Peeling off her jacket, Jean pried the inscribed stone from her pocket and set it on an unoccupied lace doily atop the bookshelf. Alasdair snapped the flashlight back into its holder, shot a hard look at the answering machine on the desk, and thumped the basket down on the kitchen counter.
“Don’t you trust Minty,” Jean asked, “or have you played your cards close to your chest for so long you’re still doing it?”
Alasdair opened the lid of the basket. “I’m no gambler, Jean.”
“Sure you are. You simply calculate the odds to the last decimal point. Or maybe you’re a scientist, suggesting a hypothesis and then testing for reproducible results.”
“I’ve got no hypothesis now. Not as yet. Still—you heard, did you, what Minty said about Wallace digging in the pit prison?”
“Maybe that was before his knees gave out. He was here for a long time.”
“Or maybe, like Zoe, Minty knows more than she’s telling.”
“Does she know Wallace had a chunk of that inscription in his pocket when he was found?”
“As next of kin, she and Angus claimed all his belongings,” Alasdair said. “I reckon it was them cleared this place of personal items.”
“Understandably leaving the tape in the answering machine. You took it out, right?”
“Oh aye, it’s tucked well away in a sock. But then, odds are whoever phoned has no idea Wallace was recording them.”
“Was it Roddy who called? Maybe he was trying to get Wallace to leave the neighborhood.”
“I’m thinking it was Roddy arguing with Wallace the day he died, never mind Zoe.”
“She sure clammed up once she realized she might have said too much.” Jean looked again at the inert bit of stone. Then her eye moved upwards to a print of the nineteenth-century painting of the murder of Mary Stuart’s secretary Riccio at Holyrood, stabbed repeatedly by disaffected nobles including a Kerr and a Douglas—and perhaps witnessed by Isabel Sinclair. The characters were lavishly costumed and the scene expansively acted to suit romantic-era tastes, not that it hadn’t been genuine high drama to begin with. No wonder she’d thought of just that event as she looked down into the dungeon. “Minty says Zoe tells tales, but then, so do I, bimonthly in Great Scot.”
“There are stories, and then there are lies.”
Jean conceded his point with a shrug. “And there’s missing Angus.”
“We’ve got no concrete evidence that anything here’s wrong, save the clarsach pinched from the museum and an answerphone message that might mean nothing at all. Like as not I’m . . .”
“Tilting at windmills? Straining at a gnat? Borrowing trouble? Those are my specialties.”
“Oh aye, those and bouncing off walls and jumping to conclusions. You’re having a bad influence on me, lass.” Focusing on the interior of the hamper, Alasdair started producing not rabbits but a glittering array of cutlery and dishes, each item wrapped in tissue paper.
“Yeah, right.” Jean inspected the bookcase, noting that the bottom shelf was bare except for a garish “Glasgow’s Miles Better” souvenir ashtray. The middle two shelves held astronomy, botany, geology, and geography texts as well as history and archaeology books and lots of thin bright-colored paperbacks of legends and ghost stories. The Ancient Monuments Commission logo, a lion and crown, was printed on the plainly bound spine of the tallest book on the shelf. She pulled it out. With it came a folded piece of drawing paper.
On the book’s cover was printed: Ferniebank Castle and St. Mary’s Chapel. Excavation and Renovation Report. Cool! She set that on the coffee table for later, then opened the paper to reveal a sketch of archaeologists digging next to the chapel, in the same rough-and-ready style as the drawings in the leaflet. Still, each face was clearly defined with only a few pencil strokes, the youthful diggers, male and female, and an older man crouched beside the excavation holding what looked like a small chest. This drawing had a tiny, tidy signature: W.B. Rutherford. The man had been a one-man band, it seemed. She laid the sketch on top of the bookcase, next to the decorative doily.
The door to the hall closet opened and Dougie emerged, whiskers as erect as his tail. He performed a silky swirl around Jean’s ankles, then padded purposefully into the kitchen and sat down beside his bowls, one filled with water, one still empty. “Yes,” Jean told him, “it’s dinnertime.”
“Long past dinnertime,” added Alasdair, perhaps with double meaning aforethought.
Jean found the box of kitty kibble, measured brown lumps redolent of rancid fish into Dougie’s dish, and left him scrunching away contentedly. The only appetite he had to satisfy tonight was one for food. Whether that made him lucky or otherwise was not a good question, period.
Alasdair was twisting two tall candles into their holders. His appetites were as complex as the rest of his personality, but she’d never know it by looking at him. Even though his face was no longer stony or icy, neither was it an open book. He was far too good at expressionlessness—something Ciara had taken pains to point out. Had he been applying intellectual rigor to dangerous emotional situations all his life? Which came first, his rational chicken or his emotional egg?
She really needed another hobby than psychoanalyzing Alasdair. Counting the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin, maybe.
He tapped a champagne flute against a translucent plate, evoking a chime. “Mrs. Rutherford does nothing by halves. If that’s not sterling silver, bone china, and crystal, I’ll eat the lot.”
“No need for that. Wow.” Jean pulled a chilled bottle of champagne, wrapped in its own little fitted quilt, out of the seemingly bottomless basket.
“Moses’s entire family has staterooms in there,” Alasdair said, and met her laugh with a smile.
He had an appealing smile, if stiff from lack of use. He was making a calculated effort to lighten the proceedings, wasn’t he, maybe even to apologize for his spasm of bad temper. Hey, she beamed at him, that’s all right, I needed to know there was a burr beneath your saddle. Speaking of which . . . “So what’s the latest in the Northern Constabulary soap opera? Did Sergeant Sawyer, a.k.a. the Troll of Inverness, finally get his just desserts?”
“Depends on how you’re defining justice. The Chief Constable suggested he work a bit harder at being a team player, so Sawyer asked for a transfer and now’s with the Strathclyde Police, a thorn in some other D.C.I’s hide.”
“And D.C. Gunn?”
“He’s swotting for the exams for promotion to sergeant. A bit prematurely, I reckon, but he’ll do well in the long run.”
“He’s got your example before him.”
Alasdair shook his head, but said nothing else.
Okay, Jean told herself, they’d covered all the important topics except one, and this was emphatically the wrong time to open the Pandora’s box of Ciara. She pulled a thick beige envelope from beneath the lid of the basket.
The stationery was the same as her invitation to Minty’s culinary function—oh, it wasn’t just that the handwriting was idiosyncratic, Jean was holding the card upside down. She flipped it over and read: “ ‘Quail’s eggs in a Parma ham nest. Salmon in sorrel beurre blanc with roasted vegetable couscous. Gooseberry and elderflower fool with shortbread biscuit.’ I hope the fool is a dish, not an editorial comment.”
“It’s mushy fruit with cream, I’m thinking.” Alasdair lit the candles—Minty had even included a book of matches—while Jean sorted the aromatic contents of several insulated plastic containers onto the dishes. Similar containers were stacked in the cupboard, weren’t they? Wallace had probably been happy to play beta tester for Minty’s preparations, conveyed to his doorstep via Helen and Polly.
Despite her dig at their unmarried status, Stanelaw’s Martha Stewart had provided the compleat honeymoon repast, lacking only a gypsy violinist tuning up in the courtyard. That couldn’t be a coincidence, either. Minty had put one and one together from comments made by Ciara or the Campbell-Reids, or Alasdair himself.
Judging by the wry curl developing in his brows, he was thinking the same thing. He reached for the bottle, saying, “I’m surprised Minty didn’t send oysters as well.”
The man could actually do comedy if he set his mind to it. “Heavens no,” Jean replied. “August doesn’t have an ‘r’ in it.”
He popped the cork from the champagne bottle, the small explosion making Dougie’s ears twitch, and filled each flute with sparkling liquid the color of straw spun into gold.
She took one from his hand and held it up. A couple of high-flying droplets landed on her glasses, making little prismatic UFOs. “To, er, Ferniebank.”
“To us, Jean.” He tapped her flute with his and set it to his lips. His look over its rim, the tiny reflection of the candle flames thawing the blue depths of his eyes, made her face flush even before she drank. If she’d ever doubted that the man was versatile enough to do romance, too—however cynically she might define that word—they evaporated like the champagne. And that was so dry it was more effervescence than liquid, teasing her tongue and throat with the subtle flavor of grape.
Ignoring his blanket, Dougie retired to the couch to apply his pink tongue to his anatomy until his gray fur was even sleeker. Outside, the sound of the wind in the trees reminded Jean of the rhythm of waves on the shore, advancing, retreating, advancing a bit farther. She sat down beside Alasdair and tried a bite of her glorified ham-and-egg appetizer. The mix of firm and soft textures filled her mouth. Suddenly she was starving.
There was no need to make idle chitchat, not now. Silently, companionably, they ate. Salt and sweet, brine and earth, sharp and mellow, the flavors warmed first Jean’s mouth, then her stomach, then radiated outward until her fingertips and toes tingled. She had always suspected Alasdair had a sensual side, if deeply buried beneath layers of police canteen bangers and mash, and sure enough, he tasted and sipped as though assessing each savory molecule for its full potential. Maybe his toes were tingling, too.
He lifted the bottle of champagne to refill their glasses. But she was already balanced on that knife’s edge between sober and tipsy, tingling but not yet numb. “No thank you,” she murmured, and Alasdair put the bottle down without topping off his own glass.
There was a protocol to this kind of event, after all. Not just the food, not just the champagne, but the lingering looks and the fingertips barely touching between the rims of the plates and then slowly, entwining. Jean wasn’t only picking up on the prickle of his energy field, she was getting the snap, crackle, and pop as well. Funny, she’d thought she knew what foreplay was, but even their meal at the Witchery had not melted her down this effectively.
The dessert might or might not be just, let alone foolish, but it was delicious, a fruit puree whipped with cream, delicate and rich at once, and buttery shortbread dissolving on her tongue. The set of Alasdair’s jaw eased at last, and his lips relaxed into their graceful and yet masculine curve, like gothic tracery. When an almost microscopic bit of the fool clung to the corner of his mouth, Jean wiped it off not with the corner of her linen napkin but with her fingertip, and then pressed the sweet morsel against her own lips.
His velvet voice was brushed against the nap. “There’s a packet of coffee in the basket. Shall I put on the pot?”
“No thanks. Caffeine after dinner keeps me awake.”
He waited, his mouth widening in a slow, supple smile.
This time her face didn’t just flush. She felt herself go red as a beet. A traffic light. A fire engine. Positively scarlet. No scarlet letters here, though. No scarlet women. She dared a quick tickle of his ribs, like a row of iron bars through his sweater, and he laughed. The sound was a bit rusty, but it was a laugh.
Jean leaned toward him, leading with her lips—and from the corner of eye saw her backpack lying on the desk, her car keys beside it. The cold water of obligation dashed her face and she halted. “Dang it, I never locked my car. Keep up the momentum. I’ll be right back.”
Alasdair was behind her as she stood up. “I’ll do it.”
“No, no problem.” Seizing the keys, she stepped out of the front door and stopped, grasping the railing beside the steps. Why did alcohol always go to her knees? Placing each foot carefully on the vociferous gravel, right, left, right, left, she walked across the courtyard, punched the button on her remote, and heard the car doors clunk in reply. There, already!
The cold light and the colder wind pressed in around her warm glow like besiegers around a castle. Like the night around the courtyard, growing darker by the minute as the clouds crept forward, devouring stars and moon. Was that a movement among the trees? Jean froze like a dog at point. No, it was just the wind in the underbrush. Was that a light winking in and out of the leaves or a will-o’-the-wisp hovering above the ancient well? No. She saw nothing in the shadow-rippled darkness, not even the ghostly shapes of the chapel walls.
Turning toward the keep, she detected a gleam in an upper window, Isabel’s window, a warm gleam not at all like the thin, off-color luminescence of the yard light. Nothing was there, either, just a sheen on the uneven window glass. Jean’s gaze rose to the serrated roof line and beyond, to the overcast sky that faintly reflected the glow of the great cities to the north and west.
Maybe her paranormal allergy was playing tricks, or her nerves were overreacting to Wallace’s dubious death, or her imagination was responding to the setting, the air stirring with time-drowned memory and desire burned to ash, nothing left behind but ravaged stone. What she’d seen at the chapel, assuming she’d seen anything at all, was the glint of headlights from the main road across the river. She hadn’t seen that much at Isabel’s window. Never mind. With something between a sigh and shrug she started back toward the sanctuary of the flat.
Alasdair stepped into the doorway, his body silhouetted against the light. His solid, concentrated body, contents under pressure. She stepped inside and he locked the door behind her. “Let’s be getting ourselves to bed, lass. No splinters. You get on, I’ll clear away.”
She brushed his lips with her own, needing to make no other reply, and headed down the hall. By the time she stepped out of the shower her nerve endings were doing the wave around the stadium of her psyche. She’d only known the man for three months. They were mature people, they knew what they were getting into. But she hadn’t shared a bed in years. Heck, she hadn’t had sex in years. Alasdair had admitted that he’d last had sex a couple of years ago but hadn’t made love in a very long time. Sex was a basic biological urge. There was a lot more to it than biology, however.
She fussed around with dental floss, tweezers, and emery board—this was no time for a hangnail—then considered her flushed face in the mirror. He’d never seen her without makeup, meager though that was. Maybe she should reinstall her eyeshadow, mascara, and lip gloss, just for the occasion. But then, he wouldn’t want to leave the lights on, would he? Maybe she could get the candles from the dining table and . . . No. Falling asleep with candles burning was stacking the odds against a long relationship. Especially here at Ferniebank, with Isabel’s cautionary tale.
Jean settled her new nightgown over her curves, sucking in her stomach and throwing out her chest. The gown was simple cotton, if with some darting and shirring to keep it from hanging like a potato sack. Appearing before Alasdair in a black lace spider’s web with a push-up bra would have been, well, fake. If they couldn’t be real now, when could they be?
You know, she told herself, you’re going to spend a lot more time worrying about it than actually doing it. She stepped out into the hall. Alasdair?
The dishes were stacked in the drainer beside the kitchen sink. Alasdair sat on the living room couch, feet propped on the coffee table. His left hand stroked Dougie and the right held open the large, flat book of the Ancient Monuments report. His sturdy forefinger tapped one of the pages as though considering testimony in a case. But at her step he looked up, then sat up, pulling off his reading glasses.
She hadn’t seen those for a while. He was just a bit vain, wasn’t he? “The bathroom’s all yours,” she said. “I’ll turn out the lights.”
Again that quick touch of lip to lip, a lick and a promise. The bathroom door shut. Jean eyed the inscribed stone lying in state on its doily and turned off the ceiling light. The front windows were pale rectangles, the pale glow of the yard light cheered by yellowed lace of the curtains.
Dougie gazed at her over the back of the couch, his eyes twin dots of phosphorescence. “Sleep tight,” she told him, and retreated to the bedroom. There she found a small nightlight beside the wardrobe. Ah good. It emitted a rosy shine, making the shadows soft and suggestible and yet providing enough light to keep the proceedings from turning into a farcical scramble.
Jean glanced out the window toward the river, no more than a skein of shimmer, and toward the chapel, invisible in the darkness. No lights flickered through the trees. The wind rattled something loose in the outbuilding.
She pulled the curtains and turned back the duvet. The sheets beneath were lightly scented with smoke—they’d been dried outdoors, downwind of Roddy’s peat fire. Inhaling, she sat down on the edge of the bed. No, that made her look as though she was waiting for a bus. She lay down, flat, like an effigy on a tomb. No. She tried rolling onto her side, but wasn’t sure where to put her limbs so that they appeared seductive and not awkward. She sat up again.
Alasdair walked in, wearing striped pajama bottoms and a fresh white T-shirt. Without taking an extra step, he came straight to the bed, sat down, and drew her back against the breadth of his chest. His exhalation across her ear sent a frisson of delight down her spine. “You’re sure about this, are you?”
Every single one of her nerve endings turned toward his true north and hung there, quivering. “Yes. Are you?”
His answer was a caress, his large, capable hands making the serendipitous discovery that, cupped, they were just the size of her breasts. Wow, she thought again, and as his fingertips put the discovery to investigation, oh yes.
Time stretched, slowed, stopped. Space contracted. The nightgown and the T-shirt and pajamas discorporated. Curious and shy at once, he touched her as though she was made of crystal, and she touched him as though he was made of the finest bone china, until the inspirational tour of the erogenous zones intensified each caress. His skin beneath her lips was salt-sweet, blending with the scent of smoke in her throat to make him taste like a fine Islay whiskey—they’d sat beside Loch Ness sipping Islay whiskey the night she’d realized it was all going to come to this.
Making love was like riding a bicycle. The body memory was still there. The mechanics were ordinary, murmured that ineradicable lump of intellect, like a stone in her shoe, that held down one corner of her senses. It was the partner who was not.
She hoped she was skilled enough to please him. If Alasdair could hold himself and everyone he dealt with to high standards in other areas, then he might do so when it came to sex, too . . . She was pleasing him. The smooth banks and braes of his body sang to her hands, her lips, her tongue, verse and response, and singed them as well.
She glimpsed his face in the shadows, intense, set, eyes slitted. His body was heavy, but not too heavy—it was comforting, solid . . . She suppressed a quick ow, and when he stopped, whispered, “Go on, go—oh.”
Yes, that was what she wanted, what she needed—bodies interlocked, limbs entwined, forehead pressed to forehead—yes. The bedposts beat muted time against the stone wall, stopped, started again as they shifted around, playing variations on a theme. His breath came in syncopated gasps, in counterpoint to hers, and that cool observer in her senses murmured that still he was holding something back, assessing and evaluating even as he enjoyed. Contents under pressure, not just for him, for her as well—let go, let go, it’s all right. Not yet.
Her unfocused eyes saw something beyond his shoulder, a glow moving against the window curtains—more headlights, certainly, headlights across the river, fluttering through the trees. . . . If she was seeing fireworks, they were inside her own mind. Her eyes shut as her body arched back against the pillows, ah, yesssss.
When she opened her eyes again, Alasdair was looking down at her, sweat glistening on his forehead and pooling between their bodies. And suddenly she felt the chill of the room that a moment ago she could have sworn was hot as a conservatory growing tropical plants.
His lips were rosy, almost bruised. They parted. She pressed her fingertips against them before he could speak—don’t say anything, above all don’t ask if it was all right for me—it’s good, it’s good. But still a faint arctic gleam lurked deep in his eyes, and she thought of Yellowstone Park in the winter, the hot springs steaming up through drifts of snow, rimmed with ice bright as gemstones. Not yet. Soon.
One more time the bedposts thumped the wall, as though knocking at the blocked door in the Laigh Hall, and he was beside her, pulling the cool duvet over them both. She lay back into his arms and cast a wary glance at the window, but if any light shone through the curtains at all it was simply the ambient light of a starless, moonless night.
And then footsteps walked across the ceiling. Jean turned her head so quickly to look upwards that she missed Alasdair’s nose by a millimeter. Her body seemed to sink into the mattress, that cold spectral sensation heavier than Alasdair’s full weight could ever be. She didn’t need to ask if he heard the steps. His body grew so hard and brittle, she felt as though she was lying in the embrace of a fully-armored knight.
The light steps moved slowly from one side of the room to the other, paused, then came back again. After what seemed like two hours, but which was probably only a few minutes, they faded away into the profound silence. But no sooner had Jean taken a deep breath and swum up from the depth of her sixth sense, and Alasdair had shaken off his petrifaction and with a similar deep breath relaxed against her, then the harp music filled the night.
The strains rose and fell, slow, then fast, then slow again, lovemaking in melody. The strings vibrated in the same frequency as Jean’s nerves. Alasdair’s fingertips stroked her flank in the same rhythm, as though she were the musical instrument. The music came from another dimension, the prickle on the nape of her neck told her that. And yet it wasn’t at all fearsome, just melancholy.
Alasdair’s hand stopped moving, his body went inert, and his breath slowed. He was asleep. Jean drew his arm further around her and clasped his hand between her own. She lay there, her thoughts drifting like thistledown, listening to the otherworldly music, until at last, it, too, faded into silence and time, and she slept at last.