains of ancient fires—politics and religion, love and hate. Drifted with the ashes of time, waiting to be sifted by an academic arson team. Campbell and Reid, Rebecca thought wryly. Abbott and Costello.

Footsteps pattered across the floor of the ballroom. Rebecca looked around but saw no one. She must’ve heard Mrs. Garst’s steps on the staircase. A strange echo, to make the steps appear to be on wood rather than stone, but that’s what it had to be. The steps hadn’t squeaked as hers had.

It was cold, and so silent she could hear her own pulse in her ears. Coffee, definitely. Rebecca started down the nearest flight of steps, another spiral staircase but not the same one she had come up.

She passed a back door into the large fifth-floor bedroom, another one into the corresponding room on the fourth, and then a long doorless stretch of curved wall. Tiny windows admitted watery light and an occasional glimpse of the surrounding trees, their dark carnelian contrasting oddly with the muted green of the lawns. There was Dorothy, leaning against the tool shed smoking a cigarette. That’s why she’d abandoned the upper story—break time. She’d certainly made quick work of all those flights of stairs.

A third door was at the bottom of the cylindrical stairwell. Rebecca opened it, peeked out, and found herself in the far corner of the Hall from the piper’s gallery. All right then. She had it figured out. The building was a fat L-shape. The Hall on the second floor and the ballroom on the sixth extended completely across their respective legs of the L. The smaller rooms were set into the L like building blocks. No need to unroll a ball of string behind her as she’d first feared.

She strolled down the main staircase, pausing to look quizzically at Mary Stuart’s inscrutable marble smile. Darnley had been sitting on the sarcophagus last night even as funny bumping noises came from upstairs. The hot water pipes, probably. Dun Iain would have made even phlegmatic Ray jump at his own shadow, let alone Michael, or Dorothy, or Rebecca herself.

She stepped into the brightly lit haven of the kitchen. An enamel kettle simmered on the range. Michael sat at the table, a mug of tea at his fingertips, a book propped against the marmalade jar. Darnley dozed on a chair, paws tucked in, looking like a furry butterscotch and white tea cozy.

“Good morning,” Rebecca essayed. Her lips stopped before they could form the words “Dr. Campbell”. He simply didn’t have the august air of a Ph.D., even though he looked more domesticated than he had yesterday. His hair was smoothed tidily from his face as if awaiting the powder and ribbon of an 18th century portrait. His sweatshirt was a conservative blue that reflected the blue of his eyes, its chest embossed with a white Saint Andrew’s cross.

“Good mornin’,” he replied. “I wasn’t goin’ to knock you up, but then the char came hooverin’ in.”

You weren’t going to what? Rebecca was wavering between indignation and a whoop of laughter when she realized that she’d foundered on the shoal of dialect. He was being polite. She hazarded, “You weren’t going to wake me, but the cleaning lady turned on the vacuum?”

“Thought you’d be needin’ your sleep,” he said equably. “Tea?”

“I’ll fix some coffee, thank you.” She lifted the kettle from the burner and asked, remembering the incessant beat of footsteps during the night, “What time did you get to bed?”

“Right after you. Slept like a bairn until seven, when I heard Mrs Garst lettin’ herself in.”

She glanced curiously at him. How could he lie with such a straight face? Why bother to lie at all? But his eyes were fixed guilelessly on his book. She attacked a jar of instant coffee, promising herself to buy some real coffee in Putnam at the first opportunity.

Darnley opened one eye, decided there were no cat comestibles forthcoming, closed the eye. Michael marked his place, unfolded himself from the chair, and headed for the range shoving his sleeves up to his elbows. “The toast should be ready. There’s no egg or sausage, but you could have a grilled tomato if you’d a mind to.”

“No, thank you,” returned Rebecca. He threw open the oven and filled a toast rack with slabs of dry toast. Good God, the man could cook. Rebecca’s father and brothers had always demanded their toast and muffins, eggs and bacon, before her long-suffering mother had had a bite for herself.

Michael dealt out butter, plates, napkins, and cutlery. Rebecca watched, delighted to have someone wait on her for a change. She decided she’d give him an A for effort and an F for consistency. “The Forbeses had a toast rack. They really were Anglophiles. Or—there must be a better word—Britophile or something like that.”

“Even the lingo is Sassenach,” Michael snorted.

Rebecca laughed. “Let me guess. You’re from one of the Campbell strongholds in Argyll with walls fifteen feet thick.”

“No. . .” Michael sat on the cat. Darnley squalled and leaped for safety. Michael swore, reversed course, and collided with the counter. Rebecca winced, looking after the cat as he whisked into a small doorway in the corner of the room. But anything moving that fast couldn’t be hurt.

Michael sat warily down with an embarrassed grimace she at first attributed to the cat incident. “No, I was born in Torquay.”

“Torquay? The resort on the English Channel?”

“My parents ran a guesthouse called, so help me, Granny’s Hieland Hame. My father wore the kilt and piped the boarders into dinner. Tryin’ to make a livin’, mind you, playin’ music hall Scots like they do in the big hotels in Edinburgh.”

No wonder he was embarrassed. But it would’ve been easier to lie about his birthplace than about his wandering around during the night. “Your family didn’t have any antiques to sell for thirty pieces of silver?”

“Those jokes about thrifty Scots aren’t all music hall blether. When you’re poor, you have to be thrifty.”

“Tell me about it,” replied Rebecca sardonically.

Michael plopped marmalade onto his toast. “Accuse me of havin’ the zeal of the convert, if you will, but we did flit to Inverness to live wi’ my grandparents when I was eight. I wisna born a Scot, really, but I was brought up one. No a teuchter, though, I promise you that. As for my family bein’ from Argyll or Breadalbane or whether some ancestor found it expedient to take the name of the local imperialists, I dinna ken. Don’t know,” he translated.

He was trying so hard to be considerate Rebecca didn’t tell him not to bother, she understood the Scots dialect. Some of it. “Teuchter?” Her mouth couldn’t squash the word like his could.

“Country yokel. Used to mean Highlander. Now it’s a term of ridicule. Like—oh—redneck, perhaps.”

“Like Sassenach?”

He grinned. His face was transformed, a Scotch mist dispelled by sun.

Dazzled, she went on, “And you play the bagpipes, too?”

“I was first piper in the Mitsubishi Glendhu Distillery Pipe and Drum Band. Kilt, bonnet, the lot. Won a prize in the Edinburgh Festival.”

“Mitsubishi what?”

Michael’s grin skewed with that dry humor she’d glimpsed the day before. “You get those pieces of silver where you can the day.”

“Of course.” Rebecca responded with an answering grin. The ceiling lights dusted his hair with auburn, and his eyes danced like sunshine on a loch. When he was good, she thought, he was very good. Quickly she scrunched her toast and dropped her eyes to the book on the table. MacKay’s British Antiques. “Studying up?”

“I’m a historian and a museum curator, no an antique dealer.”

“You were qualified for this job.”

“I got it the same way you did, by volunteerin’. No other way I could afford to see America. More toast?”

“No thank you.” She’d trained herself not to eat much. Ray was always holding help sessions with skinny coeds who didn’t know the difference between Plato and Pluto but who hung breathlessly on his tweedy good looks, gushing, “Oh, aren’t you just too clever, Dr. Kocurek,” as if he were the philosophy department’s answer to Indiana Jones.

“American women,” teased Michael, “always slimmin’.” He dangled the toast rack temptingly before her.

Ah, so much for Ray and his coeds, too. Rebecca took another piece and defiantly slathered it with butter. The cat reappeared. To Michael’s wheedling, “Eh, kittlin?” he responded with a baleful glare and wrapped Rebecca’s ankles, his sleek body vibrating with a purr. The narrow kitchen windows, chutes in the thickness of the lower walls, brightened a bit. Maybe it would be another pretty day. Maybe she’d find the Erskine letter right off the bat. Coming here was the best idea she’d had in years.

She was just drawing breath to tell Michael about her own background, such as it was, when the phone rang. It squatted on the counter at her elbow; she lifted the receiver. “Hello, Dun Iain Estate.”

The voice on the line was like Darnley’s purr translated into a velvet baritone. “Good morning. Is this Ms. Reid?”

The American accent seemed flat after Michael’s lilting cadences. “This is she.”

“This is Eric Adler, Ms. Reid. We exchanged letters. I’m an attorney, the executor of James Ramsey Forbes’s will.”

“Yes, of course, Mr. Adler.”

Michael shoved his chair back so abruptly it thunked against the wall. He swept the plates and mugs off the table and dumped them into the sink. The Scotch mist fell again over his face, congealing his expression into something resembling an outcropping of conglomerate rock.

Adler’s voice said, “I was planning to drive up from Columbus about noon to bring you and Dr. Campbell the inventory that James Forbes had on file with us. Would that be convenient?”

“Yes, it would,” Rebecca replied.

“What does he want?” asked Michael.

Rebecca said, “Excuse me,” and covered the mouthpiece. “To bring us Forbes’s inventory.”

“Why didna he bring it last week?”

How the heck am I supposed to know? Rebecca retorted silently. She turned her back on Michael. And when he was bad he was horrid. “We’d be delighted to have you visit, Mr. Adler.”

“Eric, please,” he told her.

She’d pictured an old family retainer, white-haired and bespectacled, but the voice belonged to a younger man. “Eric. And I’m Rebecca.”

“See you about noon, Rebecca.”

She replaced the receiver, Adler’s dulcet tones still caressing her ear. At least someone around here had good manners. She shot a glance from under her brows at Michael. He had a long, limber, eloquent mouth when he wasn’t clasping it tightly shut. Right now it looked like the door of a safe. Whatever had got his goat this time was something about the lawyer, the inventory, or both.

Michael scooped Darnley off the counter as the cat stalked a foil-covered dish. “Time for a recce, then.”

“I took a quick look around earlier this morning, but I. . .”

“A’ by—all by yourself?” He stared at her with exasperation and puzzlement mingled.

She stared back. Darn it, he was just as much a hired hand as she was. “I am old enough to be out without a nanny, Dr. Campbell.”

With the noble forbearance of martyred William Wallace on the way to the scaffold, he turned and walked away.

Keep it up as long as you want, Rebecca told him silently, but I won’t let you or anyone else spoil this adventure for me. Stubbornly she folded her arms and followed.

 

 

1Chapter Three

 

 

Michael led Rebecca to the door through which Darnley had fled. “The larder,” he announced. Below a sloping ceiling a window the size of a tea-tray was set deep in the wall. A broom and a mop stood next to bowls of water and cat food. One wooden shelf was scattered with cans and boxes; the others were filled with dim plastic draped shapes. Rebecca peeked. It was Royal Doulton china, untouched for years, like relics of Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

Past the vinyl floor of the kitchen and the stone flags of the entry, between the main staircase and the front door, was another door. “Lumber room,” Michael said. “Formerly the butler’s pantry and wine cellar, back when John Forbes gave house parties for the posh set.”

“Vanderbilt, Frick, Mellon. But never Carnegie—Forbes loathed him.”

“If it wasn’t for my Carnegie scholarship at Edinburgh, I’d no be here.”

Nice historical irony. Nodding approval, Rebecca squinted through the gloom in the low, dungeonlike room. It was stacked with crates and chests, loot never even opened, perhaps, after one of John’s obsessive buying sprees in the old country.

John Forbes’s parents had emigrated from Sutherland with his infant self some years before Andrew Carnegie had left Dunfermline. Carnegie had shared the fortune he made in steel; no wonder he was lionized back in Scotland. The fortune Forbes had made in railroads, oil, and various sharp practices on Wall Street he’d never shared, and it had bought him only contempt. Rebecca didn’t feel particularly sorry for him. Wealth can buy happiness, she told herself, if you use it the right way.

When Carnegie had built a home in Scotland, Forbes had built Dun Iain here, truculently copying Craigievar, the seat of Forbeses who disdained all relationship with a brash American who simply happened to have the same name.

“Forbes had a muckle great ego,” Michael continued, with a sly sideways glance, “to name the place after himself.”

He was testing her. “Dun Iain means ‘John’s Fort’ in Gaelic,” Rebecca responded sweetly.

But Michael had already taken a few steps along the narrow passageway that ran between the boxes. He ran his hand over a dusty and cobwebby trunk and then rubbed his fingers together thoughtfully. The mark he left on the trunk was almost as clean as the smudges around the unlocked catch.

Someone had opened the trunk very recently. And the dust on the lid of the box next to it was also smudged with several fingerprints. “You didn’t waste any time opening these up,” Rebecca remarked.

Michael shied like a skittish horse. “I’ve no been in here. I’ve no had the inventory, have I? I’ve been muckin’ aboot wi’ old receipts and lists.”

“Oh. Then I bet it was Mrs. Garst and the caretaker and gardener—the Pruitts—looking for the treasure.”

“Treasure?” His smile glittered. “Have you been heedin’ the old woman’s gossip?”

“Have you?” Rebecca retorted.

Shrugging, he led the way upstairs to the Hall. The lantern-shaped chandelier dangled from a plaster thistle like a spun-sugar stalactite. Dining and easy chairs were upholstered in green Forbes tartan. Beneath its ornate plaster coat of arms the fireplace gleamed with oddments of brass. Antlers hung on the walls among antique swords and muskets. On one sideboard was a chess set, its pieces ivory Celts and Norsemen. A short-necked guitar, its inlaid wood carefully polished, and a small harp were enshrined on another.

“David Rizzio’s guitar,” said Michael, “that he was playin’ the night he was murdered. Or so says a receipt. I’ve no established provenance yet, mind you. The inventory will help, when Adler troubles himself to bring it.”

“And Mary’s harp, I suppose?” Rebecca touched the guitar. The wood was strangely warm and the strings vibrated gently beneath her fingertips. Her thought reverberated in response. She saw the small supper room at Holyrood Palace violated by Lord Darnley’s bravos—Mary and her ladies staggering back, aghast, and poor harmless Rizzio dragged out screaming, until the flash of daggers cut his screams short. . .

Rebecca snatched her hand back from the guitar. She could have sworn the strings of the harp sounded a small, querulous note in some harmonic of memory. “Stupid Mary?” she asked, more breathlessly than she would have liked. It was early in the day to get carried away by the fascinating associations of the artifacts. “Last night you called Mary romantic and stupid.”

Michael was staring at the harp. He blinked. “What?”

“Stupid Mary, you said. Surely you were just pulling my leg.”

The dark, level line of his brows crumpled, appalled at the very idea. “Takin’ the mickey out of you? No at all. Mary’s heart ruled her head. She let herself be used by the men around her, like the mewlin’ and greetin’ heroine of some tatty novel.”

“I imagine she did quite a bit of crying. Given the time in which she lived, she had little choice but to ally herself with men.”

“Didn’t she, then? What of her cousin Elizabeth, who ruled England with the heart and stomach of a man, as she said herself? Now there was a woman.”

“Well yes,” murmured Rebecca, “there’s no higher compliment you can give a woman, is there, than that she acts like a man?”

Michael’s hair was starting to lose its sleekness. He scooped it off his forehead with the impatient gesture she’d already noted as characteristic. He fixed Rebecca with an aggravated frown. This time it was she who turned away, shaking her head. It wasn’t worth arguing over.

The sun really had come out, brightening the Hall and the landing. A quick glance into the study showed Rebecca the suit of armor that had frightened her the night before gleaming guilelessly in the corner amid the jumble of furniture. A large framed document proved to be a copy of the thirteenth century Declaration of Arbroath. A small door in the paneling led to a tiny chamber with a rolltop desk and several metal filing cabinets.

“At Craigievar this was ‘Danzig Willie’ Forbes’s private study,” said Michael. “There it’s called the prophet’s chamber.”

“Because Willie was a prophet of commerce?” Rebecca asked.

Michael chuckled humorlessly. “I would imagine ‘profit’—with an ‘f’—is closer to the proper meaning.”

“You’ve seen Craigievar?”

“Aye. For a copy, this one’s no bad.” He bounded lightly onto the bottom step of the spiral staircase and padded upward. For someone who moved so catlike during the day, he was certainly heavy-footed at night. Rebecca followed, telling herself she could afford the extra toast; these stairs were as good as her aerobics classes.

Michael diverted into his bedroom and returned slapping his denim-clad thigh with his spiral notebook. The whine of the vacuum cleaner filtered faintly down the staircase. “Pay attention. Here’s where we start separatin’ the coal from the dross.”

Yes, your grace, Rebecca thought again, as he led the way into the large bedroom down the hall from his small one.

Now, her second time through, she was able to focus on individual items. “Flemish tapestries,” said Michael with a flourish of his notebook. “Excellent condition. Portraits by Raeburn and Lawrence. A Rembrandt cartoon. A Meissen clock.”

Rebecca went from object to object, crooning appreciation. This was wonderful, everything she’d anticipated and more. “Graham of Claverhouse,” she said, identifying one portrait.

“Died of old age in London in 1707,” Michael returned.

She shot him a scornful look. “He was killed in the battle of Killiecrankie in 1689, as you well know.”

“Mm,” said Michael, aggressively noncommittal. “Who’s that?”

Rebecca eyed an illuminated manuscript page. “Saint Margaret, I think. She of the chapel in Edinburgh Castle. Right?”

“Right enough.”

The other small bedroom on that floor had evidently belonged to James. An aluminum walker and other bits and pieces of sickroom equipment lay jumbled beside a Sheraton wardrobe. Heck of a place to be stuck when you’re old and sick, Rebecca thought, up three flights of stairs. The man must have loved Dun Iain to have resisted moving to the nursing home Dorothy had mentioned.

Rebecca reached for the doors of the wardrobe. “Careful,” said Michael brightly. “If you go about keekin’ into cupboards, you’re askin’ for things to fall oot on your head.”

She opened the door. Nothing fell on her but the stale scent of lavender, underlain by a slight acrid reek. The wardrobe was crammed with long dresses with puffed sleeves, hatboxes, prim high-button boots, and lacy garments shrouded in yellowed tissue paper. “Elspeth’s things, still here?”

“They’re from the right time,” replied Michael. “She died in 1901.”

Rebecca gave the cradle a quick rock as they went on to the next room. By its door was a pen and ink drawing. “Dunstaffnage Castle,” she said. “Built by the MacDougals and appropriated by the Campbells.”

“Where Mary Hamilton was imprisoned in 1571.”

“Where Flora MacDonald was imprisoned in 1746. Will you stop that?”

“Stop what?” Michael eyed the drawing. “Poor daft Flora. If she’d handed Bonnie Prince Charlie over to the authorities, we’d have been spared a lot of romantic twaddle.”

“Spoken like a true Campbell,” she teased.

“So the Campbells had the gumption to see which way the wind was blowin’, and sided wi’ the Hanoverians.”

“And were richly rewarded for doing so.”

“It always comes to money in the end,” he stated, with the finality of a period at the end of a sentence.

She wasn’t about to dispute that. She waved airily at yet another portrait. “There’s Prince Charles Edward himself. Take it up with him.” And she walked on, leaving Michael to make a sardonic bow before the handsome if arrogant features of the Young Pretender.

Rebecca felt as if she were inside a kaleidoscope, bits of Scottish history from Robert Bruce to Robert Burns, from Saint Columba to Harry Lauder, shifting and sliding before her eyes. From the sublime. . . A Covenanter’s Bible. A chain mail gauntlet. A broken bit of statuary from Scone. Sir Walter Scott’s inkwell. Scrapbooks filled with old postcards, neatly labeled in what Rebecca had already come to recognize as James’s copperplate hand.

To the ridiculous. Jelly jars lined the windowsills, filled with scraggly bits of ivy. Candy wrappers were neatly spindled on old nails. Stacks of lurid detective novels teetered atop cabinets.

On the wall of the fifth floor corridor was a portrait of John Forbes himself. The old tycoon’s eyes were expressionless onyx marbles, his mouth a thin, suspicious fissure above an outthrust chin. Lush white sideburns and moustache could not soften a face dehydrated by a lifetime of resentment. On a little table below the portrait was a leather-bound copy of Man of Iron, by James Ramsey Forbes, its gilded embellishments cracked and tarnished. “Did James mean the title to be ironic?” Rebecca wondered aloud. “Iron rusts. Carnegie was the man of steel.”

“Hard to say,” said Michael. “How’d you like to be the only bairn of such a man?”

“Better than being his wife,” Rebecca said emphatically. On the dresser in the big bedroom was a set of ivory-handled hairbrushes. They were flanked by several cut-glass bottles labeled with the names of expensive Paris perfumeries. “Also Elspeth’s? John and then James kept her things out, as if expecting her to return any moment?”

“They were more than a wee bit mad, the both of them.” Michael fluffed up a pillow on the sumptuously draped and canopied bed, removing the imprint of a resting head, then turned and regarded the full-length portrait of Mary Stuart. Rebecca, too, was drawn yet again by the tragic queen’s serene expression. The crucifix she held gestured as calmly toward an inset scene of her execution as though she were a conductor sounding the downbeat of a symphony, “Scots Wha Hae” played in counterpoint to “Rule Britannia”.

“I wonder,” Michael mused, “whether yon face peerin’ into his bed put old John on or off the job.” He turned aside, disallowing his smirk.

That, Rebecca suspected, had been a salacious double entendre. She shouldn’t acknowledge it. She smothered a smile at both John Forbes’s necrophiliac tendencies and Michael’s undisciplined mouth.

Footsteps clicked across the floor above. Michael’s face tilted abruptly upward. He stood very still, very quiet, staring so intently at the plaster ceiling she thought for a moment he could see through it.

Before she could catch herself she spun about and looked toward the stairwell. Nothing appeared but Dorothy and her vacuum cleaner, heralded by thumps and crashes. Of course, Rebecca told herself. What did you expect?

“There you are!” the woman cried cheerily. “Found the treasure yet?”

Michael emitted a long exhalation.

“There’re some fascinating things here,” returned Rebecca. And yet they were lonely things, objects in exile stripped to the barest emotional resonance. Like the guitar and the harp, they exchanged quick notes of terrible reminiscence. . . Getting fanciful in your old age, she told herself. No wonder you got carried away with that guitar. Next you’ll start believing in the Forbes treasure. The Erskine letter would be treasure enough.

“Checking out the bedrooms, I see.” Dorothy rolled her engine of cleanliness into the room, plugged it in, and laid down her basket. She fixed Michael with a stare over the top of her glasses. “So the two of you will be spending a lot of time alone here together, hm?”

Michael glanced first at Mary’s painted features and then at Rebecca, just as Rebecca, to her horror, felt her cheeks grow hot in a blush.

“I know how young people behave these days,” Dorothy continued with a ghastly simpering grin. “Everything’s so casual. Sleep around, have a good time, and never mind the consequences. Well, repent at leisure, I always say.”

Time for a dignified exit. As one, Michael and Rebecca started for the hall, collided in the doorway, and lurched away from each other like magnets touching negative poles. They didn’t stop until they’d gained the airy, whitewashed expanse of the ballroom. Blocks of sunlight danced a slow and stately minuet across the floor and a suggestion of rot hung on the air.

Michael seemed undecided whether to laugh or to swear. He said at last in a rather choked voice, “So then, what do you think?”

“About the house?” Rebecca asked, smothering a rather warped grin. “The collection is more idiosyncratic than I’d imagined.”

“About the house,” affirmed Michael, settling on laughter. He sauntered down the room, floorboards squeaking, to a semicircular window seat snugged inside a turret. “It’s right mixtie-maxtie. I wager old John didna ken the half of what he had.”

“Do you think he has Admiral Nelson’s glass eye around here somewhere?”

Michael leaned his elbow against the window frame and looked out. “He has the Earl of Montrose’s heart.”

“What?” Rebecca creaked down the room and looked out the other side of the turret. Below the window the driveway streaked the lawn like a line on a map and disappeared into the trees. She felt as if she were in the crow’s nest of a ship sailing a sea of maple leaves.

“Charles II sent Montrose to Scotland in 1650. . .”

“I know that. But his heart?”

Michael cocked an eyebrow—squeamish? “There’s a receipt for it among James’s lists, signed by some retired brigadier in Swansea, of all places.”

“Well,” said Rebecca gamely, “people in the Middle Ages used to venerate the body parts of holy men and women.”

“Montrose was hardly a saint. Well kent, aye.”

“Like as not some soldier there beneath the scaffold simply helped himself to a souvenir.”

They considered each other for a moment. Michael essayed, “Rumor has it that Elizabeth Curle. . .”

“Mary’s lady-in-waiting who commissioned the portrait downstairs.”

“. . .rescued Queen Mary’s severed head and took it to Antwerp.”

“Wouldn’t John have loved that? He could’ve carried it around with him like Walter Raleigh’s wife carried her husband’s head in a velvet bag.” Rebecca shivered, a cold draft sliding through the window and tightening her shoulders. “I’ll tell you one thing Forbes doesn’t have: Mary’s death mask. I saw it at Lennoxlove, outside Edinburgh, last summer with Ray.” The name clunked as heavily as the nocturnal footsteps into the silence.

“The bloke in your photograph?”

If she’d peeked into Michael’s room, he’d peeked into hers. “Yes,” she answered. Interesting how her mouth didn’t add, “my fiance.” Michael gazed out the window, Mary and Montrose much more relevant to him than Ray Kocurek. Rebecca rushed on. “Not that the death mask looks much like the effigy downstairs, but I guess that was idealized.”

“Supposedly the one was modeled on the other.”

She crossed her arms. “A sarcophagus in your front hall, even a half-size one. John must’ve been one of the great nineteenth-century eccentrics.”

“Not so much as you’d think. The rich can afford to be slightly daft. In fact, they’re expected to be. John was quite mindful of his social status. I’ll show you some of the newspaper cuttin’s when we go back down.”

There was a distinct draft along the floor as well, wrapping around Rebecca’s ankles like a cold purr of a reptilian cat. She hugged herself. “If I had any money, I’d be glad to act crazy and amuse the peasants.”

“They say money can’t buy happiness, although I’d like to give it a try.” Michael straightened, his fingers rippling the pages in his notebook. The tiny whirring sound complemented the rustling of the trees. “Speakin’ of which, there’s a particularly interestin’ series of cuttin’s about Elspeth’s death. I doot there’s more to that than ever made the dailies. The verdict of the inquest was suppressed for a time, you know.”

“No, I don’t know. The book just said that she died.”

“Oh aye,” exclaimed Michael. “Something you dinna ken?” He paused for effect. “She jumped or fell from this very window.”

The cold in Rebecca’s shoulders wriggled down her spine to splash against the cold in her ankles. “Suicide?”

“Apparently. But John would’ve preferred bein’ up for murder, I wager, than admittin’ his wife killed herself rather than live wi’ him.”

“It wasn’t murder, though?”

“No one else was in this room when she fell, or there might’ve been some suspicion.”

“The young woman married to the old man,” said Rebecca. “A classic story. Poor Elspeth—that was the only way out of her trap.”

“They laid her out on her own bed, there in front of Mary’s portrait. After she was gone,” he concluded wistfully, “there were nae more parties.”

Rebecca remembered how Michael had fluffed the pillow. He wasn’t completely immune to Elspeth’s mysterious charms. “In 1901 James was nine. And he fell down the stairs two months ago.”

“Aye, the family seems to have had a right problem wi’ gravity.” He would have been completely deadpan, but the corner of his mouth twitched.

“Michael,” Rebecca began reprovingly, and then, “Dr. Campbell. . .” Despite herself, she, too, smiled.

“Well then, Miss Reid,” he said, “it’s awful cold up here. We should be gettin’. . .” A pickup truck was coming up the driveway, the roar of its engine and the crunch of its tires on the gravel muted by distance. “The Pruitts,” said Michael. “I’ll let them in, shall I?”

Rebecca watched him until he disappeared down the stairs. For a moment they’d almost been comrades, sifting the ashes of old scandals. He knew his history. He’d accepted that she knew hers.

She stepped closer to the window and considered the relentless ground far below. She imagined Elspeth falling, skirts fluttering madly, hair flying from its pins. It had taken courage to step out into the empty air. Not as much courage, though, as it would have taken to stay flat-footedly anchored to the stone and wood of Dun Iain.

Crimson maple leaves whirled across the window. The wind was rising. Maybe there would be a storm.

 

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